Chapter 6 #3
He was. He stood with the question of the evening still warm in his hands.
He saw the whole maneuver laid out plain as a map: Caroline's London, the engineered removal, the slow starvation of an attachment too far advanced to die of anything but distance.
A month ago he might have endorsed it. A month ago he had a speech in him about serene and uncomplicated countenances, about hearts not easily touched, about the hazards of a family.
He stood now in the ruins of his own evening, with a woman at that family's table who had seen him to the bone in eleven words.
The speech was no longer in his possession.
"Bingley is a grown man," Darcy said. "His attachments are his own affair."
The silence had a texture. Caroline's candle dipped and steadied. "Mr. Darcy. You cannot be serious. You, of all men, with your views on—"
"My views have been given. He is your brother, Miss Bingley, not your ward, and he is my friend, not my dependent.
If he consults me I will tell him what I saw this evening: a lady whose regard for him appeared equal to his own, and a family whose vulgarity is no fault of hers.
Beyond this I have nothing to offer, tonight or in Grosvenor Street.
" He took his own candle from the sideboard.
"I am for bed. Bingley, the evening was a triumph.
Your neighbors will say so for a twelvemonth. "
He left Caroline standing in the middle of the map of her campaign.
He carried the look she sent after him up the stairs.
He had made a domestic enemy. He climbed light anyway, because of what he had declined to build.
They had offered him a wall, ready-made, his favorite architecture.
He had looked at it and discovered he no longer wanted the trade.
Two evenings later, in Mrs. Phillips's snug parlor in Meryton, George Wickham chose the chair by the fire. He let the room come to him.
It always did. That was the first economy a man learned.
Arrive early, sit warm, look unoccupied, and the company sorted itself toward you by gravity.
Mrs. Phillips's card evenings collected the regiment's juniors and the village's daughters in roughly equal measure.
Within the quarter hour he had what he had come for: the youngest Miss Bennets, one on the sofa arm and one on the footstool, contending for the privilege of telling him everything.
He had missed such a ball. Lydia could not get over it. She said so four times. Everyone had been there. She named them all. He attended to the catalog with his eyes and spent his mind elsewhere. The name he was waiting for arrived on schedule.
"And Lizzy danced with Mr. Darcy, if you can credit it. Asked her himself, in front of the whole room. Two dances! And she never told us a word he said after, which is not like her, for she dines out on everybody. She was odd the rest of the night. Jane noticed it too."
"Odd," Wickham repeated, with exactly the interest the word deserved, which was none, and the angle of a man being polite, which brought Lydia forward another confiding inch.
So. Darcy had asked. Darcy, who had not danced with an unknown woman in the entire history of his condescension, had crossed a country ballroom with the county watching.
He had asked for the sister with the quick tongue.
The sister had come away odd and declined to perform him afterward.
Wickham turned his cards over gently. He thought of Darcy at sixteen, rigid at the edge of the Lambton assemblies while the steward's son danced every dance.
He thought of the old man's hand on his shoulder, the last winter, like my own son.
The words proved worth less than the breath they rode out on when the will was read.
The whole legacy came to a hope with a collar attached, three thousand pounds standing in for a name.
The son who had everything stood in the library doorway watching him pack.
He thought of what it cost a man like Darcy to want anything where the county could see.
A great deal. It would be costing him a great deal.
That was worth knowing. A man's purse could only be bled. Wickham had bled Darcy's once, and the second attempt had cost him Ramsgate, the one hand he had ever overplayed. But a man's want. A want, in a man trained never to show one, was a door with the key standing in it.
"She is a great walker, your sister," he observed, to the fire, almost idly. "I met her once on the Meryton road and she had worn out a Lucas getting there. I confess I should be afraid to offer her my company. I am sure she has a pace beyond a soldier's."
Lydia found this the funniest thing said in a fortnight.
"Lizzy would walk to Scotland if Mama would let her.
Every morning, rain or anything, up Oakham Mount or round by the churchyard path, before breakfast even.
Alone, always. She says we spoil the birdsong.
As if anyone wants birds at seven in the morning. "
"At seven in the morning," Wickham agreed, "I want nothing but my pillow," and the sofa arm and the footstool laughed in chorus, and Mrs. Phillips called from the far table for the young people to come and make up the loo, and he rose, and gave Lydia his arm, and was delightful through four hands of cards without once attending to them.
Oakham Mount, or the churchyard path. Every morning. Alone.
He played out the evening with the patience that was the whole of his capital now. He thanked Mrs. Phillips at the door for a delightful evening, and meant it.