“Oh, oh, yes!” Elizabeth exclaimed. She looked up. “That is aproperway to think about it—Iamstill most grateful. Money is such a grim matter. I hope to neverneedany such aid.”
Hartley smiled back, and then he exclaimed with some gravitas, “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady.”
“Bravo!” Elizabeth clapped. “Have you the rest of the speech memorized?”
“Not wholly. Let me think.” Hartley hummed to himself tapping the top of one of his hands with the other. “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, as full of grief as age; wretched in both. If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts against their father, fool me not so much to bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, and let not women’s weapons, water drops, stain my man’s cheeks!”
Both Elizabeth and Hartley frowned, the speech about fatherhood betrayed seemed significant to both.
As they crossed a lovely small bridge over a fine creek, Elizabeth said, “I cannot imagine that he cries often.”
“I have never seen it,” Hartley said. “I think—contrary toLear, to never cry is not seemly in a man. When I watch a deeply affecting play, I cannot stop my tears—my father always despised me for how easily I cry. But that...I always thought to myself if a murderer despises tears, should I not freely cry when I felt such an urge? But he was not a murderer.”
Hartley frowned.
“I do not think that was the Gods that stirred my heart against him,” Elizabeth said. “Robert, you do not wish to hear such, but my mother’s death was likely caused by the way he had beaten her. Three ribs broken, and the terror that forced her to flee in winter.”
Hartley did not reply.
A tear formed around the edge of his eyes. Darcy had long been aware of this sensibility in his friend. “I’d hoped...I confess it. I wish we could be a family. I always also wished to gain his approval. He always spoke slightingly of me. He always said that I have no stomach. He said that I shall fail to protect the dignity of our name. And then...when I was told that you were alive, that Lady Rochester really had fled. I hoped...maybe...I can never, never, ever forget that day. The way you screamed and sobbed as he beat you in anger. He’d given me the switch times enough, but—what he did to you was different.”
“I know. I never forgot it either.”
“I truly, truly, for so many years I thought he had murdered you both. It ate at me. I never forgot that...is it wrong for me to have wished that my father could be a decent man?”
“No, such a wish cannot ever be wrong.” Darcy spoke, though it was Elizabeth’s place.
They walked along a little. Hartley wiped his eyes.
“I find I do not hate him,” Elizabeth said. “And I fear him much less than before. But I do not want to know him—I tried to kill him. I tried to kill a man. It was fear, but the fear I felt was not reasoned fear. It was not a thinking emotion. I acted to reject what I had always been as a child. To prove that I could make him hurt as he had hurt me. And as he had hurt Mama. I knew I should not shoot him. But I wanted to, out of fear, and out of anger.”
Lowing cows. Growing wheat. Soft loam beneath their feet. They reached the wagon track and turned back towards Longbourn. Dust about them. Men on the other side of a hedge shouting and laughing at their work. A style with which they could climb into the field.
“You would forgive my father for killing your mother because you tried to shoot him?” Hartley said at last. “I confess that makes little sense tome.”
“I do not speak of forgiveness,” Elizabeth replied somberly. “The Almighty will judge him, and the Almighty will judge me. I speak more of understanding. I see something in myself that could become like him. Even my obsession with being grateful, the way I always insisted to myself that I had norightto expect anything good because I was illegitimate. That is the wayhewould think. I do not want anything of that in myself. No more. I wish to repent of that.” She looked at Darcy. “I said as much to you already.”
“A deuced odd way to think,” Hartley said. “But, my dear Lizzy, it very much confirms that I shall like you if you can think in such an odd way.”
“She was trying to read Parmenides while in Kent,” Darcy said. “Anyone who would even make the attempt must be quite odd.”
“That incomprehensible dialogue of Plato’s?Youstudied over it for weeks at Cambridge.”
“My point proven, for am I not a quite odd fellow?”
They laughed and soon reached back to Longbourn, just in time to see the man that Mr. Bennet had sent to take his message to London riding off.
Chapter Twenty-two
When they returned to the house, Elizabeth yawned.
Mr. Darcy smiled at her as she did, and she smiled back at him.
Upon entering the house, Mrs. Bennet came up to them, and she said to Elizabeth, “I have heard the oddest rumors about you and Lord Rochester. That you fought him, that he means to adopt you, that—Lizzy, do tell me the truth. I can scarce imagine whatyouwould have to do with a peer. But do tell me.”
At this question Elizabeth found the cheerfulness that she’d felt after her conversation with Papa returning. She smiled at Mrs. Bennet. “All will be clear. Perhaps very soon. I will ask Papa if he sees any reason for secrecy—” Then she turned to Robert. “Do you see any?”
Mrs. Bennet’s eyes went wider at this clear confirmation that Elizabethdidin fact have something to do with a peer of the realm, or at least his young and single son, which was nearly as good.
