Finally, in a rather desperate tone, Bingley said, “It is amazing to me how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are.”
“All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”
“Yes, all of them, I think. They paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time without being informed that she was very accomplished.”
Throughout this commentary, Elizabeth watched Mr. Darcy, his posture rigid, his profile harsh. She felt a rush of sympathy; she knew not what plagued him, but possessing a dark secret herself, she recognized the symptoms.
Finally, he returned to the table, his face as unreadable as it had been before his abrupt departure. To Bingley, he said, “Your list of the common extent of accomplishments has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”
“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.
There was an arrogance about his speech that erased some of the good will Elizabeth had been feeling toward him.
“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished woman.”
“Yes.” He met her gaze squarely. “I do comprehend a great deal in it.”
As Miss Bingley rattled off a list of requirements for a proper young lady, Elizabeth found herself staring at Darcy in a way that would certainly have disqualified her from anyone’s definition of propriety. If her heart beat faster as she held his gaze, it was due to annoyance—nothing else. If she blushed, it was with embarrassment—not with any other, unnamable feeling. If, when finally she looked away, her gaze just happened to fall to his lips before darting to some other, any other object in the room, this was due to the inescapable fact that the mouth is only a few inches below the eyes.
“All this she must posses,” said Darcy, his re-entry into the conversation causing an unsettling lurch in her stomach, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”
It was no use pretending indifference: at his veiled compliment, she arched a brow and resumed the oddly delightful staring contest he had begun. The smile that played about his lips only confirmed her fear (and hope) that she was engaged in an inappropriate flirtation with Mr. Darcy.
“I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women,” she replied. “I rather wonder now at your knowing any.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all this?”
“I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united.”
As soon as she had spoken the words, she regretted them; she sounded vain and coquettish. Indeed, he would think she was angling for a compliment. Though she felt a blush creep up her neck and face, she continued to hold his gaze, as if her boldness might somehow prove that she was not in fact trying to impress him.
“Oh, I must disagree!” Mrs. Hurst chimed in, and to Elizabeth’s simultaneous relief and disappointment, Mr. Darcy finally looked away.
“Indeed! I have known many such women!” cried Miss Bingley, despite her earlier claim to the contrary. “Perhaps, Eliza, you have not had the privilege of traveling in circles that allow you to meet such women.”
“Apparently not.”
“Come now!” Mr. Hurst said before Elizabeth’s retort could make much of an impact. “Are we playing cards or not?”
Elizabeth took this opportunity to beg leave of them, resolving as she did so that she would see no one but Jane for the rest of her sister’s convalescence. Mr. Bingley, though kind, was too anxious about Jane to be good company; the sisters and Mr. Hurst were dreadful. As for Mr. Darcy, he was not dreadful enough.
*
Her resolution was all for naught. The next morning, after Mr. Jones had visited and said that the only cure for Jane’s cold was uninterrupted rest, Elizabeth had the fortune—and misfortune—of seeing her mother and sisters at Netherfield. On finding that her daughter was not ill enough for concern, yet too ill to be moved, Mrs. Bennet was in fine form.
“I am sure,” she declared to the party gathered in the drawing room, “if it were not for such good friends, I do not know what would become of her!”
As Mrs. Bennet prattled on about Jane’s virtues, Elizabeth blushed and wished herself anywhere else in the world. Her mother meant well, but her quest to win Mr. Bingley for Jane made her insensible of her own failings. Imagine if your mother knew of my illness, Elizabeth could almost hear her father saying. Imagine how silly she would become then!
“How is Papa?” she asked Mrs. Bennet after that good lady had finally paused to draw a breath.
“Your father?” Mrs. Bennet waved a hand. “How should I know? He hides himself away in his study,” she explained to the others. “He is always reading about this or that! He rarely goes hunting or visiting anymore.”
“But have you seen him since I left?” Ignoring the stares such a question earned from the rest of the company—she was particularly careful not to look at Mr. Darcy—she pressed her mother. “Have you spoken with him?”
Mrs. Bennet looked confused. “Why should I have spoken with him? You know he pays me no mind.”
Gripping the arms of her chair, Elizabeth was on the verge of jumping from her seat and running home when Lydia said, “I wish he would pay me no mind, as well. He scolded me this morning for yelling down the stairs. But how else was I to get that lazy Sarah to help me dress?”
Elizabeth had never felt so grateful for Lydia’s willingness to say just about anything in public.
Undaunted by either of her daughter’s outbursts, Mrs. Bennet smiled at Miss Bingley. “I do hope you will come to Longbourn when Jane is feeling better. Indeed, you must all come and dine with us as often as you like!”
“We should have a dinner party,” Kitty suggested.
“What a good idea! We could introduce you to those of our neighbors you have not yet met.”
“I should think,” Miss Bingley replied coldly, “that we have met the best families in Meryton.”
“Oh, indeed!” Mrs. Bennet replied, thinking she had been given a compliment. “Still, you may find more friends here. Meryton is a very civil place. How do you like it, Mr. Bingley?”
“I like it very much, Mrs. Bennet.”
“It is true that there are not quite so many amusements here as in London,” Mrs. Bennet conceded. “But the country is a great deal pleasanter, do you not agree? I hope you will not think of quitting Netherfield in a hurry, though you have but a short lease.”
“When I am in the country,” he replied, “I never wish to leave it.”
“And when you are in town,” Elizabeth said with a smile, “it is much the same, is it not? You seem, Mr. Bingley, to be someone who could be equally happy in either place.”
Bingley laughed. “Yes, you begin to comprehend me, do you?”
“I understand you perfectly,” she replied, her smile growing. “You are cheerful, yet always in a hurry, I think.”
“I wish I might take this for a compliment,” he said, “but to be so easily seen through, I am afraid, is pitiful. It is true: if I were to quit Netherfield, I would do so in five minutes. As it is,” he finished, glancing in the direction of Jane’s room, “I consider myself as quite fixed here.”
“You need not be ashamed, Mr. Bingley,” Elizabeth assured him. “It does not necessarily follow that a deep, intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours.”
“Lizzy,” cried her mother, “remember where you are, and do not run on in that wild manner that you are suffere
d to do at home!”
That provoked something like a cough—or laugh—from Mr. Darcy.
“I did not know before,” continued Bingley, “that you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, forcing herself not to glance at Darcy, “but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage.”
“The country,” said Darcy, “can in general supply few subjects for such a study. In a country neighborhood, you move in a very confined and unvarying society.”
She could no longer help herself. Meeting his eyes, she said, “Yes, but people themselves alter so much that there is something new to be observed in them forever.”
Mr. Darcy looked as though he would respond to that, but her mother cried, “I assure you there is quite as much of that going on in the country as town.”
Elizabeth watched with mortification as Darcy frowned and turned away. Her mother, however, considered this a triumph. “Mr. Bingley, you have the right disposition to appreciate the beauties of the country. That gentleman,” she said, glaring at Darcy, who had now turned his back on them to stare out of the window, “seems to think the country is nothing at all!”
“Indeed, Mama, you are mistaken,” said Elizabeth, blushing. “You quite mistook Mr. Darcy. He only meant that there is not such a variety of people to be met with in the country as in town, which you must acknowledge to be true.”
“Certainly, my dear, nobody said there were, but as to not meeting with many people in this neighborhood, I believe there are few neighborhoods larger. I know we dine with four and twenty families!”
“With the hopes of steering her mother—and herself—to safer topics of conversation, Elizabeth asked after Charlotte Lucas. This line of inquiry, however, only brought more silliness, as Mrs. Bennet used the opportunity to compare Jane’s beauty to Charlotte’s plainness.
“When Jane was only fifteen,” she told Mr. Bingley, “there was a gentleman at my brother Gardiner’s house in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away. But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.”
“And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth impatiently. “There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”
This comment caused Mr. Darcy to return to the conversation. “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love.”
In that moment, Elizabeth realized something important about him: he enjoyed a good argument. She could not help but indulge him. “Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may,” she replied. “Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”
“Even one of Shakespeare’s sonnets?” he asked, smiling.
A general pause ensued, as if everyone realized at once that this conversation had somehow got away from them. Even Lydia and Kitty, who had been whispering to themselves the entire visit, quieted themselves for a moment. But only for a moment.
“Mr. Bingley,” Lydia said. “You once promised to give a ball. Shall you keep your promise?”
Confirming Elizabeth’s suspicion that Bingley was patient as a saint, he agreed that he would keep his promise, and that once Miss Jane Bennet was recovered, Miss Lydia could name the date.
The meeting having come to a satisfactory conclusion for Mrs. Bennet—for what could be better than a daughter ensconced in the home of a single man with five thousand pounds a year and the promise of a ball at said man’s estate?—she ordered her carriage and gathered her younger daughters.
Elizabeth walked with her family to the entrance hall, holding Mary and Kitty back from her mother and Lydia. “Please,” she said quietly, “check on Papa when you arrive home, and each day after that until I return.”
The girls exchanged glances. “But why?” Kitty demanded. “You know that he hates for us to disturb him.”
“Please, just do as I say.”
“Come along, girls!” their mother called. “Leave Lizzy to care for Jane.”
As Elizabeth watched them leave, she thought that caring for Jane had become the least of her concerns.
*
Darcy stared down at the half-written letter and sighed. He had no better idea what to write today than he’d had in the previous fortnight. The only difference between now and then was that, in the interim, he had received five frantic letters from his sister.
He knew he should respond, but all he could think to write were platitudes. He had no answers for her, no solution to their common problem. Or, no solution that he was willing to entertain. And that, he supposed, was the crux of the problem. Were he to write an honest letter, he would have to tell her that, in choosing between his happiness and hers, he had so far only been able to choose himself.
When the door to the library creaked open, Darcy nearly groaned, fearing that Miss Bingley had finally figured out where he hid most of the day. He should have known, however, that it would be Miss Elizabeth; she had a talent for disturbing him.
“Excuse me,” she said when she saw him at the writing table. She turned back to the door.
He stood and said, “You need not leave on my account.”
She hesitated. “I am only here to find something to read to my sister.”
“Then she must be improving.”
“She is, thank you. She was able to sleep most of the day.”
Darcy thought Miss Elizabeth looked as if she needed to do the same. He wondered how the others, her family especially, did not see the pain. She was adept at using wit to conceal her sorrow, but surely they noticed the circles beginning to form under her eyes. Even Miss Bingley had noticed, though perhaps it was not surprising that her jealous eye would be the first to detect a flaw in Miss Elizabeth’s appearance.
She turned to peruse the shelves, and he told himself to return to his letter. But he could not stop himself from watching her as she moved slowly from one side of the library to the other. When she reached the far end of the room, she bent to look at the titles on the lowest shelf. Then, quite suddenly, she knelt to the floor and began to laugh.
Thinking she had succumbed to nerves—he would not have blamed her for it—he strode over to her. Just as he reached her, she stood and nearly collided with him.
“Oh! I did not realize you were…” she said at the same time he said, “I thought you had fallen ill.”
Both looked away, until finally she said, “I only forget myself on balconies.”
He tried not to smile. “I will remember that in the future.”
She held up a book. “I found this on the floor. I laughed because I had this sudden image of calm and cheerful Mr. Bingley hurling the book to the ground.”
He threw back his head and laughed in a way he had not since before Ramsgate.
“Perhaps I should be asking you if you are ill!” she said.
“No, I am perfectly well.” He took a deep breath to subdue the ungentlemanly fit of laughter, but could not force the frown back onto his face. “You are not, after all, a very good judge of character.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”
“It was not Bingley who threw the book.”
“Such behavior certainly seems unusual for him.” She studied him, and he thought how much he enjoyed her frank and unsettling gaze.
“I admit to being puzzled as to who could have thrown it,” she continued, her eyes finding his. “I heard Miss Bingley say once that you had a very fine library at your own estate. Was she mistaken?”
“No, for once, she did not exaggerate. Pemberley’s library is one of the best in England.”
“And you are proud of it, too.”
“I am. I take great pleasure in acquiring and reading books.”
“Then such behavior woul
d seem uncharacteristic for you, as well.”
“Perhaps I am an intricate character,” he said, smiling.
She glanced down at the book’s cover. “Or perhaps you do not like horses.”
“In fact, I take great interest in horses.”
“Then you do not like Mr. Bingley’s library.”
“Indeed I do not. The poor design and meagre collection, however, did not provoke me.”
“Then it is a mystery as to what caused you to throw this book to the ground.”
“I did not.”
“Oh?”
“I threw it at the wall.”
She laughed. “Even more of a mystery then.”
He imagined, just for a moment, what it would feel like to bring light to the mystery, to tell her exactly why he had thrown the book, to tell her of Georgiana and Wickham and his father and everything that weighed on him at that moment. He stood so near to her that he could have reached for her hand and said, “Listen to me, Elizabeth.”
He could not, however, forget himself so easily. Frowning, he took a step backwards. “If you will excuse me, I should return to my letter.”
“Of course,” she replied, her tone equally cool. She returned to the shelves and placed the book about horse breeding in its proper place. Taking another text—he wondered what, other than Shakespeare and medical treatises, she enjoyed reading—she made to leave.
She stopped at the doorway and asked, with that mixture of sweetness and archness he was coming to cherish, “Did it help to throw the book against the wall?”
He smiled ruefully. “No. And did you find Malcolm’s advice to bring solace? Does giving sorrow words ease the grief?”
“A little, yes.”
After a pause, he asked, “How is he?”
She gripped the handle of the door. “As you had the misfortune to hear earlier, he is scolding Lydia; such behavior suggests he is doing as well as can be expected.”
“I am glad. But I must say, it was wrong of him to tell you. It is a burden on you; that I can see clearly.”
This Disconcerting Happiness: A Pride and Prejudice Variation Page 4
