Chapter 6 #2
Supper compounded the damage. Mrs. Bennet, seated within carrying distance of half the room, devoted the meal to Jane's conquest. Dear Mr. Bingley was the dearest sweetest man.
Jane had been admired from the very first evening, exactly as she had always foretold.
A daughter was to be settled three miles off.
The carriages, the pin money, the great good it must do her other girls, thrown into the way of other rich men.
Elizabeth labored at damming the flood and was overrun.
Down the table, Jane and Mr. Bingley saw nothing but each other.
They had stood up twice now, the maximum the evening permitted, a fact the whole county had marked and tallied.
Once, in the middle of her mother's review of Mr. Bingley's income, Elizabeth raised her eyes from her plate.
She found where Mr. Darcy stood. She had not meant to find it.
She had not been aware of looking, the way one is aware all evening, in a darkened room, of exactly where the candle burns.
She set her mind against the knowledge. The knowledge stayed, warm, in the corner of her attention, for the remainder of the night.
The last carriage rolled away at two, and the house exhaled.
Darcy stood at the ballroom's end window while the servants moved behind him, dousing and clearing.
He let the evening present its accounts.
He had danced with her. He had heard himself tell her about the beech avenue, about Georgiana's wrong notes.
These were matters he had never laid before another living person, offered up on a public floor to the woman his own enemy had armed against him.
She had missed her step, and steadied, and said the sentence he was now unable to put down.
Your sister is fortunate to have a brother who listens.
She had not flattered him. He knew the taste of flattery, had dined on it in every drawing room since his majority: the compliments aimed at Pemberley through him, at ten thousand a year through him, the marksmanship of mothers.
This had been aimed at nothing. She had taken the one thing he showed her and seen what it was.
She had seen him, sitting on the dark stairs outside a music room door, and had handed him back to himself without ceremony, as though the seeing were nothing remarkable.
When had he last been seen? He put the question honestly, standing in the unlit window.
The answer assembled itself with the slow weight of inventory.
His father had seen a son and heir, satisfactory, complete.
His aunt saw a contract awaiting signature.
Caroline Bingley saw a prize. The mothers of London saw a fortune.
Georgiana, God help her, saw a guardian, a rescuer, a man without faults.
That was its own kind of blindness, and lonelier than all the rest. Bingley saw a friend, and came nearest. But the last person who had looked at Fitzwilliam Darcy and found simply a man there, a particular boy who hid in beech trees and could be teased out of his gravity, had been his mother.
She was dead these fourteen years. Darcy had organized his entire life since around never requiring it again.
The portrait in the studio had been part of the organization.
He could admit it now, two glasses of Bingley's champagne to the good and the house gone quiet.
A woman in paint, who could be studied without ever studying him in return.
The perfection of the arrangement was its one-sidedness.
Tonight the original had looked back. She had crossed every fence he owned in eleven words.
What if a man could be seen, was the question the evening left him with.
What if a man could be seen, entire, and the one who saw did not turn away.
"Well," said Caroline Bingley, behind him. "Thank heaven that is over."
She had a candle and a shawl and her brother in tow, and Mrs. Hurst behind, yawning at the doorway.
She crossed the empty floor with the briskness of a woman convening a tribunal.
"Charles, do not go up yet. We must speak, and it had much better be tonight.
I have written to Louisa's housekeeper to expect us in Grosvenor Street within the week, and I see no reason to amend the letter.
This neighborhood." She let the word stand a moment, encompassing.
"You saw what I saw tonight, all of it. The mother, broadcasting settlements over supper.
The cousin, presenting himself to Mr. Darcy like a, I cannot say what.
The sisters and the officers. Charles, it will not do.
You are five-and-twenty and amiable and the whole county has marked you down as a purse, and the kindest thing, the kindest, is to go to town at once, before kindness becomes impossible. "
Bingley had stopped in the middle of his own ballroom. His open face did what open faces do, which was show everything: the happiness of the evening draining out, the doubt seeping in at the seam. He looked, as he always looked when the ground shifted, to the window.
"Darcy? You are silent."