Page 32 of A Selfish Disdain

Elizabeth said nothing to this at first. While his aunt’s letter did trouble her somewhat, it was not his aunt's opinion alone that troubled her, for she had weathered worse insults from lesser people with considerably less feeling than Lady Catherine's letter. It was the very fact of the thing having been said at all, so publicly, so pointedly, by a party with every evident intention of forcing the question toward a conclusion of her own choosing rather than allowing it to unfold in whatever time and manner it was meant to, was a liberty Elizabeth found she could not easily forgive.

Whatever understanding exists, or might yet come to exist, between us, she thought, watching him where he stood with his back half turned to her, is ours to arrive at. In our own time, and by our own lights.

She wondered, watching him now, whether he understood that this was the true injury. It was certainly not his aunt's rudeness, which she could forgive as the rudeness of an old woman too long accustomed to having her own way, but the fact that a thing so private between the two of them that had grown in their peril might now be spoken of by strangers before either of them had found the courage to speak of it plainly to each other.

***

Elizabeth walked home to Longbourn later that afternoon, alone, having declined Bingley's offer of the carriage in favour of the exercise, and found, examining her own feelings better set on a familiar road, where she might reflect longer.

I do not want to be married because Meryton demands it, she reflected, feeling a growing alarm. I do not want him to offer for me because his aunt has forbidden it and his pride cannot bear to be seen obeying her, nor because my mother's nerves require some settlement before she can rest easy, nor because four days alone together have made the whole neighbourhood expect it of him as a matter of simple decency. I want him to ask me because he wishes to, in some ordinary room, on some ordinary day, with no fever and no danger and no letter from Rosings to press either of us toward an answer we might not otherwise have given so soon.

The following morning, Elizabeth set out again for Netherfield. However, before she went to visit with Mr. Darcy, Jane requested her time in her sister’s favourite sitting room. Jane was eager to hear Elizabeth’s perspective, having been made aware of the letter from Mr. Bingley the evening prior.

"I think," said Jane, when Elizabeth had laid the whole of her private fear before her, “that you are worrying over a danger that does not exist. I have known Mr. Darcy above two months now, Lizzy, through your own account of him if nothing else, and I do not believe him a man easily moved by pressure of any kind, and his aunt's least of all. I think, whatever the gossip presently demands of him, he will ask you in his own time, for his own reasons, and not one moment before he is entirely satisfied. Those reasons are the true ones and not merely the convenient ones."

"I hope you are right, Jane. But I confess I do not know how a man is meant to separate the two, once the world has made its own expectations so very plain. How is he to know himself, whether he asks because he wishes it, or because he can no longer bear to be seen not asking?"

"I do not think that is a question anyone but Mr. Darcy can answer." Jane took her sister's hand. "You must trust him, Lizzy, or you must ask him plainly, one or the other, for I do not think this particular fear will mend itself through worry alone, however thoroughly you examine it."

"You make it sound very simple," Elizabeth sighed.

Jane shook her head. "No, I do not think it simple at all. I think it very hard, and very brave, and exactly the kind of thing you have never yet shrunk from doing." Jane smiled, and pressed her sister's hand once more before releasing it. "Though I will own I do not think either of you has very much longer to wait, whatever the reason, for the answer to make itself known one way or the other."

The two spoke a little more before Elizabeth went upstairs to visit with Mr. Darcy, though she carried Jane's words with her the whole way up.

It was not that Elizabeth doubted Mr. Darcy's feelings. But, she understood, better perhaps than Jane could, how heavily a man of his particular pride might feel the weight of being seen to act under compulsion, and how intolerable he would find it, once his strength returned to him in full, to know that his aunt believed herself to have arranged his marriage by the simple expedient of announcing it loudly enough.

And she understood, too, how far that pride, roused now into something nearer open anger than she had yet seen from him, might carry a man toward a course of action undertaken more in defiance of Lady Catherine than in any settled certainty of his own readiness for it.

Is he ready to marry me? she thought, pausing a moment outside the door with her hand not quite yet raised to knock. Or only ready to prove to his aunt that he cannot be told whom he may not?

She knocked, and was beckoned inside to see the man himself.

CHAPTER 19

On an ordinary Tuesday morning, some three weeks after Elizabeth had returned home, a note arrived at Longbourn in Darcy's own hand, asking whether Miss Bennet might be persuaded to walk with him that afternoon, if her time permitted it.

He requested that they not walk at Netherfield, nor to any of the neighbourhood's more frequented paths, but to a particular stretch of the old lane beyond Longbourn's own garden. It was quiet and generally unfrequented, where he understood, likely from Jane, that Elizabeth was accustomed to walk when she wished to walk without interruption.

She went, and found him waiting at the lane's turning, alone, without Bingley's company or any of the household's watchful attention to observe them, and understood quite evidently that he had chosen it with considerable care.

"How might you know," she said, by way of greeting, "that I come here when I wish to be private, Mr. Darcy?"

He looked at her, in his grave usually stoicness, but something in his lip twitched. "Mrs. Bingley may have mentioned it once, in passing." He fell into step beside her as she continued along the lane, his countenance grave, though not, she thought, with the old defensive gravity she had once mistaken for pride.

Darcy drew a breath, and Elizabeth, walking beside him in the dappled afternoon light, found her own heart beating rather faster than the gentle pace of their walk accounted for. "My aunt's letter arrived, as you know, with every intention of forcing my hand, and of making the question of you and me a matter of scandal. And I found, in the days immediately following it, that I could not entirely separate my own wish to come to you at once from a baser wish, considerably less creditable, to defy her as publicly and as swiftly as possible to prove that her interference carried no weight with me whatsoever."

Elizabeth kept her eyes on the lane ahead of them, but replied, "That does not seem so very ignoble a motive, sir."

"It is not ignoble. That may it be, I wanted to be certain, before I came to you, that whatever I said would be said because I could not any longer bear to leave it unsaid, and not because Lady Catherine, or your mother's nerves, or the whole of Meryton's gossip, had made the saying of it seem merely convenient, or merely necessary, rather than entirely and simply true."

They had stopped walking, Elizabeth realized, and were standing now at a bend in the lane where the hedgerow opened onto a view of Longbourn's own fields, gold with the last of the season's light, and she found, looking at him properly for the first time since he had begun to speak, that whatever composure she had maintained had entirely deserted her.

She asked, rather shyly, looking at his face, as he looked over her father’s fields, "And are you certain now?"

"I have never in my life been more certain of anything." He turned to face her fully, and she saw, in his countenance only a plainness and openness. "I told you once, in a fevered room at the Crown, that I had been in love with you since a rainy afternoon in a drawing-room we have not spoken of since. I have had a great deal of time, since that morning, to consider whether the feeling would survive the ordinary light of day, once fever and danger and the whole extraordinary drama of our journey had receded into the past, and I find, Miss Bennet, that it has not merely survived. It has grown into something I no longer have any wish, or any capacity, to argue myself out of."

"Mr. Darcy." She started, but he cut her off, holding up a hand to request she delay her reply.