CHAPTER 6
The wedding, now a fortnight distant, had begun to exert upon Longbourn and Netherfield alike. And, thus, persons who might otherwise have gone a week without meeting found themselves thrown together over discussions of white soup and the seating of aunts.
It was in the course of one such errand, the settling of which carriages should convey which parties to the church, a matter Mrs. Bennet considered of the first importance, that Elizabeth found herself walking back to Longbourn from Meryton in company with none other than Mr. Darcy; Jane and Bingley having fallen some way behind them upon the path, fully absorbed in their conversation.
Elizabeth had not sought the arrangement, and she was fairly certain he had not sought it either, from the stiffness with which he had fallen into step beside her. For the first several minutes, they walked in silence, before she broke it.
"You are very quiet, Mr. Darcy. I begin to think Hertfordshire disagrees with you more thoroughly each time you return to it."
He turned to look at a brief second, before returning his gaze to the path before them. "I had not observed myself quieter here than elsewhere," he said. "Perhaps my ordinary conversation has simply failed, upon acquaintance, to meet your expectations of it."
"Oh, my expectations were never very high," she said, with a light, careless tone.
He was silent for a moment. When he answered, his voice had lost some of its careful evenness. "You have a talent, Miss Bennet, for finding a man's faults. I wonder you never tire of the exercise."
She turned to look at him directly, and replied, "I wonder you never tire of supplying me such ready material."
He stopped at that comment, and she unknowingly did the same, and they remained on the common path staring at one another for some moments, before he finally broke the silence.
His jaw was set, and he said, "Perhaps I supply less of it than you are disposed to find.
You have said it yourself, during our dance at Netherfield, that you formed your opinion of me before I had spoken a dozen words to you.
I might commit any act, Miss Bennet, and you would find in it further evidence of what you had already decided. "
His accusation struck nearer the mark than she was prepared, and she launched into a rebuttal. "And what act, precisely, ought I to have considered differently? You will forgive me, but I have not been furnished with so long a list."
"What might you need furnished? I cannot think what, only that I find it is a very convenient sort of justice you practise, Miss Bennet, that permits you to make out my character without having full knowledge of it."
She was annoyed by this statement, for she had told Mr. Darcy only a few months prior, in a half-jest, that she had been attempting to make out his character, but was finding it difficult, having heard so many different accounts of himself to puzzle her exceedingly.
Elizabeth, allowed herself more girth to refute him.
"And you have a very convenient sort of memory," she returned, her own temper fully risen now, "that permits you to recall every occasion upon which you have condescended to explain yourself, and to forget entirely the assembly at which you would not so much as stand up with a woman you called merely tolerable, within her own hearing, because you had not yet decided she was worth the trouble of civility. "
He looked confused for a half moment and then said hastily, in a sort of tone that sounded as if it were an excuse. "I had not realized you heard.”
“You had not thought I heard? Rather than apologize for your ungentlemanly behavior? I see how it is, Mr. Darcy,” Elizabeth bit back, her chin rising, with every attempt to intimidate her.
His own frustration overruled his next speech.
“I had just arrived in the neighborhood and was in a room full of strangers who wished only to talk to me of my capital," he said, without thought.
“If the world dealt in the ordinary allowances it grants every other man his early follies, why does not that allowance extend to me? "
"Because your follies, sir, have had a habit of costing other people rather more discomfort than it cost you," she said quickly.
It was there, she saw it arrive, a darkening look that she could not have described in any single feature of his face and yet knew, with absolute certainty, when she had seen it.
Something closed behind his eyes; his jaw set, and a muscle moved once at the corner of it, and for one full second she thought he meant to answer bluntly.
However, he did not speak. And, only stood a moment with his hands closed at his sides, looking not at her but at some point past her shoulder, at nothing, at the hedgerow, at anything that was not her face; and then he said, in a voice scraped down that he believed he had left something at Meryton that wanted attending to, and that she would forgive him if he did not complete the walk, and that Mr. Bingley would see her the remainder of the way with perfect propriety; and he turned, and walked back the way they had come.
Elizabeth stood in the lane and watched him go until the trees took him, too startled for the first several seconds even to be offended, and considerably more startled by the second sensation than by the offence itself.
Aside from the affront of being walked away from mid-quarrel, and she was affronted, there moved something else, something nearer to alarm; it was the first time she had openly fought with Mr. Darcy, and she could not quite say all she felt, only that she did not believe she had entirely won the battle.
Jane and Bingley came up to her a minute after, still glowing with their own private conversation.
Upon seeing Elizabeth, Bingley looked about for his friend with mild surprise and was told, by Elizabeth, in a voice she was rather proud of for its steadiness, that Mr. Darcy had recollected some business at Meryton and begged to be excused the remainder of the walk.
She then asked if they had not seen him pass them on his return to Meryton.
"Business? No, he did not pass us; how odd of Darcy," said Bingley, in the tone of a man who was too happy that afternoon to trouble himself with his friend’s odd actions; and the three of them walked on, and Elizabeth said nothing further on the subject.
That night, she reflected on her argument with Mr. Darcy.
He had grown angry, and she knew she had provoked him, but provocation was no crime in itself.
In fact, Elizabeth found it rather satisfying to have accomplished against a man she had begun to believe entirely incapable of being moved by anything she said to him.
But that he should grow angry and then simply leave, rather than have the argument out as any person of ordinary temper would have done, struck her as confirming something worse than anger; it was a fundamental unwillingness to be brought to account, a pride too complete to permit even the indignity of losing a quarrel in front of a witness.
He could not bear, she decided, to be seen wanting the last word and unable to produce it with his usual composure, and had removed himself rather than risk the exposure.
He would rather run from a lane than be caught feeling something in it, she told herself the next day, and did not stop to ask herself why a man so entirely governed by pride should have looked, in the half-second before he fled her, so very much like a man in pain.
Elizabeth did not see him for four days after.
When she did, at church the following Sunday, he bowed and said nothing beyond what was expected.
She he told herself this was not surprising and perhaps what she wanted, but found, walking home afterward, that she was unaccountably out of temper for the whole remainder of the day, and blamed it, when Jane asked, upon the length of the sermon.
"You are unjust to him," Jane said, on the following Monday.
"You have decided what he is, Lizzy, and you fit every new thing he does into it.
I do not say you are wrong to have been angry with him once.
I only wonder whether you are still angry at the man before you, or at the one you first took him for. "
They were sewing, or Jane was sewing, and Elizabeth was holding a length of ribbon that wanted no particular attention. She did not answer at once. Jane's gentleness had a way of arriving at uncomfortable truths.
"He left me in the middle of a lane, Jane, without so much as a proper leave-taking, because he could not bear to lose an argument in front of a witness. I think that is a judgment formed on very good evidence, repeatedly supplied."
"Perhaps," Jane allowed, in a voice that made plain she thought perhaps not, and returned to her needle, and said nothing further, and Elizabeth, feeling the unpressed point sit rather heavier in the room, found herself wishing, with some irritation, that Jane would simply say what she meant instead of leaving it lying about to be tripped over.
She did not have long to sit with the irritation.
The wedding preparations that week had drawn half of Meryton through the Longbourn parlour at one hour or another, and it was into this general traffic that Mr. Darcy arrived that afternoon, brought again by Bingley, and greeted with the particular flurry of activity that always attended his entrance into a room he did not seem to wish to be the centre of and invariably became so regardless.
It was Lydia who did the damage, and did it, as she did most things, without the smallest awareness that damage had been done.
She had come in from Meryton flushed with news of the militia's imminent removal to Brighton, a subject that occupied nine parts in ten of her conversation that season, and was in the midst of a catalogue of officers she should miss most bitterly when she arrived, by the natural and thoughtless progress of her own chatter, at the name of Mr. Wickham, delivered with exactly the same careless fondness she gave every other name on her list.
"...though I am sure Wickham will be sorriest of all to go, for he has grown so attached to Meryton, and to a particular somebody in it, though I shall not say who, for I have promised."
Elizabeth did not look at Mr. Darcy, but she could sense how still he had gone, and she found herself, despite every resolution to the contrary, to watch him after all, from beneath lowered lashes, and in a sideways manner that she used when wishing to be caught at it.
He had not moved, had not spoken, had not so much as set down the teacup he held, and yet something struck her. Perhaps it was his held breath sustained past the point of comfort. His countenance, when at last she permitted herself a fuller look, wore nothing so simple as anger.
She thought, in that moment, of Wickham's own account of him, of a proud man's cruelty toward a boy raised alongside him, of an inheritance withheld, of a friendship betrayed for reasons Wickham had never troubled to make entirely coherent.
She immediately thought, there, he is showing his guilt despite himself.
The conversation moved on, as Lydia's conversation always did. And finally, Darcy set down his teacup, some minutes after with care, and excused himself not long after that, on the plea of a letter he had promised his sister, Georgiana.
Elizabeth followed him out. She could not afterward have said what possessed her to do it, except that some restless dissatisfaction drove her into the hall a full minute behind him, on the pretext of fetching a shawl she did not, in fact, want.
"You need not have gone on my sister's account," she said, before she had entirely decided to speak at all. "Lydia means very little by anything she says. She has not the sense to mean much by it."
"I do not doubt it," he said. His voice was level, but there was a rawness, different sounding than his ordinary coldness. "I did not go on your sister's account, Miss Bennet."
"Then on what account?" She had not meant to press it. She heard herself pressing it, and could not entirely account for the impulse, except that his stillness in the parlour had disturbed her and she wanted to know what lay beneath it.
Something moved across his face. "I do not intend to supply an account, standing in your mother's hall. If you wish to know, I might tell you another time, in another place."
She opened her mouth to answer, to ask him plainly what he meant, but then she said something else entirely. “What has he done to earn your dislike?”
"He has done many things, countless things, to earn my distrust," he said, with bitterness “And I ask you not press me, Miss Elizabeth.” He then added, “I had not understood restraint to be among my faults, though I collect you have found a way to make it one regardless."
He did not leave, this time, after making his statement, but he stood his ground through the whole of it, jaw set, colour risen, and said what he had to say to the end, however roughly, rather than removing himself as he had done in the lane.
But she was too caught, in the moment, in the sting of his last sentence to notice, and by the time Jane came into the hall some minutes later, drawn by voices raised half a note higher than she had expected, they had said a good deal to each other that neither was entirely proud of, and had settled nothing, and stood some feet apart breathing rather hard.
"Is everything quite well?" Jane asked, looking between them with mild alarm.
"Perfectly," said Elizabeth
"Perfectly," said Darcy
They both responded to Jane in the same breath and very nearly the same tone.
He took his leave shortly after, with a correct bow, and a look, directed at Elizabeth alone in the half-second before he turned, that she could not read at all. It was not disdain, and not anger, not anything she could quite make it.
And she stood in the hall after he had gone feeling considerably less satisfied with her own conduct than she had any right, given the provocation, to feel.