Page 26

Richard nodded slowly. “Yes, you are. You are surrendering. You have eaten humble pie by the bucket. You have taken her words in the teeth, and not hit anything but a wall. And at the exact moment when the thing is within your grasp, you want to lay down your arms and.”

Darcy cut him off, and replied directly, “I am not laying down anything!” The rebuttal came out harder than he intended. Darcy heard it ring in the quiet room, and drew breath, and went on more slowly, in a low and level voice.

“I have not given up what I feel. Do not mistake me. I have not stopped. I shall not stop if I live to be ninety. But I stood in that barn last night, Richard, and I watched her stand there, white as paper, in front of a hundred and fifty people. And I thought, I did this. Not my aunt. Not you. I did. Because I have stood between her and every comfortable way out of this since the night in the parsonage, with my name and my money and my sheer damned weight, until she cannot walk across a barn without being made the subject of embarrassment.”

“But, you defended her!” Richard urged.

“No,” Darcy shook his head. “I made it worse.” He rubbed a hand across his face and felt the stubble rasp. “I told Lady Catherine about my intentions; instead I should have left Miss Bennet alone. I have caused her embarrassment of the acutest kind. I am ashamed.”

The Colonel was silent. The sun had come up above the park wall, and the first thin ray of it fell across the parlour carpet and lit the dust over the cold hearth. Somewhere in the great house a door shut. Darcy stood with his hands hanging, mud-stained and unshaven and very tired, and the Colonel looked at him, and found that he could not answer.

“I should have liked to see it through,” said Richard at last. His voice was rough. “I should have liked to win.”

Darcy looked at his cousin solemnly. “I know.” Darcy put out a hand; it was a thing they had not done since boyhood, and Richard took it after a moment, and held it hard, and neither of them said anything more.

***

On the Saturday following the event, Elizabeth had been very ill, or had said she was. She had kept her chamber with a headache, and received Charlotte’s anxious tray, and lain with her face to the wall thinking of nothing. On the Sunday she had gone to church, with her bonnet pulled down, braced for the whole village to turn and stare. They had not. They had looked, quite kindly, and then looked away. A woman in the third pew had smiled at her. And the great Rosings pew, with its carved canopy and its red cushions, had held Lady Catherine, bolt upright and grey in the face, and Miss de Bourgh, and a tall silent man in black who sat with his eyes on the lectern and did not turn his head once.

Mr. Darcy left before the last hymn.

Monday came, and no one called. On the Tuesday she walked to the Tarrants’ farm, as she had done every week, and found Abel Tarrant mending a hurdle and his wife hanging out the wash, and neither of them said a word of Mr. Darcy, though she had half hoped that they might. On the Wednesday the post brought a letter from Jane, cheerful and brief, which said nothing about meadows. On the Thursday she realised that she had not seen the Colonel in six days.

At first, Elizabeth found it to be an immense relief. She said so to herself very firmly, several times a day. She had asked to be let alone. She had asked it of the Colonel in the gallery, and of the Colonel again behind the barn, and of the Colonel’s cousin, in the garden, in as many words. She had said that she would not be managed, nor arranged, nor presumed upon, nor made the subject of anyone’s plan. And lo, it was done. She had been heard.

A great weight, which had sat upon her for a month, had been quietly lifted, and she could walk to the post-office without wondering whether a tall black figure would be coming round the corner. She could sit in a room without hearing a particular step in the passage. She could breathe. It was most satisfactory. And she found, on the fourth morning, that she was standing at the window of the little back parlour with her embroidery in her lap, not working it, listening for a horse.

She put the needle through the linen with some violence. Do not be absurd, said Elizabeth to herself. You wished it. It is what you asked for. She worked three stitches in a very straight line. He has understood, at last. He has behaved as a gentleman. You ought to be grateful. She was grateful. She was extremely grateful. It was only that the quiet, which she had believed would feel like peace, had begun to feel rather like the quiet in a house where a clock has stopped. She kept listening for the tick.

There was the other thing, too, which she liked even less. In the course of those four days, turning the matter over in her mind as one turns a stone in a pocket, she had come to the conclusion that he had not been told to let her alone. He had decided it. She was nearly certain. There had been a particular quality in that long grey silence at the church, in the manner of his going out, which was not that of a man who has been disappointed or dismissed. It was the manner of a man who has set something down on purpose.

He was not going to come, she finally decided. No one was going to send. If she wished to see him, she would have to go and find him. He had not said so; though he had not needed to. She wondered whether he had finally accepted her answer. It would be like him, she thought, to take a refusal quite literally, once he had been brought at last to believe it. And she wondered, with a small cold drop in the pit of her stomach, whether she were disappointed that he had. It was a horrible question. It sat in the parlour with her all afternoon, like an uninvited guest, and would not be put out.

On Thursday evening, at a quarter to nine, when the household was at prayers and the lamp was burning low, Elizabeth went out into the garden alone and stood beneath the pear tree and looked up the lane toward Rosings.

There was a light in one of the upper windows, far off through the trees. She did not know whose it was. She did not wish to know. It was a small yellow square, quite steady, in the dark mass of the great house, and she stood and looked at it for what seemed to her a very long time.

The distance was only a mile. Elizabeth thought that she could put on her bonnet, and walk up the avenue, and ask for the Colonel, or for Mrs. Jenkinson, or merely for a book; she could be at the door in twenty minutes. She could say that she had come to enquire after Lady Catherine’s health. She could say anything. And he would come out, with that stiff careful face, and bow, and ask nothing at all, and she would be standing in the hall of Rosings at nine o’clock at night, of her own free will, with nothing in her hand.

She took a step toward the gate. Then she stopped, and put her hand to her forehead, and laughed, a short, helpless, mortified little laugh, quite audible in the stillness.

“No,” said Elizabeth, aloud, to the pear tree. “Certainly not; it is not to be thought of.” She went indoors and said her prayers, and brushed her hair, and put out the candle, and lay on her back with her eyes open in the dark.

And she thought of it again. And again. She thought of it until the clock struck midnight, and one, and two, and the light across the lane had long since gone out; she thought of it with the cold, careful, shamefaced persistence of a person who has been told that something is quite impossible, and has found that she can think of nothing else.

CHAPTER 15

It is a curious fact that a person who is being pursued has no leisure to think. Elizabeth discovered it in the second week of the silence. For a month she had been defending herself: against a proposal, against a Colonel, against a barn full of eyes. Every hour had been a skirmish. She had gone about the parsonage with her chin up and her answers ready, as one carries a lighted candle through a draught, with all her attention upon keeping it burning; and it was only now, when the draught had dropped, that she found how very tired her arm was.

Nobody asked her anything. Nobody required her to be anywhere. There was nothing in the world to resist. And so, because there was nothing else to do, she began to think.

She thought of the proposal first. It was where she always began; it was the fixed point, like a lighthouse on a coast, from which every other bearing was taken. She remembered the hearth-rug and the clenched hand. She remembered, with perfect clarity, the inferiority of your connexions, and the way he had said it, without a flicker, as a man names the price of a horse. She did not soften it. She had no wish to. It had happened, and it had been vile, and she would be a fool to let anything that came after persuade her that it had not.

But she found, when she turned her head, that the coast had other lights upon it. There was a muddy yard, and a man in a borrowed coat who had said I had nothing to do with it and walked out of a kitchen before anyone could thank him. There was a road in the long gold light, and a pair of bloodied hands, and the sound of his voice saying higher, and not so tight, and here. There was a garden. She remembered the garden best of all. She remembered a man leaning against a wall in the dark, hearing the worst she had to say, and saying I was wrong in a voice like a stone dropped into a well.

She did not know what to do with them. They did not fit. They sat, side by side, in her mind, the man who had said the one thing and the man who had done the other, and refused to be reconciled. It was not that she had been wrong. She was quite certain of that. She had judged him upon the evidence she had, and the evidence had been bad. It was only that the evidence had kept coming in.

She saw Mr. Darcy on the Tuesday. She had not gone looking. She had gone, as she said to herself with an air of great sincerity, to take the air; she had walked down the lane beyond the church as far as the Tarrant farm, with Maria Lucas chattering at her elbow about a bonnet, and she had come round the corner by the elm and stopped dead in the road.