Chapter 6 #3
She would not have kissed him like that if she did not love him. He would ask her to marry him in the morning. He struggled to keep his patience with the rest of the party. Elizabeth loved him, so how could he remain here with strangers when everything with Elizabeth remained unspoken?
“Your mind is not on our game, Mr Darcy,” Julia said to him later across the card table when he made another mistake. Her foot had nudged his calf for the third time. If he inched any farther from the table, he would not be able to see the cards.
“I am still shaken by that vase nearly hitting Miss Bennet.” That was also true, although his mind was also on their kiss.
But the thought of the accident pushed aside the sensations from the passion of her embrace.
That large and heavy vase could have broken her neck or crushed her skull.
He closed his eyes and envisioned her crumpled in a heap of blood and broken bones.
Horror washed over him. Inches had separated them from perfect disaster.
Julia scowled. “It did not hit her. Besides,” she said, her voice lowering, “why worry over her?”
“Because she is my friend, and she could have died.”
“But she did not. Like I said at dinner, she ought to be grateful to be here amongst grand people with the chance to find someone willing to take her. A man like you,” she added, with extra heat, “has a proper sense of his station and character, and of the relation in which you stand to others. Miss Bennet is not worth being distressed over.”
“Are you implying she roundly deserved to have a vase fall on her because she lacks your rank and wealth?”
She shrugged, then leant toward him. “I only meant there are worthier objects of your interest rather than a woman too poor and playful to be likeable.”
Elizabeth’s lively, sporting manner was one of her many attractions. She was gifted with the art of being pleasing. She was handsome, witty, humorous, and eloquent without herself suspecting anything remarkable or attractive about her manner.
And then after their day together, with her feelings for him improved—after she had sat in his lap and touched him—he had impulsively kissed her.
For how long had he waited for that moment to have Elizabeth in his arms?
But he had done it all wrong yet again. He may not have insulted her when he ought to have pleased her, but he should have proposed before embracing her.
He could not be free from fear or doubt until he talked with her.
He looked round the drawing room in disgust. Anyone’s company but Elizabeth’s was unendurable.
When the card game was over, Darcy lied to his hostess and said he would go to the billiard room until supper but instead he escaped to the solitude of the library.
After a half an hour’s quiet reflection in the library, he could either join the others with tolerable composure or be tired enough to just go to sleep.
When he entered, to his surprise, Elizabeth sat by the fire, slippers on the floor, with her feet curled under her as she read a book. She rose and slid her slippers back on, as though after appearing before him all day in breeches he would object to seeing her stockinged toes.
“Are you well?” he asked, coming forward.
She ducked her head. “I did not want to be with the others, but I was not ready to sleep, either.”
She did not have to explain. He was excessively distracted by the memory of her lips on his, the sweet little murmurs she made when he kissed her.
But she might be thinking of her ordeal with nearly being struck by the vase or of jealous Julia Metcalfe’s spite from earlier this evening.
What if her preoccupation had nothing to do with him?
“Me too,” he offered hesitantly. “Shall we hide together, at least until everyone is settled in games they do not need us to complete the numbers for?”
Elizabeth gestured for him to join her. “Only be careful; your back is to the jib-door, and I would want no one to surprise you.”
He wondered if she had been startled. “There is one to my study off of Pemberley’s library, although I doubt it fools anyone. I see there is a metamorphic table, as well. I have one at home, but it is a chair.”
Upon her baffled shrug, he rose to demonstrate.
“It is a library table that converts into a stepladder.” He felt the bottom of one end of the table to find latches and lifted the top with both hands.
“Once the tabletop is raised vertically, you find the two latches on the hand railings of the ladder, then lock the railings into place and pull out the ladder.”
Her eyes shone with interest. “It is a beautiful piece, but how does one move it to the bookcases?”
Darcy bent down to see the casters had been removed. “You could only push this heavy table a little way. I suppose no one reads much here.”
“I am not surprised,” she muttered. “I am fascinated by the table but upon the whole”—she gestured around her—“well, this is a…an interesting room.”
“It is ostentatious,” he insisted, “and has very few books.”
She sighed in relief at their agreement. “It is awful, just like the rest of the house. Every surface, niche, and shelf has some ornament on it. It is no wonder that vase above the stairs fell.”
The library, like most of the rooms, was ornamented with a profusion of gilding, from the painted ceiling to the carved chimney-piece to the bookcases.
One could not outstretch their arms without touching a vase or a sculpture or gilt panelling.
“I think it is the tawdriest house in the universe. Tessier says that in the sixties its owner laid out thirty-five thousand pounds in making Woodcote like this. But when his father bought it, the owner sold it for twenty-three. All was to have gone together, furniture, statues, books, china, pictures—few of which are good. But his mother thinks it is beautiful.”
“I know little about art and architecture, but I well know the difference between finery and elegance.” She looked round the room as he put the table to rights. “But it is a good enough room to use to avoid the others.”
Her tone struck him, and he wondered how deeply Julia’s rudeness at dinner about her being single distressed her. It had taken all his strength not to silence her by admitting he had been dying to marry Elizabeth. He dared not hope she was jealous of the way Julia recklessly threw herself at him.
“Has Miss Metcalfe been unkind to you?”
“We all have trials to bear,” she said evasively. “I keep my silence when she mentions how grateful I must be to be amongst grand people with the hope of finding a man to take me.”
“Do not let Miss Metcalfe’s spitefulness concern you.
She may feign surprise at your not being married, but it does not surprise me.
You have unparalleled principles and should compromise for no one.
And your mind, being endowed so far beyond most men’s, would overpower many of them.
You were kind not to give her the set down she deserves. ”
She had been standing by the metamorphic table and now paced a few nervous steps. He had embarrassed her, but he could not let his admiration for her go unspoken, certainly not after kissing her so thoroughly an hour ago.
“Well, this is what we do,” she stammered. “We are polite. We sit with those we despise and do not make a spectacle. Like when you saw Mr Wickham in Meryton.”
“It is frowned upon to shoot people in the street, no matter if they deserve it.”
She laughed. “I agree. In fact,” she added softly, “I think your disposition touches with mine in more points of sympathy than I ever before realised. We get along better now than we ever did.”
Hope was a strange thing. Two days ago, he hardly dared to hope that Elizabeth did not hate him. Yesterday, he scarcely hoped that she wanted to kiss him in a parlour game. Today, he hoped she might come to love him.
And now he had the pleasing hope that she already loved him back.
“We both misunderstood a great deal,” he said carefully, “about each other and ourselves.”
“I am still ashamed I snapped a judgment.”
“I made it easy for you to judge me poorly.” His heart pounded fiercely, but he could not stand another day without knowing what her feelings were. He took a few steps nearer. “How do you judge me now?”
It was forward of him, as forward as impulsively kissing her or saying that he admired her eyes.
But she was not the sort to toy with him.
He had to know if his hopes were real or the imagined yearnings of a heartbroken man.
If his kiss had been unwanted, she would tell him she regretted it and dismiss him.
He watched her carefully consider her answer.
“I once thought you were not a man who could respect me, someone I could never have affection for. And I would not offer my affections to anyone whom I was not confident would hold me in a high place in his esteem. Now, I think very favourably of you, Darcy.”
He wanted to render all the devotion he held in his heart, so he simply had to ask. “Are your feelings for me still what they were last month?”
Her pretty lips blew out a breath, then she said, “Not at all. I shall always retain a grateful regard for the esteem you honoured me with, assuming”—her voice caught—“assuming your affections and wishes are unchanged.”
“I am ever constant,” he said in a rush, “but you err in calling what I feel for you ‘esteem.’ It is not merely regard or approval or even respect.”
She avoided his gaze, and he hoped she was eager to hear of his tender sentiments. He took her silence as at least a willingness to hear him, but he had been disappointed before.
“Elizabeth, I have an unalterable attachment to you. I have always loved you, with a faithful, honest, noble, generous passion. If you accept my love, I shall be supremely blessed. Will you marry me?”