Page 22 of A Selfish Disdain

She sighed, as she bent her head to finish up her binding work. "Perhaps I am tired of being generous, Mr. Darcy. I have been generous a great deal this fortnight, in private, to myself, making every excuse for your silence that my own pride would permit. And, now, I find that you have finally troubled to explain it, that the explanation amounts to little more than that you were frightened of your own feelings, and chose, rather than face them, to treat me as though I had ceased to signify at all."

“I have told you I regret it." He sounded hurt, she thought, though his voice took on a more curt nature.

Elizabeth felt her own voice growing in agitation. "You have told me you regret the manner of it, but, in truth, I am not certain you regret the substance; that you weighed my situation, my family, my connections, against whatever you felt, and found the weighing came out against me, and only tonight, with death close enough to concentrate your mind upon it, have you found reason to reconsider the sum."

He sat up straighter now, and pushed back at her attempt to so easily calculate his feelings. "That is unjust, and you know it to be unjust."

Having finished his bindings, Elizabeth rose from her seat, and crossed her arms, as she replied to Mr. Darcy, all the fear and agitation of the evening, pouring into her speech. "Do I? I do not know what I know any longer. Mr. Darcy, I begin to wonder whether that habit of weighing is not simply what you are, beneath whatever gentler face tonight has shown me. From the very beginning, from the first moment, I may almost say, of our acquaintance, your manner has impressed me with nothing so much as your arrogance, your certainty of your own correctness, and a selfish disdain for the feelings of anyone who dared to disagree with you. I had not known you a month before I understood you to be the very last man whose good opinion I ought to have troubled myself to want."

The words fell into the quiet room with a violence force, though it was delivered in a low voice, mindful, even in her anger, of Reeves asleep by the fire not six feet distant. Darcy went very still, and Elizabeth, watched the raw openness she had glimpsed only minutes before shutter itself away behind a hardened and altogether more familiar exterior.

"I see," he said, very quietly, when he spoke again. "Then I have been mistaken, Miss Bennet, in a great many things tonight, and I will not trouble you further with any of them."

He rose, gathering his coat though the wound beneath its sleeve could not have welcomed the movement, and withdrew to his cot at the far side of the hearth without another word, leaving Elizabeth alone with the basin of water, the dying fire, and a silence into which she could not, for a long time afterward, bring herself to speak.

CHAPTER 13

Elizabeth did not sleep, or slept so little and so poorly that it was difficult to know if she had truly slept at all, and when Thatcher's voice roused the household before the sun had properly cleared the horizon, Elizabeth rose from the narrow settee she had been given near the kitchen fire. She was still and sore all over, and she suspected her fall had been great indeed.

All that night, since her quarrel with Darcy, she had lain silent, listening to the darkness of the house settle and creak around her. She turned thought over the events of the evening time and time again, unable to leave it be, though no good could come of the probing.

It was not the crash itself that kept her awake, or even the fear of it, but of the confessions of her companion that undid her. She was cross with herself, mostly. Elizabeth had asked him a plain question and he had given her a plain answer, and there was no crime in either. And yet, she lay awake regardless, and did not care for what that suggested of her, and was not in a humour, this early and this tired, to consider it further.

Elizabeth had thought, before that night, that she understood Mr. Darcy tolerably well. He was proud, exacting, better pleased with his own opinions than with the general run of company, a man she could dislike with a clear conscience and no particular effort, and had, until very recently, done so with something approaching satisfaction.

However, it was proving considerably more difficult to dislike a man who had drawn her out of a wrecked carriage with an arm that was bleeding and said nothing of it until she made him; who had walked a mile through a black wood with a pistol he no longer had, and a hand that went, all the same, to where it should have been every time a branch stirred.

And there was the other matter besides. He had told her he loved her. Not gracefully, but there, in the dark, with his sleeve soaked through and his voice unsteadied by something that did not sound like a wound. In truth, she did not know what to do with his confession. She struggled to determine whether to credit it the more for having been wrung from him against his own better judgment, or the less, as the kind of thing men say when they are frightened and tired and uncertain whether morning would come.

Drawing her knees up against the cold of the settee and pulling up the wool blanket more firmly around her, Elizabeth had all but given up on sleep. She thought, I have a very great deal handed to me for one night. Mr. Darcy’s declaration was something she had neither asked for nor, reflecting in the dark kitchen around her, entirely certain she wished undone.

Meanwhile, Darcy had not slept either, though he would have called what he had done thinking rather than lying awake.

His arm ached, which accounted for some part of it. The wound was not serious, and he had told Elizabeth so. He had not lied, though he was aware he had not told her the whole of it either, which he supposed some men would call the same thing.

Darcy’s wound throbbed with a dull persistence that made sleep, when it came at all, thin and unsatisfying, easily broken by the least shift of his weight against the low cot he had been given. And thus, he lay a long while staring up at the dark beams of the ceiling, turning the events of the night over, refusing to look in the direction of the woman who bound his wound, and broke his heart.

It did not help that she had not laughed at him when he spoke love to her. He had half expected her to laugh, and he braced for it, even, in the instant after he had spoken, certain she would seize on so plain an admission and turn it into something to be teased, some small witticism she could hold up between them like a shield against what he had just laid at her feet. And yet, she had not.

What she had done instead was, in its way, considerably worse, or so it had seemed to him at the time, lying now in the dark and turning it over. She had gone very still, and very quiet, and had asked him, in a voice stripped of its usual quickness, whether he expected her to be grateful for it; whether he supposed a confession, however sincerely meant had been offered under circumstances neither of them had chosen and both of them had been too frightened to comprehend their situation fully.

Darcy knew he had not handled the situation well. He could admit that much to himself now, in the dark, admit that he had been bitter, and perhaps still was. He had answered her coldness with something nearer to anger; had told her, in words he did not entirely care to recall, that he had not spoken in expectation of gratitude, nor of anything else, and that she might have simply said as much without troubling to make a lesson of it. It was not what he had meant to say.

He was not perfectly certain, lying there, what he had meant to say, only that it had not been that, and that her face, in the last moment before he turned from her, had worn an expression that seemed proud, and he had wanted to ask her to explain, but did not have the heart nor the stamina, and so retreated feebly to the opposite side of the room.

Of her own state of mind he could form no clear picture at all. She had said little enough since, and what she had said had given nothing away, whether she regretted the sharpness of her question, or stood by it; whether the coldness had been armor thrown up in haste against a declaration she had not wanted, or something else entirely. He knew his own bitterness intimately; hers remained, to him, a country without a map.

***

That morning, Darcy rose before the sun, and went to see what could be done, this early, about Reeves' condition, and getting Miss Elizabeth Bennet safely away from a night that had shown him considerably more of himself than he had gone into it prepared to see.

As soon as Darcy sat up, he saw Thatcher, along with Reeves and Elizabeth. Thatcher noticed him, and said, "Morning, Mr. Darcy.” He nodded his head out the small window to Darcy’s left. “There's a rider come through," Thatcher was saying, low and urgent. "Peddler, on his way to market says word's gone round three farms already that the gang what took the Dunstable road last night are still about, and meaning to finish what they started, having heard, same as everyone else by now, that there was a gentleman among the party carrying more than the usual traveller's purse."

Darcy’s eyebrows lifted at the news, and Elizabeth gasped to herself. "They know we survived, then," he finally said.

Thatcher turned to look at Darcy. "They know someone did, sir, and that's enough for men of that stamp to go looking, especially with a wounded man among you slowing your progress. I'll not have you caught here, nor my own family put at risk for the harbouring of you, begging your pardon for the plainness of it. You'd best be away before full light, and by a road they'll not think to watch."

Reeves, weakened but insistent upon rising, was helped into a coat too large for him, borrowed from Thatcher's own store, and pronounced fit enough to travel slowly. Thatcher himself proposed, offering his own son to drive them the back way toward the Aylesbury road, where a coaching inn might furnish proper transport onward, while he and Martha remained behind to give whatever account of the night's visitors seemed likeliest to send any further trouble in the wrong direction.