Chapter 5
THE CONFRONTATION
"The chimney-piece alone," said Mr. Collins, "cost eight hundred pounds."
Elizabeth had been in possession of her cousin for five days, and of this fact for four of them. Mr. Collins had arrived at Longbourn on Monday, in expectation of inheriting it. He bore a letter of such magnificent apology that her father had read it twice aloud for pleasure.
Since then the household had learned a great deal about Rosings Park, the seat of his patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
The glazing was extensive. The staircases were numerous.
The chimney-piece had now been valued four times in Elizabeth's hearing, at a figure that never varied.
Mrs. Bennet had taken one full day to determine why her cousin's eye kept settling on her second daughter.
She had spent the remainder of the week arranging every drawing room in Hertfordshire to encourage it.
Sir William Lucas's evening party offered Mrs. Bennet a whole new field. Elizabeth had been planted beside her cousin on the Lucas Lodge sofa with a maneuver involving three chairs and a footstool. There she sat, learning what a chimney-piece could cost.
"Eight hundred pounds," she said. "One hopes it draws."
"Her ladyship's chimneys," said Mr. Collins, with reproach, "would not presume to smoke."
Rescue arrived in the person of Charlotte.
She had watched the whole campaign from the tea table with the expression of a woman keeping score.
"Lizzy, you are wanted at the instrument.
If Mary settles there first we shall have the whole of Handel before supper, and my father has promised the young people dancing. "
Elizabeth rose with a gratitude she made no attempt to disguise.
She surrendered Mr. Collins to Maria Lucas, who did not deserve it, and crossed to the pianoforte.
She played a light air, and then a second to keep the seat occupied while the card tables filled.
During the second, she glanced up at the turn of a page.
Mr. Darcy was at his wall again. Fourth gathering running, same position, same untouched glass, same grave attention.
Wickham's history was a week old in her keeping.
Her cousin's chimney-piece still rang in her ears. Tonight her patience ran out.
She finished the air, left the instrument to Mary after all, and walked the length of the room directly at him.
He straightened off the wall as she came, which gratified her.
"Mr. Darcy. You are examining me again. I have decided to save you the labor and present myself for inspection."
"Miss Bennet—"
"It is the fourth evening, sir, by my own count.
You do not dance, you do not play at cards, you barely speak, and yet you attend every party in the neighborhood and spend the whole of each one looking at me.
I am at a loss. A man finds nothing worth his notice in a woman at an assembly, says so, audibly, and then cannot stop noticing her.
You will allow the accounts want reconciling.
What is it you find so fascinating about a woman who is merely tolerable? "
The word landed. She watched it land. He looked down at his glass. The pause stretched long enough for her to wonder whether he would simply bow and remove to another county. Then he raised his eyes, and the answer came from somewhere undefended.
"That remark was unpardonable. I have regretted it since the hour I made it."
"Regret is the easy half of an apology. The other half is explanation, and that is the half I came for. You looked at me before you said it, Mr. Darcy, and what was in your face was not contempt. I have spent a fortnight failing to name it, and I dislike failing. So. What was it?"
"You ask me to account for a moment I have not yet accounted for to myself."
"Attempt it. I am told I am quick."
The glass turned once in his hand. "I was not prepared for you," he said.
Heat climbed Elizabeth's throat before her wits could vote on it.
She stood in the middle of a party, two feet from a man she had decided against weeks ago.
Her body conducted its own business. The flush rose past her collar.
Her pulse went loud at the wrists. Her attention fixed on the small distance between them until she could have drawn the floorboards from memory.
He was watching her face. She was suddenly and inconveniently aware of standing inside the very look she had crossed the room to end.
The look was nothing, nothing whatever, like a magistrate's.
"Not prepared," she said, and her own voice arrived a shade lower than she had ordered. "You were warned of the country society, surely. We are savage but we are not subtle."
"No," he agreed. "You are not subtle. I had every warning a man could be given, and none of it sufficed."
She had a reply somewhere. It failed to report.
He set the glass on the mantel shelf behind him.
It was a small decided motion, like a man clearing the table before harder work.
"Since you are come to reconcile accounts, Miss Bennet, I will trespass on the audit.
You have made a new acquaintance this week.
The whole neighborhood has. I ask you to weigh him slowly. "
The flush changed temperature. "You are the second person in a week to appoint themselves auditor of my acquaintance. I begin to suspect a society."
"Then I am in better company than I knew.
" He paused, and she watched him choose his footing, stone by stone, a man crossing water.
"There are things I cannot say of Mr. Wickham.
Not because they are unknown to me, but because the saying would injure someone I have sworn to protect, who has been injured enough.
I am aware of how this sounds. He has given you a history with every door standing open, and I offer you a locked room and ask you to trust the lock.
It is a poor bargain and I cannot better it.
I will say only this much: ask yourself why a man's misfortunes are always told in the same words.
His account of himself is better rehearsed than mine, and a thing is rehearsed for the performance. "
There it was again, the family resemblance to Charlotte's warning, built, and built for a purpose.
A small cold draft went through Elizabeth.
Two people, unacquainted with each other's opinions, had arrived separately at the same door.
She put it from her mind with more force than the operation strictly required.
"And your account, sir, is unrehearsed?"
"Entirely. You have witnessed it. I have blundered through every conversation we have ever had, including the present one.
" He said it without any change of tone at all.
It took her a full second to find the thing buried in it, dry as sand, deliberate as a signature.
One corner of his mouth had lifted, a fraction.
It was the way a door opens far enough to show a light is on inside the house.
"Was that a joke, Mr. Darcy?"
"I would not presume."
"You would. You did. You have been hoarding it the whole evening, I expect, the way a miser keeps a shilling.
" The laugh got loose before she could decide against it, and his almost-smile deepened by a degree at the sound, and for the length of one breath the two of them stood at the mantel inside something with no name yet, balanced, bright, entirely unsupervised.
"Capital, capital!" cried Sir William Lucas.
He arrived beaming, between them, all waistcoat.
"Such superior conversation. I have been observing it across the room, Mr. Darcy, and I said to Lady Lucas, there is a picture of elegance, sir, worthy of St. James's itself!
And the dancing about to strike up. My dear Miss Eliza, allow me to present you to Mr. Darcy as a most desirable partner.
You cannot refuse to dance, sir, I am sure, when so much beauty is before you. "
Elizabeth retrieved her hand before the transaction could complete. "Indeed, Sir William, I have not the least intention of dancing. I beg you will not suppose I moved this way to beg a partner."
She looked up at Mr. Darcy as she said it, expecting an ally in the refusal.
The room had changed while Sir William was speaking.
The light she had glimpsed was out. Whatever had stood open at the corner of his mouth was shut and bolted.
The magistrate was returned to the bench, gray and formal.
The wall went up so fast she doubted, almost, her memory of the door.
He bowed. He said the correct thing, gravely, about the honor of it.
Sir William, delighted with everyone, swept off to assemble the dancers.
Mr. Darcy removed to the card room with his glass.
The mantel was only a mantel with a fire under it.
Elizabeth stood alone, absurdly, in the warm place where the conversation had been.
It was Charlotte who collected her. She steered them both to the quiet end of the room with two cups of tea.
She had seen everything from her post and intended to be told the rest. Elizabeth told it, and heard herself shortening the part about her throat and her wrists and the floorboards.
Charlotte listened without comment, weighing.
"He warned you about Mr. Wickham. So. Two warnings, mine and his, from the two least romantic sources in Hertfordshire."
"He warned me of a locked room and asked me to admire the lock.
You at least had the decency to argue from evidence.
" Elizabeth turned her cup. "Though I will grant the man one thing.
He apologized. Whole and unprompted. I was not prepared for you.
What is anyone to do with such a sentence, Charlotte?
It explains nothing. It is the worst explanation I have ever been offered, and I have a cousin who explains chimney-pieces. "
"You are still holding the sentence, Lizzy. I observe you have not put it down."
"I am examining it for flaws."
"Mm." Charlotte set her own cup in its saucer with a click of punctuation.
"Then examine this with it. Both of your portraits may be wrong.
The wronged lieutenant and the cruel landlord.
You painted the pair of them inside a fortnight, and you have hung them, and you defend the hanging.
But consider tonight's evidence. A man crossed by your account of him would correct you.
This one corrected himself." She paused, and the pause was Charlotte's oldest fault arriving on schedule.
"And consider the rest of it, too, as your friend, because no one else will say it to you.
Ten thousand a year, Lizzy, and he cannot keep his eyes from you across four parishes.
A sensible woman would ask what that attention could come to mean for her, before deciding what it means about him. "
The warmth in Elizabeth went out like a snuffed wick. "You sound like Mama."
"Your mother is silly about the right things surprisingly often."
"He is a man, Charlotte, not a living. I will not audit a person the way you audit a pantry, by what he would keep." She set down the tea half-drunk. "And I am the wrong daughter for the arithmetic. You have watched me decline it all week, in a parson, with the chimney-piece thrown in."
"I have watched," Charlotte said, level as a shelf, and something passed behind her eyes that Elizabeth was too warm to read, and Lady Lucas called for her daughter, and the party reabsorbed them both.
The Bennets' carriage was claimed by the size of the Bennet party.
Elizabeth, pleading a fine night and a head full of nothing she cared to name, walked the short way home.
The Lucas boy carried a lantern ahead. The October air should have settled her.
It did not. The flush had banked itself somewhere under her collarbone and stayed, an ember declining to be stamped, and every cool breath she drew did the bellows' work instead, and three sentences kept her pace along the dark road like footmen she had never hired.
Both of your portraits may be wrong, said Charlotte.
A thing is rehearsed for the performance, said the man she had decided against.
I was not prepared for you, said the same man, in a voice she had no shelf for, and that was the sentence she carried up the stairs at Longbourn, past her mother's door, holding it the way Charlotte had caught her holding it, turning it to the light, examining it for flaws, and finding, to her thorough irritation, none.