CHAPTER 22 #2
He came and sat beside her on the bench, his breadth showing in the cold morning light. He was close enough that their shoulders touched, and found, now that the moment had actually arrived, that all the careful phrases he had rehearsed across a sleepless night had deserted him entirely.
"I do not know that I have anything left to offer you beyond what I have already, in one fashion or another, told you these last days.” He took her gloved hand, and said, looking into her glowing eyes, “I love you, Elizabeth.
I have loved you a great while, and I do not intend to let caution or pride delay me a moment further. Will you marry me?"
He watched her face in the pale morning light, and found himself, even now, even after everything the last week had settled between them, holding his breath for her answer as though some part of him had not yet fully trusted that it would come.
"Had you asked me before this ordeal of ours, Mr. Darcy, I would have refused you, and I imagine in rather sharp terms." She felt him go still beside her at that, saw the sudden flicker of real alarm cross his face, his mouth parting as though to protest or to plead his case afresh, and she could not entirely suppress the small, warm laugh that rose in her at having caught him so thoroughly off his guard.
She squeezed his hand, gently, to steady him before the fear could take proper root.
"However,” she went on, relenting at last, though she let the pause stretch a moment longer, "We have both been altered, I believe this last week, by rather more than either of us would have chosen, and I find that I do not wish to be anywhere in the world so much as I wish to be wherever you are.
" She turned her hand in his, so that her fingers closed properly around it. "Yes. I will marry you, Mr. Darcy"
For a moment he did not answer her at all, and she watched, with tenderness, as his eyes went bright in a manner she did not think he would have permitted himself to shew her a fortnight before, before this whole terrible, transforming event had stripped away whatever reserve had once stood between his feeling and its shewing.
"You will forgive me," he said, at last, his voice not entirely steady, "if I do not immediately trust myself to answer that as it deserves.
I had prepared, I think, for every outcome of this morning except the one now actually before me, and find myself, for perhaps the first time in my life, entirely without a prepared response to draw upon. "
"I did not ask for a prepared response," she said. "I do not think I should have believed one, from you, half so readily as I believe whatever this surprise may be," she added with a rueful smile.
He raised her hand to his lips then, and held it there a long moment, his eyes closed, and when he opened them again some of the earlier alarm had gone out of his face entirely.
"I do not think that I have ever wanted anything so completely, as I want the whole of the life you have just agreed to share with me.
I mean to spend a very great deal of what remains of my own life proving myself worthy of having asked for it at all. "
"You need not prove anything," she said. "You have already shewn me the man I am agreeing to marry. I do not require any further proof of it, only the ordinary, unremarkable business of getting on with the marrying."
He laughed at that; it was a real laugh, unguarded, the sound of it surprising them both.
And then, he drew her hand to rest against his chest, over the heart she could feel beating hard and fast beneath her palm, and neither of them said anything further for a long moment, content, at last, to let the cold garden and the pale morning light stand witness to a thing that had taken the whole of a terrible week, and a good deal more courage than either of them had known themselves to possess.
She did not wait for him to recover before she leaned in and kissed him.
She did it briefly, and a little clumsily, for she had not, in truth, very much practice at the art, and found her own courage rather outrunning her execution.
Fortunately, he did not seem to mind, from the way his free hand came up at once to cradle the side of her face, to think the execution wanted anything at all.
When she drew back, breathless and a little astonished at her own boldness, she found him looking at her with an expression of such unguarded tenderness, that she instantly felt a warmth rising to her cheeks that had nothing to do with the winter cold.
She had teased him a hundred times across this last autumn and never once found herself at a loss for the next thing to say to him; but, this time, she found herself at something very like a loss now, and covered it, in the only way she could presently think to, by dropping her gaze to their still-joined hands and saying something rather bold in return.
"You may return that properly, if you like. I do not think either of us need stand on so very much ceremony with each other any longer, given the whole of what we have already survived together."
He smiled again, and replied in a low voice.
"I begin to think that I have never in my life been given an invitation I was less inclined to refuse," and this time it was he who closed the distance, unhurried, his hand still warm against her cheek, and kissed her properly, slowly, and with none of her own earlier clumsiness, though a great deal of the same feeling behind it, until the cold of the garden, and the ache in her ankle, and every other small discomfort of the morning had receded to something scarcely worth remarking upon at all.
It was Elizabeth, at last, who drew back, laughing softly at her own breathlessness. "We ought to go in," she said, "before my mother concludes we have both perished of the cold out here, and comes out to conduct the search herself."
"I do not think I should mind the search," he teased, "so long as it found us exactly as we are presently situated," but he rose regardless, and drew her up with him, and offered his arm for the short walk back toward the house, which she took gladly, leaning rather more of her weight against him than the ankle required.
They went in together, and Elizabeth found, crossing the frost-silvered lawn she had crossed only a quarter hour earlier, in that same cold morning air which had cut so sharply through her shawl on the way out now seemed to have lost the greater part of its bite; not because the day itself had warmed, for the frost still lay thick and undisturbed upon the grass at the garden's far edges, but because she carried, walking back, a warmth of her own that no winter morning was equal to touching.