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“Do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has been, perhaps, the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?”

She had meant to say it more gently. She had not meant to say it at all, but it was out, and she watched it strike. He had been a statue; he became, briefly, a man. A flush went up from his collar. He turned his head away and back.

“I have no wish to conceal it,” said he. “I did everything in my ability to separate my friend from your sister, and I am pleased with my success. Towards him I have begun to learn that I have been kinder, I believe, than towards myself.”

She had known it. She had had it from the Colonel’s own mouth. Still, to hear it confessed, without shame, with something almost like satisfaction, in this low room, with her sister’s letter burning against her side, was a new and different thing. She was aware that she had risen. She was aware of her pulse in her wrists.

“But it is not only this affair,” she said, and her voice had begun to shake, and she let it, “on which my dislike is rooted. Long before it had taken place, my opinion of you was decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself?”

It was then that she saw him lose his temper, and it was very different from what she had feared. She had been prepared for hauteur. She had not been prepared for the quality of his fury, which was not loud, at first, but narrow, and bright with hurt, so that for an instant she saw what lay under all that polish, and it frightened her a little, and she was angrier for being frightened.

“You take an eager interest in that gentleman’s concerns,” said Darcy, his voice rising somewhat from the heat.

Elizabeth shook her head, raised her chin, and decidedly pushed back. “Who that knows what his misfortunes have been can help feeling an interest in him?”

“His misfortunes!” Darcy laughed a bitter laugh. “Yes, madam, his misfortunes; his misfortunes have been extensive indeed.” He put a hand to his eyes.

“And of your fault,” cried Elizabeth with energy. “You have reduced him to his present state of poverty. You have withheld the advantages which you must know to have been designed for him. You have deprived him of years of his life of that independence which was no less his due than his desert.”

His answer, when it came, was not what she expected, because it was so quiet, and because it frightened her more than shouting would have done. He said, “And this is your opinion of me. This is the estimation in which you hold me?” And then, to her horror, he laughed, a short and terrible breath of a laugh that had nothing of mirth in it, and he thanked her for explaining it so fully.

His faults, according to this calculation, were heavy indeed, he added. But perhaps these offences might have been overlooked, had not her pride been hurt by his honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented his forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed had he, with greater policy, concealed his struggles, and flattered her into the belief of his being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort was his abhorrence. Nor was he ashamed of the feelings he related. They were natural and just.

“Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connexions?” he said. “To congratulate myself on relations whose condition in life is so decidedly and evidently beneath my own?”

She felt it as a blow; it was the thing she would have said, if she had been asked to guess; and still it went through her, because it came without hesitation, as a man gives a fact. In the nursery of her mind, where all her childhood’s loyalties were kept, her mother’s flutter and her father’s wit and Jane’s patience and even Lydia’s noise stood up in a row, and she found that she would have defended every one of them with her life.

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy,” said she, very low, “if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner, sir.” For some reason, she felt a need to emphasize the last word on that point.

He started. He said nothing. She pressed on, and felt, as she spoke, that she was not choosing the words but only letting them out, one by one, like blood from an old wound that she had at last been given leave to open.

“I would be honest with you, since you have been so honest with me. I can honestly say, Mr. Darcy, that you could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.”

Again his astonishment was obvious. He looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification, and in the silence she heard, distinctly, how heavily she was breathing, as if she had been running. The candle on the table guttered in some draught. The clock on the mantel, which she had not heard all this while, began to tick again, as if it had been holding its breath.

“From the very beginning,” she said, “from the first moment, I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

She stopped, because there was no more breath. Her cheeks were burning. Her hands, which had been so steady, were not steady now; she clasped them before her to hide it and saw, with a little shock, that he had seen.

He had gone perfectly pale. The first fury had passed out of his face and left behind it something she had no name for. It might have been the look of a man who has been told, at last, by a stranger, the truth about a house he has lived in all his life.

“You have said quite enough, madam,” said he, and the voice was hoarse. “I perfectly comprehend your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness.”

He took one step toward the door, and she thought, it is done, with a relief that curdled even as she felt it. And then, the voices in the passage began.

Elizabeth did not understand them at first. There was a murmur beyond the door, low and urgent and unmistakably male. She knew it was not the manservant, nor Mr. Collins returned early, nor any other person she would have looked for. The sound paused. There was a stirring, a muffled shuffle, as of a large person making a very small effort at silence. Elizabeth, whose ears were sharp and whose temper had left her strangely alert, heard her own pulse, and above it the thin, unmistakable creak of a floorboard under a man’s weight.

Darcy had halted with his hand almost at the latch. She saw his eyes go to the door, and she saw that he had heard it too, and that it meant nothing to him; he was too far gone in his own wreck to think of anything but flight. He was a man who had come in at one door a proud and certain person and meant to leave at the other a broken one, and between the two there was nothing left in him to wonder at an eavesdropper.

But she wondered. She stood in the middle of her friend’s drawing-room with her face on fire and her sister’s letter against her ribs, and watched the gap beneath the door, where the line of candlelight from the passage broke across two shadows that were not the shadows of servants. And something that was not triumph, and was very far from comfort, rose in her throat and held there.

The floorboard creaked again. A dark shape moved across the light.

Outside the drawing-room door, Colonel Fitzwilliam, who had followed his cousin across a mile of dark park for reasons he could not himself have explained to Lady Catherine, stood with his hand raised to a knock he had not yet given, and realised that something had gone terribly, comprehensively wrong.

CHAPTER 2

Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam had twice been shot at in earnest and once, at Talavera, very nearly bayoneted by a Frenchman who had slipped on a dead horse, and he was prepared to swear before any court that none of these experiences had caused him half the anxiety of his cousin’s expression at the Rosings dinner-table that evening.