She shook her head. “Everyone else will be safer if I go.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know enough.”
“Then tell me this much, Elizabeth—for I cannot get it out of you any other way! You drew the line in the parlour last week. I observed it. I have not crossed it. I have not crowded it. I have not asked you for one thing you had asked me not to ask. And still you keep stepping back. You set the distance further than the line you said you needed. Tell mewhy. Tell me why a woman who asked me for thickness between charge and guest has spent the days since moving further from a man who has given her exactly that.”
“Because the line was not enough.”
“Not enough forwhat?”
“Not enough to keep what was becoming between us from becoming further.” She did not lower her eyes. “I drew it because I thought it would be sufficient. It is not. I cannot stay in your house, Mr Darcy. I amprotectingyou. Do you not see that I am protecting you?”
“Fromwhat? From the use of my own judgement? From the choice of a man old enough to make it? Elizabeth, you cannot make that decision for me by walking out of my gate on a torn leg! Whatever you imagine you are saving me from is mine to refuse—not yours to refuse on my behalf!”
“You do not know what you are refusing!”
“Thentell me!”
“I cannot —”
“No. You knowfear.“ His voice came up rough. “And there is something for you to fear—I am not blind to it, I have not played the fool with you—which is why I will not see you crawl into it half-healed and alone! You are letting fear choose the hour, the road, and the cost for every one of us, and I will not—I will not—bear it!”
“Fear is not always false reasoning, sir! Sometimes it is merely speedier than hope.”
“Then let hope lag behind as it pleases! I will not debate philosophy with you in a lane while you stand on a torn leg and the carrier misbehaves below us!”
“Of course not. You prefer to decide and let the rest of us be grateful afterward.”
He could not—he tried, and could not—get the next sentence past his teeth. He put his hand against the stone of the lane wall because his hand had to go somewhere, and there was nowhere on her he could put it. The cold of the stone went into him. It did not steady him.
“Elizabeth.”
She closed her eyes.
“Don’t. Don’t say it again.Please, sir, don’t say it again.”
“I will say it until you tell me one true thing.”
“I cannot—”
“Youwill!Or I will carry you back to that house against your wishes for the second time and call it the only kindness left to me! I am at the end of my civility, Elizabeth—at the end of it! If there is a man, give me his name! If there is danger, tell me what it is! I havegiven you my sister, and this house, and every hour of my care, and I have not asked you for one sentence I could not bear to hear—give meone!”
Her hand had not come down. The trembling had gone further into her arm and into the crutch, which had gone wrong under her again. There was a sound from the lower meadow—water in a channel it had not yet found, looking for one.
“You cannot help me, Mr Darcy. There is no help. There is only—” She could not finish.
“There is only what, Elizabeth?”
She shook her head, once, hard, and the crutch went out from under her, and he had her before her shoulder reached the stone.
He did not answer at once, because her instinct for the line that would cost him had not dulled in three weeks of a sickbed, and she had used it now with the full force of a woman at the end of her reserves. The quarrel had briefly shown what it was under the surface—whether either of them could bear the other exercising a will where something neither had yet named had begun to grow.
“At present”—and the control he gave the words was more dangerous for being control—”I prefer to keep you from falling into the road and bleeding through the dressings. If that appears tyranny, madam, I shall have to survive the charge.”
She moved her weight in anger.
A sound broke from her—short, involuntary, the breath driven out of her by a pain she had underestimated—and her hand flew to the wall.
