Georgiana flushed, and she looked down again, with that little shrugging motion.
“Do sit straighter, dear,” Mrs. Younge said, “and do not fidget so.”
Her face covered with an embarrassed blush, Georgiana did as requested, thrusting her shoulders back and folding her hands in her lap. Her hands were a bit white.
Darcy agreed with Mrs. Younge about what would bebestfor Georgiana. She should manage her own place to gain that experience of independence. But Darcy was guilty at having taken up so many months of her youth in Bath while he was in an invalid state. If she preferred to go to her uncle, he would permit that.
Her gaze darted back and forth between them, as though she wished to divine from Darcy’s still expression exactly what he wanted her to say. “It won’t be so very terrifying, I suppose, to have the management of the servants on myself — not while you are there with me.” Georgiana smiled nervously at Mrs. Younge, who nodded supportively.
“You are certain.”
Georgiana opened and closed her mouth. “Yes.”
“Then it is decided,” Darcy said. She might not be wholly certain, but she would grow into it. “You shall go to Ramsgate, and I will not be so very distant from you in Hertfordshire.”
Chapter Two
Despite being a cripple with a blighted life, Fitzwilliam Darcy was a fine looking man, excessively tall, with an intelligent look, a noble mien and haughty but refined manners. Such at least was the judgement pronounced upon him by the loquacious wisdom of the Meryton Assembly. Merged with those virtues was the certain rumor that his estate cleared ten thousand a year.
A terrible pity about his legs though.
A few of the mothers, aunts, brothers-in-law, and interested parties of marriageable girls made an effort to speak with him in hopes that they might offer up their daughter, niece, unwanted sister-in-law, or female person of interest to him as an affectionate caretaker for his crippled state.
Unfortunately, a few of these young women recoiled at being hawked like fish at market to be the comforting companion of a crippled man in his countrified retirement.
Most of the women were willing enough — the loss of his legs did not undo the handsomeness of Mr. Darcy’s face, the width of his broad shoulders, or the size of his rumored estate.
However Mr. Darcy seemed wholly unappreciative of the charitable willingness with which the females of Meryton were willing to tie themselves selflessly to an extremely wealthy invalid. That gentleman showed not the slightest inclination to engage in conversation beyond the smallest atom required for bare politeness. And when that infinitesimal forced him to speak, he inclined his head and mouthed polite nothings before escaping to another corner of the room with surprising agility and speed on his crutches.
A dispute therefore arose amongst the good people of the neighborhood: Was he acting in a reserved and becoming manner that reflected his unavoidable sadness at his inability to dance, as he must be longing to? Or was he arrogant, proud, and above being pleased?
Most chose to pity Darcy, rather than despise him. And pity became the only permissible attitude when Jane Bennet let slip to a particular friend that Mr. Bingley told her during their dance that this was the first occasion in which Mr. Darcy had been present in a ballroom since the illness which robbed him of the use of his legs.
Darcy had walked one circuit around the ballroom, the dexterous use of his crutches giving him four limbs rather like a mutilated spider, and then he sat down in a corner and watched the proceedings, silent except for occasional conversations with the members of his own party when they sat out a dance.
Such a sad man, mourning his blighted, crippled state.
He must have loved the dance! One could almost see tears gather in the wet corners of his eyes, but as he was a stoic gentleman, the best sort, educated at Eton, he could not permit them to fall.
Fortuitously for the Meryton Assembly theotherrich young man in the room — the one who was to live amongst them — was the most personable young fellow anyone had ever seen. Mr. Bingley had been in the room a scant few handfuls of minutes before he was acquainted with all of the principal persons of the neighborhood and had made a friendly bow to all of their daughters. He danced every dance, he laughed happily, and when the ball ended, he decried loudest amongst everyone it ending so soon.
For her part, the more Elizabeth Bennet observed him, the more she inclined towards Mr. Darcy being haughty and above being pleased.
It was there in the tall way he settled himself on his crutches when she first set eyes on him, the quick and expert motions with which he had moved about the room, the way his finely tailored wool coat could not disguise the athleticism of his upper body, and the way his piercing eyes had once caught hers. Mr. Darcy had a general air of command that made it impossible for Elizabeth to consider him as an unfortunatecripple, no matter how much he met the plain definition of the word.
Thus she was also not inclined to excuse him for his silent and sit-offish behavior — he sat far more than he stood — due to the mere irrelevant circumstance that he was unable to walk without the assistance of some sort of bracing hidden under his pants and two additional wooden legs.
Elizabeth, her mother, Jane, and Charlotte Lucas discussed the matter near the middle of the evening. Elizabeth had glanced over to Mr. Darcy, who studied the dance floor with the sort of haughty frown that a king would reserve for those whose heads they had determined to have ceremoniously chopped off and set on a pike.
“Implacable man!” Elizabeth said laughingly, her feet tapping from side to side to the dancing rhythm of the music, “I fear that he’ll hire a band of brigands to burn the assembly hall to the ground before permitting Mr. Bingley to drag him here again.”
Her mother replied, “Poor man! Poor blighted man! He is longing to dance himself, but he cannot. Depend upon it. That crippled man needs a dutiful wife to nurse him. Mary would do splendidly.”
Mrs. Bennet at this point abandoned the conversation and went to talk to Mary who repeatedly shook her head vigorouslyno.
Elizabeth said to Charlotte and Jane, “‘Poor man! I agree — not for that reason which prompts everyone else to say it. I would abhor being treated simultaneously as the object of pity and avarice.”
“Heisa ‘poor man’,” Charlotte replied, “because he is an object deserving our pity. And yet he cannot be a ‘poor man’, for he owns half of Derbyshire.”
