Chapter 7 #2
Elizabeth could not but smile. Mrs. Bennet could, and did not.
Her fury, finding the front door of the argument barred, went through the windows.
"You are your father all over again," she cried at Elizabeth.
"Clever, and proud, and content to see this family starve in the hedgerows so long as you may be witty about it.
Oh, you will be sorry. When your father is dead and Mr. Collins turns us out before the funeral meats are cold, you will remember this morning, miss, and you will be sorry. "
She was not sorry. She climbed Oakham Mount that afternoon at a pace that punished the path for the whole morning.
She stood at the top with the wind pulling her bonnet ribbons, the county laid out below.
Longbourn and the village and the gray roofs of Netherfield stretched into the haze beyond.
She let the anger walk itself out of her.
Her mother would forgive her by Christmas, or at least would find a fresher grievance.
Her father had not failed her. Those columns balanced.
What remained, as her breath came back and the wind worked at her hair, was the morning's one strange residue.
Mr. Collins had proposed to her for twenty-five minutes.
In the whole of it there had not been one sentence about her.
She had stood in that breakfast room as interchangeable as a pew.
The speech had been composed before he ever chose which daughter to perform it at.
It had been rehearsed and delivered with the pauses in their places.
A thing is rehearsed for the performance.
The other thought came on the heels of it, uninvited, unannounced. Her guard was a quarter mile below on the Longbourn road.
Darcy would never tell a rehearsed story. He would sooner set himself on fire than say a thing designed to make anyone like him.
She stood quite still on the top of Oakham Mount.
It was true. That was the inconvenience of it.
It was simply, observably true. She had seen the man blunder through every conversation they had ever held.
He had refused three openings a practiced charmer would have taken at the canter.
He had handed her a warning he knew she would resent.
The truth he could not tell was lodged behind a promise.
I was not prepared for you. No one rehearsed that.
No one composed that in a mirror, with a head tilt.
It had come out of him like a tooth. The memory of it arrived now as it always arrived.
The flush had outlived Lucas Lodge by a fortnight.
It climbed her throat in the cold wind where there was no fire to blame it on.
Elizabeth put the thought away, with care, the way one puts away a letter one means not to reread.
She had reread it twice more before she reached the bottom of the hill.
Two days later, Charlotte came to Longbourn and took Elizabeth into the garden. In the level voice of a woman delivering prepared remarks, she told Elizabeth she was engaged to marry Mr. Collins.
"Engaged to Mr. Collins!" The words were out before thought, before kindness, before anything. They rode the same swift wit that had carried every drawing room in the county. "My dear Charlotte, impossible!"
She heard it land. She heard the whole freight of it land, the disbelief that was really a verdict.
The laughter stood ready behind it. The unspoken second sentence was audible to them both.
You, the only sensible woman in Hertfordshire, yoked to the chimney-piece.
She watched it strike her friend in the face.
Charlotte flinched. It was a small flinch, mastered at once.
Charlotte had clearly dressed for this conversation as for cold weather.
She had expected exactly this and prepared to bear it.
The preparation was the worst of it. Charlotte had known what Elizabeth would say.
Charlotte had stood in her own garden beforehand and braced for what her dearest friend would say.
"Why should you be surprised?" Charlotte said. The level voice had a thread of effort in it now, visible as a seam. "Do you think it incredible that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any woman's good opinion, because he was not so happy as to succeed with you?"
"Charlotte, I did not mean—"
"You did. You mean it still. You are only sorry it showed.
" She drew a breath and set the conversation back on its rails with both hands.
"I am not romantic, you know. I never was.
I ask only a comfortable home, and considering Mr. Collins's character and situation, I am convinced my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.
I am seven-and-twenty, Lizzy. I have neither your face nor your spirits nor four sisters to absorb my parents' attention while I wait to be discovered.
I have weighed it. Do not pity me. Of everything you might offer me this morning, pity is the one thing I will not take. "