Page 32 of I Have Faults Enough

"Lizzy," her mother said, with a cracked and small voice, when it came at last. "Oh! My Lizzy."

She crossed the hall and gathered Elizabeth against her in a tight hug. Elizabeth felt her mother's whole body shaking. In that moment, being held so dearly by her mother, she realized that whatever comedy she had always privately permitted herself at her mother's expense, and whatever exasperation her mother's nerves had earned across a lifetime of ordinary complaint, none of it had prepared her for the sight of her mother’s genuine, unmasked terror and relief at seeing her daughter alive and back at home.

"I thought." Her mother began, but could not finish the sentence, before she broke down into sobs. There was certainly no need for her to finish what she started, as Elizabeth felt her own tears well up in her eyes again.

Having heard the commotion downstairs, Jane flew out of her bedroom, to see the happy scene below. It was Jane that came next; her eldest sister was already crying by the time Elizabeth was wrapped in her arms. When at last Jane drew back, her face was wet and entirely unashamed of it, and she said only, "I did not think I could bear it, Lizzy, if you had not come back to us.” Jane hugged Elizabeth again, and felt a new wave of tears soak into her shoulder.

Mr. Bennet, watching this from the hall's edge, cleared his throat once, roughly, and turned his attention to the business of seeing a doctor sent for, and dry clothes found, and a proper meal prepared. Meanwhile, Elizabeth, exhausted past any further capacity, felt her knees give way at last beneath her, and found Darcy's arm beneath hers before she realized she had started to fall. He held her with the same swift steadying that he had shown at every crisis of the preceding days.

"She needs rest," he said, to the room in general, in a voice that for the moment sounded quite like its old Netherfield authority, "and a doctor's proper attention to that ankle, which has borne considerably more than it ought these three days."

Mrs. Bennet, roused by this into something nearer her ordinary self, began at once to issue instructions. Hill sent for hot water, and a fire to be built up properly in Elizabeth's own room. Kitty was told to watch for the doctor's arrival from the window, and Elizabeth, at last permitted herself to be led toward the stairs.

She looked back once and found Mr. Darcy still standing in the hall below, watching her go with a countenance so grave it might, a fortnight before, have read to her as nothing but coldness. However, she found she could no longer mistake it as such.

For, she had grown this last week, to become properly familiar with what his look actually spoke of, and she knew, reading it now that the gravity in his face held nothing of displeasure in it at all; it was only the look of concern for her, and a plain, wordless wish to see her properly cared for.

Elizabeth slept, that first night home, more deeply than she had in a very long time. And, when she eventually woke, the following morning, it was to the strange, disorienting comfort of her own familiar room, and the sound of her mother's voice, hushed for once, speaking with someone in the passage outside her door about arrangements that seemed to concern rather more than her ankle's proper healing.

CHAPTER 20

The doctor had already arrived before Elizabeth woke, and once Mrs. Hill discovered Elizabeth awake in bed, she supposed the doctor from the downstairs parlour.

He was a Meryton man born and bred, with unsentimental habits. He briskly pronounced the ankle a bad sprain rather than a break, which she had already known. The doctor prescribed rest and a tightly wound bandage and no unnecessary use of it for a fortnight at the least, and then departed with an assurance to return tomorrow.

It was over the tray Hill brought up shortly after, more food than Elizabeth's shrunken appetite could presently do justice to, though she made what inroads upon it she could, aware of her mother hovering in the doorway with her ever present anxiety, that the more practical ramifications of her kidnapping were shared with Elizabeth.

"You must not trouble yourself with any of it today," her mother assured with in a voice pitched with worry, "but I will tell you plainly, Lizzy, that Meryton has talked of nothing else these three days, and will talk of nothing else for a good while yet, and there is no use pretending otherwise."

"I did not imagine there was," Elizabeth said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at the thought of Meryton gossip’s tongues wagging. "What do they say, Mama?"

Her mother's face attempted seriousness, but was at war with her fatigue and nerves. "Some of it is dreadful," her mother explained. “I tell you Lizzy, it is the sort of talk I will not repeat to you, about what three days alone with a gentleman might reasonably be supposed to have, well, you understand me. But I will say, Lizzy, and I do not think it wrong of me to say it, that a great deal of the neighbourhood has already concluded that a match must follow, given the circumstances, and I cannot pretend I find the notion wrong. Mr. Darcy has ten thousand a year, and Pemberley besides, and I am persuaded, whatever I once thought of the man's manner, that a gentleman who conducts himself as he is said to have done cannot be so very disagreeable after all."

Elizabeth thought that these details were an honest window into the whole tangled knot of her mother's feelings. Her mother’s horror, at least, was genuine, and plain on her face.

Mrs. Bennet dreaded what gossip might yet make of her daughter's name; and Elizabeth, examining her own reaction to it, found she could not summon a tart reply that such fretting would ordinarily have earned from her. She knew well that her mother had spent three days genuinely believing her daughter might be dead. And, given that, she was prepared to be more than gracious.

It was her father who came to her that afternoon, once the worst of the household's fuss had settled. Elizabeth was still in bed, propped against her pillows with her ankle elevated. Mr. Bennet came without any of the dry armour he generally brought to difficult conversations.

"I must ask you something," he said, settling into the chair beside her bed, "and I would have you answer it honestly, without regard for anything your mother has doubtless already told you the neighbourhood expects, nor for anything you imagine I might wish to hear."

Elizabeth looked at him for a moment, and saw the seriousness in his eyes. "You may ask me, Papa.”

"Do you wish to marry Mr. Darcy?" He held up a hand before she could answer. "I do not ask whether you believe you must, for the sake of your name, though I will not pretend that it would not have ramifications. I ask whether you wish it, Lizzy, for your own sake.”

He paused and looked at her soberly. “I will not permit you to accept it on the grounds of necessity alone. I have very nearly lost you once this week, and I will not allow you to marry Mr. Darcy, if you would rather not like to, regardless of what the neighbors might think. I would rather you do what your heart wants, my dear, and nothing less.”

Elizabeth looked down at her own hands, folded on the coverlet, and then up again, and found her father watching her. He looked at her, not his usual amused and half-detached observation of the world's follies, but rather something that looked like fear.

It was a fair enough doubt, and Elizabeth found she shared some private version of it herself, though she did not say so aloud. She thought instead of the man who had gone cold and silent at the very start of his return to Hertfordshire, shutting himself away, and wondered whether the man who had fought Bill on an open road with such controlled, deliberate purpose had truly learned something that would outlast the crisis that had taught it to him, or only borrowed, for as long as the danger lasted, a courage that peace might tempt him to set down again.

But she thought, too, of his hands working the linen round her ankle with a gentleness that owed nothing to any crisis's demand, of the low, murmured words that had carried her across a wet field when nothing but his own care obliged him to offer them, and found that she trusted the gentler evidence rather more than she trusted her own lingering doubt to be fair to him.

"I think I do wish it," she said gravely. She paused, and made herself go on. "I will not pretend that my decision stands entirely apart from what the world will say of it. I am not so proud as that, whatever I may once have believed of myself."

She stopped again, and when she continued, it was more slowly, as though she were only now discovering the shape of the thing she meant to say. "I wish it because I have come to feel something for him I can only call admiration, Papa; though, I confess it sits ill with me, to own it, when I spent so many months disliking him. I have learned to depend upon him, when I did not think myself capable of depending upon anyone so thoroughly disagreeable as I once believed him to be. I have come to know him since, and I find my feelings have turned out to be very nearly the opposite of what they were."

Her father was silent a long while; she saw his mouth twitch, resettling it before he replied to her. "I could not have borne it, Lizzy, watching you nearly lost to me this week, to think you might accept his hand on grounds of necessity alone, with no true feeling behind the accepting at all.