Page 33 of I Have Faults Enough

I find I have grown rather fiercer, this last week, in my objections to watching any daughter of mine settle for less than her own heart actually wants. I do not know that I was always so fierce a father as that, before. I think perhaps I ought to have been."

His eyes were wet, and she could see through his spectacles that a lone tear ran down his cheek. She was moved by his words, and was quiet herself for a moment, before she said. "You have always been a good father to me, Papa.”

He gave her a small, rueful shake of his head. "I have been an amused one, more often than a good one, Lizzy. And that is not quite the same virtue, whatever I have generally told myself to the contrary. I have found it easier, across a great many years, to laugh at your mother's nerves and your sisters' follies than to trouble myself properly correcting either, and I have let a great deal go unaddressed in this house that a more diligent man would have seen to. I very nearly lost you this week, my dear girl, and I will tell you plainly that it has taught me rather more about my own failings than I found comfortable to learn at my age."

He reached over and took her hand, an unusual enough gesture from him, and she felt his warmth in it. "But I did not come up here to make you comfort me for my own shortcomings. I came to hear you say what you have just said, and I find, having heard it, that I am considerably easier in my own mind than I have been these three days together."

Elizabeth asked, hesitant. "Would you approve, Papa, if I chose to marry Mr. Darcy?"

"I only approve of your feelings, Lizzy." Something of his old dryness returned to him then. "If you would like, I will speak with him, when he calls, and give him whatever blessing he means to ask for. Though I confess, I could see that he did not once take his eyes from you the whole time your mother was making her fuss, and I have not often seen a man look at anything with quite that particular mixture of terror and devotion, except perhaps myself, some thirty years ago, watching your mother recover from a fever I was entirely persuaded, in my own youthful foolishness, would carry her off entirely."

Elizabeth smiled, surprised by the sudden small window her father occasionally permitted her into his own marriage. She had spent most of her life believing that her parents' marriage was a settled, comfortable disappointment rather than anything that had once been young and hopeful.

"I did not know that Mama had been so ill once," she said.

Mr. Bennet nodded his head, rising slowly, "There is a great deal you do not know.” As he lifted from the chair, she saw him favouring some ache of his own, likely from the saddle he spent hours in while in search of her. "Though, I do not intend to enlighten you further on the subject this afternoon, having already said rather more than I generally permit myself on any topic touching my own feelings.” He looked at her then and gave a warm smile, “Rest that ankle. I will send your mother up directly, though I expect she will have exhausted herself of the subject of wedding-clothes by suppertime, and you had best prepare yourself accordingly."

He left her then, and Elizabeth lay back against her pillows, thinking over their conversation. She thought rather less of Darcy in that moment, but rather about her father, and a fever and a fear thirty years old that she had never once suspected her father of carrying. She found that the whole conversation had left her with rather more to think about than the single question he had actually come to ask.

***

Charlotte came the following day. She was permitted a short visit despite the doctor's continued insistence upon rest, and brought with her the fuller flavour of what Meryton's gossip had made of the whole affair.

She declared, setting herself down in the chair drawn up beside Elizabeth's bed, that the gossip was clearly embellished, and inevitably so, and proceeded to describe its embellishments in a matter-of-fact way that tried to show Elizabeth the neighbourhood's more spectacular follies, until Elizabeth scarcely recognised, in the secondhand versions reaching her, the actual exhausting and unglamorous ordeal she had lived through.

"Mrs. Bates has it that you were carried off by a whole regiment of highwaymen," Charlotte said, with a pointed look, which Elizabeth knew to be a flavor of her friend’s sarcasm, "and Mrs. Philips is convinced Mr. Darcy fought them singlehanded with nothing but his bare hands and courage. Mrs. Long, not to be outdone by either, has added a bloodhound to the account, which I understand tracked you both eleven miles by scent alone before the search party lost its trail again in a hailstorm, though where the hailstorm came from in the middle of what was, by every other report, a perfectly ordinary rainy week, I could not persuade her to explain. I did not think it my place to correct any of it, given how much more entertaining every version is than whatever the truth actually was, though I collect the truth was rather more frightening than entertaining, from what little you have told me of it."

"It was," Elizabeth said, simply. She knew with Charlotte at least, she did not need to elaborate further. Her oldest friend's steady, undramatic presence offered Elizabeth a deep sort of comfort where the neighbourhood's more excitable sympathy could not match.

"And you are to marry him, then?" Charlotte said, not quite a question. "I confess I did not see that coming, watching you list his faults so thoroughly this autumn past. Though I will own I suspected something of it, once or twice, when you thought no one was watching you watch him."

Elizabeth laughed, for the first time in what felt a very great while, a real, unguarded laugh. "I own I did not see it coming either, Charlotte" she admitted. "I am not perfectly certain I see it clearly even now, only that whatever it is, I do not wish it undone, however strange a road it took to arrive by."

Charlotte did not reply immediately, only thought about what her friend had said. And, then seemed to reflect on another else entirely. Elizabeth watched her intently, and felt the beginning of some private admission in her friend's face that had not been there a moment before.

"I have news of my own," Charlotte said, at last, "which I had meant to save for a happier occasion than this one, though I collect there is no very good time to deliver it, and you are at least well enough now to bear hearing it without alarm. Your cousin, Mr. Collins has asked me to marry him, and I have accepted."

Elizabeth could not entirely govern her own face at this, and Charlotte watched her friend’s effort, and very nearly smiled at Elizabeth’s expense. Mr. Collins was, by all accounts, a pompous fool, and Elizabeth was in reality saddened at the news.

Elizabeth could not entirely govern her own face at this, and Charlotte watched her friend’s effort, and very nearly smiled at Elizabeth’s expense. Elizabeth knew what her own countenance must be shewing, and could not summon the will to correct it.

She could not pretend to herself that the news brought her anything but a private, sinking sorrow, thinking of Mr. Collins's pomposity, and how her cousin expected it, as if it was his due, that any woman would believe it fortunate enough to receive his notice. She wondered how a mind as quick and as clear-sighted as Charlotte's meant to spend the whole of the rest of her life accommodating it.

"You need not pretend surprise so thoroughly, Eliza. I know precisely what you think of him, having heard the whole of it from you this autumn, and I do not require you to revise the opinion merely for my sake."

"I own, I am surprised. I cannot see how you could have done it. " Elizabeth said, sounding forlorn.

"I am not romantic, Eliza. I never was, whatever you may have hoped to persuade yourself otherwise on my behalf. I am seven-and-twenty, and plain, and I have watched enough of my own family's finances to know precisely what a woman in my situation may reasonably hope for, and what she may not. I do not say it to reproach you for feeling differently. Charlotte said it plainly, without any of the bitterness. “It means a home of my own, and an income I need not depend upon my brothers' charity to provide, and a husband who will trouble me very little, I think, once the ceremony is concluded and the household falls into its own settled habits. I say it because I think you are entitled to know that I have gone into this with my eyes entirely open, and that I do not expect, nor particularly want, the kind of feeling you have evidently found with Mr. Darcy. I want a home, and a garden, and the ordinary comfortable business of managing a household of my own, and I believe I shall have all three, and will be tolerably content with the having of them."

Elizabeth reached for her friend's hand, moved by tenderness. "I do not think less of you for wanting those things, Charlotte, nor for choosing the surest road to them. I only hope." She stopped, uncertain how to finish the sentence without presuming to know better than Charlotte herself what Charlotte's own happiness required.

"You only hope I shall not regret it," Charlotte finished for her gently. "I do not think I shall, though I will own I have thought of little else these days, waiting to see whether you would be brought home safely enough for me to tell you at all. It seemed, suddenly, rather a small thing to be worrying over, my own marriage compared with losing you entirely. I found I could not deliver the news properly until I knew you were here to receive it."

"Then I am glad, on both accounts, that I am here to receive it," Elizabeth said, and found, examining her own feeling honestly, that this was true, that whatever private reservations she still carried about her friend's choice, she could not begrudge Charlotte, nor fail to recognise, in her friend's clear-eyed accounting of her own situation. Charlotte had a kind of courage not so very different in its essential nature from whatever courage Elizabeth herself had needed to survive a week she still could not think of steadily for very long together.

"We are neither of us, I think, going to have the marriage the novels generally promise," Charlotte said, rising at last to take her leave, the doctor's allotted quarter hour having long since expired. "Yours will simply arrive by a considerably stranger road than mine, and cost you a great deal more fright in the arriving. I am not persuaded that makes yours the better bargain, though I will grant you it makes for a very much better story, and I do not doubt Meryton will be telling it, in one embellished form or another, for a good deal longer than they will trouble themselves to tell mine."

She bent down to kiss Elizabeth's cheek, an unusual enough gesture from a woman generally so sparing of physical demonstration that Elizabeth felt its meaning.