Chapter Twenty-Four
The tea things had been brought in with rather more ceremony than was usual at Longbourn, which Elizabeth attributed to the carriages still visible from the front window and the effect they continued to produce upon her mother's sense of occasion.
The best cups had been found. The table had been repositioned twice.
Mrs. Bennet had directed operations from the centre of the room with focused energy.
They were settled now, after a fashion. Mr. Bingley sat nearest the window, where the light was pleasant and Miss Bennet happened also to be situated, a coincidence that appeared to satisfy both parties.
Mr. Collins had taken a chair at no very great distance from Elizabeth, a position he had arrived at by a series of small adjustments so gradual as to appear almost accidental.
Darcy stood at the mantelpiece rather longer than was strictly necessary before accepting the chair that placed him at the edge of the group, where he could see the room without being easily observed from its centre.
Elizabeth poured, because she always poured. She kept her attention on the cups and the small necessary business of the table, because every time her eyes moved across the room she found something she had not prepared herself to see.
She had seen the mask only once before today, and barely.
At the theatre in London, a few days before they met, her attention had been drawn across the house to the Matlock box, where Lady Matlock had fixed her with a look so still and deliberate that Elizabeth had spent the better part of the first act trying to understand it.
She had been occupied with that effort, turning the look over and finding no satisfactory explanation for it, when the door to the box opened and two gentlemen entered late.
One was easy and agreeable; the other was taller, darker, and moved with a quiet assurance that altered the attention of the room without appearing to seek it.
His expression was grave, his manner contained, and he took his seat at the edge of the company as a man takes a position he intends to hold.
He did not look her way. She had noticed him the way one notices something at the edge of a thought; briefly, without quite meaning to, and without being able to say precisely why it stayed.
Three days later he had crossed a stretch of Brinmouth sand to return her bonnet, and she had begun to understand the difference between that grave and guarded figure and the man he actually was. She had spent two months learning that difference. She had considered herself well acquainted with it.
She had not, until today, seen this. The mask he wore in this room was not the contained gravity she had glimpsed at the theatre.
That had been the manner of a man who wished to be unobserved.
This was something more deliberate, and it had been in place since the moment they crossed the threshold.
Her aunt had told her, in the careful way Mrs. Gardiner spoke of things she knew only at a distance, that as a boy he had retreated after grief and arrived at school a closed and silent thing.
That the losses had not come one at a time but all at once, within a matter of weeks; his mother, his infant sister, and with them the whole world his father then sealed away behind a door he did not reopen.
She had thought she understood what such losses had produced in him, but had not expected it to look quite like this, in a room where she could see it and he could not tell her it was not meant for her; and as she reached for the teapot, she held what she knew carefully.
Mrs. Bennet, having distributed cups with the liberal attention to consequence of a general reviewing her troops, settled herself with the bright expectancy of a woman about to conduct several campaigns at once.
“Mr. Darcy,” she began, “I hope you find Hertfordshire to your liking. We are a very pleasant country, I think, though perhaps not what a gentleman of your consequence is accustomed to. Jane, Mr. Darcy will want more tea. Jane is very attentive,” she added, turning to Darcy with the fond confidence of a woman producing her finest exhibit.
“She has always been the most obliging of my girls. And accomplished. She sings, and draws, and she is admired by everyone who sees her. She is thought,” she continued, as though offering a point of local geography, “to be the most beautiful young woman in the county.”
Jane received this with a smile of particular modesty and said nothing, which was itself a kind of accomplishment.
Mrs. Bennet looked from Jane to Darcy and found herself dissatisfied.
This gentleman's consequence was of a different order from Mr. Bingley's entirely, and yet Jane and Mr. Bingley were so very nearly settled.
She had not yet determined what to do with the contradiction, and found the not-determining of it disagreeable.
Her gaze moved to Elizabeth. She had always found those eyes unsettling.
Dark, with flecks of gold that caught the light; handsome enough on a man, like her father's eyes, she supposed, but on a girl who would not sit still for her music and came home with her hem in a state, they were simply wasted.
Mrs. Bennet returned to her tea and resolved to think about Mr. Darcy later, when she had more information.
"Mr. Collins," she said, turning with the smooth pivot of a woman who has been managing multiple objectives for thirty years, "I do not think you have yet had the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth.
She has been abroad these two months, and is quite lately returned.
She is very capable." She smiled at Elizabeth.
"Very useful about the place. Runs the household accounts, if you can believe it.
Mr. Bennet could not do without her, I am sure, though she will go about out of doors more than is strictly necessary and never could be persuaded to sit still for her music.
But she has a great deal of energy. Too much, perhaps, for her own good. Still, she is a good girl, in her way."
Elizabeth said nothing. She had learned, many years ago, that response was rarely the remedy.
Mr. Collins turned toward her. He had formed his first impression upon entering the room, which was that she was not handsome in the way her sister was handsome.
Upon further consideration, however, he had found her eyes rather fine, her manner animated, and her accomplishments unusually suitable.
He had it upon unimpeachable authority that the matter was settled, and considered himself, on the whole, very well pleased with the arrangement.
"Cousin Elizabeth," he said, "I understand you are most particularly employed in the management of this household.
It is a most commendable quality, most commendable.
Lady Catherine herself is of the opinion that a young woman who applies herself to the practical arts of domestic management is a far more estimable creature than one who merely ornaments a drawing room, and I find myself, as I generally do, in complete agreement with her ladyship, whose understanding is, in my experience, without parallel.
I am told you are very accomplished, Cousin Elizabeth. "
"You are told a great deal, Mr. Collins," Elizabeth replied pleasantly, "that may not entirely survive closer examination."
Mrs. Bennet's cup came down rather sharply. "Lizzy."
"I mean only," Elizabeth continued, with the composure of long practice, "that Mr. Collins ought to form his own opinions. Second-hand accounts are rarely quite accurate."
Collins produced a smile that attempted to accommodate both compliment and correction.
"Ha. Yes. Most refreshingly put, Cousin Elizabeth.
A lively mind is a very agreeable quality, I am sure, and I do not at all object to it.
" He said this in the manner of a man granting a concession he had not been asked for.
"I shall look forward greatly to forming my own opinions, as you recommend.
I shall look forward to it very much indeed. "
He looked at her as he said it, with a smile that remained rather longer than the sentence required.
From the mantelpiece, Darcy looked away and fixed his attention upon the window. Proper channels existed for a reason. He was finding the belief somewhat harder to maintain than usual.
Lydia, who had been observing Mr. Darcy throughout with the frank curiosity of someone conducting a private assessment, decided it was time to make herself known to his attention.
"Mr. Darcy," she said, with the confidence of someone accustomed to being found charming, "those are your carriages in the drive, are they not? Both of them?"
"They are," said Darcy.
"And do you always travel with two?"
"When occasion requires it."
“And the horses, are they your own? They are very fine. Do you attend many assemblies? We have a very good assembly at Meryton. And do you dance?”
A pause that was, in its way, rather eloquent. "When I am prevailed upon to do so."
She withdrew with the decisive efficiency of someone reallocating a resource, and turned to Kitty with something more promising to discuss.
It was at this moment that Jane turned to Elizabeth. “Lizzy, you look tired. The journey must have been so long.” She glanced toward their mother. “I said so this morning, did I not, Mama? I said I hoped Lizzy had not been overdoing it.”