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“And you did not.” She said it almost like a question; Elizabeth seemed suspicious.

“No.” He swallowed. “I am told it would have been wrong.”

She was silent so long that he was forced, in the end, to look at her. She was regarding him with her head a little on one side, as she had done once at Netherfield, in the instant before she said something dangerous. It was not a look he had learned how to meet.

“It would have been wrong,” said Elizabeth, slowly. “Not because it was not kind. It would have been kind. But a man in Mr. Tarrant’s position does not need a gentleman’s pity. If you paid his debt, he should be grateful all his life, and he would never be free of you, and the agent would go on to the next farm.” She paused, and he saw her draw breath, as though what came next cost her something. “It is a hard thing to be helped, Mr. Darcy; and I think much easier for the person who is doing it.”

He was quite still. “What would you have done?” he asked, and it was perhaps the strangest thing he had ever asked a woman. He saw her take it as such. A flush came up beneath her skin, and she dropped her eyes, and for a moment there was nothing between them but the wind, the wet, and a baby crying somewhere in the house.

“I should have asked him, I think,” was her reply. She paused and moment, and then Elizabeth added, “I should have asked Mr. Tarrant before I did anything. I should have asked what he wished, and let him be the one to say it. If the record is wrong, it should be made right where everyone can see it, and not hushed up, and not forgiven. Forgiveness is the thing that keeps a man a debtor.”

Darcy was quiet. He considered what she said, and felt it was a sound argument. In fact, it was exactly right, and it was precisely what he had overlooked in his wretched state. “Thank you,” he said and then walked out towards his horse.

She stared at him as though he had spoken in Greek and watched him walk away.

At half-past twelve, Mr. Pruett sat in the Tarrants’ kitchen, on the only good chair, with the ledger open before him and an expression of great and unhappy attention. Abel Tarrant stood at the end of the table with his cap in his hands. A neighbour, called in as a witness, sat by the wall. Darcy himself stood in the corner with his arms folded and said not a single word.

It was Tarrant who asked the questions. It took a quarter of an hour. At the end of it the agent, who had begun by being very red, and passed through white, and was now merely grey, took up a pen and struck out three lines. Nobody thanked anyone. When it was over Tarrant looked once at the corner of the room, where the tall gentleman in the muddy coat was standing, and the gentleman said gravely, “I had nothing to do with it,” and went out.

Elizabeth watched him from the gate. She had meant to go in. She had told herself it was the basket, and Mrs. Collins, and the baby; and instead she had stood outside, with her hand upon the cold iron, and seen the whole thing through the open door as one watches a play from the back of a theatre. He had said nothing. He had not so much as looked toward the neighbours. He came out into the yard and untied his horse, as quietly as he might have done at an inn, and swung up with that stiff, careful movement of a man protecting his hand, and turned the horse’s head for the lane.

He did not look back. He did not look for her. He did not wait to see whether she had seen. It was a small thing. She knew it for a small thing, and she was angry with herself for noticing it at all. But she stood there for a long time afterwards, in the wet, with her fingers going numb upon the gate, watching the empty lane where a man had been, and did not trust the part of her that went on thinking about it.

CHAPTER 6

Maria Lucas was the person who first remarked that the invitation to Rosings was a very odd one.

“Only a few friends,” she read aloud, with the card held up to the window. “Tea and music, Thursday, at seven. And Colonel Fitzwilliam’s compliments, and he particularly hopes Miss Bennet will be well enough to attend.” She lowered it. “Why should he particularly hope? He is not even the one who writes it.”

“He is a very attentive man,” said Mrs. Collins, in a voice so perfectly even that Elizabeth looked up from her embroidery. Charlotte did not meet her eye.

Elizabeth went and would have looked marked not to, for she had, besides, a stubborn disinclination to be seen hiding in a parsonage from anyone. But she dressed with more care than the occasion warranted, and when she came into the drawing-room at Rosings on Mr. Collins’s arm, with Lady Catherine’s voice rolling toward her over the carpet like a coach on gravel, she put her chin up, as one does when going into a room with a pistol in it.

There were, indeed, only a few friends. There was her ladyship, enthroned. There was Mrs. Jenkinson, in the corner, with her knitting. There was Anne de Bourgh, who looked at the fire. There was the parson, bowing, and Charlotte, and herself, and by the window, with his back to the room, a tall figure in black.

Darcy did not turn at once. She saw his shoulders move, as of a man bracing against a wind. When he did turn he did it all at once, with a kind of heavy abruptness, and she saw that the bandage was gone from his hand and that the knuckles, healing, were still dark and raw. He looked at her once, a quick hard look with no pleasure in it, and then at the floor.

He said, rather quietly, “Miss Bennet.”

“Mr. Darcy,” she replied with a short bow.

That was all. And she was so struck by it, by the bare, wooden quality of the exchange, that she almost missed what was happening behind it.

The Colonel was moving. He did it so easily that no one marked it. He had risen to give Mrs. Collins a chair, and in the offering of the chair he had arranged her beside Mrs. Jenkinson at the fire, which left the sofa beneath the window empty but for a place at the end of it; and the place at the end of it, she observed, was the only seat in the room from which one could see both the pianoforte and the door.

Her ladyship, at the card-table, had been persuaded by some remark she could not catch into a game of piquet with Mr. Collins, which would occupy them till midnight. Miss de Bourgh was despatched, with a murmured word, to sit by her mother. And Darcy, somehow, without a syllable passing, had been left standing by the instrument with a sheaf of music in his hands.

There was nobody to turn pages for. There was only the sofa, and the pianoforte, and the empty space between them. Elizabeth had been brought up in a house in which five sisters were regularly disposed about drawing-rooms by their mother, and she knew a placing when she saw one. She stood very still.

“Miss Bennet,” said Darcy. “I did not arrange this.” He said it low and quick, without looking up, as a man says a thing under fire. She turned. He had gone a dull red along the cheekbone and his hands were not quite steady on the music.

She wore a frown. “I beg your pardon?”

“I did not know.” He paused and then clarified. “I do not know what my cousin is about.” He broke off, jerking his head slightly towards the sofa, and with a kind of savage honesty finished it. “You play or sit there.”

It was the most unvarnished remark she had ever heard from him. She looked at him a moment, with the draught from the window cold on her neck, and found, to her annoyance, that she believed him entirely. “Thank you,” said Elizabeth. “I think I shall take a turn about the room.”

She took a turn that brought her, by an accident she took pains to arrange, to the door; and there, in the passage with the baize curtain half drawn behind her, she waited.