Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Mr. Bennet received Mr. Darcy on Monday morning with the air of a man who has been expecting a visitor for some time and has thought carefully about what he intends to say.
The library door was closed for thirty-five minutes.
Elizabeth knew because she was in the hall for thirty-four of them, standing at the window that looked onto the frost-bitten garden, listening to the quality of the silence behind the door rather than to anything actually audible.
The house moved around her — Hill somewhere below, her mother's voice from the upper floor occupied with opinions about Tuesday, Lydia and Kitty in their usual unresolved negotiation — and she attended to none of it.
What she could hear, at intervals, was the low exchange of two voices.
Her father's, which she could identify at any distance, conducting the measured rhythm of a man who has a point and is choosing the pace of its delivery.
And Darcy's, lower, which she could not make out at all and did not try to, because the conversation behind that door was not hers to follow.
She had wondered, over the past several days, what her father would say.
Not whether he would say yes — she had a fair sense of that already, from the fourth volume of Cowper and the expression he had worn when he said that is the right answer for a man in your particular situation.
But what he would say. He would not make it easy.
He never made anything easy that was worth doing, and he had opinions about Darcy that had been forming since October with the particular interest he reserved for people he found genuinely worth the trouble of assessing.
The door opened.
Mr. Bennet emerged first, as she had known he would.
He looked at her with the mild, direct gaze that she had inherited almost complete, and which told her, in the shorthand of twenty-three years, that the conversation had gone as he had expected and that he intended to be unhelpful about the details.
"He is not finished," he said, "but he is promising. You may have him back on Monday."
Elizabeth let out a breath she had not been entirely aware of holding. "Thank you, Papa."
He looked at her for a long moment — taking his time, as he always did with the things that mattered — and then turned back toward the library. At the door he stopped.
"He held his own on the Johnson question. I found I could not fault his position." A pause. "Do not tell him that."
"I won't."
"Tell him I said the retirement poems were melancholy."
"He already knows."
"Good." Mr. Bennet nodded once, with the satisfaction of a man whose estimate has been confirmed, and went in. The door closed behind him with its particular click.
Elizabeth stood alone in the hall. The house continued around her. From somewhere above, Lydia produced an opinion about something; from the kitchen, the sound of Hill; from the garden, nothing at all, only the cold clear light of a Monday morning in November falling across the frost.
She had not asked for any of it. She had come to Netherfield looking for a book. She thought she might, on reflection, have found rather more.
The End