The business of bettering them proceeded at once. A small table was drawn within reach of the bed. The screen was moved so the draught from the passage should not creep at her shoulders. A clean cloth went over the table, then a book, a glass, a dish no one expected her to finish, and the workbasket Jane had taken up more from need than inclination. By the time Mrs Reeves was satisfied, the room looked less like a place in whichone waited upon pain and more like a place in which a human creature might be expected to continue living.
Elizabeth ought to have been grateful.
Shewasgrateful.
It did not lessen the humiliation of lying still while everyone else improved her life around her.
When the women had withdrawn as far as the hearth and the door, Jane came back to settle the coverlet once more over the injured leg, though it had not moved.
“You look as if we had sentenced you to purgatory.”
“You have. Only with cleaner linen and better management.”
Jane’s mouth altered. Weariness had worn the laughter thinner in the last days, but it still answered when Elizabeth contrived to provoke it. “I am only going to speak to Mrs Reeves about the tray. You are not to attempt anything in my absence.”
“What a singular warning to give a woman whose greatest enterprise is turning a page.”
“You know what I mean.”
Jane went out.
Left alone, Elizabeth became aware how different the room had become merely for having been arranged as if convalescence, and not only suffering, belonged in it. The light reached farther across the floorboards. The polished legs of the little table shone. Beyond the half-open door came the muted domestic movement of a house not entirely governed by one body’s pain.
Relief was immediate.
So was fatigue.
She might have slept had not a door opened above, then closed again with care. Silence followed, not empty but listening. A light tread crossed the landing, began the stair, paused once, then came on. It stopped just beyond her door.
Elizabeth turned her head.
The door stood open enough to show first only the passage and the farther wall. Then the opening widened by an inch and a face was at the door—pale still, fair hair simply arranged, eyes larger than Elizabeth recalled from the fevered glimpse beside the upstairs bed.
The girl looked caught at once, though not guilty exactly. Merely discovered in an act of caution she had hoped to manage more elegantly.
“You must be Miss Darcy,” Elizabeth said.
Colour rose at once in her face. “I beg your pardon. Nan told me you were awake, and I thought—I did not mean to look in without leave.”
“Then I am glad you failed. Come in, if you have not been forbidden more severely than I was.”
That won her two steps, then three more. She came into the room slowly, one hand resting for an instant on the back of a chair as if the house still required negotiation at certain points, though pride would not let the movement appear timid. She wore a dark shawl over a gown too fine for carelessness and too plain for vanity. Illness had sharpened rather than blurred her face.
“I was not forbidden,” Georgiana said. “Only advised. Fitzwilliam always advises most on the exact points where advice is least convenient.”
“It is a defect in brothers, I believe. They are never so certain as when their certainty is a nuisance to others.”
A smile almost broke, was reconsidered, then came properly. It changed the whole countenance. “You speak as if you have had practice.”
“Not of brothers. Of people generally. The fault is widely distributed.”
Georgiana came at last to the chair nearest the bed, though not so near as to presume. Before she sat, her eyes went to the little table, the book, the folded note lying there.
“I am glad they have made you more comfortable,” she said. “Nan said Mrs Reeves had declared war upon your room.”
“Mrs Reeves conducts all benevolent designs as if they were campaigns.”
“She does. It is one of her charms.” Georgiana lowered herself into the chair, and a faint colour rose at once in her cheeks. “I had meant only to ask whether you had done with Miss Edgeworth. If you had, I could send another down. Only not history, unless you particularly desire improvement. Fitzwilliam always believes history improves the mind and never notices what it costs the spirits.”
