Page 13 of A Selfish Disdain

Darcy did not answer this directly, which Bingley, who had grown considerably more perceptive upon this particular subject than his general habits of observation would have suggested, took to be answer enough. They remained silent for a moment, enjoying their drink.

That same evening, Elizabeth sat with Jane in Netherfield’s comfortable drawing room, where the family often retired in the evenings after dinner. However, on this night, Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy went to the former’s study to enjoy some port, while the ladies sat together in the sitting room, awaiting the gentlemen’s return.

Elizabeth, for her own part, began to notice small things she had not troubled to notice before, like the particular attention Darcy paid when she spoke, even upon subjects of no great consequence; the care he took, amid all his disputing, never once to belittle an opinion of hers even when he thought it entirely wrong; the manner in which his gravity seemed to soften by some unmistakable degree whenever she entered a room he was already in.

"You are very quiet this evening, Lizzy," Jane observed, as they sat near each other in silence.

"I am considering my next argument, Jane," said Elizabeth, returning from her woolgathering. Her comment was not, strictly speaking, true, and she suspected Jane knew.

Jane looked at her sister thoughtfully. "You need not consider it so very hard, as I think you have found a partner equal to the exercise."

Elizabeth took a settling breadth and shook her head, "I have only found an opponent, Jane."

Deciding to change the subject, Jane asked, “Why don’t you play a little this evening, Lizzy?”

Meanwhile, the two gentlemen having lingered rather longer over their port.

"You seem displeased, Darcy. I hope my cellar has not disappointed you."

Darcy shook his head precipitously. "Your cellar is excellent, as you know very well. I am only considering how long we may decently remain here before we are missed."

"Missed by whom, I wonder." Bingley's look was entirely too innocent to be believed. "Jane will not mind if we take our time. She is occupied just now persuading Miss Elizabeth to play for us, and I do not think either of them has spared a thought for where I've got to."

"Miss Elizabeth plays?" Darcy asked, sounding surprised.

"A little, and indifferently, by her own account, though I have heard her, and thought it a great deal better than indifferent. She does not care to be pressed into it, however. Jane has been at her these ten minutes, I should think, and Lizzy has refused her twice already, which I am reliably informed is her opening position upon every such occasion, and means nothing at all beyond the fact that she means to be properly persuaded."

Darcy set down his glass with rather more attention than the action required. "Then we had better go through, or we shall miss the persuading."

Bingley grinned into his port and said nothing, though the look he gave his friend as they rose from their chairs suggested he had drawn precisely the conclusion Darcy would have preferred he did not.

At that moment, Jane was encouraging her sister to play the piano. "You have played for us before, Lizzy, and very prettily," said Jane. "I do not know why you should suddenly grow so shy of it."

"I am not shy, Jane, I am honest, which you would do well to distinguish more carefully. There is a difference between playing prettily for one's own family, who are obliged by blood to think well of it, and playing before a room that has no such obligation."

The men entered the family room at that moment to find it arranged much as Bingley had predicted, Jane seated beside the instrument, and Elizabeth standing a little apart from it, protesting that her performance would disgrace the company far more than it would entertain it.

Darcy, having heard Elizabeth’s protests, remarked, "I think you underrate your audience, Miss Bennet. I do not know that anyone in this room is so easily disgraced as you suppose."

Elizabeth turned to him with the particular light in her eye that he had come, by now, to watch for. "That is very handsome of you, sir, though I notice you have not yet heard me play, and so cannot properly judge what you are being so generous about."

"Then let me hear you, and judge for myself, rather than take your own poor opinion of yourself upon trust. I have generally found your opinions upon every other subject to want no defending at all. I confess myself curious to discover whether this is the single exception."

It was, in the end, this, rather than Jane's gentler urging, or the polite entreaties of Mr. Bingley, that carried the point, though Elizabeth could not afterward have said precisely why a challenge from Mr. Darcy should have succeeded where a sister's affection had failed. Nevertheless, Elizabeth seated herself at the instrument with a small, resigned laugh, remarking that she hoped Mr. Darcy would remember his own confidence in her when it proved entirely misplaced, and began to play.

As she played, Dary thought that Elizaebth was not, in truth, a very great proficient, and would have been the first to say so; however, there was in her playing an unstudied ease, perhaps a want of self-consciousness that Darcy had rarely encountered in the more accomplished performances he had sat through in London drawing-rooms, where every note pressed for effect and every performer's eye strayed to gauge the impression being made.

Darcy thought Elizabeth played as though the room had ceased, for the moment, to exist at all, her attention given wholly to the music, her countenance unguarded in a manner he had not yet seen it, the sharp readiness she generally wore in company softened into something, to Darcy's eye, very much more affecting for being entirely unintentional.

He could not look away from her, and did not, for some considerable time, trouble himself to try.

Darcy had told himself, not a fortnight past, standing at the his window with an unfinished letter in his hand, that reason must eventually prevail over inclination, as it had always done before in every other trial of his life; and he understood now, watching her hands move over the keys with an absorption that owed nothing whatsoever to any wish to please him, that he had been arguing a case already lost.

Whatever defence he had constructed, of family, of fortune, of connections his relations would consider beneath him, seemed, in that quarter of an hour, to possess no more substance than the last note that faded into the general murmur of the room once she had done.

Darcy did not know, watching her rise from the instrument amid the company's polite applause, whether what he felt could properly be called falling, or only the final and entire admission of a thing that had already fallen some while before, and waited only for him to notice it.

He knew only that his heart, which he had spent months instructing with every argument reason could furnish, had ceased, in that quarter of an hour, to listen to him at all.