Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Monday arrived rinsed and shining, as mornings do when they have something to answer for; and at half past ten, a full half-hour before Mr. Bingley's carriage was ordered, the Longbourn coach came up the sweep with Mrs. Bennet inside it.
Elizabeth, watching from the hall window, felt her heart descend in stages, like a woman going down a dark stair.
Her mother had not been able to leave well alone.
The carriage that could not possibly be spared on Tuesday had proved sparable on Monday, the moment there was a triumph to be collected in person; and here was Mrs. Bennet ascending the steps in her second-best bonnet, Lydia and Kitty behind her, come to retrieve her daughters with the maximum of ceremony.
The next half-hour was, by Elizabeth's private reckoning, among the longest of her life.
Mrs. Bennet, installed in the saloon, thanked Mr. Bingley for his care of Jane in terms that mislaid the line between gratitude and contract.
She admired the room and asked what the chimney-piece had cost. She observed, twice, with a glance like a semaphore, that Jane always looked so well in the mornings, did not everybody find that Jane looked particularly well this morning?
Lydia, not to be outdone, reminded Mr. Bingley at volume of his promise of a ball, and named the officers who must be asked to it.
Miss Bingley sat through the whole with the smile of a woman storing provisions for a hard winter of correspondence.
Then Mrs. Bennet turned — with the bright, confiding air she adopted for her most considered remarks — and addressed herself to the room at large.
"I always say, a girl of Jane's beauty and character would look well at the head of a very fine table indeed.
And Netherfield — such a house! Though of course for some people Netherfield is only a beginning, I dare say — is it not, Mr. Darcy?
" The glance that followed was as subtle as a cannon.
"We can hardly imagine the sort of establishment that would suit — a man of your position. "
There was a silence in which the air changed.
Elizabeth, by the window, heard it drop like a stone into still water and watched the rings spread outward to touch every surface in the room. Miss Bingley's cup paused mid-air. Bingley found something of enormous interest in the fire-screen. Jane looked at her hands.
And Mr. Darcy stood by the window; and Elizabeth, who had resolved not to look at him, audited every breath he took.
She knew what he was seeing. Yesterday in the library her family had been an abstraction, a column of figures gallantly waved away.
This was not abstract. This was her mother, bright and artless and entirely unstoppable, arranging his future and Jane's in the same sentence with the confidence of a woman who had been planning this since the first mention of five thousand a year.
The old construction of Mr. Darcy — the one Elizabeth had owned for two months, the one with the curled lip — assembled itself in her mind's eye, ready, almost comfortable.
Now he will look at them the way he looked at the chimney-piece, and Tuesday will quietly die of it, and I shall have learned better than to rearrange my conclusions on the strength of one wet morning.
"Mrs. Bennet," said Mr. Darcy.
The room performed a small collective adjustment, as rooms did when he spoke; her mother turned with the wariness of a woman addressed by an unfriendly power.
"I understand from your daughter that Mr. Jones attended Miss Bennet here, but that you directed her care by letter before he could be fetched — the saline draughts, the keeping her from the night air.
My own sister was ill in much the same way two winters ago, and her physician in town prescribed nothing different.
Miss Bennet's recovery has been quicker than hers.
The credit of that would seem to be yours. "
There was a silence of a wholly new kind.
Mrs. Bennet had been paid, in her life, every sort of attention but this sort; flattered, humoured, managed, endured — never credited, and never by a man of ten thousand a year with a physician in town.
The effect was extraordinary. She turned the colour of moderate sunrise, said that to be sure nobody thought anything of a mother's nursing but that the saline draughts — well, and so she had told Hill, had not she, Kitty?
— and for fully four minutes was launched upon a stream of medical reminiscence in which no other vessel could move; but it was a harmless stream, an innocent stream, and she emerged from it gentled, like weather that has rained itself out.
She looked upon Mr. Darcy with the bewildered beginnings of approval.
She said, gathering her shawl, that she was sure Netherfield had been all kindness, all kindness; and such elegant chimney-pieces too.
Elizabeth stood very still by the door, holding the discovery carefully, as though it might spill.
He had not done it for effect; there was no one in the room he could mean to impress.
He had found the one thing in her mother that could honestly be praised, and praised it; and he stood now hearing the saline draughts a second time through, head bent, attending, like a man who had bought something dear and did not regret the price.
She thought, with sudden precision, of the first dinner at Netherfield.
She had said something about Meryton — a generalisation, something light, something she had said to provoke him and had expected to be received with the usual fortified silence.
Instead he had asked a question. She had attributed it at the time to the reflexive politeness of a man who had remembered his manners; had filed the attention under performance and moved on.
She examined it now from a different angle.
He had asked the question. He had listened to the answer.
He had asked another. She had put it down to condescension, because condescension was the theory that made the rest of him cohere.
What if it had simply been interest?
The thought reorganised twenty-seven evenings of evidence in under a second.
The half-formed sentences at the Lucases' — which she had taken for interrupted contempt — what if they were interrupted attempts?
The habit of watching her when she spoke to other people — which she had read as appraisal — what if it were, simply, what Jane had said: a man not yet sure he was allowed to look, so looking anyway?
She had been sketching his character for two months. She looked down and found that the buttons of her gloves had marked her palm. An uncommonly bad artist, she thought; and the likeness would have to be begun again, from the first sitting.