Chapter 4
The gentlemen rode out after breakfast, ostensibly to look at some plantation of young trees Mr. Darcy wished Bingley's opinion of, though Elizabeth privately suspected the trees were a convenience invented to give the morning a shape, and that the true business of the ride was simply to be men, on horses, away from a house full of women for an hour or two.
She did not begrudge them it. She found, watching them go from the breakfast room window, that she was rather glad of the arrangement herself, for it left her with an entire morning in which to discover what she thought of Georgiana Darcy, without an audience to either of their discoveries.
She had expected — she admitted this to herself honestly, walking out to the garden a little after the riders had gone — to find a girl very like the rumor that preceded her: shy to the point of unfriendliness, perhaps, or proud in the quieter, more insidious way of someone who has been taught her own consequence too early and too thoroughly.
Mr. Wickham had said something of the kind once, at a card table in Meryton, in the careless way of a man passing along an opinion he did not expect to be questioned, and Elizabeth had absorbed it without examination, the way one absorbs a great many things said pleasantly by a pleasant man.
She thought of that now, walking beside Georgiana along the upper terrace, and felt the particular discomfort of recognizing, for perhaps the third time in two days, how cheaply she had once purchased her opinions.
She had been, she was beginning to understand, a person who collected impressions the way some women collected lace — admiring the pattern, never troubling to examine the thread beneath it, and calling the whole business discernment because it pleased her to think so well of her own eye.
"My brother tells me you walk a great deal. More than is fashionable, he says, though I think he means it as a compliment, when he says such things of you."
"I find walking clears a great many things that sitting in a drawing room only thickens. I am told it is not elegant. I have decided I do not greatly mind."
"I should like to walk more than I do." Georgiana said it simply, without complaint, but Elizabeth heard, underneath the simplicity, something that wanted drawing out, and did not draw it out directly, because she had begun to understand, in the short time she had known her, that Georgiana Darcy was not a girl to be drawn out by direct questions.
She was a girl who would come to a subject in her own time, sideways, if she came to it at all, and a friend's task was to leave the path clear rather than to walk down it ahead of her.
"What prevents you?"
"Nothing prevents me, precisely. I have simply not been in the habit of it.
I was a great deal at school, and at school one does not walk so much as one is walked, in a line, with a governess counting heads.
" A small, dry note entered her voice, surprising Elizabeth slightly; she had not expected dryness from this particular quarter.
"And since I left school I have been — careful.
About a great many things. Walking among them, though I could not now tell you precisely why a walk should have seemed dangerous. "
Elizabeth let this stand without comment for a few paces, turning it over.
There was a story behind the word *careful*, said in that particular tone, and she did not think it her place to ask for it outright, not on a first acquaintance, however much Mr. Darcy's house and Mrs. Reynolds's testimony and the rose border had already done to soften her toward the family it concerned.
"Then we shall be reckless together this morning," she said instead, "and walk considerably farther than is sensible, and you may decide afterward whether the danger was worth the exercise."
Georgiana laughed — that same small, surprised sound Elizabeth had drawn from her the previous evening, as though laughter were a key she kept in a drawer and had only recently begun to reach for — and said that she thought the danger entirely manageable, provided they kept to the garden and did not attempt the lake, which her brother had forbidden her to swim in unaccompanied, on no grounds she had ever been able to discover beyond his own anxiety.
"He is careful of you."
"He is careful of everything, but he is particularly careful of me, and has been more so this past year than before it, though he tries not to let it show, and does not always succeed.
" She glanced at Elizabeth sideways, a quick, assessing look that reminded Elizabeth, not for the first time, that this girl was a great deal more observant than her quiet manner suggested.
"You have noticed it, I think. Most people do not.
Most people see only that he is grave, and conclude that grave means cold, which is not at all the same thing, though I understand why the two are easily confused. "
"I had occasion to make precisely that confusion myself, not very long ago."
"And now?"
It was, Elizabeth thought, a remarkably direct question from a girl who had just spent several minutes demonstrating that she did not generally favor directness, and she suspected it had cost Georgiana something to ask it, which made her disinclined to answer it lightly.
"Now I think I owed your brother an apology I have not yet found the occasion to give him, for an opinion I formed too quickly and held rather longer than the evidence warranted. I am still deciding how best to offer it."
Georgiana said nothing to this for a little while, but Elizabeth saw her expression settle into something that looked, unmistakably, like satisfaction, and understood that she had said the right thing, or near enough to it, without entirely knowing why.
They came, by the slow drift of the path, to a small stone seat overlooking a fall of water, and sat, and the conversation turned, by Georgiana's own steering, to books — she read, Elizabeth discovered with some pleasure, a good deal more widely than her reputation for accomplishment suggested, having got through most of the histories in her brother's library and a fair quantity of poetry besides, though she confessed a private fondness for novels that she generally kept from her brother's knowledge, not because he disapproved of them but because he would feel obliged to discuss them with her seriously, and she did not always want to discuss a novel seriously.
She wanted, sometimes, simply to have liked it.
"I understand that completely. My father is exactly the same with anything I bring him. He will turn the silliest book into a philosophical exercise if I let him, and so I have learned not to let him, except when I particularly want the exercise."
"Is your father very clever?"
"He is. Cleverer than is entirely good for him, I think, or for the rest of us. He uses his cleverness chiefly to amuse himself at other people's expense, which is delightful when one is the audience and considerably less so when one is the joke."
"I should like to meet him," Georgiana said, with a wistfulness that made Elizabeth look at her properly.
"I have never known a household with much laughter in it.
My father was a serious man, and good, but not given to jokes, and my brother — " She stopped, seeming to consider how to finish the sentence fairly.
"My brother can be very droll, when he forgets to guard against it.
But he guards against it more often than not.
I think he believes gravity to be a kind of duty. "
"And is it?"
"I used to think so. I am less certain now." She said this with the air of someone reporting a fact rather than confiding a feeling, and Elizabeth, recognizing the deflection for what it was, did not press it.
Georgiana smiled at this, and asked one or two further questions about Longbourn, about Elizabeth's sisters, with the careful curiosity of someone unused to large families and faintly wistful about what she imagined them to contain — noise, Elizabeth gathered, mostly, and the particular comfort of never being entirely alone with a problem, whether or not the company helped solve it.
She asked, too, with a carefulness that suggested the question had been waiting some while for an opening, whether Elizabeth's younger sisters were much out in company yet, and seemed, on hearing that the youngest two were very much out indeed, to file the answer away somewhere private, for reasons Elizabeth could not at the time account for, though she would have occasion to remember the exchange later, and understand it rather better than she did now.
It was on the walk back, as they were nearing the house again, that Elizabeth allowed herself to say the thing she had been turning over since breakfast.
"Your brother is very fortunate in his sister."
"I think," Georgiana said, after a small pause, "that he would say the reverse. He has told me so, more than once, and rather more plainly than is usual for him. I do not always believe him when he says it, but I have begun to believe him a little more than I used to."
"Why should you not believe him?"
Georgiana did not answer this directly. She looked instead toward the house, where the riders could now be seen returning along the avenue, small dark figures against the green, and said, in a tone Elizabeth understood to be deliberately lighter than the subject warranted: "Because I made him a poor sort of sister once, and have not entirely forgiven myself for it, whatever he says to the contrary.
But that is a long story, and not one for a morning as fine as this one.
Perhaps another day, if you are willing to hear it. "
"I should be glad to hear it, whenever you are ready to tell it."
"I know," Georgiana said, and looked at her for a moment with an expression Elizabeth could not entirely read — gratitude, perhaps, or something closer to relief — "that is rather why I think I shall tell you."
They walked the rest of the way to the house in a companionable silence, and Elizabeth, watching the riders draw nearer and Mr. Darcy's particular, upright way of sitting a horse become distinguishable from the others, found that she had arrived, by a route she had not chosen and could not now retrace, at an understanding she had not possessed at breakfast: that whatever had happened to this girl, her brother had spent the better part of a year absorbing the cost of it himself, quietly, without complaint, in a hundred small acts of carefulness that asked nothing in return and expected no credit for the asking.
She did not yet know what the story was.
She thought, watching him swing down from his horse and turn toward the house with an expression that warmed, unmistakably, at the sight of his sister waiting for him, that she was beginning to understand its shape regardless.
It did nothing whatever to settle her own feelings on the subject of Mr. Darcy.
If anything, she thought, walking in to change before the midday meal, it had made the question considerably more complicated than it had been at breakfast, and she suspected, with a kind of resigned amusement at her own predicament, that it was very likely to grow more complicated still before the week was out.