Page 1

CHAPTER 1

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

—Jane Austen

Elizabeth Bennet had pleaded a headache, and it was nearly true. The pain had begun, in any case, as a very small one, an inconvenience of the temples that might have been borne through an evening at Rosings had she wished to bear it. But she had not wished it. She had listened that afternoon to Colonel Fitzwilliam’s careless and good-humoured account of a friend whom his cousin had lately preserved from an imprudent connexion, and she had put together, with a swiftness that left her cold to the fingertips, the name of that friend, the particulars of the lady, and the plain, appalling fact that Jane’s unhappiness had been arranged by a gentleman who now sat at Lady Catherine’s card-table.

To be civil to Mr. Darcy that evening, over quadrille, was beyond her, at least she told herself so. Elizabeth had begged Charlotte to make her excuses, watched the party depart in Mr. Collins’s wake, and shut herself in the parsonage drawing-room with her sister’s letters, where she had read them over until the sentences ceased to be words and became only the shape of a grief.

The clock on the mantel had struck seven, and she was upon the third reading of a paragraph she knew by heart, when she heard a step in the passage that was not any step she expected.

She had heard the bell before she knew the visitor. Maria Lucas, who was timid, could not have rung so; she knew that must. The ring was a short, decisive pull, and it was followed by a murmur at the door, the maid’s flustered answer, and a pause that went on a little too long. Elizabeth had time to put Jane’s letter into her pocket and to rise, and no time at all to arrange her face, before the door opened to the last person she expected, nor desired, Mr. Darcy walked in.

He did not speak. Instead, he bowed, very slightly, and she returned it, and for the space of a breath they regarded one another across the width of Mrs. Collins’s second-best carpet like two persons who have each arrived at the wrong house.

“Mr. Darcy,” she said at last. “The house is at Rosings.” She hesitated for a moment, before she added, “I understood you were of the party.”

He nodded once. “I was.” It was not an answer, and he seemed to know it. He crossed to the window and stood with his back half turned, one hand closing and opening at his side; then he crossed back to the hearth, and Elizabeth, who had never in five months’ acquaintance seen him at a loss for a deliberate movement, watched him with the particular uneasiness of one who sees a clock begin to strike thirteen.

“You are unwell,” he said. “I am sorry for it. Mrs. Collins mentioned a headache. Are you any better?” He stopped. “I beg you will sit.”

It was her own drawing-room, or Charlotte’s at the least, and she was a little astonished to be directed in it. Elizabeth sat, because standing seemed to give the thing a dignity she did not wish it to have. He did not sit. He remained upon the hearth-rug with his eyes fixed on a spot some inches above her head, and she understood, with a sinking of curiosity into dread, that he was about to recite.

“In vain have I struggled,” he began.

And there it was; she heard the whole of it arrive, and she could not at first make it mean what it meant. He had struggled. Against what? Against Hunsford, perhaps, or against the length of the evening, against the dullness of Lady Catherine’s conversation. She waited for the sense of the sentence to complete itself, and he said, in a voice that tried to be steady and succeeded only in being hard, that his feelings would not be repressed, and that she must allow him to tell her how ardently he admired and loved her.

Elizabeth did not move. Her first sensation, if she was honest, was not astonishment at all, but a kind of fierce and offended suspicion that she was being made game of; it was the only reading that agreed with what she knew. This man had refused to dance with her at Meryton because she was only tolerable.

He had looked at her, throughout most of their short acquaintance, as one looks at a distant and unpromising hill. He had separated Jane from the one man she loved, and sat at dinner afterward in a handsome coat. It was not to be believed that he stood here, in a plain parsonage, declaring himself, and she was just beginning to compose a reply to the jest when she observed his colour.

But, he was not jesting. He was white about the mouth, and his hand had stopped its terrible opening and closing and gripped the mantelpiece instead, and she knew in an instant, with the sick clearness of a thing seen too late, that every word he had spoken was true.

And, worst still, Mr. Darcy went on. He had come, it seemed, with a plan of campaign. He spoke of her connexions as one lists a string of hazards; he mentioned the inferiority of her family, the degradation of such an alliance, the objections of his own judgment and his own relations, which he had weighed, and found weighty, and set aside.

He had been so good, so obliged, he explained, to overcome them. He had been kept from her side by his better sense and had come to her anyway, and he trusted that she would recognise the force of what he was prepared to sacrifice, and make him the happiest of men. He stopped. The silence in the room was so complete that she could hear, through the wall, the maid in the kitchen dropping a spoon.

Elizabeth looked at him. There was nothing in his countenance that asked; she saw that at once. He was not afraid. He looked, in that dreadful pause, as a man quite pleased with himself.

It came to her, in that horrid, silent moment that she ought to be moved. Elizabeth had never been loved by anyone of consequence, nor, to her certain knowledge, by anyone at all with any conviction, and she had always supposed, in the idle hours of girlhood, that such a declaration must be accompanied by some stir of the heart even where it could not be returned. She searched herself for the stir. She found only that her hands, in her lap, had gone quite steady.

“I am sorry,” she said, and was surprised at her own voice, which was low and civil and sounded as though it belonged to someone else, “for the pain I may give you. I had not thought it possible that you should feel as you describe. Your sentiments do you credit, if they are sincere, and I thank you for them. But I cannot return them.”

He was arrested, and momentarily seemed to still because he said, “Cannot?”

Elizabeth shook her head and looked down at the worn carpet. “I cannot accept you, sir.”

He stared at her; it was not the stare of a man hurt, but of one whose language has suddenly proved a foreign tongue, and she thought, even then, with some distant mercy, that nobody had ever before told him no. “You are refusing me,” he said, it sounded incredulous, almost in the form of a question.

Elizabeth looked up, into his face just then, and said, “I am.”

He was still a moment, and then he scoffed, as if not believing his current predicament. “May I be permitted to ask why, with so little attempt at civility, I am thus rejected?”

The word civility should have warned her, but the better temper that had carried her through the first minute had begun, very quietly, to desert her. And, she suddenly felt compelled to inform Mr. Darcy of all his great, no, his vast defects.

“I might as well enquire,” said she, “why, with so evident a design of insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character. Was this not some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil? But I have other reasons; and of consequence; I am sure you are aware.” She almost spit out the last statement.

He straightened, and could hardly speak. He seemed to only be able to say, “I am not aware.”