Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
The leave-taking assembled itself on the steps: trunks, civilities, Bingley promising to call almost before the horses could be supposed rested, Jane glowing in a way that needed no semaphore.
Mrs. Bennet was handed in; Lydia and Kitty after her; and for a moment, in the general arranging, Elizabeth stood at the carriage door with Mr. Darcy beside her and nobody attending to either of them.
"You are abandoned to a quiet house at last," she said. "I should apologize for the invasion, but I find my repertory of apologies for my family wants reorganizing, and I no longer know which of them you'll accept."
"I have retired the whole account," said Mr. Darcy. "It was wrongly drawn up. The auditor has been dismissed."
"So the books are simply to be burned? That is shocking practice, sir."
"It is the new economy." And then, lower, with the rain-grey morning of the library briefly in his face: "I am in the weather's debt, Miss Bennet.
If Sunday had been fair, you would have been gone by eleven, and I should have spent a comfortable winter being entirely wrong about my own state. I mean to remain in arrears."
Elizabeth looked up at him. There were a dozen answers on the shelf, all witty, all safe; she heard herself reach past every one of them.
"Then I will make a confession to balance the books," she said. "You have had more words from me in two days than I meant to spend on you in a lifetime — and I find I have not once counted the cost. You will understand the size of that admission."
"I do," he said gravely. "I have excellent ears. They are considered my third-best feature."
She was still laughing when the carriage door closed.
She sat back. The carriage moved off the gravel and onto the lane, and she felt the shift in the surface underfoot — the small lurch, and then the steadying — the way a vehicle always settles when it commits to its direction.
Her hands were in her lap. They didn't quite know what to do with themselves, which she recognised as the physical consequence of something large having just happened while she was standing still.
She pressed them flat against her skirt.
The morning was bright and cold; the lane threw up clean light from yesterday's wet, and the hedges on either side were winter-bare, the Hertfordshire she had grown up in, everything known, everything the same as it had been on Sunday when the rain began.
She leaned once to the glass.
He was still on the steps. Not gone in with the others — standing where she had left him, watching the coach the whole length of the avenue.
A tall, correct figure with all his fortifications down about his feet, in the bright wreckage of which he appeared to stand quite comfortably.
She watched him until the gate took him, and then the hedge took the gate, and Netherfield was behind them with the lane opening ahead and the whole familiar country rolling away toward home.
She sat back.
"Lizzy," said her mother, in the tone of one resuming a debate, "I am sure I never knew a man so improved on acquaintance as Mr. Darcy. Such very gentleman-like attention! It is my belief he was monstrously shy all along, poor man, and nobody in Meryton took the least trouble with him."
Lydia hooted. Kitty giggled. Jane, smiling, looked the question across the carriage.
"Do you know, ma'am," said Elizabeth, watching Netherfield turn behind its hedges, "I begin to believe you may be right."