CHAPTER 20
The doctor had already arrived before Elizabeth woke, and once Mrs. Hill discovered Elizabeth awake in bed, she supposed the doctor from the downstairs parlour.
He was a Meryton man born and bred, with unsentimental habits.
He briskly pronounced the ankle a bad sprain rather than a break, which she had already known.
The doctor prescribed rest and a tightly wound bandage and no unnecessary use of it for a fortnight at the least, and then departed with an assurance to return tomorrow.
It was over the tray Hill brought up shortly after, more food than Elizabeth's shrunken appetite could presently do justice to, though she made what inroads upon it she could, aware of her mother hovering in the doorway with her ever present anxiety, that the more practical ramifications of her kidnapping were shared with Elizabeth.
"You must not trouble yourself with any of it today," her mother assured with in a voice pitched with worry, "but I will tell you plainly, Lizzy, that Meryton has talked of nothing else these three days, and will talk of nothing else for a good while yet, and there is no use pretending otherwise."
"I did not imagine there was," Elizabeth said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at the thought of Meryton gossip’s tongues wagging. "What do they say, Mama?"
Her mother's face attempted seriousness, but was at war with her fatigue and nerves.
"Some of it is dreadful," her mother explained.
“I tell you Lizzy, it is the sort of talk I will not repeat to you, about what three days alone with a gentleman might reasonably be supposed to have, well, you understand me.
But I will say, Lizzy, and I do not think it wrong of me to say it, that a great deal of the neighbourhood has already concluded that a match must follow, given the circumstances, and I cannot pretend I find the notion wrong.
Mr. Darcy has ten thousand a year, and Pemberley besides, and I am persuaded, whatever I once thought of the man's manner, that a gentleman who conducts himself as he is said to have done cannot be so very disagreeable after all. "
Elizabeth thought that these details were an honest window into the whole tangled knot of her mother's feelings. Her mother’s horror, at least, was genuine, and plain on her face.
Mrs. Bennet dreaded what gossip might yet make of her daughter's name; and Elizabeth, examining her own reaction to it, found she could not summon a tart reply that such fretting would ordinarily have earned from her.
She knew well that her mother had spent three days genuinely believing her daughter might be dead.
And, given that, she was prepared to be more than gracious.
It was her father who came to her that afternoon, once the worst of the household's fuss had settled. Elizabeth was still in bed, propped against her pillows with her ankle elevated. Mr. Bennet came without any of the dry armour he generally brought to difficult conversations.
"I must ask you something," he said, settling into the chair beside her bed, "and I would have you answer it honestly, without regard for anything your mother has doubtless already told you the neighbourhood expects, nor for anything you imagine I might wish to hear."
Elizabeth looked at him for a moment, and saw the seriousness in his eyes. "You may ask me, Papa.”
"Do you wish to marry Mr. Darcy?" He held up a hand before she could answer. "I do not ask whether you believe you must, for the sake of your name, though I will not pretend that it would not have ramifications. I ask whether you wish it, Lizzy, for your own sake.”
He paused and looked at her soberly. “I will not permit you to accept it on the grounds of necessity alone. I have very nearly lost you once this week, and I will not allow you to marry Mr. Darcy, if you would rather not like to, regardless of what the neighbors might think. I would rather you do what your heart wants, my dear, and nothing less.”
Elizabeth looked down at her own hands, folded on the coverlet, and then up again, and found her father watching her. He looked at her, not his usual amused and half-detached observation of the world's follies, but rather something that looked like fear.
It was a fair enough doubt, and Elizabeth found she shared some private version of it herself, though she did not say so aloud.
She thought instead of the man who had gone cold and silent at the very start of his return to Hertfordshire, shutting himself away, and wondered whether the man who had fought Bill on an open road with such controlled, deliberate purpose had truly learned something that would outlast the crisis that had taught it to him, or only borrowed, for as long as the danger lasted, a courage that peace might tempt him to set down again.
But she thought, too, of his hands working the linen round her ankle with a gentleness that owed nothing to any crisis's demand, of the low, murmured words that had carried her across a wet field when nothing but his own care obliged him to offer them, and found that she trusted the gentler evidence rather more than she trusted her own lingering doubt to be fair to him.
"I think I do wish it," she said gravely. She paused, and made herself go on. "I will not pretend that my decision stands entirely apart from what the world will say of it. I am not so proud as that, whatever I may once have believed of myself."
She stopped again, and when she continued, it was more slowly, as though she were only now discovering the shape of the thing she meant to say.
"I wish it because I have come to feel something for him I can only call admiration, Papa; though, I confess it sits ill with me, to own it, when I spent so many months disliking him.
I have learned to depend upon him, when I did not think myself capable of depending upon anyone so thoroughly disagreeable as I once believed him to be.
I have come to know him since, and I find my feelings have turned out to be very nearly the opposite of what they were. "
Her father was silent a long while; she saw his mouth twitch, resettling it before he replied to her. "I could not have borne it, Lizzy, watching you nearly lost to me this week, to think you might accept his hand on grounds of necessity alone, with no true feeling behind the accepting at all.
I find I have grown rather fiercer, this last week, in my objections to watching any daughter of mine settle for less than her own heart actually wants. I do not know that I was always so fierce a father as that, before. I think perhaps I ought to have been."
His eyes were wet, and she could see through his spectacles that a lone tear ran down his cheek. She was moved by his words, and was quiet herself for a moment, before she said. "You have always been a good father to me, Papa.”
He gave her a small, rueful shake of his head.
"I have been an amused one, more often than a good one, Lizzy.
And that is not quite the same virtue, whatever I have generally told myself to the contrary.
I have found it easier, across a great many years, to laugh at your mother's nerves and your sisters' follies than to trouble myself properly correcting either, and I have let a great deal go unaddressed in this house that a more diligent man would have seen to.
I very nearly lost you this week, my dear girl, and I will tell you plainly that it has taught me rather more about my own failings than I found comfortable to learn at my age. "
He reached over and took her hand, an unusual enough gesture from him, and she felt his warmth in it.
"But I did not come up here to make you comfort me for my own shortcomings.
I came to hear you say what you have just said, and I find, having heard it, that I am considerably easier in my own mind than I have been these three days together. "
Elizabeth asked, hesitant. "Would you approve, Papa, if I chose to marry Mr. Darcy?"
"I only approve of your feelings, Lizzy.
" Something of his old dryness returned to him then.
"If you would like, I will speak with him, when he calls, and give him whatever blessing he means to ask for.
Though I confess, I could see that he did not once take his eyes from you the whole time your mother was making her fuss, and I have not often seen a man look at anything with quite that particular mixture of terror and devotion, except perhaps myself, some thirty years ago, watching your mother recover from a fever I was entirely persuaded, in my own youthful foolishness, would carry her off entirely. "
Elizabeth smiled, surprised by the sudden small window her father occasionally permitted her into his own marriage. She had spent most of her life believing that her parents' marriage was a settled, comfortable disappointment rather than anything that had once been young and hopeful.
"I did not know that Mama had been so ill once," she said.
Mr. Bennet nodded his head, rising slowly, "There is a great deal you do not know.” As he lifted from the chair, she saw him favouring some ache of his own, likely from the saddle he spent hours in while in search of her.
"Though, I do not intend to enlighten you further on the subject this afternoon, having already said rather more than I generally permit myself on any topic touching my own feelings.” He looked at her then and gave a warm smile, “Rest that ankle.
I will send your mother up directly, though I expect she will have exhausted herself of the subject of wedding-clothes by suppertime, and you had best prepare yourself accordingly. "