Chapter 5
He had spent the afternoon, before dinner, in the deliberate pursuit of ordinary occupation — letters to answer, a tenant's complaint about a boundary hedge to resolve, the small accumulating business of an estate that did not pause its demands merely because its master had a houseful of guests and a great deal on his mind.
More than once he caught himself reading the same line of a letter three times without absorbing it, and had set the work aside at last with the wry acknowledgment that he was not, this particular afternoon, fit for anything requiring real attention.
He had gone instead to find Georgiana, and had found her at the pianoforte in the small music room, not practicing so much as simply playing, the way she did when no one had asked her to perform and she had therefore lost the self-consciousness that generally attended any music made within her brother's hearing.
He had stood in the doorway some minutes before she noticed him, and when she did, she did not stop, only glanced up and smiled, and asked, without any particular emphasis, whether he had enjoyed his walk that morning, as though the question were nothing, as though she had not spent the whole of it in close company with the one person in England whose opinion of him Darcy found he could no longer pretend indifference to.
"It was a satisfactory ride. Bingley's trees will do very well, once they have had ten years to forget how recently they were planted."
"And Miss Bennet? Did she enjoy her morning?"
"You spent it with her, Georgiana. You are better placed to answer that than I am."
"I am asking what you think she enjoyed of it, not what I observed of it myself," Georgiana said, with a precision that made him look at her properly, and he found, in her face, an expression of such careful, deliberate innocence that he understood at once she was teasing him, gently, in a manner she had not attempted with him in longer than he cared to calculate, and he did not know whether to be alarmed by it or grateful for it, and settled, in the end, on something nearer the latter.
"I think," he said, "that you are enjoying yourself a great deal at my expense this afternoon."
"A little," Georgiana admitted, and returned to her playing, and did not press the subject further, which he took, correctly, as a kindness rather than a retreat.
He allowed himself, that evening, a small and carefully rationed experiment: to sit in the same room as Elizabeth Bennet, for the length of an entire evening, without keeping watch over his own face.
It was harder than he had anticipated. He had grown, this past year, very accomplished at the particular discipline of appearing unmoved — at Rosings, at his aunt's table, in the weeks immediately following Kent, when he had gone about the ordinary business of his life with the specific, exhausting attention of a man carrying something fragile through a crowded room.
He had got rather good at it. He found, watching Elizabeth across his own drawing room before dinner, laughing at something Fitzwilliam had said, that the skill abandoned him almost entirely the moment he had no further use for it.
She was telling Georgiana something, he could not hear what from across the room, but he could see his sister's face, bright and unguarded in a way it had not been with anyone outside the family in longer than he cared to count, and he watched Elizabeth notice this too, and soften toward it in a manner that had nothing performed about it.
She was not charming his sister for his benefit.
She had no notion, he was fairly certain, that he was watching at all.
That was, he thought, very nearly the whole of the difficulty: that everything in her which moved him most was offered without the smallest awareness of an audience, which made it impossible to discount as performance, and equally impossible to claim as anything addressed to him in particular.
Fitzwilliam caught his eye across the room and did something with his eyebrows that Darcy chose, deliberately, not to interpret.
At dinner he was seated, by an arrangement he had not made and would not have presumed to make, near enough to Elizabeth that conversation between them was the natural order of things rather than a thing requiring engineering.
Georgiana's doing, he suspected, though she had said nothing to indicate it, and he did not mind the suspicion in the least. Mrs. Sutcliffe had been speaking, at some length and with considerable satisfaction, of the improvements her husband had lately made to their own grounds — a stretch of formal parterre laid out with geometric precision, gravel walks raked into patterns, a row of clipped yews that marched, she said proudly, in a perfectly straight line from the terrace to the gate.
"And do you approve the effect, Miss Bennet?" Mrs. Sutcliffe asked, with the particular confidence of a woman who has not seriously considered the possibility of disagreement.
"I think it must be a great deal of work to maintain," Elizabeth said, with the diplomacy of someone choosing her words with care, "though I confess I have always had a partiality for grounds that look as though they had occurred, rather than been arranged."
"Occurred, Miss Bennet?"
"I mean only that I prefer a wildness that appears natural to an order that announces itself as such at every turn.
A garden that insists upon its own design rather defeats the pleasure of walking in it, I think — one spends the whole time admiring the gardener's intentions instead of the place itself. "
Darcy, who had said almost nothing through the whole of Mrs. Sutcliffe's account, was drawn forward into the conversation before he had entirely decided to enter it. "You would have every park in England returned to wilderness, then, Miss Bennet, on the principle that order is an imposition."
"Not every park, sir. Only the ones that have forgotten there is a difference between order and tyranny. A well-placed tree need not announce that it has been placed well. It may simply be permitted to stand where it is most natural, and trust the eye to find it."
"And who decides where a tree is most natural?
The tree itself has no opinion in the matter.
Someone must decide, Miss Bennet, whether the tree stands or falls, whether the water is dammed or left to find its own course.
The appearance of wildness is no less a design than the parterre — it is simply a design that conceals its own hand, which I am not entirely persuaded is the more honest of the two approaches. "
"Perhaps not the more honest. But the more generous, I think — to leave a place enough of its own nature that it might still surprise the person who made it."
He had no immediate answer to that, and was aware, in the small silence that followed, of Fitzwilliam watching them both with an expression of frank and undisguised enjoyment, the look of a man at the theatre who has found, unexpectedly, that the second act is considerably better than the first.
"I believe that Pemberley's grounds were laid out very much on the principle you describe.
My father had the formal gardens nearer the house removed entirely, against the advice of nearly everyone he consulted, because he said a man ought to be surprised by his own park now and again, or there was very little point in owning one. "
"Then your father and I should have agreed very well."
"I believe you would have." He said it simply, and was unprepared for how much it cost him to say.
Not the sentiment, which he believed entirely, but the particular vulnerability of admitting, aloud, at his own table, that he had imagined this woman in conversation with his father, a man two years dead, whom he had loved without complication and missed without remedy, and whose good opinion Darcy had spent the whole of his adult life attempting, in various imperfect ways, to deserve.
Elizabeth looked at him for a moment with an expression he could not entirely read, surprise, perhaps, at the simplicity of the answer, or something gentler than surprise, and said nothing further on the subject, which he understood, with some gratitude, to be its own kind of tact.
The conversation moved on, as dinner conversations do, to lighter matters, but Darcy found that something in him had not fully returned from the exchange, and sat through the remainder of the meal with the particular distracted attentiveness of a man replaying, privately, a handful of sentences that had mattered to him a great deal more than their content alone would suggest.
It was, he thought afterward, the best conversation he had had in a very long while.
Not because it had resolved anything, or settled any question between them, but because it had been entirely itself: an argument conducted for its own pleasure, with no design behind it beyond the wish to be understood and to understand in return, between two people who had once mistaken each other so thoroughly that the present ease felt, by contrast, almost suspicious in its rightness.
He did not trust it, quite. He had been wrong about what he was permitted to feel once before, and the wrongness had cost him a humiliation he did not care to repeat.
But he found, walking up to his room that night, that he was not managing his face nearly so carefully as he had been a week ago, and that the lapse troubled him a great deal less than it ought to.
Fitzwilliam found him on the stairs and fell into step beside him without invitation, as was his custom.
"That was quite a performance at dinner."
"It was a conversation about landscape gardening, Fitzwilliam. I am aware you find very little entertaining that does not concern horses or wagers, but I assure you the subject was exactly what it appeared."
"I have rarely seen a man so thoroughly undone by a discussion of tree placement," Fitzwilliam said, entirely unbothered by the rebuff.
"You may tell yourself it was about the trees if it pleases you.
I shall continue to think otherwise, and I shall continue to enjoy myself a great deal while doing so. "
"Goodnight, Fitzwilliam."
"Goodnight, Darcy. Sleep well. I expect you shall."
He did not, particularly, but he did not regret the cause of his wakefulness.
He lay some while in the dark, turning the evening over with the same care he generally reserved for matters of real consequence, and found that what stayed with him most was not the argument itself, satisfying as it had been, but the small unguarded moment in the middle of it — the look on her face when he had spoken of his father, the brief silence in which she had chosen not to press him further, as though she understood instinctively that some things were better left to settle of their own accord than examined too closely while they were still raw.
He thought of Hunsford again, as he had taken to doing rather more often than he liked to admit, and found that the comparison, this time, brought him less pain than usual.
He had gone to her then with a speech prepared, certain of his own merit and careless of hers, and had been answered exactly as he deserved to be answered.
He had nothing prepared tonight. He had said only what he meant, when he meant it, and had found that the saying of it required no courage at all, because there had been no design behind it to protect.
He did not know what this signified, beyond the plain fact of it.
He suspected, drifting finally toward sleep, that he was no longer entirely the man who had stood in that parsonage and catalogued his own condescension as though it were a gift.
He did not know yet whether the man he had become in the meantime was sufficient to the task before him.
But he thought, for the first time in a long while, that he might be permitted to find out.
The permission itself, however provisional, however easily it might yet be withdrawn, was, he thought, perhaps the first useful thing he could say of any night since Kent.