Page 56 of The Marriage Articles

Chapter Thirty-Four

A book left open at the same page for an hour is generally agreed to be a tragedy of the attention. Elizabeth’s volume of Cowper had suffered exactly so, face downward on the table she had made her own, its spine bent in a manner no librarian could forgive. She turned it over, read the same four lines a third time, and set it down again. The fault was not the poet’s. The house had chosen this evening, after a fortnight of refusing, to be quiet.

The quiet was absolute. No carriage on the gravel, no pianoforte from the music room, no voice in the corridor enquiring after anything at all. Lady Catherine and Miss de Bourgh had gone that morning. The Bingleys had gone the day before. Georgiana was in her room. Jane was walking somewhere with her own thoughts. She was alone in a room larger than any library she had known and she had thought she would be glad of it.

She was not glad of it.

The library at Darcy House had been her refuge in London, small and well-chosen, dark at the corners, and she had loved it for its intimacy. This room was grander in every particular, higher, fuller, better lit, and she loved it too. It was not the room that was lacking. She turned the page she had not read and turned it back.

She had missed him today. The fact presented itself plainly, without apology, and she let it stand. Today, when he had been with the steward from breakfast onward over some business of a tenant, she had missed him as though he had been in Derbyshire and she in Hertfordshire. There was no accounting for it, and she did not attempt to account for it.

What came to her instead were the small freedoms of the past fortnight. There had been morning walks, taken early, before the other guests thought to claim the grounds. Looks across the dinner table had been brief and entire, when Lady Catherine had pronounced upon something and there had been nothing to say that could be said aloud. A low joke at the picnic, delivered so quietly that only she had heard it, and her own answer, quieter still. She remembered the door of the drawing room, where he had waited one evening with his hand on the frame while the company settled, watching her come in. She remembered the window of this very room, which she had glanced up at from the garden two days ago to find him standing at it, doing nothing, only standing there.

She had missed him on every one of those days too, she realized, even the days that had contained him. A house full of people had kept him at one end of the table and her at the other, and their looks had been a sort of correspondence, brief as monosyllables. She had been busy. She had been entertained, watched, assessed, and pronounced upon, and through all of it she had missed him. It was, she thought, a most unreasonable economy, to be granted a person’s society in such daily abundance and to spend the whole of it wanting more.

The door opened.

He came in with his coat over his arm and a sheaf of papers in his hand, and did not stay to compose himself or greet her. He began speaking before he had entered the room.

“Old Naylor has moved his fence again,” he said. “Eleven feet this time, if Pritchard’s chain is to be believed, and I am inclined to believe it, because the man measured it twice. Eleven feet of my meadow, Elizabeth, taken in the night, or as near the night as makes no difference, since nobody saw it happen and everybody saw it done.”

He dropped the papers on the table beside her unread Cowper and put his hands behind his back.

“And the arrears,” he went on. “Four quarters. I am told, with great civility, that the wet spring was hard on him, which it was, and that his eldest boy has been ill, which he has. Neither of these truths explains the fence. A man may be behind in his rent and honest, or forward with his fence and honest, but I cannot see how he may be both at once.”

“And what does Mr Pritchard counsel?”

“Patience. Pritchard counsels patience in all things. I believe he would counsel patience if the house were on fire, provided the fire were a tenant of long standing.” He took up the letter and put it down again. “I rode along the boundary myself on the way home. The fence is new, the posts are green, and the ditch on my side of it has been filled in with my own stones, which was at least thrifty of him.”

He was walking about the room as men do when their thoughts will not sit still.

“I mean to call on him in the morning and be civil, which will cost me more than the eleven feet are worth. There is a clause in the lease, written by my grandfather in the year sixty-one, which was meant to prevent precisely this.”

Elizabeth said nothing. She watched his face, which was doing everything his voice declined to do, and his hands, which had come out from behind his back to take up the letter again and put it down.

I love him, she thought.

The thought came the way the quiet had come, without ceremony, and she did not argue with it.

He was still speaking, turned now to the window with the last of the light on him.

He brought her this, she realized. He had had Mr Pritchard, his steward, all day, and his own judgement, and every reason to keep the difficulty to himself until it was solved. Yet he had come to her and given her all his irritation with the law, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to unburden himself to her of tenants and boundaries.

She found she liked him the better for it. Such civilities were for people who were still performing. It must be love, she thought. What else can it be?

She put the question to herself honestly, as a verdict and not as rhetoric, and waited for some objection to rise. None rose. She had been in the habit, all her life, of interrogating her own feelings until they confessed to being something smaller, and she applied the interrogation now, out of habit, and the feeling declined to confess. Gratitude it was not, though she was grateful. Esteem it was not, though she esteemed him. Nor was it the residue of the alcove, or the habit of a house, or the relief of Lady Catherine’s departure, or any of the smaller things that might have pretended to its name. It was love. She had a fortnight of glances and one quiet evening, and the evening had proved the more instructive of the two.

She stood up.

The chair made a small sound on the floor. He turned, still speaking, some clause about notice and re-entry, while she crossed the room and the sentence was still in his mouth. She reached him, took the letter out of his hand without looking at it, set it on the sill, and kissed him.

He was still for a moment. Then his arms came about her, both hands at her back. He drew her in and held her close, and the stillness went out of him entirely.

The letter lay on the sill. Under the ash the fire glowed small and red while the light off the river climbed the shelves and left them. The kiss, which had begun almost gently, grew less leisurely, less hers to direct, until she was no longer certain who had begun it and who had answered. Her breath went uneven. At her back his hands tightened. She had hold of his collar without deciding to have hold of it. He bent his head and held her nearer, and the whole quiet house narrowed to the space between his hands.

There was a knock at the door.

They parted, but slowly, and with every appearance of unwillingness, and stood breathing at each other at close quarters. His hands stayed at her waist. She looked at him and he looked at her, and neither of them looked at the door.