Page 54 of The Marriage Articles

She wished them good sport and was gone. The men filed out into the damp with the keepers and the dogs at their heels. Bingley was still laughing over liberty and boredom as they crossed the yard. Hurst asked whether luncheon would be brought out to the pegs or taken at the house.

They took their pegs across the home field, and the first drive began. The beaters moved through the copse with their flags, and the birds came over high and fast. For half an hour the morning was all noise and smoke. Darcy shot as he did most things, without flourish and without waste, and the tally at his peg grew steadily. Bingley fired oftener and brought down less. “Did you mark that one?” he called between drives. “I had him square, Darcy, I swear I had him.”

Hurst discharged his gun once in the first drive, hit nothing, and thereafter stood at his peg with the gun under his arm, counting what fell elsewhere. “How many is that?” he asked the keeper when the horn sounded. “And we eat at half past one, I hope. A man shoots better for a luncheon under him.” The keeper, who had served Pemberley twenty years, answered both questions without expression.

Walking to the next line of pegs, his hands clasped behind his back, Darcy found Bingley falling into step beside him and taking up his true subject. “I must tell you about Miss Lawrence,” he said. “She is an angel, Darcy. I do not use the word lightly. She is kind, she is beautiful, she plays and sings, and her temper is the sweetest in England. Sir Adam is the best of men, and he has been good enough to approve me. Can you believe my luck?”

“I am glad to hear it,” Darcy said. “She sounds everything you deserve, and Sir Adam everything a father should be.”

“You will like her, I know you will. Everyone likes her. My sisters dote on her already, and they are not easily pleased.”

“No,” Darcy said. “They are not.” Bingley took this for agreement, which it very nearly was, and went on happily about a wedding in the spring.

The horn called them to their pegs, and the second drive went much as the first. Afterwards, crossing the wet stubble towards the third, Bingley was quiet for a dozen paces, which in Bingley was rare. “I hope you will not think it wrong of me,” he said at last, “to own that Miss Bennet, your sister now, I mean, was the handsomest creature I ever saw at Netherfield. I say it with all respect. Miss Lawrence has my whole heart, you may depend on it.”

“That is all past now,” Darcy said. “She is my sister now, and I have a brother’s right to say there is not a sweeter temper in England. She would have made you an excellent wife.” He kept his voice even and his eyes on the line of beaters. Bingley looked at him sidelong and then laughed. “You are a good fellow, Darcy, and I am a lucky one, and we will speak of it no more.”

They walked on in a companionable quiet. “And you,” Bingley said, when the pegs were in sight. “How does the marriage go? You look well. You look, I hardly dare say it, content.”

“It goes well,” Darcy said. “Very well.” It was the plain truth, and plainer than he would have offered any other man alive. Bingley, to his credit, asked for nothing more.

“I am glad,” Bingley said. “You were so long resolved to be unhappy that I had given up hope of you. And now look at you, married to the finest woman in Derbyshire and shooting better than ever. There is no accounting for it.”

“There is not,” Darcy said, and let the drive begin.

The last drive ended past noon, and the keepers counted the bag twice over. It stood at forty-one brace, and it was divided as custom directed, with a share for the beaters and the best of it for the house. Hurst surveyed the birds with more warmth than he had shown any person all morning.

The party came back across the park in the early afternoon, damp-footed and hungry, and Elizabeth was at the long window above the steps, watching for them.

She was waiting in the hall when they came in. Bingley and Hurst went on to be rid of their boots, which left them a moment of privacy. “Well,” Elizabeth said. “You are returned whole, which is more than I dared hope.”

“And you have had the harder day of it,” he said. “How went the siege?”

“No blood was shed,” she said, “though I will not deny that some feathers were ruffled. Your aunt read us a lecture on the proper management of a household, which I attended to with my whole face. Miss Bingley declined the drawing room the entire morning, and we bore her absence with what fortitude we could. Miss de Bourgh and Jane went walking to the village and came home without a single catastrophe. All is well.”

He thought of the gun room that morning and the brow that had undone him before breakfast. Twice in one day she had stood to mark his going and his coming, and he found he liked being seen off and welcomed back.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Six days into the Bingleys’ fortnight at Pemberley, and Elizabeth had survived them all with so little visible damage that she had begun to entertain the suspicion she might prove equal to it. The picnic had come off without a lost fork or a spoiled gown. The village visit had been pronounced charming by everyone. Tonight she had arranged a musical evening. She stood at the drawing room door and watched the candles burn themselves into their proper business of lighting a party.

The room had been made ready under her own direction that afternoon. The pianoforte stood open at the end nearer the windows, its lid raised in a way that invited company. Chairs had been drawn into an easy semicircle between the hearth and the instrument. The sideboard had been laid with tea and cake and the good plates.

The guests were now arriving in the manner of people who had been given all afternoon to prepare for an evening, which was to say, with an air of having dressed as an accomplishment. Mr Bingley came in first with Mrs Hurst upon his arm and his face already arranged for enjoyment. Mr Hurst followed them and went, without remark, to the sofa by the far wall. Lady Catherine entered with Anne, surveyed the room and took the chairs of honour with a certainty that admitted no question. Jane came with Georgiana, both of them in pale colours, both of them smiling with the same gentleness. Miss Bingley came last, in a gown Elizabeth privately considered an argument for restraint, with a tall white feather standing from her hair in open defiance of good taste.

Elizabeth had invited Miss Bingley to open the evening’s performances, as was proper with a guest, and had congratulated herself in private that a guest so thoroughly humbled could not take offence at a compliment. Miss Bingley rose and floated to the pianoforte with every appearance of doing the whole room a favour. She laid her gloves aside with a smile distributed impartially over the assembly. The feather in her hair nodded with the gesture.

Miss Bingley played first. She was very talented, which was the most provoking part of the entire business. Her hands moved with accuracy and a certain elegance, her expression avoided nothing of the heroic, and her eyes swept the company at every musical phrase as if cataloguing the applause she intended to collect. When she finished she smiled over them all with the complete and unshakeable satisfaction of someone who believed herself the finest musician in any room and had arranged the evidence accordingly. The room applauded with proper feeling. Elizabeth applauded with the rest.

Mrs Hurst had begun a speech concerning the masters by whom her sister had been taught, in a manner that promised a considerable length, when Lady Catherine addressed the performer with the magnanimity of manner that only she could arrange into ceremony.

“The piece was passably executed, Miss Bingleby,” said her ladyship. “Although I have observed your taste in the adagio to be somewhat hurried. Taste is everything, as I have always maintained, and no amount of facility will do for a want of it.”

Miss Bingley’s smile faltered at one corner. “Bingley, your Ladyship,” she offered, very softly.

“The adagio in question was not written to be hurried,” Lady Catherine repeated, with exactly the same indifference, as if no correction of the name had ever been laid before her. She returned to her tea.

Georgiana played next. She came to the instrument with a colour in her cheeks that spoke of being put forward by half the room at once, and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap before she began. What she gave them was a quiet piece, modestly chosen, without ornament of any kind, played for herself rather than for the assembly, and Elizabeth thought it the more decided performance of the two.