Page 35 of I Have Faults Enough

They sat a moment in a silence; and, it was Bingley, at last, who broke it. "Is she." he began, and stopped, and tried again. "Miss Elizabeth. I have had only the barest account from her father, in the confusion of everyone's arriving home, and I did not like to press him for more, given the state he was himself in.”

"I believe she will be recovered soon enough," Darcy started. "Her ankle wants a proper fortnight's rest, and I do not think either of us will forget the particulars of this week very quickly. But she is alive, and she is safe, and she is, I believe, considerably less troubled by the whole affair than her own mother presently is on her behalf, which I collect is rather characteristic of her as well."

"I am glad of it," Bingley said, relief filling his tone. "Jane has scarcely stopped weeping since the news came that she was lost."

"I imagine it." Darcy shifted against his pillows, some ache in his ribs asserting itself with the movement, and Bingley, catching the small wince, leaned forward with a fresh alarm that Darcy found himself obliged to wave off.

"It is nothing that signifies," he said. "I rather think my rib is bruised and not broken. And, I feel considerably improved already for a proper meal and a bed to rest it in. You need not look at me as though I mean to expire, Bingley. I have survived a good deal worse this week than your own excessive concern for my comfort."

"I shall try to contain it," Bingley replied, though his relief at being told the injury was minor was plain enough on his face regardless, "though I do not promise complete success, given how thoroughly this week has taught me that a man's friends may vanish from a garden with very little warning, and I find I have grown rather less inclined to take anyone's continued presence for granted."

Darcy, feeling rather tired of the subject of kidnappings, decided to change the topic of their conversation. "I do not think I properly thanked you, either," Darcy said, "for coming into Hertfordshire when you did, this second time, and for deciding to marry a woman worth marrying, rather than the connexion I once tried to persuade you was more prudent. I was wrong about her, and I do not think I have said so to you as plainly as the wrong deserves."

Bingley's face, hearing this, underwent a small, surprised alteration, for Darcy was not, by nature or by habit, a man given to volunteering such admissions unprompted. "You need not say it now," Bingley said, rather more kindly. "You are tired, and battered, and I do not think a man in your present condition owes anybody an accounting of old grievances."

"Perhaps not," Darcy said. "Though, I find I wished to say it regardless, while I had the occasion, having learned this week rather more than I care to admit about how little warning a man generally receives before the chance to say such things is taken from him entirely."

"I cannot say precisely when you were taken. It must have been some hours before we so much as realized you were gone, let alone that you had been carried off by force. One of the stable boys came forward to say he had seen you and Miss Elizabeth taken by a party of men, though he confessed he had not rightly understood what he was witnessing at the time, not until word had already gone round that you were both missing, and he came to see the two circumstances were one and the same."

Darcy almost smiled, recollecting the horror of that night. "It was no fault of the boy's, nor of anyone's here, that so many hours were lost."

Bingley nodded his head in agreement and rose, judging correctly that his friend's strength, however improved by bath and supper, had not yet reached the point of sustaining conversation indefinitely, and pressed his arm once, briefly, before turning to the door. "Rest, Darcy," he said. "The doctor will be down from town by tomorrow at the latest, and I shall have Cook prepare whatever you can be persuaded to eat between now and then, and you are not to trouble yourself with anything further tonight beyond the sleeping of it."

"I do not think sleep will trouble me tonight," Darcy jested, ever so dryly.

And, once Bingley left, Darcy turned down the light on his bedstand, and slept more deeply that night than he had slept in a very great while, the whole accumulated weight of the week finally permitted, in the safety of his own familiar room, to set itself down.

***

Not one to spend much time abed, after two days of rest, and a prompt visit by his doctor, come from London, Dary was permitted to walk downstairs. It was in the small hall off the drawing-room, that he encountered the first proper realization of change.

A young footman, new to the household since Darcy's own absence, had hurried in with an armful of correspondence that had accumulated. The footman came round the corner too fast, and collided with Darcy hard enough to send half the letters scattering across the floor, and Darcy growling in pain, as his hand went directly to his ribs.

“I’m so sorry, sir!” The young man looked up at Darcy's face with frozen dread, expecting some sharp word for his clumsiness, in addition to running into his master’s own particular guest.

A week before, Darcy owned to himself that he would have said nothing cruel, for cruelty to servants had never been among his failings; but he would have said nothing at all, either, and would have let his own silence itself deliver whatever correction the moment seemed to demand.

He knew it was the same cold, correct withdrawal he had practised with Caroline Bingley, and with Bill in the barn. It was a silent coldness that he had learned to use for those particular provocations that he deemed better to retreat than engage.

Darcy slowly knelt instead, and helped gather a few of the scattered letters, and handed the recovered stack back to the astonished young man, "No harm done," Darcy replied, and saw, watching disbelief in the boy’s face. The boy quickly apologized again, before hurrying down the hall.

He found, examining his own reaction to it, that the small, unremarkable transaction had left him with satisfaction. He had chosen kindness where his old habit would have chosen nothing at all; the choice had cost him nothing, no dignity surrendered, no ground conceded, only a moment's plain civility offered to a frightened boy who had not deserved to be made to answer for an honest accident with anything harsher.

Darcy thought that he had learned the choice from her, though she had never once sat him down to teach it directly; he had simply watched her, across a whole autumn's acquaintance, offer exactly this same unthinking warmth to everyone who crossed her path, to their housekeeper Hill, to Charlotte's own younger sisters, to a groom holding her father’s horse. He wanted to be more like Elizabeth.

His next test came in the form of Caroline Bingley, who, if he were honest, offered him a much larger test than the footman.

She found him in the library that evening, where he had retreated in search of solitude, and came in without knocking, in the manner she had always permitted herself where he was concerned, and settled into the chair opposite his with an expression that told him exactly what direction the coming conversation meant to take.

"I collect congratulations are in order, Mr. Darcy, though I confess I hardly know how to offer them properly, given the circumstances. Three days alone together, unchaperoned, in the company of highwaymen; one can hardly imagine a more efficient method of securing an engagement, whatever the lady's own family connexions might otherwise have recommended against it.” She lightened her voice and looked at him with scrutiny. “I do not say it unkindly. I only observe that Miss Eliza Bennet has managed what a great many more conventionally ambitious young ladies have failed to accomplish."

Two months before, at the very start of this whole autumn's trial, he would have gone silent under exactly this kind of remark. And, he would have spent the following days paying for the restraint in a coldness that he learned had cost Elizabeth a great deal more than it had ever cost Caroline. He felt, hearing this fresh version of the same old cruelty, the familiar cold contraction begin behind his sternum, the narrowing of the throat that had always, before, been his signal to retreat rather than engage.

Though, this time, Darcy did not retreat.

"You will not speak of her so again," he said, and his voice, though it did not rise, carried none of the flat, careful governance. "Not in my hearing, Miss Bingley.” He leaned forward slightly, “And, I would advise you, for your own comfort's sake not to test whether I mean that as strictly as I intend it to be understood.”

“But,” she started, looking somewhat startled, though he cut her off before she could speak more.