Page 10 of I Have Faults Enough

"Perhaps," Jane allowed, in a voice that made plain she thought perhaps not, and returned to her needle, and said nothing further, and Elizabeth, feeling the unpressed point sit rather heavier in the room, found herself wishing, with some irritation, that Jane would simply say what she meant instead of leaving it lying about to be tripped over.

She did not have long to sit with the irritation. The wedding preparations that week had drawn half of Meryton through the Longbourn parlour at one hour or another, and it was into this general traffic that Mr. Darcy arrived that afternoon, brought again by Bingley, and greeted with the particular flurry of activity that always attended his entrance into a room he did not seem to wish to be the centre of and invariably became so regardless.

It was Lydia who did the damage, and did it, as she did most things, without the smallest awareness that damage had been done. She had come in from Meryton flushed with news of the militia's imminent removal to Brighton, a subject that occupied nine parts in ten of her conversation that season, and was in the midst of a catalogue of officers she should miss most bitterly when she arrived, by the natural and thoughtless progress of her own chatter, at the name of Mr. Wickham, delivered with exactly the same careless fondness she gave every other name on her list.

"...though I am sure Wickham will be sorriest of all to go, for he has grown so attached to Meryton, and to a particular somebody in it, though I shall not say who, for I have promised."

Elizabeth did not look at Mr. Darcy, but she could sense how still he had gone, and she found herself, despite every resolution to the contrary, to watch him after all, from beneath lowered lashes, and in a sideways manner that she used when wishing to be caught at it.

He had not moved, had not spoken, had not so much as set down the teacup he held, and yet something struck her. Perhaps it was his held breath sustained past the point of comfort. His countenance, when at last she permitted herself a fuller look, wore nothing so simple as anger.

She thought, in that moment, of Wickham's own account of him, of a proud man's cruelty toward a boy raised alongside him, of an inheritance withheld, of a friendship betrayed for reasons Wickham had never troubled to make entirely coherent. She immediately thought, there, he is showing his guilt despite himself.

The conversation moved on, as Lydia's conversation always did. And finally, Darcy set down his teacup, some minutes after with care, and excused himself not long after that, on the plea of a letter he had promised his sister, Georgiana.

Elizabeth followed him out. She could not afterward have said what possessed her to do it, except that some restless dissatisfaction drove her into the hall a full minute behind him, on the pretext of fetching a shawl she did not, in fact, want.

"You need not have gone on my sister's account," she said, before she had entirely decided to speak at all. "Lydia means very little by anything she says. She has not the sense to mean much by it."

"I do not doubt it," he said. His voice was level, but there was a rawness, different sounding than his ordinary coldness. "I did not go on your sister's account, Miss Bennet."

"Then on what account?" She had not meant to press it. She heard herself pressing it, and could not entirely account for the impulse, except that his stillness in the parlour had disturbed her and she wanted to know what lay beneath it.

Something moved across his face. "I do not intend to supply an account, standing in your mother's hall. If you wish to know, I might tell you another time, in another place."

She opened her mouth to answer, to ask him plainly what he meant, but then she said something else entirely. “What has he done to earn your dislike?”

"He has done many things, countless things, to earn my distrust," he said, with bitterness “And I ask you not press me, Miss Elizabeth.” He then added, “I had not understood restraint to be among my faults, though I collect you have found a way to make it one regardless."

He did not leave, this time, after making his statement, but he stood his ground through the whole of it, jaw set, colour risen, and said what he had to say to the end, however roughly, rather than removing himself as he had done in the lane.

But she was too caught, in the moment, in the sting of his last sentence to notice, and by the time Jane came into the hall some minutes later, drawn by voices raised half a note higher than she had expected, they had said a good deal to each other that neither was entirely proud of, and had settled nothing, and stood some feet apart breathing rather hard.

"Is everything quite well?" Jane asked, looking between them with mild alarm.

"Perfectly," said Elizabeth

"Perfectly," said Darcy

They both responded to Jane in the same breath and very nearly the same tone.

He took his leave shortly after, with a correct bow, and a look, directed at Elizabeth alone in the half-second before he turned, that she could not read at all. It was not disdain, and not anger, not anything she could quite make it.

And she stood in the hall after he had gone feeling considerably less satisfied with her own conduct than she had any right, given the provocation, to feel.

CHAPTER 7

In the last week before the wedding, Mr. Bingley had the Bennet family over for a small dinner, with no company beyond the two households and Sir William Lucas, who had attached himself to the party on the strength of some errand concerning the church flowers and shewed no early inclination to detach himself again.

It ought, by every reasonable expectation, to have been an unremarkable evening. Elizabeth had gone to it, if she was honest, in rather good spirits, and had not anticipated that an evening so modest in its scope could produce anything worth remembering beyond the ordinary business of getting through it civilly.

She thought, dressing for it, that she would try to be civil to Mr. Darcy and attempt to stop dreading his company. But, the trouble began, as such trouble generally did, with Mrs. Bennet.

Her mama had taken it into her head, over the fish course, to discourse at some length upon the felicity of having one but eventually probably two daughters married, for she did not scruple to hint, and hint broadly, that where one Netherfield gentleman had led a near friend or London acquaintance might reasonably be expected to follow, and looked, in delivering this sentiment, directly and without the smallest subtlety at Mr. Darcy, who had the misfortune to be seated near enough to receive the whole of it undiluted.

She went on, encouraged by no one's attempt to stop her, to observe that it was a great thing for a family so situated as theirs to have such connexions come their way, and that she was sure she did not know how the Lucases would bear it, Charlotte being three-and-twenty already and nothing in prospect for her at all.

Elizabeth attempted, twice, to turn the conversation. She was not, on this occasion, been entirely successful. Her mother having achieved a momentum that light redirection did little to check, and it was some minutes before Mr. Bennet, from the table's foot, observed with dryness that he had not realised the entail extended so comprehensively as to cover the fish, at which the subject was at last permitted to lapse, though not before it had done its work.