Chapter 7
Fitzwilliam proposed the walk himself, after breakfast, with a casualness Darcy had known him long enough to distrust entirely.
He had been watching for the opportunity, Darcy realized only afterward, with the particular patience of a man who did not generally trouble himself to wait for anything, which ought to have alerted him sooner than it did.
Fitzwilliam had said almost nothing of substance through the whole of breakfast — had instead occupied himself with a long, comic account of a brother officer's misadventure with a borrowed horse, delivered chiefly for Georgiana's benefit, and had watched Darcy across the table with an expression of such studied unconcern that Darcy ought to have known, the moment he saw it, that something considerably more pointed was being held in reserve.
"Come down to the lake with me. I find I have eaten too much and require the exercise, and you have been looking, this last hour, like a man who would benefit from being made to walk somewhere instead of sitting and thinking, which I have observed you doing rather too much of lately."
"I have business to attend to this morning."
"Your business can wait twenty minutes. It is not as though Pemberley will fall down in your absence.
" Fitzwilliam was already moving toward the door as he said it, with the particular confidence of a man entirely certain of being followed, and Darcy, who had not in fact decided to follow him, did so regardless, which told him something about the inevitability of the conversation to come that he would have preferred not to be told.
They walked some distance in silence, down past the rose border where old Thomas was at his work, along the gravel path that curved toward the water, before Fitzwilliam spoke again, and when he did, it was with none of his customary lightness.
"I have been watching you for four days, Darcy, and I find I can no longer hold my tongue about it, whatever you may think of me for speaking."
"I had rather hoped you might surprise me by managing it."
"I am not a man given to surprising restraint, as you are perfectly aware, and you would think considerably less of me if I suddenly developed any at this late stage of our acquaintance.
" Fitzwilliam stopped walking, and turned to face him properly, with an expression that had set aside its usual mischief entirely.
"Miss Beaumont is a very pleasant woman.
I have known her some years, and I like her, and I believe you like her too, in precisely the same uncomplicated way I do — as an old acquaintance one is glad to see and entirely content to see depart again.
You have never had the smallest interest in her beyond that, in all the time I have known you both, and I do not believe you have begun to develop one now. "
"I am not certain what you imagine you are accusing me of, then."
"I am not accusing you of anything. I am observing that you appear, this week, to be conducting some sort of private comparison, with Miss Beaumont serving as the instrument of it, and that the result of the comparison is written rather plainly on your face every time Miss Elizabeth Bennet enters a room you are already standing in. "
Darcy said nothing to this for a long moment. The water moved before them, unhurried, indifferent to the conversation taking place at its edge, and he envied it that indifference, briefly and without much hope of acquiring any of his own.
"That is a very particular sort of observation to have made, Fitzwilliam."
"It is not a difficult one. I am not, generally, a man celebrated for his subtlety of perception — you have told me so yourself, on more than one occasion, usually when I have failed to notice something you considered obvious — but I have known you the whole of my life, and I have never once seen you look at a woman the way you look at Miss Bennet when you believe no one is attending to you.
You looked at her that way in Hertfordshire, before either of us had any business calling it anything at all.
You looked at her that way at Rosings, with rather more unhappiness attached to it, which I confess puzzled me at the time, though I understand the puzzle a great deal better now than I did then.
And you have looked at her that way every single day since she arrived at this house, with an addition I had not seen before, which I can only describe as hope, and which I find, frankly, rather moving to witness in a man I had begun to fear had given up the practice of hoping for anything at all. "
"You should not have told me that."
"Probably not." Fitzwilliam's mouth moved, not quite into a smile. "Are you glad I did?"
A pause, longer than the question strictly required.
"Yes."
"Then I shall consider the indiscretion justified, and proceed to commit a second one, since I am evidently in the mood for it this morning.
Miss Bennet has, twice since breakfast yesterday, looked at you when she did not believe you could see her doing it.
I happened to be seated where I could see both of you at once, which is a vantage point I recommend highly, and intend to occupy as often as the company permits for the remainder of this visit, because I find the view considerably more entertaining than anything else on offer at present. "
Darcy turned this over for a long moment, walking on a few paces with his eyes on the water rather than his cousin, because he did not entirely trust what his face might do if he kept it turned toward Fitzwilliam a moment longer.
"I proposed to her once, Fitzwilliam. At Hunsford, in the spring. I was refused."
"I had gathered something of the kind had occurred, from the general shape of your misery that season, though you never told me so directly, which I thought rather poor of you, given how many of your other miseries I have been obliged to hear about over the years, frequently at considerable length and with no encouragement whatever on my part. "
"There seemed very little point in discussing a humiliation I had no intention of repeating."
"And is that your present plan? To say nothing further, on the theory that a man who has been refused once forfeits all future right to try again, however much may have changed in the interval?"
"It is not a question of forfeiture. It is a question of having been entirely wrong, the first time, about what I was owed, and about what I had any right to ask for, and I am not in the habit of repeating mistakes I have already paid handsomely to learn from."
Fitzwilliam stopped again, and this time there was no mischief in his face at all, only something that looked, to Darcy's considerable surprise, like genuine exasperation.
"The mistake was not the proposal, Darcy.
The mistake — whatever it consisted of, and I confess I was not present to judge the particulars — was very likely the manner of it, and the man who made it.
If you cannot see the difference between the man who stood in that parsonage at Easter and the man who has spent this week walking his own grounds with something like joy in his face for the first time in a year, then you understand your own conduct considerably less well than I have always given you credit for, and I have generally given you a great deal of credit on that particular score. "
"You have not seen me at Rosings, Fitzwilliam. You do not know what I said to her there, or how I said it."
"I do not need to have heard it to recognize that a man capable of the conversation I overheard at dinner three nights ago, about trees and rivers and your father's opinion of formal gardens — a conversation I watched undo you rather more thoroughly than any battle I have personally witnessed, and I have witnessed several — is not, whatever his past failures, incapable of doing better the second time, provided he can be persuaded to make the attempt at all. "
Darcy did not answer this immediately. He stood looking at the water, turning the substance of it over with the same careful attention he generally reserved for matters that mattered to him a very great deal, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he had no immediate counter to offer, which was not, he reflected, a sensation he was accustomed to in conversation with his cousin.
"I do not know what she feels," he said at last. "I have no grounds for assuming anything beyond ordinary civility on her part, and I will not presume upon a kindness that may amount to nothing more than good manners extended to a host."
"No," Fitzwilliam agreed, "you do not know what she feels.
Nor does she know, I should imagine, with any great confidence, what you feel, since you have spent the better part of a week guarding the information as though it were a state secret.
That is rather the difficulty with the two of you, Darcy, if I may be permitted one further observation before we return to the house and I am obliged to pretend I have said none of this: you are both, I think, waiting for the other to declare first, out of an excess of caution that does either of you very little credit, and a great deal of unnecessary suffering. "
They turned back toward the house in a silence that felt, to Darcy, considerably less comfortable than the one in which they had set out, and yet he found, walking up the gravel path with the morning sun now fully risen over the water behind them, that something in his chest had loosened slightly that had not been loose in a very long while — not resolved, not settled, but loosened, the way a knot loosens before it can properly be undone, and he thought, glancing once at his cousin's profile beside him, that he owed Fitzwilliam a debt he had no immediate means of repaying, and did not, for once, particularly mind owing it.
"You will say nothing of this to her," he said, as they neared the terrace, "nor to anyone else. I will not have her made uncomfortable on my account, nor become the subject of speculation belowstairs before I have had the chance to settle my own mind properly."
"I am a soldier, Darcy, not a gossip. I can keep a confidence when one is worth keeping, and I think this one very much is.
" Fitzwilliam paused at the foot of the steps, and something of his usual lightness returned to his face, though tempered now with a warmth Darcy did not often see him display so plainly.
"I will say only this, and then I shall trouble you no further on the subject today: you have spent a great many years being careful, Darcy, in matters where carefulness served you well — your sister, your estate, your name.
I do not think it serves you here. I think, in this single instance, you would do better to be a little reckless, and trust that the woman in question is at least as capable of judging her own heart as you have always insisted Georgiana is capable of judging hers. "
He went in ahead, whistling something tuneless and entirely unbothered, and left Darcy standing alone at the foot of the steps for some minutes longer, turning the whole conversation over with the same deliberate attention he brought to every decision he considered worth making properly, and arriving, by the time he went in himself, at no firm conclusion beyond the certain knowledge that he could not now unmake what had been said, and was not entirely sure he wished to.