CHAPTER 21 #3
Darcy thought that he had learned the choice from her, though she had never once sat him down to teach it directly; he had simply watched her, across a whole autumn's acquaintance, offer exactly this same unthinking warmth to everyone who crossed her path, to their housekeeper Hill, to Charlotte's own younger sisters, to a groom holding her father’s horse. He wanted to be more like Elizabeth.
His next test came in the form of Caroline Bingley, who, if he were honest, offered him a much larger test than the footman.
She found him in the library that evening, where he had retreated in search of solitude, and came in without knocking, in the manner she had always permitted herself where he was concerned, and settled into the chair opposite his with an expression that told him exactly what direction the coming conversation meant to take.
"I collect congratulations are in order, Mr. Darcy, though I confess I hardly know how to offer them properly, given the circumstances.
Three days alone together, unchaperoned, in the company of highwaymen; one can hardly imagine a more efficient method of securing an engagement, whatever the lady's own family connexions might otherwise have recommended against it.” She lightened her voice and looked at him with scrutiny.
“I do not say it unkindly. I only observe that Miss Eliza Bennet has managed what a great many more conventionally ambitious young ladies have failed to accomplish. "
Two months before, at the very start of this whole autumn's trial, he would have gone silent under exactly this kind of remark.
And, he would have spent the following days paying for the restraint in a coldness that he learned had cost Elizabeth a great deal more than it had ever cost Caroline.
He felt, hearing this fresh version of the same old cruelty, the familiar cold contraction begin behind his sternum, the narrowing of the throat that had always, before, been his signal to retreat rather than engage.
Though, this time, Darcy did not retreat.
"You will not speak of her so again," he said, and his voice, though it did not rise, carried none of the flat, careful governance.
"Not in my hearing, Miss Bingley.” He leaned forward slightly, “And, I would advise you, for your own comfort's sake not to test whether I mean that as strictly as I intend it to be understood.”
“But,” she started, looking somewhat startled, though he cut her off before she could speak more.
“I spent three days watching a woman I love manage four dangerous men with more courage and more resourcefulness than I have seen from anyone of my own acquaintance in my whole life, gentleman or lady, and I will not sit and listen to you reduce the whole of it to a scheme for securing a match she never once, in any hour of that ordeal, showed the smallest evidence of having orchestrated.
I have permitted a great deal of this kind of talk from you across a great many years.
However, I do not intend to listen to any more of it simply to preserve a peace that was never, in truth, worth keeping quiet about. "
Caroline's face, hearing this, went from surprise to what looked like genuine hurt, before settling into a brittle composure that did not quite disguise how thoroughly she had been caught off guard. "I see," she said coldly. "You might have spoken more civilly, Mr. Darcy. I only meant."
Darcy cut her off again. "I know what you meant; I have known what you meant for a very long time, and said nothing, because I believed silence the more comfortable course for both of us.
I do not judge it so any longer. I would rather have this said plainly, once, and be done with it for good, Miss Bingley. "
She did not answer that. And, instead, at length, only rose with what dignity she could muster, and said something about the lateness of the hour, and left him alone in the library with the fire's low light and the unfamiliar satisfaction of a man who said a difficult thing at the moment it was warranted rather than banking it against some later reckoning that generally never came.
Darcy sat a long while after she had gone. He found himself thinking, not for the first time that week, that he had spent nearly thirty years enduring provocation by silence or coldness, rather than doing the harder work of actually settling what was owed, to himself or to anyone else.
He did not think that he would ever perfectly balance his silence, as he was not so changed, in a single week, as to believe himself suddenly free of many years' habit merely because one difficult conversation had gone differently than it once might have done.
But he thought, watching the fire burn low, that he had at least begun, for the first time he could properly remember, to make an honest attempt at it.
He did not permit himself the comfortable illusion that it was.
But it was a beginning, and he found he could carry it forward, whole and unashamed, into whatever the rest of his life with Elizabeth Bennet was about to ask of him.
For he knew already, that she would ask a very great deal of him yet, in the years remaining to them both; more, very likely, than he had ever been asked to give any single person in his life before her. Though, he found he did not want to withhold even a fragment of it.