“He did not set aside sufficient money for you to have independence, or an attractive dowry. You would not need to worry about marrying without inclination if he had. And your sister would have had no need to marry that toad-eater.”
Seeing Elizabeth’s frown, he hurriedly added, “That was not a polite question. You make me forget myself. I only…”
“You were thinking about the duties of a father towards his daughter,” Elizabeth replied, thinking she understood him. “As you often do.”
“That… and about my own marriage.” He hesitated. “I beg you to tell me… Do you resent your parents for pressing you and your sisters to marry against your inclinations?”
“What about your own marriage?” Elizabeth asked. She felt something odd and hollow in her stomach, at realizing that an assumption she’d made about Darcy’s own marriage, that it was a love match, might have been mistaken. She’d always assumedthat he had loved his wife dearly, from how he spoke of her with the highest respect, and due to the black armband, that he woreright now.
She gave him the smallest touch on his shoulder. “Please, you might tell me. I’ll say nothing to anyone.”
Darcy did not answer. He frowned at the ground.
“Then I’ll speak.” Elizabeth paused to collect her thoughts. Her heart felt odd. Speaking about this subject at all felt wrong. “No… he could have done more. But it… I simply do not blame Papa for my poverty… the estate was entailed, and while it would have beenwiseto save a sum of money, we all enjoyed the use of the estate’s income on clothes, entertainment, and the rest.”
“And then your sister married Mr. Collins, the heir? The economy proved unnecessary in the end.” Darcy’s voice was sardonic. His look was bleak.
He suddenly stood up, walked over to Emily, pulled the stone she’d been sucking on out of her mouth, and said in a soft voice, “Do not eat that, dear.”
He picked the girl up and moved her to a spot ten feet away from where she had been before returning to sit next to Elizabeth.
“No, no — Collins proves the opposite. But it also would have been useless for my father to have made the attempt to save enough money to protect Jane from Collins. In the whole course of his life, he could not have put aside enough to keep Mama from terror at the loss of position that followed his death — I mean with reasonable economies. I do not imagine a situation where we lived without more than two servants and with no carriage for the entirety of my life. Even had Papa set aside five or ten thousand additional pounds over the years, Jane would have dutifully obeyed Mama’s demands.”
“A dutiful daughter…” Darcy was silent for a while. He looked back at Emily, who seeing him looking at her ran back to her father and was picked up by him and swung around.
He put her on his arm and said, “I do not want Emily to be so dutiful that she would do anything I insist. I was raised to respect my parents when they made demands in the most serious and private of situations, and that proved to not be good.”
“Did you…” Elizabeth felt quite nervous as she asked the question. “Did you marry your wife from family duty?”
“The situations are not the same.” Mr. Darcy sighed. “Mr. Collins is a man who chose to remain my aunt’s servant, her lackey, when there was no harsh necessity driving him. It does not speak well for his character.”
“We have already established that neither you nor I like him.”
Emily squirmed and Darcy set her down again. She ran over to Elizabeth and pulled on Elizabeth’s dress.
Elizabeth picked her up, and then Emily pointed in a direction, and with a glance over at Darcy the two of them started walking in accordance with Emily’s instructions.
“She wants us to go to the pond, to watch me skip rocks,” Darcy said with a soft smile. Then the thundercloud returned to his face. “Lady Catherine made Anne’s life miserable. I am glad she was not there when the birth came. It would have been… awkward to exclude her from the birthing room if she had wished to be there, but I would have. My aunt is a woman who means well, in some ways… I had always thought well of Anne’s character. I always… respected her. So, you see, that is wholly different from Mr. Collins. And it was to Anne’s benefit that I marry her, not my own.”
“But you did not love her?”
Darcy pressed his hand against his mouth. He shook his head. He looked rather sick.
They reached the pond, and Emily was set down. She grabbed a flat stone and pressed it into Darcy’s hand. He took it and tossed it so that it skipped three times, without seeming to look at anything.
In a slow voice Darcy said, “Anne was a small person. She had been ill for much of her life, and she did not have the clear healthy skin and stride that… you have. I did not… I never admired her person. Not even when I came to wish that I could. It had been the wish of my mother, when she was dying, that I marry Anne. I believe… I believe my mother’s motivation was that she liked to imagine the estates being united, and the two branches of the Fitzwilliam blood growing back together. Afterwards… I made a firm determination to never make another deathbed oath to comfort the dying.”
Elizabeth put her hand on Darcy’s arm and pressed it against the fine weave of his wool coat, a squeeze.
Darcy nodded
Emily splashed a bit in the water with her hands, and then she gave Darcy another stone. He returned it to her saying, “This one is too rounded, see, it will not skip well. Perhaps that one. Can you give it to me?”
Elizabeth asked what was suddenly foremost on her mind. “If you did not love her, why is it that you are determined not to marry again?”
Darcy’s face flattened and changed. He pressed his lips together. Then he said, “She was an excellent woman. Kind, loving. Always smiling, even when very ill. She delighted in caring for small animals, in seeing to it that orphans were cared for and schooled. She… she so wanted a child. I wish… She loved me. She admired me… as a man would wish to be admired by his beloved wife. She… she deserved a husband who could loveher for the goodness of her character without caring for anything else.”
Elizabeth wondered what it could have been like for such a woman, married to a man who she must truly have loved dearly — any woman would have no choice but to fall in love with a man such as Mr. Darcy. And then to know, for a woman would know, that he did not feel so strongly for her. Not in the same way. “But you never could look at her and see beauty.”
