Chapter 6
As Darcy followed Elizabeth from her parents’ drawing room, he felt himself holding on to his self-control with his fingernails.
How could he have been so foolish as to not realise the hopes he would raise by such a declaration?
As they walked to the front door, he was conscious of little except the awkwardness of the situation he had created.
He had gone to Longbourn determined to speak with discretion, to excite as little notice as possible, and to accomplish the business that had brought him there without causing any disturbance.
Instead, by a want of foresight that now mortified him, he had allowed Mrs Bennet to imagine he intended to marry her daughter.
A thought that did not horrify him nearly as much as it ought to. Aghast at his own foolishness, Darcy pushed away an errant surge of admiration for Elizabeth. This was hardly the time.
The cold air that met them outside was bracing, though it did little to steady him.
Elizabeth paused on the gravel walk long enough to draw her cloak more closely about her and to settle her gloves, then moved forward with an appearance of calm which Darcy, in his present confusion, found both admirable and humbling.
The house lay plainly behind them, and the drawing room windows served as a reminder that they were being observed.
Elizabeth glanced once toward the house and then looked back at him with composed assurance. “You need not be uneasy, Mr Darcy. We remain in full view of the windows, and I do not imagine my mother can demand more than that.”
There was enough dry amusement in her tone to make him feel the full force of the allusion.
He coloured in spite of himself and answered, with more earnestness than elegance, “I regret very much that my request should have occasioned such a misunderstanding. I had no intention of exposing you to anything of the kind.”
Elizabeth adjusted the wrist of one glove and said calmly, “My mother is happily able to construct a great deal from very little. Had you added a compliment to the request, she might already be planning the settlements.”
Despite his embarrassment, Darcy could not remain entirely insensible of her generosity in absolving him, nor to the humour of it. A faint smile touched his expression before he recollected himself. The subject was too delicate to invite further levity.
They walked on a little way in silence. The season had stripped the garden of all softness.
The paths were hard beneath their feet, the hedges bare, and the pale winter light lay thinly over the grounds without warmth or cheer.
There was, however, a severity in the scene that suited Darcy’s mood better than any gentler prospect could have done.
It was easier to speak of serious things where everything around him appeared equally stripped of ornament.
Elizabeth was the first to break the silence.
Without looking directly at him, she said, “You may also be entirely at ease on another point. Whatever expectations my mother may have formed, I have none. I am entirely persuaded that you did not come to Longbourn this morning with any design such as she has fancied. I know perfectly well that you do not admire me.”
Darcy turned toward her more quickly than he intended. The certainty with which she spoke struck him at once. “You did not think the same?” he asked before he could think better of it.
“Of course not.”
He looked at her with an astonishment that he made no attempt to disguise. There was no coquetry in her manner, no affectation of modest disbelief. She spoke with the quiet assurance of a woman stating what appeared to her to be an obvious truth.
After a moment, Elizabeth glanced at him and seemed to perceive something of his surprise, for she added, with the same composure that had marked her first remarks, “I had imagined your opinion of me too settled to allow such a change.”
Darcy stopped walking altogether.
Elizabeth, who had gone a step or two farther, turned back at once.
Her expression was one of real surprise now, though not of alarm.
The path curved slightly where they stood, and from that point the house was still plainly visible behind them.
Darcy was conscious of all this and of nothing.
The words she had spoken had touched him too nearly for indifference.
“You believe my opinion of you so decidedly unfavourable,” he said, “that you can think such a supposition impossible?”
Elizabeth met the question steadily, though with some increase of colour. “Even from the first meeting, your judgment of me was evident. Then, too,” she added after a brief pause, “I do not think you are partial to my connections.”
The fairness of the latter charge made it impossible for him to deny it at once. He resumed walking more slowly, and she fell into step beside him.
“That is not the same thing,” he said after a moment, “as being indifferent to your own merit.”
Elizabeth’s expression altered slightly. It was not astonishment exactly, but something near it, as though she had been prepared for contradiction, perhaps even for hauteur, but not for this.
“You are kinder in your distinctions than I had supposed,” she said.
“I mean only to be just.”
She was silent, and Darcy, who had not intended to say even that much on so dangerous a subject, found himself unwilling to let her continue under an error that had suddenly become intolerable to him.
“You mistake me,” he said, with more feeling than he had wished to betray. “If my manner has ever led you to believe that I thought lightly of your understanding or your character, I must regret it.”
Elizabeth did look at him then, and with an attention so direct that he immediately wished for greater command over his own expressions.
“My understanding?” she repeated.
“Yes.”
He might still, perhaps, have withdrawn into general civility.
It would have been more prudent to do so.
Yet prudence, though never wholly absent from Darcy’s mind, had lately grown less effectual wherever Elizabeth Bennet was concerned.
He had come prepared to speak of Wickham and nothing else, but the idea that she had long believed herself an object of his contempt was impossible to bear.
“I have never thought lightly of either,” he said. “On the contrary, I have long regarded your judgement as uncommonly intelligent. To say nothing of your wit, which I consider unusually charming.”
If he had been less agitated, he might have heard how near such an admission approached a declaration of a very different kind, even as he spoke it. As it was, he only perceived the fact when Elizabeth’s countenance changed once more, and when she looked away rather than answer him immediately.
The pause that followed was not long, but it was enough to restore his recollection of where they were and why he had sought her. He felt at once that he had said too much and not enough. Too much, because any praise of her from him must appear strangely out of place in the present circumstances.
And not enough, because what he truly felt must remain unspoken.
Elizabeth drew a breath and said, with an effort at lightness which did not entirely conceal her uncertainty, “You astonish me, Mr Darcy. I had not understood that we held one another in such esteem.”
He seized at once upon the only safety still available to him, which was the original purpose of the interview.
“I did not come,” he said, and was obliged to begin again more steadily, “I did not come to speak of my esteem, however justly or unjustly you may think it bestowed. I came because I believed it my duty to warn you.”
The playfulness vanished from her face at once. “To warn me?”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth waited in silence, but the gravity of her manner now was very different from the half-amused composure with which she had first undertaken the walk.
Whatever she might have expected from him, she had not expected this.
Darcy, who had imagined the opening of the subject many times before coming to Longbourn, found that the words were no easier to arrange now than they had been in solitude.
He could not begin where he must end, and every lesser beginning seemed inadequate.
At last he said, “I have reason to believe that you have been encouraged to think well of a particular man, and that what you have heard of him has been so managed as to mislead you entirely.”
A faint colour rose again in Elizabeth’s cheeks, though whether from displeasure or surprise he could not yet determine. “I believe I could name the man of whom you speak.”
“I am sure you could,” Darcy said quietly. “I speak of George Wickham.”
Her countenance grew more guarded. “You need not trouble yourself, Mr Darcy. I am already acquainted with Mr Wickham’s history, at least in part.”
Darcy had expected no less, yet to hear Wickham’s name spoken by her in that tone of composed confidence was enough to awaken all the indignation he had been striving to master since he first saw them together in Meryton.
“You know what he has chosen to tell,” he answered. “You do not know the truth.”
Elizabeth looked at him steadily, and though her voice remained perfectly civil, there was a coolness in it now which had not been there before. “You accuse him of dissembling, then.”
“That, I cannot say without knowing what he has told you,” Darcy replied. “But there are things I believe you ought to know. Things which would certainly change your opinion of Wickham, and which I highly doubt he has told you.”
“That is a serious accusation.”
“It is.”
“And one which, I think, requires more than confidence in its own justice.”