Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Darcy had risen at six with his plans in excellent order.
The Bennet sisters would depart at eleven.
He would be out on Cerberus by eight, would contrive to be at the far end of the estate when the carriage was brought round, and would return at noon to a house restored to safety.
The whole error could then be quietly written off — for it was an error, he had settled that on Friday; an error of idleness, nothing more.
A man confined to the country, starved of conversation, might mistake novelty for charm.
It signified nothing that he had begun listening for her step.
It signified nothing that he could have repeated, verbatim, everything she had said at dinner for five days together, while retaining not one syllable of Miss Bingley's.
Attention was not attachment. He had only to stop attending.
Accordingly he had spent the whole of Saturday not attending, with a thoroughness that had left him exhausted, and had gone to bed a free man.
Then it had rained.
He stood now in the library with his riding gloves still in his hand, looking out at the drowned park, and conducted a brief, silent review of his situation.
The lane impassable. The visit extended.
The household confined — all of it, every member — to four or five rooms for the length of an English Sunday.
It could be managed. It only wanted method.
The library this morning — Bingley never read, Hurst never woke before noon, and the ladies would keep to the saloon.
Letters until two; he owed Georgiana a letter.
After dinner the card-table would absorb everyone, and he need only lose at piquet with sufficient attention to be safe until bedtime.
What he declined to review — what he had been declining to review since the landing — was the half-minute he had just spent looking up a staircase.
She had been at the window, with the grey light full on her face, looking out at the rain that kept her here; and she had looked trapped, and entirely satirical about it, both at once, as though captivity were one more acquaintance whose absurdities she was collecting.
No performance in it — she had not known herself watched.
That was the devil of it. Elizabeth Bennet performing — sparring with Caroline, fencing with himself, all her wit out and glittering — that woman he had armoured himself against. But Elizabeth Bennet unobserved, thinking her own thoughts by a wet window, her whole quick mind visibly at work on nothing and no one?—
He had bowed and removed himself with the promptness of a man stepping back from a ledge.
Attention, he reminded himself, was not attachment.
He put down the gloves, sat at the writing-table, and addressed himself to his sister.
My dear Georgiana, — We are weather-bound at Netherfield, and you would laugh to see how ill your brother bears confinement...
He stopped. Georgiana never laughed at him; that was half her trouble, and most of his. He knew one person who laughed at him without the smallest hesitation — who had informed him to his face, in this very house, that he was to consider himself material?—
Darcy laid down the pen, with care, as though it had misbehaved.
One day. The library, the letters, the card-table. Method.
He had written three lines more when he heard, in the hall, a step he had spent five days learning not to listen for — light, quick, unmistakable, and coming, with the whole malice of Providence behind it, directly toward the library door.