CHAPTER TWELVE
They walked out from the house the following afternoon, the whole party by twos and threes along the river path, and it was Colonel Fitzwilliam, arrived unexpectedly with Darcy's cousin the day before, who engineered, with rather more subtlety than Elizabeth expected of him, that she and Darcy should fall behind the others near the stone bridge.
"You have gone very quiet, Darcy," Fitzwilliam had said an hour earlier, low enough not to carry, "for a man who told me a month ago he intended to answer for himself properly. Here is your opportunity. Do not waste it fishing for compliments about the trout."
Now, walking beside her with the others' voices fading ahead among the trees, Darcy found the opportunity considerably more daunting than the advice had made it sound.
"I have been turning your list over," he said finally, "which I have never seen, and yet find I can recite from memory nearly as well as if I had."
"You recite it accurately enough for a man who claims never to have read it."
"I have thought of little else for a month.
That is a different kind of memory than reading.
" He stopped walking, and she stopped with him, the river running low and clear beside the path.
"Your mother's want of conduct. I stand by the observation, though I no longer believe it was mine to make, uninvited, in the middle of asking you to marry me.
A man does not court a woman by cataloguing her family's failings and expecting gratitude for overlooking them. "
"That is one item answered, of a kind."
"Your father's want of authority. I have watched enough of Lydia's conduct since to know I was not wrong in substance. I was wrong to believe the fault reflected on you, or that it was mine to weigh against your own worth, as though you were somehow diminished by faults not your own."
She said nothing, but he saw her breath catch, very slightly, and pressed on before his own courage failed him.
"Your uncle in trade. I have met him now.
I like him considerably better than I have liked most gentlemen of unquestioned birth I have been obliged to dine with this past year.
" A ghost of something like humor crossed his face.
"I withdraw the objection entirely, and I am ashamed it took meeting the man himself to teach me what I ought to have known was possible without the introduction. "
"Two full items, then, and part of a third."
"Your sisters." He hesitated here, longer than the others.
"I cannot withdraw that one entirely. Miss Lydia's conduct concerns me still, and I will not pretend otherwise merely to complete the accounting neatly.
But I was wrong to weigh it against you, as though her recklessness were somehow a debt you personally owed to be settled before I could love you honestly. "
"And the fortune. Five daughters and nothing to recommend even one of us."
"That," he said, "was the falsest item on the entire list, and I knew it even as I spoke it.
I did not offer for you because your fortune made the match sensible.
I offered because I could not make myself stop wanting you regardless of what it cost me, which is a very different arithmetic than the one I claimed to be doing. "
She looked at him for a long moment, the river sound filling the silence between them, and he watched her weigh something, visibly, the way he imagined she must have weighed the six items themselves a hundred times over the past month.
"You have answered five," she said finally. "I count six on my own paper."
"Then tell me the sixth, since you will not show me the list itself, and I will answer it honestly or admit I cannot."
She was quiet a moment, and when she spoke her voice had dropped, less guarded than he had ever heard it.
"The sixth was not a separate failing, Mr. Darcy.
It was the manner of the whole. You did not simply list my family's faults.
You made me understand, in that moment, that you believed loving me required forgiving something, as though I came to you already in your debt before a single word of courtship had passed between us. "
He absorbed that fully, and found it struck deeper than any of the previous five, because it was not a fact he could correct or a claim he could disprove. It was a wound, plainly named, and there was no arithmetic that answered a wound.
"I cannot undo having made you feel that," he said slowly. "I can only tell you that I do not feel it now, and have not felt it since long before this conversation began. You owe me nothing, Miss Bennet. I never should have made you believe, for a single moment, that you did."
Her eyes were bright, and she looked away first, toward the water, giving herself a moment before she trusted her voice. "That is the first thing you have said to me in two months that did not sound like a settled account."
"Good," he said quietly. "I find I am tired of settling accounts. I would rather simply tell you the truth, and let it stand or fall on its own merit, without a ledger to defend it."
She looked back at him, something unguarded in her face that he had not seen since the rain-soaked porch at Hunsford, and for a moment neither of them moved, the space between them charged with everything still unspoken, until Mrs. Gardiner's voice carried back along the path, calling that the others had stopped ahead to admire the falls, and the moment broke, gently, into ordinary daylight once more.
They walked on together in a silence that felt, for the first time in months, like something other than distance.