It was really the worst way it could have gone.
That was one thing a gentleman did not do. A gentleman did not break an engagement, even if it were made in an untoward way. A woman might change her mind, but a gentleman, once having promised his protection and financial resources to a woman, he did not simply pull that out from under her. If I had done what they said I’d done to Elizabeth, I would have been a very bad man indeed.
It wasn’t the sort of thing that would prevent my moving about through society, of course. Men were censured, but women were shunned. However, it could materially lessen my own marriage prospects. No one wants to align their own daughter with a man who backs out of marriage proposals.
If I went back to London, though, I could probably mitigate all of it. Ishouldgo back to London. I had been here too long. If all of this was for Georgiana, then I should definitely go back and see to her.
Still, I tarried.
One afternoon, I went to Meryton with Bingley. He was delivering some of his invitations for the ball, and I came along mostly to have some time on horseback, with the wind in my face, which might help me to think this all through.
There, we saw the rest of the Bennet sisters—Elizabeth was notably absent, not being able to walk on her ankle. They had some man along with them, some guest of the family, and I might have gotten introduced to this Mr. Collins, but I was distracted, in a very bad and upsetting way, by seeing someone who I had not expected to be here.
It was him.
Mr. George Wickham, the man who had destroyed my sister. He had the audacity to touch his hat, in greeting, and to smile at me.
I got on my horse and left.
I galloped straight back to Netherfield, and when I got there, Caroline was in the hallway as I swept through it, going back to my bedchamber.
“You haven’t married her,” she said to me. “You haven’t even tried to marry her.”
I did not acknowledge her. I went down the hall even faster.
She came after me.
I opened the door to my bedchamber and attempted to shut it behind me.
She caught it, holding it open. She stood there, her expression determined, her eyes bright and intense, her breath coming quickly.
I pulled a bit at the door, and there was a moment there, a moment wherein I knew my superior physical strength could end this. I could simply close that door on her, leave her outside in the hallway, and she would be forced to stand there and bang on my door, ineffectual, impotent, and I would have some sort of victory over her.
But something about doing that felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite explain. Perhaps it was simply that it would not have been fair, though what I owed to Caroline Bingley in terms of fairness I was not sure. I did not suppose I owed her a damned thing.
However, it simply was not the sort of man I was.
So we stood there for a moment, both of us holding the door, standing quite close.
And then I let go and stepped backward and raised my eyebrows at her, permitting her to have this victory, to have forced her way in.
She lifted her chin. “I knew you didn’t actually wish to marry her.”
I sighed heavily. “I should apologize to you for what I said on that walk. It was beneath me. I descended to a level that I ought not have descended to. I am sorry.”
“I teased you too mercilessly,” she said, looking away. “It was beneath me as well.”
A long pause. Finally, I said, “Well, we shall both forgive the other and move on from this. No reason to discuss anything else. If that’s all?”
“I simply don’t understand, I suppose,” she said. “I have gone back and forth, this way and that, inside and outside, and I cannot make it into sense, sir.”
I only blinked at her. “What don’t you understand?”
She squared her shoulders. “Well, there were two ways of it, I suppose. There was the way that I told myself was the rightway of it, and then the way I feared it was. The right was that everything was as it had been before, everything that you had done hitherto had meant everything that I had thought it meant, but that you simply… you simply thought she was pretty and you made some offhand comment of it. To me. You said it tome. That is why it does not make sense. Because if everything was the way that I had perceived it to be, you would not have told me you found another woman pretty.”
I hung my head, letting out another sigh. “Perhaps I needs must explain—”
“But if it were the other way, wherein you never felt anything at all for me, and you had no intentions towards me, and you were planning to marry her, then you would have done it already. You have every excuse to do it.”
