Chapter Thirty-Two
Netherfield
They stayed in London a further week, the visit settling, by degrees, into something considerably easier than its formal beginning had suggested, the Earl calling twice more before their departure and Georgiana attaching herself to Elizabeth with an affection that showed no sign of diminishing, the two of them found, on more than one occasion, deep in conversation over some book or other, quite oblivious to whoever else might be in the room.
Jane watched her sister and Mr Darcy with a particular attentiveness she did not think either of them properly noticed, the two of them falling, over the course of that week, into the easy habit of seeking each other out at dinner, at the theatre one evening when the whole party attended together, in the quiet mornings when Elizabeth walked in the garden and Darcy, Jane observed more than once, found some pressing reason to be walking there also.
“You are staring,” Elizabeth said, catching her at it one afternoon, though there was no real reproach in the observation.
“I am watching my sister become rather better acquainted with a gentleman than I think she is presently willing to admit.”
“We have had perhaps a dozen conversations, Jane, about books and Derbyshire and the general management of an estate, which I understand rather better than most young ladies of my acquaintance, thanks to certain lessons I have had considerable cause to learn these past years. I do not think a dozen conversations constitutes an acquaintance worth remarking upon.”
“No,” Jane agreed, “though I think a dozen conversations of that particular quality, conducted with that particular attention, constitutes rather more than you are presently willing to call it,” and Elizabeth, for once, had no ready answer to that, only a faint colour rising that told Jane everything the words themselves declined to say.
?∞?
It was on their final evening in London, the household gathered for a last quiet dinner before the party was to disperse, that Jane found herself briefly alone with Mr Darcy in the library, both of them having wandered there separately in search of a book neither properly remembered wanting.
“Your sister,” Darcy said, without much preamble, in the manner of a man who had been turning something over and had decided, at last, to say it plainly, “is a very unusual young woman.”
“I have always thought so, though I confess I am not entirely impartial on the subject.”
“I do not mean it as an idle compliment. I have met a great many young women in company who could discuss a book with tolerable intelligence, and rather fewer who could discuss it as though the discussing of it mattered to them, beyond the mere performance of accomplishment.” He was quiet a moment, turning a volume over in his hands without appearing to properly see it.
“I have a particular friend, Bingley, a young man of considerable fortune newly come into it from trade, who has been talking of taking a country estate. I have encouraged him, more than once, toward Hertfordshire, when I saw him today. I find, having met you and your sister both, that my reasons for the encouragement were perhaps rather less disinterested than I originally believed them to be.”
Jane kept her expression carefully neutral.
“Hertfordshire is a pleasant county, whatever its want of fashionable diversion.”
“So I am beginning to understand.” Something almost like a smile crossed his usually composed features, there and gone before she could properly be certain of it.
“In the meanwhile, I find myself reluctant to let a week’s acquaintance simply lapse into a correspondence I have no proper right to conduct.
I wonder whether I might propose something else instead. ”
He raised the matter that same evening, before the whole party, with rather more formality than Jane suspected he had originally intended to bring to it.
He was for Derbyshire within the fortnight, he said, Pemberley wanting his attention after a long absence, and Georgiana having missed her home a good deal more than she generally admitted.
He should be very glad, if the scheme did not seem too great an imposition, to have them all as his guests there, Jane and Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth together, for as long as the visiting suited them.
“Matlock lies almost directly on the road,” Fitzwilliam observed, “and I own I have been putting off my own duty visit rather longer than my mother has been willing to forgive. We might break the journey there, and travel on to Pemberley together, if that suits everyone’s convenience.”
It suited everyone’s convenience remarkably well, Jane thought, watching Elizabeth’s face carefully manage itself into an expression of polite, unremarkable agreement that fooled nobody in the room, and the whole party’s plans were settled before the tea things were properly cleared away.
“I begin to think,” Fitzwilliam murmured to Jane later, as they went up, “that we shall be attending a second wedding in this family before very much longer, and I confess I find myself rather looking forward to watching Darcy make a thorough idiot of himself proposing. That man always has trouble saying what he truly means”