Chapter Twenty-Six
The letter from Lady Catherine arrived at Longbourn before it arrived in Kent, forwarded by Charlotte with a covering note of evident and considerable relief, and Elizabeth, reading it in the privacy of her aunt's parlour some days after Darcy's visit, found herself obliged to read it twice before she fully credited its altered tone.
Darcy had written to his aunt, she learned from Charlotte's accompanying explanation, not once but twice in the preceding fortnight, the first letter a firm and detailed account of the whole business, laying the blame for the scandal's origin plainly at the feet of circumstances entirely outside Mr. and Mrs. Collins's control, and the second, arriving only days later, a considerably more pointed communication reminding his aunt, in terms Charlotte described as "startlingly direct, for I had not known your Mr. Darcy capable of such plain speaking with so formidable a relation," that any withdrawal of patronage from Mr. Collins's living, undertaken as punishment for a matter in which the Collinses bore no fault whatsoever, would be regarded by Darcy himself as a personal injury, and would be answered, he had made plain, by his own withdrawal of whatever family countenance and connection Lady Catherine presently valued from her nephew's continued good opinion.
Lady Catherine's letter to Charlotte, forwarded now to Elizabeth, retained a great deal of its accustomed hauteur, but the substance beneath the tone had shifted considerably.
Reading between its imperious lines, Elizabeth understood that her ladyship had determined, upon reflection, that the fault in the whole unfortunate business belonged entirely to careless servants and idle gossips, and not, as she had first supposed, to any impropriety on the part of the Collinses, whose conduct she now pronounced entirely without reproach.
The living remained secure, and Lady Catherine trusted the matter might now be permitted to rest, with no further disturbance to the peace of her parsonage.
It was, Elizabeth understood, as complete a retreat as Lady Catherine's considerable pride was ever likely to permit her, and she felt, setting the letter down, a wave of genuine relief that surprised her with its intensity, relief not merely for Charlotte's sake, though that alone would have been sufficient cause, but for the fresh evidence it offered of exactly what Darcy was prepared to spend, in influence and family standing both, to set right the consequences of a business he had spent weeks working to repair.
She wrote to Charlotte that same evening, sharing in her friend's relief and adding, though she scarcely knew how to explain the sentiment fully even to herself, a private gladness that the man responsible for Lady Catherine's change of heart was one whose regard she had, at last, begun to trust as thoroughly as she had once, at Hunsford, distrusted it.
She thought, folding the letter for sending, of the whole strange, difficult course this business had taken since that first garbled account had arrived at Longbourn weeks before: the public exposure she had never invited, the friendships tested and, in Mr. Vane's case, gracefully redirected into something honest, the threat from Wickham met and answered by her own hand, the doubt that had nearly undone everything and the honesty, finally, unguarded and unrehearsed, that had mended it.
She thought of Darcy's face, standing before her in her aunt's parlour, saying plainly what fear had kept him from saying a week sooner, and found, examining her own heart with the same honesty she had demanded of him, that whatever remained unresolved between them, the essential question, the one she had once believed answered forever at Hunsford, had long since answered itself in an entirely different direction.