"I should have listened to the pig."
Elizabeth almost smiled. "We should all have listened to the pig."
Truffles grunted and settled more firmly against Lydia's feet, and the three of them sat in the window seat and watched the garden and said nothing for a long time.
Mr. Bennet emerged from his library on the fourth day. He was thinner. He was quieter. He called Elizabeth to his desk and sat with his spectacles off and his eyes weary and said: "I have been a poor father to the younger ones. I have laughed where I should have guided and watched where I should have acted. The fault is mine."
"Papa —"
"Do not contradict me, Lizzy. I am being honest with myself for the first time in twenty years, and the honesty does not flatter me." He put his spectacles back on. "Wickham is removed from the regiment. Colonel Forster has seen to it. There will be no scandal, or no more than the usual amount. Your mother is recovering. Lydia is chastened, though I doubt the chastening will last."
"It might," Elizabeth said. "She was frightened, Papa. Underneath the anger, she was frightened."
"Good. Fear is instructive. I have been too comfortable with my own amusement and too distant from my own children, and the result is a daughter who nearly eloped with a predator because nobody taught her the difference between attention and love."
His voice was steady, but his hands, resting on the desk, were not entirely still.
Elizabeth thought about her own lessons in the difference between attention and love. She thought about Wickham's easy charm and Darcy's difficult kindness. She thought about a pig who had judged both men in an instant and been right about both.
"Papa," she said. "I need to tell you something about Mr. Darcy."
Mr. Bennet looked at her over his spectacles.
"He found Truffles. When she was taken. He rode to the farm and confronted the man and brought her back. He carried her inside his coat."
Mr. Bennet said nothing for a moment. Then: "Inside his coat."
"Against his chest. Because she was cold."
"Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. Ten thousand a year. Carried a pig inside his coat."
"Yes."
Mr. Bennet took off his spectacles again. He polished them on his sleeve. He put them back on. He looked at Elizabeth with the expression he wore when he was revising a long-held opinion.
"Well," he said. "It appears the pig has been right about rather more things than the rest of us."
Elizabeth smiled. It was small and tired and real, and it was the first smile she had managed in days.
CHAPTER 22
Mr. Darcy
Darcy returned to Longbourn on a Friday morning, and he brought Bingley with him.
He had told Bingley everything the night before. They had sat in the Netherfield library with the fire burning low, and Darcy had laid out the truth the way he laid out everything, plainly and in order, and Bingley had listened.
He told Bingley about his own feelings for Elizabeth. He did not dress them up or soften them. He said the words plainly: I am in love with her, I have been in love with her for weeks, and I have been too proud and too afraid to say so.
He told Bingley about Caroline's scheme with the pig. The farmer at Haye Park. The cart. The cold pen. The trembling piglet he had carried home inside his coat. Bingley's face had gone through several transformations during this part of the story, ending on an expression that Darcy had never seen on his friend's cheerful face: cold, quiet fury.
He told Bingley about Jane. About the fact that Jane Bennet loved Bingley with a quiet, steady devotion that Bingley was a fool not to see, and that Caroline had been whispering against the match for months, and that anyone who tried to separate Bingley from Jane would have to go through Darcy first, which was a reversal of his earlier position, which had been to silently agree with Caroline that the match was imprudent, and he was sorry for that, and he would like it noted for the record that a pig had better judgment about love than he did.
Bingley had listened with growing astonishment, then growing indignation, then the simple, resolute determination of a man who had been told the truth and intended to act on it.
"We are going to Longbourn tomorrow," Bingley said.
"Yes."
