Page 5 of The Marriage Articles

“Charles looked as though he had been asked to surrender the furniture,” Miss Bingley said.

A third set of footsteps sounded on the gravel, slower, and Elizabeth knew before Miss Bingley spoke again that Mr Darcy had been drawn into their walk, or had not escaped it.

“Mr Darcy, you were in the drawing room,” Miss Bingley said. “You heard Mrs Bennet’s speech. You said yourself, and very justly, that a country neighbourhood offers a very confined and unvarying society. Did you ever, in all your life, observe such a total lack of conduct?”

Elizabeth’s hands tightened on the shawl.

“I said what I thought,” he replied, which was no answer at all.

“And you were right,” said Mrs Hurst. “One pities them, one truly does. I am told the estate is entailed, did you know? Entailed away from the daughters entirely, to some distant cousin. Collins, I believe the name is. A man none of them has ever met.”

“Entailed,” Miss Bingley repeated, pronouncing the word with evident satisfaction.

“Mr Bennet cannot leave so much as an acre to those five girls, for all the fine talk of their beauty. The day he dies, the cousin steps in, and Mrs Bennet and her daughters are turned out of Longbourn with whatever her marriage settlement allows them, which I daresay is little enough. Five thousand pounds does not stretch far when six women must live upon the interest of it.”

“One almost feels for them,” Miss Bingley said.

“One does feel for them,” Mrs Hurst added, with an air of comfortable agreement. “It is a most pitiable case. To be so situated, and to conduct oneself so! If I were Mrs Bennet, with such a prospect before me, I should be on my knees to every family of consequence in the county, instead of exhibiting myself in their drawing rooms.”

Elizabeth sat very still. The entail was not news to her. She had known of it since childhood, and her father’s jokes on the subject of their cousin, Mr Collins, were an old family entertainment, of the kind that ceased to be funny only when examined. But it was one thing to know a fact and another to hear it recited by strangers on a gravel path, recited accurately, with the sum attached. She had not supposed that strangers could be so intimately acquainted with her family’s affairs.

“Mr Darcy.” Miss Bingley’s voice took on its most courteous shape, the one that placed herself and her hearer on one side of a subject and the rest of the world on the other. “You are very silent. What is your opinion? You have seen them now at home, so to speak, in our drawing room. Do you not pity them?”

There was a pause. Elizabeth, behind her hedge, was holding the shawl at her throat with both hands.

“Their situation is unfortunate,” Mr Darcy said at last, “and their conduct does little to recommend it.”

He had spoken without malice. That was what she would remember afterwards, and what she considered now as the sound of their footsteps faded down the path. No laughter, no mimicry, no pleasure had accompanied the words. Their situation is unfortunate. Their conduct does little to recommend it. He had weighed the facts and found no reason to spare them, and the verdict, which was the most intolerable part of all, was entirely just.

She considered stepping out. Her foot was already set upon the path, and she saw the scene so clearly in her mind that she stopped where she was. She pictured the three faces turning, the sudden silence, and the knowledge in every one of them that she had been behind the hedge for every word. To be caught listening would complete the disgrace her mother had begun. She stayed where she was, though to remain silent cost her more than any speech could have done, and she hated them the more for it.

A maid came down the walk seeking the ladies, sent to inform them that the housekeeper required their direction, and Miss Bingley’s voice and Mrs Hurst’s voice receded towards the house together. The footsteps died away. Elizabeth was left alone upon the bench with all that she had heard.

A long time passed before she moved. The damp came through her shawl unregarded. Her family she loved dearly, and that was the plain truth, which she stated to herself plainly because it was going to have to carry a good deal of weight. She loved her mother, whose voice could be reproduced by a malicious woman on a garden path and recognized at once. She loved her sister Lydia, who had demanded a ball of a comparative stranger as though the world owed her entertainment. She loved her father, who had made a jest of Mr Collins for twenty years and would leave his daughters to that man’s mercy without, so far as anyone could tell, a single thought for their future provision. All of it she had known before today. That was the curious thing, that which she had not anticipated. Humiliation she had supposed herself to feel, and she did, but beneath the humiliation lay something colder, the discovery that the party at Netherfield had reached in one afternoon the conclusions she had spent her life avoiding. It was one thing to know a truth herself. To hear it spoken aloud by strangers was that for which she was wholly unprepared.

Before dinner she would beg the carriage of Mr Bingley, and she would be civil to Miss Bingley while she waited for it, and she would not, she decided, think of Mr Darcy’s sentence again.

Footsteps returned along the path, slower this time, a single walker, and she looked up with the rehearsed composure of a woman who had been admiring the hedge. Mr Darcy stood before her. He stopped, and the stillness came over him that she had seen at the window in the drawing room, and his face showed, without any arrangement at all, the surprise of a man who had not expected company.

Chapter Three

Elizabeth rose from the bench, her chin raised and her heart beating with uncontrollable agitation. Mr Darcy stood before her on the gravel, but a few paces distant, and the surprise in his eyes was already giving way to that cold stillness which marked his habitual composure.

“Miss Bennet.” He bowed, and the bow was so scrupulously polite that it offended her more than the incivility of another man could have done. “I must beg your pardon. I had no notion anyone was in the garden, still less that you were so near. I am sorry you were obliged to overhear a conversation never intended for you.”

“You are sorry I heard it, sir.” She kept her voice low. “Not that you said it. You take nothing back.”

He did not pretend to misunderstand her. That much she gave him, and grudged giving. “I will not pretend the visit this afternoon was decorous,” he said. “You would not thank me for the pretence, and I should not respect myself for making it. I believed myself unobserved when I spoke. That I was mistaken does not make the observation less true.”

“How fortunate,” Elizabeth said, “that truth should so often excuse the man who speaks it from the trouble of kindness.”

“It excuses no one. It is simply the truth.” He had hooked his hands behind his back, and he regarded her with the air of a man stating an indisputable fact. “Your family’s situation is unfortunate. I said so. It remains so whether or not you were behind the hedge to hear it.”

“And their conduct does little to recommend it.” She gave him back his own sentence, and had the small, sharp satisfaction of seeing a momentary change in his countenance. “You will forgive me for remembering it so exactly. It is not every day one hears one’s family weighed and found wanting by a man who has spoken to them perhaps twice.”

“I have spoken to them more than twice.”

“Then the verdict is the more considered, and the more generous for it, no doubt.”