"I sent an express," Darcy said.
“So you did. I had not fully attended to it, I confess.” His glance had already moved, by no very deliberate process, toward the window, where Jane stood in the pleasant light with the unaffected ease of someone who had chosen that position with some care. “You will not mind the house being not quite in order.It answers well enough for my purposes, though my sisters would say otherwise.”
Jane returned the attention with a smile of particular quality; warm, unguarded in appearance, and uncommitted to anything specific. She had looked at Darcy once when he entered and seemed content to leave him to his own observations. Her attention returned to Mr. Bingley, who was still talking.
The second gentleman cleared his throat.
He was dressed with the careful respectability of someone who understood the importance of appearances without possessing a natural instinct for them. His eyes travelled about the room and came to rest upon Mrs. Gardiner's cap. Something in his expression altered.
Mrs. Bennet, who had followed them in with the cheerful authority of someone who knew exactly whose house this was, drew breath.
“Mr. Bingley, I see you are already acquainted with Mr. Darcy. This is my sister, Mrs. Gardiner. Mr. Collins, this is my sister, Mrs. Gardiner; her friend, Mr. Darcy; and my most dutiful daughter, Elizabeth Bennet.”
Mr. Collins stepped forward with solemn consequence before anyone could remark upon it.
“Mr. Darcy.” He bowed with the depth of a man paying tribute to a principle. "I am most particularly honoured to make your acquaintance, and I flatter myself that you will not think it presumptuous if I mention that I have the honour of being intimately acquainted with your aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I have the living of Hunsford, which is in her ladyship's gift, and I may say, without exaggeration, that her condescension and benevolence toward those in her patronage is quite without parallel in my experience of the great. I hadthe privilege of dining at Rosings no fewer than four times in the last month alone." He paused to allow this distinction to be appreciated. "Her ladyship is all graciousness. I trust I may take the liberty of saying, Mr. Darcy, that she speaks of Pemberley with the warmest admiration, and of yourself with a particularity of regard that reflects the greatest credit upon her feeling heart."
Darcy bowed and said nothing. He had considerable practice in receiving this particular speech.During its delivery, he looked at Elizabeth. She was not attending to Mr. Collins. Her attention appeared fixed elsewhere; yet when she became aware of his gaze, she looked at him in return, and the understanding between them required no explanation.
Mr. Collins, satisfied with his own address, turned his attention to the room. His gaze moved methodically among the younger ladies before settling upon Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, was giving him more attention than she wished. There was something in the ease with which he had been received, and in her mother's manner toward him, that she did not entirely like.
Mr. Bennet regarded the scene with increasing dissatisfaction. He had a plan; orderly, if not generous. Collins was a reasonable man; obedient, unimaginative in the particular way that makes a man manageable, and entirely without the inclination to question his good fortune. Elizabeth would manage him as she managed everything else. The estate would remain in order, and life at Longbourn continue as it had, with the minor adjustment of a clergyman at the table. It had appeared a sufficient arrangement until Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley walked into his parlour and stationed himself within two feet of Elizabeth Bennet.
Mr. Bennet turned the situation over with the methodical calm of a man who keeps his alarm very close to his chest. Collins was still in the room. Nothing had been declared. There was time, if he moved with care, if he managed his wife, if he introduced the matter in its proper order.
His gaze returned to Darcy and settled there with a quietness that had nothing comfortable in it.
His plan would not fail. He had not permitted himself to consider the alternative.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The tea things had been brought in with rather more ceremony than was usual at Longbourn, which Elizabeth attributed to the carriages still visible from the front window and the effect they continued to produce upon her mother's sense of occasion. The best cups had been found. The table had been repositioned twice. Mrs. Bennet had directed operations from the centre of the room with focused energy.
They were settled now, after a fashion. Mr. Bingley sat nearest the window, where the light was pleasant and Miss Bennet happened also to be situated, a coincidence that appeared to satisfy both parties. Mr. Collins had taken a chair at no very great distance from Elizabeth, a position he had arrived at by a series of small adjustments so gradual as to appear almost accidental. Darcy stood at the mantelpiece rather longer than was strictly necessary before accepting the chair that placed him at the edge of the group, where he could see the room without being easily observed from its centre.
Elizabeth poured, because she always poured. She kept her attention on the cups and the small necessary business of thetable, because every time her eyes moved across the room she found something she had not prepared herself to see.
She had seen the mask only once before today, and barely. At the theatre in London, a few days before they met, her attention had been drawn across the house to the Matlock box, where Lady Matlock had fixed her with a look so still and deliberate that Elizabeth had spent the better part of the first act trying to understand it. She had been occupied with that effort, turning the look over and finding no satisfactory explanation for it, when the door to the box opened and two gentlemen entered late. One was easy and agreeable; the other was taller, darker, and moved with a quiet assurance that altered the attention of the room without appearing to seek it. His expression was grave, his manner contained, and he took his seat at the edge of the company as a man takes a position he intends to hold. He did not look her way. She had noticed him the way one notices something at the edge of a thought; briefly, without quite meaning to, and without being able to say precisely why it stayed.
Three days later he had crossed a stretch of Brinmouth sand to return her bonnet, and she had begun to understand the difference between that grave and guarded figure and the man he actually was. She had spent two months learning that difference. She had considered herself well acquainted with it.
She had not, until today, seen this. The mask he wore in this room was not the contained gravity she had glimpsed at the theatre. That had been the manner of a man who wished to be unobserved. This was something more deliberate, and it had been in place since the moment they crossed the threshold. Her aunt had told her, in the careful way Mrs. Gardiner spoke of things she knew only at a distance, that as a boy he had retreated after grief and arrived at school a closed and silent thing. Thatthe losses had not come one at a time but all at once, within a matter of weeks; his mother, his infant sister, and with them the whole world his father then sealed away behind a door he did not reopen. She had thought she understood what such losses had produced in him, but had not expected it to look quite like this, in a room where she could see it and he could not tell her it was not meant for her; and as she reached for the teapot, she held what she knew carefully.
Mrs. Bennet, having distributed cups with the liberal attention to consequence of a general reviewing her troops, settled herself with the bright expectancy of a woman about to conduct several campaigns at once.
“Mr. Darcy,” she began, “I hope you find Hertfordshire to your liking. We are a very pleasant country, I think, though perhaps not what a gentleman of your consequence is accustomed to. Jane, Mr. Darcy will want more tea. Jane is very attentive,” she added, turning to Darcy with the fond confidence of a woman producing her finest exhibit. “She has always been the most obliging of my girls. And accomplished. She sings, and draws, and she is admired by everyone who sees her. She is thought,” she continued, as though offering a point of local geography, “to be the most beautiful young woman in the county.”
Jane received this with a smile of particular modesty and said nothing, which was itself a kind of accomplishment.
Mrs. Bennet looked from Jane to Darcy and found herself dissatisfied. This gentleman's consequence was of a different order from Mr. Bingley's entirely, and yet Jane and Mr. Bingley were so very nearly settled. She had not yet determined what to do with the contradiction, and found the not-determining of it disagreeable.
Her gaze moved to Elizabeth. She had always found those eyes unsettling. Dark, with flecks of gold that caught the light; handsome enough on a man, like her father's eyes, she supposed, but on a girl who would not sit still for her music and came home with her hem in a state, they were simply wasted. Mrs. Bennet returned to her tea and resolved to think about Mr. Darcy later, when she had more information.
"Mr. Collins," she said, turning with the smooth pivot of a woman who has been managing multiple objectives for thirty years, "I do not think you have yet had the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth. She has been abroad these two months, and is quite lately returned. She is very capable." She smiled at Elizabeth. "Very useful about the place. Runs the household accounts, if you can believe it. Mr. Bennet could not do without her, I am sure, though she will go about out of doors more than is strictly necessary and never could be persuaded to sit still for her music. But she has a great deal of energy. Too much, perhaps, for her own good. Still, she is a good girl, in her way."
Elizabeth said nothing. She had learned, many years ago, that response was rarely the remedy.
