CHAPTER 22
Darcy had meant to come earlier, but his doctor left little room for argument. He had pronounced that a bruised rib and a river crossing required at least a full week of rest before he was permitted to leave the estate.
It was not the confinement itself he minded, for he had endured worse discomforts this last week than a soft bed and an excess of leisure, but the cruelty of being told that Elizabeth was recovering not three miles distant, and that he was forbidden from going to see her himself.
A thought came to him, the second evening of his confinement, of writing her a letter.
The idea arrived innocently enough. He told himself he would write a note; it would be nothing more, some line to assure her that he was mending, that his thoughts had not strayed from her for any waking hour since they had parted at Longbourn's door.
He had very nearly called for paper before the whole impropriety of the notion arrested him. Darcy was not officially engaged to her, for he had asked nothing of her father, and had said nothing to her beyond what circumstance and danger had already wrung from them both on a riverbank.
And, he knew that a letter now, unsanctioned and unrequested, sent from an unmarried gentleman to an unmarried lady with no understanding yet formally settled between their two families, was a liberty he had no right to take, however thoroughly the preceding week had already stripped away every other liberty either of them had once thought themselves bound to observe.
Darcy set the idea aside, and found it a good deal harder to keep it aside; instead, he thought over a dozen careful sentences in the privacy of his own head across that second night, sentences that went nowhere, being written for no eye but his own and destined for no paper at all.
Bingley, calling in on him the following afternoon with news of the neighbourhood's continuing fascination with the whole affair, found him in a temper considerably shorter than the day prior, and remarked on it with a fond bluntness that only a friendship of many years permitted.
"You are cross," Bingley observed, settling into the chair by the window. "I do not think I have ever seen you cross from an injury before."
"I am not cross about the rib," Darcy said, feeling rather annoyed.
"No," Bingley agreed, with a knowing look that told Darcy plainly enough he had already guessed the whole of it, "I did not imagine you were.
" He was quiet a moment, and then said, "You might send word through Jane.
I am sure I might carry any message for you, and Jane might carry it with your compliments. "
Darcy considered this a moment, but felt a reluctance to have even so small and innocent a sentiment filtered through a third party's careful delivery, when what he actually wanted was nothing so modest as compliments passed along, but the plain sight of her own face confirming that she was truly as recovered as everyone continued to assure him she was.
"Perhaps," he said, "once I have had another day or two to consider what such a message ought properly to say."
"You are hopeless," Bingley said, with real affection beneath the teasing, "and I do not think I have ever been so glad to see a man made so thoroughly hopeless by anything in my life.
I shall leave you to your considering, then, and come back tomorrow to see whether your patience has improved your temper any, though I confess I am not sanguine about the prospect. "
The week passed slower than any week of Darcy's life had previously contrived to pass, each day marked out by the same small, insufficient intelligence relayed through Bingley’s visits to Longbourn.
He was informed that Elizabeth's ankle continued to mend, that her spirits were good, that she had asked, on more than one occasion of how Mr. Darcy's own recovery progressed.
By the seventh day, the doctor having at last pronounced him fit for a slow and short carriage ride, Darcy found he had exhausted every reserve of patience he had, and rose before the household was properly stirring to order his carriage for Longbourn at the earliest hour propriety could possibly excuse.
And then, Darcy found himself standing some minutes in Netherfield's own hall, unable to account for the sudden reluctance that had overtaken a resolution he had believed, the night before, entirely settled.
It was not doubt, he told himself, as he stood there with his gloves already in hand, and found that what held him was not any uncertainty of what he meant to ask, but perhaps some question as to whether or not he would receive the answer he hoped for.
Finally, building his courage, he walked out of Netherfield, as he had done a dozen times that autumn, and entered into his carriage, bound for Longbourn by a road he had travelled a number of times.
On this particular morning, Darcy found he noticed small things he had previously ridden past unremarked; the frost still silvering the hedgerows in patches, a robin working some hidden seam of the bank for its breakfast, and his heartbeat increasing in intensity with every passing moment.
He asked for Mr. Bennet upon arriving, was shown into the library, and found the older man already risen from his chair to meet him.
"You need not tell me why you have come," Mr. Bennet said, gesturing him to the chair opposite his own. Darcy hesitated in taking the chair Mr. Bennet offered, feeling himself more inclined to stand, if not pace, as was his preference.
Seeing the young man’s own hesitation, Mr. Bennet, added.
"I find, examining my own inclination this morning, that I would rather hear you say it properly.
So, if you would be so good, sit, Mr. Darcy.
I do not think either of us is in so great a hurry that the saying of it cannot be done sitting down. "
Darcy sat, and found, gathering the words he had rehearsed a dozen times on the drive over, that they came to him now with considerably less polish than he had intended.
"I have come to ask your leave to marry your daughter," he started, looking at the older man, sitting across from him.
"I do not know that I can offer you any very elegant account of why, beyond the plain fact that I have loved her a great deal longer than either of us permitted ourselves to know it, and that I have spent this last week discovering, by the hardest possible means, exactly how much of my own life I am unwilling to imagine continuing without her in it.”
Darcy took a fortifying breadth, and seeing that Mr. Bennet remained silent, he continued.
“I cannot any longer imagine wanting anything so much as I want her for my wife, and because I believe, though I would not presume to speak for her own feeling until she has had the chance to speak it herself, that she has come, this last week at least, to want something of the same in return. "
Mr. Bennet was quiet a long while studying him.
He had thought Mr. Darcy, like his daughter had once thought him, a proud and rather distant figure, the first evening the young man walked into a Meryton assembly the previous autumn and stood the whole night through without troubling himself to dance.
It was a judgment he had not, in the months since, found much occasion to revise, for the man had given the neighbourhood precious little else to go on. Mr. Bennet found, considering that old impression now against the man sitting opposite him, that he could no longer make the two accounts agree.
Whatever pride Mr. Darcy had once worn as his only visible feature, a single terrible week had worn a good deal of it away, and left standing in its place someone Mr. Bennet found he could regard, examining his own daughter's evident happiness alongside the evidence of the man's own conduct.
"I will tell you something I do not know that I have said aloud to anyone, Mr. Darcy, not even my wife," he said, at last. "I have not always been the father I ought to have been to my daughters; indeed, I have found it easier, across a great many years, to laugh at the world's absurdities than to trouble myself with correcting them, and I have let a great deal go unaddressed in my own household that a more diligent man would have seen to properly.”
This time, Mr. Bennet took a deep breadth before continuing.
“I very nearly lost Elizabeth, and I will tell you plainly that it has taught me a great deal about my own failings.
I do not say this to burden you with my own regrets.
I say it because I find I would rather give my daughter to a man who has done the hard work of correcting himself than to one who has never had cause to discover what wanted correcting in the first place.
You have my leave, and my blessing besides, for whatever either is worth to a man who does not, I think, much require either to proceed regardless. "
He rose, and something that was almost his old dryness returned. "Go and find her. She is in the garden, I believe, testing that ankle against her mother's express instructions to the contrary, which I gather you will come to learn is rather characteristic of her."
Darcy thanked him briefly, and left the library with a haste that he made no particular effort to disguise. His gloves were forgotten on the chair behind him, as his whole mind was already three rooms and a garden path ahead of his own feet.
He found Elizabeth exactly where her father had promised, seated on the low stone bench near the rose beds that had nothing left to offer but bare, thorned canes and the memory of what they had been in summer.
Her injured foot was propped up with careful disregard for the doctor's orders. She had a thick shawl drawn close against the morning's lingering chill. She looked up at his approach, and he saw in her face that she had already guessed something of his errand.
"Good morning, Mr, Darcy. I am glad to see you recovering,” she said, offering a warm smile, and demure look, as her own heart began to beat in rapid succession.