While they had their coffee, Darcy sent a note to Gardiner House, requesting an interview for Bingley. During their wait, Darcy remembered to tell Bingley that the man Caroline had seen with Jane, was her uncle, Mr Gardiner, dispelling his idea that it could have been Deveril.
~T~
The sisters and Mrs Gardiner received them in the drawing room. Darcy was not much surprised to find that Deveril and Fitzwilliam were also present.
Despite having just finished coffee at Darcy’s house, Bingley accepted the offer of coffee as it bought him some time, and he joined in the general conversation. But soon his period of grace was at an end.
‘Mr Bingley, last night you asked me a question. Do you still want to hear my answer? And if you do, would you prefer to hear it in private? In chaperoned privacy, I mean.’
Bingley looked around the occupants of the room before he addressed Jane. ‘I presume everyone here knows about this?’
‘To a greater or lesser extent,’ Jane confirmed. ‘My sisters in great detail, most of the gentlemen less so.’
‘You might as well tell me now.’ Bingley sighed. ‘Considering what a fool I made of myself last night…’
Very well, Mr Bingley, but please understand that what I tell you will hurt you although I have no wish to do so.’
‘I understand.’
‘The main problem was that you only ever saw my physical beauty. You never bothered to look at me. You did not care about what I think or feel, and you never respected me.’
‘I respected you greatly,’ protested Bingley.
‘No, Mr Bingley. You went through the forms of showing respect, but you did not feel respect. You gave the impression of feeling nothing but avarice. You wanted to own me like an ornament. You cared nothing about how I felt otherwise you would have noticed that I was trying to avoid you.’
Jane sighed. ‘I suppose that I could have cut short your interest by falsely responding to your advances, but I refuse to lower myself to play such games. And admittedly there was a small chance that I was wrong about you, and you were truly serious. I would never lead someone on.’
‘I could never have lost interest in you.’
‘Mr Bingley, please allow me an analogy. You appeared to me to be like a puppy, who will chase anything that moves and will do so quite charmingly. But once that puppy has caught whatever it was chasing, it usually does not know what to do with it. It might play with it for a while and then lose interest and chase something else.’
‘A puppy?’ Bingley’s eyes widened in shock. He was horrified that he had been perceived to be so immature as to be compared to a puppy.
He felt worse when he heard Fitzwilliam mutter, ‘very apt.’
‘Was there anything else,’ Bingley asked, hoping that there might have been a serious reason for her disinterest.
‘I have to confess that we felt you had several shortcomings.’
‘Go on.’
‘You are supposedly the head of your household, and yet you allow your sister to insult one and all. You do not check her behaviour. If she is rude to people above her in rank, it does not greatly matter, we will usually simply laugh at her, but she was ridiculously demanding of the staff as well as rude, disdainful, and even cruel to all who had no way of defending themselves. Yet you did nothing to stop her. That is not the character of a man I can respect.’
‘Oh.’
‘And then there is of course the matter of the estate. You leased Netherfield to learn how to become a landed gentleman, yet you paid not the slightest attention to the running of the estate, leaving all the work on the shoulders of the steward.’
‘I was waiting for Darcy to come and teach me.’ Bingley said, trying to defend himself. ‘But what has that to do with anything?’
‘I will explain the relevance in a minute. In the meantime, are you telling me that there was not a single gentleman in the area who offered to assist you by giving advice?’
‘Well, there were several gentlemen who did so, including Mr Bennet.’
Elizabeth interjected, ‘Yet you did not take any of them up on their offer. As much as it pains me to admit that our father is an indolent master, but while he is indolent, he is not completely neglectful.
‘I was busy paying court to your sister… Miss Bennet.’
‘Which was completely unwelcome, but that is irrelevant to this question. The point is that we were raised as gentlewomen. As such we understand the needs of an estate and the people on it. We do not respect a man who does not care for his estate, who ignores his responsibilities and only thinks of his own pleasures. And we would never consider such a man as a potential husband.’
