What sat now on Darcy’s table was a clergyman in petticoats. Collins had not retreated. Collins had been, in those four nights at his desk, turning himself by Lady Catherine’s hand into the instrument by which she meant to drive the present matter to its end. Collins now believed himself the bearer of the truth. Collins now believed his cousin to be a fallen woman. He had the law on his side and Lady Catherine who endorsed him.
But Darcy had four nights of conviction at his desk to harden him. He was no longer a man to be retreated into misunderstanding.
A year ago, the letter would have done its work.
A year ago, Darcy would have read it through a third time, and by the third reading he would have begun to consider whether some particular of what Collins had set down might be the truth he himself had been too gallant to see. He would have looked at the wordsfallen natureandcorruptible heartand turned them in his head in the manner his father had taught him to turn such words. He would have set the letter down and gone, by some unhurried route, to look at Elizabeth again with the scepticism his father had taught him—the attitude that required her, and not Collins, to make the proof. By the end of it, the doubt would have been planted; Collins, and Lady Catherine behind him, would have had their way.
It did not do its work this morning.
The convictions he had been taught for twenty years to disbelieve were, this winter, his own. His faith had given him Elizabeth in the water that had healed everything it had touched. There was no part of him, this morning, willing to set anything against it.
He sat down to write.
“MrsMarsden.Doyouride?”
Georgiana had settled herself on the carpet by the fire. Elizabeth had been at the same paragraph of her book for some little while; Jane had been turning the pages of hers without reading them. They had been quiet the better part of an hour.
Jane closed her book on her finger, and the question turned her toward Georgiana with an interest Elizabeth had not seen her sister give any question for the better part of a year.
“I have ridden, Miss Darcy, though I should not say I am much of a horsewoman. My father had a very gentle old mare, of whom my younger sisters were perhaps more fond than I, but I went out on her now and again when I was a girl, and she did me very little harm. I should be very glad of an excuse to be on a horse again, if you would have me.”
“I should—” Georgiana began, and stopped, and her colour rose a small degree at having begun a sentence with so much eagerness, and she put her finger more carefully into the place in her book. “I have been thinking of trying again. My brother has said for some weeks that the bay in the south yard is very quiet, and I have not been able to put it from my mind this morning. I do not know whether I shall manage it. I have been on a horse since the summer twice, and the two times together did not amount to a great deal.”
“I have been on a horse exactly twice in my life since I was sixteen, Miss Darcy. The two times together do not amount to a great deal either.”
Georgiana laughed. It was a small laugh, half-startled out of her, and Elizabeth caught Jane’s eye over Georgiana’s head on the carpet and held it there for some breaths.
“Lizzy?”
“Yes, Georgie.”
“Will you come out with me when I try?”
“I shall come out with you when you try. I have not been on a horse since before my father died, but I have, very recently, been on a leg I had not expected to walk on, and I am, this winter, inclined to be ambitious. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, if my brother or Richard will indulge us.”
“Your brother would run out and saddle the horse himself this very instant if he thought you would desire it. He has been praying for you to feel well enough for that for months now. Jane, you should come, too.”
“Perhaps I shall. I shall come on whatever horse we can borrow from the neighbourhood. Perhaps Mr Hadley will be willing to bring one out for me, even if it is no more than the donkey he uses for the lower garden.”
Georgiana laughed. “He has no donkey, Mrs Marsden.”
“Then I shall come on foot, Miss Darcy, and walk you both about the yard, and watch.”
Georgiana laughed again, and it was a longer laugh this second time, and she turned to her book, and she did not, when she turned, look back at the page.
The fire gave as a small log collapsed down on itself. Jane looked at the fire. “I have been turning a thing in my mind these two days, Lizzy. I do not, in the end, see any other course.”
“And what is that?”
“I shall need to go to Hertfordshire.”
“I had been waiting for you to tell me.”
“You had?”
“Our mother has not had her eldest daughter to herself in a year and a half, Jane. Of course you must go to her.”
