Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Of all the answers Elizabeth had imagined — and in a quarter-hour of not reading the county history she had imagined several — this was not among them.
"You will have to construe that for me," she said. "I have no Latin, and apparently no English either."
He rose and went to the fire, which needed nothing done to it, and did something to it.
With his back half turned he said, "You asked whether you might decide to regret the offence.
There is none to regret. The fault of yesterday was mine, and the explanation of it does me no credit, and you have asked for it directly, so you shall have it.
" He set down the poker. "I am ill-qualified for conversation, Miss Bennet.
I have not the talent some people possess, of talking easily to those I do not know — of catching the tone of a room.
Where I cannot do a thing well I have generally preferred not to attempt it, and I have allowed that preference to pass for judgement.
What you took for offence was — economy. "
"Economy," Elizabeth repeated.
"You laugh at the word."
"I am deciding whether to. You must allow me a moment; I am rearranging a fortnight's conclusions, and they were very well organized." She closed the county history. "You should know, Mr. Darcy, that in Meryton your economy has been thoroughly audited, and the books say pride."
"I do not doubt it." He said it without heat, taking the chair across from the window-seat — not near, but no longer fortified behind the table — and she observed that he sat like a man attending an examination he had resolved not to fail.
"And the audit is not wrong. I will not pretend the two are strangers to each other.
But a man may be proud and shy together, and the world only ever bills him for the pride. "
"Shy." Elizabeth considered the word, and the large severe gentleman to whom it was now attached, with his fastidious cravat and his ten thousand a year. "You will forgive me. It is as though one were asked to believe a fortress timid."
"Fortresses are the most timid buildings there are," said Mr. Darcy. "Nobody builds one who feels safe."
The rain filled the pause that followed. Elizabeth found that she had drawn her feet up into the window-seat in the attitude of a woman settling in, and elected not to correct it.
"Very well," she said. "I shall extend you provisional credit. But there is an entry in the ledger you cannot economize your way around, and since we are being direct this morning, I will read it out. At the Meryton assembly, you were asked to dance with me, and you said?—"
"I know what I said."
"—within my hearing, Mr. Darcy. Fifteen yards. I have excellent ears; they are considered my third-best feature."
It had come out more lightly than it had lived in her. The remark had kept its bruise these two months, and she heard the bruise in her own voice a syllable too late to disguise it.
He had gone slightly pale. "I had been dragged to an assembly of strangers," he said slowly, "every one of whom knew my income to the shilling before I was through the door.
I was angry at Bingley for requiring me to be there, and I said a thing designed to make him leave me alone — designed for his hearing, with no thought of yours.
That is no excuse. It is what happened. I knew it for a falsehood before the set had formed. "
"A falsehood."
"You are fishing, Miss Bennet."
"I am owed the fish."
The thing that happened then to Mr. Darcy's face had occurred perhaps four times in the course of their acquaintance, and Elizabeth had previously catalogued it as a defect in his gravity.
It was a smile attempting to come up through stone.
"Then I will say this much, since the weather has abolished prudence.
No man who had looked at you twice could repeat that remark, and I had looked at you a great many more times than twice by the end of that evening.
The remark has been an active mortification to me for two months.
There. The fish is yours; I hope it chokes you. "
Elizabeth burst out laughing — at the words, at the dead-level voice he delivered them in, at the sheer unlooked-for existence of a joke arriving from that quarter, like a parcel from a county one had no acquaintance in.
And Mr. Darcy watched her laugh with the unguarded look of the staircase, and this time made no attempt to put it away.
"You are direct, sir, once you begin. I begin to see the economy. You save it all up."
"I am told my good opinion is parted with sparingly too."
"Your good opinion, once lost, is lost for ever. You informed me of it on Thursday. I thought it the most comfortable doctrine I ever heard, for it excuses a man the trouble of ever thinking twice."
"And yet I have spent this fortnight thinking twice," said Mr. Darcy. "You may judge how comfortable I have found it."
It was said quietly, without gallantry, in the tone a man uses for plain fact; and it went through Elizabeth's composure like a pin through paper. She was spared the necessity of an answer — was robbed of the opportunity, she could afterwards never decide which — by the sound of the door.