Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Eighteen
Till Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield and looked in vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a doubt of his being present had never occurred to her.
The certainty of meeting him had not been checked by any of those recollections that might not unreasonably have alarmed her.
She had dressed with more than usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than might be won in the course of the evening.
But in an instant arose the dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted, for Mr. Darcy's pleasure, in the Bingleys' invitation to the officers; and though this was not exactly the case, the absolute fact of his absence was pronounced by his friend Mr. Denny, to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and who told them that Wickham had been obliged to go to town on business the day before, and was not yet returned; adding, with a significant smile, "I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if he had not wished to avoid a certain gentleman here. "
This part of his intelligence, though unheard by Lydia, was caught by Elizabeth; and as it assured her that Darcy was not less answerable for Wickham's absence than if her first surmise had been just, every feeling of displeasure against the former was so sharpened by immediate disappointment, that she could hardly reply with tolerable civility to the polite inquiries which he directly afterwards approached to make.
Attention, forbearance, patience with Darcy, was injury to Wickham. She was resolved against any sort of conversation with him, and turned away with a degree of ill-humor which she could not wholly surmount even in speaking to Mr. Bingley, whose blind partiality provoked her.
Lieutenant Denny, who had said his piece with a significant smile because it was the kind of thing a young man says at a ball, went and stood by the wall afterwards and was rather quiet.
He had been told to go to town by Captain Harding, and had said so, and had been told that his friend's absence was Mr. Wickham's own affair and that the regiment had no business in it; and Denny, who liked Wickham enormously and had spent eleven months learning to trust a thing he could no longer feel, had gone away with the distinct impression that Harding had known Wickham would be gone before Denny told him.
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She had come in through the great door, as everybody did, and put two fingers to the frame, as everybody did.
And stopped, because something had happened to it.
The ward on that door was not the ward that had been there in October, when the Bennets came to dine.
It was not a thin gray line. It was — she had no vocabulary and no training and only a country girl's habit of touching a lintel the way one straightens a hat — deep.
It went in. It sat under the wood and under the stone and it did not move when she pressed it, and it had the quality, which she recognized without ever having felt it before, of a thing recently and very thoroughly done.
"Lord," said Lydia, going past, "the door has been polished. How grand they are."
The whole house had been done. She could feel it at the foot of the stairs and along the passage and, when they came into the ballroom itself, standing in the doorway with the candles and the crush and the noise all coming at her at once, she felt it close overhead like the roof of a mouth.
Elizabeth put her hand down and made a joke to Charlotte about the flowers.
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The two first dances brought a return of distress; they were dances of mortification.
Mr. Collins, awkward and solemn, apologizing instead of attending, and often moving wrong without being aware of it, gave her all the shame and misery which a disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give.
The moment of her release from him was extasy.
That is the account she gave of it afterwards, to Charlotte, and to Jane, and to herself; and it was perfectly true, and it left out the middle of the second dance.
It began in the fourth figure.
They came together and back and together, and Mr. Collins said, "I have been given to understand, cousin Elizabeth, that the mode of dancing here is somewhat freer than at Rosings, where her Ladyship is very exact," and Elizabeth said, "Indeed," and they turned; and as they turned, the room leaned.
That is the only word she ever found for it.
The floor did not move and the music did not falter and the candles burned straight up.
But the ballroom at Netherfield, with a hundred people in it and a fiddler and a boy with a cello, leaned in, the way a crowd leans when something is happening at the far end of the street; and the leaning was toward her, and toward the heavy man in black holding her right hand in his; and every window and door of that new deep ward turned over like an eye and looked at the two of them.
Somebody's hand — Mrs. Long's — brushed her sleeve and Mrs. Long said, "Beg pardon, my dear," in a voice from a long way off.
Mr. Collins said, "—and I flatter myself that her Ladyship would not disapprove, particularly upon an occasion which, as I have had the honor of observing to my cousin Mary, may be considered as—"
Elizabeth could not remember the figure.
She had danced it since she was twelve. It went out of her head entirely, the way a name goes, and she stood in the middle of the set with her hand in her cousin's hand and the whole room bending slowly toward her like water going round a stone, and she thought, with great clarity: I do not know what is happening and it is happening to me.
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Two things happened then.
The first was that Miss Mary Bennet came round the outside of the set.
She had been in the little card-room since the dancing began, with a candle and a book she had brought from home in the pocket of her gown, because she had not been able to find the word at Longbourn and had thought it might be in the appendix; and she had found it at nine minutes past ten, on page four hundred and eleven, in a note printed smaller than the rest.
She had then had to get from the card-room to her sister through the crush at the top of the set, past Mrs. Long, past the Gouldings, past her own mother, in a room where nobody had ever once in her life got out of Mary Bennet's way.
She was eleven feet short when it stopped.
The second was that Mr. Darcy, who had been standing at the west end of the room with his back to the window bay for an hour and a quarter, not dancing, not speaking, and being disliked by everybody in the county for it, turned round and put his right hand flat against the frame of the bay window, and took back four days' work in about nine seconds.
Elizabeth felt it go.
The whole vast attention of the room lifted off her, all at once, like a hand off the back of the neck; and the fiddler was playing, and the figure was the ordinary figure she had known since she was twelve, and Mr. Collins was saying "—as I was observing, an occasion of a very superior kind," and Mrs. Long was going past with a glass of negus.
She finished the dance. She had no idea how.
When she came off the floor Charlotte took her arm and said, "Lizzy, you are white as the tablecloth," and Elizabeth said that the room was very hot, which was true, and that Mr. Collins had trodden on her foot, which was also true, and that she had never in her life been so glad of anything as the end of a dance, which was the truest thing she said all evening.
At the west end of the room, Mr. Darcy was standing with his back against the window bay and his hand out of sight behind him, flat on the wood, and he did not move away from that window for the next four hours.
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Mary came up at last.
"Lizzy."
"Mary, my dear, not now. I am going to sit down."
"It was 'the acknowledgment,'" said Mary. "That is the name of it. Colwood does not use it, because he thinks it superstitious, but Harrow's appendix has it, and there is a case in it from Northamptonshire in 1704 where a room did it to two people who—"
"Mary."
Mary stopped.
Elizabeth looked at her sister — at the flat, plain, unregarded face, and the book still gripped in both hands with a finger in it at page four hundred and eleven, and the two spots of color high on her cheeks from getting through a crowd that had not once given way to her — and something turned over inside her.
"Did anything happen to me just now?" she said quietly.
"Yes," said Mary.
"Do you know what?"
"No. Something began and then it stopped." Mary's finger moved in the book. "It should not have stopped, Lizzy. That is the part I do not understand. It cannot be interrupted from inside a room. There is nothing in any of the books about a thing like that stopping."
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Elizabeth was standing by Charlotte, in the middle of saying something about Mr. Collins that was very amusing and that she abandoned in the middle, when Mr. Darcy came up and surprised her into accepting his hand for the next two.
Charlotte tried to console her.
"I dare say you will find him very agreeable."
"Heaven forbid! — That would be the greatest misfortune of all! — To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! — Do not wish me such an evil."
When the dancing recommenced, however, and Darcy approached to claim her hand, Charlotte could not help cautioning her in a whisper, not to be a simpleton and allow her fancy for Wickham to make her appear unpleasant in the eyes of a man of ten times his consequence.
Elizabeth made no answer, and took her place in the set, amazed at the dignity to which she was arrived in being allowed to stand opposite to Mr. Darcy, and reading in her neighbors' looks their equal amazement in beholding it.