Chapter 12 #2
If even Bingley could see the futility of tonight’s efforts, then he ought not to have wasted his energy.
“I thought it might help, Bingley. I thought it might show matters in another light, show Grantchester a better way to proceed…”
“Grantchester?” Bingley asked with a frown, and Darcy backtracked, realising that his friend had not really understood anything at all.
“Why do you say the evening was pointless?” asked Darcy. “It might have been from my perspective, but why from yours also?”
Bingley laughed without humour. “I am not a complete fool, Darcy. You invite me to supper with three eligible ladies of fortune and let half the evening’s conversation run to marriage. What else can I think but that you are trying to distract me from Miss Bennet? But it is no use.”
“Bingley,” Darcy said his name ruefully, before slapping him across the shoulders and leading the way back into the house. “I have been thoughtless, haven’t I?”
Thoughtless indeed. While the presence of Lady Summerhill, Lady Jefferson, and Lady Sophia Kettering had been deliberately designed to provoke thought on the subject of matrimony, the target had not been Charles Bingley.
It would be better if Grantchester married a woman with a certain age, experience, and sophistication, but Bingley ought to have a bride as young, good-hearted, and uncomplicated as himself.
“I am in love with her, Darcy,” Bingley confessed further, stopping his friend on the top step.
“Bingley, you must try to put your mind on other things,” Darcy urged him. Inwardly, he groaned. It was only too clear that their move to London had not been as effective as he had hoped in quelling Bingley’s unfortunate passion.
“I know it’s hopeless and I cannot compete with Lord Grantchester,” Bingley continued. “I would not dream of trying, since Miss Bennet is in love with him, and her happiness matters more to me than my own. Still, I cannot help loving her.”
“Love? Oh, curse it all, Bingley! Why must you bring love into it? Jane Bennet can only be in love with her own dream of Grantchester,” Darcy grumbled, largely in frustration at his own failure.
“In love with a dream? What do you mean?” asked his bemused friend.
“I mean that Miss Bennet barely knows the man she has agreed to marry, and I fear they will find themselves fundamentally incompatible in the end,” Darcy covered himself quickly. “I only hope it will not be too late when the realisation comes.”
“You judge too hastily,” Bingley said with a small, sad smile as they continued into the hallway.
“You speak as a man who has never loved. It does not matter how long you have known someone when you fall in love. They get into your blood and your dreams from the very first. It is beyond your control.”
“Really, Bingley,” Darcy chided him. “You ought not to give in so easily to your impulses. Self-control requires constant discipline. Remember that you know Jane Bennet no more than she knows Lord Grantchester. Less, in fact.”
Bingley was not the first to tell Darcy that he knew nothing of love, but it stung less now than Elizabeth Bennet’s accusation had done at the garden party. That fiery scene and its imagined alternative conclusions had not ceased to play on Darcy’s mind ever since.
Darcy shook his head, half irked at himself and half amused. Where was all his fine talk of self-control now? He knew well that such imaginings were ridiculous fantasy, and yet he could not shake them off.
“I shall be less impulsive when you agree to be less cynical, Darcy,” Bingley said then, not to be swerved from his course.
“Believe me, a man cannot stop loving, as though it were as simple as blowing out a candle. So, I will continue to love in silence and only hope that Grantchester will make Miss Bennet happy.”
“I am not a cynic,” Darcy insisted. “I am a realist, and you must be as na?ve a dreamer as Jane Bennet.”
“Well, I prefer my ‘na?ve delusions’, if you wish to consider them so, to your unhappy reality,” Bingley said, his voice unwavering.
They were now outside the drawing room door, greeted there by the sounds of a popular ballad accompanied by the pianoforte.
“As you will,” Darcy responded, supposing that he had said all that he could.
The two friends had not quite argued tonight, but they were very far from either agreement or mutual understanding. It was better that their present conversation ended here for now.
As Bingley turned the handle of the door, Darcy’s eyes detected a flicker of movement in the hallway, and he suddenly perceived Caroline Bingley standing there beside the grandfather clock in her silvery-grey evening dress, partly in the shadow of the stairwell.
As their eyes met, she smiled, as though inviting him to linger with her there rather than join the group in the drawing room.
Darcy hesitated, but then held the drawing room door open pointedly. It would not do to lurk in dark hallways with young ladies like Miss Caroline Bingley. She might bear a physical resemblance to her brother, but her mind was no more like his than a maze resembled a straightforward privet hedge.
“After you, Miss Bingley,” he said politely, closing the door once she had sailed in ahead of him.
How long had she been there, and how much had she heard? Darcy did not suppose it mattered much to him personally. Still, Bingley might not have wished to confess his deepest feelings in front of his sister.
∞∞∞
“They sound well together, do they not?” said Caroline Bingley softly, coming to stand at Darcy’s side where he stood next to the mantelpiece. “A strong contralto can be more pleasing with a fine baritone than a less robust soprano, I think.”
Lord Grantchester and Lady Summerhill were singing a comic duet, still accompanied by Mrs Hurst on the pianoforte, and with much laughter and applause from the other ladies and Lord Keeble.
“Where the contralto and baritone are as well balanced as this, yes,” Darcy agreed neutrally, finding Miss Bingley too close to him and stepping away slightly as if to examine a nearby clock.
“I know what you have been trying to do tonight, Mr Darcy,” continued Miss Bingley with a confidential smile, closing in on him again.