Page 7 of A Quiet Affection

When Elizabeth asked for them to put a red silk ribbon in her hair, the shocked reactions of Mrs. Phillips, the housekeeper, and the maid were deeply gratifying. Especially when the maid exclaimed, “This is why the evil eye looked upon you!”

It was impossible for Elizabeth to not laugh.

Mrs. Phillips angrily pulled at her hair and tied a, presumably black, ribbon into it, while scolding Elizabeth, and asking her if she had cared nothing for her family, and if she had no love for their memory.

Elizabeth did not see why wearing black for her father or Lydia, or Kitty, did anything for their memory. Lydia had loved bright colors. Lydia would have wanted her to wear pink or red for her. And the dress was sufficiently black to respect Mama and Mary, even with a bright ribbon in her hair.

After this, Mrs. Phillips tied a light scarf over Elizabeth’s eyes, and when she protested that it was uncomfortable, Mrs. Phillips replied angrily, “They are hideous and unsettling. Do you wish for him to see?”

Then Elizabeth was brought across to the drawing room and made to sit instead of walking. And then they waited for Fitzwilliam.

Elizabeth was rather glad that it was Fitzwilliam retrieving her, and not Mr. Darcy. Even though Papa had loved Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth had always found the solemn man a little frightening. She suspected that he had never laughed, and he certainly smiled seldom. The way he spoke to her had always shown that he had no respect for her intelligence, or her ability to understand any subject that required deep thought and attention.

Besides, he always doted upon Jane, bought her expensive gifts, and took her away for months and months each year, and Elizabeth did not like him on this account.

However, even though Fitzwilliam had begun to make a strong effort to imitate the manners of his father,hestill found jokes funny. Besides, Fitzwilliam had kept a regular correspondence with Papa, asking questions about philosophy and translation, and matters about life in the university halls that he was perhaps too embarrassed to ask his father about.

He would be the first person she would meet since her family had died who had also loved her father—though Elizabeth loved and appreciated Mr. Gardiner, she knew that no great closeness had subsisted between him and his brother-in-law.

While they waited, none of the conversation was directed towards her.

She hated how the adults talked about her as though she were not there and then were upset if she tried to say something about the matter.

Every time that she tried to stand up, she was told to sit down so she wouldn’t trip over anything and break it. Elizabeth was beginning to hate Mrs. Phillips. At least they were about to part. Maybe forever.

She had to wait. And wait. And wait.

When tea was brought out, Mrs. Phillips speculated about whether young Master Darcy may have become lost on the road. It was odd for him to be so late. Mrs. Phillips then refused to let Elizabeth have her own cup of tea, because she might spill it, not being able to see what she was doing.

That was nonsense.

Elizabeth had weeks ago established that when she was sitting up, she was as capable of successfully bringing a cup up to her lips as she’d ever been. At least Mrs. Phillips let her eat one of the biscuits, so long as she promised to be very careful not to scatter the crumbs over her dress.

It was as though they were waiting for a great personage and notFitzwilliam. Oh certainly, Fitzwilliam was much older than Elizabeth, but she was perfectly capable of telling the difference between him and an actual adult who deserved respect. He was still just a big over-grown boy.

At last, that young gentleman arrived, with an apology about a horse who had gone lame halfway between post stations.

At this time Fitzwilliam Darcy was a serious young man. He chose to trimly dress himself in the stockings and britches that his father’s generation already thought were outdated, rather than the pants and buckskin breeches that were the ordinaryclothes of his own. He was very tall and very thin, and he put a great deal of thought into adopting a hair style, clothing, and a general manner that expressed what he thought was his inner nature, while believing himself to care nothing at all for his appearance—Darcy was already handsome, yes, but he would be much more handsome at seven-and-twenty than he was at nine-and-ten.

Men often need maturity to give gravitas and fineness to their person and comportment.

At this time, he read rather too much—or to be more specific, he spent far too much time indoors, sitting at his candlelit desk, inscribing notes into his vellum-bound octavos, with a book open in front of him, and a stack of books next to it.

Darcy considered himself to be chiefly spirit and mind. The body was unimportant; what mattered were the thoughts, the contemplation of the Good, the contemplation of those things of deepest significance. He read philosophy, grand poetry, and mathematics. He disdained the sciences for being about the merely material. It was not this brute world which mattered, but rather the spiritual.

Berkeley’s idea that all in the world was an idea held in place by God’s continual attention appealed to him, while he despised Hume not only for being an atheist, but also for his denigration of pure thought and pure reason. The notion that a man can only discover matters of importance throughexperiencedid not sit well with a young person who knew himself to know more, and to know more of importance, than many persons far older whose minds were filled with trivial, pecuniary, and immoral concerns.

Darcy was overly pale, with a tendency to have dark rings around his eyes from nights spent reading instead of sleeping, and his body was not athletic.

In the years after he inherited the estate, much of this would change. Time riding about his estate would tan him. He would find more joy in the activities of the sportsman—fencing, games of marksmanship, horse and carriage racing. What Fitzwilliam Darcy was never able to properly enjoy was hunting or shooting pheasants. He’d do enough of it to be friendly with his neighbors, but there always seemed to be something unseemly in finding delight in killing another creature, even if it was not one made in the image of God.

A sense of shock and a little horror went up Darcy’s arms and legs when he first saw little Lizzy, dressed all in black, face and neck wholly scarred, a black scarf around her eyes. She sat upon the cramped sofa in the cramped drawing room of Mr. Phillips’ cramped house in the cramped town of Meryton.

“Jove,” he exclaimed, “How did you survive?”

This made Elizabeth laugh and she hopped up to walk to Fitzwilliam. She had always liked him; he had his own interesting thoughts, and he argued brilliantly with both Papa and Mr. Darcy. And he was serious about knowledge, about philosophy, and about matters requiring deep thought and study. While Elizabeth had far less application than he did, she rather wished she could be more like Fitzwilliam in that regard.

As she stepped towards him her legs banged into the table that stood in the middle of the room, knocking one of the teacups from Mrs. Phillip’s finest set off the table and onto the ground. That it was from the best set of china, Elizabeth did not know. She had assumed that the tea set was the ordinary one, not considering how Mrs. Phillips would honor Fitzwilliam Darcy’s consequence as the heir of a great fortune.