CHAPTER 15
The church clock in the smallish town struck three while Elizabeth sat counting the intervals between Darcy's breaths, a habit she had fallen into somewhere past midnight, into the third day of his fever.
Reeves had fought his own exhaustion valiantly through the earlier hours, insisting each time his head began to nod that he was perfectly capable of continuing the watch, and each time losing the argument a little more completely, until at last, some while after the second candle had been lit to replace the first, he slept in earnest, his breathing settling into the deep, untroubled rhythm, and Elizabeth had not the heart to wake him.
She had told herself, somewhere in the middle hours of that long night, that she had begun to understand, a little, what nursing truly demanded.
It wanted a steadiness she had not expected of herself, yet when the occasion called for it, she had managed it.
Elizabeth laboured, and prayed, and watched, and grew a particular kind of patience of a woman who has stopped asking how much longer a thing must be endured, and has settled instead into simply enduring it.
Her laboring was not in vain. And, slowly, surely, Mr. Darcy began to change.
There was no sudden cry or a violent thrashing to announce the growing crisis.
There was only a subtle alteration in the rhythm she had been counting; his breaths growing shorter, and faster, and shallower, drawing from somewhere higher in his chest than they had before, until they were so quick and too uneven for counting to keep pace with at all.
She sat forward in her chair and laid her hand flat against his chest, and felt beneath her palm a heart labouring at a pace that frightened her more thoroughly than anything the whole of the preceding two days he had.
"No," she said, very quietly, as though a quiet voice might somehow persuade where a loud one could not. "No! You do not have my permission to do this!"
Reeves was alarmed and once, asking what he might do, and she called for him to find the doctor.
Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy did not answer her cries, of course; he was past answering, and past any awareness. However, at that very hour, there was a woman sitting beside him whose hand was pressed flat his heart that would not slow.
With Reeves gone, Elizabeth began to talk to Mr. Darcy.
She sobbed, as she said, "I take it back," pressing the cool cloth once more to his burning brow with her hand shaking all the more.
"Everything I said to you. Every word of it. I do not know if any part of you can hear me, but I can’t bear to let it stand.
I could not bear it, do you understand me, being the last thing ever spoken between us. "
She stopped, and drew a breath that shook and went on regardless.
"You are not selfish. But, heaven knows you are proud enough to try the patience of a saint, and I do not withdraw that particular charge, whatever else I withdraw. I knew it was unjust even as I said it, but I said it anyway because I was frightened, and angry, and too proud myself to admit what frightened me. I have watched you these two months arguing with me over everything under the sun, and I told myself, and told Jane, and told anyone patient enough to listen, that it was nothing more than the pleasure of a contest neither of us could resist losing. I do not believe that any longer, Mr. Darcy. I have not believed it, if I am entirely honest with you, for rather longer than I’d like to admit. ”
His breathing did not steady, not truly, but something in her own chest eased a little.
"I do not know if you can hear any of this," she went on, quieter now, "but I find I cannot sit here in silence a moment longer, waiting, pretending I do not feel what I feel.
So I will say it, and you may forget it entirely once the fever has passed, and we may go on afterward as though tonight never happened, if that is what you would prefer.
But I will have said it, at least once, honestly, with nothing between us but the truth of it. "
She did not finish the sentence she had begun, believing him too far gone to hear or remember it, and staring intently to see if his chest stopped moving up and down with breadth.
It was into this incomplete silence that Dr. Ashworth arrived at last, moving past her with haste and no time to waste. He did not knock, but moved into the room with a man with a purpose.
He worked over Darcy for several minutes, while she watched his face for some sign of what he found, and found nothing there she could read; she only saw the grave, focused concentration of a professional man attending to his work, giving nothing away to the anxious woman waiting next to him.
Finally, when he straightened at last, the doctor turned to her, and said in some relief, "The fever has broken," he said.
"Or is breaking. I would not tell you the danger is entirely past, not today, for these things can turn again before morning, and I have learned not to promise more than the body has yet proven it will deliver.
But the worst of it, Miss Bennet, I think has come, and I believe, upon my best judgment, that it has gone.
I would not have wagered a great deal on that outcome three hours ago.
I find myself rather more willing to wager on it now. "
Hearing the news. Elizabeth's legs gave way beneath her. It was only Dr. Ashworth's quick hand at her elbow that kept her from sitting or rather falling down more suddenly, and rather less gracefully, than she would have liked.
“Oh dear, thank you!” She exclaimed, as he came to her side abruptly to hold her upright.
He replied as quickly. "Sit, Miss Bennet, before you fall. You have had a longer night than your cousin, and no one has thought to nurse you through it. I can see you have not abided by my instructions to rest, young lady.”
The doctor took his leave and promised to return later that evening.
And, Elizabeth, finally permitted herself, at last, to sleep.
Her own eyes had grown heavy, and she was all worn past the point of any careful thought.
Instead, she allowed her head to droop toward the arm of her chair, when his voice, weak but unmistakably his own, drew her fully back into wakefulness.
"Elizabeth, Elizabeth are you there?” Mr. Darcy asked, sounding rather weak, while his eyes fluttered open.
Elizabeth, sleeping ever so slightly, was upright before she had properly finished waking.
Her hand found his without meaningful thought, and found his eyes open, and clear, and fixed upon her with an enduring intentness.
At that moment, she knew that the fever’s shadow had ceased, and he was truly on the mend, as Dr. Ashworth had suggested.
"I am here." Her own voice broke, slightly, as her spirit felt now entirely spent. "You gave us all a very great fright, sir. I do not think I am prepared to forgive you for it easily."
"I do not think," he said, and there, faint but unmistakable, was a ghost of his old dryness, weak but genuinely his, "I had very much say in the matter." He scanned over the room and then to his bad arm.
She laughed. It was a short, unsteady sound, more relief than mirth, but genuine for all that, and felt the tears she had held back through the whole of the crisis finally, unstoppably, begin to fall, and did not, for once, trouble herself to hide them from him.
She could only say, “Mr. Darcy,” before her sobs took over.
He did not press her, seeming to understand, even in his own considerable weakness, that she wanted a moment simply to look at him, to satisfy herself over and over that he was truly there, truly breathing, truly himself again, before either of them attempted anything so demanding as conversation.
It was he, eventually, who broke the silence, his voice still weak, still hoarse from disuse, but carrying a steadiness that owed nothing to the fever and everything, she would come to understand, to some resolve arrived at in whatever depths of the night his own mind had wandered through.
"I dreamed," he said, slowly, as though testing each word before committing to it, "or I believe I dreamed that you were speaking to me. I cannot recall the particulars. Only that you were there, and that I did not want, whatever was happening, to stop hearing it."
Elizabeth felt the colour rise hot in her own face, and found, for perhaps the first time in the whole of their acquaintance, that she had no ready wit at all to deploy against the plain sincerity of what he had just offered her. She only stared, her eyes still red brimmed with feeling.
He started back, and over a few more moments, she finally calmed herself enough to form a reply.
"I said a great many things, Mr. Darcy," she managed at last, "most of which I am not entirely certain I am prepared to repeat to you now that you are in your right mind, having said them only because I believed you too far gone to hold me to any of it afterward. "
"Then I will not ask you to repeat them.
" He was quiet a moment, his gaze not once leaving hers.
"Though I confess myself curious, and I do not think, having come as near as I apparently did to never hearing the end of whatever you were telling me, that I have very much patience left for waiting to satisfy that curiosity properly.
I find I have a confession of my own to make, whether or not I have already heard the whole of yours in some form I cannot presently recall. "
She offered him a warm little smile and shook her head. "You are not strong enough yet for confessions, sir. There will be time enough for it, once you have properly recovered."
Darcy did not relent so easily. "Madam, I have spent two months finding reasons to delay this particular confession. And, I suppose given your current state, I may have very nearly lost the chance to make it at all."
He drew a slow breath, visibly gathering what strength the fever had left him, and Elizabeth, watching him do it, found she could not have interrupted him now if she had wanted to, so entirely was her own attention given over to whatever he meant to say next.
"I have been in love with you," he said, "I believe, since a rainy afternoon some weeks past, in a drawing-room neither of us has spoken of since that day.
I withdrew from you afterward not because the feeling lessened, but because it did not, and because I did not know, then, how to reconcile what I felt with everything I had been raised to think and do. "
Elizabeth sat very still, her hand still resting in his, and found that her quick tongue that had carried her through every previous exchange with this man had entirely and completely deserted her, leaving nothing behind but the plain, unguarded truth she had already spoken to him once in the dark, believing him past hearing it, and must now find some way to speak again.
"I do not know that I have anything half so eloquent to answer you with," she said, at last, very low.
"Only that I said something very like it myself, last night, believing you past hearing it.
And I find, now that you are plainly not past hearing anything at all, that I am not sorry to have said it.
Nor unwilling to say it again, however poorly mine compares to yours. "
He offered a weak smile to her and squeezed her hand, "I do not require eloquence, Miss Bennet. I only ask for the truth."
Reeves, having come up from a hurried meal downstairs, entered the room just then, and was plainly relieved to find Mr. Darcy awake and lucid at last. His arrival put an end to their conversation as neatly as a door closing, and whatever else remained unsaid between them retreated, by unspoken and mutual consent, to some later and more private hour.