“A week,” said Richard, sounding disappointed. “So soon.”
“You don’t even like her,” I said.
“Caroline?” he said, turning to look off into the distance, a wistful look on his face. “I like her.”
I was taken aback by that. I did not think I had seen that expression on his face when it came to women. Especially not when it came to one woman in particular.
He was talking. “She’s not like most women, I suppose. There’s this bravado about her, but when you get past it, you realize she’s desperately insecure and she has this shy way about her. She wants to please you. She wants to be pleased, but she has no idea how to go about doing any of that, and she’s sort of… bumbling, perhaps. But there’s something rather fetchingabout it in a way that I can’t quite explain.” He chuckled. “And she’s sort of sad, you know, Will. Deep down in there, there’s this painful wound in her, as if everyone has rejected her, simply everyone, and perhaps I’m the same, I don’t know. Maybe everyone has that little sad center in them, and maybe wants to show it to someone and have that other person embrace you and hold you against their beating heart, clutch you close, kiss you, and finally accept you, once and for all.”
Well, this was not good, not at all. I thought my cousin might have fallen in love with Caroline Bingley of all people.
He turned to look at me with another chuckle, this one a bit embarrassed. “Oh, dear, I went on a bit there, did I not?”
“You have been careful, I hope,” I said. “You have taken precautions not to get her with child.”
“I’m not a fool,” he said to me. “But I wonder what our children would look like. Hopefully, they would take after her and not me. She is much nicer to look at than I am.”
“I don’t know if I agree,” I said, for Caroline was really quite plain, I had always thought. “At any rate, you ought not be thinking that way. I think you really must go. You must bid her goodbye. She has got what she wanted and hopefully her curiosity has been slaked and you have found it all diverting, and I think you must put her from your mind now.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and furrowed his brow.
“She is another man’s wife, Richard,” I said.
“Yes, but he hardly counts as a man, does he?” said my cousin.
“I do not think he would agree with that statement,” I said.
Richard did not leave, and the days passed quickly, and the arrival of the party from the Lakes grew closer and closer.
I told myself it would be all right, that Mr. Bennet could not be too angry about it all, in the end, and that perhaps they could come to some agreement like the one that Bingley had offered me.
I told myself that I must apologize to Mr. Bennet, make peace with my wife’s brother, for we would be associated for a long time.
I could not ever say that the bible did not condemn his behavior, I supposed, but perhaps that did not matter. It was not my concern, truly, how it was that other people conducted themselves. It was only my concern that I see to myself and my household. I should leave the state of Bennet’s and Bingley’s souls to themselves and God.
After all, it was God who judged.
It was not my place.
After I thought this, I thought of only twenty other aspects of my life where I needed to take this advice, and I felt a heavy weight of shame. I had been most exacting with a number of people, not least my own wife. I resolved that I should do much better in the future, for she deserved a better husband than what I had been to her hitherto.
The party arrived mid-day, and they were all quite festive, full of laughter, and they spent the afternoon regaling us with all manner of stories. Truly, the three of them did seem to be perfect travel companions. I imagined that if my wife had married Bingley, there would have been compensations. They would have had quite a good deal of fun together.
But she was ever so happy to see me, and I was to see her, and when we were alone that night, she whispered in my ear that she thought she might be with child, that her monthly time was quite late now, and I apologized to her on the spot, promising to her then and there that I should be a different man, that I should never subject our child to whatever it was that I had subjectedher to, that I had realized that it was my job to see to myself not to tell others how to behave.
She covered me in kisses and said that we would balance each other so very well, the both of us, that sometimes it would be necessary for me to be stern when she was not, and vice and versa.
I had missed her very much.
But we were awakened in the night by a frantic pounding on the door, and Mr. Bennet called in that he must speak to Elizabeth, and I got up and yanked the door and said there had better be a good reason for waking my wife when she was likely with child, and this stopped Bennet cold.
“You never said,” he said to her.
She was yawning behind me, wrapped in the bedsheets. “I thought you would be angry. You have spent almost the entire trip insulting him, you know. Will, this would be a fine time for you to tell him what you say you wish to tell him.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “You see, I have been quite wrong to have ever put any judgment to you or to Bingley. It is not for me to say, and I must spend more time looking at the beam in my own eye and not the speck in my neighbor’s. I know that you will not—”
“It’s Caroline,” he broke in. “She and the colonel have eloped.”
