Chapter 13 #2
I cannot be married at St. George’s. There is no one here to say the words at me, and so I shall say them myself, both parts, which I am aware is irregular and which I do not care about in the least.
I take you. I have taken you. I took you a good while before I admitted it to you, and I would take you again this morning, in this room, with two locks on the door and a bar across the window and nothing whatever to recommend the occasion; and I would not have one word of it altered but the address.
For better: Pemberley, and your face when I have surprised you into laughing, and the whole long ordinary lifetime you once told me you had stopped letting yourself believe in.
For worse: I imagine this is it. I should like it recorded that we are getting the worse over with early, and that I expect the remainder to be conducted entirely on the other side of the ledger.
For richer, for poorer: Your aunt would wish it noted that I bring nothing whatever to this. She is wrong, but not about the money.
In sickness and in health: I am perfectly well. Tell my Aunt Gardiner so, and make her believe it, for I know precisely what she is doing to herself and I cannot get at her to stop it. That is the hardest thing in this room, and I would have you know it was not the bar at the window.
Till death us do part. Not before. Do you hear me? Not one day before.
There. It is done, and I am your wife in every part of the thing that signifies, and the rest is a clergyman and a register and a great deal of fuss; and we shall have those too, and soon, because you are coming.
I have not doubted that for a moment. I have doubted a great many things in this room; the day of the week, and whether the woman who brings my bread is deaf or only obedient, and once, badly, for the better part of a night, whether I should still know my own face. But not that. Never once that.
Come and find me, and marry me properly, and I shall let you off the whole of the reciting I promised you. Very nearly the whole of it.
Your wife, in every particular but the paperwork,
E.
And at the end of it she set down the thing, their thing, the foolish private article of it, so that if it ever came into his hands by any road at all he should know past doubting whose hand had written it.
Then she read it once through, and did not correct anything, because it was true as it stood and she had no wish to make it better.
Elizabeth folded it small. She went down on her knees at the table and felt along the underside, and worked the little square up into the gap beside the others until it caught and held.
It was the longest of them, and the only one she had written on the day it was addressed to.
Then she rose, and brushed off her knees, and set the chair square, and capped the ink, and laid the good pen back its half-inch off the square, and went to eat what was on the tray, because she had a great deal to be strong for and a husband, now, to be strong for it with.
Darcy spent the hour of his wedding alone, on his feet, and in motion, because to sit down was not possible.
He had thought, earlier, that he might walk to St. George’s, not to go in, only to stand across the square at the hour and be, for those few minutes, in the place where it was to have happened.
He had his hat in hand before he understood that he could not. To stand outside that church and watch other people’s ordinary day go past its door would undo him, and he could not afford to be undone.
So he set the hat down, and walked instead the length of his own house and back, through the long rooms that someone had mercifully stripped of the wedding breakfast they had been made ready for.
For that one hour, he let himself stop being the methodical man, and let it be simply true.
That this was to have been the morning that she was to have come to him in the gown still standing on its form a mile away, with his mother’s brooch at her throat and the particular look she got before she said the thing that would make him laugh where laughing was not done.
He let himself want it, with everything in him and no discipline laid over the wanting. And then he changed out of the wedding clothes, and put the methodical man back on like a coat, and sent for the carriage to take him to Gracechurch Street, because the searching was not over.
At Gracechurch Street the household had not so much risen as failed to sleep.
Mr. Gardiner had been up since six. Mrs. Gardiner had got as far as the head of the stairs and no farther, and Jane had gone in to her and not come down, so that the two of them kept the morning together behind a closed door where no useful thing could be said.
In the dining parlour Mr. Bingley stood at the window with his hands behind his back, having long since given up the pretense of breakfast; and on the cloth, unopened, lay the morning’s letter from Longbourn in Mr. Bennet’s hand.
The lie was still holding, and the family was still in Hertfordshire, and Jane’s careful letters had bought one more terrible day in which her father sat down in his own library two days’ ride away believing his Lizzy ill and mending and soon to be a bride.
Mr. Gardiner had not been able to open it. He could not, that morning of all mornings, read a letter from a man who thought the wedding only postponed.
Darcy came in before ten and sat down without a word, and for a time no one spoke at all. It was Mr. Gardiner who broke it, at last.
“I have been trying, this morning, to remember her as a child,” he said.
“She used to be sent to us in Town for a month in the summers, when she was small. I have a memory of her at six or seven, running the length of our little garden with her hair come loose from its ribbons and a great triumphant shout in her throat because she had outrun Jane to the wall. I can see her at six as plain as my own hand. I can see her at twenty, the evening before she came up to London to be married out of my house. I cannot, this morning, call up her face at any of the ages between. Only the two ends of her. It distresses me more than I can account for.”
“Sir—” Darcy began, and found he had nothing to help the man.
“I shall remember the rest in time. I only wished to have her with us this morning.”
Mr. Gardiner went on,to Darcy, “You knew her last of all, and differently. Would you tell me, it is a strange thing to ask, and you must forgive an old merchant his sentiment, what she looked like, the first morning after you were engaged? I was not there. I have wished, since, that I had seen her that morning.”
Darcy did not, for a moment, trust his voice.
When he had it, he said, “She came down very early. She had not slept. Her hair was loose at the ends where she had not braided it properly. She wore a morning dress the colour of ripe peaches. She looked at me across the breakfast table, and she smiled, and the smile was such that I thought I should never in my life forget it. I have not forgotten it, sir. I see it every day.”
Mr. Gardiner nodded slowly. “Thank you,” he said.
In the doorway, Jane had come down quietly, and no one had heard her. She stood with her hand on the frame, and began to cry without sound, the tears falling, and Mr. Bingley crossed to her and bent and laid his cheek against her hair and said nothing.
The clock in the hall struck ten, the hour at which Darcy was to have set out for the church.
Darcy rose, and went to the window, and stood looking down at the grey pavement of Gracechurch Street and the corner past it, and stood there through the full slow stroke of ten, and did not speak, and no one spoke to him.
When it had finished, he turned back from the glass and sat down again, and said, in a voice that was once more entirely his own, “We shall have her home. If not on her wedding day, then soon after it. I have decided it, and I will not be argued out of it. We have lost the morning. We have not lost her. Let us eat something, for she would be very cross with the lot of us sitting here starving over her, and let us be about our work, because the work is what brings her back and grief is not.”
He looked round at them, at Mr. Bingley, at the doorway where Jane stood, at Mr. Gardiner. “She would not have us sit still. Whatever else our Lizzy is, she has never once in her life sat still, and she would not thank us to begin on her account.”
And they ate, a little. And they were about their work.
And none of them spoke of the hour again but each of them carried it, privately, all the rest of that day and a good many days after, the memory of a man standing at a window through the stroke of ten for a wedding that did not happen, keeping the only vigil the morning left any of them to keep.