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“I am damned if I know what I am,” said the Colonel, and sat down abruptly in the leather chair. “For the first time in three weeks I have not the faintest notion what is going to happen. It is a most disagreeable sensation, and it is exactly what I should wish for a brother.”

Darcy said nothing. He had stopped, he noticed, bracing his shoulders, and could not remember when.

The Colonel looked at him for a long moment. “Send it,” said the Colonel.

“Not yet.” He took the letter back, and folded it again along the same creases, with great care. “I do not know, yet, why I am writing it.”

The Colonel looked at him for a long moment. He picked up the glass again. It was empty. He set it down, “Go to bed,” said Richard at last. “You look like a corpse.”

***

Darcy did not sleep. He lay on his back with the letter on the table beside him, a pale oblong in the dark, and heard the house tick and settle and the owls cry across the park. Thursday passed. He packed the last of his books. He had a long and wholly unnecessary conversation with the head groom about the black horse’s off fore, in which neither man said a word that mattered. He took his leave of Lady Catherine, in her sitting-room, in the presence of Mrs. Jenkinson, and she gave him her cheek, and her stiff, bitter, blistering blessing, and said that he knew where her door was, if ever he should come to his senses.

On Friday morning, a little after eight, Mrs. Collins arrived at Rosings. She came on foot, in a plain brown pelisse, with no bonnet-ribbons and no errand. The footman, who knew a lady in difficulties when he saw one, showed her straight into the small parlour, and sent word; and Darcy, who was standing in the hall with his gloves in his hand, saw the Colonel look at him across the width of the flags, and looked away again.

Charlotte did not curtsey. She stood with her hands folded before her and her plain sensible face quite composed, and spoke in the low steady voice she used for things that mattered. “Mr. Darcy. I have not been sent with any letter. I do not carry messages. But I was asked this morning to say, if you were still at Rosings, that Miss Bennet would be very glad to speak to you before you go.”

He stood quite still.

“She asked it herself,” said Charlotte. “I should like you to know that. She was not prompted by anyone. She came to me at half past six, in her wrapper, and said it as if it cost her a tooth. I did not have to say a word.”

The hall was very quiet. The great clock ticked. He found that his hand, which held the gloves, had closed into a fist, and that he could not make it open. “I see,” said Darcy. It was not at all what he meant. He meant a great deal. But he put his hand into his breast pocket, and took out a folded sheet of paper, and looked at it, and understood, in a single bright cold moment, what it was that he had been waiting for. It was not to know that he had said the truth. It was to know that it could not be a lever.

He sealed it then, in the hall, with a plain wafer, against the cold marble of a console-table, and held it out. “I should like you to keep this, Mrs. Collins. Not to give her now. If she wishes it, afterward, when I am gone, and she has said whatever she has to say, you may let her have it. If she does not, burn it.”

Charlotte took it. She did not look at the direction. She held it for a moment between her two hands, as one holds something living, and put it into her reticule. “Three o’clock,” she said. “The lower garden. She said you would know where.”

CHAPTER 17

Elizabeth was early. She had told herself that she would not be. She had told herself, walking up the avenue in her plainest bonnet, that she would arrive at three exactly, or at five minutes past, with the quiet composure of a woman who has an appointment and not a catastrophe. And she had come through the lower garden gate at a quarter to, out of breath, and found nothing there but the sundial, the yews, and a very small wind turning over the dead leaves on the gravel.

It was a different place by day. She had known it only in the dark, a hollow of shadow and moon and the cold smell of box; now it lay open under a pale October sky, all its edges plain, the terrace wall green with moss and the eleven steps worn hollow in the middle by two centuries of de Bourgh feet. It looked smaller. It looked, she thought, rather like the sort of place where nothing of any consequence could possibly be said.

She walked to the sundial and put her gloved hand upon it. The stone was cold. The shadow of the gnomon lay across the numeral two, and crept, with the infinite deliberation of such things, toward three. She had prepared a speech. She had prepared several, in the night, in the dark, with the sheet pulled up to her chin, each more graceful and guarded than the last; and they had all gone out of her head at the sound of a step on the terrace above.

He came down the eleven stairs slowly, with one hand on the stone. She quickly saw that he was dressed for travelling; he wore a black coat, buff breeches, boots splashed to the ankle. His hat was in his hand. He had shaved, and the lean planes of his face looked harder for it, brown from three weeks of Kentish weather, with fine white lines at the corners of the eyes that she did not remember.

He had the spare, scoured, sinewy look of a man who has been working very hard and eating very little, and when he drew near she saw his hands, held tight behind his back as a soldier holds them on parade, and the raw, healing, ruined palms. He stopped, a full two yards off, and bowed. “Miss Bennet.”

She nodded her head once. “Mr. Darcy. Thank you for coming.”

“You sent for me.” He said it plainly, as a statement of fact. “I should have come from the other side of England.” It was such a very simple remark that she did not know what to do with it. She took her hand from the sundial. A rook cawed somewhere above the yews.

“I will not keep you long,” said Elizabeth. “You go tomorrow.”

He nodded slightly. “At ten.”

“I wished to tell you something. I have been thinking, in the last fortnight, about a good many things that I said to you. About the things you said, too.” She swallowed. “My view has been changing. I do not entirely know how. I cannot yet say what it means, and I do not wish you to take it for more than it is. But I did not think it right that you should go without knowing it.” She looked up.

He had not moved. He stood, tall and still and grey-faced, with his hands behind him and his eyes fixed on her face with an attention so naked that she almost looked away. There was no hope in it. That was the strange thing. There was no leap of the heart, no flush, no sudden brightening, such as she had half dreaded to see. There was only a kind of stillness, like the stillness of a man who has been handed something very heavy, and is waiting to see whether he has been trusted to carry it.

“Thank you,” said Darcy. He bowed again, and that was all.

He had told himself, a hundred times, what he would do. He would listen. He would say thank you. He would bow, and wish her well, and go up the eleven steps, and be on the Great North Road by ten tomorrow with his face to the rain and his heart in a drawer. He had gone over it on the ridge of Tarrant’s barn, and in the leather chair in the Colonel’s dressing-room, and in the long grey hours of three nights without sleep. It was a perfectly clear plan. It had the merit of being the only decent one.

But she had said, I did not think it right that you should go without knowing it, and he found that he could not keep his mouth shut. “Miss Bennet. I have no right to say this. I will say it once, and then I will not say it again, and you may put it out of your head the moment I have gone.”

Her eyes widened. She did not speak. “I have not stopped,” said Darcy. His voice was very low and rough. It was not the voice of the parsonage, with its polished, ruthless fluency. It came out hoarse, in pieces, like something torn up by the roots.