Chapter Thirty-One #2
"And this," cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, "is your opinion of me!
This is the estimation in which you hold me!
I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to this calculation, are heavy indeed!
But perhaps," added he, stopping in his walk, and turning toward her, "these offenses might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design.
These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unmixed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by every thing.
But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence.
Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related.
They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?
— to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own? "
Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she tried to the utmost to speak with composure when she said,
"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner."
She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she continued,
"You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it."
Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on.
"From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. "
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She had not intended to say the other thing. She had held it since the lane, all through the tea-things and the letters and the ringing of the bell, and it came out now because there was nothing left to lose by it.
"And there is one more, and then I have done. Your cousin told me why you took your friend out of Hertfordshire."
Mr. Darcy went very still.
"Not the connections," said Elizabeth. "Not my mother, and not Cheapside; I have had those from Miss Bingley at a card table and I found I could bear them.
The country, Mr. Darcy. You told Colonel Fitzwilliam that the neighborhood was unhealthy, in a tone he thought worth laughing at, and you removed your friend from it, and you gave up the house, and you would not be got to say another word.
"It is my home. It is the only place I have ever been.
There are people in it — there is a girl of fifteen in it — and you sat in this room a week ago and asked me whether I had always been at Longbourn, and I said that I had, and you said yes, I know, and I have thought about that ever since and I do not understand it and I am sick of not understanding it.
What did you mean by it? What is unhealthy in Hertfordshire? "
He opened his mouth.
Elizabeth saw it: she was three feet from him and she was looking at him and she saw the whole of it happen.
He drew breath to speak — his jaw moved, his hand came up an inch from his side — and then his eyes went blank in the way that eyes do when a man is listening to something inside his own head, and his hand went down again, and after a moment he said, in a voice with nothing in it at all:
"I cannot answer you."
"Cannot."
"No."
"Then you will forgive me," said Elizabeth, "if I understand you perfectly."
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"You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness."
And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth heard him the next moment open the front door and quit the house.
The candles guttered.
Both of them, together, on the mantle-piece and on the table, went down to a blue thread and stood so for perhaps three seconds, and the fire in the grate drew in on itself and sank, and the little parlor at Hunsford went cold — not draughty; cold, all through, the way a church is cold in February — and Elizabeth's ears popped as though she had come down a hill too fast.
Then it passed off, and the candles came up, and the fire took hold again, and there was a smell of the coals.
She stood in the middle of the room with her hand on the back of a chair.
She had refused it. Whatever it was — eight hundred years of it, offered out of a man's own body across four feet of Mr. Collins's carpet — she had refused it, and it had gone back into him; and she had seen him take it, out in the hall with the door not yet shut, put his hand flat against the wall and lean there for a moment before he went out into the lane.
The tumult of her mind was now painfully great.
She knew not how to support herself, and from actual weakness sat down and cried for half an hour.
Her astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by every review of it.
That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy!
That he should have been in love with her for so many months!
So much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections which had made him prevent his friend's marrying her sister, and which must appear at least with equal force in his own case, was almost incredible!
It was gratifying to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection.
But his pride, his abominable pride — his shameless avowal of what he had done with respect to Jane — his unpardonable assurance in acknowledging, though he could not justify it, and the unfeeling manner in which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty toward whom he had not attempted to deny, soon overcame the pity which the consideration of his attachment had for a moment excited.
She continued in very agitated reflections till the sound of Lady Catherine's carriage made her feel how unequal she was to encounter Charlotte's observation, and hurried her away to her room.
And in the middle of the night, waking, she thought: he did not say he would not answer. He said he could not.
She turned over, and told herself that a man who has been refused will say anything, and that it was the readiest excuse in the world and cost him nothing.
But she had seen his hand come up.