“Thank you.”
“For God’s sake, man, do not thank me. I am not consenting. I am only no longer arguing.”
“That was my meaning.”
She held to the door frame.
In the quarter of an hour she had been standing at it she had heard a man take up every cost his cousin could lay before him and choose her anyway. She had come down the passage to give him her answer, but she could not now give him that. Every cost his cousin had laid out would walk with her up the aisle and stand at his side on the marriage book under the eyes of his sister, his county, and his name; and her name being the cause of it, she could not put it there.
The tears that had been waiting since before light came; she did not wipe them. Her leg, which had stood the quarter of an hour for the sake of an answer she had now to keep back, gave under her. The stick slid a half inch on the boards. She got the door frame harder.
She had not meant to put her shoulder to the door. It gave a small creak under her.
Inside, the voices stopped.
She knew the footsteps in the room before the latch lifted. The door opened.
“Elizabeth. You have been standing too long. Let me bring you a chair.”
She shook her head, drew breath against the stick, and looked past his shoulder into the room at his cousin; his face she could not, at this nearness, yet afford to look at.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam. Have you any further word from my sister this morning?”
The Colonel rose at once. “I have, Miss Bennet. She sent up a note by Mrs Hadley not half an hour ago. It is not long, and it is not—confiding. But it is in her own hand, and she says she is well.”
He took a folded paper from inside his waistcoat and brought it to her. “With my compliments, ma’am.”
She took it. The paper, when it came into her hand, was still warm from him; Mrs Hadley would not have surrendered it to a servant, and so he had carried it on his person until it could be given.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Yes.”
She allowed herself to look at Darcy for the count of a single breath; a second breath she could not, in the passage, afford.
“I shall read this in the parlour, Mr Darcy. I shall not be long.”
“Take what time you need.”
She turned. She went back down the passage to the parlour with the note in her hand, and with all the thinking she had finished in the night to do over again.
Hehadnotbeenable to remain in the study after the door closed on her.
Fitzwilliam, who had been standing at the table putting the morning’s papers back into the leather case, took his own coat down from the peg when Darcy took his, and went with him out by the side door without remark. Norton would in the course of an hour find the study empty and infer the rest.
The path Darcy chose was the upper path along the rise above the lower meadow. It was a path he had taken with Hadley a hundred times since November when there had been some piece of land to be looked at. He did not at this hour intend to walk to its end. He had taken it because it was the path on the estate furthest from the parlour, and the parlour, at this hour, was the room in the house he was least able to enter.
The cold of the morning had not lifted. The cloud had moved off the western shoulder of the hill since yesterday but not the eastern. The mere lay below them with the eastern half still dark and the western a poor sort of pewter. Hadley’s report of the water’s drawing truer was a matter of inches. There were further inches the water had yet to draw.
“I have not yet given you the half of what I came north to tell you, Darcy. The greater part of what I rode for you cannot have heard, because you have not asked, and because the parts you have asked for required answering first.”
“Tell me now.”
“I shall. I had thought to keep some of it until tomorrow.”
“Today is sufficient.”
“I came north out of Rosings, Darcy, by way of Matlock. I stopped at Rosings four nights, between the last day of the winter assize and the morning I rode to my father. I had not meant to stop more than one. Lady Catherine kept me three further.”
