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“I said once that I could not repress it, but I was wrong. I have found it can be kept still. I have kept it still for three weeks. But it has not gone, and it has not diminished, and I will not stand here and tell you that it has. I love you. I loved you in April and at the parsonage and on the Westerham road. I shall love you at Pemberley, in the rain, in the winter, when you are married to someone else. I do not say it to ask you for anything. I say it because you have been honest with me, and I will not give you less.”

He stopped. He was breathing hard. “I cannot expect it returned,” he said. “That is not why I say it. I should only despise myself if I let you believe I had put it down.” The wind came down into the hollow and stirred the yew-boughs, and the shadow on the dial moved a hair’s breadth. Neither of them looked at it.

Elizabeth could not have said how long she stood there. She had thought that she was ready. She had known, in the abstract, that something of this kind might be said; she had rehearsed her answers in the dark, a quiet civil I am sorry, or a careful I do not know. She had not rehearsed this. She had not been prepared for the absence of everything she had steeled herself against: the entreaty, the demand, the long dangerous pause in which a woman is expected to say yes.

He had said it, and shut his mouth, and stood there with his ruined hands behind his back, looking at her as a man looks at a verdict he has already agreed to abide by. It was the most terrible declaration she had ever heard. It asked her for nothing.

“You would truly go,” she said. Her voice did not sound like her own. “Tomorrow. You would get into your carriage, and drive away, and not ask me to reconsider?”

He shook his head in rejection. “I have already asked once.”

“Mr. Darcy.” She tried to say, but he would not let her.

“I asked, and you gave me an answer. It was the most honest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I have been trying for three weeks to deserve it.” He drew a long breath. “I will not make you give the same answer twice. I will not stand in front of you every day, and every week, and every year, and ask until you tire of saying no.” He sounded utterly rejected.

A laugh caught in her throat, and turned, unaccountably, into something else. She put her hand to her mouth. It had been so much easier when he was proud; and, when he had stood on that hearth-rug and talked about degradation, she had known precisely how to meet him; she had had every weapon she needed.

She had not the faintest idea what to do with a man who simply stood there, and was kind, and kept his word. His restraint frightened her more than any amount of ardour. It left no room for resistance. It gave her nothing to push against. It lay before her like an open road. “I do not think you are the man I thought you were,” said Elizabeth slowly. “I do not say it lightly. I have been wrong about you in a great many particulars. And I have.” She stopped. “I am not ready to give you anything. I do not wish you to carry away the notion that I am. I do not know what I feel, or what I shall feel in a month. I should be lying if I said that I did.”

He looked at her, his eyes seemed to bore into her soul. “I have not asked for anything, Miss Bennet.”

“I know that,” said Elizabeth, with a quick sharp catch of exasperation that was very nearly a sob. “That is exactly the trouble.”

They stood and looked at each other. Neither moved. It was very quiet in the hollow, and the great grey house stood above them with its thousand windows, blind and indifferent, and somewhere a long way off a bell began to strike three. She did not decide to do it. It was her hand that moved. It seemed to belong, for the moment, to someone with a good deal more courage than herself. It came out from beneath her reticule, and went across the two yards of gravel between them, and stopped, an inch from his sleeve, trembling in the air.

He was looking at it, but he did not reach. That was what undid her. He might have caught it; any man would have; it hung there, in the cold, as plain an invitation as she had ever offered anyone. But his hands stayed behind his back, clenched on each other, white at the knuckle, and she saw the muscle jump in his jaw. He was waiting. He would stand there, she understood, until the bell stopped, and the dusk came down, and she took it back.

She hesitated. The whole of her sense, her prudence, her pride, cried out to withdraw. Then she let her fingers fall, very lightly, against his. It was the barest touch. It could not have lasted three seconds. Her glove lay against the rough torn ridge of his palm, which he had at last, slowly, as if afraid to breathe, brought round from behind him; and she felt the whole length of his arm go rigid, and then tremble. He did not close his hand. He did not draw her nearer. He let her fingers rest there, light as a leaf on a stone, and neither of them said a word.

It was the first tenderness between them that nobody had arranged. The bell struck the last of three. Elizabeth drew in her breath, and took her hand away, and found, with an astonishment that was very nearly fear, that she did not wish to.

CHAPTER 18

Colonel Fitzwilliam had lost battles before, and he had a habit, after each one, of making an exact reckoning. He did it at six on the Saturday morning, in the dressing-room at Rosings, with his boots half on and his valise open on the bed, in the thin grey light that comes before the sun. He did it as he always did, in two columns, with a stub of pencil, on the back of a laundry-list. It was a discipline he had learned from a major of engineers at Corunna. Gains. Losses. One looked at the figures without flinching, and one did not tell oneself stories.

The losses column was very long. He was leaving Kent with the objective unachieved. There was no engagement. There was no understanding. There was not even, so far as he had been able to ascertain, an appointment to write. The lady had stood in a garden on Friday afternoon and told his cousin, in terms the Colonel had had from Darcy at midnight, in a flat unsparing voice, that she was not ready to give him anything. She had said that she did not know what she felt. She had said that she did not know what she would feel in a month.

And Darcy had said thank you. The Colonel put down the pencil. He looked at the column. He had run a campaign for three weeks with all the resources of his profession, and by any honest military standard it had been a failure, and the lady had not so much as promised to see the man again.

He turned over the laundry-list, and looked at the other column. It was shorter. He had written four things in it, and he looked at them for some time. He sleeps. He eats what he is given. He has not struck anyone since the barn. And under that, in a smaller hand, as though he had been a little ashamed to write it, He is not angry. He is sad.

They breakfasted together at half past seven, in the east parlour, by the light of a very small fire. Lady Catherine had not come down. A footman had carried away the first of the trunks, and the clatter of it going down the back stairs had the dull, hollow, departing sound of a house being emptied.

Darcy was dressed for the road. He sat at the table with a cup of coffee going cold at his elbow and his bandaged hands, newly dressed that morning by Cowper, resting loosely on the cloth; and Richard, who had spent three weeks reading him like a map, looked across the toast-rack and tried to find the thing that had changed.

It was hard to say. There was no look of triumph. There was none of the dull white anguish of that night in the barn. Darcy sat with his shoulders square and his eyes on the window, a man at the end of a long march who has put down his pack, and the Colonel realised, with some surprise, that he was not looking at the face of a man who had been refused.

“Did she say anything else?” Richard asked cautiously. “Yesterday. I have not liked to ask.”

Darcy exhaled, and seemed to lift his shoulders slightly. “She touched my hand.”

The Colonel waited, but Darcy did not go on. So, he asked, “Is that all?”

Darcy’s eyes shot up; he seemed annoyed. “It is a great deal” He turned his head. The grey eyes, steady and clear and rather tired, met his. “I will tell you something, Richard, and you may make what you will of it. I was angry with her once. In the parsonage, after, and for some days because she had not given me what I came for. I was angry because I had made up my mind to a thing, and she would not hand it over. I thought, I have offered her everything. How dare she not take it.” He was silent a moment. “But, I went out into that garden yesterday, and she said I am not ready, and I looked for the anger, but it was not there.”

Richard understood it. “You are disappointed.”

“I am very much disappointed.” He said it quite quietly. “I should be lying to say otherwise. But I am not angry. I find that I can bear it that she has a will of her own, and may use it against me. I would not have it otherwise. If she were the sort of woman who could be talked into it, I should not have wanted her.”