CHAPTER 8 #2
"You are very quiet tonight, Mr. Darcy," she ventured, upon the third such evening, in a tone she hoped struck the balance she intended between lightness and genuine inquiry. "I begin to think I have said something to offend you, though I cannot for the life of me recall what it might have been."
He merely shook his head, and politely replied, "You have said nothing to offend me, Miss Bennet. I am only a little occupied with matters of business."
"Matters of business," she repeated, and could not, quite, keep the flatness from her own voice. "Of course."
He offered nothing further, and she did not press him, though the exchange left her with a hollowness she was at some pains, for the remainder of the evening, to conceal beneath her usual liveliness.
***
Elizabeth reflected on the matter several dozen times in the days that followed, examining it from every angle her considerable understanding could bring to bear, and arrived, by a slow and painful resolution, that she could not entirely dislodge once it had taken root.
He has grown tired of me, she told herself. And, if she were honest, it was not so very difficult to account for.
I amused him, she supposed. For a time, I have furnished him with an opponent worthy of his own considerable wit, in a neighbourhood that could offer him little else in the way of intellectual diversion.
But, she told herself, novelty is a poor foundation for anything lasting, and she had perhaps mistaken the pleasure of a passing entertainment for something it had never truly been.
Mr. Darcy was a man of consequence, with a great house and a great name and, in all likelihood, a great many ladies in London and elsewhere far better suited to his situation than a country gentleman's daughter with no fortune and a mother whose want of delicacy she was under no illusions about.
I was foolish, Elizabeth chastised herself, to have imagined it might be otherwise.
She did not confide this conclusion to Jane, who she suspected would only look at her with that particular gentleness that Elizabeth found more difficult than usual to bear; nor to Charlotte, whose practical good sense she did not trust to receive the matter with the sympathy she was not yet ready to admit she wanted.
She also countered that Charlotte, having recently accepted the hand of Elizabeth’s cousin, a Mr. Collins, was not equal to the task of discussing matters of the heart, deciding herself to marry swiftly without giving her own heart a moment’s counsel.
In fact, she confided in her insight to no one at all, and resolved instead, in the manner she had always found most natural to her own temperament, to meet distance with distance, and to give Mr. Darcy no cause whatsoever to suspect that his withdrawal had wounded her in the smallest degree.
Once formed, her resolution was not difficult to execute.
Elizabeth had a talent for composure that served her, especially on this occasion, rather better than she might have wished it to.
Where she had once sought his opinion, she now offered none that invited a reply.
Where she had once teased him into argument, she now answered him with the same correct civility he had lately adopted toward her, meeting his gravity with a politeness so entirely proper, so thoroughly without warmth, that it might have belonged to any two strangers introduced at a dinner and destined never to meet again.
"You are very civil this evening, Miss Bennet," Darcy observed, on an occasion when she had answered some general remark of his with nothing more than a brief agreement.
She gave him a polite smile, "I did not know I was ever otherwise, sir. I have always attempted civility."
His brows furrowed together. "I had assumed you were otherwise, I think, upon a great many previous evenings."
"Perhaps I have grown wiser since," said Elizabeth, with lightness, "and have learned that a gentleman occupied with matters of business has little patience to spare for argument."
Something crossed his countenance at this reply, but she could not read it, and told herself it did not signify. And, Mr. Darcy made no reply beyond a slight inclination of his head, and the conversation, such as it had been, ended there.
***
Neither Elizabeth or Darcy was aware, in the days that followed, how closely their present situation mirrored the other's private reasoning, nor how completely each had mistaken the other's wound for indifference.
Darcy, observing Elizabeth's new reserve, told himself it was proof of the wisdom of his own resolution, that she had felt, after all, nothing more than the ordinary pleasure of a lively acquaintance, and that his withdrawal, whatever it had cost him, had cost her nothing at all beyond the loss of a diverting companion for a country season.
The thought ought, by every principle of the reasonable case he had constructed against himself, to have brought him some relief.
It brought him instead a low and persistent unhappiness he found himself unable to reason away with nearly the success he had reasoned away everything else.
Elizabeth, for her part, observing Darcy's continued gravity, told herself it was proof of exactly what she had already concluded, that the diversion had run its course, and that whatever she had permitted herself to imagine beneath the sparring had been, from the beginning, a great deal more than the sparring itself had ever actually promised.
However, Jane, who observed a great deal more than either of them supposed, confided to her husband one evening, when they were alone, that she did not know when she had seen two people go to such trouble to make each other, and themselves, so entirely miserable.
"I had thought them halfway to an understanding a month ago," said Bingley, frowning. "What in the world could have happened?"
"I do not know," said Jane, "though I begin to suspect that whatever it is, neither of them has the least notion of how to mend it, nor even, perhaps, that there is anything to mend."
"Should we say something?" He asked, wondering if Jane felt one way or the other.
After a moment’s consideration, Jane said, "I think that we had much better not.
I do not believe either of them would thank us for it, and I have found, upon the whole, that these things generally right themselves better without an audience than with one; though I confess I do not know how long I can watch it go on before my patience is past bearing. "
Mr. Bingley agreed, as he generally did in matters that wife spoke, and drew her against him, her head finding its familiar place beneath his chin, content, for the moment, to let the fire and the quiet of the room answer for them both, and to leave Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet to whatever slow, stubborn reckoning still lay ahead of them.