Chapter Twelve
She avoided him for three days, as much as avoidance was possible in a neighborhood the size of Rosings Park, and found him anyway, on the fourth morning, standing at the very gate where the lane met the grove she had claimed for her private walks.
"You have been walking to meet me," she said, before she could stop herself. "This is not accidental, three mornings running."
"No," he admitted. "It is not."
"Then say what you mean to say, Mr. Darcy, and let us have done with the suspense of it, for I confess it is beginning to wear on my patience."
He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his stillness told her, before he spoke a single word, that whatever came next would not be small.
"I have struggled," he said, "against my own better judgment, my family's expectations, and every reasonable objection I could raise, and I find I can struggle against it no longer. I love you, Elizabeth, ardently, and I am asking you to be my wife."
The words hit her with an entirely different force than she had expected, arriving not as triumph but as something closer to grief, standing as she was on the exact knowledge Colonel Fitzwilliam had handed her three days before.
"You say this," she said, slowly, "and yet you spent this past autumn ensuring my sister's happiness was destroyed as thoroughly as you could manage."
His face changed. "What."
"Colonel Fitzwilliam was kind enough to tell me, quite unknowingly, of the great service you rendered a friend this summer, saving him from an imprudent attachment. I did not need to ask which friend, Mr. Darcy. I already knew."
"Elizabeth."
"You separated Mr. Bingley from my sister.
You judged her indifferent, judged our family unworthy, and arranged the whole business as neatly as you arrange your own correspondence, without once considering that Jane's heart might not survive your management of it as easily as your conscience apparently has. "
"I believed," he said, his voice tightening, "that your sister felt no strong attachment. I was wrong, I see that now, but I was not wrong out of cruelty."
"You were wrong out of pride, sir, the very same pride that told you, a year ago, that I was not handsome enough to trouble yourself over. It seems your first estimation of my family has followed you rather faithfully ever since."
"That is not fair."
"Fair." She laughed, short and without any real humor in it. "You ask me to marry you in one breath, and confess to ruining my sister's happiness in nearly the next, and you speak to me of fairness."
He stood very still, color draining from his face in a way that told her, more clearly than any words could, exactly how deep the wound had landed.
For one long moment neither of them spoke, the whole weight of the assembly and Netherfield and Hunsford pressing down between them, and Elizabeth felt, beneath her anger, something that frightened her considerably more, the unmistakable, unwelcome awareness that whatever she felt for this man had grown far too large to simply walk away from cleanly, however much he had earned her fury.
"I did not come here to quarrel with you," he said, finally, very low.
"No. You came to propose, and found a quarrel instead. I am sorry to have disappointed the arrangement."
He looked at her a moment longer, something raw and unguarded moving across his face that she had never seen him show anyone, and then he turned and walked back up the lane without another word, and she stood alone at the gate with her heart pounding and her hands shaking and no earthly idea, yet, whether she had just won something or lost it entirely.