Chapter 18
Dinner that final evening had been a longer, more leisurely affair than usual, as though the whole table had silently agreed to make the most of an occasion none of them wished to hurry toward its natural conclusion.
Mrs. Sutcliffe had insisted upon a second helping of the fish course purely, she said, because she did not know when she should next taste anything so well prepared, and her husband had told a long and only moderately interesting story about a neighbour's disputed boundary hedge that no one had the heart to interrupt, given the particular fondness with which he told it.
Elizabeth, throughout, glanced rather more often than strictly necessary toward the head of the table, where Mr. Darcy sat attending to his duties as host with his usual quiet competence, and caught, on perhaps three occasions, his own glance returning hers before either of them looked properly away.
The last evening arrived with the particular soft melancholy of an occasion everyone present has agreed, by unspoken consent, not to acknowledge directly, though Elizabeth thought she could see the awareness of it in nearly every face around the drawing room — a kind of gentle, loosened warmth in the company, the specific ease of people who have spent a fortnight together and have, on the whole, very much liked the experience, and who understand, without saying so, that tomorrow will scatter them in several directions and that this particular configuration of people in this particular room will very likely never occur again in quite the same way.
Georgiana played for the better part of an hour after dinner, with a confidence and warmth that Elizabeth had watched grow steadily since the visit's earliest days, and which had, this final evening, arrived at something Elizabeth could only describe as full ease, not performance, not even the looser, more private playing Elizabeth had once overheard through a half-open door, but something genuinely shared, music offered to a room full of people Georgiana had decided, by slow and considerable effort, that she trusted.
Elizabeth watched Darcy listening to his sister with an expression of such quiet, unguarded pride that she looked away after a moment, not from any discomfort but from the particular sense that she was witnessing something almost too tender to observe directly, the way one looks away from a sunset rather than diminish it by staring.
Fitzwilliam told a story afterward — an account, delivered with considerable embellishment, of a fellow officer's disastrous attempt to impress a young lady by demonstrating his horsemanship before an audience he had not realized included her father, a retired admiral with very particular opinions about how a gentleman ought to sit a horse — that had the whole room laughing within the first minute and helpless by the end of it, Darcy included, who laughed with the rare, full unguardedness Elizabeth had learned, this fortnight, to treasure on the infrequent occasions she was given to witness it.
"I do not believe a word of that story," Mrs. Sutcliffe said, wiping her eyes, "and I find I do not care in the smallest degree whether it is true, which I think rather proves your point for you, Colonel, whatever you intended by making it."
"Very few of my best stories are entirely true, madam," Fitzwilliam said, with evident satisfaction.
"I have found, over the years, that the truth is generally a great deal less amusing than what actually happened, and I see no reason to let mere accuracy interfere with a good evening's entertainment. "
Bingley and Jane sat together near the fire for the whole of the evening, saying very little to anyone beyond the ordinary courtesies the company required, and radiating, even in their silence, the particular quiet incandescence of two people whose happiness has settled so completely that it no longer requires demonstration to anyone, least of all to each other.
Elizabeth, watching her sister's face across the room, thought that she had never seen Jane look quite so entirely herself, not performing contentment, as she had sometimes seemed to do in the difficult months after Netherfield's first abandonment, but simply, uncomplicatedly happy, in the manner of a person who has stopped bracing for disappointment because the disappointment has finally, decisively, failed to arrive.
Mrs. Gardiner, seated a little apart with her needlework largely abandoned in her lap, had been watching the whole room with the particular satisfied attention of a woman who understood considerably more of what was occurring beneath its surface than she had troubled to comment upon aloud at any point during the visit.
She had said almost nothing to Elizabeth directly on the subject of Mr. Darcy since that first afternoon by the stream, when her own delight at his invitation had been so visible that Elizabeth had been obliged to look away from it, but Elizabeth had not mistaken the silence for inattention.
Her aunt had simply chosen, with the particular tact of a woman who understood that some matters arrived at their own conclusions best left unhurried, to watch rather than to press, and Elizabeth, in this final hour, was grateful for the restraint rather more than she had appreciated it at the time.
She caught Elizabeth's eye across the room at some point during Fitzwilliam's story, and raised her glass an infinitesimal amount — so slight a gesture that anyone not specifically watching for it would have missed it entirely — with an expression that contained, in roughly equal measure, affection, amusement, and the particular knowing satisfaction of an aunt who has drawn her own conclusions some ten days previously and has been waiting, with admirable patience, for her niece to catch up to them.
Elizabeth, who was sitting at that moment beside Mr. Darcy on the small sofa near the window, and who was aware of the proximity with every nerve she possessed, found that she could not look at her aunt directly without giving away considerably more than she was prepared to give away in a room full of company, however affectionately disposed that company might prove.
She kept her eyes, instead, on Fitzwilliam, and laughed at his story with rather more determination than its content alone might have warranted, and was conscious, the whole time, of Mr. Darcy's quiet presence beside her, near enough that she could feel the particular warmth of him without either of them touching, near enough that some part of her attention remained fixed upon him regardless of where her eyes were directed.
"You are not attending to the story at all, Miss Bennet," he said quietly, at some point during a lull, his voice pitched low enough that it carried no further than the small space between them.
"I am attending perfectly well, sir. I have laughed in all the correct places."
"You have laughed in all the correct places a half-second after everyone else in the room, which I think rather gives away that you are following the room's reaction rather than the story itself."
She turned to look at him properly then, caught out, and found him watching her with an expression of such quiet amusement, entirely without mockery, that she laughed again, this time at nothing Fitzwilliam had said at all, and saw something move across Darcy's face in response, not quite a smile, though near enough to one that she understood herself to have been, in some small private way, rewarded for the laugh.
"I confess my attention has been somewhat occupied this evening, by matters I do not find myself entirely prepared to discuss in present company, however pleasant that company may be."
"Nor I," he said, and said nothing further, and Elizabeth understood, from the particular quality of the silence that followed, that they had each just admitted to the other something neither was prepared to name outright, in a room full of people neither of them wished to make privy to the admission, and that the not-naming of it was, for this particular evening, exactly sufficient unto itself.
The evening wound down by degrees, as such evenings do — Mrs. Sutcliffe and her husband retiring first, with many expressions of gratitude for a visit they had found entirely delightful; Fitzwilliam persuaded into one final story, considerably less embellished than the first, about Georgiana's childhood that made his cousin blush and protest and ultimately laugh along with everyone else; Bingley and Jane lingering by the fire until the very last, reluctant to be the ones to end an evening that both of them seemed to understand, without either saying so, marked some sort of quiet threshold in their own particular history together.
Elizabeth watched them rise at last, Bingley offering Jane his arm with a courtesy that had nothing performed about it, and thought that she had rarely seen two people look so entirely prepared for whatever came next, in a manner that had nothing to do with certainty about the world and everything to do with certainty about each other.
Georgiana came to find Elizabeth before they all finally parted for the night, and took her hand with an unguarded warmth that had not been available to her, Elizabeth suspected, before this particular fortnight had given her the practice of it.
"I shall miss you very much, Miss Bennet."
"And I you, Georgiana. I hope you know you may write to me, whenever you wish, about anything at all — books, or nothing in particular, or matters that require rather more courage to put into a letter than either of us generally finds easy to summon.
" She pressed the girl's hand gently. "You have given me a great deal to think on this fortnight, more than you know, and I should be sorry indeed to let the acquaintance lapse simply because the visit has ended. "
"I think I shall write to you about all three," Georgiana said, with a small, steady smile that Elizabeth thought looked nothing at all like the careful, watchful girl she had first been introduced to a fortnight before, "and I think I shall look forward to your replies more than I have looked forward to almost anything this past year, save perhaps my brother's safe return from Brighton, which I do not think anything could quite surpass. "
Elizabeth went up to bed at last with the singular, settled certainty that she had spent the past fortnight becoming someone rather different from the woman who had arrived at Pemberley expecting nothing beyond a tour of fine grounds and a few days' diversion — a woman considerably less certain of her own judgment, considerably more honest about the particulars of her own heart, and entirely, hopelessly, without any further capacity for the cool indifference she had once been so confident described her feelings on the subject of Mr. Darcy.
She thought, undressing slowly with her maid's quiet assistance, of all the small accumulated evidence this fortnight had offered her, each piece negligible on its own and overwhelming taken together: a gardener's forty years of loyalty; a sister's hard-won trust, given to a near-stranger in a quiet garden; a man's willingness to confess his own failure before offering her anything else at all; a journey undertaken without expectation of gratitude, and a return marked by nothing more elaborate than the wish to sit quietly in undemanding company.
She had come to Pemberley prepared to defend a judgment she had once held with great confidence.
She was leaving it, tomorrow, with that judgment so thoroughly revised that she scarcely recognized the woman who had first formed it — and with no idea whatsoever whether tomorrow would bring her any word from him at all before the carriage door closed.