CHAPTER TWO
Mr. Wickham told his story over cards at her aunt Phillips's house, his voice pitched low and confiding, and Elizabeth listened with the particular hunger of a woman who has already half decided what she wishes to hear.
"He is proud, certainly," Wickham said, turning a card over with unhurried fingers, "but it is a colder pride than most men's.
His father doted on me as if I were his own, and Darcy could never forgive either of us for it.
When the living was denied me, he did not shout.
He did not even trouble to look ashamed.
He simply informed me, as though reading from a list, exactly why I did not deserve it.
My temper, my extravagance, my want of application.
Each fault numbered and dated, I think, as if he had been keeping the account since we were boys. "
"He keeps accounts of everyone," Elizabeth said, before she could stop herself. "I have seen him do it."
Wickham's eyes sharpened with interest, then softened again into practiced sympathy.
"Then you understand him better than most. It is not temper with Darcy.
It is arithmetic. He has never in his life forgiven a debt he believed unpaid, and he has never in his life admitted that some debts cannot be settled with money or apology. "
She thought of the dance, of his voice dropping to admit he had not stopped doing the sum since. She did not repeat it to Wickham. Some evidence, she found, she wished to keep for her own use only.
Bingley's party quit Netherfield within the week, and Jane's letters after grew shorter, then careful, then finally admitted what Elizabeth had already guessed: Miss Bingley wrote of London, of Miss Darcy's accomplishments, of her brother's certain admiration for that same Miss Darcy, and never once mentioned any intention of return.
"He did this," Elizabeth said to Jane, pacing the small bedroom they had shared as girls. "I do not know how, but I know it bears his signature. A man who prices a woman's family before he has finished being introduced to her does not leave his friend to make such a match by accident."
"You cannot know that, Lizzy."
"I know his habits of mind. I have watched him do the same sum to me twice now." She stopped pacing. "He looked at our family, Jane, and calculated the cost of it, and decided you were not worth what we would cost Bingley to keep."
Jane's composure did not break, but something in her eyes did, briefly, before she gathered it back into her usual gentle patience.
"Then he has done us a great unkindness, if it is so.
But I would rather believe it an error of judgment than a deliberate cruelty.
It is easier to forgive a man his mathematics than his malice. "
Elizabeth said nothing to that, because she was no longer certain there was a difference, and because some private, treacherous part of her did not want there to be one.
If it was mathematics, it could be argued with.
If it was malice, there was nothing to do but hate him cleanly, and she had begun, despite every resolution, to want the argument more than the clean hatred.
Mr. Collins's proposal, when it came, gave her the third and least welcome entry in an account she had not yet named as such.
He had listed his reasons for choosing her over her sisters with the solemn thoroughness of a man reading a deed of settlement: her situation as second daughter, the convenience of the connection to Longbourn, Lady Catherine's expressed wish that he marry a woman of sense rather than fortune, and finally, almost as an afterthought, some vague acknowledgment that he found her person not disagreeable.
"You have named every reason a sensible man might marry," Elizabeth said, when she could finally speak without laughing outright, "and not one reason a man might love."
"My dear cousin, I assure you my regard is entirely sincere."
"I do not doubt your sincerity, Mr. Collins. I doubt your arithmetic." She rose, done with the interview. "You have added me up and found the sum acceptable. I am afraid I require a suitor who forgets to count."
He did not understand her. She had expected as much. But walking away from him, she found her mind returning, unbidden, to a taller man who had also once looked at her and totaled a column of figures, and who had at least had the grace, on a crowded dance floor, to admit that the sum troubled him.
It was a small distinction. She told herself it should not matter. She found, distressingly, that it did.
Charlotte's engagement to Mr. Collins, announced within days, struck her harder than she had expected.
"You cannot mean it," Elizabeth said, when Charlotte told her plainly, without apology, exactly what she had decided and why. "You, of all women, to marry a man who proposed to you the way one signs a lease."
"I am seven and twenty, Eliza, without beauty and without fortune, and I have watched enough marriages made for love to know they are not proof against unhappiness either.
" Charlotte's voice was steady, almost kind, as though she were the one comforting Elizabeth rather than the reverse.
"I ask only a comfortable home. If that is arithmetic, then I have simply decided to do the sum honestly, rather than pretend I am adding love where there is none to add. "
Elizabeth walked home that evening turning the phrase over and over.
Adding love where there is none to add. She thought of Darcy again, of the dance, of his voice admitting he had not stopped doing the sum since he first priced her at nothing.
She did not know, yet, which frightened her more: that he had once added her up and found her wanting, or that some part of her now wished, however uselessly, to know what figure he had reached since.
She resolved, packing for Hunsford a fortnight later, that she would think of him no further than courtesy required. She was aware, even as she made the resolution, of precisely how little she trusted herself to keep it.