Page 11 of I Have Faults Enough

She had watched Mr. Darcy through the whole of it, unable to help herself, and had seen him say nothing, eat nothing, and simply hold his wine glass. She had felt, watching him, a small hot flush of shame on her mother's account, and directly upon its heels a flare of resentment at herself for feeling it, and at him for being the sort of man in whose presence she could not help but feel it; and it was this small, knot of feeling, shame, and resentment of the shame, and resentment of him for occasioning both, that she carried with her into the drawing-room, still unpicked, still working beneath the surface of our being.

It was there, when the party had broken into its smaller currents, that the real damage began. It did not happen all at once, but was rather a slow accumulation of small provocations, each one bearable alone, each one adding its weight to what came after.

She had gone to sit near him, not, she told herself, from any particular design, but because the chair was empty and the alternative was Sir William's continuing effusions upon the church flowers; and, had asked him, in what she believed a perfectly civil spirit, whether he thought his sister might be persuaded to come into Hertfordshire for the wedding itself.

"She will not come," he said. "She has not the constitution for so much company at once, and I would not press her to it only if to satisfy the neighbourhood's curiosity."

"I did not ask from curiosity," Elizabeth said, quite warranted. "I asked because Miss Bingley has spoken kindly of her, and I thought she might have liked to see her brother's friend married."

"You do not know my sister, and I cannot believe you would know her mind on the matter. She is quite indisposed in London with her studies and her governess.”

"I make no claim to know her mind, Mr. Darcy. I only asked a question. You have a talent for hearing an accusation in whatever is said to you, whether or not one was offered."

He bit back rather sternly, "And you have a talent for offering one regardless, and calling it a question when it is remarked upon."

She might, even then, have let it lie. She had let a dozen such exchanges lie across the preceding fortnight, had learned, or believed she had learned, the particular discipline of allowing his sharper replies to pass unanswered rather than fed.

But something in her that evening, the fish course, perhaps, or the shame still working under her composure, or simply a fortnight's accumulated weariness of being made, however subtly, to feel herself and her whole family perpetually under his review, declined, on this occasion, to practise the discipline.

"I collect I am not to be trusted with an opinion on the subject at all, then," she said. "Forgive me. I had forgotten that only persons of a certain fortune are permitted to judge what suits a young lady's constitution."

"You have it in your head that I only give credit to persons of wealth? How very singular of you, Miss Elizabeth,” his voice was grave and quiet.

"Singular, perhaps," Elizabeth said, "but not, I think, unfounded. You have shown a marked partiality for judging my family, and I confess I have not yet discovered why, unless it be that my sister does not come with five thousand a year and has little else to recommend her beyond her own good nature." She said it lightly, in the tone she might have used for any piece of drawing-room absurdity, though she watched him as she said it, curious, despite herself, to see whether the shot would land, or only glance off him as her observations generally did.

"Then let us speak, since you are so determined we shall." His voice had dropped further, pitched now for her alone, though the effort of keeping it so cost him something visible in the set of his jaw. "I was wrong to treat you thusly at the Meryton Assembly, and perhaps I have behaved too silently at Longbourn. It has not been want of fortune but propriety. Is that concession enough for you, or would you have me kneel in your mother's drawing-room and say it again for the benefit of Sir William?"

"You need not go so far back as the Assembly," she said, and heard, with some dismay, that her voice had lost the edge she had meant to keep in it. "That was one evening, and I have made a very good story of it since, at your expense, so you may consider us even on that account." She paused. "As for your silence at Longbourn, I had thought it pride, but you say it is propriety. I collect I am now to think it as something else, though I confess I do not yet know what to call it, if not a selfish disdain for the feelings of others." She did not look at him as she said this.

"I am sorry for it, for sharing the truth. But, what I will not do, Miss Bennet, is pretend the whole of my reasoning, and that I looked at your family and saw only prejudice where there was, in point of plain fact, a great deal to give a cautious man pause, and that no quantity of subsequent regret obliges me to unsee it."

It was there that the true argument began, the one that would not, this time, be turned aside by the arrival of the tea tray or the interposition of some third party's chatter, for both of them had by now dropped their voices so low, and leaned so close in the pretense of ordinary conversation, that no one else in the room marked anything amiss beyond, perhaps, Caroline Bingley, who glanced their way once from across the room with a small frown.

"No," Elizabeth said. "No, I find I will not permit you that, even as concession. It is one thing to say you were wrong to slight me at an assembly, wrong to hold your tongue, as I could forgive that easily enough, and nearly had. It is quite another to tell me that the conclusion stands, only the manner of arriving at it wants apology. You are not sorry for what you think of us, Mr. Darcy. You are only sorry that thinking it did not remain a private economy, kept to yourself and Mr. Bingley, and never once required good manners to disguise it in front of me."

She had not meant to say so much, but she did not take back a word of it. Instead, she continued. "My mother wants discretion. I have never once pretended otherwise. My youngest sisters want governing, and my father wants the will to govern them, and I have spent a good part of my life being sorry for all three." She lifted her chin. "But I did not think, until this moment, that being sorry for my own family and hearing a near-stranger list their faults to my face, and call the listing reasoning rather than what it is. You have taught me tonight that they are not. Now, since you have gone this far. You have never once, in all these weeks of careful civility, said it to my face entire. Say it now, if it wants saying so badly."

He looked at her a long moment. "Very well," he started, his voice still quiet, but taciturn. "I think your mother wants sense, and says so publicly, at her own table, in front of persons who will carry the saying of it into every drawing-room in the county, as she has done tonight, not an hour past, over the fish. I think your youngest sisters conduct themselves in a manner that would shame a house with half Longbourn's pretensions to gentility, running after redcoats with no more discretion than they would show chasing a dropped fan, and that your father, who has both the wit and the authority to correct it, finds it easier to be amused by the spectacle than troubled to end it. I think a great deal of what passes in your family for liveliness is nothing more than a want of any check upon it whatsoever, and I think you know this as well as I do, Miss Bennet, because I have watched you colour at your mother's conversation more than once this fortnight, and I do not think the colour came of pride in her."

The silence that followed was deafening. She might have found some sharp enough reply to carry her through, had he stopped there; but, he did not quite stop there.

"I do not say it to wound you," he went on, more quietly still, and this, somehow, was worse than the rest, for she heard in it not cruelty exactly but a terrible honesty. "I do not require you to disown them; that is not fair to my judgments, only that you stop treating my seeing what you already see as some fresh insult invented for your particular injury."

"Not fair." She repeated it back to him, and something in her own voice frightened her a little, it was so unlike the voice she generally kept for company, or for anger, or for anything she had ever felt before this particular autumn. "No. I don't suppose it is. It is not fair that my father laughs where he ought to govern, and it is not fair that my mother says aloud what better-bred women only think, and it is not fair that Lydia is fifteen and behaves as though she is answerable to no one, because she is not, because no one in that house has ever once required it of her. I have known all of this longer than you have known my name, Mr. Darcy. I did not require a gentleman of ten thousand a year to travel into Hertfordshire and instruct me in the particulars of my own family's failings, as though I were a child being shown, for the first time, that the stove is hot."

"That is not fair, and you know it is not." His voice had dropped, low and very controlled. "My fortune has nothing to do with it, or if it has, it is only that a man with less of it could not have afforded, at not one in eighteen to learn as slowly as I did what your family costs you, because he would have been made to reckon with his own family's faults a good deal sooner, and would not have had the luxury of mistaking a stranger's failings for a novelty."

"No," she agreed soberly. "It is not. Though, I find I am not much interested, tonight, in being fair."

"Then we are agreed on one point at least," he said, and something in his voice had gone very final, "for I do not think either of us has managed it this whole conversation."

She did not cry. She would have died before crying in front of him, and told herself so, fiercely, in the half-second it took her to master her own face. "You have said, at least, what you think," she said, very quietly, rising, "and I thank you for the honesty, however long you were about arriving at it, and however long I was about earning it from you. I find I would like some air."

She was out through the terrace doors before Jane, occupied across the room with Bingley, had so much as looked up, and before Caroline, who had marked the whole exchange with growing unease from her chair by the window, could rise to interrupt Mr. Darcy.

Darcy stood a moment where she had left him, and found that he could not, honestly, retract a word of what he had said of her family, for he believed every word of it true; and found, in the same breath, that he did not want to correct her, not even to be understood by her, but simply to be known by her at last, fully. And had achieved, in the event, nothing but her tears withheld and her back retreating through a door he had no right to follow her through.

He did not go after her to apologise. He was not yet ready to call it apology, not yet certain, even now, that an apology was owed for words he still believed correct in substance if not in the delivering of them, nor for a countercharge that had been, whatever its aim, entirely earned by his own history.