He got up from the table under some pretext of the study. He went into the study and closed the door, then stood a long minute with his hand against the mantel. Then he crossed to the desk, took down the meadow ledger, and turned back three weeks to the entry he had made the day after the ice.
He read the entry. He turned two pages forward. He read the entry at the head of the second week. He turned two pages further. He read the entry at the head of the third. The Pemberton boy, entered in the second week as losing ground, was entered in the third as holding it. Old Mr Ashby’s cough, entered in the first week as winter-worsened, was not entered at all in the second or third. Two of the lower field lambs, entered in the first week as unlikely to last to February, had lasted. One was presently with its mother.
He closed the ledger.
He did not know what he had read. He knew only the facts as verified, and he knew that the pattern it described had not been invented by him, and he knew that the pattern extended from his sister’s breakfast plate to the old mother at the cottage to the lamb in the lower field to the leg that, twelve hours ago, had answered his fingers with clean muslin where no answer ought to have come.
He went back to the parlour before noon because he could not, at present, be anywhere else.
Miss Bennet was in the bed. She looked up when he came in. Her face altered—not in a way he could have described to another man, but in the way he had begun to know her faces altered when she saw him—that expression belonged to him, he was sure of it. And shining over it, there was brightness that had been new since yesterday—a conversational eagerness pitched half a degree higher than suited either of them, the grave humour edged with something courting, something covering, something he could not put words to. She asked him after Hadley and the lower carrier with an attention she had never previously extended to hydraulic questions. She laughed at something he said which had not been witty enough to earn a laugh.
He did not know, for the length of the morning, whether she was endeavouring to court him or to distract him, and by the evening of the second such day he had concluded that she did not know the difference herself. He suspected the truer answer was that she had guessed, as nearly as a woman in her bed might guess, what he had begun to know in the study before noon. And that she was attempting, by the only instrument she had to hand, to keep him from arriving there openly for as long as she possibly could.
Onthefourthday—bythe crudest counting, the twenty-sixth since the ice—he was in the steward’s room off the passage when he heard, from the parlour, a single small sound—the tap of a crutch-tip setting down on floorboards. Setting down once. Not twice.
He rose and went to the parlour door.
Through the gap at the hinge—for the door had been closed rather than shut, which at Merebank signified nothing—he saw Miss Bennet standing at the south window.
She had not heard him.
She stood without the crutches, one hand against the sill, the line of her body favouring the leg that, by Mrs Hadley’s last report, ought not to be bearing any weight at all. She was not walking. She wasstanding. She had, by the arrangement of the crutches laid flat against the writing-table, crossed the room on foot to reach the view.
He stepped back from the door before any additional eye in the room would touch her, and returned to the steward’s book.
He did not confront her. He was not ready for the conversation. He suspected, with a discomfort he had not previously permitted himself regarding his own character, that if he did confront her he would emerge from the conversation having agreed to keep the new offence as he had kept the old.
Thebagbegan,aboutthis time, to trouble him more than it had before.
He had seen it first on the morning of her arrival, clutched against her chest like something she would rather have died than let go of. He had seen Mrs Marsden set it under the bed on the second day, and had seen no one touch it since. It had sat, motionless, for three weeks.
It was no longer motionless.
On the day of the fall it had stood against the wall at the bed’s head. By the fourth day following it had retreated under the bed proper and a hand’s-breadth from where Mrs Marsden had first set it. By the sixth day it had come back again, but not to the position it had begun in—a hand’s-breadth to the right, which was adistance large enough for a man watching to mark, and small enough for a woman moving it to believe it had not been seen.
He watched the bag.
He was not proud of watching the bag. By the seventh day he had begun to dislike the quality in himself that had taken up this small domestic surveillance as if it were a matter of character. It was the quality that required truth. It was the quality that had not, in three weeks of gentlemanly restraint, lost its ordinary edge. It was the quality that had begun to wonder whether he had been silently purchasing the lady’s presence in his house at the cost of a scruple he had, until this month, assumed he was incapable of selling.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ontheseventhday,he came into the parlour without knocking.
He had a letter for her from the post—that was the reason he rehearsed afterwards, and it was true as far as it went. The remainder of the reason, which he was not yet willing to say aloud even to himself, was that he had begun to prefer arriving before anyone inside had composed herself for his arrival. He had discovered, in the nights following the fall, a new dislike of the prepared face.
Hers most of all. The prepared face lied.
He had learned the species young. He had been twenty-two at his father’s funeral and twenty-three when the books at Pemberley had come up before him in the hand of a man he had trusted. Hargrove had been the school. The lesson, taken once, had not since unlearned itself. He had the equipment to read a face by it still. He had been reading hers, in the prior two days, with the close attention of a man whose schooling did not allow him to read it any other way. The reading had not, in those two days, recommended him to any decision a sensible man would have taken next.
She was crossing the room on crutches.
And she was alone.
She stopped when she saw him. She did not move to the chair. She did not lower her eyes. She stood where she had been crossing and kept her balance over the two crutches as a woman keeps her balance over an argument she did not intend to lose.
He shut the door behind him. The click was louder than he had meant it to be.
For the length of perhaps three breaths neither of them said anything. The parlour filled with the quiet into which a question had walked ahead of the speaker—the fire sighing once, the clock on the mantel, the small wind at the south window. She was upright on the crutches, her weight properly distributed between the two of them, her wounded leg held as Mrs Hadley would have required—clear of the floor, the bandage invisible under the hem. Aldridge’s eight-week minimum had been entirely forgot beforeits first fortnight, and here she stood, executing the manoeuvre like a woman who had been doing it for weeks.
