Page 9 of The Marriage Articles

“If the story spreads,” Darcy said, “I shall offer for her.”

The fire settled. Bingley looked at him for a long moment and said nothing at all.

“Offer for her!” Bingley said at last. “Upon the strength of a mere rumour? Darcy, ought a man to marry simply to satisfy public gossip, when his heart is wholly unengaged? If it were myself, if it were Miss Bennet, that would be another matter, but you have spent the entire month finding fault with that family. You have said as much yourself. A gentleman does not dispose of his life and fortune where he has no inclination, merely because the drawing rooms of Hertfordshire choose to talk.”

Darcy was silent for a while. The honest answer was simple, and he had been avoiding it all evening.

“It might not be so very bad a thing,” he said, “to be forced to marry Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”

Bingley’s mouth opened and stayed open.

“You need not look at me with such astonishment. I am eight and twenty. I have known these five years that I must marry, and I have spent those five years being introduced to young ladies who agreed with every opinion I expressed, which is a trial I would not wish upon any man. I have observed her, Charles. At the assembly, at Lucas Lodge, and here under your own roof. She has a habit of regarding a man as though he were a character she intended to decipher, and I found myself wishing to be understood by her.”

“But the assembly. You refused to dance with her.”

“I refused to dance at all. It is not at all the same thing.” He turned the glass slowly by its stem. “At Lucas Lodge she refused to dance with me, an injury which no woman has offered me in my adult life. Then she walked three miles through the mud to sit beside her sister, and arrived at Netherfield with her petticoat six inches deep in dirt, looking at me as though I were the spectacle. Your sisters observed that her fine eyes were brightened by the exercise.” He stopped, his gaze fixed on the quiet turning of his glass, and swallowed before he spoke again. “They were.”

“Darcy.”

“Throughout our acquaintance, whenever I spoke, she contradicted me, meeting every assertion with a spirit that refused to be managed. And this afternoon, in the drawing room, before any of this, she was sitting with her family and she looked up at me, and I thought, I will tell you exactly what I thought. I thought that I had rather quarrel with that woman for the rest of my life than be agreed with by anyone else in it.”

A long silence fell between them, broken only by the steady crackle of the hearth fire. Darcy raised his glass of port to his lips without drinking, his expression hardening with self-reproach.

“I went out into the garden shortly after, without any deliberate intention of meeting her, yet my steps took me straight to her side, where I managed to provoke her almost immediately. I cannot even plead ignorance of my own folly.”

“And her family? Mrs Bennet? The younger girls? This afternoon you called them objectionable.”

“They are.” He had done the reckoning this evening. “But they are a price I would be entirely willing to pay for the only woman I have ever both respected and desired.”

“Then why in heaven’s name do you need a rumour? Go to Longbourn tomorrow. I will send a footman over tonight with a note begging her to receive you.”

“You will do nothing of the kind. You will keep silent, which is the single favour I require of you.” Darcy stood up and stirred the fire with the poker, seeking an outlet for his restlessness. “Listen to me, Bingley. If this business with the gardener becomes known in the village, I shall offer her my hand without delay. I will not have her name ruined on my account. But I shall not press my suit under any other circumstance.”

“If you love her, Darcy, why wait for a scandal? A man does not wait for a servant’s blubbering to give him permission to seek the woman he desires.”

“Permission is not what holds me back,” Darcy said, his posture stiffening with proud self-defence. “It is the dread of her answer. After my conduct in the garden this afternoon, I have every reason to believe she despises the very sight of me. I will not presume to offer where I am certain to be rejected. If her reputation requires my name, I will give it to her. If it does not, I must bide my time until I know her mind.”

“How very noble,” Bingley said softly. “And you will simply sit here and await the event?”

“The world will act as it will, and I have made my decision.”

Chapter Five

In the drawing room at Longbourn, Elizabeth sat with her workbasket upon her knee, eight days after the Netherfield shrubbery and still with the cold of it in her sleeves, while every voice in the room said what was known to all of Meryton.

Hill had set down the fish on Monday with her mouth pursed in solemn gravity. The butcher’s boy had lingered at the back door on Tuesday with an air of unusual importance. Her mother’s voice had carried up the stairs on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, each day a little higher, each day a little more confident in its conjectures. The story had been told within the house since Monday. It had grown steadily ever since, as reports are accustomed to do when they pass through servants’ halls, across shop counters, and along the pews of a parish church. By Saturday it had very little connection to the truth, and a great deal to do with what Meryton wished to believe.

“We are ruined,” Mrs Bennet said, from the sofa where she had taken refuge with her salts. “Absolutely ruined, and all for your obstinacy in dragging Jane home! I said it at the time, did I not, Hill? I said, Lizzy will be the death of us. Now she has gone and done it, and in Lent too, when we are meant to be quiet and plain. What is to become of us all I do not know!”

Elizabeth did not look up from her work. “I did not drag Jane home, Mama. Jane was ready to come home, and I came with her.”

“Ready to come home! As if that were the point! The point is that you were found, Lizzy, found alone with Mr Darcy in the shrubbery. Now every shopkeeper in Meryton is talking of it. Mrs Long has told her niece, the niece has told the Lucases, and the Lucases have told everybody. We are undone!”

“Lord, Lizzy, you sly thing,” Lydia said, from the window where she had been sitting. “And never told us a word of it! I should have thought you would have boasted of it. To have Mr Darcy in the shrubbery, when he is worth ten thousand a year! If you had only had the sense to be found a little sooner, we might all have been going to town by now.”

“Lydia!” Jane said, softly.

“Well, I should have boasted of it,” Lydia said. “I should have told everybody. What is the use of being compromised if nobody is to know of it?”