“No, you are wrong! It was never my intention that we should be discovered, but I was expecting your addresses. And instead, you seemed about to change your mind and leave me again. I thought you must still not comprehend my feelings!”
“I did not! How could I when you were so cold and reserved all the time?”
“Could you expect me to behave differently after you abandoned me so cruelly?”
Bingley ran both hands through his hair, grasping two fistfuls and squeezing his eyes shut. Releasing them, along with a gruff sigh, he took several strides towards her. “Yes, I left. It was ill done, and I have never apologised properly for it. But I came back! I braved the reproach of your friends and family to return and court you in the best way I knew how. And you barely spoke to me! The only person who ever showed any pleasure in my return was Lizzy.”
Jane lurched to her feet with a wordless cry. “Yes, Lizzy! Perfect, wonderful Lizzy! Why did you simply not marry her?”
“I would have, had you not come to the room where I awaited her and draped yourself all over me!”
It was not as shocking as it ought to be—only bitterly predictable. Had she not suspected all along that he preferred Elizabeth? In retrospect, she supposed every other appalling consequence of his thwarted affections had been inevitable.
“Would that you had never come back,” she whispered. “I could have lived far better with the memory of a man I believed loved me for a few short months than endure a lifetime with a man who does not love me at all.” She dropped her face into her hands and burst into tears. For a while she could only sob, her distress heightened by Bingley’s continued silence. After a few minutes, he did speak, but his words, far from comforting her, threw her into a tumult of confusion and alarm.
“The same graceless independence and brazen coquetry of which youhave ever accused her?”
Jane gasped and looked up. He was reading from her letter!
“Are you in the habit of exchanging insults about your sister with Lady Ashby?”
His expression was furious, yet his defending Elizabeth vexed Jane as nothing else could, curdling her dismay into righteous anger. “Better to say I am in the habit of commiserating with her.”
“Commiserating?”
“Yes!” she cried, wiping her tears away with the heel of her palm. “I know you will find this difficult to comprehend, but I am not alone in my aversion to her unending teasing and impertinence.”
Bingley gaped at her. “Are you out of your mind, maligning Lizzy to this woman? She is Darcy’s cousin!”
“Precisely!” She snatched the letter from him. “That is why she is as mortified by Lizzy’s behaviour as I am!”
The more she said, the angrier Bingley’s expression became. The angrier Bingley grew, the more indignant she grew. “Think you any of Mr Darcy’s family approves of her determined coquetry? Imagine their horror when they learnt what trouble her flirting has already brought about from Mr Wickham andMr Greyson! I assure you they are far less impressed than you were by her efforts at Pemberley and even more dismayed to hear how she constantly argues with her husband! So you see, she is not as?—”
He thrust his face towards hers, his eyes huge and his complexion flooded crimson. “Good God, that all came from you?”
She recoiled and fell silent, stunned by his ferocity though too angry herself to regret any of what she had said.
“What possessed you to write such things of your own sister?”
“It is all true!”
“How can you be so obtuse? True or not, everything you have ever whispered in that woman’s ear has now been spread over the whole of London! I witnessed it myself when I was there in October—twisted versions of everything you just said, things only you could know—flung at Lizzy in contempt. I wondered then where it all began. Never could I have suspected it originated with my own wife!” He returned to clutching fistfuls of his hair. “They have been sunk into a scandal of your making, and Darcy is punishing Lizzy for it! You have made her the contempt of society and condemned her to her husband’s resentmentand disdain. Damn you, Jane, you have ruined your sister’s marriage!”
“That seems just,” Jane cried, “for she has ruined mine! She has condemned me to my husband’s complete indifference! Why can you not care about my happiness half as much as you care about hers?”
“Still you accuse me thus?” he roared. “Upon my life, I forswore my own heart to preserve yours!”
Jane wilted in the face of his vehemence, dropping into the nearest seat and looking wordlessly upon his escalating fury.
“Ignorant as I was of your scheme to entrap me, I offered for you without excuse or objection and have endeavoured ever since to make the best of the situation—to love you, if I could!”
She shook her head helplessly as he wound himself into a greater and greater pique.
“I may not always have done it well, and God knows you have not made it easy, but nonetheless, I have tried! My sacrifice was evidently in vain if you are as miserable as you say. So be it! I see no benefit to prolonging our mutual agony. Allow me to relieve both our suffering and leave!”
His pronouncement was so unexpected it rendered Jane speechless. She uttered not a sound from that instant to the moment the door closed behind him—not while he informed her he would remove to his London townhouse directly, not while he informed her he meant to remain there for the foreseeable future, not while he forbade her from obtruding upon his seclusion with either letters or visits, and not while he informed her she ought to go about the business of being Mrs Bingley in the same way she ever had—as though his being her husband bore no relevance to the situation whatsoever. He was gone before dinner.
By breakfast the next day, Mrs Bennet had learnt of his decampment, returned to Netherfield, and said enough words to compensate for Jane’s want of them several times over. By the end of a week, Jane began to fear that, on this occasion, Bingley truly meant not to return.
