Colonel Fitzwilliam said, “You always have been terrified of being taken advantage of by those beneath you, like Wickham would when he took out debts in your name. I suppose it makes sense that you’d then equally be in fear of taking advantage of another.”
“And yet I did.”
“Perhaps you ought not think of marriage as a fair exchange. A partnership, where both partners work for the benefit of the whole.”
“She would not have joined me in partnership. I’ll not argue that our situation is wholly different fromforcingher in the sense you speak of. But I had placed her into an intolerable situation, and I never asked.”
“Past is past.” Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed well on the way into a maudlin drunkenness. “The future is what matters.”
“No. If nothing else, the past determines how the present is understood.”
“Ideas that are present in the mind determine how the present is understood. The past can influence these ideas, but it is the past. What ispresentare those ideas.”
The afternoon sun had nearly sunk, and Darcy was already far drunker than he had been since that night.
When he finished his current glass, Colonel Fitzwilliam went to pour him another, but Darcy put his hand over the glass.
“Bad form,” his cousin said. “You cannot expect me to drink alone.”
“I do not expect you to drink at all — billiards. We’d accidentally kill each other if we went fencing.”
“Would not, destroy an eye at most.”
They went to the billiards room and laid out the balls. Colonel Fitzwilliam watched Darcy line up a shot, and saidcontemplatively, “It is wholly possible to poke out an eye by chance with billiards, just as possible as with fencing blades.”
Darcy’s ball rolled true.
As Colonel Fitzwilliam lined up his shot, Darcy said, “That is what has kept me in London, I cannot bear the thought of seeing her every day, being married to her, yet never being able to share her bed again.”
“Talk to her.”
“I will not pressure her, I will not make any threats, I will not even tell her that it is her duty. If she does not want my presence, I will not impose it on her.”
“I suggested you talk to her. But what doIknow? I am sure your situation is hopeless.”
It was clear that the memories Darcy had brought to the fore had given his cousin a depressed mood.
His play was also worse than it usually was, and it usually was not at Darcy’s level.
“You do not mean to tell me that it is a husband’s right to take his wife, and furthermore that my duty to my noble blood demands that I ensure that there is an heir, no matter how ill my wife may take the making.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam did not reply for a while. “I have seen too much of real rapine to find appeal in anything which touches on it.”
Two more shots.
“I do not think that she would refuse me if I demanded my rights,” Darcy said at last. “Not once her temper cooled. No violence, force, or any sort of threat would be necessary. Only…”
“You desire to be desired.”
“Yes,” Darcy replied. “Is it too much to hope for?”
“Foryou. You were too blessed with fortune and appearance, and a clever mind, for anyone to ever like you.” His cousin grinned at him.
“Is that how you think I see myself?”
“Yes.”
Darcy won the game, and they set up the balls for another one.
