CHAPTER 3
A fortnight passed, and then another, and Netherfield remained shuttered, and Longbourn settled into a household waiting on news that it would not admit to be waiting for.
Mrs. Bennet raised the subject of Mr. Bingley at every meal, generally to lament his absence and just as generally to predict his imminent return, so that the two sentiments arrived together and cancelled each other before either could be properly felt.
Jane bore this with such patience that Elizabeth privately thought her sister’s patience must be wearing considerably thin, but she refused to share the contents of her letter from Caroline with the rest of her family, least of all her mother
Elizabeth's own feelings on the subject admitted less discipline.
She had settled, in the weeks since Caroline's letter, into a steady resentment of the whole Netherfield party, of Caroline for her letter, of the Hursts for their complicity, and of Mr. Darcy for a great many things, though she did not trouble herself overmuch with the examination of all his faults.
She did not yet know, nor had any means of knowing, that it was Darcy's hand and not merely Caroline's that had first turned Bingley's course from Hertfordshire; she suspected the sisters of managing the business, and disliked Darcy chiefly for what she took to be his ready complicity in it; his silence at the ball, his evident conviction of his own and his friend's superiority to the whole neighbourhood, the settled disdain she had watched him fail to disguise at every assembly since his arrival.
That his disdain had, in fact, been disguising something else entirely was not a possibility that occurred to her, nor would it have been believed if it had.
This resentment she permitted herself to feel fully and to speak, when the occasion offered, with a freedom that left her the better for it.
She said what she thought of the Bingley sisters to Charlotte Lucas over tea, and said it wittily, and laughed at her own wit, and by evening had very nearly forgotten to be angry, the feeling having done its work and spent itself in the saying.
This was, as it happened, very much Elizabeth's habit with every grievance she had ever held; once it was voiced, examined, exhausted, and set down, she carried very little concern for it from one week into the next.
***
In town, no such clean resolution offered itself to anyone.
Darcy had told himself, upon quitting Hertfordshire, that removal was a cure.
However, much to his chagrin, he found, some three weeks into his residence in town, that the scheme had not answered.
He had business enough to occupy his mornings and society enough to occupy his evenings, and neither occupation touched the thing that wanted addressing, and which continued, unaddressed, to accumulate.
He was short with Bingley, on the single occasion Bingley ventured to ask whether he did not think Hertfordshire had, on the whole, been rather agreeable; short enough that Bingley, who took offence slowly and forgave it faster, noticed the sharpness and did not raise the subject again.
Darcy was shorter still with Caroline, whose satisfaction at the scheme's success expressed itself in a series of remarks about the neighbourhood they had left, delivered in a tone that invited him to agree with her low opinion of it, and which he found, increasingly, that he could not do without an irritation he was at some pains to conceal, not because her opinions had altered, but because his own had not aligned with them for some weeks, and he disliked being reminded of it.
London had never before struck Mr. Bingley as a dull place.
He had passed a dozen seasons in it without once feeling the want of anything beyond what its shops, its clubs, and its dinners could supply; but he had not before come to it directly from Hertfordshire, with the particular sensation of having left something behind him, a particular lady, and every morning that he woke in Grosvenor Street he found the town a little duller than the morning before.
He did not say as much to his sisters. He was not, by nature, a man given to saying things that might occasion an argument, and he had observed, with mild attention, that any mention of Hertfordshire produced in Caroline a briskness of manner that was somehow more exhausting than open opposition would have been.
Caroline would agree with him; she agreed with him entirely that Netherfield had been a charming house, and the neighbourhood not without its share of pleasant, unaffected people, and Miss Bennet in particular she had always found sweetness itself.
And then, before he had properly finished being gratified by this, she would find some occasion to mention the party's want of consequence, or the aunt in Cheapside, or how much more comfortable town was, upon the whole, at this season, and somehow he would end the conversation feeling that he had been talked out of something without ever having been told he must give it up.
It was a skill he half admired in her, but mostly found frustrating and rather distasteful.
Darcy, for his part, said less, but Bingley had known him too long to mistake silence in his friend for indifference.
Darcy's opinions, when he troubled to produce them, were generally delivered as if they were a magistrate's ruling, and it was this, more than anything Caroline said, that kept Bingley from writing to Netherfield the first week, and the second.
He did not think Miss Bennet was indifferent to him.
Well, not precisely, Bingley thought. Indeed, Bingley did not believe Darcy thought anything so unkind, but he had allowed, one evening over a silent game of billiards, that Darcy had “observed nothing in her manner,” on the several occasions of their meeting, “that a stranger might not equally have observed”; that her civility was general, her composure unbroken; that a man of Bingley's warmth might easily mistake good breeding for particular regard, having so much of the former himself and so little practice in distinguishing it from the latter.
It had been kindly meant. Bingley was certain Darcy had meant only to warn him.
And for the better part of a fortnight it had done its work, so that he threw himself into town amusements with something like his old spirit, and told himself that a man of five-and-twenty need not fix his happiness upon a five-weeks' acquaintance, however agreeable.
But it did not hold.
Bingley found that he could not sit through an evening party without considering every fair, gentle-mannered woman in the room against a memory of Jane Bennet's smile, and finding the room's occupants wanting; that he had twice begun letters to Netherfield, to nobody in particular, he told himself, merely to Bingley's own steward there, on the pretext of some question about the stables, and twice found that he had written, at the bottom of the page, a line asking to be remembered to the family at Longbourn, which he had then to strike through, feeling foolish, as though the paper itself might report him to Caroline.
He found that he thought of Miss Bennet produced not with the sharp ache of a man refused, but the steadier, more persistent discomfort of a man who has left a task undone, as though he had walked out of a room in the middle of a sentence and could not now recall how it was to end, only that the ending had mattered to him a good deal.
It was this, more than any settled conviction of his own heart, for he was not so a young man given to settled convictions of any kind, that at last undid Caroline's careful work.
A mild temper, unlike a violent one, has this advantage, that it may be led a great distance by those who take the trouble, but it cannot be led against its own true inclination forever, for want of the very obstinacy that would be needed to sustain the deception.
Bingley was not obstinate. He was, however, in his quiet way, sincere; and sincerity, given time enough and no fresh provocation to renew the doubt, has a way of reasserting itself very much as water finds its own level.
The fresh provocation, when it came, came from Caroline herself, and it was her very success that undid her.
She had taken to speaking, with increasing frequency, of Miss Darcy, of Georgiana's accomplishments, her fortune, her gentle disposition, the charming picture the two of them, Bingley and Georgiana, might make united; and she had done this so often, and with such transparent design, that even Bingley, who was not quick to suspect design in anyone, began at last to suspect it in her.
It was one thing to be talked out of Jane Bennet by an appeal to his own doubts.
It was quite another to be talked into Georgiana Darcy by an appeal so bald that he found himself, one evening in early December, sitting silent through the whole of dinner while Caroline discoursed upon the excellence of the Pemberley connexion, and thinking that he did not want Miss Darcy.
He wanted Jane Bennet, who had sat beside him at supper and laughed at nothing very clever that he had said, and coloured a very little when he had said it, and he could no longer entirely believe that a woman does these things, and does them consistently, across five weeks, out of civility alone.
Bingley said nothing that evening. But he did not sleep well, and in the morning he did a thing he had not done above twice in his life, he sought Darcy out before breakfast, in the small room Darcy used for correspondence, and asked him, without preamble, whether he believed Miss Bennet had truly been indifferent to him, or whether he had only supposed it.
Darcy was some moments in answering. He had his pen in his hand, and he set it down slowly, before looking squarely at his friend.
"I believed it," Darcy said at last. "I believe it still, upon the evidence I had. But I will not pretend the evidence was of the surest kind, or that I am the properest judge of a lady's heart."
It was, for Darcy, a remarkable admission, and had Bingley been a man of keener observation he might have wondered at the particular seriousness with which his friend delivered it, and wondered further what private account Darcy might be keeping, that he should speak thus.
But Bingley was not, and never had been, a close observer of anything but open weather and good company, and he took the words only for what they plainly offered, not a retraction, but a door left unlatched.
It was enough, and Bingley was sure that he did not require more than that.
He did not tell Caroline he was going. This was, in itself, so unlike him, as he had spent the past several years consulting his sisters' comfort in every arrangement of his life, from the hanging of curtains to the choosing of a cook, until consultation had become so settled a habit that he scarcely knew he practised it, that when he came to write the order for his horses, his hand hesitated a moment over the paper, as a man's hand will hesitate before a door he has never before opened without knocking.
However, this time, he did not put the pen down.
Bingley wrote to his steward and housekeeper at Netherfield to have the house made ready, and he said nothing at all to Caroline, and when she came down the next morning to find him already in his boots and his greatcoat, with his portmanteau standing packed in the hall, her face underwent a series of alterations, surprise, and then, a very determined sweetness, that he observed with more amusement than he usually permitted himself at his sister's expense.
“Charles. Surely you cannot mean to go into Hertfordshire today. In this weather, and without the least notice? Louisa will be excessively disappointed, we had thought to have the Walters to dine on Thursday," she started.
"You must have them without me," he said, and was surprised to find how easily the words came. "I have been from Netherfield above a month, Caroline, and my tenants must think me a very careless sort of landlord. I ought to have gone back a fortnight since."
"Your tenants," said Caroline, in a voice that made plain what she thought of this excuse, and might have gone on, for she was not a woman easily routed by a single reverse, had not Darcy, coming through the front door, with his own hat in his hand, remarked, in a tone of perfect and infuriating mildness, that he believed he would go into Hertfordshire himself, as he had promised to look over some drainage on the Netherfield home farm before the winter set in properly, and had rather see to it now than leave it till spring.
It was not true, and Bingley, who had known Darcy twelve years, and had never once heard him invent a reason for anything, looked at his friend with an astonishment, as though drainage were a subject upon which a man might reasonably be expected to feel sudden and pressing anxiety in the third week of a London December.
Caroline, faced with the defection of both gentlemen at once, had no resource left but to declare that she and Louisa would follow within the week, as soon as Netherfield could be made ready to receive them.
By this, she meant, though she did not trouble herself to say so, that she intended to arrive in sufficient time to superintend whatever might require superintendence, and, more particularly, to ensure that nothing occurred which might escape her notice.
She was, however, somewhat relieved by Mr. Darcy’s departure, because she trusted his judgement where Mr. Bingley was concerned.
If anyone could persuade her brother to steer a wiser course, Caroline thought, it was Mr. Darcy; she was not altogether easy at the prospect of Bingley being left to his own inclinations, particularly where Jane Bennet was concerned, and Mr. Darcy would do good to attend to her brother.
Caroline made another statement, and eventually left the corridor in which they had been standing, vexed beyond belief. However, Bingley scarcely attended to what Caroline said.
He was already, in his mind, some twenty miles down the London road, and did not fully return to the hall in which he stood until Darcy, settling his hat, asked him, in the same mild tone, though something in it now made Bingley glance at him twice, whether he meant to travel post, or would take his own carriage.
Finally, Bingley remarked that he would take his carriage, and Darcy nodded in agreement, informing Bingley that he would follow Bingley the following day.
"By all means," said Bingley, and found himself, for the first time in a month, entirely and simply happy, so happy that he did not think to ask why a man so recently reluctant to have him go to Hertfordshire at all should now be in such haste to arrive there with him.