“I shall need to write to her first. She will have things to say upon receipt of the letter that she had better say to a piece of paper before she says them to me. And then I shall need a few days to be sure of myself in the carriage. After that—perhaps the second week of April, if the roads will bear it.”
“You shall go in the Northmere carriage as far as Stamford, where uncle Gardiner can meet you if his business will allow it; or with the Colonel if it will not. You shall stay with our mother as long as is necessary, and as long as is bearable. The two will not, perhaps, be the same period.”
Jane smiled. She had loved her mother imperfectly, and she had known it, and she was—this hour—beginning to set about the loving regardless. Georgiana looked at her book. The page she had been on, all the small while of this conversation, was the same page she had begun on. She turned it now.
The library door opened. Darcy came in with some particular thing in his head, and he stopped at the door at the sight of three women rather than one.
“Ladies.”
The other two rose at the same time, which was not what he had been bracing for. Georgiana came to him first.
“Brother.”
“Georgie.”
She kissed him on the cheek lightly, and Darcy’s colour came up into his face. His hand came up to her cheek, and he kept it there longer than the kiss had needed of him, and Georgiana did not pretend to mind it.
“I shall go up to finish a letter to Mrs Reynolds. I have promised her some news of the valley and the house this evening, and I now have it. The bay is to come up to the south yard at half past ten to-morrow, with Mrs Marsden and Lizzy and myself all upon it or about it as we may manage. You shall come, brother?”
“I shall come.”
“Good.” She let herself out of the room.
Jane went next. She did not look at Elizabeth in passing—Elizabeth was the one staying. She came up to Darcy, and his colour rose a second time, a great deal further than it had at his sister’s kiss.
Jane curtseyed. The curtsey was a small, mild, careful thing, and it carried in it no acknowledgement at all of his colour, nor of the matter that had produced it, and was, in its mildness, the cleanest dismissal of the matter that any curtsey ever gave. “Mr Darcy. I shall see you both at dinner.”
“Until dinner, Mrs Marsden.”
He stood, after the door had closed, in the place where he had been when Jane had passed him, and he did not at first move from it.
“Come, Mr Darcy. Don’t stand there looking as if you have been caught at something.”
He came across the carpet at the summons, and she set her hands on the front of his waistcoat as he reached her—the colour had not yet quite gone from his face, and the arm he put about her was not the arm she had had in the water that morning.
“Elizabeth—”
“It is all right, my love. It is all right with Jane. You have been carrying it all afternoon as if it were going to break in your hand and cut you, and I am here to tell you it hasbeen carried, and it has been put down, and there is nothing left in it for you to handle so carefully. You may put your face into your usual countenance and stop standing turning red about the ears.”
“What is all right with her?”
“You shall not pretend, Mr Darcy. I am not at present in any mood to make you a present of the thing without your knowing what it has cost me to give it to you.”
“I do not pretend, Elizabeth. I am asking, very honestly, because I should rather hear it from you than guess at it in this room for another quarter of an hour.”
“Then you shall have it. Jane has forgiven you. Both of us, really. I was there, and heaven knows I was in far greater need of her forgiveness than you were. She has not forgotten—I shall not pretend that to you—and I do not expect her to forget it for some considerable while. But the forgiving and the forgetting are not the same article, Mr Darcy. You may have the one this afternoon and trouble yourself about the other in your own time.”
He was, for a small while, very still against her hands.
“And what is the rest of it?”
“The rest?”
“You have not told me the whole, Elizabeth. I can see it in your face.”
“You can see—”
“I can. I have been learning to look at your face. I have been an indifferent student until this morning, but I have, since this morning, been making some progress.”
