Page 69 of The Marriage Articles

A play was underway, if play was the name for it. The hearthrug had become a stage. Henry Gardiner, in a cloak contrived from a curtain tie-back and a paper crown gone soft at the points, was delivering a speech of considerable length concerning a kingdom, a dragon, and a tax. Meanwhile John, costumed as the dragon in a green counterpane, waited on all fours with the patience of a creature who had been promised a great scene. Mr Gardiner sat on a low stool with a sheet of paper in his hand, prompting and playing at once, which required him to be a herald, a wise woman, and, at the present moment, the king’s entire council.

“Your Majesty,” Mr Gardiner said gravely, “the dragon demands tribute.”

“What tribute does the dragon demand?” Henry said, looking at his brother.

“Two sheep and a cow,” John answered.

“And a rice pudding,” little Lizzy Gardiner, who had been cast as the dragon’s treasurer, called out, rising from her nest of shawls.

The room, which contained Mrs Gardiner, Georgiana, Lord and Lady Matlock, and every available chair, answered in a single burst of laughter. It was of the warm kind, with nothing polite in it, and above it all Darcy heard Elizabeth. She had stopped two steps inside the door, still on his arm, laughing with her head back and her hand tight on his sleeve, laughing as she did when she had forgotten anyone was listening, which was the way he liked best.

Georgiana laughed too, half hidden behind little Lizzy’s shawls, helping the child rearrange her treasure with a composure that broke every few seconds. Darcy stood and watched his wife laugh, and thought that a man might build a very fair life out of less.

He lingered by the door a while. From there he took his inventory, quietly, as he had once taken inventories of rooms he meant to leave early. Georgiana was well. His sister on the floor in the firelight, letting a little girl crown her with the paper points, shy still but easy in her shyness, adored by the Gardiner children and adoring them back without a single reservation. The Gardiners themselves were kind in the way he had learned to trust, kind without design. Mr Gardiner corrupting the herald’s lines for the pleasure of his children, Mrs Gardiner watching it all with her mending in her lap and her eyes missing nothing. His uncle and aunt were settled by the window, Lord Matlock following the play with the air of a man observing foreign customs he had decided, on balance, to tolerate, Lady Matlock’s eyebrow raised at the dragon and her mouth not quite disapproving of it. The children were loud. The house was full. It was easy in a way he had not known a house could be, and he stood at the edge of it feeling something close to bewilderment, that all of this should be his, and that his chief contribution to the evening was to watch it.

The play reached its end in due course. The bows were extensive. Henry swept his paper crown low, John rose from the counterpane and bowed from the waist with a dragon’s dignity intact, and little Lizzy curtsied so deeply she sat down. She accepted the resulting applause as no less than her due. The family clapped. Mr Gardiner clapped loudest of all, on the grounds, he said, that a prompter’s triumph is never his own. Georgiana remained on the hearthrug with the children, helping Lizzy out of her shawls while Henry explained to her, in detail and at length, how the second act would differ when it was performed for the wedding guests.

The rest of them drew to the corner by the tea table, where the talk went on at its ease and nobody so much as mentioned bed.

Mrs Gardiner poured. “Jane says that all is readiness at Longbourn.”

Jane and Richard were at Longbourn with Mr and Mrs Bennet, seeing to the last of the wedding preparations.

“They took their time over it,” Mr Gardiner said. “Four months of courtship, and not a day of it wasted. That is how these things ought to be done.”

“I have another observation,” Mrs Gardiner said, lowering her voice though the hearthrug was a good distance off and fully occupied. “You will tell me if I presume. I think we may live to see Miss Lucas mistress of Longbourn.”

Elizabeth set down her cup. “Aunt!”

“Mr Collins has been at Longbourn these four months, learning estate management of your father, and your father says that he is a very respectable man and a quick study, which from your father is high praise.” Mrs Gardiner’s eyes were mild. “And Charlotte dines there twice a week, and has begun to consult him about the stillroom.”

“You are become a matchmaker,” Elizabeth said. “I shall tell my mother. She will want to take lessons of you.”

“Your mother takes lessons of no one. It is her great strength and her ruin.” Mrs Gardiner smiled into her tea. “But you are glad of it, Lizzy, so you may tease me as much as you please.”

“I am glad of it,” Elizabeth admitted. “Charlotte has more sense than any of us, and she has spent it too long on other people’s houses.” She glanced at Darcy. “You are very quiet, sir.”

“I was reflecting that I have never once managed to win an argument in this family, and I have been married into it long enough to know better than to try tonight.”

“Wisdom at last,” said Mr Gardiner, and reached for his tea.

The talk went on, low and unhurried, while on the hearthrug Henry’s second act began to take shape around Georgiana’s patient suggestions. Darcy drank his tea and said little. There was a particular pleasure in saying little in a room where speech was not required of him, and he had come to it late in life, and he valued it accordingly.

Later, the house quieted by degrees. The children were carried off protesting, the Matlocks withdrew, Georgiana went up with little Lizzy asleep against her shoulder and delivered her to her nurse. By eleven the corridors were still. In their private chamber the fire had burned low. Elizabeth sat by it in her dressing gown with her hair down. Darcy shut the door on the last of the house’s noise and stood a moment in the quiet that remained.

“I cannot remember a happier Christmas,” he said.

She did not answer at once.

He thought at first she had not heard him. But then she sat up straighter in her chair, and her hand went to her middle, and she went very still. Darcy stopped where he was.

She looked up at him, and her eyes were wet and bright and entirely unafraid. “Fitzwilliam,” she said, very low, “I think I felt it.”

“The quickening?” he asked.

She gave the smallest nod.

He released a breath he had not known he held, and came to her at once. He knelt before her chair, and laying his hands gently upon her, he pressed his lips to the place beneath her fingers. Then he rose and took her in his arms, holding her as though she were the most precious charge in the world. “Elizabeth,” he murmured against her hair, “you have made me the happiest man alive.”