Page 34 of I Have Faults Enough

Charlotte’s visit left her alone with a strange, mingled feeling the visit had produced both gladness for herself as well as a complicated tenderness for her friend, and a fresh, sober gratitude for whatever accident of feeling had delivered her to a match she would not, examining it honestly, have traded for any of the safer, more sensible arrangements the world generally offered women in her position.

CHAPTER 21

The day of his rescue, Mr. Darcy returned to Netherfield with Bingley, who was summoned after Darcy’s initial arrival to Longbourn. When they arrived, Darcy felt a relief so complete, it left him almost unsteady, and close behind his feeling of relief was an exhaustion that went deep and seemed to have settled into his very joints.

Carrying both sensations with him still, he walked into the estate's main corridor and looked about him, as if seeing it for the very first time, though his mind was on neither the tapestries nor the finery, but on the one thing he had very nearly lost: the very thing he had spent so many months trying to fend off. Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

He had held Elizabeth carefully at arm's length these many months, and he could not, after this week, imagine holding her at any distance ever again. He thought of how much time he had spent at Netherfield doing exactly the opposite of what he wanted now, leaving her, and staying away, and telling himself each departure was the wiser course.

He had quit Hertfordshire once already on Bingley's account, or told himself it was Bingley's account, and had spent a remainder of the autumn in town persuaded that distance would answer where proximity had only ever unsettled him further.

Then, he had come back to Netherfield a second time telling himself he came for Bingley, and had known that the reason was the same one it had always been; it had all been for her.

Darcy did not intend to leave Elizabeth ever again. Whatever distance he had once believed necessary between them, for his own comfort, he found he could no longer locate any version of himself that wanted it restored.

He meant to marry her, and to keep her near him for whatever years either of them was given; and, as he looked around the great hall, he did not think that he had ever wanted anything so simply, or so completely, as he wanted that.

Bingley accompanied him into the hall from the carriage, with the same warmth that he always did, and had scarcely begun giving his instructions for a warm bath and a proper meal when Caroline came down the stairs so quickly that she had plainly been watching for the carriage from some upstairs window.

"Mr. Darcy!" She stopped a few feet from him, her face showing the relief of someone who seemed to be rehearsing, in private, and was ready for her act. "We had begun to fear the very worst! I do not think I have slept two hours together since word came you were missing!"

"I am obliged to you for the concern, Miss Bingley. And, I assure you I am well," Darcy said civilly, offering a brief bow, though it caused his ribs some pain.

Mrs. Hurst came behind her sister with rather less haste but no less evident feeling, and pressed her hand onto her heart, and murmured how glad, how very glad, they all were that he was safe; some ways behind her was Mr. Hurst, roused from whatever post-dinner torpor he generally occupied at this hour.

The drunken man offered his own gruff word of welcome from the drawing-room doorway, along with an observation that Darcy ought to have a proper meal inside him after an ordeal of that kind, and that he had told Bingley as much the moment the news of Darcy's finding had reached them.

"Of course, you must go up directly," Caroline said with something nearer her usual quickness. "I have had a bath prepared already, and told Cook to have something ready the moment you were fit to eat it."

"I had precisely that instruction ready to give him myself, Caroline" Bingley said, with a rueful half-smile at having been so thoroughly anticipated, "though I meant to deliver it with rather more ceremony, but you have just now spared me the trouble of it."

Darcy allowed himself to be shepherded toward the stairs, grateful, in the moment, for the particular efficiency with which a household roused to real alarm generally reorganises itself the instant that alarm is lifted, and it was only once he had gone some way up the staircase, Caroline's voice still audible below issuing some further instruction to a hovering servant, that he heard Bingley turn his own attention to Mrs. Hurst, asking whether either of the letters he had sent off that morning had yet had any answer.

Darcy was seen to at once, and as soon as he was convinced that his friend was taken care of, Bingley made haste to ensure two further letters were written and sent with all haste.

The first was directed to Darcy's own physician in London, asking that the man come down at once to see Darcy properly examined, whatever his own protestations of being perfectly well might claim to the contrary. The second was addressed to Darcy's cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam.

Bingley had written to the Colonel already, once the household first understood Darcy to be missing, and then, with a horror none of them had yet fully recovered from, that he had very probably been taken, along with Miss Elizabeth. Bingley had judged that a man's own family ought to hear such news from a friend's hand rather than stumble upon it secondhand.

Bingley was uncertain, that first letter having gone off amid all the general confusion of the search, had ever properly reached the Colonel at all, or whether it sat even now, unopened, in some London post office while its intended recipient remained in perfect and prolonged ignorance of the whole affair.

He judged it warranted, therefore, that a second note and considerably shorter than the first was sent to assure the Colonel, wherever and whenever the news might finally find him, that his cousin had been recovered safe, and was presently at Netherfield recovering his strength, and required nothing further from anyone but rest, a good deal of quiet, and the general cessation of any further alarm on his account.

When Bingley was permitted into Darcy's room, he found his friend resting in bed, his pillows propped up against the headboard, bathed and fed and looking, upon the whole, a good deal more like himself than the grey, winded figure that had climbed down from the carriage an hour before.

"I did not know what else to do with myself," Bingley admitted, drawing a chair near the bed and settling into it with none of his usual restless energy, "and writing letters at least gave me some occupation. I hope you will not think I overstepped, sending for your cousin without your leave to do it."

"Not at all Bingley," Darcy said. "I think it very likely the most sensible thing done in this whole business."

His friend managed something that was very nearly a laugh, though it did not sit easily on him, and Darcy, watching Bingley’s face in the candlelight, and noticed beneath the attempt of lightness an exhaustion of a different kind.

Bingley himself looked hollowed-out. Darcy supposed his friend had imagined every terrible thing that might have befallen him. He had watched Bingley's face across a dozen years of easy friendship, and had never once seen it worn so thin, and he knew that Bingley must have felt all the guilt and horror of his friend, along with the woman who would, within the month, be as good as a sister to him, taken at his doorstep.

After a moment, Bingley said, "I do not think I have properly told you how very glad I am to see you sitting there at all. I have spent a great deal of this week composing, in my own head, the letter I should have to write to your uncle, should the worst have happened."

Darcy was quick to rely. "You would have managed this whole business well, Bingley. I can imagine how difficult it was in keeping the household from falling entirely to pieces while the master's friend went missing."

"I did not do it for thanks," Bingley smirked tiredly. "I did it because I could not think what else a man does, with a friend missing and no certain word of him. What you can have endured, I can hardly fathom, Darcy."