Chapter Twenty-Eight
She returned from her walk with enough colour in her cheeks to be attributed entirely to the morning air, and came to the side door to find Jane already there, shawl in hand, as though she had only just thought of going out, or had only just returned, and had happened by the happiest chance to be precisely where Elizabeth must arrive.
“Lizzy. You are back. I had thought to join you, but you were gone before I came down.” She smiled. “You always did love the early hours.”
“I do,” Elizabeth said.
They went in together. Elizabeth removed her gloves as they crossed the passage and laid them beside her bonnet upon the side table.
“I have been thinking,” Jane said, falling easily into step beside her, “that we have scarcely spoken since you came home. Not properly. There is so much I do not know of your time away, and perhaps a little you have not chosen to tell me.”
“There is very little to tell.” Elizabeth untied her bonnet and set it down. “Aunt Gardiner was determined to spoil me, Uncle Gardiner fed me too well, and the sea air made everyone believe themselves wiser than usual.”
“And Mr. Darcy?”
Elizabeth glanced at her. “What of him?”
Jane adjusted the shawl about her shoulders. “Only that I have seen how you are when his name is mentioned. I saw you at tea. I have seen you since father made his announcement. I am not blind, Lizzy, and I am your sister.”
Elizabeth looked at her sister and felt the peculiar discomfort of having no reasonable objection to something she nevertheless did not want. That, precisely, was the difficulty.
“I am perfectly well,” she said. “The visit was very enjoyable. I am sorry father took against Mr. Darcy, but I dare say it will resolve itself in time.”
“I hope so. Mr. Bingley, at least, is much easier to manage than Mr. Darcy, though perhaps not half so interesting.” There was enough affection in her voice to make denial feel almost like ingratitude. Yet the unease Elizabeth had first felt in Brinmouth returned.
As they reached the upper landing, Elizabeth seized upon the necessity of changing for breakfast as a welcome means of ending the discussion.
The day went on as days at Longbourn generally did.
Mrs. Bennet lamented that Mr. Bingley had gone to town to fetch his sisters and would not return until the evening of the assembly, which she considered a most inconsiderate arrangement for a gentleman who must know very well how much depended upon proper appearances.
“If he means to marry Jane, he ought not to leave her to spend two whole days wondering whether he still remembers she exists,” she declared, though Jane protested that she was in no danger of such distress.
Lydia and Kitty altered ribbons and gowns with the serious application they reserved exclusively for occasions involving dancing, and debated at length whether officers were more attentive to blue silk or pink.
Mary observed that she did not see why new ribbons should be thought superior to old ones when the cultivation of the mind was of so much more lasting value, and was ignored so completely that even she seemed to feel it.
Mr. Collins made three separate attempts to engage Elizabeth in conversation and was politely defeated each time; on the fourth, he succeeded by intercepting her before dinner, when escape was made impossible by the combined obstacles of her mother, the drawing room, and propriety itself.
“Cousin Elizabeth,” he said, “I wonder if I might have the honour of the first two dances at the assembly on Monday.”
“Thank you, Mr. Collins,” she said. “I should be very happy to stand up with you.”
Mr. Collins beamed. Mrs. Bennet, overhearing enough to understand the substance if not the elegance of the exchange, looked equally satisfied. From the piano, Mary struck a chord of such unnecessary force that it startled the cat.
At dinner, her father asked, with the idle ease of a man making conversation chiefly for his own amusement, whether she had walked toward the northern fields that morning, as Kitty had mentioned seeing her and Mrs. Gardiner in that direction the day before.
Elizabeth looked up at once and caught Kitty’s eye across the table.
Kitty, who was very intent upon her potatoes, gave the smallest shake of her head.
“The lower fields today,” Elizabeth said. “The morning was fine.”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Bennet. “Yesterday the northern fields, today the lower. I admire such geographical industry. Shall we expect east on Monday, or do you mean to go west; or perhaps north again?”
Mrs. Bennet, who had no wish for geography of any kind at dinner, interrupted to ask whether anyone had remembered to send word to Hill about Monday’s blancmange, and the moment passed.
Elizabeth went to bed with little prospect of sleep.
She lay awake thinking of her father's slip, and the locked drawer, and the grandfathers who could not have been the man he meant, because both had died before she was born.
The family bible remained shut in his desk, the key never leaving his person.
He said she had nearly destroyed it as a child, though she could not remember either the crime or the danger.
Church, Mr. Collins, and the ordinary business of the following day did nothing to settle her thoughts.
She rose on Monday before the house had properly stirred, dressed in the quiet dark, and thought of very little beyond the certainty that she should see him.
Jane was already in the hall when Elizabeth came down, dressed for walking, which was not a habit of hers at half past six in the morning, nor one she had previously cultivated with any enthusiasm.
“I thought I might join you this morning, if you do not object to company. I have been indoors so much lately.” She smiled. “You do not mind, do you, Lizzy?”
Elizabeth looked at her sister and felt again that quiet sense of entrapment which Jane's kindness so often produced. Jane met her look with nothing but calm sincerity. That, precisely, was the difficulty.
“Of course not,” she said.
They went out together, and Elizabeth turned them west without seeming to choose it, away from the northern fields and everything they might contain.
Jane spoke of the assembly, of Mr. Bingley, and of everything she hoped the evening might bring; Elizabeth listened, answered properly, and kept both her eyes and her thoughts to herself.
Whenever Jane smiled, Elizabeth felt again the older, easier affection of habit, and with it the uncomfortable suspicion that habit itself was part of Jane’s advantage.
At the far edge of the lower meadow, where the land rose gently toward the eastern fields, she saw him; a figure on horseback at the crest of the rise, too distant to be clearly distinguished, and yet not so distant as to be mistaken.
He saw Jane beside her and turned his horse without the slightest alteration of pace that might invite notice. A moment later he was gone, and Elizabeth felt the disappointment of it more keenly than she had any right to admit.
They walked back in the same pleasant conversation with which they had set out.
Elizabeth said everything that was required and betrayed nothing, and was not entirely certain whether she was proud of such composure or merely weary of maintaining it.
An hour later she presented herself in her father's book room at the proper hour, the week's ledger beneath her arm.
Mr. Bennet signed without reading, as he always did. She gathered the ledger, closed it, and said, without looking up, “I should like to speak with you, sir. About Mr. Darcy.”
“Should you,” said Mr. Bennet.
“You have not told me your reasons.”
“No,” he said. “I have not.”
“I think I am entitled to them.”
He set down his book and regarded her over his spectacles.
“Since you ask, a man of his consequence does not attach himself to a woman in your position without calculation. He may feel it very sincerely at present; men of his sort generally do, while the novelty holds. But novelty fades, Lizzy, and when it does, a man of ten thousand a year finds he has rather more options than a woman with nothing to recommend her but a sharp mind and a knowledge of harvest figures.”
"I am doing this for your own good," he said, taking up his book.
“You do not know him,” Elizabeth said.
“I know his kind. I have known it longer than you have been alive,” her father said. “You have obligations to this family that have nothing to do with your own preferences, and I will not have them set aside because a wealthy gentleman found you diverting for six weeks at the seaside.”
“And if I disagree?”
“Then you disagree quietly,” he said, “and you do nothing about it. I cannot prevent your attending the assembly this evening; it would cause more talk than it settles. But I expect you to conduct yourself properly. You are not to seek out a man I have expressly asked to stay away.”
He returned to his page.
“That will be all, my dear.”
She stood a moment longer than was necessary. Then she said, “Yes, sir,” and left him to his reading, and went to dress for the assembly.