Chapter 12
The household had gathered for a final breakfast together before Miss Beaumont's departure, a shorter and less leisurely meal than usual, conducted with the particular bittersweet temper of a party that knows its present shape is about to change, however slightly, and is making the most of the last few minutes in which it remains complete.
Fitzwilliam had been in excellent spirits throughout, relating some absurd story of Miss Beaumont's exploits during a previous visit to Bath that had Georgiana laughing properly into her chocolate, and Miss Beaumont herself had borne the teasing with the easy good humour of a woman entirely secure in her own dignity, returning Fitzwilliam's volleys with rather more wit than he generally received credit for provoking.
Darcy had watched the exchange with a quiet attention that had little to do with its content and a great deal to do with his own private accounting of the fortnight just past, an accounting he had been conducting, by degrees, since the rainy afternoon some days before, and which he could not set aside even now, with Miss Beaumont's trunks already being carried down to the waiting carriage.
Miss Beaumont's carriage was ordered for ten, and she came down a little before the hour, dressed for travel, with the particular brisk efficiency of a woman who disliked lingering over departures and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
"You have been a very tolerable host, Darcy," she said, drawing on her gloves in the hall while a footman saw to her trunks, "which I mean as considerably higher praise than it sounds, since I have stayed in a great many houses where the master could not be troubled to notice his guests at all, beyond the necessary civilities at table.
You have noticed mine rather more than that, this fortnight, and I am obliged to you for it. "
"You make my ordinary duties sound like some particular accomplishment, Miss Beaumont. I have done nothing beyond what any host owes his guests."
"You have done rather more than that, though I shall not embarrass either of us by specifying what, since you would only deny it, and I have not the time this morning to argue the point properly.
" She finished with her gloves, and looked at him for a moment with an expression that combined genuine affection with something shrewder, something that suggested she had observed rather more of the fortnight's proceedings than she had troubled to comment upon aloud.
"I shall say only this, and then I shall go, because Fitzwilliam tells me the roads are tolerable today and I should like to make the most of them: I think you have changed since I last saw you, Darcy, and changed for the better, and I do not think the change has very much to do with anything I have said or done in your company this visit. "
He said nothing to this, and she did not appear to expect him to, only smiled, in the particular knowing way of a woman who has made her observation and has no further interest in pressing it, and turned to take her leave of the rest of the assembled household: a warm embrace for Georgiana, a teasing word for Fitzwilliam, a perfectly civil farewell for Elizabeth that contained, as far as Darcy could discern, nothing beyond ordinary courtesy, though he watched the exchange with rather more attention than the occasion strictly warranted.
He stood at the door as the carriage pulled away down the long avenue, and felt, watching it go, an emotion he examined with some care before allowing himself to name it, because he had learned, this past fortnight, to distrust his own quick judgments of his own feelings rather more than he once had.
It was not regret. He searched for regret specifically, turning the question over as the carriage grew smaller against the green of the park, and found none whatsoever, which struck him, on reflection, as a rather precise measure of something he had not previously had occasion to measure so directly.
He had known Miss Beaumont some years. He liked her, genuinely and without complication, in the manner one likes an old acquaintance whose company is pleasant and whose departure occasions no particular sorrow beyond the ordinary regret of any parting.
He had watched her, this fortnight, move through his house and his company with the easy confidence of a woman entirely secure in her own situation, accomplished, handsome, perfectly suited, by every external measure his aunt or his uncle or anyone else inclined to advise him on the subject would have applied, to the position of mistress of Pemberley.
He had felt, in her presence, precisely nothing beyond the comfortable warmth of long familiarity.
He thought of Elizabeth Bennet, by contrast, and found that he could not think of her at all without some considerable disturbance of his composure — without the particular alertness that came over him whenever she entered a room, the attention he could not quite govern, however he tried, whenever she spoke, the lingering awareness, hours afterward, of some remark she had made that he turned over privately long after the conversation itself had ended.
Miss Beaumont was an admirable woman. He found he could not think about her for more than a few minutes together.
Elizabeth Bennet he found he could not stop thinking about at all, and the comparison, set side by side in this manner, told him precisely what Fitzwilliam had already told him by the lake, though he had needed, evidently, the additional evidence of Miss Beaumont's actual departure to feel the truth of it as fully as he now did.
He went back into the house, and found Georgiana waiting in the hall, watching him with an expression of such evident, careful curiosity that he could not entirely suppress a small private smile at the sight of it.
"You are looking at me, Georgiana, as though you expect me to say something particular."
"I am not expecting anything, precisely. I am only observing that you do not appear especially sorry to see Miss Beaumont go, which I confess does not surprise me, though I had wondered, before this visit began, whether it might."
"Why should it have surprised you?"
"Because everyone has always said," Georgiana said, with the careful, deliberate honesty he had come, this past fortnight, to recognize as a new and hard-won quality in her, "that Miss Beaumont would suit you very well, and I think, watching the two of you this fortnight, that everyone has always been entirely wrong, in a way that I find rather reassuring to have confirmed, since I have privately thought so for some years myself and never quite had the courage to say it. "
"And who does suit me, in your present estimation, since you have apparently given the matter some private thought?"
"I think you already know the answer to that, and I think Miss Bennet may know it a great deal better than you currently credit her with knowing, and I think the only person at Pemberley presently uncertain of the matter is you."
She left him standing in the hall with that, and went off toward the music room with the particular light step of a girl who has said something she had been wanting to say for some while and found, in the saying of it, considerably more relief than apprehension, and Darcy stood alone for some minutes afterward, turning his sister's words over with the same careful attention he generally brought to matters of real consequence, and found, examining them, that he had no honest objection to raise against a single word of it.
He was aware, standing there in the quiet hall with the carriage's wheels still faintly audible on the gravel beyond the door, that he had spent the better part of a year training himself out of precisely the sort of certainty Georgiana had just displayed so plainly — the certainty of a person who simply says what she observes to be true, without first weighing every possible objection or softening the observation into something more easily dismissed.
He thought it rather remarkable, and rather moving, that his sister, of all people, should have arrived at that particular courage before he had managed it himself, given everything she had once suffered for trusting too readily in her own judgment.
He found he was proud of her for it in a manner that had very little to do with brotherly indulgence and a great deal to do with simple admiration.
He thought, walking eventually toward his study and the morning's neglected correspondence, of Hunsford again, and of the particular certainty he had carried into that small parsonage — the certainty of a man who believed his own merit a sufficient substitute for her consent.
He had walked away from that conversation believing himself wronged.
It had taken him the better part of a year to understand how much of the wrong had been his own to bear.
He did not feel that old certainty now. He felt, instead, something considerably more valuable: the hard-won understanding that being loved, if he was ever to be loved at all, would require him to have become someone worth loving first, and that the becoming was not yet, perhaps, entirely complete, however much progress the fortnight just past had persuaded him he had made.
He thought of his father, briefly — generous without calculation, careful of his tenants and his servants and his own family in equal measure, never once requiring gratitude for any of it.
He had spent his whole life believing he had inherited that generosity along with everything else his father had left him.
He understood now that inheritance was not the same as practice.
He was not yet certain it was enough. He thought, sealing the first of the morning's letters with rather more deliberation than the correspondence itself required, that he intended to find out, and that the finding out, whatever its outcome, would at least be conducted honestly this time, by a man who had learned, at considerable cost, precisely what honesty required of him, and was no longer quite so afraid of paying the price.
The house, with Miss Beaumont gone, felt very slightly smaller than it had the day before, in the particular way a house always contracts a little once a guest has gone from it.
He found, sitting at last to his correspondence, that he did not mind the contraction in the least — there was, if anything, a clarity in it, fewer voices to attend to, fewer claims upon his notice.
But the clarity cut both ways. With Miss Beaumont gone there was no longer any comparison to hide behind, no further evidence to gather before he was obliged to act on what the fortnight had already shown him, and he found, setting his pen to the first unanswered letter, that he had run out of every reason he had ever given himself for waiting.