Chapter Fifteen The Proposal
Charlotte and Mr. Collins had gone to Rosings.
This was an ordinary occurrence. Lady Catherine expected the parsonage residents at regular intervals and they attended with the regularity she expected, and Charlotte had said at breakfast that morning that she thought Elizabeth might be glad of a quiet morning at home, and said it with the quality of a person who had observed something and was arranging space around it rather than pressing at it.
Elizabeth had been glad.
She sat in the parsonage sitting room with a letter she was writing to Jane and attended to it with the focused clarity that had come from the walk in the lane, and she was finding that the clarity, while uncomfortable, was at least clean.
She knew what she knew. She was writing to Jane about other things, about the grove and the county and Charlotte's garden, and she was not writing about what Fitzwilliam had said because she did not yet know what she was going to do with it and until she knew that she could not write it to Jane, who would absorb the information with all the generosity of her character and none of the anger that the information warranted.
She heard the door.
The housemaid was in the kitchen. Charlotte was at Rosings. Mr. Collins was at Rosings. Maria had gone with the carriage to the village.
She heard the door and she heard the housemaid's voice and she heard a voice in response that she had heard in a grove on two consecutive mornings, and she had perhaps three seconds before the sitting room door opened.
He came in.
She rose. This was what you did. She rose and she composed herself with the practice of a woman who had been composing herself in relation to this particular man for months, and she said, in the voice she had available: "Mr. Darcy. I did not know you were expected."
"I was not," he said. His voice had a quality she had not heard in it before, which was the quality of a man who had made a decision and was no longer in the part of the process that involved weighing.
"Mr. Collins and Mrs. Collins are at Rosings," she said. "They will not be long, I should think."
"I came to speak to you," he said.
He was standing in the middle of Charlotte's sitting room with its comfortable furniture and its fire that was doing its reliable work and its general quality of being a room organised by a competent woman for the practical purposes of living, and he was entirely incongruous with it in the way that he was always slightly incongruous with any setting smaller than the life he had been raised in, and she looked at him and thought: whatever this is, I am not ready for it.
She did not say this.
She said: "Please sit down," because it was what you said.
He did not sit down. He moved to the window and stood there for a moment and then turned back toward her and he said, with the quality she had heard on the first morning in the grove, the quality of a man who had chosen precision over ease: "I have been attempting, for a very long time, not to feel what I feel. "
She was very still.
"I have argued against it," he said. "I have argued on very sound grounds.
The situation is not what I would have chosen.
Your family's position, the want of connexion, the difficulties that the entail presents and that your mother's behaviour has made visible to everyone with eyes to see it.
I do not tell you these things to wound you.
" He stopped. He took a breath that had in it the specific quality of a man who is doing something genuinely difficult.
"I tell you them because I cannot, in conscience, speak honestly to you and leave them out. You deserve the honesty."
She was looking at him.
She was looking at him with an expression she was managing with everything she had, which was considerable, and she was managing it because she needed to hear all of this and she needed to hear it clearly and she could not afford to let what was happening underneath her composure reach the surface before he was finished.
"I have struggled," he said. "Against my own judgment.
Against every principle of prudence I was raised with.
Against the claims of family and position and everything that I have understood, since I was old enough to understand anything, to be the correct ordering of things.
" He looked at her directly, and his eyes had the expression she had been unable to classify for six months and could now classify only as everything at once.
"And I find that I cannot struggle against it successfully.
I find that you are the most interesting person I have met in my adult life and that this fact has proven entirely resistant to the application of reason. "
He stopped.
She thought: he is proposing.
She thought: he is proposing and he has told me, in the course of proposing, that my family is unsuitable, that the situation is not what he would have chosen, and that the primary recommendation of his love is that it has been remarkably difficult to feel.
She thought: and he is doing it with total honesty, which is the most maddening version of this.
"In short," he said, "I must tell you how ardently I admire and love you."
The room was quiet.
Outside, the Kent afternoon was going about its business with complete indifference to the sitting room of the Hunsford parsonage, and Charlotte's fire was doing its patient work, and Elizabeth stood in the room and looked at the man in front of her and felt the full weight of the last six months pressing against the inside of her composure like water against a wall.
She thought about the doorway.
Not by choice. The thought arrived without invitation, the way it always arrived when she had been holding it at a distance and the distance collapsed.
She thought about his voice in the dark.
The ease of it. The specific, uncalculated ease of a man who had never considered that someone might be listening.
She thought about Jane's letter. About Fitzwilliam's pleasant, conversational, devastating account of a service well rendered.
She said: "In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to express a sense of obligation for the feelings avowed, however unequally they may be returned."
He looked at her. Something moved in his expression.
"I am not," she said, "of a temper to make those acknowledgments."
She kept her voice even. She was very good at keeping her voice even. It was one of the skills she was least proud of.
"You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it."
The word moved across his face. The beginning of something. Not the ending yet.
"I have every reason in the world to think ill of you," she said.
She was not performing this. She was saying what was true and the truth of it was not pleasant to say, which was how she knew it was true.
"Your manners convinced me from the very beginning of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others.
I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. "
He was very still now.
She thought: I have not yet said the worst of it.
She thought: the worst of it is that he asked me to be honest with him, in the grove, in the way of a man who genuinely wanted honesty, and I am giving him honesty and it is not what he anticipated, which means he did not know what he was asking for.
"You have reduced your friend," she said, and her voice was even and her hands, she noted from a distance, were not, "from what I consider a situation of real happiness.
My eldest sister has been in love with your friend for many months, and has been injured by your interference.
" She stopped. She gave herself one breath.
"And you have done this on the basis of a judgment that I believe was made in haste, from the outside, without the actual information required to make it. "
"You have been informed of this," he said, and his voice had changed. "By Fitzwilliam."
"I have been informed of it in various ways," she said. "And I have believed it because I know enough of your character to find it entirely credible."
"I see."
Two words. She had never heard his voice produce so little.
"Then I must ask," he said, after a moment, in the careful, precise voice of a man who was doing something very difficult and would not allow it to be visible, "whether these are your only objections. Or whether there are others."
She looked at him.
The doorway.
The dark passage. The voice carrying. The four seconds she had stood in the dark before she straightened her gloves and walked back into the light.
She did not say it.
She did not say it because she could not, not here, not like this, not with everything else between them that was raw and real and the room full of what he had just said and what she had just said and the specific weight of all of it pressing the air flat.
She could not say it here because it would be the worst possible moment to say it and she knew it and she chose not to.
"They are sufficient," she said.
He moved.
She thought he would go immediately, and he did not.
He stood in Charlotte's sitting room for a moment that was long enough to feel like a decision rather than a pause, and then he said, with the voice of someone who is putting something away very carefully: "Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time. "
He bowed.
She curtsied.
He went.
She listened to the door and then she sat down, because standing was requiring an effort she had not known she was making until the reason for the effort was gone, and she sat in Charlotte's armchair by the fire and she put her hands in her lap and she looked at them.
They were shaking. Slightly. The specific fine tremor of a body that has held something very tight for a very long time and is only now discovering the cost of the holding.
She sat with it.
She thought: I have refused him.
She thought: I said true things. I said the thing about Jane and I said the thing about his arrogance and I said the thing about his conceit and all of it was true, and I did not say the thing about the doorway, which is also true, and which sits in me now with a quality it has not had before, which is the quality of something that should have been said and was not.
She did not examine this for long.
Outside, through the window of Charlotte's sitting room, she could see a fragment of the lane.
She watched the lane for a moment, and after a time she saw him, moving away from the parsonage with the contained, precise walk of a man who was going somewhere specific and had no intention of stopping before he got there.
His face, in the angle of the afternoon light, was not what she had expected.
She had expected the face of wounded pride. The face of a man who had been refused and was rearranging himself around the refusal.
What she saw, in the single moment before the lane curved and he was gone, was different. It was the face of a man who had received information he had not anticipated and was in the very early stages of understanding what it meant.
She looked at where he had been until the lane was empty.
She thought: I do not know what I expected to feel.
She thought: this is not it.
She sat for a long time with the fire and her hands and the afternoon going on outside the window, and she tried to identify the exact shape of what she was feeling, and the closest she came was this: that she had said true things, every one of them, and she had done it from behind the doorway, and the doorway had been there in every word, and he did not know it, and the not-knowing it had changed the quality of what passed between them in a way that she had not accounted for and could not, at present, fully account for now.
She sat with this.
Outside, the afternoon continued in its complete indifference.