Chapter 8 #3
“I should be pleased to have you for an acquaintance, Mr. Cresswell. I do not doubt my aunt and uncle would receive you, should you find yourself in Gracechurch Street. They are both engaged in charitable endeavours.”
“You are very kind.” Mr. Cresswell bowed again. “I shall not detain you, Miss Bennet.”
Elizabeth was left near the punch bowl, feeling she had escaped an uncomfortable situation with grace and good feeling on both sides.
And then Mr. Darcy approached.
He had not come for her; that was plain. He came for the punch, or to escape some manoeuvre of his own across the room, and he had nearly reached her elbow before he saw her.
“Miss Elizabeth,” he said, startled.
“Mr. Darcy.”
“You are—” He stopped and met her gaze. “You have been provided for, I hope. That is to say—I trust the punch—” He did not finish whatever he had meant to say about the punch, which was just as well, for she doubted it had been going anywhere meaningful.
Mr. Darcy looked at her for a moment. Then he glanced to his left where his mother was standing. Why he had done so, she could not say, but when he looked back at her, he sighed. “Forgive me. I am keeping you from your friends.”
This was a curious statement, because just now she was standing alone. Mr. Darcy was not keeping her from anything at all, yet he removed himself from her vicinity with a haste that was almost impolite.
Elizabeth looked across the room.
Mr. Darcy was soon at the far end of it once more, his back three-quarters turned, listening to another gentleman. He had bowed to their party when the butler announced them, but other than that one accidental meeting near the punch, he had not come near her.
There was no slight in his inattention. He had paid every civility required of him and was now attending to his other guests, exactly as a host should.
Lady Anne had asked after Elizabeth’s family in such a way as to make her questions difficult to evade.
She had expertly drawn from Elizabeth that she was not being called upon by any gentleman.
Then she had almost immediately introduced Elizabeth to an earnest clergyman with a comfortable living who had come to Darcy House tonight on the strength of a private hint from his hostess.
And in all that time, the gentleman of the house had been studiously engaged with other people.
Elizabeth thought this might be the oddest, most perplexing evening party she had ever attended.
She set her glass down and went to find Jane.
Supper was announced soon afterward. Elizabeth found herself placed between an elderly Mr. Hollingsworth, who had opinions about every parish in London, and a Mrs. Standish, who appeared to possess few opinions of her own but was a kind listener.
Mr. Cresswell was across the table and a seat removed, neither too far for civility nor too near to seem presumptuous.
It seemed, Elizabeth observed, an arrangement calibrated to the half inch.
She was both amused by and admiring of it.
Farther down on the same side of the table, Jane and Mr. Bingley were so taken with each other that the courses came and went without their seeming to notice.
Their happiness should have been enough to occupy her, yet Elizabeth found her eyes drawn, against every better judgement, to the gentleman who seemed determined not to see her at all.
A man who had once stood across a country drawing room and looked at her with a steadiness she had felt at twenty feet was now, a month later in his mother’s own house, evidently unable to glance down half the length of his own dinner table.
Then, just as the meat course was being cleared away, his eyes did meet hers—but then his attention was back at the lady on his left before Elizabeth even could be certain it had happened.
Elizabeth had her answer. She had not been wanted here.
It seemed clear enough. Lady Anne was a kind woman, but she had spoken to Elizabeth primarily to keep her out of Mr. Darcy’s way.
He was willing to assist Mr. Bingley in his pursuit of Jane, and that was something Elizabeth could not help but be grateful for.
But she had been invited here only because Jane had been.
Elizabeth could not mind it overmuch. She had told Mr. Cresswell she was here for her sister’s benefit, and that much was true.
But she admitted to herself that there had been some foolish part of her that had been encouraged by Aunt Gardiner’s quiet hints, that had entertained the unlikely notion that Mr. Darcy was not quite so disapproving of her as he had shown himself to be in Hertfordshire.
His behaviour this evening, however, had extinguished any such hope.
He had not sought her out, had not joined any group she stood in or even listened to her from a few steps away, had not engaged her in debate, had said nothing to her, in fact, beyond a handful of strangled words when he stumbled upon her near the punch.
Very well. She would do him the same courtesy.
For the remainder of the evening, she would not look at him either.