Chapter Nineteen
The account reached Darcy through Caroline Bingley, delivered with a satisfaction she did not trouble herself to entirely disguise, at a dinner he had attended chiefly, he later reflected, from an obligation to Bingley that he had come, by the evening's end, to regret honouring.
"You will have heard, I suppose," Caroline said, seating herself beside him with a deliberateness he recognized, too late, as calculated, "of Miss Eliza Bennet's rather remarkable defense of your character at Mrs. Fenwick's gathering this week.
The whole of London is speaking of it, Mr. Darcy.
She stood before half a dozen witnesses, I am told, and delivered quite a speech upon your private tenderness and your principled nature, in terms considerably warmer, I think, than mere acquaintance generally produces.
Some are saying she has been carrying your letter about with her, showing it to particular friends as evidence of the affection she has secured, though whether secured is quite the word, given the circumstances of the original proposal, I confess I am uncertain. "
Darcy felt something cold settle beneath his ribs, a stillness that was not, he would understand only later, the stillness of a man receiving true information calmly, but the stillness of a man too willing, in a moment of fresh vulnerability, to believe the worst of a report he ought to have questioned considerably more carefully before accepting it.
"She said this," he repeated, "before witnesses."
"So I am told, and by more than one source, Mr. Darcy, so I do not think the account can be entirely without foundation.
I confess I did not think Miss Eliza the sort to parade a private correspondence for the sake of her own consequence, but then, I have always found her rather more calculating than her wit generally lets on, whatever charm the wit itself possesses. "
Darcy said nothing further to Caroline that evening, but the seed she had planted found unexpectedly fertile ground in a mind already exhausted by weeks of managing crisis after crisis, weeks of Wickham's threats and his own cousin's confessed carelessness and the accumulating strain of watching a story he could not fully control continue to reshape itself into forms he had no power to prevent.
He had believed himself, until that evening, to have found some solid ground in his understanding with Elizabeth, however fragile and unspoken that understanding remained.
Caroline's account, however unreliable its source, struck at the one certainty he had permitted himself to hold onto through the whole of this ordeal: that whatever else the gossip cost them both, Elizabeth herself would not be the one to wield his private confession as a weapon for her own advantage.
He did not seek confirmation. This, he would understand later, was his greatest failure in the whole business, greater even than the pride of Hunsford, for pride had at least been honestly felt, while this new withdrawal was built upon nothing sturdier than an account delivered by a woman he knew, from long acquaintance, to bear Elizabeth no genuine goodwill.
He did not call at Gracechurch Street the following week.
He did not write. He answered, when Fitzwilliam inquired after the state of his understanding with Miss Bennet, only that circumstances had grown more complicated than he had anticipated, and offered nothing further by way of explanation, retreating instead into the old reserve he had spent weeks working to dismantle, a coldness that felt, even to himself, like the wearing of a familiar and uncomfortable garment he had believed himself finished with entirely.
He told himself he was protecting himself from a fresh disappointment.
He told himself the account, if true, changed nothing of substance, that Elizabeth's motives, whatever they were, could not undo the genuine growth he had experienced these past weeks.
He told himself several things, in the privacy of his own study, that he did not, upon later and more honest reflection, entirely believe even as he was telling them to himself.
What he did not do, in the whole of that week, was the one thing that might have resolved the matter within a single conversation: he did not ask her.