Chapter Twenty-Seven
The weeks that followed Darcy's unannounced visit to Gracechurch Street passed with a quietness Elizabeth had not experienced since long before Hunsford, a quietness that felt, after so many months of managed crisis, almost unfamiliar in its gentleness.
He called upon her regularly, always with Mrs. Gardiner's knowledge and generally with her presence somewhere near enough to satisfy propriety, and their conversations, freed at last from the weight of scandal and secondhand accusation, took on a character she had glimpsed only rarely before: easy, unguarded, full of the particular pleasure of two clever people who had finally stopped defending themselves against each other long enough to simply talk.
She met Georgiana properly at last, on a bright afternoon some three weeks after the reconciliation, and found in her precisely the shy, earnest warmth Darcy had described, along with an unexpected sharpness of observation that reminded Elizabeth, more than once during their first long conversation, of her own younger self.
"I have wanted to meet you for weeks," Georgiana confessed, with the particular frankness of a girl still young enough to say plainly what an older woman might have thought better of admitting.
"Fitzwilliam would not tell me your name at first, though I pressed him considerably, and when he finally did, I confess I have thought of very little else since beyond what manner of lady could make my brother reconsider the whole of his own character.
I am glad, now that I have met you, to find the reality considerably more agreeable than even my own imagining had allowed. "
"I hope I do not disappoint whatever imagining preceded me, Miss Darcy."
"You could not possibly disappoint it, Miss Bennet, for I confess my imagining ran chiefly to hoping you would not mind a sister considerably more awkward at conversation than yourself, and considerably less accomplished at the sort of wit I understand you possess in great abundance."
"I think," Elizabeth said, with real warmth, "that we shall get on very well indeed, Miss Darcy, whatever our differences of temperament, for I have always found the truest friendships are built on considerably less similarity than people generally suppose necessary."
Mr. Vane, too, remained a presence in Elizabeth's London acquaintance, though the nature of it had settled, exactly as he had predicted, into an easy and genuine friendship, unburdened by any hope on his part beyond the pleasure of her company.
He called at Gracechurch Street the week following her reconciliation with Darcy, offering his congratulations with a grace that confirmed, once again, the good opinion she had formed of him.
"I confess I saw this coming rather sooner than you gave me credit for, Miss Bennet," he said, with his familiar easy smile.
"You wore, that first evening we met, the particular expression of a lady already half in love with someone else entirely, whatever her own understanding of the matter presently allowed her to admit. "
"You are a very perceptive man, Mr. Vane, and a considerably kinder one than the general run of society deserves."
"I shall take the compliment, Miss Bennet, and offer in return my genuine wish for your happiness, wherever it presently seems to be leading you.
I hope you will permit me to remain your friend, whatever changes your circumstances undergo, for I have found your company too genuinely diverting to give up entirely for the sake of a disappointment I have, I promise you, very thoroughly recovered from. "
Word of Wickham reached them near the end of that same month, delivered by Colonel Fitzwilliam with evident satisfaction: the man had quit London entirely, his creditors having grown considerably less patient once certain particulars of his history began circulating through channels he could no longer control, and had taken up, it was reported, with a regiment stationed at some sufficient distance to trouble no one of their acquaintance further.
Elizabeth received the news with a simple, uncomplicated relief, understanding that her own plain speaking in that small tea house had done more to end his threat than any amount of careful management from more powerful hands might have accomplished.
It was Mrs. Fenwick, of all people, who provided, without any intention of doing so, the setting for what followed.
She held, near the season's close, an evening of some considerable consequence, a gathering large enough that half of London's interested drawing rooms found occasion to attend, and Elizabeth, receiving the invitation, understood at once that Mrs. Fenwick intended the occasion as a kind of culmination, a final opportunity to extract, before the season concluded and its principal entertainment dispersed to the country, whatever remained unconfirmed of the story that had occupied her curiosity these several months.
She accepted the invitation regardless, and found Darcy waiting for her upon her arrival with an expression she had not seen him wear before, a quiet, contained purposefulness that reminded her, faintly, of the resolve he had carried into Lord Ashworth's dinner weeks before.
"You look, Mr. Darcy, like a man with some particular design upon this evening."
"I have a design, Miss Bennet, though I confess I have not yet worked up the full measure of my courage to execute it. I wonder if you might grant me a few minutes of your company, away from the general crush, before the evening proceeds much further."
She followed him to a quieter corner of the room, near enough to remain within sight of propriety but far enough that ordinary conversation could not easily be overheard, and found him regarding her with an expression that carried, beneath its evident nervousness, something she recognized, with a small leap of her own heart, as genuine and settled hope.
"I have thought a great deal, these past weeks, about the manner in which I first asked you to marry me, and about how thoroughly that proposal failed to honour either your feelings or my own, delivered as it was in terms of condescension I have spent months learning to be properly ashamed of.
I resolved, some time ago, that should I ever find myself in a position to ask you again, I would do it very differently, and I find, tonight, that I have run out of patience waiting for some private, sheltered occasion to arrive, and would rather ask you here, plainly, before whatever witnesses Mrs. Fenwick has assembled, than wait a moment longer for the perfect privacy I have been telling myself the question required. "
Elizabeth felt her breath catch, understanding, with a clarity that arrived all at once, precisely what he intended, and precisely why he had chosen, this time, to intend it so publicly.
"Mr. Darcy"
"Allow me to finish, Miss Bennet, for I have rehearsed this considerably less than the last, and find I would rather say it plainly than lose the thread of it entirely.
" He drew a breath, and though his voice remained quiet, pitched for her ears alone, something in his bearing had straightened, had settled into the particular steadiness of a man who had finally stopped fearing the outcome of honest speech.
"The whole of this business began with a proposal made privately, and overheard, and turned by strangers into a story that never belonged to either of us.
I find I would like, very much, to give this second proposal back to the world that took the first one from us, not as a secret to be guessed at and distorted, but as a truth spoken plainly, by myself, in front of whoever cares to witness it.
I love you, Elizabeth Bennet, not despite the pride that nearly cost me your regard entirely, but through the dismantling of it, which you alone accomplished, and which has left me, I think, a considerably better man than the one who first and so badly asked for your hand at Hunsford.
I do not ask you now from any assumption that you must accept me, nor from any confidence that my consequence or my fortune entitles me to your answer.
I ask you because I have come to know you, these past months, as the truest and cleverest and most honest person of my acquaintance, and I find I would rather spend the whole of my life earning your good opinion than spend another day without the chance of it. Will you marry me, Miss Bennet?"
Elizabeth was aware, distantly, that the quiet corner they had chosen had not remained entirely private, that Mrs. Fenwick's evening had gone, in the space of Darcy's speech, considerably quieter than its earlier crush had been, conversation stilling in ever-widening circles as guests nearby recognized what was unfolding and passed word of it, in hushed murmurs, to those further off.
She was aware of it, and found, examining her own heart in the moment the awareness demanded, that she did not mind it at all, that the very publicness Darcy had chosen, the same publicness that had once cost them both so dearly, felt now like exactly the right setting for an answer she had no wish to give privately, in some shadowed corner where its truth might later be doubted or distorted by anyone who had not heard it spoken plainly.
"I will," she said, her voice carrying further than a whisper, deliberately, "and I will tell you, Mr. Darcy, before whatever witnesses presently attend us, that I accept you not for your fortune, nor your consequence, nor any of the considerations that first, unjustly, seemed to weigh so heavily against you in my own early judgment of your character, but because I have watched you, these past months, become precisely the man your letter promised you were trying to be, and I find I would rather spend my own life beside that man than beside any other I have ever had the good fortune to meet. "
The small crowd that had gathered, by the speech's conclusion, into an unmistakable audience broke, at this, into a murmur of genuine warmth, quite unlike the calculating curiosity that had governed so much of the season's earlier attention to their business, and Elizabeth, looking past Darcy's shoulder as he took her hand, saw Mrs. Fenwick herself standing near enough to have heard every word, her expression, for once, entirely without artifice, something close to genuine delight replacing the habitual calculation Elizabeth had grown so weary of these past months.
"Well," Mrs. Fenwick said, into the settling quiet, with the particular graciousness of a hostess claiming credit for an outcome she had done nothing to arrange and everything to provoke, "I do believe this has been the very best entertainment of my whole season, and I shall consider myself, Mr. Darcy, Miss Bennet, quite the proudest hostess in London for having provided the occasion of it. "
Darcy, to Elizabeth's considerable amusement, bowed to Mrs. Fenwick with a courtesy that carried, beneath its perfect correctness, a private irony only Elizabeth was positioned to fully appreciate.
"You have my gratitude, Mrs. Fenwick, for an occasion I could not have arranged half so effectively on my own. "
They were married at Longbourn some two months later, in a ceremony considerably smaller and quieter than the public spectacle of the proposal that had preceded it, attended by the whole of the Bennet family, by Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, by Colonel Fitzwilliam, standing at Darcy's side with an expression of unguarded happiness that suggested his own guilt over the whole business had, at last, been fully forgiven, and by Georgiana, seated beside Mrs. Gardiner with a smile she made no effort to contain.
Charlotte and Mr. Collins attended as well, travelling up from Kent with Lady Catherine's blessing, if not her presence, for that formidable lady had declined the invitation in terms that preserved, at least, some remnant of her accustomed dignity, while offering, in a private note to Darcy alone, a grudging acknowledgment that his choice, whatever her earlier objections, had proven itself, upon reflection, considerably more sensible than she had first been prepared to credit.
Mr. Vane sent his congratulations from a house party in Derbyshire, along with word that he had, in the intervening months, formed an attachment of his own to a young lady of considerable good sense, whose company he described, in terms that made Elizabeth laugh aloud upon reading them, as very nearly as diverting as her own, though he no longer required the comparison to recommend her.
Standing at the front of Longbourn's small church, watching Elizabeth walk toward him on her father's arm, Darcy found himself thinking, not for the first time these past months, of the whole strange, difficult course their courtship had taken: the worst proposal in England, delivered in pride and received in anger, turned by careless gossip into a public trial neither of them had invited, survived through honesty hard won and finally, gladly, offered freely, without fear, before witnesses who had once been strangers and had become, somewhere in the telling and retelling of their story, genuine well wishers of a match that had, in the end, proven itself considerably stronger for having been tested so publicly and so thoroughly.
He had come back from the worst moment of his life, he understood, watching her approach, not by escaping its consequences but by facing them, plainly and repeatedly, until the story the world had told of him no longer bore any resemblance to the man he had determined, through her example and her honesty, to become.
She reached him at last, and took his hand, and Elizabeth Bennet, soon to be Elizabeth Darcy, found herself thinking, as the ceremony began, that whatever the worst proposal in England had once cost them both, the man standing before her now had proven himself, through every difficult week that followed it, entirely worth the coming back to.