CHAPTER 7 #2
He looked at her a long moment. "Very well," he started, his voice still quiet, but taciturn.
"I think your mother wants sense, and says so publicly, at her own table, in front of persons who will carry the saying of it into every drawing-room in the county, as she has done tonight, not an hour past, over the fish.
I think your youngest sisters conduct themselves in a manner that would shame a house with half Longbourn's pretensions to gentility, running after redcoats with no more discretion than they would show chasing a dropped fan, and that your father, who has both the wit and the authority to correct it, finds it easier to be amused by the spectacle than troubled to end it.
I think a great deal of what passes in your family for liveliness is nothing more than a want of any check upon it whatsoever, and I think you know this as well as I do, Miss Bennet, because I have watched you colour at your mother's conversation more than once this fortnight, and I do not think the colour came of pride in her. "
The silence that followed was deafening. She might have found some sharp enough reply to carry her through, had he stopped there; but, he did not quite stop there.
"I do not say it to wound you," he went on, more quietly still, and this, somehow, was worse than the rest, for she heard in it not cruelty exactly but a terrible honesty.
"I do not require you to disown them; that is not fair to my judgments, only that you stop treating my seeing what you already see as some fresh insult invented for your particular injury. "
"Not fair." She repeated it back to him, and something in her own voice frightened her a little, it was so unlike the voice she generally kept for company, or for anger, or for anything she had ever felt before this particular autumn.
"No. I don't suppose it is. It is not fair that my father laughs where he ought to govern, and it is not fair that my mother says aloud what better-bred women only think, and it is not fair that Lydia is fifteen and behaves as though she is answerable to no one, because she is not, because no one in that house has ever once required it of her.
I have known all of this longer than you have known my name, Mr. Darcy.
I did not require a gentleman of ten thousand a year to travel into Hertfordshire and instruct me in the particulars of my own family's failings, as though I were a child being shown, for the first time, that the stove is hot. "
"That is not fair, and you know it is not.
" His voice had dropped, low and very controlled.
"My fortune has nothing to do with it, or if it has, it is only that a man with less of it could not have afforded, at not one in eighteen to learn as slowly as I did what your family costs you, because he would have been made to reckon with his own family's faults a good deal sooner, and would not have had the luxury of mistaking a stranger's failings for a novelty. "
"No," she agreed soberly. "It is not. Though, I find I am not much interested, tonight, in being fair."
"Then we are agreed on one point at least," he said, and something in his voice had gone very final, "for I do not think either of us has managed it this whole conversation."
She did not cry. She would have died before crying in front of him, and told herself so, fiercely, in the half-second it took her to master her own face.
"You have said, at least, what you think," she said, very quietly, rising, "and I thank you for the honesty, however long you were about arriving at it, and however long I was about earning it from you. I find I would like some air."
She was out through the terrace doors before Jane, occupied across the room with Bingley, had so much as looked up, and before Caroline, who had marked the whole exchange with growing unease from her chair by the window, could rise to interrupt Mr. Darcy.
Darcy stood a moment where she had left him, and found that he could not, honestly, retract a word of what he had said of her family, for he believed every word of it true; and found, in the same breath, that he did not want to correct her, not even to be understood by her, but simply to be known by her at last, fully.
And had achieved, in the event, nothing but her tears withheld and her back retreating through a door he had no right to follow her through.
He did not go after her to apologise. He was not yet ready to call it apology, not yet certain, even now, that an apology was owed for words he still believed correct in substance if not in the delivering of them, nor for a countercharge that had been, whatever its aim, entirely earned by his own history.
But he could not sit in that drawing-room, with Sir William's voice rising again somewhere behind him and Mrs. Bennet's laughter carrying from the card table, and let the last word between them stand exactly as it had been left; both of them cruel, both of them accurate, and neither of them, he suspected, entirely finished, without at least the attempt to say something further, though he could not himself, crossing the terrace into the dark garden beyond it, have said with any confidence what that something was to be.
Meanwhile, Caroline, watching the situation, was momentarily stopped by her housekeeper, who was distressed about some matter of their downstairs servants, forcing Caroline to follow her out of the room and down the hall.
The night had turned colder than the evening of the larger party, the mildness of that earlier week having given way at last to a sharper, more seasonable chill, and the gardens, when he came into them, were darker than he remembered; the moon not yet risen, but he could just make out, ahead of him on the gravel walk, the pale shape of her gown moving toward the yew screen and the working garden beyond it, toward the lane he had not, until that moment, had any particular occasion to think of at all.
"Miss Bennet," he called, low, not wishing to summon the whole house to witness whatever was about to pass between them. "Miss Bennet, a word." She did not stop moving, and so he finally called out, “Elizabeth!” in a tone that indicated he requested she halt.
It was the first time he had used her name aloud in her hearing, and even in the dark, even at that distance, he saw her stop.