Page 13 of The Marriage Articles

The room went on without her. Lydia wanted to know whether Charlotte had heard anything more of the militia, and Charlotte had not. Mary observed that letters from fashionable people were seldom the instruments of comfort they were designed to appear, which was true and unhelpful in equal measure. Elizabeth kept her eyes on her sister’s back.

Jane stood a little while at the window, and then folded the letter, came back to her chair, and sat down with her work, and her face, when she lifted it, was as serene as it had been all morning.

“Miss Bingley writes in raptures of the delights of town,” she said. “The whole party removes to London before the week is out, to join Mr Darcy, she says. They are all to be very gay.”

“Then Mr Bingley is lost to us, and I shall never survive it!” Mrs Bennet’s voice climbed as it went. “I knew how it would be. I said how it would be. We are finished, quite finished, and not one of you will ever marry now, not one, and when your father dies we shall all be turned into the hedgerows, and I hope Lady Lucas is satisfied, for she has helped to do it.”

“Mother!” Jane said, and crossed the room to her.

Mrs Bennet would not be comforted. She took to the sofa with her handkerchief and her salts, and the weeping that followed was of that thorough kind which expected no answer and received none. Lydia declared the whole business prodigiously dull and went to find her bonnet. Mary offered a sentence upon the refining influence of affliction, received no acknowledgement, and returned to her book with the dignified composure of a philosopher whose counsel was lost upon a foolish world. Kitty sat down beside her mother and wept a little from affection, or perhaps merely because the snub at the draper’s still rankled in her mind.

Charlotte set down her tea-cup. “I have lingered long enough to be a hindrance,” she said, rising, though her quiet composure gave no sign of her feeling so. “I shall return on Monday, if Monday be convenient.”

“It is entirely convenient,” Elizabeth replied, accompanying her to the door. In the hall, beyond the reach of the drawing room, she expressed her gratitude at last. “Charlotte. Thank you.”

Charlotte secured her bonnet against the wind and stepped out into the raw air. Elizabeth shut the door upon her and remained in the hall a moment. She turned her eyes towards the closed door of her father’s study at the end of the passage. Then she knocked.

❧ ❧ ❧

Mr Bennet was seated at his desk, a letter spread open before him, with the red wax of its broken seal scattered across his paper-blotter. He had put on his spectacles, which he wore only for business or correspondence he considered worthy of the exertion, and his features wore the look he assumed whenever the foolishness of mankind had outdone his calculations.

Elizabeth did not wait to be bid sit down. “Papa, I have changed my mind. I cannot in good conscience refuse Mr Darcy and let my family pay the cost of it. If he will still have me, I must accept him. Will you write to him for me?”

“Well, Lizzy, you could not have timed it better.” He pushed the letter across the blotter. “Mr Darcy writes from town. The offer stands. If I write asking him to return, he will come at once and renew his offer.”

Elizabeth sat down in the worn leather chair opposite him, because her knees would no longer hold her.

Her father cleared his throat with ceremony and read. “I am sensible that my behaviour at Longbourn may have left your daughter in doubt of my intentions. Permit me to remove that doubt. The offer I made her stands, and I will not press Miss Elizabeth or any of your family to accept it. If you write asking me to return, I will come at once and propose in form, and I shall abide by her answer, whatever it is, without further importuning either of you.” He laid the letter down.

The offer stands. She should have been grateful. She was grateful, in some well-regulated corner of herself. The rest of her was furious, and the fury had no decent object, for the man had done nothing uncivil, nothing overbearing, nothing she could hold up to the light and resent honestly. He had merely been more gracious than she had thought him.

Mr Bennet pushed the letter a little towards her. “Mr Darcy has solved it very neatly for you.” He took off his spectacles. “He has relieved you of begging him to marry you, and he has done it nicely enough that no one is put to any inconvenience.”

“He has,” Elizabeth said. “Will you answer him for me, Papa, and tell him I accept his offer?”

“I will not press my favourite child into a marriage she does not want, whatever it costs me with the neighbourhood. You may say the word, and I will write back tonight refusing him, and take the consequences, and think none the worse of you. That offer stands as well, and I flatter myself mine came first.”

She stood and went to the window. Outside, the lawn was grey and soft with wet.

“Write to him, Papa. Tell him I accept.”

Behind her she heard the chair creak. She turned to face her father. He studied her face when she did. Whatever he found there satisfied him. He drew a fresh sheet towards him, trimmed his pen, and took it up without another question. The letter went by the evening bag, sealed in red wax with the Longbourn seal. Elizabeth paid the boy his penny at the door herself, for her father said the recipient would pay for the answer, and she would not have Mr Darcy charged a farthing for her acceptance.

Chapter Seven

Mr Darcy set the folded documents on her father’s desk. Elizabeth had been called down from her chamber and given the chair by the hearth, from which she could see the drive through the tall window and the side of Mr Darcy’s face.

Mr Darcy had walked over from Netherfield in the morning, and there was a line of mud along one boot that he had not troubled about, or had troubled about and failed to remove. Netherfield had stood empty for only one week since the Bingleys’ departure. Mr Bingley had opened the house for his friend only two days ago, and Elizabeth supposed a man might be grateful for a house to sleep in while the papers were sorted and the date of the wedding agreed.

“Mr Darcy.” Her father had risen from his chair with the air of a man whose morning has been moderately inconvenienced. “You find us in a state of uncommon tranquillity. My wife does not yet know you are in the house, which I mention only as a recommendation to haste.”

“I am obliged to you for the warning, sir.” Mr Darcy bowed. He bowed to Elizabeth, a degree lower, and said, “Miss Bennet,” and nothing else to her at all.

She had not been alone with him since she had refused him in this same room.

“I have had the settlement drawn up by my solicitor in town,” he said. “I should be glad of your opinion, Mr Bennet, and of Miss Bennet’s.”

Mr Bennet put on his spectacles. The room fell quiet in the manner the study always did, where the rustle of paper and the scent of ink and old leather performed the duty of conversation. Mr Darcy stood with his hands joined behind him, staring at the nearest shelf without, Elizabeth was reasonably certain, reading a single title upon it. She observed him in silence.