Chapter 6
THE NETHERFIELD BALL
Mr. Collins secured Elizabeth for the first two dances before her wrap was off her shoulders. The injustice of it lasted her halfway down the first set.
He danced the way he conversed. He was solemn where the figure was lively, apologetic where it was solemn, and wrong at every turn, begging her pardon with a fullness of ceremony that held up four couples while the music went on without them.
By the second dance Elizabeth had stopped steering and surrendered.
When at last he restored her to the edge of the room, with a bow recommending his performance to her notice, she received her freedom with a gratitude she trusted her face to conceal and her sisters not to.
"You looked like a woman dancing with a wardrobe," Lydia said, against her ear, with love.
The ballroom at Netherfield blazed end to end.
Mr. Bingley had thrown his house open with both hands, and the neighborhood had come in its entire strength.
Every family of the four-and-twenty came.
The officers stood in a body of scarlet at the far wall.
Sir William beamed at the foot of the room as though he had built it.
Jane stood up with Mr. Bingley for the first dances, and watching them was the evening's plainest pleasure.
They turned through the figure looking at each other, talking when the dance allowed and once or twice when it did not.
The sight had the comfortable inevitability of water finding its level.
One pleasure failed to arrive. Elizabeth had dressed, she admitted to herself, with half a thought to a scarlet coat and an easy laugh.
The scarlet body at the far wall did not contain him.
It was Mr. Denny who supplied the intelligence.
Mr. Wickham had been obliged to go to town on regimental business the day before.
"Though I fancy," Denny added, with a wink for the company, "that business would have kept another week, had a certain gentleman not been the host's particular friend.
" It confirmed everything and cost nothing.
Elizabeth filed it under the heading of further evidence.
She was surprised to find the file close with less satisfaction than usual.
She was two glasses into recovering from her cousin when Mr. Darcy crossed the room toward her.
She watched him come and could not assemble a response before he arrived.
He bowed. He asked, with perfect gravity, for the honor of the next two dances.
Elizabeth's wit had carried her through every drawing room in the county.
She heard herself accept him without the participation of a single faculty she relied upon.
She was left standing in the wreckage of her own composure while he walked away to wait for the music.
"Heaven and earth," said Charlotte, materializing with tea. "Close your mouth, Lizzy. You look like a carp."
"I meant to refuse him."
"I am sure you will find the opportunity to be rude to him during the set.
" Charlotte's eyes were doing something suspiciously like dancing themselves.
"It is two dances, not a settlement. Though I observe for the record that he has asked no other woman in the neighborhood, this evening or any other. "
The music began before Elizabeth could rule on the observation.
She took her place opposite Mr. Darcy in a line of couples that went suddenly and universally attentive.
She could measure the room's astonishment by the angle of its feathers.
Every turban down the set had tilted one degree toward them.
They danced the first figure in silence, and she made up her mind to punish him for it.
"You must say something, Mr. Darcy. We cannot stand here amazing the neighborhood for half an hour with our mouths shut. I have a reputation for conversation, and you are ruining it."
"I am at your disposal. Assign me a subject."
"You see, this is your error. You treat conversation like correspondence, where one waits to be addressed.
It is much more like dancing. One simply begins, and hopes not to tread on anybody.
" The turn took her past him. His hand found hers, gloved, brief, correct.
"Very well, I shall begin. You have a fine house in Derbyshire, I am told. Tell me what you love in it."
"Pemberley has been in my family four generations. The estate supports some hundred and twenty families besides my own. The land—"
"Stop. Stop at once." She shook her head at him down the line. "You have answered like a land agent. I did not ask what you are responsible for, sir. You have listed obligations, not pleasures. I asked what you love."
The figure separated them. She watched the question work in his face the whole length of the set. He held it two-handed, a little away from himself, as if it might go off. When the dance returned him to her side, the answer came in a different voice altogether. Lower. Unfenced.
"There is a beech avenue, west of the house, that my mother planted the year I was born.
I walk it early, before the household is awake, when the mist is still on the water and the deer come down to the stream and no one in the world knows where I am.
That hour does not need me to be anything.
I have never said so aloud." The turn brought him close.
The words landed below the music, for her alone.
"And my sister plays. In the evenings, when she believes no one is listening, she plays the things she loves rather than the things she has been taught, and I sit on the stairs beyond the door like a thief, because if I go in she will stop, and play correctly, for my benefit.
I would rather hear her wrong notes than any performance in London. "
Elizabeth missed her step.
It was a small fault, recovered inside a beat, charged to the crowded floor by anyone watching.
But she knew. Her body had been keeping score all evening, against her instruction: the warmth of his palm bleeding through two gloves at every turn, and the bare two inches his hand rode above her waist in the allemande, close enough that the heat crossed the gap like a coal's.
And now this: a misstep, hers, in the middle of the plainest declaration of nothing at all.
He sat on the stairs to hear his sister's wrong notes.
There was no place to put such a fact. It did not fit the man she had decided he was.
It belonged to some third man, neither the villain of Wickham's history nor the magistrate at the mantelpiece.
This third man had a hand two inches from her waist. He was watching her recover her step with grave attention.
"Your sister is fortunate," Elizabeth said, when she had her breath disciplined, "to have a brother who listens."
Something went through his face. She saw it arrive and saw him fail, for once, to manage it.
The whole countenance opened, swift and helpless.
It was as though she had reached past every fence he owned and put her hand flat on the one live thing.
For a moment he looked very young. For a moment he looked the way he had looked at the assembly, before the insult, in the second she had never found a shelf for.
"Yes," he said. Nothing else. The dance ended. The room applauded the musicians. The two of them stood a beat too long in the set, looking at each other. The bow and the curtsy restored them to the ordinary world.
The ordinary world had Mr. Collins in it.
He surfaced at Elizabeth's elbow with the light of discovery upon him.
He had learned, he announced, by means of a fortunate inquiry, that the nephew of his own patroness, of Lady Catherine de Bourgh herself, stood at this moment in this very ballroom.
He considered it his positive duty to present himself.
He had no doubt the gentleman would receive the attention as a compliment to her ladyship.
Elizabeth caught at his sleeve and the facts both.
She urged that Mr. Darcy was a stranger, that the etiquette ran the other way, that an unsolicited introduction from an unknown clergyman would be received as a liberty.
She might as profitably have advised the tide.
Mr. Collins issued himself across the room and bowed at a depth suitable for royalty.
He delivered an address of which she could hear, mercifully, only the shape: the rolling clauses, the word condescension surfacing twice, the second bow arriving before the first had been answered.
Mr. Darcy received it with an astonishment so civil it could have been framed.
His eyes, once, found Elizabeth's over her cousin's bent back.
What she read in them was not the contempt she had braced for but something nearer to suffering fellowship, one survivor of the chimney-piece saluting another across open water.
Then Mr. Collins achieved his peroration, bowed a third time, and returned to her in triumph.
Mr. Darcy had answered him with perfect civility.
Elizabeth, fielding her cousin and the memory of the look in the same overloaded instant, made a discovery of her own.
She had drunk nothing but lemonade. She was holding her glass with both hands to keep her pulse from showing in it.