Chapter 14
The carriage was at the door, and Darcy had got as far as the hall with his hat in his hand for the second time that day, when Foster came to him with a face sorry for unwelcome news and said that Lady Catherine de Bourgh had called and was on the stairs.
To refuse his aunt at the door, the aunt who had so lately and so handsomely made her amends, the aunt the whole family was now at pains to believe in, would be a strangeness, and strangeness was the one thing the cover could not afford.
A man whose bride was merely ill, whose wedding was merely postponed, received his concerned relations; he did not flee them down the back stair.
And so Darcy set his hat upon the table in the hall, where it would wait, as Sable’s note had waited in his pocket all that day, and turned to receive the one caller he least wished to see, and could least be seen to turn away.
She came up in grey, half-mourning grey, he registered, the grey one wears for a sorrow not quite one’s own, and she crossed his drawing-room to him with both hands out, and took his in a clasp of such evident feeling that a stranger would have wept to see it.
“My dear Fitzwilliam,” she said. “No. Do not say anything. I know what the day is. I have known it all morning. I have been able to think of nothing else, and I said to Anne at last, I cannot sit in that house another hour pretending this is an ordinary day while that poor boy bears it alone across the town. So I have come. You need not entertain me. You need not be anything at all. I have only come to sit with you a little, because grief shared is grief halved, and you have no mother to share this one, and I am the nearest thing to it you have left.”
It was so exactly, so monstrously the right thing to say that Darcy felt the ground of his own composure shift under him.
Not from grief, though there was grief enough, but from the sheer disorienting wrongness of being comforted, well and tenderly comforted, on the worst morning of his life, and being unable to refuse the comfort without explaining a thing he could explain to no one.
He thanked her. He rang for tea he did not want, because to ring for tea was the thing a composed man did, and composure was now the whole of his employment.
They sat. And Darcy gave, for the next half-hour, the finest and most terrible performance of his life.
He could not grieve as he had grieved alone in these rooms before, because that grief was too large for an illness and she would mark the size of it; so he banked it down to the proper dimensions, the dimensions of a postponed wedding and a feverish girl, and he sat inside the smaller grief like a man crouching inside a room too low for him.
He made the small sad civil remarks the smaller grief permitted, and watched his aunt across the tea things, and did not know that he was watching the one person who could have told him where Elizabeth was and what she was suffering, and exactly how to end it.
For her part Lady Catherine was all gentleness. She poured. She asked after Miss Bennet’s fever in a hushed and proper voice and received his careful answers with grave little nods, and did not press.
She spoke of the cruelty of an illness arriving so near the day, of how these things came sometimes to try us, of how a strong constitution might yet carry the dear girl through.
She was so good at it that twice he nearly forgot to doubt her, which frightened him afterward more than anything else about the visit, when he came to think it over, that she was so practiced in the forms of love that a grieving man, defenseless, had twice felt almost held by them.
It was over the second cup that she came, by gentle degrees, to the thing she had truly climbed his stairs to say.
She approached it as she approached everything that day, softly, sorrowfully, with every appearance of reluctance, as a woman forced by her conscience to a hard kindness.
“Fitzwilliam,” she said, “I am going to say a thing that you will not wish to hear, and you may be as angry with me as you like for the saying of it, for I had rather you were angry than that no one who loves you said it at all. Will you let an old woman speak plainly, this once, on a day when plain speaking may be the only useful thing left?”
He said, because there was nothing else a composed and ignorant man could say, that she might speak as she wished.
“Then I will say it.” She set down her cup.
“I have wondered, these last days, and I have reproached myself for the wondering, and wondered all the same, whether there is not some meaning to be read in this.
I do not say it to wound you. But consider, Fitzwilliam.
You were eight days from a marriage that the whole of your family, myself among them, once thought unwise, and I include myself in the wrong of how that was said to you, you know I do.
And then, eight days out, with no warning and no cause, the thing is stopped.
Halted. As though some hand larger than ours had reached down and said wait. "
Her voice was very soft. "I am not a superstitious woman.
But I have lived a long time, and I have learned that when Providence troubles to intervene so pointedly in the affairs of a family, it is generally because the family was about to do a thing it had not thought through to the end, and is being given, at great and cruel cost, I grant you, one last chance to think. “
Darcy said nothing. He could not have said how he kept his face. He held it while the rest of him went very cold, listening.
“All I ask,” she went on, “is that you do not waste the chance the way grief makes men waste things. When she is recovered, pray God she is recovered, the marriage will be there to take up again, if you still wish it. Nothing is lost by waiting. But you are given, now, this strange terrible pause, this gift in its dreadful wrapping, a stretch of days in which you are not yet bound, in which you might ask yourself whether this is truly the life you want. Most men never get to ask it. You have been given the asking, Fitzwilliam, at a price, and I should think it a sin against Providence itself not to at least sit quietly with the question while the chance is here. That is all. That is the whole of my cruelty. I will not say it again.”
He was a long moment finding a voice he could trust, and when he found it, it came out level, which afterward he counted the single accomplishment of the entire dreadful day.
“You have always had my interest at heart, Aunt,” he said.
“I know that you believe you do. I will tell you what I am able to tell you, which is this, there is no question in me of the kind you describe.
There never has been. Whatever Providence may or may not have intended by it, it has not given me a doubt, because I had none to be given.
When Elizabeth is well, I shall marry her, as soon as it can be arranged, and not one hour later.
That is the whole of my answer, and I am grateful for your concern, and I find I am very tired. "
It was, he thought, exactly the answer of a devoted man, which was precisely the answer he needed it to be and if there was an edge under the level of it, she might lay that to grief, as she might lay anything to grief that day.
Lady Catherine rose, and pressed his hands again, and said that she had expected nothing less of him, that his constancy did him honour, that she had only wished as the nearest thing to a mother he had to be sure the question had at least been heard.
And she went, in her sorrowful grey, down the stairs and out to her own carriage, leaving behind her the faint expensive scent she wore.
He did not know what he had just been handed. He thought he had endured a hard, well-meant, intrusive kindness from a newly amenable aunt, and that it had cost him more than it should have because the day had already cost him everything it could hold.
He thought he would not tell Elizabeth of it, when he had her back, that it was the sort of thing one quietly forgot, an old woman’s clumsy sermon delivered on a bad day.
Darcy could not yet know that he would remember this half-hour to the end of his life with a particular and bottomless loathing. That he would sit, weeks hence, and understand that his aunt had sat in his drawing-room enjoying his grief like a fire she had laid herself.