Chapter 2
Chapter Two
She ought to have folded it then.
She did fold it — afterward; that was the order of events her conscience would have to live with.
But the sheet was open before her, and her eyes had been reading for eighteen years and would not be instructed; and the first line below the salutation had already happened to her before she could decide whether to allow it.
The library was very still. Morning light came through the east window in a long pale bar, catching the dust above the shelves.
Her back was to the door. Her father's clock ticked.
She was aware, in the way that the body records what the mind is too busy to notice, of the exact weight of the paper between her fingers — lighter than she would have expected; the weight of nothing, of ordinary correspondence — and of the cold she had not noticed until this moment, coming up through the floorboards and her thin shoes.
You asked me in October whether I thought Miss Bennet indifferent, and I answered you as a careful man. I have been some weeks learning what my carefulness is worth.
Below it, ruled through but legible, lay an earlier beginning: Caution in these matters is the better part of — and there the line stopped, struck out at the exact place where, Elizabeth could only suppose, the writer had heard himself.
She sat down — not from design, but because her knees had decided it, and found the window-seat, and she was in it with her feet underneath her the way she sat when she read, which was entirely without thinking.
She read four lines more. She would wonder, later, whether she could have stopped sooner, and conclude honestly that she could have, and had not.
Her regard, to a fairer eye than mine has lately been, appears sincere.
You are advised on every side by people who love you variously well.
Trust your own understanding of her; it is better than you are told it is.
A man may do more harm by managing his friend's happiness than by hazarding his own discomfort — and then a phrase struck through: as I have reason — and resumed plainly: I write from experience of the error.
There the draft ended. No signature; the last line trailed into a blot, as if the pen had been set down mid-thought and never taken up again — as though the writer had gone to dress for dinner, or been called away, or had simply looked too long at the words experience of the error and found nothing fit to follow them.
Elizabeth folded the sheet. Her hands did it slowly and very neatly, as if neatness now could mend the order of things.
She stood in her father's library and held a page of Mr. Darcy's mind.
That was the only honest description. Not a letter — a letter performs; a letter is dressed for company before it leaves the house.
This had been thinking, with ink on it. He had sat down to advise Bingley as the world's Mr. Darcy would advise — caution is the better part — and somewhere between one line and the next he had ruled his own voice through and written against himself.
I answered you as a careful man. I have been some weeks learning what my carefulness is worth.
Nobody had been meant to see the correction.
That was what corrections were: the part of a man done privately, so that the world need only meet the fair copy.
She had seen it. She could not now unsee it, any more than she could unhear the rain of three weeks ago; knowledge did not fold back up because the paper did.
And what she knew was this: that Mr. Darcy, alone, with no one to perform for and his own October judgment sitting in front of him, had looked at Jane's happiness — Jane's, who he scarcely knew; Jane, whose heart Elizabeth had privately feared was at the mercy of other people's management — and had taken Bingley's side, and Jane's, against his own caution and against whoever it was that loved Bingley variously well.
He had done it in a draft he never sent, where it could win him nothing, charm no one, and never be thanked.
It was the most persuasive thing she had ever read, and it had persuaded her of two things at once: that the man was better than his fair copy — and that she had come by the knowledge like a thief.
The wrong hand. The phrase arrived unbidden and sat down as if it meant to stay. The letter had reached the wrong hand; and the wrong hand had closed on it; and the only question that mattered now was what the wrong hand would do.
She put the folded sheet in her workbox, beneath the threads, where no one would look.
At dinner she talked — she always talked at dinner; it was the easiest place in the world to be present without being seen.
She argued with Lydia about a hat. She answered her father's questions about nothing.
Across the table Jane was Jane, unclouded, attending to her soup with the serenity of a woman who does not know that the instrument of her happiness is sitting in her sister's workbox under six skeins of blue thread.
After dinner Elizabeth went upstairs on the pretext of a headache, which was not a lie so much as a translation.
She sat on her bed and looked at the workbox.
She did not open it. She did not need to; she could reconstruct the hand perfectly by now, the small upright letters, the ruled-through lines, and the blot at the end where the pen had rested and never been picked up again.
She went back down in twenty minutes and was agreeable for the rest of the evening. It weighed nothing. She felt it in the house all day, like a coal.