The change in her opinion had occurred so gradually that she could hardly identify the moment it began. She only knew that she no longer anticipated his company with irritation and that his absence had left her feeling unexpectedly altered. The real difficulty lay in the proposal.
Elizabeth had spent several hours reminding herself of its absurdity and with considerable justification. No woman of sense ought to be won over merely because a gentleman declaredit must be so. Yet when she recalled the scene now, what struck her most forcibly was not the confidence of his expectations but the confidence of his feeling. It was a dangerous thing to be loved by a man who felt everything so deeply.
Was it love then? That he felt—that she felt? Elizabeth frowned at the passing hills.
His face swam into her mind, earnest and open and full of an emotion that she had not thought she could name. But it must be, mustn’t it?
She had known him scarcely a month. No sensible person could become attached in so short a time.
Unfortunately, the argument seemed rather less convincing than it once had.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Three days after the Bennets' departure, Darcy was deeply dissatisfied with the art of letter writing.
The fault did not lie in any deficiency of subject. Had the quantity of feeling he wished to express borne any relation to the quantity of paper before him, he might have filled a library. Unfortunately, the act of transferring one to the other proved considerably more difficult. Every letter seemed inadequate almost as soon as it was begun. What appeared sincere in his head looked pompous on the page; what appeared restrained upon the page felt cold upon a second reading. He had now reached the point of distrusting every sentence that he coaxed—unwillingly—from his pen.
The latest attempt lay abandoned upon the desk. Darcy stared at it for some time before deciding that further observation was unlikely to improve it.
Permission to write had seemed a great triumph whilst he was standing in the middle of the road, having achieved some sort ofsmall victory. From the comfort of a writing desk, it appeared a far less complete solution.
The house itself did little to assist his spirits. In the space of a few short weeks, the Bennets had contrived to make themselves part of the fabric of daily life. Their absence lingered in unexpected places. Jane's quiet good sense seemed inseparable from the breakfast table. Mrs Bennet's observations had become strangely attached to the drawing room. Elizabeth appeared to have left traces of herself everywhere.
A knock at the door interrupted these reflections and Bingley entered without waiting for an answer. "You are still writing."
"I am attempting to write."
Bingley's gaze travelled briefly across the desk. "I see. Well no use beating a dead horse, Darcy, come and have some tea. We are to be off tomorrow and I fear Mrs Makepeace has copious pearls of wisdom to impart before we go."
He clapped his hands together and turned, leaving Darcy with little choice but to follow him.
???
A quarter of an hour later they found themselves in the small parlour where so much of the previous month had been spent.The room looked exactly as it always had, which only served to emphasise how much had changed. Mrs Makepeace occupied her usual place beside the hearth. Georgiana sat near the window with some embroidery work in her hands, though she appeared to have accomplished very little of it.
Conversation soon settled upon the subject which had occupied all of them in one form or another since the Bennets' departure.
Mrs Makepeace was the first to speak openly of it.
"I had forgotten," she observed whilst pouring tea, "how quickly a house may grow accustomed to particular people."
Bingley accepted a cup with unusual solemnity. "It is remarkably quiet," he agreed. "Well, not so much quiet as unsettled. It feels deuced unsettled and I cannot set myself to rights."
"I miss them," Georgiana said softly.
There was no embarrassment in the admission. She looked down at her stitching for a moment before continuing. "I knew I should. I had not expected it to feel quite so strange."
"It is perfectly natural," said Mrs Makepeace. "People spend half their lives travelling about the country forming acquaintances, and every now and then one of them has the impertinence to become important."
For a few moments the conversation wandered through recollections of Lyme. A walk, a dinner, an afternoon spent upon the Cobb. Every memory seemed to contain a Bennet somewhere within it. At length the discussion arrived at the subject of correspondence.
"Have you written?" Georgiana asked her brother.
"Several times."
"And sent them?"
"None as of yet."
