Chapter Sixteen
It had been six weeks since her uncle first permitted Mr. Darcy to call; six weeks since her heart learned a new habit of beating.
She wrote nothing of it, for words set down would look presumptuous; yet the truth moved quietly in her, and to deny it would be as false as to deny the tide.
Their first morning after Mr. Gardiner spoke to him was a failure of courage on her side.
She had fancied herself composed, yet when Mr. Darcy appeared upon the strand she could scarcely command any sentence that did not contradict the one before it.
The sea was very still; her thoughts were not.
He was kind, and so patient that she might have wept for shame at her own stiffness.
That night she lay awake, persuading herself that she had ruined every hope and that he would not come again.
In the morning he came. They spoke of nothing of consequence, or so it would seem to anyone overhearing; shells, and a fishing boat, and whether the gulls foretold a change of wind.
An hour passed like a minute; when they parted, it felt as though a page had been turned without noise, and a better chapter begun.
The lighthouse followed later that day. She had looked at it often from the beach and thought it cold; yet as they mounted the steps, and the light-chamber opened around them, it appeared the very figure of benevolence.
A steadfast thing, set high for the sake of strangers.
She told him so, and he smiled a little, not in mockery but with that look of attention which renders one both braver and more careful.
“A light that does not ask to be admired,” she said, “yet must be trusted if it is to do any good.” He answered, “There are blessings that do not shine until we venture near them. From far away they look severe.” He said nothing of himself; yet she felt he had revealed more than he intended.
When they descended, the air was clearer than before, and the day that followed seemed to borrow its pattern from that steady beam.
From that hour their mornings were claimed.
James kept his distance at her aunt’s request; she never forgot that he was there; Mr. Darcy never forgot it either.
They walked at first in a quiet that did not oppress; then in a talk that gained a little courage every day.
He told her, by slow degrees, of the years after his mother’s death; of a house that was grand and unhappy; of duties that began before boyhood had done; of a pride he mistrusted in himself because it had become a screen rather than a guard.
She listened because she felt the honour of being trusted; she trembled because she heard in his account something that resembled her own life, although told from another side.
When he asked, very gently, about her father’s accounts, she spoke without thought of the long evenings at Longbourn when the books were laid before her and she corrected them while Mrs. Bennet proclaimed herself too weak for sums, and Jane assured her that she had a particular talent for making things neat.
She said it smiling, foolish girl that she was, for she had always been proud to be useful.
He grew grave in a different manner; not the gravity of coldness but of pain.
He did not reprove her; he never presumed.
He said only, very low, “It was much to require,” and changed the subject to the tide-table.
The words were nothing; the look told her he understood more than she had had the sense to hide.
Ever since, whenever she spoke of home, he was tender where others were merely comfortable.
He knew there was a kind of love that begins and ends with usefulness, and another kind that begins before it asks anything at all.
There were little excursions among their mornings.
Mr. Gardiner took them to the docks to watch the frame of the new vessel rise, and she stood with her aunt while the men spoke of timber and pitch, of sound rivets, and of a ship that must be stout rather than showy.
Mr. Darcy asked few questions, yet they were always those which bring a matter forward; never to display himself, always to prove the point.
Mr. Gardiner’s eye brightened in answering him, and once, when they fell into a calculation together, Mrs. Gardiner touched Elizabeth’s arm and smiled as though something she had long hoped for had quietly arranged itself.
Afterward, as they passed through the little market, Mr. Darcy paused before a toy stall.
“I have promised to send some trifles to our cousins at Ashford House,” he said, looking over a row of painted soldiers and wooden beasts.
“Margaret insists her ark has lost half its animals, and George declares that the whale is too proud to swim with the others.” Mrs. Gardiner laughed at this, and suggested a box of paints to replace the broken toys.
He considered it gravely, then turned to her with that look of quiet intention which always precedes some kindness.
“If I am to remember the Ashford children, I must remember yours as well,” he said.
“Grace and Bethany, Eddie and little Freddie must not think their cousin forgetful.”
Mrs. Gardiner was taken quite by surprise and named the children’s small fancies; Grace’s fondness for stories, Bethany’s for ribbons, Eddie’s for ships, and Freddie’s delight in anything that rolls.
She added, laughing, that since they had yet to meet their cousin Mr. Darcy, being spoiled by him would serve for an excellent introduction.
He took the jest with perfect seriousness, listening as though she spoke of treasures, selecting with care, and asking her to approve his choices.
She tried to protest; he would not allow it.
“I am already too late in my attentions,” he said, smiling.
“Let me at least be correct in them.” When the parcels were made up, he paid the shopkeeper with his usual composure, and Elizabeth thought how gentle a nature must be to turn generosity into something so unassuming.
The circular library became a favourite resort on clouded days.
They would find a nook under the gallery while Mrs. Gardiner selected a volume for the evening; and there he and Elizabeth spoke of books, and of the way a life sometimes presses one to read only what is set before one.
She confessed how much of her reading had been chosen for her by chance and household economy; a sermon-bound miscellany, a family book of travels, volumes borrowed in a hurry from neighbours who valued the size of a book over its sense.
He listened as if she had named the rarest catalogue.
When she exclaimed, in a foolish moment, that she liked a passage of Cowper because it sounded like wind along the Downs, he repeated the lines very softly, not to perform, but as though they belonged to a memory he was willing to share.
It was not gallantry; it was companionship.
She did not know how a woman falls in love; only that she stood there with a book open in her hand and discovered she had not turned a page for ten minutes.
There were cheerful afternoons too. Mrs. Gardiner would contrive tea in town when the weather was squally, and they sat by the window while boats ducked under the rise and fall of the water.
Mr. Darcy spoke little in company; yet with Mrs. Gardiner he was ready, and Elizabeth loved him for it.
He met her aunt’s intelligence as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
He invited her uncle’s judgment as if it were a map.
When Captain Mountjoy called to report that the wind would serve for a short excursion, Mr. Darcy said only, “If Mrs. Gardiner approves.” It was so simply done that Mrs. Gardiner was more pleased than if he had made a speech in her praise.
They went out upon the little boat two days later.
Elizabeth had thought herself courageous until the moment the shore slipped behind them and the water lifted like a creature breathing.
Mr. Darcy stood by the rail; he did not insist upon her bravery; he stood where she could look at him without seeming to seek support.
When she smiled, more from determination than gaiety, he inclined his head as if to say she need not pretend to any boldness beyond her own.
The boat pitched; she laughed in surprise; and at that he laughed too.
The sound seemed very young, as if it had escaped him.
It was most unfair that a stern countenance should keep such a warm sound hidden.
Sometimes they walked into the poorer lanes beyond the quay.
Mrs. Gardiner’s kindness was never paraded, yet all Brinmouth knew it.
They passed a child one noon, a little boy with hollow cheeks and bare feet, who stood gazing at a baker’s window as though his eyes might carry food to his stomach.
Mrs. Gardiner’s hand went to her reticule, but before she could cross the street Mr. Darcy stopped a moment to speak to the baker, then to the boy, and afterward to a woman at a door who turned out to be the child’s aunt.
Elizabeth did not hear the particulars; she saw only that the boy vanished round the corner and reappeared half an hour later with a heel of bread and a cap too large for him, and that he ran straight to Mr. Darcy as if he had known him all his life.
“Thank you, sir,” he cried, and Mr. Darcy coloured like a lad, and made too much of the baker.
She could not think of it without feeling foolish; yet she had been foolish then.
She had wanted to tell him that she had seen it all; that the delicacy with which he contrived to stand aside was the very mark by which he stood out.