CHAPTER 21 #2
Darcy, feeling rather tired of the subject of kidnappings, decided to change the topic of their conversation.
"I do not think I properly thanked you, either," Darcy said, "for coming into Hertfordshire when you did, this second time, and for deciding to marry a woman worth marrying, rather than the connexion I once tried to persuade you was more prudent.
I was wrong about her, and I do not think I have said so to you as plainly as the wrong deserves. "
Bingley's face, hearing this, underwent a small, surprised alteration, for Darcy was not, by nature or by habit, a man given to volunteering such admissions unprompted.
"You need not say it now," Bingley said, rather more kindly.
"You are tired, and battered, and I do not think a man in your present condition owes anybody an accounting of old grievances. "
"Perhaps not," Darcy said. "Though, I find I wished to say it regardless, while I had the occasion, having learned this week rather more than I care to admit about how little warning a man generally receives before the chance to say such things is taken from him entirely."
"I cannot say precisely when you were taken.
It must have been some hours before we so much as realized you were gone, let alone that you had been carried off by force.
One of the stable boys came forward to say he had seen you and Miss Elizabeth taken by a party of men, though he confessed he had not rightly understood what he was witnessing at the time, not until word had already gone round that you were both missing, and he came to see the two circumstances were one and the same. "
Darcy almost smiled, recollecting the horror of that night. "It was no fault of the boy's, nor of anyone's here, that so many hours were lost."
Bingley nodded his head in agreement and rose, judging correctly that his friend's strength, however improved by bath and supper, had not yet reached the point of sustaining conversation indefinitely, and pressed his arm once, briefly, before turning to the door.
"Rest, Darcy," he said. "The doctor will be down from town by tomorrow at the latest, and I shall have Cook prepare whatever you can be persuaded to eat between now and then, and you are not to trouble yourself with anything further tonight beyond the sleeping of it. "
"I do not think sleep will trouble me tonight," Darcy jested, ever so dryly.
And, once Bingley left, Darcy turned down the light on his bedstand, and slept more deeply that night than he had slept in a very great while, the whole accumulated weight of the week finally permitted, in the safety of his own familiar room, to set itself down.
***
Not one to spend much time abed, after two days of rest, and a prompt visit by his doctor, come from London, Dary was permitted to walk downstairs. It was in the small hall off the drawing-room, that he encountered the first proper realization of change.
A young footman, new to the household since Darcy's own absence, had hurried in with an armful of correspondence that had accumulated.
The footman came round the corner too fast, and collided with Darcy hard enough to send half the letters scattering across the floor, and Darcy growling in pain, as his hand went directly to his ribs.
“I’m so sorry, sir!” The young man looked up at Darcy's face with frozen dread, expecting some sharp word for his clumsiness, in addition to running into his master’s own particular guest.
A week before, Darcy owned to himself that he would have said nothing cruel, for cruelty to servants had never been among his failings; but he would have said nothing at all, either, and would have let his own silence itself deliver whatever correction the moment seemed to demand.
He knew it was the same cold, correct withdrawal he had practised with Caroline Bingley, and with Bill in the barn. It was a silent coldness that he had learned to use for those particular provocations that he deemed better to retreat than engage.
Darcy slowly knelt instead, and helped gather a few of the scattered letters, and handed the recovered stack back to the astonished young man, "No harm done," Darcy replied, and saw, watching disbelief in the boy’s face. The boy quickly apologized again, before hurrying down the hall.
He found, examining his own reaction to it, that the small, unremarkable transaction had left him with satisfaction.
He had chosen kindness where his old habit would have chosen nothing at all; the choice had cost him nothing, no dignity surrendered, no ground conceded, only a moment's plain civility offered to a frightened boy who had not deserved to be made to answer for an honest accident with anything harsher.