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He nodded ridiculously. “A most orderly gentleman. His man tells the housekeeper that every trunk has been packed these four days. And there has not,” said Mr. Collins, with some satisfaction, “been the slightest suggestion of any wish to extend the visit.”

Elizabeth went on buttering the bread, and it took her a very long time to finish, and when she had finished she found that she had buttered both sides.

Mr. Darcy is going. She had known it, of course. She had known, from the first week, that the time must come; it had been written in the calendar of the whole affair, like the date of an execution. But it was one thing to know it as a fact in the mind, and another to be given a day, and a carriage, and a servant with a trunk. Saturday week. Twelve days. She counted them without meaning to, as one counts the stairs in a dark house.

And he has made no effort to see me. She went over it carefully. She went over it that night, lying on her back in the dark; she went over it the next day, walking up and down the garden. Twelve days, and he had not sent a note. He had not walked up the lane. He had not so much as cast a glance at the parsonage window, as he passed it on his way to the Tarrants’. He was going to go, she saw, quite quietly, as he had come, with every trunk packed and every promise kept, and not one word more would be said unless she said it herself.

She stopped, at the end of the pear walk, with her hand on the cold bark of the tree. She was a woman who had told him, in a lighted room, that he was the last man in the world. Elizabeth stood very still under the pear tree, with her heart going like a hammer, and the leaves coming down around her one by one.

CHAPTER 16

The last tile went on the Tarrant barn at four in the afternoon on the Wednesday, and nobody said anything about it. Darcy had come down off the ridge by the ladder, since there was no other way, and stood in the yard with his gloves hanging from his belt and the new roof ticking and settling in the sun above him. His palms were raw. The blisters of the first week had broken, and healed, and broken again, and he had stopped noticing them somewhere about the tenth day.

Abel Tarrant came across the mud with his cap in his hand, looked at the roof, looked at him, and held out a hand like a bundle of roots. Darcy took it. It was a hard dry grip and it lasted exactly as long as it needed to. “Aye,” said Tarrant.

Darcy thought, walking back along the lane in the long yellow light, quite the best thing anyone had said to him in a year. He had not seen her. He had known that she stood in the lane on Tuesday, because he had known it with the back of his neck, as a man knows when a gun is trained on him; and he had gone on hauling rope. It had been the hardest forty minutes of his life.

He had not looked round. If he had looked round, he would have come down off that ridge, and he would have been at her side before he had time to think, and whatever had been given into her hands would have been taken back again, in a moment, with a clumsy fist. That night he sat down to write.

Darcy had no illusions about it; he knew it was the sixth letter he had written her in three weeks, counting those he had burnt. It was the fifth that he had not sent.

The room at Rosings had grown very familiar. He knew the pattern of the carpet. He knew the crack in the plaster above the window, and the way the candle-flame leaned in the draught from the door. He sat at the small table in his shirt-sleeves, with his torn hands flat on the blotter, and looked at the white sheet before him as a man looks at a gap in a wall he has been ordered to hold.

He would be gone in three days. He had known it from the first morning, and had never once had the courage to look at it directly. Three days, and a carriage, and a road south, and then Derbyshire, and the long grey house in the long grey rain. He would stand in the hall at Pemberley and take off his gloves, and Georgiana would come running down the stairs. And whatever happened after that, whatever the winter held, there would be a chair in a Kentish parsonage where she had sat, and he would never see it again.

He picked up the pen; as he wrote, he decided that it was not an apology. He had written apologies; they had all been wrong. This was something else, and he did not know what to call it. It was an account. It was the thing a man does when he has taken stock, and found it ugly, and sets it down in plain figures so that at least the books are honest. It took him until one in the morning, and ran to a page and a half.

Miss Bennet —

I leave Hunsford on Saturday, and I would not go without setting down what I should have said at the beginning.

I spoke of your family with contempt. I have thought a great deal about those words, and I find that I cannot make them better by explaining them. They were mine, and they came from a habit of thinking that I did not examine, because it had never been questioned. I was proud, and I mistook my certainty for judgment, and I have paid for the mistake. I do not ask you to think the less of it.

I should say also that my feelings do not entitle me to yours. I understood that at last, some time in the second week, and I wish I had understood it sooner. A man may love a woman with his whole strength and still have no claim whatever upon her. I do not ask you to reconsider. I do not ask for a reply. I ask nothing.

I will tell you only this. I came here to be rid of a trouble, and I leave having learned more of myself in three weeks than in twenty-eight years. It has not been pleasant. I would not undo it. I go with a gratitude that I do not know how to express, for every occasion you gave me, wittingly or otherwise, of seeing myself more honestly than I had done before.

I visit with Bingley the week I return to London, and I aim to tell him the sordid details of my involvement in separating him from your sister.

I only will add, God Bless You,

— F. D.

He read it once, and he did not read it again. He felt the letter was not elegant. In fact, it was very nearly rough. But it was true in every line, which he could not have said of anything he had written since he was fifteen, and he sat looking at it for some time with his torn hand pressed against his mouth, and the candle guttering low. Then he folded it, and did not seal it, and put it in his breast pocket, and went to find his cousin.

The Colonel was awake. He was generally awake. He sat in a leather chair in his dressing-room with his boots off and a glass of something in his hand, and a volume of Napier’s dispatches open upon his knee, which he had not been reading. He looked up as Darcy came in, and one eyebrow went up, and then, seeing his face, came slowly down again.

Richard gave one look at Darcy and knew he had not slept a wink. “I thought you were asleep.”

“No.” Darcy held out the paper. “I should like you to read this.”

Richard looked at him, and took it. He read it standing, with his glass in the other hand. It did not take long. Darcy stood by the fire, with his arms folded tight against his ribs, looking at the grate, and waited as a man waits for the verdict of a surgeon. The silence went on. Somewhere in the walls a clock struck two. He heard the paper rustle, and the small dry sound of the Colonel clearing his throat; and then a longer pause, in which he thought, absurdly, of a Cambridge examination-room, and the sound of a pen being laid down.

“Well,” said the Colonel, rather hoarsely. He set down the glass. He had not, Darcy saw, been drinking from it for some time. He stood with the paper held between two fingers, quite still, and his square plain brown face had gone oddly unguarded, with a look in it that Darcy had not seen since the day they buried Lord Matlock. The Colonel was not a man who wept. But there was a very odd brightness about his eyes, and when he spoke, it was in a voice scraped down to the bone.

Richard continued. “I have read a great many letters,” he said. “I have written a few.” He held up the sheet. “This is a fine one, Fitz. There is no campaign in it.”

“No.” Darcy nodded. “I thought you would be pleased.”