Chapter 5
FIVE
FITZWILLIAM DARCY
Elizabeth had gone pale again by the time he concluded his recitation of the facts of his decades-long, misbegotten association with George Wickham. When she put her face in her hands, he instinctively reached out, only to draw back at the last instant and speak instead.
“Shall I call for more camomile to ease your pain?”
“No,” she said, muffled by her hands. Then she dropped them, saying again, decisively, “No. My head is well enough. I am only thinking back on my acquaintance with Mr Wickham, and at last understanding how easily I was deceived.”
She believed him, then? The relief was dizzying. “He is very plausible,” he said. Now that she had learnt the truth, he found himself eager to relieve her distress over it. “He has fooled many, my own father—so wise in every other way—among them.”
“And I was eager to hear and believe anything that might be said to your detriment,” she replied with a wry expression, shaking her head. “Because you had mortified my pride, I was determined to accumulate a battalion of reasons why yours was ridiculous.”
“I beg your pardon; I do not understand you. I concede that my behaviour in Hertfordshire was prideful and thereby offensive, but if I did something you found insulting to yourself alone, I am ignorant of what it might have been.”
She regarded him then with that single arched eyebrow that had so often entranced him.
“I think very few ladies, and perhaps especially those of us who have been used to being accounted at least passably pretty, would fail to be insulted at being proclaimed tolerable, but not handsome enough to dance with.”
“Good God,” he muttered, hands clenching with an excess of emotion so jumbled he could not have named its parts. “Surely Bingley did not repeat that?”
“I heard you myself, sir. I was not far away.”
“I hardly glanced at you,” he said. “I only wanted Bingley to leave me alone about dancing and knew he would do so if I said something outrageous.”
“You glanced at me enough to pronounce a judgment upon my appearance,” she replied drily.
He grimaced. “I am defending myself rather than offering my apologies. My manners truly have become execrable, have they not?” He shook his head and drew a fortifying breath.
“I apologise unreservedly for what I said of you at the assembly. I hope you will believe me when I say that whatever erroneous impression I may have formed in an instant when I was already in a foul mood, I have long since come to consider you one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.”
“I did intuit that your opinion must have undergone a change on that score, or else I have just inherited a great fortune and you somehow came to learn of it before I did. The latter does seem rather unlikely, however.”
He had to smile at her wit, though it stung. “Did you truly not know that I... that I had an interest in you?”
She shook her head. “Until you made your offer, I was entirely certain that you disliked me as heartily as I disliked you. We hardly ever spoke but to quarrel, you had early withstood my beauty, and when we were in company, you had a habit of fixing me with quite a fearsome glower. Even Jane, who never likes to think that anyone could disapprove of those whom she loves, agreed that you had taken a disgust of me. Although, being Jane, she was sure I should win you over in the end.”
“She was not wrong about that,” he offered with weak humour.
“What you call quarrels I viewed as stimulating debates, and if I seemed out of sorts when you caught me looking at you, I must presume that those were among the many times I was reading myself a silent lecture to stop paying you so much attention, as I—” He broke off abruptly, not wishing to voice those concerns once more.
“As you would not wish to raise expectations in a lady whose condition in life was so decidedly beneath your own?” she asked archly, though there was something of amusement in the tone of her voice. He clung to the hope that he was not imagining it.
It took him a moment to find a reply. “That strikes me as a great deal more conceited when you repeat it to me than it did when I formed the words myself,” he admitted, chagrined.
“I thought, when I first spoke of the faults of your family, that I was complimenting you, by allowing you to know that I would endure all of it for the sake of your company. It was a sentiment unworthy of us both, I now see. I should have judged better to remain silent on that score.”
“I presume, sir, that you are fully aware of your aunt’s faults, but would take umbrage were I to not only detail them to you, but also suggest that you were lessened by association with her,” she said in a quiet, careful tone belied by the firmness of her expression.
He could not, and would not, deny it, not least because he had formed a similar thought himself, earlier.
“You presume correctly. It is a fact that the behaviour of our relations reflects upon us, yet when that reflection is damaging, my first reaction is always offence that I am not being judged on my own merits. It must be the same for most people. And as to your particular example, she is my aunt; though I may disapprove of her ways at times, I feel I must defend her because we are family.”
“I feel the same about my relations, sir. Though I cannot say that being less in company with some of them would not be an advantage to marrying away from my own neighbourhood, I should not wish to give any of them up entirely, and—forgive me if I am mistaken—but I think you had it in mind that I should have done, had I accepted you.”
“I...” She had caught him off balance again.
“I do not know that I had considered it in detail. I suppose I assumed that we should see your family occasionally, for a day or two, on our way to or from London in the spring. If your sisters married and went away, we might not see them at all unless they happened to be in London at the same time, but Longbourn must be visited every now and then, for civility’s sake.
I did not expect to see your uncle in trade, though if you wished to visit his family discreetly when we were in town, I do not suppose I should have made much objection.
” He paused, taking in the picture he had painted with his own words, and then admitted, “It all sounds quite dreadful, now that I voice it.”
How was it that he could so clearly and belatedly see the selfishness of these assumptions he had made without a qualm?
He had, when he resolved upon making his proposals, vaguely expected that he would, with great forbearance—for which he would be entitled to gratitude and praise—indulge his wife with two or three days among her family each year, and he would grudgingly allow her to sneak about London in the older carriage he kept, with no crest upon it, to pay a call upon her relations in Cheapside once or twice each spring.
And he should have thought himself quite magnanimous in it, too, though he would simultaneously have expected her to cheerfully bear with his aunt, Lady Catherine, who would positively despise anyone he married for ruining her plans for a union between Rosings and Pemberley, and to do so for any length of time he chose to visit.
He had, he thought with an internal shudder, been considering her as almost an appendage to himself rather than a person with thoughts and wishes of her own.
It was entirely ridiculous, for one of the things he liked most about her was that she did not alter herself to please him.
Yet somehow he had expected she would naturally do so, once granted the honour of his hand.