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She was not ready to be convinced. But she found that she had begun, against her own will, to wish to be.

***

Darcy finished it at six in the morning; the letter ran to four close sheets, in a plain hard hand, without a single flourish. He had written it as he would have written a deposition. There was no I trust, no I hope, no I beg; there was a list of dates, and amounts, and names, and the places where the proof might be had. He gave the Colonel’s direction and his own, and the name of Mr. Kendrick in Lincoln’s Inn, who had drawn up the papers and would answer any question put to him by a lady.

He did not mention what she had said. He did not mention what he felt. He put in the matter of the young sister, in a single paragraph, with no name and no place, and then he sat with the pen over the page for twenty minutes and did not write the next line. In the end he wrote only, I make no claim upon your belief. I wished you to have the facts. Do with them as you see fit. And signed it with the initials, and sealed it.

Darcy could not take it to her. He had given his word. He sat looking at the thing in his hand, at the heavy, plain, silent oblong of it, and understood, with something like despair, that all his life he had been able to command whatever he wished to be done, and that the only thing that mattered now was out of his power. Instead, it was Charlotte Collins who took it.

Mrs. Collins had come to Rosings that morning on some errand of her husband’s, and he met her by accident in the passage, with the packet in his fist; and she looked at it, and at him, and did not ask what it was. She only held out her hand.

He shook his head. “I cannot send this to her,” said Darcy. “I have promised.”

“I know.” Charlotte’s eyes were very steady. “I shall give it to her, if she will take it. I shall not press her.”

Charlotte gave the letter to Elizabeth that afternoon in the little vestry room, with the door shut. Elizabeth looked at it, and at her friend, and for a long moment did not touch it. She scarcely knew what to think.

“Is it a letter?” Elizabeth asked wearingly.

“He says it is an account and there is proof.” Her friend added, “You need not forgive him anything, Eliza.”

Elizabeth was thinking of her aunt’s letter, and Miss King, and a lieutenant in a red coat bowing over her hand in Meryton and saying he had been told his history was not to be spoken of. “Do I wish to read it, Charlotte? I do not know. I am very much afraid that I do.”

She paused for a moment, and then said, “No.” She took the packet. It was heavier than it looked. “I shall read it because I want the truth,” said Elizabeth, quite steadily, “and for no other reason in the world.” She told herself so, as she walked upstairs to her chamber.

CHAPTER 8

Elizabeth read it by the window of her chamber, with the door locked and a single candle, though it was not yet dark. She began with the intention of finding it false. She admitted this to herself without difficulty, being a person who disliked a lie in her own mind quite as much as in another’s, and she took up the first sheet in the posture of a magistrate, with her chin raised and her eyes narrowed, prepared to find the flaw. There would be one. There was always a flaw. A man who had written to her in that cold, bare, graceless way, with no word of regret and no softening of any kind, had the look of a man laying a snare, and she meant to be the one to spring it.

She was at the end of the first sheet before she knew it, and she had found no flaw. It was not the tale itself, though that was dreadful. It was the manner of its telling. She had expected eloquence, and been prepared to resist it, as she had resisted him in the parsonage drawing-room. Instead the sheets were laid out like the account-books of a hard honest steward: Michaelmas, 18—; the sum of three thousand pounds, paid to G. Wickham, Esq., in lieu of the living. Received the same day. Receipt enclosed. And there was the receipt.

She turned it over in her fingers; there was a small stained slip in a dashing hand that she knew well, for she had seen it on the title-page of a borrowed book, the long flourishing W, the proud downstroke of the k. It was dated and signed. She laid it down, and looked at it, and picked it up again.

Elizabeth had never, in all her life, been so disagreeably conscious of a fact. It sat upon the paper, small and flat and indifferent, the plain evidence of a man’s own hand, and every one of the things she had been told about it, in a drawing-room in Meryton, with the candour of a man pressing a trembling lip, rearranged themselves quietly around it and fell to pieces.

He has withheld from me the advantages designed for me. He had said so on the second evening of their acquaintance, to a young woman of whom he knew nothing. She had been pleased by it. She had thought, how honourable, to speak so freely of his wrongs, and yet with such good feeling. She had never once asked herself what sort of man tells his wrongs to a stranger at a card-party within an hour of meeting her; or why he was not afraid that the person he accused should arrive.

He had known that Darcy would not speak. That was what the account told her, in its hard and wordless way. He had counted upon it and had stood in her aunt’s drawing-room and told his story, secure in the certainty that the one man who might contradict it would rather be thought a villain than say the truth.

She put down the second sheet, and walked to the window, and stood with her forehead against the cold glass. The letter made her skin crawl; Mr. Wickham had been smooth, aggrieved, sorrowful, and to know that his words had been laced with a thread of menace so slight that it could have been denied in a court of law. I should be sorry to think that your friends, who hold you in such esteem, should ever have reason to learn what has passed between us.

She knew that voice, for it was the voice that had said, at Mr. Phillips’s supper-table, that it would be a very great pity for anyone to suffer on his account.

She read the paragraph about the sister three times. It did not name her, nor did it give a place, and no date save the summer before last, and no details but the barest; but it was clear enough that a person with the use of her wits could not mistake it. A girl of fifteen. A respectable woman paid to keep her. A man calling at the house when the brother was from home, and a plan, and a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. Elizabeth had a very good imagination. She sat down on the edge of the bed, and the room seemed to tilt, and she saw it all, quite horribly, in a quick succession of small clear pictures. A girl in a white frock, at a window. A man on a sofa with his boots off. A door.

She had thought him charming. It was a very small word, and it filled the whole room.

Elizabeth thought of her youngest sister, Lydia then, who was sixteen, and loud, and flushed, and followed the militia officers down the street like a pup on a string. She thought of Kitty. She thought of her mother in the parlour, holding up a bonnet, saying, Mr. Wickham is such a very agreeable young man. She put her hands over her face, and it was a long time before she lowered them.

What she felt, when she examined it, was not grief, and was not, quite, shame. It was something nearer to vertigo: the sensation of a person who has been standing upon a floor for months, and been told it was stone, and finds it is canvas stretched over nothing. How had she come to be so sure? She had been proud of her discernment. She had been vain of it; she had said a hundred times to Jane that she could read a character in a quarter of an hour, and had gone about the world in a happy glow of penetration, rejecting the proud man and accepting the pleasant one, and flattering herself all the while upon her impartiality. She had not been impartial. She had been prejudiced, with the whole force of her sharp, quick, eager mind; she had hated him for one slight, at a ball, in one evening, and she had taken up the first story that justified her.

And he had stood in that room, and been told he was the last man in the world, and said nothing. She slept very little that night. In the morning she rose before the household, dressed in the grey half-light, and went out by the back gate, with a shawl over her head and no particular plan, except that she knew, with a clarity that surprised her, where she would walk.

***

She was not the one he had promised not to seek. That was the thing she kept returning to as she went up the lane. He had put it into her hands. He had said, through Charlotte, in so many words, that if there was to be another meeting it would rest with her. She had thought it, at the time, a kind of insolence. She did not think so now. She went up the long chalk-white slope toward the Rosings palings, where the road ran between the park wall and a stand of old beeches, and she did it of her own free will and no one else’s, which made it, in its way, the bravest thing she had done in a month.

He was there. She had not been certain that he would be. Charlotte had said once that he rode early; and she had told herself that this was only an idle fact, of no particular use to anyone. But there he was, at the top of the rise, on a tall black horse, with his hat pulled low and his coat collar up against the wet, and he was riding the horse as a man rides who has not slept, hard and silent, with all his weight in the heels.