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The long barn had no roof. It had had one a month ago, a sagging, wretched, daylight-spangled thing; now there was only a gaunt frame of rafters against a pale sky, and a stack of new timber in the yard, and a thin acrid smell of tar and sawn pine. There were six men upon the frame. Abel Tarrant was one of them, and his eldest boy, and a couple of labourers she did not know; and there was a seventh, on the ridge, forty feet from the ground, with his sleeves rolled and his coat flung over a post, hauling on a rope.

She knew him by the set of his shoulders before she knew his face.

Mr. Darcy was filthy. That was the first thing. His shirt was black with sweat and plastered to his back, and his hair, which was usually so carefully dark and neat, had come down over his forehead in a wet lock; there was a smear of tar along his forearm and a long scratch across the back of one hand. He was swearing. She could not hear the words, but she could see his mouth, and she could see the rope fighting him, and the savage economical jerk of his whole body as he hauled the beam up and over and into its place.

When it seated, he said something short, and Tarrant, on the other side of the frame, laughed. He did not look down.

Maria had stopped talking. After a moment she said, in a small awed voice, “Is that… Lizzy, is that Mr. Darcy?”

Elizabeth nodded. “I believe so.”

“But what is he doing?” Maria asked in disbelief.

“Mending a barn,” said Elizabeth with as level as a voice as she could muster.

Mr. Pruett, she learned afterwards, had been obliged to refund the false charges, and the timber had come out of his own pocket; Darcy had not paid for a plank of it. He had only turned up on the second morning with a pair of old gloves, and asked Tarrant what wanted doing, and done it. There had been no announcement. He had told no one. The Tarrant children, who had been paid a penny each to keep the dog quiet, said that the gentleman worked from six till dusk and ate his bread and cheese on the rafters, and did not say much at all.

She stood in the lane with her hands tight on her reticule and watched him do it. She could not have said how long. The sun moved; the beam rose; the men called to each other in the rough easy shorthand of a task shared. And all the while he did not turn his head. He knew, she was certain, that she was there. There was a stiffness in the line of his back, a held quality in his attention, that no one could have mistaken. But he did not look. He did not pause in his work, or climb down, or lift a hand. He had put it into her hands, and left it there, and gone on hauling rope.

“Come, Maria,” said Elizabeth, at last. “We shall be late.”

She walked home very fast. It was only when she reached the parsonage gate that she discovered she had no idea what Maria had said to her in the last half-mile.

***

“Do you still despise him?” asked Charlotte one evening; the lamp was lit in the small back parlour, and the two of them sat on either side of a very small fire with their work in their laps. Charlotte had asked it quite lightly, with her eyes on her hem. She had a way of putting the most enormous questions in the voice in which other people ask whether it is going to rain.

Elizabeth did not answer at once. She had known it would come. It had been coming for a fortnight, down the long dim corridor of their friendship, and she had been walking toward it with her eyes shut. She laid down her needle and looked at the fire.

“I do not know that despise was ever the word,” she said slowly. “I was angry. I was angrier than I have been in my life. I think I mistook it for contempt because it was so large.”

“And now?” Charlotte looked up.

“Now I find,” said Elizabeth, looking at her friend’s calm face, “that I cannot despise a man whose conduct has become so very difficult to dismiss.” Elizabeth thought it was a good sentence, and she was rather proud of it.

Charlotte merely looked at her.

“I do not say that I forgive him,” said Elizabeth, rather quickly. “Nor that I think him perfect. He is not perfect. He is stubborn and overbearing and a good deal too fond of his own opinion, and I should be astonished if three weeks in a barn had cured him of any of it. He will go back to Derbyshire, I dare say, and be as dreadful as ever.”

Charlotte’s eyes narrowed. “Do you think so?”

“No,” said Elizabeth, after a moment. “No, I do not.” She exhaled and thought to herself that it was a most disagreeable thing to have said. She picked up her needle again, and put it down. “It is only that I used to think,” she said, “that he was his pride. That there was nothing under it. That if you took it away, you would find only another sort of pride, all the way down. And I find that it is not so. There is a man in there, Charlotte, who knows it. Who sees it, quite clearly, and is ashamed, and is doing what he can. I had not thought him capable of that. I had not thought he could look at himself and not like what he saw, and go on looking.”

Charlotte seemed to appreciate the sentiment. “That is a good deal to have found out in a month.”

“It is not a thing to be forgiven,” said Elizabeth, with a sort of despairing precision. “It is only a thing to be taken into account.”

“Yes,” said Charlotte gently. “I think you are quite right, Eliza.”

Charlotte said nothing more. She was a woman who had married a man for his house, and she knew, better than most, the difference between esteem and something else, and she did not choose to press upon her friend a distinction that her friend was perfectly capable of drawing for herself.

***

Mr. Collins who told her the news, in the end. He did not mean to. He was holding forth at the breakfast-table on the Friday about the arrangements at Rosings, which he was always the first to know, in his capacity as a spiritual adviser and the keeper of a very sharp pair of ears; and in the course of a long and self-congratulatory discourse upon the condescension of Lady Catherine in having taken him into her counsels, he let fall, between two mouthfuls of egg, that the carriage had been ordered for Saturday week.

“The Saturday after next,” said Mr. Collins. “Her ladyship’s nephews depart on that day. The three weeks they were so good as to allow themselves will then be fully elapsed. I understand that Mr. Darcy has given the most express orders to his servant.”

Elizabeth was buttering a piece of bread. She did not stop. “Has he?” she said.