Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Meryton spent the week dressing for the ball; and on Saturday Elizabeth walked in with Jane and Lydia for gloves, and met both her educations on the same pavement.
Mr. Wickham was at the milliner's door, and attached himself to their party with the grace of a man conferring a favour while receiving one.
He was very amusing about the ball — he had hopes of dancing, he said, if a poor lieutenant could find partners brave enough — and he was midway through an anecdote of a garrison ball at which everything had gone gloriously wrong, when the sound of horses turned every bonnet on the street.
The gentlemen from Netherfield came down the high street at a walk.
What followed lasted five seconds and told a fortnight's truth: Mr. Wickham's countenance, mid-sentence, went the colour of paper; Mr. Darcy's, finding him, went hard as one.
Wickham touched his hat — beautifully, even that.
Darcy returned the coldest civility that can still answer to the name, and his horse came on.
"Why, there is — I recollect an engagement," said Mr. Wickham, with the first unpolished sentence she had ever heard from him; and he was gone toward the bridge, his charm still hanging in the air behind him, unclaimed.
Elizabeth did not watch him go. She stepped to the pavement's edge in front of the milliner's, the street attending, her sisters' lieutenant retreating, and said up at the rider, clearly enough for any ears that chose:
"Mr. Darcy. You will be at Longbourn before the ball, I hope? My father has discovered a new error in your opinion of Johnson and is impatient to enlarge upon it."
Something went over Darcy's face that could be read at thirty yards, and would be reported through Meryton by supper.
"Tomorrow, Miss Bennet," he said, and bowed from the saddle. "Errors of mine should never be kept waiting."
"Lizzy," hissed Lydia, scandalized, as the horses passed on, "he was in the middle of a story?—"
"He will finish it for somebody," said Elizabeth, taking her sister's arm toward the glover's. "He has a great many editions."
The invitation cards went out on Monday under Caroline Bingley's superintendence — engraved, elegant, and issued with the expression of a general signing terms; whatever else might be said of the campaign for Grosvenor Street, its colours had been struck in form.
Bingley rode to Longbourn the same morning, ahead of his own card, for the pleasure of asking Jane in person for the two first dances; and Jane said yes in the voice she reserved for answered prayers, and then was serene all afternoon in a manner that deceived nobody, including the cat.
Mr. Darcy came with him, and was closeted twenty minutes with Mr. Bennet, returning the second volume of the Rambler in person.
"He returns books like a Christian, I will say that for him," her father observed, drifting into the parlour afterward.
"In person, in order, and with opinions.
He disputes Johnson on the employments of solitude.
He is wrong, but he is wrong like a man who read the essay twice.
Lizzy, where does he find the time? I understood him to be occupied chiefly in being looked at. "
"He economizes elsewhere, Papa," said Elizabeth, and would not be drawn further.
In the garden — it had somehow become the custom of the visits' last quarter-hour, and the household had stopped remarking it, which is the deepest form of social ratification — Darcy walked beside her down the gravel where she had once held out a folded paper with her heart going like a hammer.
The roses were finished. The walk was the same walk. Nothing about it was the same.
"I have a debt to discharge," he said. "The fair copy went to Bingley a week ago Monday.
You will have observed the consequences riding over here at a gallop this morning to secure two dances.
I made it shorter than the draft. It wanted less courage by then; you had spent some of the cost of it yourself, on a gravel walk.
" He looked ahead, down the bare garden, and she had learned by now that what he said while not looking at her was what he had carried longest in the inner pocket.
"There is a thing I have wanted to say about the letter, Miss Bennet, and I have been some weeks drafting it, and the drafts have all gone the way of the first one.
So you shall have it with the blots in, which I am informed" — the faintest inclination of his head toward her — "is the hand I am trusted in.
It went to the wrong reader by every law of direction, that paper.
It was meant for a man who needed telling that his judgment could be trusted.
By some misdelivery of Providence it reached instead the one reader in England who could teach the same lesson to its writer.
I have given up calling it the wrong hand. It was only the wrong address."
They had reached the hedge's turn, where the windows lost their angle; and Elizabeth found that her store of raillery, that inexhaustible estate, had failed entirely, and that she did not regret its loss.
"Then I will close the account of the subject," she said at last, "since we are agreed never to speak of it again, and have now spoken of it three times by my counting.
You once warned me, sir, that your good opinion once lost was lost for ever.
You said nothing of how it was gained. It appears it is gained slowly, against the writer's better judgment, and over his own dead drafts.
I am content with that, Mr. Darcy. It is the only kind I should know what to do with. "
He bowed — and it was not the banister bow of Netherfield, nor the verdict bow of the gravel walk; it had something in it that bows are not licensed to contain in public — and then, straightening, with a hesitation she could have powdered and sold as the genuine article:
"Your father has lent me Cowper. But your father's pages, he gives me to understand, are pristine, and I find — having now some experience of the editions — that I have lost my taste for unmarked copies.
I am told there is a volume in the house with its corners bent, and arguments in the margins against the author and the world.
I should consider its loan," said Mr. Darcy, "a very great trust."
Elizabeth laughed — at him, at herself, at the perfect, fatal legibility of the request, which asked for a book the way the rain had once asked for nothing at all.
"It is a dangerous edition, sir. The margins dispute everything. The hand is very bad."
"I have excellent eyes for a bad hand," said Mr. Darcy. "They are considered, I am reliably informed, somewhere among my best features."
She sent the volume to Netherfield the next morning, wrapped in brown paper, corners bent, margins armed; and what came of that loan — what he found there, and what he left there, and what Elizabeth discovered when the book came home — belongs to another of the unrecorded hours.
The End