CHAPTER 19
Mr. Bennet was off his horse before it had properly stopped, and moved across the remaining distance between them at a speed Elizabeth would before have credited to the man.
And when he reached her he did not speak at all for a long moment, only gathered her against him with an unguarded desperation.
"Papa," she managed, her voice continuing to sound like a sob into his shoulder, and felt him shudder once before he mastered himself.
He then moved to take her face with his hands, and studied her intensely.
He thought she looked exhausted, and had a healing bruise where she had struck her cheek in the river on something.
"You are alive." Mr. Bennet's voice came out unsteady; it sounded like nothing she had never once heard in the whole of her life. "I had begun to permit myself to believe otherwise!" he confessed, holding her tight.
His eyes, when she looked up at him, had gone bright and unashamed, and he did not trouble himself to hide it or turn away, as she rather thought the father she had always known might have done. He only looked at her, and felt all the relief of her battered, but by far better than he imagined.
The riders with him, six or seven men, some she recognised as Longbourn's own grooms and tenants, others strangers she took for constables or volunteers drawn from Meryton's alarm, had already turned their attention to Bill, still groaning in the the dark, and to the business of securing him and sending word ahead, given Darcy’s explanation of who the man was and why he was on the ground.
It was in the midst of this practical commotion that Mr. Bennet's eyes found Darcy, standing a little apart.
"Mr. Darcy," he said, and crossed to him, and took his hand and held it a moment.
"I do not think I have words equal to what I owe you, sir.
I collect, from the state of you both, that you have brought her through whatever this ordeal has been by rather more than good fortune alone. "
Darcy returned the grip, and found, to his own mild surprise, that he had to consider his answer before he trusted himself to give it.
"You owe me considerably less than you suppose, sir," he said at last. "I will not pretend I did nothing, but I do not think honesty permits me quite that much modesty; rather, it was your daughter's courage, and her own wit, that answered for the greater part of what stood between us and disaster this morning, this last occasion of it not the least among them. "
Mr. Bennet's eyes had sharpened slightly upon him.
"I would be obliged, sir, if you would allow me to call upon you at Longbourn, once matters here are settled and your daughter has had the rest and care she is owed.
There are things I believe I ought to say to you directly; things that do not belong on an open road with your daughter still standing in the mud beside us, sir. "
Mr. Bennet regarded him a long moment; his face did not convey suspicion, but it did suggest the attention of a man who prided himself on reading a situation accurately.
"I think, Mr. Darcy," he said slowly, "that I begin to suspect what those things might be.
I find, somewhat to my own astonishment, that I am not opposed to hearing them.
" He released Darcy's hand at last. "Longbourn, then.
Once she is safe under my own roof, and not a moment sooner; I find I have had quite enough conducting my family's business on public roads. "
It was Sir William Lucus, in the end, who took charge of the more practical business, as though sensing that Mr. Bennet had neither the composure nor the inclination just then to attend to it.
He directed two of the men toward Bill, still groaning weakly where he lay, and had them bind his wrists with a length of rope produced from someone's saddle; rope enough, Elizabeth thought, with a grim and not entirely charitable satisfaction, to answer for what had been done to her and Darcy both with rope of the very same sort.
"He'll live," one of the men pronounced, after a brief and unceremonious examination of the wound at Bill's crown, "though he'll have a head on him worth remembering it by."
"He is to be delivered to the jail at Meryton," Mr. Bennet declared, "and questioned there as to the whereabouts of the man who fled him.”
Sir William nodded slowly in agreement, "I will see to it myself," he said, "and send word to Longbourn the moment there is anything worth the sending.
" He glanced toward Elizabeth, and something in his expression softened considerably.
"But I think the two of you have done enough for one day.
Get her home, Bennet. The rest can wait on men better rested than either of you looks fit to be. "
Bill was hauled, none too gently, up onto the back of one of the spare horses, bound hand and foot to the saddle in a manner that left him groaning afresh at every jolt, and the small procession began, at last, to sort itself into some order for the journey back.
Mr. Bennet insisting, over what protest Elizabeth could still summon, that she ride before him.
Darcy, she noticed, was afforded no such insistence, though she saw Sir William's easy eyes rest on him with some private assessment before he offered, in a tone that permitted no easy refusal despite its habitual good humor, the loan of his steward's mount for the ride, on the grounds that a man with cracked ribs had no business walking a step further than was required.
"Can't have you arriving at Longbourn on foot, sir, after all you've been through," he said, with the man’s usual goodnature.
"Wouldn't do at all. Wouldn't do at all. "
Thus, the ride back to Longbourn passed in a haze. Her father's arm stayed about her the whole way, and she felt a deep sort of contentment, for once, to let him hold her so without the small independent protest she might, in other circumstances, have felt obliged to make.
Darcy rode close beside them, near enough that she could hear, now and again, the shallow rhythm of his breathing over the horses' hoofbeats.
She had watched him mount, and thought he looked entirely spent, having exhausted himself in a fight with Bill, and pained his rib further, than we could have liked.
The country grew steadily more familiar as they went; Elizabeth saw a stile she had climbed a hundred times, a bend in the lane she could have walked blindfolded, the church spire at Longbourn's edge rising into view.
Each landmark brought a fresh, disorienting proof that the whole strange, separate world of the last three days had occurred within so short a distance of everything she had always known.
She found it difficult, if not not entirely impossible to reconcile the two facts, the nearness of home and the vast unbridgeable distance she felt from the woman who had last walked this same lane a lifetime ago in appearance only three days past. And, she felt, riding alongside her father, that they only thing she could do was weep; a deep, heart-wrenching cry poured out of her, causing her eyes to pour out in relief, exhaustion, and the great security that she was home, and above all else, safe.
Longbourn, when she arrived, was in a state of unmistakable vigil.
Just days prior, it had been filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of a household in the ordinary bustle of a wedding fortnight’s preparations.
Yet now, Elizabeth could see that the candles were burning low in the windows that should have been dark at this hour, and the drive was churned in mud by all the comings and goings of search parties organized, dispatched, and returned empty-handed again and again.
They entered through the main door, and into the familiar hall.
Mrs. Bennet ran down the steps from the second floor, and met them in the all.
Elizabeth braced herself, from a long habit, of her mother’s performance, always associated with her nerves.
She expected exclamations, smelling salts, and hysterics.
What she encountered was shockingly opposite. When her mother's eyes fell upon her, Mrs. Bennet was entirely silent; her mother looked frightened out of her wits, and it took her a moment to register that her daughter was come home.
"Lizzy," her mother said, with a cracked and small voice, when it came at last. "Oh! My Lizzy."
She crossed the hall and gathered Elizabeth against her in a tight hug.
Elizabeth felt her mother's whole body shaking.
In that moment, being held so dearly by her mother, she realized that whatever comedy she had always privately permitted herself at her mother's expense, and whatever exasperation her mother's nerves had earned across a lifetime of ordinary complaint, none of it had prepared her for the sight of her mother’s genuine, unmasked terror and relief at seeing her daughter alive and back at home.
"I thought." Her mother began, but could not finish the sentence, before she broke down into sobs. There was certainly no need for her to finish what she started, as Elizabeth felt her own tears well up in her eyes again.
Having heard the commotion downstairs, Jane flew out of her bedroom, to see the happy scene below.
It was Jane that came next; her eldest sister was already crying by the time Elizabeth was wrapped in her arms. When at last Jane drew back, her face was wet and entirely unashamed of it, and she said only, "I did not think I could bear it, Lizzy, if you had not come back to us.” Jane hugged Elizabeth again, and felt a new wave of tears soak into her shoulder.
Mr. Bennet, watching this from the hall's edge, cleared his throat once, roughly, and turned his attention to the business of seeing a doctor sent for, and dry clothes found, and a proper meal prepared.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth, exhausted past any further capacity, felt her knees give way at last beneath her, and found Darcy's arm beneath hers before she realized she had started to fall.
He held her with the same swift steadying that he had shown at every crisis of the preceding days.
"She needs rest," he said, to the room in general, in a voice that for the moment sounded quite like its old Netherfield authority, "and a doctor's proper attention to that ankle, which has borne considerably more than it ought these three days."
Mrs. Bennet, roused by this into something nearer her ordinary self, began at once to issue instructions.
Hill sent for hot water, and a fire to be built up properly in Elizabeth's own room.
Kitty was told to watch for the doctor's arrival from the window, and Elizabeth, at last permitted herself to be led toward the stairs.
She looked back once and found Mr. Darcy still standing in the hall below, watching her go with a countenance so grave it might, a fortnight before, have read to her as nothing but coldness. However, she found she could no longer mistake it as such.
For, she had grown this last week, to become properly familiar with what his look actually spoke of, and she knew, reading it now that the gravity in his face held nothing of displeasure in it at all; it was only the look of concern for her, and a plain, wordless wish to see her properly cared for.
Elizabeth slept, that first night home, more deeply than she had in a very long time.
And, when she eventually woke, the following morning, it was to the strange, disorienting comfort of her own familiar room, and the sound of her mother's voice, hushed for once, speaking with someone in the passage outside her door about arrangements that seemed to concern rather more than her ankle's proper healing.