CHAPTER 73
Terms at Rosings
By the middle of September, Pemberley had learned its guests.
Mr. Bingley no longer discovered the lake with quite the same violence of pleasure every morning, though he still found cause to admire it under a new light, from a new angle, or with a cloud above it which had not, he was certain, arranged itself so well the day before.
Jane had ceased apologising to footmen for requiring what they were employed to bring.
Mary had made the east-room pianoforte submit to discipline.
George Darcy had improved enough to complain more widely.
And Kitty, who had been at Pemberley long before the Bingley party came north, had become so familiar with the safer passages, the sunnier windows, and the most objectionable Darcy ancestors that Georgiana now relied upon her for several private absurdities which would have shocked the family portraits if paint had any remaining delicacy.
The month had not made Pemberley simple. Elizabeth distrusted simple houses. But it had made it inhabited.
That, she thought, was something.
The western apartments were not yet ready, though they had advanced from intention to noise.
Dust-sheets appeared and disappeared. Men went in with tools and came out with opinions.
Mrs. Reynolds and Mrs. Doddridge had developed a manner of speaking about plaster, bell-pulls, and draughts which suggested that neither time, stone, nor masculine tradesmen were likely to prevail against them.
Fitzwilliam inspected the rooms daily, always professing it a matter of household duty, and always looking at Elizabeth afterward as if walls might be persuaded into comfort by vigilance alone.
George Darcy came down now more often, and sometimes stayed long enough to object to a second subject.
He walked a little with Fitzwilliam’s arm, with a cane, or, on especially rebellious days, with both and the conviction that neither was necessary.
Georgiana watched each advance with such fierce, quiet gladness that Elizabeth sometimes had to look away.
“Miss Kitty,” George Darcy had said two mornings before, “has renamed one of my grandfathers.”
“Only in private, sir,” said Kitty.
“That is the usual beginning of public disorder.”
Georgiana had laughed, and George Darcy, who had been pretending not to value the sound, had reached for his tea with an expression of severe indifference.
Miss Bingley, too, had behaved well, which Elizabeth attributed less to humility than to calculation.
Pemberley had not subdued her; it had offered her a new map.
She had examined the portrait gallery with an attention almost scholarly, asked Georgiana the names of cousins, uncles, marriages, and collateral branches, and inquired after relations with so much propriety that only Elizabeth perceived the appetite beneath the civility.
Miss Bingley wished to know precisely what family her brother had married into by connexion, and what family Elizabeth had married into by law: who possessed rank, who possessed money, who had influence, who had lost it, and who might yet be useful.
It was not generosity. It was intelligence, and Elizabeth could not despise intelligence merely because it kept accounts of consequence.
She had also written several long letters to Mrs. Hurst. Their exact contents Elizabeth could not know, but she suspected they contained less of Derbyshire weather than of Pemberley’s rooms, Pemberley’s relations, and Miss Bingley’s own admirable composure in the midst of both.
It was on such a morning, warm with the last confidence of summer and the first clear hint of autumn in the air, that Mary and Georgiana played together in the music room.
Mary had been surprised by Georgiana’s talent.
She had then been surprised by her own conduct under the discovery.
In former days, such a superiority might have driven Mary either into moral reflection or a piece too long for the patience of the hearers.
Pemberley, Miss Carr, and perhaps Jane’s quiet management had done better by her.
She listened now before she played, and if listening still sat upon her face with nearly judicial solemnity, it was listening nevertheless.
Georgiana finished a passage of Mozart with a hesitation at the close, as if she had not quite decided whether admiration might safely follow.
Mary did not speak at once. She looked at the page, then at Georgiana’s hands, then at the page again.
“You play very well,” she said.
Georgiana coloured. “Thank you.”
“No,” said Mary, with careful seriousness. “I do not mean only that you have been well taught, though you have. I mean that you understand what the music is doing.”
Georgiana looked more startled by that than by flattery.
Kitty, seated near the window with a drawing-board across her lap, looked up. “That is a very Mary compliment. It sounds as if it has passed an examination before being allowed out.”
“It is better that compliments should be accurate,” said Mary.
“Is it? How tiring for them.”
Georgiana smiled, and the colour in her face softened into pleasure.
Elizabeth sat near Jane, not far from the open window.
The heat had lessened enough that the morning air could be admitted without argument from Mrs. Doddridge, though a chair had still been placed where Elizabeth might have light without sun, society without exertion, and escape from neither if Mrs. Doddridge had anything to say of it.
Mary bent again over the music. “Do you count this part, or feel it?”
Georgiana considered the question with more seriousness than Elizabeth had expected from a girl who might once have answered only to be agreeable.
“I count it until I trust myself not to show that I am counting.”
Mary took this in as if it were a maxim worth preserving. “That is very useful.”
Kitty looked between them. “That sounds like dancing.”
“It is nothing like dancing,” said Mary.
Georgiana glanced at Kitty and then at the page. “It is a little like dancing.”
Mary appeared troubled by this, then intrigued. “In what particular?”
“In the part where one must know the step well enough to stop looking as if one is surviving it.”
Kitty laughed. Mary, after a brief struggle with the impropriety of being amused while instructed, wrote something in the margin of her copy.
The duet began after that. Mary took the steadier lower part with a conscientiousness which might once have been heavy, but now gave Georgiana room to soften above it.
Georgiana, feeling the support beneath her, grew less timid.
Mary did not play brilliantly. She did something rarer for her: she listened while playing.
The little piece held together with more grace than either girl expected.
It was then, while Mary counted with solemn care and Georgiana trusted her enough to breathe inside the phrase, that the child moved with such decision that Elizabeth lost the thread of every thought she had been keeping in order.
She had felt the child before, often enough now to know the difference between fancy and life. But this was stronger, oddly timed with the turn of the music, and her hand went low before she could prevent it.
Jane looked at her at once.
Elizabeth made herself smile, because Georgiana had glanced up from the pianoforte with alarm, as if she had played a wrong note sufficiently violent to injure a relation.
“No,” Elizabeth said. “Go on.”
Georgiana hesitated.
“Indeed,” Elizabeth added. “If Mary has found the courage to feel a rhythm, none of us ought to interrupt her.”
Mary’s eyes widened, but Georgiana smiled and returned to the page. The music resumed. Elizabeth kept her hand where it was.
Fitzwilliam had been absent that morning with Bingley, who had expressed so much admiration of the stables during his first week that a visit had become insufficient and a ride unavoidable.
By now the two gentlemen rode twice a week when weather and George Darcy’s claims permitted it.
Mr. Bingley admired a horse as he admired a view: immediately, honestly, and with no desire to possess more than the pleasure of looking.
Fitzwilliam, who had spent too many years hearing Pemberley spoken of as inheritance, accusation, right, or loss, had begun to endure hearing it praised simply as a place.
They returned before luncheon, Bingley sun-warmed, delighted, and full of a horse named Cato who, by his account, had more sense than many men and better manners than some.
“I do not say he understood me,” Bingley told Jane, “but he gave every appearance of wishing to.”
“That is more than can be said of many conversations,” said Elizabeth.
Bingley laughed. “Exactly. Darcy says he is too fresh for careless riding, which I take as a compliment to Cato’s spirits and a warning against my own.”
“I meant it as a warning against your neck,” said Fitzwilliam.
“You see?” Bingley said to Jane. “Brotherly concern. Very severe, but unmistakable.”
“Brotherly concern,” said Jane, looking at Darcy with affectionate gratitude, “is often severe in its first language.”
Fitzwilliam did not quite know what to do with this, which made Elizabeth love him more than was convenient in company.
Later, after luncheon, Jane contrived to draw Elizabeth into the small parlour that had become theirs by habit.
It was not a room of confidences exactly; neither of them had yet learned how to manufacture childhood from a month of careful affection.
But it was a room where Jane asked questions more bravely than she had at first, and Elizabeth answered them more often.
Jane closed the door, but softly.
“Lizzy,” she said, “was it the child?”
Elizabeth, who had known the question was coming and had still not prepared a sensible answer, sat by the window and looked out at the terrace below.
“Yes.”
Jane’s face changed with such unguarded feeling that Elizabeth had to look away.
“Stronger than before?”
“Plainly enough to accuse me of inattention.”