Page 33 of A Selfish Disdain

"Let me finish, while I have found the courage." He reached for her hand, and she let him take it, her own fingers closing about his with a readiness that surprised her even as she offered it. "I love you. I have loved you, I think, for rather longer than I permitted myself to know it. I mistook you for a servant upon our very first meeting, and never properly begged your pardon for it; I withdrew from you when I ought to have trusted you. I do not offer you a perfect account of myself, Miss Bennet. I offer you only the truth, entirely my own, entirely chosen, and entirely without regard for what anyone, whether it be my aunt, your mother, or the whole of Hertfordshire.” He looked her steadily in the eye and asked, “Will you marry me?"

Elizabeth, who had spent a fortnight fearing that whatever proposal finally arrived would carry the taint of obligation, found, standing in the golden light of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon with her hand held fast in his, that the fear dissolved entirely the moment the question was actually asked, that there was nothing in his voice, nor in his countenance that spoke of anything but a man asking because he could no longer imagine not asking.

"Yes," she said, and heard her own voice come out steadier than she expected, given the nature of a rapidly beating heart. "Yes, Mr. Darcy. Fitzwilliam, I will marry you, and I will tell you, since you have been so thoroughly honest with me, that I have been waiting to hear you ask since the very morning I woke to find you recovered and understood how very much I had very nearly lost."

He drew her hand to his lips, and then, when she made no move to withdraw it, closer still, until there was very little distance left between them at all in the quiet lane.

"I owe you an apology, besides," she said, staring intently into his eyes. "For what I said to you at the farmhouse. I called you selfish, and disdainful of everyone's feelings, but the charge was never just, however wounded I felt when I made it.”"

"I think that it was just enough, once, to sting as it did, and I would rather you had said it and meant it, in that moment, than pretended a forbearance. Indeed, I was proud, and I was thoughtless, more than once, before I properly understood what I stood to lose by continuing to be either. If your anger taught me to see it plainly, I cannot regret the anger my dear, loveliest, Elizabeth."

She offered him a warm smile, as her eyes trickled in what could only be described as sheer happiness. "That is very generous of you, sir."

He returned her smile, showing off an endearing dimple in the process, which she delighted in. "I believe you have taught me, above everything else, to value rather more than I ever did before the benefit of being thoroughly and repeatedly contradicted."

She thought he spoke a mixture of truth and jest in the last part of his speech, and she could only laugh at it. It was a small, unguarded laugh, when she noticed something shift in his expression, the gravity returning to it, though gentled, as his eyes grew darker.

He lifted his hand, slowly enough that she might have drawn back had she wished it, and she found she did not wish it at all. His thumb grazed, very gently, the curve of her bottom lip, a touch so light she might almost have imagined it, had it not stilled every other thought in her head so completely.

Neither of them spoke, as everything in their past seemed to fade away entirely, leaving nothing behind it but the space between them, which was closing, slowly and steadily, until his lips found hers.

When at last they drew apart, it was by inches, as though neither of them could quite bring themselves to relinquish the nearness all at once. Darcy's hand had come to rest against her cheek, and he left it there a moment longer, looking at her with an expression so entirely unguarded that Elizabeth felt something in her own chest answer it before she had thought to permit it.

"I have wanted to do that for a rather long time,” he admitted openly.

"How long?" she asked, though she suspected, from the sudden and very unDarcy-like colour that rose along his throat, that the honest answer would embarrass them both.

"Since the day you corrected my assumption that you were a draper, my dear," was all he would say, in as grave a voice as he could entertain.

Elizabeth stared at him. "It cannot be, sir. I will not hear of it." She laughed, certain he meant to tease her, and waited for the smile that would give the joke away.

It did not come. He only looked at her, as though he found the truth of it not so flattering, as to point to his very instant attraction.

"You are not jesting," she said, wonder replacing the laughter in her voice. "You cannot mean to tell me that a man who required a full quarter hour, by his own account, merely to recognize he had given offence, had also somehow contrived, in that same quarter hour, to fall in love?"

"I did not say I recognized it as such, at the time," said Darcy. "You will own that I have had a great deal of leisure since to examine my feelings. But I will own that something in me took very particular note of a woman who corrected me so thoroughly, and with so little concern for my consequence, that I did not entirely recover from it since."

"You have quite silenced me, sir," she said at last, "which I promise you is a feat few men have accomplished, and none so thoroughly as this."

He offered her another large smile. "I shall endeavour not to grow used to it, as I understand it does not last."

She laughed again and his teasing way. "It will not last a minute longer, if you mean to stand there looking so satisfied with yourself about it." But she said it without heat, and let him see that she did not mean it, and there was a quiet a moment between them that asked for no further words to fill it.

It was Darcy who broke it, offering her his arm. "Will you walk with me, Miss Bennet? Only so far as the lane, if you can spare the time from your family, who I imagine are wondering already what has kept you so long from breakfast."

"I imagine they are wondering a great deal more than that," said Elizabeth, her eyebrows lifted high, though she took his arm regardless, "but I find I do not mind keeping them in suspense a little longer."

They walked on together, through the last of the golden afternoon, toward a house that would, within a few minutes, be thrown into transports of joy. Elizabeth knew her mother's nerves would finally and gloriously be vindicated, and her father's dry congratulations would conceal a satisfaction he would disguise.

However, for that moment, the news was still entirely their own, unshared and unhurried, and Elizabeth found she wanted nothing more than exactly this. She had come to adore the man beside her, and relished in the gold light fading gently toward evening, and an understanding between them that had been, from its very first difficult beginning to this quiet and long-awaited conclusion, been worth every argument it had taken to arrive at.

CHAPTER 20

Mr. Darcy's recovery, once it began in earnest, proceeded with a swiftness that surprised even his London doctor, who had traveled at once to attend to him, once Darcy arrived at Netherfield. Within the fortnight of his proposal, Darcy was pronounced well enough to ride the three miles to Longbourn each morning, rather than take a carriage. It was an act that Mrs. Bennet found no cause whatsoever to complain of, and every cause to remark upon to anyone in Meryton who would listen.

It had been decided, by Mr. Bennet, that Elizabeth could not properly remain under Mr. Bingley's roof once Mr. Darcy had proposed, whatever the strict proprieties of nursing might have permitted during his illness. And so she had returned to Longbourn, and Mr. Darcy, rather than accepting this arrangement as the natural conclusion of the matter, had simply transferred the whole of his attention to the lane between the two houses, riding over each morning with a punctuality that Mr. Bennet privately observed put the postal service to shame.

"You are very constant in your visits, Mr. Darcy," said Mr. Bennet, one such morning, looking up from his book with his same dry amusement. "I begin to wonder whether Netherfield's library has failed you, or whether it is merely my daughter's conversation you find superior to your own books."