Page 11 of A Quiet Affection

“I do not care.”

“You mean to be difficult upon such things,” Darcy replied with a smile.

“I deserve to be as difficult as I wish to be, if I wish to be. It is only fair.”

“No,” Darcy replied. “Your wounds, your losses cannot change the demands that morality and rationality place upon you—they require that everyone about you acts to help you, that we changeour ways to make your life easier. You have become an object deserving of pity, but--”

“No. No. No. I will not be pitied.” Elizabeth felt a great pang at that thought. “I won’t pity myself. I am—I won’t be unhappy. I refuse it.”

“I do not tell you to be unhappy.”

“You tell me to think of myself as pitiable. Useless. An object deserving to be despised who only hovers about in the world to burden her relations and to prevent them from inheriting so much wealth as they ought—have you seen Jane? How does she take all our deaths?”

“I was in Cambridge until Papa directed me by letter to bring you to Pemberley. There are matters of business which made it difficult for him to be absent from the estate.”

“Not a letter from her. We wrote letters to each other every third day, and now she won’t write. She hasn’t written a letter yet.” Then Elizabeth added with some bitterness, “Not that Mrs. Phillips would have bothered to read them to me.”

“I am certain she would have.”

“I begged her to read anything, a book, something from a hymnal, her account tables, anything, and she would not. She said that no one of them had the time for it. And I suppose that if I demand to be read to, Iwillbe a burden.”

“I will happily read to you,” Darcy replied, “at any time. But especially if we might find a book that has an interest for both of us.”

“And you will not thinkmea burden? And what if I insist on a book you particularly do not wish to read?”

“Miss Elizabeth, you cannot read for yourself, but you are gently born and not without friends and resources. If you insist onlistening to a text that no person might possibly wish to share with you, we can find a person to read it to you. That your aunt did not arrange for such speaks very ill of her. I assure you that in my father’s house the situation will be different.”

Poor Elizabeth was in a mood which did not wish to be mollified.

But her legs were also tired. Perhaps it was because after having spent around a week in company each year with Fitzwilliam for as long back as she could remember, but she had no fear of him, and no sense that it was unsafe to communicate her true feelings and resentments to him. He had, after all, been one of her father’s favorite correspondents, whose enthusiasm for arguing about philosophy and history had brought Papa to reply with one somewhat shorter letter to every third or so of Fitzwilliam’s frequent letters.

“I still shall hate it. But I amdelightedto still be alive. Even if it means that Jane won’t have six thousand pounds. What nonsense; I am as deserving of our family money as she is. And I don’t believe God hates me,” Elizabeth replied after a while.

“What a nonsensical idea,” Fitzwilliam agreed. “Of course, the Almighty does not. It is an irreligious notion to think that he does.”

Elizabeth’s legs were beginning to tremble from the walking. “Please, bring me back to the carriage. I am so weak. I don’t like being so weak.”

“You shall become stronger, and quickly,” he replied. “There are only twenty or thirty steps to the carriage. We shall take another long walk soon as we reach the next stop, if you feel rested sufficiently.”

Darcy had in fact detected that the young girl was becoming tired before she did herself and brought them back to the carriage in good time. The horses had been long since changedand were waiting for them, and this time Darcy perceived Lizzy’s desire to find the step without his help, and he willingly waited until her foot reached it, and then she pulled herself up with a grunt of effort.

Lizzy’s general desire to do for herself anything that she might reminded him of how Georgiana had been as a very small child. Perhaps it was the same need to learn everything. He did, however, remain in a position behind where he could catch Lizzy if she missed the step and fell.

The next several days of travel went much more slowly than Darcy had anticipated on the road from Cambridge to Meryton.

Lizzy was desperate for exercise, and Darcy had no will to refuse her the chance. Nor did he have the heart to assign the task of escorting her to his valet, or one of the maids that travelled with them in a baggage carriage that went behind Darcy’s main carriage.

The girl chattered, and chattered, and chattered. She asked for descriptions of the landscape, before laughing at herself, and withdrawing the request as that was the sort of thing she knew from books that every blind person asked for. And then, instead of Darcy describing the scenery, they argued about whether it was in truth what every blind person asked to hear, and whether it was true that books suggested that they all did.

Darcy saw that Lizzy was desperately lonely.

Even more than her desire for exercise, she had a desire for conversation. And Darcy had a sense, though he could not say it quite out loud to himself, that she would not find sufficient friendship at Pemberley. So, he walked about with her for a long time at each change of the horses, delayed starting the carriage so that she could hear the difference in the way that each inn yard sounded in the morning, and, a little against his betterjudgement, he let her stand out in a summer thunderstorm for three minutes before insisting that she use an umbrella and not let the rain fall on anything but her hands.

The delighted smile that the young girl showed him as she wiped the water off her face made it impossible for him to regret having allowed her that liberty. Or at least impossible after it was clear that she’d not taken any illness.

In general, Darcy did not depend on the company of other people.

While he enjoyed his friends, there was a thing in him that simply did notneedto speak to another person more than once a week or even once a month. It was this which had led him to spend so much time in the libraries in general, and to focus so much upon his studies.