Page 36 of I Have Faults Enough

“I spent three days watching a woman I love manage four dangerous men with more courage and more resourcefulness than I have seen from anyone of my own acquaintance in my whole life, gentleman or lady, and I will not sit and listen to you reduce the whole of it to a scheme for securing a match she never once, in any hour of that ordeal, showed the smallest evidence of having orchestrated. I have permitted a great deal of this kind of talk from you across a great many years. However, I do not intend to listen to any more of it simply to preserve a peace that was never, in truth, worth keeping quiet about."

Caroline's face, hearing this, went from surprise to what looked like genuine hurt, before settling into a brittle composure that did not quite disguise how thoroughly she had been caught off guard. "I see," she said coldly. "You might have spoken more civilly, Mr. Darcy. I only meant."

Darcy cut her off again. "I know what you meant; I have known what you meant for a very long time, and said nothing, because I believed silence the more comfortable course for both of us. I do not judge it so any longer. I would rather have this said plainly, once, and be done with it for good, Miss Bingley."

She did not answer that. And, instead, at length, only rose with what dignity she could muster, and said something about the lateness of the hour, and left him alone in the library with the fire's low light and the unfamiliar satisfaction of a man who said a difficult thing at the moment it was warranted rather than banking it against some later reckoning that generally never came.

Darcy sat a long while after she had gone. He found himself thinking, not for the first time that week, that he had spent nearly thirty years enduring provocation by silence or coldness, rather than doing the harder work of actually settling what was owed, to himself or to anyone else.

He did not think that he would ever perfectly balance his silence, as he was not so changed, in a single week, as to believe himself suddenly free of many years' habit merely because one difficult conversation had gone differently than it once might have done.

But he thought, watching the fire burn low, that he had at least begun, for the first time he could properly remember, to make an honest attempt at it. He did not permit himself the comfortable illusion that it was. But it was a beginning, and he found he could carry it forward, whole and unashamed, into whatever the rest of his life with Elizabeth Bennet was about to ask of him.

For he knew already, that she would ask a very great deal of him yet, in the years remaining to them both; more, very likely, than he had ever been asked to give any single person in his life before her. Though, he found he did not want to withhold even a fragment of it.

CHAPTER 22

Darcy had meant to come earlier, but his doctor left little room for argument. He had pronounced that a bruised rib and a river crossing required at least a full week of rest before he was permitted to leave the estate.

It was not the confinement itself he minded, for he had endured worse discomforts this last week than a soft bed and an excess of leisure, but the cruelty of being told that Elizabeth was recovering not three miles distant, and that he was forbidden from going to see her himself.

A thought came to him, the second evening of his confinement, of writing her a letter.

The idea arrived innocently enough. He told himself he would write a note; it would be nothing more, some line to assure her that he was mending, that his thoughts had not strayed from her for any waking hour since they had parted at Longbourn's door.

He had very nearly called for paper before the whole impropriety of the notion arrested him. Darcy was not officially engaged to her, for he had asked nothing of her father, and had said nothing to her beyond what circumstance and danger had already wrung from them both on a riverbank.

And, he knew that a letter now, unsanctioned and unrequested, sent from an unmarried gentleman to an unmarried lady with no understanding yet formally settled between their two families, was a liberty he had no right to take, however thoroughly the preceding week had already stripped away every other liberty either of them had once thought themselves bound to observe.

Darcy set the idea aside, and found it a good deal harder to keep it aside; instead, he thought over a dozen careful sentences in the privacy of his own head across that second night, sentences that went nowhere, being written for no eye but his own and destined for no paper at all.

Bingley, calling in on him the following afternoon with news of the neighbourhood's continuing fascination with the whole affair, found him in a temper considerably shorter than the day prior, and remarked on it with a fond bluntness that only a friendship of many years permitted.

"You are cross," Bingley observed, settling into the chair by the window. "I do not think I have ever seen you cross from an injury before."

"I am not cross about the rib," Darcy said, feeling rather annoyed.

"No," Bingley agreed, with a knowing look that told Darcy plainly enough he had already guessed the whole of it, "I did not imagine you were." He was quiet a moment, and then said, "You might send word through Jane. I am sure I might carry any message for you, and Jane might carry it with your compliments."

Darcy considered this a moment, but felt a reluctance to have even so small and innocent a sentiment filtered through a third party's careful delivery, when what he actually wanted was nothing so modest as compliments passed along, but the plain sight of her own face confirming that she was truly as recovered as everyone continued to assure him she was.

"Perhaps," he said, "once I have had another day or two to consider what such a message ought properly to say."

"You are hopeless," Bingley said, with real affection beneath the teasing, "and I do not think I have ever been so glad to see a man made so thoroughly hopeless by anything in my life. I shall leave you to your considering, then, and come back tomorrow to see whether your patience has improved your temper any, though I confess I am not sanguine about the prospect."

The week passed slower than any week of Darcy's life had previously contrived to pass, each day marked out by the same small, insufficient intelligence relayed through Bingley’s visits to Longbourn. He was informed that Elizabeth's ankle continued to mend, that her spirits were good, that she had asked, on more than one occasion of how Mr. Darcy's own recovery progressed.

By the seventh day, the doctor having at last pronounced him fit for a slow and short carriage ride, Darcy found he had exhausted every reserve of patience he had, and rose before the household was properly stirring to order his carriage for Longbourn at the earliest hour propriety could possibly excuse.

And then, Darcy found himself standing some minutes in Netherfield's own hall, unable to account for the sudden reluctance that had overtaken a resolution he had believed, the night before, entirely settled.

It was not doubt, he told himself, as he stood there with his gloves already in hand, and found that what held him was not any uncertainty of what he meant to ask, but perhaps some question as to whether or not he would receive the answer he hoped for.

Finally, building his courage, he walked out of Netherfield, as he had done a dozen times that autumn, and entered into his carriage, bound for Longbourn by a road he had travelled a number of times.

On this particular morning, Darcy found he noticed small things he had previously ridden past unremarked; the frost still silvering the hedgerows in patches, a robin working some hidden seam of the bank for its breakfast, and his heartbeat increasing in intensity with every passing moment.

He asked for Mr. Bennet upon arriving, was shown into the library, and found the older man already risen from his chair to meet him.