Elizabeth found herself grateful for her father’s insistence.
It was only five days, but how much they had to say to one another!
On the first day, Elizabeth offered Mr. Darcy a confession. “I was so afraid that your aunt had convinced you to stay away.”
His bemused expression was almost comical. “I beg your pardon?”
“She came to see me. Did she not tell you?”
He shook his head slowly, his dark eyes turning stormy.
“Lady Catherine informed me very directly that she did not approve of you proposing to me, and as you had done no such thing, I did not know what to say.”
“So you said nothing? Forgive me, Elizabeth, but that does not sound like you.”
She glanced away. “I said many things. She pressed me not to accept you even should you ask, and that request I refused.”
Mr. Darcy rubbed the back of his neck. “I would not see my aunt when she came to London. Perhaps if I had, I might have spared us a few miserable months.”
“It does not matter now,” she assured him. “For despite everything, we shall soon be wed.”
He pressed her hand in his.
On the second day, Mr. Darcy explained that he had requested the marriage license before he brought Bingley back to Hertfordshire. When she saw the brief flash of melancholy cross his face, she regaled him with stories of her youth at Longbourn. Her escapades while visiting with the Gardiners in London, her taste in books—biographies over histories, comedies over tragedies—and how she had always wanted to learn to play the harp, but the instrument was too expensive to purchase when they already had a pianoforte—anything to make him smile. Mr. Darcy asked her a hundred questions and listened carefully to every answer.
Over the remaining days, while she continued to amuse him with tales of her irreverent ways, Mr. Darcy told her stories about his own childhood, how he and Colonel Fitzwilliam had spent much of their summers together at Pemberley, how he had run from his home to Lambton and ridden to the far edges of his father’s property, what he recalled from the time when both his parents lived, how his father had changed and become a much more solemn man after his wife died. How the weight of his responsibilities had almost crushed him when, at twenty-two, he had found himself helping to bear his father’s casket to the church yard.
“It was too soon,” he said softly. “I was not ready.”
“I cannot imagine you ever would be, but you were so young.”
“My father never allowed either Georgiana or me to doubt that he loved us,” Mr. Darcy told her quietly, “but he treated Wickham in the same way, and knowing that Wickham in no way deserved it, but feeling unable to disappoint my father by revealing that man’s transgressions . . . that was difficult.”
Elizabeth squeezed his hand. “I cannot tell you how I regret what I said to you in regard to him.”
“It is no matter, Elizabeth,” he told her. “I am not that man any longer. Your reproofs soon taught me that I wanted to be a better one, and I hope that I have succeeded in that.” He stroked her cheek with the back of one hand. “Not that my work there is done.”
“You are not the only one who felt the need to change,” Elizabeth replied, leaning into his touch. “I am a different woman than the one who rejected you out of hand. Wiser, I hope. Less gullible, certainly, and I hope also less prejudiced.”
“Elizabeth,” he asked haltingly, “why did you keep the letter I gave you in Kent? It was certainly not kind.”
“I did not want to believe it, at first,” she admitted. “It was so dismissive of Jane and hinted that I held some sort of infatuation for Mr. Wickham.”
He shut his eyes and shook his head.
“Please look at me,” Elizabeth said.
Mr. Darcy did as she asked.
“It was not very long, though, before I saw how foolish I had been. I needed to keep that letter to remind myself how easily I had been led and how I had allowed my prejudice against you to blind me to certain truths. It was a lesson I sorely needed. And your adieu was kindness itself.”
“Will you burn it now?”
“Must I?”
“Those words haunt me nearly as much as the proposal in Kent. Knowing that they still exist is painful to me.”
“I suppose I do not need it anymore, for I have a more recent one. One I like a great deal better.”
