Page 6 of The Marriage Articles

A muscle moved in his jaw. She watched it with interest. “You are angry,” he said, “and you have cause to be angry at the manner of your hearing it. I do not quarrel with that. But you are asking me to apologize for the substance of what was said, and that substance I cannot in good conscience retract.”

“Cannot.” She took a step towards him. “What a convenient word! You cannot retract it, as though your candour were a necessity of nature from which you could not escape. You might have preserved a civil silence, sir. A path lay before you that cost nothing and spared the feelings of others, yet you chose rather to unite with Miss Bingley in her censures.”

“Miss Bingley required no agreement from me. She is amply supplied with opinions of her own.”

“And yet you contributed yours. How liberal of you.”

“I was asked a question,” Darcy said. “I answered it. I have never yet learned the trick of answering a question with a falsehood because a falsehood is more comfortable, and I do not mean to begin learning it now, however much it might oblige you.”

“Oblige me!” The words came out very quiet. “You think this a matter of my comfort? You stood in this garden and told two ladies who already hold my family in contempt that we are unfortunate and indecorous. When you are caught in the act, you speak to me of your honesty as though it were a virtue under persecution. Your honesty is not under persecution, Mr Darcy. It is under examination, and it is not acquitting itself well.”

“My honesty has no need to acquit itself before you.”

“No,” she said. “Nothing about you needs to account to me. That must be a great convenience.”

A long moment passed, and the stillness came over him again. She hated it. He would not be discomposed, and she resented him the more for his self-command. “A truth merely spoken to wound would be cruelty,” he said at last. “I grant you that freely. But I did not speak to wound. I did not know you were there to be injured.”

“And a blow struck in the dark hurts no one, I suppose, until someone stumbles into it.”

“A blow that was never aimed at you.”

“It struck me all the same.” Her voice rose on the last word and she pulled it back down, furious at the crack in it, more furious that he had heard it. “You will tell me next that a truth cannot be unkind. That accuracy is its own defence. I have heard that doctrine before, sir, generally from people whose truths are always about other people’s failings.”

Something changed in his face at that, and what came out of him came out harder than anything he had yet said. “Your wit is wasted defending what cannot be defended.”

“And yours is admirably employed, I am sure, in telling tradesmen’s daughters that a gentleman’s family is beneath notice.”

“That is not what I said.”

“It is precisely what you said, in prettier words, to an eager audience.”

“You put words in my mouth and then quarrel with them. It saves you the trouble of quarrelling with what I actually said.”

“I quarrel with both, sir, I am equal to the labour.”

“You are determined to make this an offence of a particular kind, and I will not help you make it.” He had taken a step nearer, and his voice had dropped, while that part of her still capable of observation noted that his composure was giving way at last, and derived a silent pleasure from the sight. “I spoke of your mother’s conduct, which was imprudent, and of your sisters’, which was worse, and I spoke of them as facts, because they are facts, and no degree of your indignation can make them otherwise.”

“Facts.” She took a step nearer herself. “How comfortable it must be to live among facts, where nothing is ever cruel, only accurate. Tell me, is it a fact that you said what you said to the two people in this county most likely to repeat it?”

“I did not say it to be repeated.”

“You said it to Miss Bingley, which is the same thing with the trouble of posting it saved.”

“She would have said worse without me.”

“Then let her speak worse without your assistance! That is the entire substance of my complaint, and you cannot grant it, because to grant it you would be forced to acknowledge that your boasted accuracy has a cost, and that other people must pay it.”

“I have never asked anyone else to pay for my opinions.”

“You are asking my family to pay for them at this moment. You simply cannot see the reckoning from where you stand.”

“I can see perfectly well from where I stand.” His voice had gone low and rough, and he was no longer still at all. “You think me a man without feeling because I will not perform feeling for you. I will not. I said what I believed to be true, and I am sorry you heard it, and I am not sorry I said it, and if that makes me a villain in your accounting then I must be a villain, because I will not lie to be acquitted.”

“Nobody asked you to lie.”

“You asked me to repent. It amounts to the same thing.”

The grind of a wheelbarrow upon the gravel, accompanied by a man’s low voice, caused them to turn in the same moment towards the sound. In that single instant both became conscious of their position, standing so close that propriety was entirely breached, concealed behind the foliage out of sight of the mansion, and they drew back in immediate confusion. Elizabeth’s shoulder struck against the yew.