Chapter Eleven
Chapter Ten
The day passed much as the day before had done.
Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley had spent some hours of the morning with the invalid, who continued, though slowly, to mend; and in the evening Elizabeth joined their party in the drawing room.
The loo table, however, did not appear. Mr. Darcy was writing, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching the progress of his letter, and repeatedly calling off his attention by messages to his sister.
Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.
Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion.
The perpetual commendations of the lady either on his hand-writing, or on the evenness of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in unison with her opinion of each.
"How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter!"
He made no answer.
"You write uncommonly fast."
"You are mistaken. I write rather slowly."
"How many letters you must have occasion to write in the course of a year! Letters of business too! How odious I should think them!"
"It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of to yours."
"Pray tell your sister that I long to see her."
"I have already told her so once, by your desire."
He wrote to Georgiana on Tuesdays.
He had written to her on every Tuesday for fifteen months, and on a good many days between, and there had been a period of eleven weeks last year when he had written every morning without fail and had received, in the whole eleven weeks, four lines in reply, in a hand he did not recognize as hers.
He did not think about that period if he could help it.
He was thinking about it now, faintly, because Miss Bingley had asked him three times to say that she longed to see her, and the number of people in England who longed to see Georgiana Darcy and did not know the first thing about her had become, in fifteen months, a subject on which he had no temper at all.
"I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well."
"Thank you — but I always mend my own."
"How can you contrive to write so even?"
He was silent.
"Tell your sister I am delighted to hear of her improvement on the harp; and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with her beautiful little design for a table, and I think it infinitely superior to Miss Grantley's."
"Will you give me leave to defer your raptures till I write again? At present I have not room to do them justice."
"Oh! it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do you always write such charming long letters to her, Mr. Darcy?"
"They are generally long; but whether always charming, it is not for me to determine."
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"It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter, with ease, cannot write ill."
"That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline," cried her brother, "because he does not write with ease. He studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?"
"My style of writing is very different from yours."
"Oh!" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest."
"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them — by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."
"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."
"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."
"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"
"The indirect boast; — for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting.
The power of doing any thing with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.
When you told Mrs. Bennet this morning that if you ever resolved on quitting Netherfield you should be gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of panegyric, of compliment to yourself — and yet what is there so very laudable in a precipitance which must leave very necessary business undone, and can be of no real advantage to yourself or any one else? "
"Nay," cried Bingley, "this is too much, to remember at night all the foolish things that were said in the morning.
And yet, upon my honor, I believed what I said of myself to be true, and I believe it at this moment.
At least, therefore, I did not assume the character of needless precipitance merely to show off before the ladies. "
"I dare say you believed it; but I am by no means convinced that you would be gone with such celerity.
Your conduct would be quite as dependent on chance as that of any man I know; and if, as you were mounting your horse, a friend were to say, 'Bingley, you had better stay till next week,' you would probably do it — you would probably not go — and, at another word, might stay a month. "
"You have only proved by this," cried Elizabeth, "that Mr. Bingley did not do justice to his own disposition. You have shown him off now much more than he did himself."
"I am exceedingly gratified," said Bingley, "by your converting what my friend says into a compliment on the sweetness of my temper.
But I am afraid you are giving it a turn which that gentleman did by no means intend; for he would certainly think the better of me, if under such a circumstance I were to give a flat denial, and ride off as fast as I could. "
"Would Mr. Darcy then consider the rashness of your original intention as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?"
"Upon my word I cannot exactly explain the matter, Darcy must speak for himself."
"You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine, but which I have never acknowledged.
Allowing the case, however, to stand according to your representation, you must remember, Miss Bennet, that the friend who is supposed to desire his return to the house, and the delay of his plan, has merely desired it, asked it without offering one argument in favor of its propriety. "
"To yield readily — easily — to the persuasion of a friend is no merit with you."
"To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either."
"You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the influence of friendship and affection.
A regard for the requester would often make one readily yield to a request, without waiting for arguments to reason one into it.
I am not particularly speaking of such a case as you have supposed about Mr. Bingley.
We may as well wait, perhaps, till the circumstance occurs, before we discuss the discretion of his behavior thereupon.
But in general and ordinary cases between friend and friend, where one of them is desired by the other to change a resolution of no very great moment, should you think ill of that person for complying with the desire, without waiting to be argued into it? "
"Will it not be advisable, before we proceed on this subject, to arrange with rather more precision the degree of importance which is to appertain to this request, as well as the degree of intimacy subsisting between the parties?"
"By all means," cried Bingley; "let us hear all the particulars, not forgetting their comparative height and size; for that will have more weight in the argument, Miss Bennet, than you may be aware of.
I assure you that if Darcy were not such a great tall fellow, in comparison with myself, I should not pay him half so much deference. "
Everybody laughed except two people.
Elizabeth did not laugh because she had begun, without at all meaning to, to attend; and it had occurred to her that Mr. Bingley had made a joke of a true thing, in the way that men do when the true thing has been sitting on them a long while, and that height was the politest possible word for it.
Mr. Darcy did not laugh because he had noticed exactly the same thing, at exactly the same moment, and had further noticed that Elizabeth had noticed it; and he looked up from his letter and found her looking at him, and felt the dry attentive pressure of it go over him and stop.
He said, "Bingley is at liberty to disregard me in all things and knows it."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "That is what I should say, in your place, if I wished it to remain true."
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After a short silence, Mrs. Hurst begged Miss Bingley to play; and Miss Bingley, after some little entreaty, complied.
She played well. Her line was young, and had no music in it, and what she had was a fine instrument and a French master and eleven years of unhappy diligence; and it went off very creditably, and Mrs. Hurst turned the pages, and the room talked over it, as the room had talked over Mary.
Some Italian songs succeeded, and then a lively Scotch air; and Mr. Darcy, drawing near Elizabeth, said to her —
"Do not you feel a great inclination, Miss Bennet, to seize such an opportunity of dancing a reel?"
She smiled, but made no answer. He repeated the question, with some surprise at her silence.
"Oh!" said she, "I heard you before; but I could not immediately determine what to say in reply.
You wanted me, I know, to say 'Yes,' that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of their premeditated contempt.
I have therefore made up my mind to tell you, that I do not want to dance a reel at all — and now despise me if you dare. "
"Indeed I do not dare."
Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry.
She was also — and this she did not examine, then or for a long while — very glad that she had said no; because the room was small, and the ward on the door of it was a hundred and forty years old and had been laid by somebody's steward, and she had felt what happened at Lucas Lodge when Sir William, meaning nothing in the world by it, had put her hand out toward that man's.
There were two dances at a country ball. Six meetings of the hands in the figure. Gloved.
She thought that she would rather not, at present, find out.
---
Miss Bingley saw, or suspected, enough to be jealous; and her great anxiety for the recovery of her dear friend Jane received some assistance from her desire of getting rid of Elizabeth.
She often tried to provoke Darcy into disliking her guest, by talking of their supposed marriage, and planning his happiness in such an alliance.
"I hope," said she, as they were walking together in the shrubbery the next day, "you will give your mother-in-law a few hints, when this desirable event takes place, as to the advantage of holding her tongue; and if you can compass it, do cure the younger girls of running after the officers.
And, if I may mention so delicate a subject, endeavor to check that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence, which your lady possesses. "
"Have you any thing else to propose for my domestic felicity?"
"Oh! yes. Do let the portraits of your uncle and aunt Philips be placed in the gallery at Pemberley.
Put them next to your great uncle the judge.
They are in the same profession, you know; only in different lines.
As for your Elizabeth's picture, you must not attempt to have it taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes? "
"It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their color and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied."
At that moment they were met from another walk by Mrs. Hurst and Elizabeth herself.
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He finished the letter to Georgiana that night, late, when the house was quiet.
He sealed it in the way his father had taught him and his father's father had taught him — a thing of no ceremony at all, done in four seconds with the wax and the ring and a small deliberate willingness — and it took, out of him, rather more than it should have done.
He sat back and looked at his hand.
He had walked Barrett's fields twice in two days and laid nothing, mended nothing, and closed nothing; he had simply looked, which costs a man of his line about as much as reading costs a man with good eyes.
And yet.
Mr. Darcy put out the candle and sat some while in the dark, and thought that he had been in Hertfordshire nineteen days, and that he had told Bingley he would see to the ward on the ballroom himself, and that he had better do it soon, while he still had the whole of what he had come here with.