Chapter Seven
Mr. Collins arrived at Longbourn three days after the ball, with a letter of introduction, a great deal of solemnity, and an air of a man who has already decided how his visit will end.
Elizabeth watched him bow over her mother's hand and thought, not for the first time that week, that her life had recently acquired a great many men who spoke with confidence about things they understood very little.
"My dear cousins," he said, over dinner, "I have come with the particular design of, as I have already intimated to your excellent father, healing whatever breach may exist between our two branches of the family, and, I will confess, with a further design which I trust will meet with general approval. "
"How thoughtful," Mrs. Bennet said, with the glazed cheer of a woman calculating dowries.
Elizabeth caught Jane's eye across the table and had to look away before either of them laughed.
The particular design revealed itself two mornings later, when Mr. Collins requested a private audience with her in the breakfast room, and Elizabeth, seeing no polite way to refuse, sat through what she could only describe afterward as an hour-long inventory of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's virtues, followed, almost as an afterthought, by a proposal of marriage.
"You must be sensible," he said, "of the very great honour I do you. My situation in life, my connection with Rosings, my income, all recommend me as no common suitor."
"I am sensible of the honour," Elizabeth said, "and must decline it."
He blinked at her as though she had spoken in a foreign tongue. "I am aware it is usual for young ladies to refuse at first, out of delicacy, and I am not at all discouraged."
"I assure you, sir, I am perfectly serious."
"Lady Catherine herself will be delighted to hear of our understanding, once it is settled."
"There is no understanding to hear of."
It took a further quarter hour of increasingly baffled repetition before he seemed to grasp, however incompletely, that her refusal was not a formality to be waited out. She left the room afterward feeling as though she had spent an hour arguing with a wall that occasionally quoted his aunt.
Her mother's reaction, when informed, was considerably louder.
"Refused him! Have you lost your senses entirely, Lizzy? Longbourn entailed on that very man, and you throw away the one chance to keep it in the family!"
"I would rather keep my own good sense, Mamma, and lose the house."
"You will not have both, I promise you that. Your father shall speak to you."
Her father did speak to her, briefly, in the library, with the particular dry amusement he reserved for moments when the rest of the household had lost its collective mind.
"Your mother tells me I must insist you marry Mr. Collins, or she will never see you again.
And Mr. Collins says he will never speak to you again if you do.
An unhappy choice is before you, Lizzy. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. "
"Then I shall choose the stranger who does not quote Lady Catherine, Papa, if it is all the same to you."
He laughed, and that, at least, settled the matter as far as Longbourn's library was concerned, though her mother's ill humor lasted the better part of a week and found its outlet, eventually, in a new and equally unwelcome direction, the still-unresolved subject of Mr. Darcy's rudeness, which she had apparently decided to revive as a general complaint against the unreliability of gentlemen everywhere.
Elizabeth thought of the hallway at Netherfield more often than she wished to admit, and told no one about it, and found the not telling harder this time than it had been with the assembly.
That silence had been a wall she had built alone, brick by brick, to keep the wound in.
This silence felt more like something she was protecting, and she did not examine too closely why the difference mattered.