Page 30 of A Selfish Disdain

She spoke gently to him, though with a touch of sarcasm. "You know my mother well enough to know it is precisely the sort of detail my mother would invent, given four days and no contrary information. I do not think it wise to give her a fifth."

He was quiet for a moment, and she could sense he was thinking of some excuse to give, but in the end, he abated. "Go," he said, at last. "You have sat this room a great deal longer than any claim I have on you can properly justify, and your family has the better claim regardless. I will not pretend I do not notice the room rather less well recommended in your absence from it.” He said gravely, before adding, “But go."

Elizabeth favored a large smile, and his eyebrows raised, slightly, at her adoration. "I shall not be gone above a few hours," she said, even softer than before.

He held his jaw flatly, it looked almost to be a grimace, certainly a sign of some sort of irritation. "I did not ask for a few hours. I said only that you should go." He paused. "Though I would ask you to return again as soon as you may, and safely at that.”

Elizabeth laughed at this. "I promise you, Mr. Darcy, I have had quite my fill of overturned carriages for one season, and mean to take every possible precaution against a repetition." She rose, smoothing her skirts, and permitted herself, at the door, one last look back at him.

He was pale still, and tired still, but watching her go with an expression she found looked like regret and a touch of sadness, and his look warmed something in her chest. "I will send word the moment I arrive, so that you need not lie there inventing catastrophes of your own to match my mother's."

He let out what sounded like a gruff of sorts. "I make no promises.”

She issued a gentle goodbye and left his room soon after. Then, Elizabeth went down to order Mr. Bingley’s carriage, being too tired to walk to Longbourn that morning, while thinking that Mr. Darcy surely was an awful patient, brooding as he was at her departure home.

***

"Lizzy! Oh, my dear, dear Lizzy!" Mrs. Bennet was down the steps and across the drive before the carriage had fully stopped, her handkerchief already pressed to her eyes, her voice carrying easily across the whole of the drive and, Elizabeth suspected, a fair portion of the neighbouring fields besides. "How was Mr. Darcy hurt? Was it highwaymen? Surely it must have been for I have heard nothing else spoken of in Meryton this se'nnight, and I said to your father, I said, Mr. Bennet, our Lizzy set upon by highwaymen and nearly killed, and here she comes back to us thin as a rail and pale as a ghost, and I do not know that my nerves will ever properly recover from the fright of it, not if I live to be ninety!"

"Mama, I am quite well, I promise you." Before she could explain, her mother cut her off.

"Well! You do not look well, Lizzy, you look as though you have been dragged through a hedge backward, which I collect from your aunt's letter is very nearly the literal truth of it, and I have half a mind to write to the newspapers myself about the shocking state of the roads, that a young lady cannot travel to London without being set upon by ruffians!"

Mr. Bennet, following his wife down the steps at a rather more measured pace, caught Elizabeth in an embrace. WIth considerably more than his usual dry manner generally permitted him, he expressed aloud, "I am glad to have you home, Lizzy. Whole, and in one piece, whatever your mother's account of the hedge may suggest to the contrary."

Elizabeth hugged him tightly, and said, "I am glad to be home, Papa."

In a lower tone he said. "You will tell me the whole of it properly, I hope, once your mother has exhausted the subject and moved on to whatever fresh alarm presently occupies her attention, which I judge, by the set of her countenance, will not be very long in coming."

It was, in fact, rather sooner than even Mr. Bennet's dry prediction had been anticipated, as Mrs. Bennet, having exhausted her first transports of relief, turned her considerable attention next to the question of Mr. Darcy.

However, only an hour later, the man himself was handed down from a carriage by Bingley with care. Elizabeth was shocked to see him, and would have soon chastised him back from whence he came, if not for her family being about.

"Well," said Mrs. Bennet, her eyes moving from her daughter to Mr. Darcy and back again. "I am sure I do not know what people will say, spending days together with no proper chaperone but a wounded coachman and a farmer's family, however respectable, though I am sure nobody could think ill of dear Lizzy's conduct, being set upon by highwaymen through no fault of her own, but I do think, Mr. Darcy, that a gentleman in your position must be very conscious of what is owed to a young lady's good name, under such particular circumstances as these."

Elizabeth was instantly mortified by her mother’s speech, and quickly sought to cut her off. "Mama!"

However, Mrs. Bennet would not give way. "I am only saying what everyone will be thinking, Lizzy, whether or not anyone troubles to say it to your face, and I think it a great deal kinder that I say it plainly now than that you should be left to discover it for yourself at the next assembly."

Darcy, weak as he still was, drew himself up with a composure, and answered Mrs. Bennet with his usual gravity, though hearing him made her heart beat rather faster. "You need not concern yourself, Mrs. Bennet, upon that particular subject. I am entirely conscious of what is owed to your daughter's good name, and I do not intend that consciousness to remain, for very much longer."

Mrs. Bennet, for one of the very few occasions in the whole of her married life, found herself entirely without a ready reply, and it was left to Jane, to observe to Elizabeth, in the relative privacy of the sisters' first embrace, that she had never in her life seen their mother rendered speechless by anything, and did not think she should ever forget the sight of it.

Not a quarter of an hour later, Bingley finally convinced Darcy to return to Netherfield to rest and recover.

CHAPTER 18

Just as Elizabeth suspected, it did not take longer than a se'nnight for her story to make its way through the whole of Meryton. It was, of course, embellished, and by the time it had passed through half a dozen drawing-rooms, the incident was something considerably more sensational than the truth, though the truth itself, Elizabeth privately reflected, had wanted very little embellishment, since it was quite sensational on its own account.

She had known, from the very first morning after her return, that some account of it must inevitably circulate; as the servants, although good, were not under great regulation under Mr. Bingley.

Elizabeth was certain that little by little, the story of a carriage overturned by highwaymen, a coachman injured, a gentleman carried near death into a country inn, as well as a young lady nursing him through days and nights under not quite unchaperoned intimacy, was not, whatever the innocence of its true particulars, the kind of story that Meryton's limited society could be expected to let pass on.

However, what Elizabeth had not anticipated was quite how swiftly, nor quite how thoroughly, that the stories of intimacy between herself and Mr. Darcy would proceed.

She had been home long before she began to hear the rumours that were running their course through the whole of Meryton. On one such visit to Longbourn, Elizabeth had scarcely entered the family room before her youngest sister, Lydia, pounced upon her with a bright sort of fervor in her eyes. Lydia was clearly excited and directly told her sister, Elizabeth, about the most scandalous intelligence she had heard from Meryton.

The occasion in which the news was delivered, Lydia explained, was a little sort of party at Lucas Lodge. Lydia shared that Sir William had hosted a card party, not four days after Elizabeth's return. The party was ostensibly to celebrate nothing more particular than the pleasure of their neighbours' company.