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Darcy held out the paper. The Colonel took it. He read it first slowly. And then, he read it again with the quick, harsh, practical eye of a man who has been trained to extract the maximum of intelligence from the minimum of text, and when he had finished he looked up, and his whole face had begun, very gradually, to change.

“By Golly!” said Richard Fitzwilliam. “Now, listen. This is the time, Fitz! There is not a moment to be lost! You must answer at once, today, by the afternoon post. But you must be careful how. She is a clever woman, and you must not seem too eager.” Richard cautioned. “You will say that the house is at her disposal, and you will let it be understood that you have your own engagements; and then there is the matter of the date. If she comes in the spring, there is the garden to consider, and Georgiana, and the dinner, and… I could draw you up a plan of the whole thing by dinner-time, with contingencies, if you would give me a map of the grounds!”

Darcy looked up at his cousin, whose face was still bent towards the letter, and replied sternly, “Richard.”

“I have been thinking of it since Kent! I have some notion of the order in which the rooms should be shown, to take the greatest advantage of the light!” Richard was ecstatic, and began to think about all that should be done to prepare for Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s visit to Pemberly.

“Richard,” said Darcy firmly. “Be quiet.” He said it without heat. But there was a quality in it that stopped the Colonel in mid-sentence, with his mouth a little open and the plan of the grounds dying on his lips, and he stood there a moment looking at his cousin, and then, slowly, shut it.

“Yes,” Richard said, visibly calming himself down to a relaxed look. “Quite right.” He nodded slowly.

Darcy looked at his cousin and told him directly, “I shall write to her myself.”

“I should be glad to look it over,” Richard added.

Darcy cut him off and shook his head, “No.” He said it firmly and plainly.

The Colonel only nodded, sat down, and lifted a glass to drink a mouthful.

Darcy wrote it at the writing-table in the window, in ten minutes, in his own hand, with no draft. It was very short. He did not read it over. He told her that Pemberley was open to her, at any season, at any hour, for as long as she chose to stay, and that nothing whatever would be expected of her, now or afterward, by him or by anyone under his roof. He said that his sister would be glad to receive her. He said that he would be honoured.

He signed it, and sealed it, and put it into the hand of the groom himself. Then he came back and stood by the window, looking out over the long wet lawns toward the park. The Colonel, in his chair by the fire, found that he was gripping the arms of it to keep from saying anything, and was astonished, a moment later, to discover that he did not wish to. There was no plan. There was no strategy, no contingency, no order of battle. There was only a letter on its way to Hertfordshire, and the rain coming down upon the grass, and two men in a silent room who, for the first time in their lives, had not the smallest idea what was going to happen next, and did not try to find out.

CHAPTER 20

Pemberley, when she came to it in the last week of August, was not at all what she had been afraid of. She had braced herself for grandeur. She had pictured it for months, in the dark, with the sheet pulled to her chin, as a vast cold pile of stone, with a hall like a cathedral and servants lined up in rows, in which a woman from Hertfordshire might be expected to feel as small and ill-made as a pebble on a floor. And it was grand, for it lay in its valley under a washed spring sky, honey-coloured, with the beechwoods climbing behind it and the river running bright through the park, and she had stopped the carriage at the top of the rise, and said nothing at all, and Mrs. Gardiner had taken her hand.

But it was a lived-in house. That was what she had not expected. There was a wet spaniel on the steps. A boy went by with a barrow of seedlings. In the great hall there was a pair of muddy boots set carelessly by the stair, a man’s boots, large and worn, with the clay of the home farm still drying upon them; and when she looked up, Mrs. Reynolds the housekeeper, who was coming forward with her hands folded, followed her eyes, and said in a tone of weary, resigned affection, that the master would leave them there, and that she had given up.

Mr. Darcy was out on the estate. He had expected them tomorrow. He came in at four, by the garden door, in his shirt-sleeves, with his coat over his arm and mud to the knee, like a man who has not looked at a clock in a week. He stopped on the threshold. She saw the whole of it go across his face, the stillness, the colour, the sudden wary lifting of the head; and she saw him, quite deliberately, stand where he was, three paces off, and not come one step nearer.

“Miss Bennet!” Darcy said, rather startled, “You are very welcome.”

She nodded and gave him a small smile. “Mr. Darcy. I hope we do not inconvenience you.”

“You could not,” said Darcy. He turned and rather kindly bowed, and said, “Might you introduce me to your family, Miss Bennet?”

He spoke to her relatives as equals, without a flicker. Mr. Gardiner, who was a man of business and had been looked at in his time by a great many gentlemen who did not choose to see him, felt it at once, and straightened a little, and was shaken by the hand. Elizabeth saw it. She saw it with a small, cold, secret contraction under the ribs. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connexions? He had said that. And here he stood, in his own hall, with mud on his boots, asking her uncle whether he fished.

The visit to Pemberley had been intended to last no more than a few hours. Elizabeth was to accompany her aunt and uncle back to the inn at Lambton that afternoon, where they had planned to remain before continuing their travels. Mr. Darcy, however, would not have it. He insisted they stay for dinner, then pressed them to remain overnight, and then a fortnight and when Mr. Gardiner raised the matter of their rooms at the inn, Darcy offered to send for their belongings himself. He did so with such quiet determination that further protest seemed useless.

She watched him for three days and did so with scrupulous care, as one studies an instrument one has been told is unreliable. She watched him with the steward, a long grave man named Matthews, who brought a question of drainage and was heard out to the end, and told, in four plain sentences, that he was wrong, and why, and then, when the man made one quiet objection, was told, “No. You are right. I did not know the ground was so low. We will do it your way.”

She watched him in the kitchen-garden, where an old gardener gave him a flat contradiction before a boy and two undergardeners, and he took off his hat and listened. She watched him in the stables, in the dairy, in the long cold library with his sister’s head against his shoulder, and she was struck by the quality of his silence with the girl. It was not the silence of the parsonage. It was a gentle, watchful, uncluttered quiet, like the quiet of a man sitting by a sleeping child.

Darcy was blunt and often short. He swore, once, at a stuck gate, under his breath, and begged her pardon. He had a temper still, and a hard hand with a lazy groom, and a way of going quite white and silent when he was angry. He was not a good man made easy; there were truly not anyone perfectly good, and she knew it. No, she reasoned, Mr. Darcy was a hard man, working at it, and she had never in her life been so moved by a spectacle.

However, Elizabeth did not see him perform once. She looked for it. She watched every look, every gesture, every word, for the faint false note of a man being seen to do well; and it was not there. He did not know she was watching, or he did not care. There was no audience. There was only a man in his own house, doing his work, and being what he was.

It was the third evening, in the garden, that she told him. The Gardiners had gone in. Georgiana had gone with them, shyly, carrying a book. The long August light lay over the terrace like honey, and the yews threw their shadows across the grass, and in the quiet she could hear the river.

They walked down the long walk of limes, side by side, a yard apart, not speaking. The young leaves were out, a thin new green, so bright it hurt the eyes. “I have not,” said Elizabeth, “forgotten Hunsford.” She looked up at him, and her heart was beating furiously, as she said it.

“I should not wish you to.” He said it at once, quietly, without turning his head.

She stopped. They had come to a place where the walk opened out, and the old limes arched overhead like the roof of a church, and the light came through them in long green bars.

She looked at him. “My feelings have changed,” said Elizabeth. “I do not know how to say it better. They have changed a great deal... I am.” She drew a breath, which was shaking, and she let it. “I am very much afraid, Mr. Darcy. I should like you to know that. I am afraid of what it would mean to trust you. I have been wrong so often, about so much, and the last time I was certain of a man; he was a liar. I do not know how to be sure.”