Chapter Fifty-Three #2
"That is what you did for Lydia," she said at last.
"Yes."
"You found her a church with nothing in it, so that she could have the whole of what she wanted and none of what it would have cost her, and she will never know, and she will be perfectly happy, and it was the kindest thing anybody did for anybody this year.
" Elizabeth's voice was not quite level.
"And now you are offering me the same church. "
"Yes."
"No," said Elizabeth Bennet.
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"I want you to hear me properly," she said, "because I am not being brave and I am not being romantic, and if you think either of those things you will argue with me and I shall lose my temper.
"You said to me at my father's gate that you had been in love with me for ten months. I have been at this rather less time than that — since a lane in Kent in April, if I am honest, which I have got into the habit of this summer and cannot now get out of.
"And in the whole of that time, every single disaster in this family has come out of one thing.
Not out of wickedness; there has been very little wickedness in it.
My mother was right about the entail for four-and-twenty years and was laughed at.
Jane was ironed flat since she was four and nobody told her, and lost two men for it, and thought it was a coldness in herself.
Kitty was drained from Michaelmas to May and was told to hold her head up.
Mary knew what he was in March, in a still-room, and my aunt Gardiner explained to me very kindly why she was not to be attended to.
Lydia has been sent to Newcastle in a green gown and will die at seventy without one true word ever having been said to her about her own blood.
And you swore an oath to a girl of fifteen because she asked you for it, and kept it for fifteen months, and that man walked into my mother's drawing-room.
"Every one of those was somebody deciding, kindly and sensibly and out of love, what somebody else was not to be told or not to be exposed to.
"You are standing on a hill offering to marry me in a room with the life taken out of it, so that I shall be safe. And I would be safe. And in eleven years I should be a woman who had been protected from her own marriage, by a very good man, for excellent reasons, without ever having been asked."
"You are being asked," said Darcy. "That is precisely what I am doing."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "And it is the first time in the whole of this business that anybody has, and I am extremely aware of it, and it is why I can say no to you instead of finding out in ten years."
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"Then say what you want," he said. "Plainly. I shall do it."
"I want a church with a ward on it," said Elizabeth, "and I want the words said properly, and I want it done knowing all four of your possibilities, out loud, by both of us, in front of my father while he is alive to see it — and if the answer turns out to be the third one, then I shall have taken you down with my eyes open and you will have gone with yours open, and that is a marriage, and the other thing is an arrangement. "
"It may cost you Pemberley. It may cost Georgiana her brother."
"Then ask Georgiana," said Elizabeth.
Mr. Darcy stopped.
"She is sixteen and a half," said Elizabeth, "and something was taken from her that nobody has ever properly told her the size of, and she was made to ask for her own silence when she was fifteen and frightened, and she has been carrying it ever since; and you are about to decide a thing that will run through the whole of her life, on a hill in Hertfordshire, without her.
"Write to her to-night. Tell her the four possibilities and tell her what her aunt said about the horse and do not soften one word of it, and tell her that her brother wishes to marry a woman whose family is inside a failing keeping, and ask her what she thinks; and if she says do not, then I will go to St. Clement's in the Fields and be married in an empty room and be glad of it, and I will never once reproach you.
"But she is to be asked."
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He was quiet for a long time.
"You understand," he said at last, "that she will say yes. She will say yes within four lines and she will be pleased to have been asked and she will not sleep for a week thinking about whether she said it too quickly."
"Then she will not sleep for a week having been consulted about her own life," said Elizabeth, "which is more than anybody else in this story has had, and it will do her a great deal of good, and I shall write to her myself the day after and tell her so."
Mr. Darcy looked out over the low ground for a while.
"I have been managing people since I was two-and-twenty," he said. "My sister, my friend, my tenants, your family, that man in a room in Aldgate. I have got very good at it. I have always thought of it as the thing I had instead of being agreeable."
"I know."
"You are going to be extremely inconvenient to me for the whole of my life."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "I am aware of it, and I have thought about it, and it seemed to me only fair to give you warning while there is still a road down this hill."
He took her hand, which was gloved, and held it for a moment, and neither of them said anything at all.
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They got back to Longbourn very late for dinner, and Mrs. Bennet said a great many things about it, and Kitty said that they must have walked to Stevenage; and Jane looked once at her sister across the table and then looked down at her plate and did not say one word for the rest of the evening, and was so obviously, radiantly certain that Elizabeth had to leave the room twice.
Mr. Darcy asked to see Mr. Bennet in the morning.
He wrote three letters that night at Netherfield, and the longest of them was to a girl of sixteen and a half in Derbyshire, and it took him four hours, and there was nothing softened in it anywhere.