Chapter 20
He had rehearsed nothing, in the end, despite the whole of a sleepless night spent attempting to do precisely that.
He had thought, walking the short distance from the house to the edge of the grounds, that he ought to have some clear notion of how to begin, some careful sequence of sentiments properly ordered and properly weighed, the kind of speech a man of his education and his standing might reasonably be expected to produce for an occasion of this consequence.
He found, arriving within sight of her, that every such sentence had deserted him entirely, and that he was left with nothing beyond the plain, unornamented truth of what he wished to say, which struck him, in the moment, as considerably more frightening than any rehearsed eloquence could have managed, and also, he suspected, considerably more likely to be believed.
"Mr. Darcy." Elizabeth turned, and found him standing closer than she had expected, his hat in his hand and an expression on his face that she did not think she had ever seen him wear before — not the careful composure of their earliest acquaintance, nor the warmth that had grown between them this fortnight, but something more exposed than either, the particular nakedness of a man who has decided, finally and completely, to stop protecting himself from whatever the next few minutes might cost him.
"I had hoped to find you before the carriage was ready."
"You have found me in good time, then. Though I confess I had begun to think you might let the morning pass without a proper farewell, given how thoroughly Colonel Fitzwilliam and Georgiana both seem to have monopolized your attention since breakfast."
"They have been offering me a great deal of advice this morning, which I have found myself, somewhat to my own surprise, almost entirely willing to accept.
" He looked at her for a long moment, and Elizabeth saw something move across his face that she had learned, this fortnight, to read as the particular effort of a man gathering himself to say something that mattered to him a great deal.
"I had thought, walking here, that I would prepare some proper speech for this moment.
I attempted one, in fact, on the way from the house, and abandoned it almost immediately, because I found it sounded a great deal like the speech I made to you once before, in a small parsonage in Kent, and I have no wish whatsoever to repeat that particular performance, however much the sentiment beneath it may have remained, in certain essentials, unchanged. "
Elizabeth felt something catch in her chest, hearing this, and said nothing, only waited, understanding that whatever he had come to say required no prompting from her to arrive at it in its own time.
"I will not make you a speech, Miss Bennet.
I find I have very little use for speeches, this morning, beyond the plain truth of what I wish to ask you, which is this: would you permit me to call at Longbourn, once you have returned home?
I do not ask it lightly, nor without understanding that you owe me no particular obligation to grant it, given everything that has passed between us.
But I find I am not willing to let this fortnight end without asking, whatever the answer proves to be. "
She looked at him for a long moment, at the particular vulnerable hopefulness in his face, so unlike the proud, certain man who had once stood before her at Hunsford and catalogued his own merits as though they constituted the whole of his case, and found that her answer required no deliberation at all, having been settled, in truth, for rather longer than this single morning's conversation.
"Yes. I would like that very much."
Something in his expression eased, all at once, in a manner that told her, more plainly than any further words could have managed, precisely how much the asking had cost him to risk.
He had not, he found, fully anticipated what relief of this particular kind would feel like — not triumph, not the satisfaction of a difficult negotiation successfully concluded, but something gentler and considerably more disorienting, the sensation of a held breath finally permitted to leave the body that had been holding it.
He had spent the better part of a year believing himself entirely recovered from the humiliation of Hunsford, and understood now, standing in this garden with her answer still settling over him, that he had not been recovered at all, merely numbed, and that the numbness had only now, in this single moment, been permitted to give way to something he had not let himself feel so completely in all the intervening time.
"I will come within the week. I do not intend to delay any longer than the journey itself requires. "
"I shall believe it when I see it, sir. Gentlemen have been known to promise a great deal in the warmth of a parting morning, and to find their resolution somewhat cooler once a hundred miles and the ordinary business of their lives have intervened."
"I know," he said, and the simplicity of the acknowledgment, offered without the smallest defensiveness, told her that he understood precisely what she was testing him against, and did not resent the test, and intended to pass it regardless of whether she had asked him to.
They began to walk back toward the house together, neither hurrying the distance, both of them aware, without saying so, that the carriage waiting in the drive marked the practical end of a conversation neither was yet entirely ready to conclude.
"I have spent a fortnight at Pemberley," Elizabeth said, after a little while, "expecting nothing beyond a tour of fine grounds, and find I am leaving it considerably more altered than I arrived.
I do not think I am the same woman who first stood in your gallery and discovered, to her own very great surprise, that she could not entirely dislike a man whose housekeeper praised him so thoroughly. "
"I do not think I am the same man who stood for that portrait, either, though I will own the resemblance has occasionally been pointed out to me, this past fortnight, by persons who have not always been entirely tactful about the comparison.
" He said this with a small, dry note that she recognized, now, as the particular quiet humour he rarely permitted himself to display, and which she had learned to treasure precisely because of its rarity.
"Your sister has been very dear to me this visit. I hope you know that. I do not say it merely as a courtesy."
"I know it. I have watched the two of you together a great deal more closely than either of you, I suspect, has fully realized, and I do not think I have ever seen her so entirely herself in anyone's company outside her own family.
Whatever else this fortnight has given me, Miss Bennet, I think I shall always be grateful to it for that alone. "
They reached the edge of the formal garden, where the path widened toward the drive, and Elizabeth could see, beyond the last hedge, the Gardiners' carriage standing ready, her aunt already settled within it, watching the two of them approach with an expression she made no particular effort to disguise.
"I must go," Elizabeth said, with genuine reluctance she did not attempt to hide. "My aunt has been remarkably patient about the packing, this morning, but I do not think her patience extends indefinitely."
"Then I will not delay you further, except to say — " He paused, and something in his face settled into the particular steadiness she had come, this fortnight, to associate with his most sincere moments.
"Except to say that I am glad, more glad than I have any adequate words to express, that you came to Pemberley at all, however little either of us intended it at the time.
I do not think I have been entirely the same man since. "
"Nor I, sir. Though I confess I knew, almost from the moment I stood in your gallery, that I was unlikely to leave this county quite as I had entered it."
He walked her the remaining distance to the carriage, and handed her up into it with a care that lingered a half-second longer than the ordinary courtesy required, and Elizabeth settled into the seat beside her aunt, who said nothing whatsoever, though the look she gave Elizabeth as the carriage began to move contained enough unspoken commentary to fill several letters.
Elizabeth looked back once, as the carriage turned down the long avenue, and found Darcy still standing where she had left him, at the edge of the drive, his hat in his hand, watching the carriage go.
He raised his hand, not in any large or theatrical gesture, but simply, plainly, the way a man raises his hand to someone he expects to see again and has no wish to make a greater ceremony of parting from than the occasion strictly requires.
She turned forward at last, facing the road ahead and the long journey back to Hertfordshire, to Longbourn, to her father's crowded library and her mother's nerves and the particular noise of a house with five sisters in it that she had missed more than she expected to, this fortnight, and which she would be glad, she thought, to return to — gladder still, though she did not yet say so aloud, for the knowledge of what she had left behind her at Pemberley, and what she had every reasonable hope of seeing again within the week.
Mrs. Gardiner, beside her, said only, after a decent interval had passed: "Well, Lizzy."
"Well, Aunt."
"I shall say nothing further on the subject, since I think you have heard quite enough advice this morning already, from persons rather more directly invested in the outcome than I am."
"You may say whatever you like, Aunt. I find I am in remarkably good spirits this morning, and very little you could say is likely to disturb them."
Mrs. Gardiner smiled at that, and patted her hand once, and turned to look out at the passing scenery with the particular satisfied silence of a woman who has watched a story she suspected from its earliest chapter arrive, at last, exactly where she had always believed it would, and Elizabeth, settling back against the carriage seat with the whole of Pemberley receding gently behind her, found that she was smiling too, and did not trouble herself in the least to stop.
She thought, as the carriage carried her south through country she had grown, this fortnight, to know rather better than she had ever expected to know any county beyond her own, of all the small accumulated steps that had brought her to this particular morning — a housekeeper's unprompted praise; a portrait that had stopped her in a gallery and would not entirely let her go; a sister's hard-won trust, offered in a quiet garden to a woman she had known only days; a confession given before any gratitude had been asked for or earned; a journey undertaken and a danger ended, quietly, without the smallest expectation of thanks.
She had arrived at Pemberley certain of her own judgment and confident, above nearly everything else, in her own ability to see clearly what other people so often failed to see in themselves.
She left it considerably humbler about that particular confidence, and considerably the richer for the humbling, having learned, in the space of one short fortnight, precisely how much a heart could be mistaken about itself, and how much grace there was, when the mistake was finally recognized, in simply admitting it and beginning again.
Darcy stood at the edge of the drive long after the carriage had passed entirely out of sight, watching the dust settle slowly back over the avenue, and found that he did not feel, as he had half expected to feel, the particular hollowness of a man returning to an empty house.
He felt, instead, something closer to anticipation — the specific, patient anticipation of a man who has finally said what needed saying, and has been answered exactly as he had hoped, and now has only the ordinary business of waiting, and of keeping his word, standing between himself and whatever came next.
He thought it, on the whole, a very satisfactory exchange for a year of careful, solitary regret, and turned at last back toward the house, already composing, in his mind, the letter he intended to write that very evening, confirming the date of his arrival at Longbourn, so that she should have no further grounds for doubting whether he meant precisely what he had said.
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