Page 72 of A Quiet Affection

“And you think that if I had more such experience, I would not wish to marry Elizabeth.”

“It is at least possible,” Lord Matlock shrugged.

Darcy did not reply quickly, as he was trying to arrange his thoughts in a way that made the repulsion he felt at such a notion clear, but didn’t insult his uncle.

However, before Darcy had prepared any reply, Matlock spoke again with a disgusted sigh. “No, if you had been convinced to take a mistress, you would have sponsored an opera singer and then fallen in love withherafter a few trysts and insisted upon making her Mrs. Darcy to restore the honor of both parties. I have changed my mind. You have convinced me. It is best that you marry Miss Bennet.”

“I would not.”

“You would,” his uncle insisted laughing. “You are too much like your father. Lunatics, both of you.”

“I have come to find that I am different from what he was in many ways.”

“A different variant of the same character. A good sort of character—I hope that Miss Bennet can soften you and directyou in the way that my sister Anne directed your father. But about Miss Bennet, there is some fortune, is there not? And she is a gentlewoman, and she has an excellent education. She has what, three thousand? That is a great deal more than nothing.”

“Four thousand; Papa did not draw upon her income and instead set it aside to increase her fortune.”

“A great deal more than nothing,” Lord Matlock repeated. “Well, are we ready to shake hands and declare ourselves to still be friends?”

Darcy did shake his uncle’s hand, and he said, “I appreciate your concern for the family, and you said something that I shall actually think about, which I had not expected.”

“Do not worry too much upon it,” Lord Matlock laughed. “I was well past thirty before I could admit to myself that I shared many of the patterns of character that annoyed me most in my mother. This is a form of wisdom that ought not be hurried.”

That evening when Darcy called on Elizabeth and told her about the conversation, she laughed at the disgruntled way that he announced that Lord Matlock had said that he was just like his father.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “You are in many ways. But despite the failures in his last year, he was a great man.”

“I wish to be a wholly different sort of father than he was.”

“Do not worry about that. You have many of his features, but they are different in you. And I love you, all of you. And I understand you very well, and we will be very happy together, and at least your uncle is happy enough with the marriage. That is a great deal.”

“And we shall not need to remain on friendly terms with Lady Catherine,” Darcy added, “which will please Georgiana.”

Elizabeth laughed, and at hearing her name Georgiana demanded to know what they had been speaking of.

When Darcy’s sister was informed upon the matter, she agreed. “She always frightens me. I’ll be happy to not need to see her.”

“For my part,” Elizabeth said, “I have never been able to dislike her since I once overheard her saying that I was a perfectly useful person and not likely to be a burden. But I do agree that unless she makes a sincere apology that we cannot be friends.”

As it happened, Lady Catherine never did on her own account, but some years later after her daughter Anne had her first child, Anne determined that she would like her son to know his cousins and arranged for a family reconciliation.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Happy for all who knew the couple and their worth was the day, more than month after her seventeenth birthday, when Elizabeth Bennet left the house of her uncle and became Mrs. Darcy, after enduring a painfully long engagement (or so it seemed to the happy couple, though those who must establish themselves in the world before they can marry often suffer from much more prolonged periods of courtship).

The reader of this tale may easily imagine the joy with which Georgiana Darcy watched them say their vows in a London parish church, for her new sister had been as dear to her as a true sister for many years.

As one who was long familiar with Pemberley, and already known and beloved by the servants, Elizabeth Darcy entered the role of mistress with ease and pleasure. Due to her blindness, there were matters upon which she had to depend upon the advice of Mrs. Reynolds more than Lady Anne had relied upon her housekeeper, Mrs. Peake. But Elizabeth was an active woman, who placed herself at the heart of the community, and who was beloved by the tenants, and whose visits brought joy and laughter.

She was, without any doubt, a better ornament for the Darcy name and the glory of Pemberley than a wealthy heiress, or another daughter of an earl would have been.

For their honeymoon they visited the Peak District, where Darcy minutely described the view, the mountains, the beauty of it all. Elizabeth was determined to forget nothing of that, and she was able to describe the features of the famed district with far moreexactness than Darcy ever was, even though she had not directly seen them.

Those were happy weeks that would always be remembered by Darcy for their amorous delights, the joy of coming to know his dear wife in a yet deeper way, and the general happiness that surrounded everything in a rosy glow.

After they had been settled at Pemberley for a period of some months, almost enough to cause concern upon the matter, Elizabeth became with child and was delivered after nine months with a son who was healthy, screaming, the apple of his father’s eye, and the grape of his mother’s ear.

He was named Bennet, and he would prove to be a worthy heir to the Darcy name. Though this gentleman was forced by circumstance to endure the great misfortune of being very advanced in middle age, almost old—for a man who has half-grown grandchildren is certainly not young—before he had mastery of his own estate.