Chapter Twelve
The call, when it finally occurred, proved considerably less private than either of them had hoped, for Mrs. Gardiner, mindful of the proprieties but not unsympathetic to the difficulty of conducting an honest conversation beneath a chaperone's direct supervision, arranged to be occupied with the children in an adjoining room, near enough to satisfy convention, far enough to grant them something approaching genuine privacy.
Darcy arrived precisely at the appointed hour, and Elizabeth, receiving him in her aunt's small parlour, was struck freshly by how much less composed he appeared than the careful, correct gentleman who had greeted her at Mrs. Fenwick's party.
He seemed, this morning, like a man who had rehearsed a great deal and trusted very little of what he had rehearsed.
"Miss Bennet. I thank you for permitting this call."
"You are welcome, Mr. Darcy. Please, sit, if you are able to; you have rather the look of a man who has been standing since dawn deciding what he means to say."
A small, unexpected smile crossed his face at this, the first genuine ease she had seen in him since his arrival.
"You are not far wrong, Miss Bennet. I confess I composed and discarded a considerable number of openings before setting out this morning, and find, now that I am here, that none of them serve the purpose nearly so well as I hoped. "
"Then perhaps you ought to abandon the rehearsed version entirely, and simply say what is true."
He sat, at her invitation, though he chose the chair nearest the window rather than the one directly across from her, as though some part of him required the small additional distance to steady himself.
"I have thought of little else these three weeks but the wrong I did you at Hunsford," he began, and his voice, though quiet, carried a directness she had not heard from him even in his letter.
"Not merely the manner of my proposal, though God knows that alone deserved every word of censure you gave it, but the pride beneath it, the assumption that my regard, however genuinely felt, entitled me to speak to you as though your own feelings, your own family, your own situation in life, were obstacles to be acknowledged rather than a whole person to be respected.
I have turned the conversation over so many times since that I could recite it to you now nearly word for word, and I find, with every recitation, fresh cause to be ashamed of my own conduct. "
"Mr. Darcy"
"Please, allow me to finish, Miss Bennet, for I do not know that I shall find the courage to begin again if I am interrupted now.
" He drew a breath. "I do not say this to solicit your pity, nor to suggest that my shame absolves me of the consequences my conduct has produced, consequences which have fallen, I am bitterly aware, rather more heavily upon you than upon myself.
I say it only because I have never, in the whole course of my life, been so thoroughly shown to myself as I was in that parsonage drawing room, and I find I am a considerably different man for the showing, whatever small comfort that transformation offers you now, given how little it can undo of what has already been done. "
Elizabeth found herself, listening to him, unable to summon any of the careful, guarded responses she had prepared for this conversation, for none of them seemed equal to the plain, unpolished honesty of what he had just offered her.
"I have not been entirely fair to you either, Mr. Darcy," she said, finally, "in the account I gave you at Hunsford.
I believed a great deal of ill of you on evidence that has since proven considerably less solid than I supposed, and I spoke it to you with a cruelty I have had cause to regret nearly as often as you claim to regret your own conduct. "
"You spoke only what you honestly believed, Miss Bennet, based upon information I had given you every reason to trust. I do not think you owe me an apology for having believed a version of events I myself had done nothing to correct until it was almost too late."
"Perhaps not an apology, then. But an acknowledgment, at least, that I was not entirely the wronged party I believed myself to be in that conversation, however genuinely wronged I was in some particulars of it."
They sat a moment in a silence that felt, to Elizabeth, considerably less uncomfortable than any of their previous exchanges, a silence in which something long tangled between them seemed, very cautiously, to be working itself loose.
"I have had news from Kent," she said, at last, "that troubles me considerably, and I do not know whether it is within your power to address it, but I find I must ask regardless, given the circumstances."
She told him, then, of Charlotte's letter, of Lady Catherine's discovery of the scandal's origin, of the threat hanging over Mr. Collins's living.
Darcy listened with a stillness that grew, as she spoke, into something harder and more determined, and when she had finished he was quiet a long moment, his jaw set in a way she recognized, with some unease, from his more forbidding moods.
"My aunt," he said, finally, "has always valued her own consequence above nearly everything else, including, I am sorry to say, the genuine welfare of the people whose lives she considers herself entitled to govern.
I will speak with her, Miss Bennet. I cannot promise you the outcome you wish, for she is not easily moved once her mind is fixed, but I will not permit Mrs. Collins's family to suffer for a matter that belongs, in its entirety, to myself and to no one else. "
"I did not ask this of you to add further weight to what you already carry, Mr. Darcy."
"You did not ask it at all, Miss Bennet, you merely told me of a difficulty, and I find I would rather act upon it than sit idle while people I have some power to protect continue to suffer for my failures.
" He rose, and there was something in the set of his shoulders, a purposefulness she had not seen in him since Hertfordshire, that told her the matter, whatever its outcome, would not be left to chance.
"I thank you for telling me. And I thank you, more than I know how to properly express, for receiving me today with a patience I had no right to expect, given everything that stands between us. "
He took his leave shortly after, the visit necessarily brief given the constraints of propriety, and Elizabeth stood a long while at the window after he had gone, watching his figure recede down Gracechurch Street, and found herself, for the first time in the whole of the last three weeks, entertaining a hope she had not permitted herself to name even privately: that whatever came of this tangled, publicly scrutinized courtship, the two of them, given time and honesty enough, might yet find their way to something genuine on the other side of it.