Chapter 3
Chapter Three
To be fair to Providence, Elizabeth was looking for a book.
She had reasoned it out on the stairs. Mr. Darcy was dressed for riding; he had doubtless passed through to the stables to be disappointed in person.
The library would therefore be empty, and the library was the one room where a wet Sunday might be honourably survived — occupation enough to discourage conversation, and nobody to ask sweet questions about her family.
She opened the door on this comfortable theory and found Mr. Darcy seated at the writing-table not six feet away.
Both of them had a single instant in which retreat was possible, and both of them, from sheer good breeding, lost it.
He had risen; she had curtseyed; the door had swung shut behind her on its excellent hinges; and now to withdraw would be to declare that his company drove her from rooms — which was true, but not a truth one performed.
"I beg your pardon," said Elizabeth. "I came in search of a book. I understood the library to be unoccupied."
"It is at your disposal." And then, with a courtesy so stiff it creaked: "The collection is poor. Bingley's father bought the house's books with the house. I believe nobody has opened most of them since."
"Then they will be glad of the attention." She moved to the shelves, putting the long table between them as a fortification, and began to read spines with the fixed diligence of a woman who intends to be invisible. Sermons. Sermons. A history of the county. Sermons.
Behind her she heard him resume his seat, and the scratch of his pen begin again.
It was a large room, and the rain made it larger, sealing it in grey.
The fire ticked. The pen scratched. Elizabeth took down the county history, established herself in the window-seat at the room's far end, and read four pages without receiving the smallest impression from any of them, because the silence had begun to develop a texture.
It was his doing. A silence between strangers is nothing; but Mr. Darcy did not produce the silence of a stranger.
He produced a worked silence, an attended silence — she could feel the pauses in his pen, and they corresponded, she could not help observing, to the turning of her own pages.
He was aware of her to exactly the degree she was aware of him, which was completely; and they were both pretending otherwise; and there was something in the mutual pretence that was almost — the word arrived unbidden and she eyed it with suspicion — companionable.
She would not have it. This was the man who had called her tolerable within fifteen yards of her hearing. If he chose to sit in profound consciousness of her presence rather than open his mouth like a Christian, that was his pride's affair.
Yet the fourth or fifth time the pen halted, Elizabeth glanced up, and caught him.
Not looking at her — worse. He had been looking at her and was now looking away, at the window, with an expression of such severe abstraction that it could only have been assumed within the last half-second; and on his face, just departing, was the look from the staircase.
Unreadable no longer, at this range. She read it.
Mr. Darcy was not contemptuous. Mr. Darcy was uncomfortable.
The discovery was so astonishing that she spoke before her prudence could sit up. "Mr. Darcy, I find I must ask you a question, and the rain has destroyed every polite means of avoiding it. You may blame the weather; I intend to."
He turned. "Madam?"
"Yesterday you did not speak to me from breakfast until the candles were brought.
Today you are writing a letter in which — forgive me — you have made no progress this quarter-hour.
I had concluded, on the evidence, that I had given you some grave offence.
I should like to know what it was, so that I may decide whether to regret it. "
The pen was set down. The look he gave her then was long, and in the course of it something in his face came undone — not softened; unfastened, like a man giving up a defended position he had privately known to be untenable since Tuesday.
"You have given me no offence," said Mr. Darcy. "That is the difficulty."