***
The family gathered with their usual variety of spirits. Mrs Bennet was already animated, Lydia and Kitty restless, Mr. Collins solemnly attentive to his plate.
Elizabeth took her seat quietly.
“You will want to be punctual today,” Mrs. Bennet declared. “I will not have us arriving after the Netherfield party. Nothing looks so careless.”
Mr. Bennet folded his paper. “Carelessness is sometimes only punctuality viewed from the wrong angle.”
No one attended to him, which suited him very well.
Mrs. Bennet declared the previous evening a triumph. She could not say enough of the pleasures of it. She did mention that she could have sworn she had placed Mr. Darcy next to Mr. Bennet, but that it all turned out better. “We discussed it with Lady Lucas that he behaved above expectation. He understood the trials of mothers.” She sighed. “He is a bachelor, yet it is too bad he is unavailable for the likes of us.”
Lydia spoke of the coming ball. Kitty spoke of dancing. Mr. Collins spoke of propriety.
Elizabeth listened.
At one point, Mr. Bennet remarked, without looking up, “The militia seems to attract an astonishing number of men who discover, rather late, that they are fond of discipline.”
Lydia laughed. Kitty echoed her. The remark passed on.
Elizabeth did not laugh. She found that she could not. The remark had struck too near the truth to admit of amusement.
By half past ten, they were ready. Cloaks were fetched, gloves adjusted; the bustle of departure lent importance to even the smallest motions.
As it was rather cold that morning, Mr. Bennet had the carriage ready. Elizabeth and the two younger sisters chose to briskly walk. Jane was not allowed that freedom; her mother wanted her at the church when Mr. Bingley arrived.
***
Mr. Darcy did not sleep late.
When he rose, the house was still, the quiet of Sunday morning pressing more insistently than that of any other day. Bingley was right, he thought. He really did not like Sundays and their obligations – and, of course, the required idleness of them. He dressed with his usual care, though his thoughts were not fixed upon the routine. They returned, with persistence, to the previous evening. His valet adjusted to his distant mood and quietly executed the morning steps.
It washereyes he sought first upon arriving. Since first noticing her, he had fallen into the habit – though he was scarcely aware of it.
Then Miss Elizabeth Bennet crossed the room with unmistakable purpose. Mr. Collins had been on the brink of making himself insufferable. Darcy recalled it clearly now – the swelling confidence with which he had prepared to address the company, the officious tone already forming, the dangerof embarrassment extending well beyond the bounds of mere absurdity. It had not been Darcy’s concern; such displays were not uncommon in his experience. What had concerned Miss Elizabeth was something else entirely.
The dignity of her family.
She had acted to prevent a public impropriety. For a fleeting instant, he wondered whether she had acted to sparehim– but he knew better. She had intervened because the moment required it, and she had done so with such natural authority that the foolish man never realised he was corrected.
Darcy could not but acknowledge the propriety of her actions – though he would have preferred that they had not been necessary. There had been, moreover, a composure in her manner that carried a quiet authority – a quality he was not accustomed to encounter, and which he found more striking than he chose to admit. He could not recall many occasions on which he had witnessed good sense so efficiently applied and without any desire for admiration.
He could not dismiss, either, the absurdity that had been so publicly advanced. That his aunt might speak of such a plan within the family was nothing new; she had long been accustomed to arranging the future according to her own convenience. But that the notion should be repeated beyond that circle – and with such confidence – was a liberty he could not approve. It must be corrected, and decisively, if it were to spread further. Yet even as he resolved upon it, he was aware that this was not the source of his greatest irritation. That the matter had been brought forward before Miss Elizabeth – that she should hear it, weigh it, perhaps even believe him already engaged – was what he found most difficult to endure. He had no wish to be thought attached where he was not, and still less to appearindifferent to how such an impression might be received by Miss Elizabeth.
That it should signify so much to him – and so particularly in her estimation – was a circumstance he did not examine, though he was far from indifferent to it.
Their conversation afterwards, however, troubled him even more. Wickham. Always Wickham. A raw impulse returned: he wished – not for the first time – that he had not stopped after striking him once at Ramsgate. But Georgiana, misled and terrified, had cried out for him to stop – and he did.
Wickham was now at liberty to poison ears with whatever story best flattered himself and to slander Darcy without restraint. So much so that Miss Elizabeth had been moved to defend him. He hoped she would not wholly dismiss the warning.
Wickham’s ease would win him friends wherever he went. A ready smile and unguarded attentions were too often mistaken for virtue. Darcy found such transparency contemptible; civility, he knew, was no proof of character.
He was at least relieved that he had spoken frankly with her father.
Mr. Bennet’s rebuke had been delivered earlier, with an ease that had disguised its seriousness. Darcy did not deceive himself as to its cause. The remark he had made at the assembly – careless, unexamined, and spoken in the assurance of not being overheard – must have wounded Elizabeth more than he had allowed himself to consider. That her father should have thought it necessary to address the matter spoke plainly enough.
What unsettled Darcy was not the correction itself, but his own response to it.
