Page 27 of Miss Bennet is Gone

“I have been trying, this morning, to remember her as a child,” he said. “She used to be sent to us in Town for a month in the summers, when she was small. I have a memory of her at six or seven, running the length of our little garden with her hair come loose from its ribbons and a great triumphant shout in her throat because she had outrun Jane to the wall. I can see her at six as plain as my own hand. I can see her at twenty, the evening before she came up to London to be married out of my house. I cannot, this morning, call up her face at any of the ages between. Only the two ends of her. It distresses me more than I can account for.”

“Sir—” Darcy began, and found he had nothing to help the man.

“I shall remember the rest in time. I only wished to have her with us this morning.”

Mr. Gardiner went on,to Darcy, “You knew her last of all, and differently. Would you tell me, it is a strange thing to ask, and you must forgive an old merchant his sentiment, what she looked like, the first morning after you were engaged? I was not there. I have wished, since, that I had seen her that morning.”

Darcy did not, for a moment, trust his voice. When he had it, he said, “She came down very early. She had not slept. Her hair was loose at the ends where she had not braided it properly. She wore a morning dress the colour of ripe peaches. She looked at me across the breakfast table, and she smiled, and the smile was such that I thought I should never in my life forget it. I have not forgotten it, sir. I see it every day.”

Mr. Gardiner nodded slowly. “Thank you,” he said.

In the doorway, Jane had come down quietly, and no one had heard her. She stood with her hand on the frame, and began to cry without sound, the tears falling, and Mr. Bingley crossed to her and bent and laid his cheek against her hair and said nothing.

The clock in the hall struck ten, the hour at which Darcy was to have set out for the church. Darcy rose, and went to the window, and stood looking down at the grey pavement of Gracechurch Street and the corner past it, and stood there through the full slow stroke of ten, and did not speak, and no one spoke to him.

When it had finished, he turned back from the glass and sat down again, and said, in a voice that was once more entirely his own, “We shall have her home. If not on her wedding day, then soon after it. I have decided it, and I will not be argued out of it. We have lost the morning. We have not lost her. Let us eat something, for she would be very cross with the lot of us sitting here starving over her, and let us be about our work, because the work is what brings her back and grief is not.”

He looked round at them, at Mr. Bingley, at the doorway where Jane stood, at Mr. Gardiner. “She would not have us sit still. Whatever else our Lizzy is, she has never once in her life sat still, and she would not thank us to begin on her account.”

And they ate, a little. And they were about their work. And none of them spoke of the hour again but each of them carried it, privately, all the rest of that day and a good many days after, the memory of a man standing at a window through the stroke of ten for a wedding that did not happen, keeping the only vigil the morning left any of them to keep.

14

The carriage was at the door, and Darcy had got as far as the hall with his hat in his hand for the second time that day, when Foster came to him with a face sorry for unwelcome news and said that Lady Catherine de Bourgh had called and was on the stairs.

To refuse his aunt at the door, the aunt who had so lately and so handsomely made her amends, the aunt the whole family was now at pains to believe in, would be a strangeness, and strangeness was the one thing the cover could not afford.

A man whose bride was merely ill, whose wedding was merely postponed, received his concerned relations; he did not flee them down the back stair.

And so Darcy set his hat upon the table in the hall, where it would wait, as Sable’s note had waited in his pocket all that day, and turned to receive the one caller he least wished to see, and could least be seen to turn away.

She came up in grey, half-mourning grey, he registered, the grey one wears for a sorrow not quite one’s own, and she crossed his drawing-room to him with both hands out, and took his in a clasp of such evident feeling that a stranger would have wept to see it.

“My dear Fitzwilliam,” she said. “No. Do not say anything. I know what the day is. I have known it all morning. I have been able to think of nothing else, and I said to Anne at last, I cannot sit in that house another hour pretending this is an ordinary day while that poor boy bears it alone across the town. So I have come. You need not entertain me. You need not be anything at all. I have only come to sit with you a little, because grief shared is grief halved, and you have no mother to share this one, and I am the nearest thing to it you have left.”

It was so exactly, so monstrously the right thing to say that Darcy felt the ground of his own composure shift under him. Not from grief, though there was grief enough, but from the sheer disorienting wrongness of being comforted, well and tenderly comforted, on the worst morning of his life, and being unable to refuse the comfort without explaining a thing he could explain to no one.

He thanked her. He rang for tea he did not want, because to ring for tea was the thing a composed man did, and composure was now the whole of his employment.

They sat. And Darcy gave, for the next half-hour, the finest and most terrible performance of his life.

He could not grieve as he had grieved alone in these rooms before, because that grief was too large for an illness and she would mark the size of it; so he banked it down to the proper dimensions, the dimensions of a postponed wedding and a feverish girl, and he sat inside the smaller grief like a man crouching inside a room too low for him.

He made the small sad civil remarks the smaller grief permitted, and watched his aunt across the tea things, and did not know that he was watching the one person who could have told him where Elizabeth was and what she was suffering, and exactly how to end it.

For her part Lady Catherine was all gentleness. She poured. She asked after Miss Bennet’s fever in a hushed and proper voice and received his careful answers with grave little nods, and did not press.

She spoke of the cruelty of an illness arriving so near the day, of how these things came sometimes to try us, of how a strong constitution might yet carry the dear girl through.

She was so good at it that twice he nearly forgot to doubt her, which frightened him afterward more than anything else about the visit, when he came to think it over, that she was so practiced in the forms of love that a grieving man, defenseless, had twice felt almost held by them.

It was over the second cup that she came, by gentle degrees, to the thing she had truly climbed his stairs to say.

She approached it as she approached everything that day, softly, sorrowfully, with every appearance of reluctance, as a woman forced by her conscience to a hard kindness.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said, “I am going to say a thing that you will not wish to hear, and you may be as angry with me as you like for the saying of it, for I had rather you were angry than that no one who loves you said it at all. Will you let an old woman speak plainly, this once, on a day when plain speaking may be the only useful thing left?”

He said, because there was nothing else a composed and ignorant man could say, that she might speak as she wished.