Chapter Five The Length of Five Days #2
Jane was well enough to sit up. The household settled into the slightly altered atmosphere of a convalescence concluding, and Elizabeth sat with her sister in the morning and talked about things of the kind sisters talked about when they had been separated for five days and one of them had had a fever and the other had been in a house that was not their own and both of them had things they were and were not saying.
Jane asked, with the careful indirection she used for questions she suspected Elizabeth might deflect, whether Netherfield had been tolerably comfortable.
"Very tolerably," Elizabeth said. "The library is excellent and the cook has a way with soup that I intend to commend to Mrs. Hill."
"And the company?"
"Bingley is all that one could wish. His sisters are all that one could have predicted. And Mr. Darcy is Mr. Darcy."
Jane waited. This was one of Jane's most effective instruments: the patient waiting of a woman who had correctly identified that there was more and was prepared to give it time to arrive.
"He is not," Elizabeth said, after a pause she was aware of, "precisely as I had supposed him."
Jane's expression shifted in the direction of a smile that had the sense to stay small.
"He is proud," Elizabeth said firmly. "That is established and unchanged.
He has the quality of a man who has never found it necessary to doubt his own judgment and sees no present reason to start.
But he is also," she considered the word, "precise.
He says what he means. He does not perform at people.
When he disagrees with you he does it because he actually disagrees and not because he is deciding what to think of you. "
"That sounds," Jane said, still small with her smile, "rather like a compliment."
"It is an observation," Elizabeth said. "They are not the same thing."
In the last hour before the carriage came, she was in the drawing room with her coat on and her bag packed, and the household had the slightly loosened quality of a visit conclusively ending, and she found herself, somehow, in the library.
She had gone for her book, which she had left on the window seat. This was true.
Darcy was there. This was the kind of thing that happened in rooms you went to for entirely legitimate reasons and found occupied.
He stood when she entered and she told him she had only come for the book, and he said of course, and she found the book, and she was leaving when he said, with the quality she had identified over five days as his version of speaking before the preparation was quite complete: "I hope Miss Bennet recovers her strength without difficulty. "
She turned. He was standing near the fire with his hands clasped behind his back and the expression of a man who had said the thing he meant and was now waiting to see what it weighed.
"She is nearly herself already," Elizabeth said. "She is very resilient."
"I am glad to hear it."
A pause. The fire settled. Outside, the carriage wheels could be heard on the gravel.
She had seven minutes. She had perhaps always had seven minutes, in this library, in this specific quality of winter afternoon light, and she found that none of them were available for anything but the present company, which was itself a piece of information she tucked carefully away in the place where she kept information she was not yet examining.
"The library," she said. "It is very well arranged."
"My mother arranged it." He said it without particular feeling, but the without particular feeling was itself a kind of feeling, the kind that came with long familiarity. "She had a system for it that I have attempted to maintain."
"Attempted?"
"I reordered the natural philosophy section three years ago. I believe she would have objected."
"What was her system?"
He told her. It was not a short explanation.
She had not expected a short explanation, which was perhaps why she had asked.
His mother had arranged books by the quality of the reading experience they produced rather than by subject or author, which was idiosyncratic and also, Elizabeth thought, rather intelligent. She said so.
He looked at her with a quality she had seen before on his face and still had not fully classified, which was attention without agenda. The specific look of a man who was listening because what you were saying was what he was interested in.
The carriage. She heard the coachman's voice.
"I must go," she said.
"Of course," he said.
She went. In the entrance hall she said goodbye to Bingley who was warm and genuine, to Caroline who was warmly audible and less genuine, to Mrs. Hurst who had the look of someone relieved to be returning to the standard household arrangement.
She allowed herself one last look at the library door, which was closed, and which told her nothing she did not already know and rather more than she was prepared to consider on a carriage ride home.
She thought, on the way, about the clock above the library mantle.
She had noted the time when she arrived. She had noted the time when the carriage bell sounded. She had noted, with the peripheral attention that her mind applied to things it declined to officially acknowledge, how much time had remained after the first noting and before the second.
She had thought: seven minutes.
She had thought it twice.