Chapter Twenty-Five
He did not send word ahead. He understood, walking the length of Gracechurch Street with a nervousness he had not felt approaching any engagement since his own coming of age, that whatever he meant to say to Elizabeth required saying without the shelter of an arranged visit, without the careful staging of propriety that had governed every previous exchange between them since Hunsford.
He wanted, for the first time in this whole exhausting business, simply to arrive, unannounced, and say plainly what he had failed, through cowardice and old habit both, to say when it mattered most.
Mrs. Gardiner received him with evident surprise, though she did not turn him away, and Elizabeth, summoned from an upstairs room, entered the small parlour with an expression that carried more wariness than warmth, a wariness Darcy understood he had entirely earned through the silence of the preceding week.
"Mr. Darcy." Her voice was carefully even. "I confess I did not expect you, given the tenor of our last correspondence."
"I know it, Miss Bennet, and I have come, without warning and without the shelter of a proper appointment, because I found I could not wait another day to say to you, in person, what I ought to have said the moment Caroline Bingley first planted her poison in my mind.
" He glanced toward Mrs. Gardiner, who, understanding the moment's requirements with the particular grace of a woman who had watched this whole difficult courtship unfold from close quarters, withdrew to the adjoining room with a quiet excuse, leaving them as private as the proprieties, stretched to their furthest reasonable limit, allowed.
"I was wrong," Darcy said, once they were alone, the words arriving without the careful architecture he had rehearsed the whole length of Gracechurch Street.
"Not merely wrong to believe an account delivered by a woman I knew, from long experience, to wish you ill.
Wrong in the whole manner of my response to it, which was not to question, not to seek you out and ask you plainly whether the account bore any truth, but to retreat into a silence I had spent weeks trying to teach myself was unworthy of the regard I claimed to feel for you.
I let fear govern me, Miss Bennet, fear of a fresh disappointment, and in doing so I inflicted upon you a considerably worse injury than any disappointment could have produced: I let you learn of my doubt not from myself, but from my own cousin, who was obliged to discover the whole business through his own inquiry because I had not the courage to bring it to you directly. "
Elizabeth was quiet a long moment, studying him with an expression he could not entirely read, though something in it, he thought, had softened very slightly from the wariness of her greeting.
"You hurt me, Mr. Darcy," she said, finally, "considerably more than I expected, given how carefully I had begun to trust the man who wrote me those two letters.
I had thought, foolishly perhaps, that we had moved beyond a stage where either of us would permit gossip and secondhand accounts to govern our understanding of the other, and I found, in your silence, a fear that we had not moved so far from Hunsford as I had allowed myself to believe. "
"We had not moved far enough, evidently, or I should have come to you the moment Caroline's account first troubled me, rather than a full week later, after your own courage in writing to me directly did the work my own courage ought to have done considerably sooner.
" He crossed the small distance between them, close enough now that he could see the particular fatigue in her face, the strain of weeks of managing a crisis neither of them had invited.
"I do not ask you to forgive this quickly, Miss Bennet, nor do I ask it lightly, for I understand, more fully than I did even at Hunsford, how much my own failures have already cost you.
I ask only that you believe this: whatever fear governed my silence this past week, it was never a fear born of doubting your character, but a fear of losing something I have come to value beyond nearly everything else in my life, a fear so complete that it made me, briefly, precisely the coward I had spent weeks trying to prove myself no longer to be. "
Elizabeth's composure, which had held through the whole of his speech, wavered, very slightly, at this, and Darcy saw, with a hope he scarcely permitted himself to feel, something in her expression that had not been present when he entered.
"I went to Mr. Wickham myself," she said, after a moment, her voice carrying a note of something between pride and residual anger, "and told him plainly that his scheme would not succeed, and that I would expose the whole of the Ramsgate business if he attempted any further extortion.
I did not wait for you to manage it, Mr. Darcy, nor for anyone else.
I have grown considerably weary, these past weeks, of having my own affairs managed by other people, however well intentioned, while I stood by and permitted it. "
"I am glad of it," Darcy said, with genuine feeling.
"You should never have needed to wait, Miss Bennet, for me or for anyone, to defend what was rightfully your own to defend.
I find, the more I come to know you, the more I understand that whatever protection I once believed I ought to offer you, you have always been considerably more capable of providing for yourself than my own presumption allowed me to credit. "
"That," Elizabeth said, and something in her voice had softened now beyond mistaking, "is perhaps the first entirely honest thing you have said to me since Hunsford that required no letter, and no rehearsal, and no careful architecture to arrive at."
"I have had a great deal of practice, this past month, in learning to say true things plainly, Miss Bennet, whatever it costs my composure to say them. I find I would rather risk the discomfort of plain speech than lose you again to the silence my old habits nearly cost me."
They stood a long moment in a silence that carried none of the strain of their earlier exchanges, a silence in which something long circling between them, since Hunsford, since the letter, since every careful, watched conversation conducted beneath the scrutiny of London's curious drawing rooms, seemed, at last, to settle into something neither of them any longer needed to guard against.
"I do not think," Elizabeth said, finally, "that I am prepared to answer, this very moment, everything your visit today invites me to answer.
But I will tell you this, Mr. Darcy: I do not wish you to leave believing yourself unforgiven, for I find, examining my own heart honestly, that I forgave you the moment you stood before me and said plainly what you ought to have said a week ago, rather than continuing to hide behind whatever fear kept you silent.
What I require now is not further apology, but time, and honesty, and the ordinary, unremarkable work of two people learning to trust each other properly, without gossip or letters or secondhand accounts standing between us. "
"Then I will give you whatever time you require, Miss Bennet, and I will spend it, gladly, in the ordinary work of earning that trust properly, however long the earning takes."