Chapter 13
Elizabeth had observed, over the course of the visit, that Mr. Bingley possessed a particular kind of courage that operated everywhere except in the one place he most needed it.
He would speak without hesitation before a room full of strangers, manage a horse no one else cared to attempt, lose at cards with such cheerful indifference, and make himself agreeable to persons of every station with an ease that cost him nothing whatsoever, that Elizabeth had once told Jane, privately and with great affection, that she did not believe Mr. Bingley had ever in his life felt anxious about anything that did not actually matter to him.
It was the things that mattered that undid him entirely.
He had been visibly building toward something for the better part of a week — a particular restlessness about him at breakfast, a tendency to begin sentences in Jane's direction and abandon them halfway through, a habit of finding reasons to walk in whatever direction Jane happened to be walking and then appearing faintly surprised to discover himself there.
She had watched this particular drama unfold once before, at Netherfield, and had watched it end, that first time, in disappointment that had taken her sister the better part of a year to recover from fully, though Jane had borne the recovery, as she bore everything, without complaint or visible bitterness.
Elizabeth had not forgotten that history, watching its gentler repetition play out this fortnight, and was rather more invested in its present outcome than she generally permitted herself to be invested in matters not strictly her own concern.
Jane deserved this. She had deserved it the first time, and had been denied it through no fault of her own, and Elizabeth wanted, with a fierceness that surprised her a little, to see the denial properly remedied at last.
"He means to speak to her," Fitzwilliam observed, watching this performance unfold over the course of a long morning with the particular satisfaction of a man enjoying a play he has already guessed the ending to.
He had joined Elizabeth at the breakfast room window, ostensibly to admire the view, though Elizabeth suspected his true purpose was rather closer to the one he now confessed.
"He has meant to speak to her for the better part of a week, and has been thwarted, as far as I can determine, entirely by his own nerves, since no one else has done anything whatsoever to prevent him. "
"Jane is equally nervous, I think, though she conceals it rather better."
"Most people conceal most things rather better than Bingley does.
It is not a very high standard to clear.
" Fitzwilliam said this with evident affection rather than unkindness, and Elizabeth, who had grown genuinely fond of him over the course of the fortnight, smiled at the observation rather than disputing it.
It was Fitzwilliam, in fact, who proposed the arrangement that finally permitted the matter to resolve itself — a walk to the lake after luncheon, the whole party setting out together and then, by what Elizabeth strongly suspected was deliberate engineering rather than accident, gradually dispersing into smaller groups until Bingley and Jane found themselves walking some distance ahead, alone, with no one near enough to overhear whatever might pass between them.
"You are remarkably skilled at this sort of arrangement, Colonel," Elizabeth observed, as they set out. "I begin to wonder whether you have had practice."
"A great deal of practice, Miss Bennet, though generally on behalf of friends considerably less deserving of the trouble than Bingley.
I have spent half my military career managing men a great deal braver than him in every circumstance except the one that mattered most to them personally, and I have learned, over the years, that the kindest service one can render such men is not advice, which they never take, but opportunity, which they occasionally have the sense to use. "
"You make it sound a science."
"It is rather more an art, I think, and a poorly rewarded one, since the men in question generally credit their own courage entirely and forget the friend who arranged the circumstances under which that courage was permitted to appear.
I do not mind the lack of credit, on the whole.
I find the result tolerably satisfying to witness regardless. "
"You will keep me occupied, Miss Bennet," he added, with the particular brisk cheerfulness of a man executing a plan he had no intention of admitting to outright, "while Bingley either finds his courage or loses his nerve entirely, in which latter case I shall be obliged to push him into the lake out of pure exasperation. "
"I begin to suspect you of managing this entire morning, Colonel."
"I manage very little, Miss Bennet. I merely create the conditions under which other people's courage is permitted to find itself, and then I stand well back and allow nature to take whatever course it wishes.
" He offered her his arm with exaggerated gallantry, and she took it, laughing, and they fell into step some way behind Darcy and Georgiana, who had taken the other path along the water, leaving Bingley and Jane the clear field Fitzwilliam had evidently intended them to have.
Elizabeth kept up her end of the conversation for some while, discussing nothing in particular with the particular determined cheerfulness of a woman who understands her present duty to be distraction rather than substance, but found her attention drifting, more than once, to the figures ahead of them — Bingley and Jane, walking close together near the water's edge, their pace slowing by degrees until they had stopped entirely, facing each other in the soft afternoon light with the lake spread out behind them and no one, as far as either of them appeared to know, near enough to observe.
She saw the change happen from a distance too great to hear a single word of what passed between them, and yet she understood, watching it, precisely what she was witnessing — the particular alteration in Jane's posture, a kind of settling, as though some weight she had been carrying without complaint for a very long while had finally been set down; the way Bingley's hands moved, briefly, uncertainly, before Jane's own hand found them and stilled them; the long, quiet moment afterward in which neither of them moved at all, simply standing together by the water as though the whole of the visible world had narrowed, for the two of them, to the small space between their joined hands.
"Well," said Fitzwilliam, who had followed her gaze and arrived, evidently, at the same conclusion, "I think we may safely conclude that Bingley has found his courage after all, and I shall be spared the indignity of pushing him into the lake, which I confess I am rather relieved about, since the water looks considerably colder than the day warrants. "
Elizabeth found, watching her sister's quiet, transformed happiness from this small distance, that she felt nothing in herself but the purest and most uncomplicated relief — no envy whatsoever, no private comparison of her own unsettled circumstances against Jane's now evidently settled ones, only a deep and genuine gladness that the best of her sisters had been given, at last, precisely the happiness she had always deserved and had borne its absence, this past year, with such quiet, uncomplaining grace.
She understood, examining the feeling with her usual honesty, that its very purity told her something useful about her own heart.
She had spent the better part of this visit in a state of considerable private confusion regarding her own feelings — confusion she had examined, and re-examined, and arrived at no entirely settled conclusion about, beyond the certain knowledge that she no longer felt anything resembling the cool indifference she had once been so confident described her opinion of Mr. Darcy.
Watching Jane now, she found that confusion replaced, for the length of this one observed moment, by something simpler: the plain understanding that she wanted this, this particular quiet certainty, this settling of a long-carried weight, for herself as well, and that she had perhaps wanted it for rather longer than she had been willing to admit even to her own private reflection.
She thought, watching her sister's face from this small remove, of all the years she had spent believing herself the more clear-sighted of the two of them — Jane, who saw the good in everyone and was occasionally deceived by her own generosity; Elizabeth, who saw the absurd in everyone and prided herself on rarely being deceived by anything at all.
She wondered now how much of that pride had been earned, and how much had simply been the comfortable self-regard of a woman who had never yet been tested by anything she could not resolve with a clever remark.
She had been tested this past year, rather more thoroughly than she had anticipated, and had found her own clear sight a good deal less reliable than she had once supposed.
Jane's heart, slower to commit and slower to despair, had perhaps understood something all along that Elizabeth's quicker wit had taken considerably longer to learn.
"You are very quiet, Miss Bennet," Fitzwilliam observed, with the particular gentle perceptiveness she had learned, this fortnight, to expect from him beneath the easy good humour, the perceptiveness she suspected most of his acquaintance never troubled themselves to look for.
"I am only glad, Colonel. I find gladness of this particular kind tends to make me quiet rather than otherwise."
"A reasonable response to the sight before us, I think.
Though I shall confess, since we are being honest with each other this afternoon, that I find myself rather more interested, at present, in the gladness of a different observer entirely, watching from somewhat further along the path than either Bingley or your sister has any notion of. "
Elizabeth followed the direction of his glance and found Darcy, some distance off near the water's edge, having evidently paused in his own walk with Georgiana to observe the same small scene she and Fitzwilliam had just witnessed — Bingley and Jane, still standing close together by the lake, the whole of their happiness written plainly across a distance too great for words but entirely sufficient for understanding.
Darcy's expression, watching them, was one of such unguarded warmth that Elizabeth felt something catch, briefly and without warning, somewhere beneath her own composure.
"He has wished for this for some while, I think," she said, more to herself than to Fitzwilliam.
"He has wished for very little else, this past fortnight, beyond a small handful of things he has been considerably less successful at securing," Fitzwilliam said, with a particular dryness she did not entirely know how to interpret, and offered her his arm again before she could ask him to clarify the remark, and steered her firmly back toward the house, observing, as they went, that he was unaccountably hungry already, and hoped very much that Bingley and Miss Bennet did not intend to remain by the lake so long that they missed the whole of the afternoon entirely.
They had not gone much further before Jane and Bingley caught them up, walking quickly enough that Elizabeth understood the catching-up itself to be a kind of announcement.
Jane's face, when Elizabeth turned to look at her properly, had a brightness in it that no amount of her sister's habitual composure could quite govern.
"Lizzy." Jane took both her hands, and seemed, for a moment, to have nothing further prepared to say beyond her sister's name, as though the name itself were sufficient to carry the whole of her meaning.
"Lizzy, I am the happiest creature in the world.
I know everyone says so, when they say it at all, and I have always privately wondered whether anyone could mean it quite as entirely as they claimed. I find I no longer wonder."
"I never doubted it of you, dearest. I only wondered how much longer the two of you intended to keep the rest of us waiting to hear it properly said."
Bingley, arriving a half-step behind Jane with the particular sheepish delight of a man who has just accomplished the most important thing he has ever attempted, laughed at that — a real laugh, entirely unguarded.
"Considerably less long than I deserve credit for, Miss Elizabeth, given how thoroughly I have been managed toward this exact spot by very nearly the whole of the company present.
I begin to suspect I am the only person at Pemberley who did not know precisely how this afternoon would end before it began. "
"You are very far from the only person who suspected it, Bingley, but you are very likely the only person who required quite so much managing to arrive at it, and I shall take no small credit for the management, whatever modesty obliges me to pretend otherwise."
"I shall not argue the point with you today, Colonel, of all days, though I reserve the right to dispute it thoroughly on some future occasion when I have rather more dignity to spare for the disputing."
Elizabeth walked back beside him in comfortable silence, turning the day over with a fullness of feeling she had not anticipated when they had all set out so lightly that morning.
She thought she understood, now, rather better than she had an hour before, why a long house party of this particular kind could accomplish in a fortnight what a season of formal calls and careful distances might never have managed at all — proximity, sustained and ordinary and entirely unforced, had a way of revealing people to one another that no single evening, however well conducted, ever could.
Jane had her answer now, settled and certain, and Elizabeth found she could not be entirely glad for her sister without also marking, with some private discomfort, how very far her own situation remained from anything she could call settled at all.