Page 7 of I Have Faults Enough

His attachment to Bingley, however, appeared sufficiently strong to bring him back into the neighbourhood, though it had not, as yet, inspired any corresponding inclination to cultivate the society of those whom Bingley had chosen for his friends.

Elizabeth was therefore scarcely less surprised to discover that Mr. Darcy had declined the invitation to dinner at Longbourn, despite Mrs. Bennet’s gracious extension of hospitality to her son’s taciturn friend. She could not decide whether his refusal ought to offend her or relieve her, though, upon reflection, she suspected the latter to be the more sensible choice.

Nevertheless, beneath her irritation lay a growing suspicion that his present reserve concealed some design against the happiness of Mr. Bingley and Jane. She was sure that Mr. Darcy was not a man to tolerate what he considered an imprudent attachment, and Elizabeth feared that, should he once determine their union unwise, he might employ all the influence of their friendship to persuade his friend to abandon it.

CHAPTER 5

Darcy had told Bingley he came for the drainage, and this was true, as far as it went; a man does not travel in December weather for a friend's sake without meaning, in some part, the reason he gives. Darcy refused to examine his motives too closely. But even he could not mistake, beneath the excuse he had made, that drainage was a pretext, for a truer purpose.

Darcy had, in fact, spent the last few months in town telling himself he would not return to Hertfordshire; he could not return to see Elizabeth Bennet. Indeed, he told himself this during his first week in London, when the memory of that witty woman with a pretty face was still fresh enough in his mind

Though as the weeks wore on, it took him far more effort than he liked to keep from conjuring her company in memory. Soon enough, Elizabeth had begun to occupy so steady a portion of his attention that his business, try as it might, could not supersede her.

At length, out of patience with himself, Darcy gave up the pursuit of denial, and allowed himself to dwell on the memory of the lady and her fine countenance.

However, when he finally returned to Hertfordshire, Darcy found it difficult to govern his temper. He was vexed not to see her, and no less vexed with himself for wishing to.

To guard, therefore, against any unwarranted sharpness, he fixed his attention on Bingley's estate, resolved to see the drainage problem solved that he had noticed during his earlier stay in autumn.

When Bingley arrived that afternoon, cheerful beyond belief at his good fortune in securing Jane Bennet’s hand, Darcy found that his instant reaction was to resent the match.

While he had no specific objection to Miss Bennet herself, whose gentleness and beauty he had never disputed, and whose regard for Bingley he had once, wrongly, believed insufficient, and had since had ample private reason to doubt his own judgment upon such matters generally.

What he resented, if he was punishingly honest with himself, was not the match, but its consequences. Bingley stood to gain nothing by it beyond a beautiful wife, and that wife's sister was impertinent, and altogether too often in his thoughts for his own comfort.

Aside from her family’s brash behavior, Elizabeth was more clearly the second and more private resentment he had for the match. Darcy had wanted to believe himself, in the weeks after he had all but fled Hertfordshire, tolerably cured from her.

And yet, he was not cured at all. He had told himself as the carriage came at last within sight of Netherfield's chimneys, going into Hertfordshire a fool. He was going as a man goes toward a fire he knows will burn him, and yet, he could not stay away.

Of course, Darcy said none of this to Bingley, but stood by and congratulated his friend, with every appearance of sincerity, on securing so lovely a lady.

Two days after Bingley’s proposal of marriage to Jane Bennet was accepted, Caroline arrived, with the Hursts, and with a manner toward her brother's engagement that Darcy was hardly surprised by. She was all sweetness upon the subject in company, and all barbed civility the moment company thinned. The thing she had labored so diligently to prevent was now, without a great deal of scandal, beyond undoing.

And, it was in one such moment, on the third evening after her arrival, that Darcy's temper came nearer to open failure than it had in a great many years. The evening had been got up at Longbourn, where they attended a small family dinner in honour of the engagement.

Darcy had spent the better part of it in particular discomfort; he was seated near enough to watch Elizabeth Bennet across a room and too far to speak with her without contrivance; this distance was to his own taste; where he might behold her and all her loveliness, while also ensuring she remained at a safe distance away from him.

He noticed that she had been in high spirits that evening, teasing her sister, drawing even her father into some private joke at the table's foot, and Darcy had watched her with an enduring attention; though, had said very little, because he did not trust himself to say anything that would not betray more than he wished known by anyone in that party.

It was on the carriage ride home that Caroline, seated opposite him with Louisa dozing against the window, remarked, in the light, careless tone she used for her most deliberate cruelties, that she wondered Eliza Bennet did not tire of setting her cap quite so openly; that a young woman with so small a fortune and so very enterprising a mother could hardly be blamed for angling wherever a connexion offered, though she herself would have thought a little more delicacy might recommend the effort, whatever its object.

She did not name the object, and she did not need to, as her eyes, in the carriage's dim light, moved to Darcy and away again with a swiftness that made plain she had watched him watching Elizabeth all evening.

Darcy felt the anger arrive the way he always felt it, a cold contraction was felt somewhere behind the sternum, a narrowing of the throat that made speech, for a moment, entirely impossible.

He was aware that Caroline had spoken of Elizabeth as she might have spoken of a servant caught above her station, and that the insult was not merely to Elizabeth's dignity but, in its way, some kind of admission he was not ready to make.

He said nothing.

Darcy had learned, long before this evening, in a nursery long emptied of the father whose temper he had watched, as a boy, break china and walls both, and whose example he had spent thirty years determined never to follow, that the surest way to prevent his own anger from becoming his father's was to starve it of any words at all, to let it go inward and cold rather than outward and loud. It was a consciousness effort that had served him, upon the whole, very well.

That his father had been, in every other respect, a man worth loving, had never made the lesson easier to learn. He had been generous where generosity cost him nothing, and just where justice cost him a little more; he had taught Darcy to read a ledger and ride a horse and hold his tongue in company that did not deserve his opinion, and had done all of it, for the better part of every year, with a patience that Darcy had once believed inexhaustible. It was only the other days, the days the temper broke free, that had taught him that patience had a bottom to it after all, and that a man might be loved and feared in the same house.

He said, when at last he trusted himself to speak, only that he thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet did her sister great credit by her attentions, and that he had observed nothing in her conduct that evening he should wish altered. Fortunately, Bingley agreed with Darcy, and he told his sister as much,

“Caroline, there was nothing wanting in Elizabeth Bennet’s manner; she was charming and joyful, as she always has been.” Bingley delivered this speech in a flat tone, and, in doing so, was the loudest thing he had said to his sister in a twelvemonth.

Unfortunately, it did not end there. Darcy came down to breakfast the next morning civil and entirely closed. He answered what was asked of him, initiated nothing, sat through Bingley's cheerful chatter so absorbed in his own happiness, and did not think to remark upon. It was the same at dinner, and the same the day following, and the day after that.