“Come here, Elizabeth.” Darcy held out his hand to her and taking it, she jumped over the foot high brick wall of the flower bed.
She looked back mournfully. “Poor, poor flowers. They didn’t deserve that.” And then she sobbed.
Darcy put his arms around her and held her as she cried.
“I don’t even know why I’m crying. It’s not for him. It’s not for the flowers. It’s not for myself. I am well.”
“Dear, dear Lizzy.”
“Lord! And poor Robert!”
Darcy held her. His hand made long slow rubs on her back. After a while she let out a long breath. Then another. She smiled at him through her tears. “Thank you for being here.”
“Of course.”
“I must look a sight.”
“You look beautiful.”
She rolled her eyes. She took her handkerchief out and thoroughly wiped the tears away from her face. “Youalways think that. I did my simple best to look as poorly as I could—and still you could not take your eyes off me. I wondered sometimes if you meant to criticize. Did you notice the ink stains? I put at least one on every piece of clothing I owned.”
“I confess to not having been so focused upon your beauty as to fail to notice the presence of the ink stains.”
Darcy took Elizabeth’s arm and led her along the path through the geometrically arranged flower planters, and around the side of the mansion to where he’d noticed the hill with the temple. When they crossed around the bit of the path that allowed them over the ha-ha, the deer with its majestic antlers was still there. But he looked at the couple and then wandered off into the trees.
“Good,” Elizabeth replied with a pert smile. “I put a great deal of thought into the arrangement of the ink stains—did you note that some of them were in places where it would be quite implausible for them to have arrived via accident? I always was proudest of those.”
Darcy laughed. “It was part of what confused me about you.”
“Oh, and do say what you thought then. I shall never be able to account for you having fallen in love with me. Will I need to wear a servant’s cast-off rags to keep your affection? Lady Elizabeth is known to be an eccentric, so I think she might carry that off.”
Darcy kissed her hand. “I fear I love your essentials, and I saw through everything to that good core of your character, and that is what I loved.”
She showed him that pleased pink look and then quickly kissed him, but thoroughly.
They started up the path again. Elizabeth said, “But you must account for it to me. Tell me honestly, when did you first come to love me?”
“I think I began when I stepped out to the balcony to apologize to Lydia, and I heard you say, ‘I think Mr. Darcy is a much more interesting man than Mr. Bingley.’”
Elizabeth laughed. “You remember it so precisely. But is that really all it is? Gratitude for perceiving my interest.”
“That made me pay attention to you, but my affections could never have become solid ifyouwere not a far more interesting person than any who I had ever met before. It was quite a puzzle to me, for a long time.”
They now reached the top of the eminence and stepped amongst the little Grecian temple, with a fallen marble column artfully arranged against one of the standing ones, and then carefully cemented into place to make it impossible to dangerously make it roll.
“I have behaved in such contrary manners at times,” Elizabeth said. “I always had a sense of playing a role, and so it was easy to change to a different role. Except with Papa. Maybe it is still a role then, but it is the role of being who I wished to be and liked to be. I think you are the first person besides him who I ever felt safe to be my truer self with.”
Now it was Darcy who turned to kiss her soundly.
“I see you both!”
Lord Rochester hurried up the hill, and he laughingly shouted, “Now unhand my sister you rogue!”
“Shall you insist we marry if I do not?” Darcy replied, glad to see that Rochester also was in a better mood.
“No, no. Only if my sister wants me to.” He stepped up next to them. “Well Lizzy?”
“He does kiss very well,” Elizabeth replied with that familiar mischievous glint to her eyes.
