Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
By Sunday evening Jane was well enough to come down, and the drawing-room received her with the small festival a sick-room release always occasions: the best chair drawn to the fire, the screen adjusted, Mr. Bingley hovering with a footstool as though the deployment of footstools were a science he had lately taken his degree in.
Jane assured him she was perfectly warm; he discovered fresh grounds for doubting it; and the two of them had achieved that condition, common to persons falling honestly in love, of believing their conversation about draughts to be a conversation about draughts.
Elizabeth, watching from the tea-table, attended the other theatre.
Miss Bingley had spent dinner in thought, and her play since the cloth was drawn had been a model of recovered form.
There were no more shots fired at Longbourn — that ground was burned, and she knew it.
Instead there was Pemberley: the gallery dear Georgiana so adored; the library, the work of how many generations, Mr. Darcy?
; the exquisite taste of the late Lady Anne, whom Caroline had not met, the lady having died some years before Caroline had contrived to be anybody, but whose taste was nonetheless a personal treasure to her.
It was artillery of a patient kind. It did not attack Elizabeth; it simply furnished, item by item, the world in which no Elizabeth could occur.
At the card-table — Mr. Hurst having woken at the sight of it being set — the campaign continued. "Miss Eliza is a great reader," said Miss Bingley, dealing, "and has no pleasure in anything else. She told us so herself her first evening here. We must not tear her from her book."
"I deserve neither such praise nor such censure," said Elizabeth, "for I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in a great many things.
I have even, this visit, taken pleasure in being proved wrong — which I am assured is the rarest entertainment of all, for nobody ever seems to get any practice at it. "
She had not meant it for him — or she had meant it nine parts for the room and one part for him, which was as much as could be owned anywhere but a library in the rain.
But across the table Mr. Darcy looked up from his hand; and Miss Bingley, whose eyes missed nothing that touched that quarter, saw the look, traced it, weighed it; and set down a card with the deliberation of a woman revising a campaign for the second time in a day.
"We shall all be dull tomorrow when you are gone," she said, smiling at Elizabeth with whole-hearted insincerity. "Charles, you will be moping for a week. I declare I do not know how Longbourn can spare its treasures to us so long, nor how we shall ever — Mr. Darcy, you have thrown away your king."
"So I have," said Mr. Darcy, unmoved, gathering the trick he had spoiled. "My attention was elsewhere. I find it is a season for revising one's play."
Elizabeth bent over her cards, grateful to the candles, which flattered everybody; and when she looked up it was at Jane — safe, sweet Jane by the fire — only to find her sister watching her in return, with a soft conjecturing wonder that no draught-screen in England could have shielded her from.
Elizabeth gave her a look that promised later.
Tonight, returned Jane placidly, who never exacted anything, and was inexorable.
It was past one before the sisters' candle was out.
The library had been heard twice through — Jane requiring of any narrative that it be told once for the facts and once for justice to all parties — and the second telling, the one for justice, had been the more careful of the two.
"And when Miss Bingley came in," said Jane, from her pillow, "what did he do?"
"He closed the fortress," said Elizabeth. "Stone by stone. Everything I had just seen — all of it — went away behind the bow and the polished nothing. Except—" She paused. "When Miss Bingley said what she said about Mama, and the dear lieutenants?—"
"What did she say?"
"The sort of thing she always says." Elizabeth kept her voice easy, though it was not quite.
"The sort of thing I have been thinking myself, for a fortnight.
But from her it was artillery; she was loading it in front of him and inviting him to fire.
" She smoothed the counterpane. "He didn't fire. He offered to ring for candles."
"That is all?"
"It was enough." She thought about it. "It was the most complete thing he could have done without doing anything at all. He simply — declined to agree. And she knew it."
Jane was quiet for a moment. Then: "Did he watch you at the assembly? At the Meryton assembly — before he said what he said?"
Elizabeth turned to look at her. "How did you?—"
"I noticed. I was dancing with Mr. Bingley and I noticed.
" Jane said it with the serenity of someone who has been observing longer than anyone has given her credit for.
"He looked at you as though he had not decided yet whether he was allowed to, and then he looked away very correctly, and then he looked again.
For the whole of the first set. I thought at the time it was unusual for a man who professed to find you only tolerable. "
Elizabeth was quiet.
"He watched you at the dinner on Thursday too," Jane went on. "When you were arguing with him about Meryton — about the assembly-rooms, and the officers. He had a very particular expression."
"A contemptuous one."
"No." Jane considered. "More like a man in a fight who is having a better time than he expected."
Elizabeth lay back and looked at the ceiling. The candle was still lit on Jane's side; the shadows moved with the draught from somewhere. The house had settled into its night sounds — that correct, contained silence, not like home.
She thought about the fortnight. She thought about all the evenings she had felt his attention arrive and depart like weather, and ascribed it to censure.
She thought about Saturday's deliberate silence, which she had catalogued as affront, and which now — in the light of I knew it for a falsehood before the set had formed — had a different face on it entirely.
Not contempt managing her out of his sight. Discomfort holding her at arm's length.
She had been so certain. The certainty had been comfortable. It was not comfortable now.
"Jane," she said.
"Mm."
"I have been very stupid."
"Not stupid," said Jane, with the mild authority she reserved for questions of character. "You saw what he showed you. It was not a very legible face." A pause. "It was more legible than you thought, I suspect. Only you were looking at the wrong parts of it."
The candle went out not long after. Elizabeth lay in the dark and listened to Jane's breathing slow into sleep.
Her verdict, delivered just before — into the dark, with Jane's whole authority — had been this: "I always thought there must be a reason he stood about in doorways so, Lizzy.
Nobody is disagreeable on purpose for weeks together; it must be the most fatiguing thing in the world. — Tuesday. I am very glad it rained."
From Jane Bennet this was an oration. Elizabeth lay awake a good while afterward in the dark — the ceiling invisible, the house entirely still, the particular quality of wakefulness that arrives when your conclusions have rearranged themselves and your mind is going over every room they used to occupy — and found she could improve upon neither half of it.