Chapter 3
Chapter Three
"Caroline writes," said Jane at breakfast on Monday, in the voice she used when she was determined that news should be good, "that they may all be wanted in town before the winter is out.
Mr. Hurst's affairs — and Charles has business there too, she says, a great deal of business; she wonders that he can be spared from it so long.
" She smiled at the letter as though it could be encouraged to improve.
"It is very natural. Men of his — of their consequence must have many calls upon them. "
"And does Mr. Bingley speak of his business in town?
" said Elizabeth. "He was here Thursday a full three hours.
He mentioned the partridges, the new mare, the ball he means to give, and a scheme of planting Jane an arbour that cannot possibly be wanted before June.
Business in town never once came up. How strange, that Miss Bingley should know his affairs so much better than he does. "
"Lizzy."
"I am very fond of Caroline's letters. They are the only correspondence I know that is written entirely in the future tense."
Jane laughed, and looked grave directly afterward, which was Jane's whole heart in two movements. "I do not mind it," she said, untruthfully. "Only — if he were to go, I should hope it would be because he wished it. Not because he was — persuaded that he ought."
She said it lightly. She picked up her teacup with both hands.
She looked, for the space of one breath, like someone measuring something they have decided not to say; and then the serenity came back, complete and unforced, the way Jane's serenity always returned — not as concealment but as genuine resolution, as if she had visited the difficulty and come home again by an interior route Elizabeth could never quite follow.
She changed the subject to the arbour, and whether Mr. Bingley had consulted anyone competent about the south-facing wall.
Elizabeth watched her being serene and felt something in her chest contract that had nothing to do with the letter.
Jane would make no claim. Jane would never put her happiness in anyone's hands in a form that could be declined.
She would simply go on being Jane — clear-sighted, gracious, brave in the particular way that looks like ease — and wait for the world to come right or not, and find a way to make sense of it either way.
It was the most infuriating courage Elizabeth had ever seen in a person she loved.
Elizabeth, watching her, understood with a tightening of the chest exactly what the paper in her workbox was worth.
It was not a curiosity. It was a map of the battlefield on which her sister's happiness would be decided.
Caroline's letter lay beside Jane's plate, all warmth on its surface and all current underneath, tugging gently, ceaselessly, toward town — and against it, unknown to every person at this table, stood twenty lines in a small upright hand that had taken Jane's part in private where it could earn nothing.
The unfairness of her own advantage arrived then, complete.
She knew which counsellor had told the truth.
She knew it the way no one was entitled to know anything — by reading a man's struck-out lines.
If she kept the knowledge, she would go on knowing it every time Darcy entered a room; she would like him on evidence he had never consented to give — and there was something in that, Elizabeth found, that she could not stomach.
It was not even virtue. It felt nearer to pride: he had corrected himself honestly in the dark, and she would not be less honest in the daylight.
She went upstairs. She sat on the bed. She took the sheet from the workbox and held it, still folded, and had the argument with herself that she had been postponing since Saturday.
The principled version was easy: she had come by knowledge she had no right to, and a thing got without right ought to purchase nothing. That was the version she would say aloud, if it came to saying.
But the private version was messier and more honest. She liked him on stolen evidence.
She had liked him since Sunday — since the letter, since the crossed-out lines, since the discovery that the man's interior bore no resemblance to the face he showed the county — and she had no right to the liking because she had no right to the evidence.
She would go on meeting him in parlours and on gravel walks, and every time she would know what his corrected hand looked like, and he would have no idea she knew, and she would be warmer than she was entitled to be, and she would know why she was warmer, and he would not, and the whole commerce of them would be built on a document he had never meant to produce.
There was also the simpler thing, underneath the principle: he had corrected himself.
He had looked at his own careful judgment — the careful man's caution — and had ruled it through.
He had done it alone, unobserved, for Bingley's sake and Jane's.
He did not know she had seen it. He could not be performing it.
It was the only opinion she had ever read that she was absolutely certain had not been written for an audience.
She could not keep it, and she could not simply bury it, and the only remaining option was to give it back.
She went for her bonnet before she could reason herself comfortable.
Her father intercepted her in the hall, a volume under his arm and a glint behind his spectacles.
"If you are walking toward sense, Lizzy, take a wrong turning for me.
Your mother has determined that we are to dine the Netherfield party on Thursday, and is at this moment composing a dinner for ten persons of which three removes are to be entirely in Mr. Darcy's honour.
The man lends well, I grant him. I had not thought we would be paying interest so soon. "
"I am sure he will be sensible of the compliment, Papa."
"He is sensible of everything; that is his whole complaint." Mr. Bennet looked at her a moment longer than was idle. "You are a good deal in my library of late, child. Has it anything in it you want?"
"I am returning something," said Elizabeth, with the folded sheet already buttoned beneath her spencer; and was out the door before he could examine either the sentence or her colour.