Chapter Nine
On the fifth morning, with the water down and the new crossing holding and the village busy remembering its own business, Mr. Collins finished his sermon.
He read it to them over breakfast, since they had been so inconsiderate as to be present and eating.
It had grown. It had been growing for five days, in the manner of a thing left in a warm cupboard, and where it had once wanted only a comma it now wanted a chair to sit down in.
“On the Salutary Humbling of Worldly Reliance, the Duties of a Parish in Adversity, and the Providential Blessings of Noble Patronage, as Exemplified in the Recent Affliction at Hunsford,” Mr. Collins pronounced, and laid the page down as a man lays down a winning hand.
It had acquired another dependent clause sometime in the night. Elizabeth was nearly sure of it.
“It is very complete,” said Charlotte, who had been awake since five hauling water and had a gift for the word that would do the least harm.
“It is, is it not?” Mr. Collins beamed at the title as though it were a christened child. He had composed it, she gathered, while better people mended a bridge; and he was prepared to be modest about the achievement if pressed.
Charlotte caught Elizabeth’s eye across the table. Elizabeth bit the inside of her lip and looked hard at the butter.
She got outdoors as soon as she decently could.
The lane was quiet, scoured clean by all the feet that had pounded it for days and now had other places to be.
She walked it without deciding to—down toward the water, along the rutted stretch where, on the first day, she had heard the bridge go with a sound like the world cracking its knuckles and had picked up her skirts and run.
She was not running now. She was thinking, which was worse, because thinking gave her nothing to do with her hands.
Something was coming. She had felt it last night the way you feel weather, a pressure behind the eyes, a stillness in the house that was not only the late hour. She was not afraid of it.
But she was not calm, either, and she was too honest with herself to pretend the two were the same thing.
She heard his step before she saw him. She knew it by now—the long, even stride, slower than it had been that first evening, as though he had learned to walk at the pace of people carrying things.
Darcy came down the lane and fell in beside her without a word, and she let him, and they walked.
The silence was not easy. She would not have called it easy.
But it had stopped being a wall, somewhere across the last five days, and had become only a silence, the kind two people keep when there is too much to say to begin lightly.
Neither of them moved to break it. Neither of them moved away.
They went down the rutted lane together toward the water, and her heart was going harder than the walking accounted for, and she let it.
“Miss Bennet.” He stopped. She stopped with him. “I have something to say to you, and I have made a poor business of saying things to you before, so I will try to do it plainly.”
“You need not warn me first,” she said. “I am not so easily startled as I was.”
“No.” The corner of his mouth moved and was still. “You are not.”
He looked at her, and then past her, at the brown water sliding under the new planks, and then back, as though he had checked that the world was where he had left it.
“I have watched you for five days,” he said.
“I do not mean the way I watched you before, in the parlor, when I had already decided what you were and only wanted you to confirm it. I mean I have watched you set a child’s leg in the road with your hands shaking and your voice steady, and run a sickroom on no sleep, and stand in that kitchen and not give my aunt one inch of ground she had not earned.
I had a great many opinions about you, once.
I have spent five days finding out how few of them were worth anything. ”
“You are determined to flatter me,” she said, because the alternative was to let him see how far the plainness of it had got in. “It is very unlike you.”
“I am not flattering you. Flattery is what I did in the parlor, when I told you what you were and waited for your thanks. This is the truth, and you are at perfect liberty to find it inconvenient.”
She did find it inconvenient. She said nothing, which was its own kind of answer, and he seemed to know it.
“When I asked you before,” he went on, “I told you I admired you against my judgment. As though you were a weakness I had been unable to govern. I have thought about that sentence every day since you refused me, and I have been ashamed of it every day, because it was exactly backward. You are not the failure of my judgment. You are the best thing it has ever done. And the more I know of you, the more—”
He broke off. She watched him take hold of himself.
“I was wrong before,” he said, lower. “In the asking, and long before the asking—in the whole way I held myself toward you and your family, in believing that the having of a thing was the same as the deserving of it. I do not deserve you now. I know that. I would not ask you to pretend otherwise. I only ask that you let me spend the—that you allow me to try to—”
“No.” It came out of her sharper than she meant, and she did not call it back. “Stop. Stop there.”
He stopped.
“I did not refuse you,” Elizabeth said, “so that you would spend the rest of your life on your knees about it. I cannot abide a man on his knees. I refused you because you were wrong, and insulting, and so certain of your own worth that you mistook a proposal for a favor. That man I could not have married.” She made herself hold his eyes, because it was costing him to hold hers and the least she could do was match it.
“But you have been, this week, considerably less of that man. You hauled timber until your hands bled. You did what a carpenter told you and not an inch besides. You let me be angry at you across a bridge and did not once tell me I had no right. Do not undo all of that now by asking me for permission to grovel. It does not suit you, and I will not have it.”
The water went on under the planks. Somewhere up the bank a rook complained about something.
“Then tell me how to ask you,” he said, “and I will ask it that way.”
“Plainly. You said you would do it plainly. Do that.”
He drew a breath. When he spoke again his voice had stopped reaching for anything.
“I love you. I am not asking you to forgive the rest of it today—your sister, the winter, what I cost her. I have no right to that yet and I know it. I am asking you to marry me, and to let me earn the forgiving for as long as it takes. That is all. If you cannot, tell me, and I will not trouble you with it again.”
There it was. No insult folded into it, no condition, no catalog of what he was overlooking in her in order to want her—only the plain fact, and her free to do with it whatever she judged right.
She looked at him. He had his hat in one hand and the other open at his side, the knuckles still raw from the rope, and he was waiting on her answer without the least assurance of it.
He had stopped assuming, and he had done it anyway, for her, on a muddy lane, with no surety of being paid back in so much as a kind word.
She had spent five days declining to name what she felt when she looked at him. She gave it up there on the lane. It was want—plain and stubborn and entirely her own—and it had stopped asking her leave.
Her throat had gone tight. Heat came up under it, fast, and her eyes stung, and she was furious to find herself near tears over a proposal when she had been so composed about so much worse. She blinked it down. She would say this with her eyes dry if it killed her.
“You are asking me,” she said, and her voice came out rough, “having finally learned to make a sentence I can answer.”
“I am.”
“Yes.”
She watched the word land on him. She watched it go in and stop him cold—his breath caught, his hand half-rose and forgot what it was doing, and for a moment the most controlled man of her acquaintance could not have told her his own name.
She had done that. The knowing of it ran through her hot and unrepentant.
“Yes,” she said again, because the first one had done such gratifying damage.
“And before you thank me, or say anything noble, you should know precisely what you are getting, because I will not have you imagining it was your timber that did it. It was not gratitude. I am not grateful to you.” Her chin came up.
“I am still angry about Jane, and I will go on being angry about her after we are married, on my own schedule, and you will simply have to live alongside it. And I want you anyway. Which I find,” she said, and her voice cracked clean down the middle of the wit and let the wanting through, “a great deal more troubling than either.”
It was, she thought, the least gracious acceptance ever spoken in the county of Kent.
He did not seem to mind.
“I find I prefer you troubling,” he said, when he could speak.
“That is fortunate.”
He almost laughed. She saw him almost laugh, and felt it like winning.
“You will go to Mr. Bingley,” she said. “In person, if the letter does not fetch him. You told me you would.”
“I will go this week.”
“Good.” She held his eyes a moment longer. “I am marrying a man who finishes what he starts. Mind you prove me right about that one, at least.”
“I mean to spend a great while proving you right about a great many things.”
“Do not be greedy. One at a time.”
He was, she thought, going to be a great deal harder to win an argument against than she had bargained for, and a great deal easier to live beside, and she found she did not mind either prospect as much as she ought.
“I shall have to tell my aunt,” he said.
“Oh,” said Elizabeth, “do let me be present.”
“I would not.” The near-smile got the better of him at last. “I love you far too well for that.”
They walked back up toward the parsonage together, in no hurry, and the morning came to meet them with its hands full.
Word had come over the new crossing while they were on the lane. The Rosings rider had ridden down from the upper ford with his coat steaming and brought it himself, glad of the telling.
Mrs. Poole was with her daughter.
Mrs. Barrow had reached the farm a day ahead of any need of her and settled in by the fire as though she had always meant to.
Nan was well, and frightened in the ordinary way and not the dangerous one, and the baby had not come and was in no hurry to.
All was quiet on the far side. All was, the rider said, as right as a body could wish.
Elizabeth heard it standing in the lane with the sun on her face, and let the relief go through her, clean and uncomplicated, the first such feeling she had had in days.
Charlotte was at the parsonage gate with a bowl on her hip, and she had seen them come up the lane together, and she had seen, Elizabeth understood, rather more than the walking.
Charlotte did not say a word. She did not need to.
She looked at Elizabeth, and her mouth did the small careful thing it did when she was too pleased to risk speaking, and then she looked, very deliberately, at the bowl, and went in to deal with the breakfast that Mr. Collins’s sermon had so cruelly interrupted.
Behind her, through the open door, Mr. Collins could be heard observing to no one in particular that Miss Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy seemed remarkably reconciled to one another’s company of late, and that he flattered himself his small efforts at keeping the peace beneath his roof had not been wholly without effect.
He mused that the bishop, when he came to hear of the week’s trials, would no doubt wish to know how harmoniously the household had borne them.
No one corrected him. There would be time enough for that. Lady Catherine did not yet know. The bishop did not yet know. Half of Kent did not yet know, and would, in the fullness of time and to its very great astonishment.
“Walk me to the water,” Elizabeth said. “I want to see if it holds a person who isn’t being brave about something.”
They went down to the crossing. The new span sat low and broad over the brown water, the planks Dawes had cursed and re-laid steady on their braced timbers, and the river ran under it, high still and indifferent, with nothing to say about any of them.
Elizabeth stepped up onto the first plank and looked back at him over her shoulder.
“Well,” she said. “It’s held worse than us all week.”
“It has had a good deal of practice.”
“Is that wit, Mr. Darcy?”
“I am told I am capable of it. On occasion. With supervision.”
She laughed—out loud, surprised out of her, the sound of it carrying out over the water—and the near-smile he had been rationing all morning got away from him entirely and became the real thing.
She turned and went out over the planks, and he came after her, and they crossed.
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