Chapter Fifty-Three
He came on the Saturday.
Elizabeth had passed two days in a state she would not have wished on anybody.
Lady Catherine had gone away furious; Lady Catherine would go to Darcy; Lady Catherine would tell him, in her own words, that his aunt had asked a young woman of two-and-twenty in a hornbeam grove for a promise and had been refused.
And Elizabeth had spent forty-eight hours discovering that she could construct that scene two ways, with equal ease, and that the two ways led to opposite ends of the earth.
If he still cared for her, her aunt's report was the best news he could possibly have.
If he did not — if the summer had done what summers do, if eight days in London in August and a piece of his own line spent in a tavern had left him with nothing but a duty and a wish to be well out of it — then he would hear that she had refused to disclaim him, and he would be a man of honor with a claim upon him that he had not wanted for four months, and she had put it there herself.
She got very little sleep and was extremely disagreeable to Kitty about a bonnet, and apologized, and was disagreeable again the same afternoon.
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Mr. Bingley came at eleven on the Saturday and Mr. Darcy with him, and Mrs. Bennet, in the highest good humor, proposed that they should all walk out; and it was contrived, by that lady, with a want of subtlety which made Elizabeth wish the ground would open, that Mr. Bingley and Jane should go on in front, and that Kitty should be got rid of at the Lucases', and that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy should be left to walk together.
They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.
She soon learned that they were indebted for their present good understanding to the efforts of his aunt, who did call on him in her return through London, and there relate her journey to Longbourn, its motive, and the substance of her conversation with Elizabeth; dwelling emphatically on every expression of the latter which, in her Ladyship's apprehension, peculiarly denoted her perverseness and assurance, in the belief that such a relation must assist her endeavors to obtain that promise from her nephew, which she had refused to give.
But, unluckily for her Ladyship, its effect had been exactly contrariwise.
"It taught me to hope," said he, "as I had scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before. I knew enough of your disposition to be certain, that had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine, frankly and openly."
Elizabeth colored and laughed as she replied, "Yes, you know enough of my frankness to believe me capable of that. After abusing you so abominably to your face, I could have no scruple in abusing you to all your relations."
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But she had something to say first, and she had been carrying it for a fortnight, and she said it before he could go on.
"Mr. Darcy, I am a very selfish creature; and, for the sake of giving relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be wounding your's.
I can no longer help thanking you for your unexampled kindness to my poor sister.
Ever since I have known it, I have been most anxious to acknowledge to you how gratefully I feel it.
Were it known to the rest of my family, I should not have merely my own gratitude to express. "
"I am sorry, exceedingly sorry," replied Darcy, in a tone of surprise and emotion, "that you have ever been informed of what may, in a mistaken light, have given you uneasiness. I did not think Mrs. Gardiner was so little to be trusted."
"You must not blame my aunt. Lydia's thoughtlessness first betrayed to me that you had been concerned in the matter; and, of course, I could not rest till I knew the particulars.
Let me thank you again and again, in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion which induced you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the sake of discovering them. "
"If you will thank me," he replied, "let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you, might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe, I thought only of you."
Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word.
After a short pause, her companion added, "You are too generous to trifle with me.
If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once.
My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever. "
Elizabeth feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances.
The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.
Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heart-felt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.
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They walked on, they scarce knew whither.
There was, in the end, nowhere in that country to walk that was not the subject; and after a mile and a half they came out on the rise above the church, where the whole of the low ground is in view — the church, and the water, and the hundred and ninety acres beyond it, lying in the September sun exactly as green as everything round it.
They stopped without either of them proposing to.
"I have been three weeks getting to this," said Darcy, "and I would rather do it here than in a room, and I am going to do it badly.
"Your aunt Lady Catherine said a thing to you in that grove that you told me on the road just now, and passed over rather quickly, and I do not think you passed over it in your own mind."
"No."
"Say it back to me."
"That nobody knows what a line does when it comes off a broken keeping," said Elizabeth, "because it has not happened in England since before the rolls. That braiding mine into yours might strengthen us, or take you down with me, or do nothing whatever. That she would not do it with a horse."
"She is right," said Mr. Darcy.
"I know she is right. I have known since Thursday and I have not slept much."
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"Then hear the whole of it," he said, "because I have spent three weeks on it and I have had Tarrant's answer and I have had my cousin Fitzwilliam's, and neither of them will say anything useful, and I have arrived at four possibilities and I can eliminate none of them.
"The first is that it does nothing at all; that a keeping and an Accord are different animals and do not mix, and your family's part in this is a matter of your father's blood standing on that ground and not of anything that could be braided anywhere.
"The second is that it strengthens you. There is a doctrine — it is in Colwood, your sister has it marked — that a failing thing may be carried by a sound one, as a keeping in its last life may be carried on if there is enough put in.
That is what my aunt intends for her daughter and it is why she has wanted me for Anne since we were four years old, and I have never until this month understood one word of it.
"The third is that it takes me. Not quickly and not all at once; but if what is under this county is coming off its hold, and I am braided into the blood that has been holding it, then I am inside it, and I do not know what that is like and neither does anybody else."
"And the fourth?"
"The fourth," said Darcy, "is that it does all three, in some order, over forty years, and that we should not know which until it was much too late to do anything about it."
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Elizabeth stood on the rise and looked down at the water.
"You have brought me up here to offer me something," she said. "You do not walk a person a mile and a half to a view in order to give them four possibilities. What is it?"
"There is a church in London," said Mr. Darcy.
She turned round.
"St. Clement's in the Fields," he said. "No incumbent since 1794, served from Aldgate, and the ward has been dead thirty years and there is nobody alive who could put it back. I have seen it. I have stood in it.
"A man and a woman may be married in that room as legally and as bindingly as anywhere in this kingdom. There is a register and a curate and a license and two witnesses and God, and every promise made in it is kept in the sight of everybody who matters.
"And there is nothing in it to take."
He said it quite steadily.
"You would be my wife. There would be no braiding — nothing merged, nothing spent, nothing put at risk in either direction.
Whatever happens under this county happens to your father's blood and not to mine, and whatever happens to Pemberley happens to Pemberley.
It is not a trick and it is not a half-measure in any way that the law or the church or your mother would recognize.
It is the safest thing available to us and I have been sitting up at night for three weeks arranging it and I have the license written out in my pocket-book.
"I am offering it because I would rather have you and be safe than have you and find out in eleven years that I have taken you down, or that you have taken me, or that Georgiana has a brother at four-and-forty who cannot lift the ward on his own front door — which is what my aunt said would happen, and she may be right about that too. "
Elizabeth did not say anything for some time.