Chapter 17
His letter arrived four days after he had gone, brief and plainly written: a short account confirming that the matter in Brighton had been settled, that Lydia was entirely safe and would hear nothing further from Mr. Wickham, and that he expected to return to Pemberley within a few days, once certain remaining arrangements had been properly concluded.
He gave no particulars beyond this. Elizabeth read the letter perhaps a dozen times over the course of that single day, searching its careful brevity for some indication of what the settling had actually required, and found nothing beyond the plain fact of its accomplishment.
She told herself, the first time through, that this was restraint, of precisely the kind she had asked him to practice less of, not more, and found, the third and fourth time through, that the telling did not entirely persuade her.
It was, after all, exactly the sort of letter a careful man wrote when he intended to manage what someone else was permitted to know.
She had warned him against that very thing in the garden, not four days before, and had believed, walking back to the house afterward, that he had heard her.
Reading this, brief, plain, offering nothing she had not already been given leave to receive, she could not entirely silence the small, unwelcome voice that wondered whether she had mistaken a man's good intentions for a change he had not yet fully made, in precisely the manner she had once mistaken his pride for the whole of his character.
She did not write this fear to Jane. She was not yet certain she could write it to herself without doing it an injustice she could not afterward unsay.
She folded the letter and kept it nonetheless, in the same small drawer where she had, without quite admitting to herself why, begun keeping one or two other things this fortnight that she was not yet ready to examine too closely.
She wrote to Jane that same afternoon, a careful letter that conveyed the substance of the relief without explaining its source in any detail she had not been given leave to share, and received, some days later, a reply so full of grateful astonishment that Elizabeth laughed aloud, alone in her room, with a relief so considerable it had nowhere else to go but laughter.
Jane had apparently learned, through some channel of Mrs. Forster's own correspondence, that Mr. Wickham had ended his attentions to Lydia with unexpected suddenness, and that Lydia, after a brief period of wounded vanity, had already transferred her enthusiasm to a different officer entirely, with the particular resilience of a girl too young and too lightly attached to feel any wound very deeply.
She thought, reading the letter a second time with her amusement somewhat settled, that she would owe Mr. Darcy a debt for this single piece of news that she did not think she could ever adequately repay, however much he had insisted, in the garden, that he wanted no repayment at all.
The household, in the meantime, had settled into a quieter rhythm than the visit's earlier weeks had known.
Fitzwilliam kept everyone's spirits tolerably high with a steady supply of regimental anecdotes and an unflagging willingness to be teased in return, but Elizabeth noticed, beneath his good humour, a watchfulness she had not seen in him before — a habit of glancing toward the window whenever a carriage was heard on the drive, quickly suppressed, as though he had appointed himself the household's unofficial sentry for his cousin's return and did not wish his vigilance remarked upon.
"You are listening for him too," she said to Fitzwilliam, on the second evening, finding him at the window after dinner with an expression that did not entirely match the casualness of his posture, his hands clasped a shade too tightly behind his back for a man merely admiring a view.
"I am listening for nothing in particular, Miss Bennet. I am merely admiring the grounds, which I find myself doing a great deal more often than usual this week, for reasons I cannot fully account for."
"I had not realized the grounds had grown so much more admirable in his absence."
"They have not. I have simply run out of other excuses for standing at this particular window, and find I have grown too lazy to invent a fresh one each evening.
" He said it with a small, rueful smile that confirmed, rather than denied, the substance of her observation, and Elizabeth liked him a good deal for the honesty of the admission, however lightly delivered.
Darcy came back to Pemberley on a Tuesday evening, in the rain, considerably later than anyone had expected him, and Elizabeth learned of his arrival only because she happened to be in the library when he came in by the garden door rather than the front, evidently wishing to avoid the small commotion a more formal entrance would have occasioned.
He looked, she thought, watching him cross the room before he had noticed her presence in the window seat, both tired and unburdened in a manner that struck her as somehow contradictory and yet entirely accurate to what she could see of him — travel-worn, his coat damp with rain, a particular weariness about his eyes that spoke of several nights' insufficient sleep, and beneath all of it, something lighter than she had seen in him even before he left, the specific lightness of a man who has set down a weight he had carried so long he had nearly forgotten its full measure until the setting-down revealed it.
She thought, watching him, that she had perhaps never seen him look quite so unguarded.
Not even in the library on the rainy afternoon, not even in the garden when he had told her the worst of himself; there had been, in both of those moments, some residue of careful composure he was still managing even in vulnerability.
There was none of that composure visible now.
He simply looked, for the first time in their whole acquaintance, entirely and unremarkably tired, in the way any man looks tired after a difficult journey, with nothing further being performed beneath it.
"Miss Bennet." He stopped, evidently surprised to find her there, and something in his face arranged itself, briefly, into the careful composure she remembered from their earliest acquaintance, before some private decision seemed to override it, and he let the composure go entirely, and simply looked at her instead, tired and rain-damp and unmistakably glad.
"You came in by the garden door."
"I did not wish to make an entrance of it.
I am not at my best this evening, and I had rather not greet the whole household looking as though I had been dragged through several counties by my own horse, which is, I confess, not entirely far from the truth of the matter, given the state of the roads between here and Brighton this time of year. "
"What happened?"
He crossed to the chair near her window seat, and sat, not across the room as he might once have done, but close enough that conversation between them required no raising of voices, and Elizabeth noted the proximity with a small private warmth she did not attempt to suppress.
"Lydia is safe. The matter is closed. Mr. Wickham has ended whatever understanding existed between them, entirely and permanently, and has given me his word — for whatever that word is worth, which I confess is not a great deal, though I have arranged matters such that he has every practical reason to honour it regardless — that he will conduct himself, for the remainder of his time in Brighton, in a manner that occasions no further comment. "
"That is the whole of it?"
He looked at her, and something in her tone seemed to register with him before the question itself had fully landed. "You mean to ask for more than the outline, I think."
"I mean to ask for the whole of it, sir, exactly as you gave it to Georgiana, and exactly as you did not give it to me, in a letter brief enough that I read it a dozen times and still could not have told you what it actually required of you.
You asked me, in the garden, to trust you provisionally and hold you to account afterward.
I have done the trusting. I find I am now collecting on the rest."
He was quiet for a moment, and she watched him decide something, the particular stillness of a man choosing the harder of two available courses because he has promised himself he will no longer reach for the easier one out of habit.
Then he told her, plainly, and at length, with none of the careful editing she had learned to expect of him in matters that touched his own conduct: the two days of hard riding, the shabby lodgings near the camp, Wickham's practiced composure and the precise moment it had begun to crack, the threat of exposure he had been prepared to carry out in full had Wickham refused him, the debts, the bargain struck without a shred of contrition on the other side of it.
He did not soften his own part in it, nor make it sound braver than it had felt to live through.
When he had finished, Elizabeth found that the small, unwelcome doubt she had carried since his letter arrived had gone somewhere she could no longer locate it.
"Thank you, for that, and not only for Lydia."
"It was not—" He stopped, and seemed to gather himself, choosing his next words with evident care.
"I did not do it to be thanked, Miss Bennet.
I would not have you feel any obligation on my account, nor imagine that I undertook the journey in expectation of your gratitude.
I did it because the failure was mine to correct, and because your sister's safety mattered to me a great deal, quite apart from any claim it might give me upon your regard. "
"I know that. That is why I am thanking you."
He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted — not surprise, exactly, but the particular quiet recognition of a man hearing his own meaning understood more precisely than he had managed to state it himself, and he said nothing further on the subject, only inclined his head slightly, the smallest possible gesture of acceptance, and let the matter rest.
They sat together for a while after that, in a silence that Elizabeth found, somewhat to her own surprise, entirely comfortable — not the charged, watchful silence of two people uncertain of each other, but something closer to the quiet two people share when they have run out of pretense and found the absence of it a considerable relief.
The rain continued, steady against the windows, and the fire someone had thought to light against the evening's chill burned low and companionable in the grate, and Elizabeth thought, watching it, that she could not recall the last time she had felt so entirely at ease in anyone's company, let alone the company of a man she had once been so thoroughly certain she despised.
"Georgiana will be glad to see you returned safely," she said at last, when the silence had stretched long enough that some acknowledgment of the ordinary world seemed due.
"She has been rather anxious on your account, though she has hidden it well, for her sake as much as everyone else's.
Colonel Fitzwilliam has been nearly as bad, though he would deny it thoroughly if you asked him. "
"I will go to her shortly. I wished, first—" He paused again, and Elizabeth saw him weigh whatever he had been about to say, and decide, evidently, in favor of saying it.
"I wished, first, simply to sit somewhere quiet for a few minutes, with someone whose company required no explanation of myself.
I find I have not had a great deal of that, these past several days. "
"You may sit here as long as you like, sir. I have no pressing engagement elsewhere this evening, and I find I am in no particular hurry to end this one."
He smiled at that, a real smile, unguarded, the kind she had seen perhaps twice in the whole of their acquaintance, and which transformed his face so thoroughly that she was, for a moment, entirely unable to look away from it.
He settled more fully into the chair, and they remained there together for some while longer, talking of nothing very consequential: the rain, the state of the roads he had travelled, a small comic account of Fitzwilliam's letters to him along the way, full of news he insisted could not wait for his cousin's return.
Two people who had each carried a great deal these past several days had found, in this small quiet room with the rain falling steadily outside it, a brief and entirely undemanding respite from the carrying.
Elizabeth thought, walking up to dress for the dinner he had missed and would now be expected to join, that she had come to Pemberley a stranger to herself in certain particulars she had once been very confident she understood completely, and was leaving this particular evening considerably more certain of at least one thing: that whatever remained unsettled between herself and Mr. Darcy, indifference was no longer among the available accounts of it, by any honest measure she could bring to the question.