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“I hear you perfectly well, Louisa. You need not make such a fuss.”
The door opened on the last word, and Bingley came in with Jane on his arm.
“There you all are! We have come to say goodbye.”
It was remarkable how quickly the room changed. Miss Bingley ran forward to kiss her new sister, and Hurst got up off the sofa faster than Darcy had ever seen him move for anything but his dinner. Mrs Hurst told Jane she looked lovely in her travelling dress, which happened to be true. Darcy shook Bingley's hand. It was warm, and it held on to his as though nothing in the world had changed.
Jane curtsied to him last of all. She said only, “Mr Darcy,” but she looked at him a little longer than she needed to, very gravely, and he could not tell what she was thinking. Then Bingley took her out.
They all went down to the front steps to see them off. The afternoon had turned grey and bitter, and the wind came round the corner of the house hard enough to make Mrs Hurst clutch at her shawl. A footman was tying the last trunk on behind. Bingley handed Jane in, jumped up after her and let the window down so he could shout goodbye to them all a second time. Jane had taken leave of her family at Longbourn before the guests came in from the garden, and they were to go straight on to the north road.
Darcy watched the carriage out of sight. Ten minutes more at Longbourn, and Jane would have heard the whole of it in the hall. He thought of Miss Lydia, who had never kept a secret for longer than it took her to find somebody to tell, and was glad, for once, of Bingley’s hurry to be on the road.
Miss Bingley went back inside without looking at anyone. Hurst followed her, no doubt in search of the madeira. Mrs Hurst stayed where she was on the step.
“You will ask her anyway, I hope.”
“So that she can refuse me?”
“Perhaps she will. But then it is her refusal, and everyone knows you asked. If you do not ask, they will say you ruined a gentleman's daughter in a cellar and ran off to London the next morning. That will do you very little harm. It will do her a great deal.”
He looked at her in some surprise. “You have thought about this a good deal, Mrs Hurst.”
“Everybody thinks I am the stupid sister.” She shrugged. “It is very useful. Nobody ever bothers to argue with me.”
She went in. Darcy stood on the step until the cold had got right through his coat.
She was right, and he knew it. He had been imagining Miss Elizabeth's refusal ever since noon. Now it came to him that he had been imagining it ever since April. At the parsonage she had stopped him before he had said half of what he came to say. He had never told her the rest, and she had never given him her answer. Every answer he had heard since then, he had made up for her himself.
Tonight he would hear the real one.
***
It was dark by the time he got to Longbourn, and it was not a servant who opened the door. It was Mr Bennet, with a candle in his hand.
“I thought you might come,” he said. “I was not quite sure of it. You had better come into my study, Mr Darcy. It is the only room in the house where nobody is crying.”
The fire had burned low, and there was a book lying open on the arm of the chair. Mr Bennet put the candle on the mantelpiece but did not sit down, and Darcy was grateful for it.
“I have come to tell you, sir, that I am ready to marry your daughter, if she will have me.”
“That is very handsome of you. A good deal more handsome than we deserve. I owe you an apology for my wife, since she will not make it herself. She is upstairs, and I do not think she has made up her mind yet whether she is the one who has been wronged.”
“There is no need...”
“There is every need. You will think it a poor excuse, but she meant it kindly. Mr Collins and I have been going back and forth at length about the entail. You know this, of course, since you were there during our visit to Kent. Well, it seems Mr Collins decided to make an offer to Elizabeth and my wife was determined to see it stopped. She envisioned Charlotte Lucas as a suitable substitute and attempted to make it happen. Through a series of rather ridiculous circumstances you found yourself ensnared along with Elizabeth. That is the long and short of it.”
“I understand, sir.”
He did. He understood the rest, too, though Mr Bennet was too proud to say it. If Darcy rode away tonight, the disgrace would fall on all five of the sisters, and on Bingley after them.
“I understand also that if I do not marry Miss Elizabeth, it is your family who will suffer for it.”
Mr Bennet looked at him over his spectacles. “You see a great deal, Mr Darcy. It is not the most comfortable thing to have in a son-in-law.” He went to the door. “I will send Lizzy down to you. I am going upstairs to sit with my wife, which will show you what I am prepared to do for my daughter.”
A few minutes went by. A door closed overhead, there was a murmur of voices, and then quick light footsteps came down the stairs.
Elizabeth came in and shut the door behind her. She did not come far. She stopped at her father's desk with one hand resting on the edge of it, and for a while neither of them said a word.
