The Best Room in the House #2
Jane tired before the ladies left the dining room.
She did her best to conceal it, which deceived no one who loved her and almost everyone who did not.
Mr Bingley noticed at once, rose before the servant could reach her chair, and looked so distressed by her pale smile that Elizabeth was obliged to like him more than was convenient.
“I am quite well,” Jane said.
“You are quite exhausted,” Elizabeth replied, taking her arm.
Miss Bingley rang for a maid with admirable promptness. “You must go up directly, my dear Miss Bennet. We shall not hear of your overexerting yourself.”
For once, Elizabeth believed she meant it.
Jane allowed herself to be led upstairs, though she protested softly for the first half of the way and leaned rather more heavily on Elizabeth for the second.
By the time she was settled, the colour in her cheeks had risen again.
“You see,” Elizabeth said, drawing the coverlet over her, “this is what comes of appearing at dinner to please Mr Bingley.”
Jane closed her eyes. “I did not appear to please Mr Bingley.”
“No. You appeared because you are an angel of self-command, and he happened to be pleased by it.”
“Lizzy.”
“I am only stating facts. Mr Darcy tells me that is not the same as compliment.”
Elizabeth left Jane smiling and took up the little volume she had carried from Longbourn. It was Mr Bennet’s copy of Cowper, pressed upon her before she left with the assurance that illness was improved by poetry, provided one did not read too much of it aloud.
When she came downstairs again, the drawing room was occupied. The card table had been drawn out, Miss Bingley sat with Mrs Hurst and Mr Hurst, Mr Bingley stood nearby with a book he was not reading, and Mr Darcy was at the far side of the room, looking on with no great interest.
“Miss Eliza,” Miss Bingley called, “you must join us.”
Elizabeth glanced at the table. The coins beside Mr Hurst’s elbow were arranged with careless abundance.
“You are very kind, but I am a poor player.”
“All the better,” said Mr Hurst, waking at once to the sound of disadvantage.
Elizabeth smiled. “I meant morally poor, sir. I dislike losing what I might have spent on books.”
Mr Bingley laughed. “Then we must play lower.”
“Pray do not alter the game for me. I shall only disturb it.” She looked towards the door. “I think I shall find a book instead.”
“You have one already,” Mr Bingley said, noticing the small volume in her hand.
“So I have,” Elizabeth said. “But a borrowed house requires borrowed books. It is a rule I have just invented.”
Mr Bingley accepted this with all the good humour due to invented rules. “Then I hope Netherfield does not disappoint you.”
Mr Darcy’s attention shifted at once.
“The library is just across the passage,” Miss Bingley said, with a smile that suggested she thought it a very odd refuge. “Though I cannot promise there is anything there to tempt you. Charles chose Netherfield for its shooting, not its books.”
“Then I shall lower my expectations accordingly,” Elizabeth said.
She left them to their cards. The library door resisted her at first, then yielded with a scrape that seemed louder in the quiet passage than it had any right to be.
Elizabeth glanced back, half expecting someone to have heard, but the drawing room had already returned to cards and conversation.
Inside, the library was dimmer than she remembered, the fire low, the curtains drawn against the cold, and the shelves rising on three walls with an old familiarity that surprised her more than it ought.
She took a volume at random, discovered it to be sermons, and returned it with all the respect due to a book that had failed her expectations so completely.
The next shelf was more promising. A worn copy of The Spectator stood between a history of the Peloponnesian War and a volume of Cowper, and Elizabeth drew it out with a sense of having found an old acquaintance.
She carried it to the chair nearest the hearth, setting her own little book on the table beside her.
It was only when she had opened The Spectator that the room arranged itself around an older memory: herself at twelve, Jane at fourteen, and Miss Emma Robinson declaring that no one could possibly find her in the library if only everyone would stop looking in the obvious places.
Emma had been wrong, of course. Emma was often wrong in matters requiring silence, patience, or any willingness to remain still.
She had sneezed within the minute, Jane had laughed, and Elizabeth, who had been seeking with more enthusiasm than method, had found her half-hidden behind the curtain, flushed with triumph and entirely visible from the hearth.
She smiled at the recollection and looked down at her book.
A few minutes passed. The drawing room voices rose and fell across the passage, softened by distance and the unreliable door.
Elizabeth read two pages of The Spectator without retaining much of either, then heard a light knock.
Before she could answer, the door opened with its usual complaint, and a maid appeared carrying a branch of candles.
“Oh,” the girl said, stopping short. “Begging your pardon, miss. I thought the room was empty.”
“It is not very far from being so,” Elizabeth said. “You may come in.”