Page 37 of I Have Faults Enough

"You need not tell me why you have come," Mr. Bennet said, gesturing him to the chair opposite his own. Darcy hesitated in taking the chair Mr. Bennet offered, feeling himself more inclined to stand, if not pace, as was his preference.

Seeing the young man’s own hesitation, Mr. Bennet, added. "I find, examining my own inclination this morning, that I would rather hear you say it properly. So, if you would be so good, sit, Mr. Darcy. I do not think either of us is in so great a hurry that the saying of it cannot be done sitting down."

Darcy sat, and found, gathering the words he had rehearsed a dozen times on the drive over, that they came to him now with considerably less polish than he had intended.

"I have come to ask your leave to marry your daughter," he started, looking at the older man, sitting across from him. "I do not know that I can offer you any very elegant account of why, beyond the plain fact that I have loved her a great deal longer than either of us permitted ourselves to know it, and that I have spent this last week discovering, by the hardest possible means, exactly how much of my own life I am unwilling to imagine continuing without her in it.”

Darcy took a fortifying breadth, and seeing that Mr. Bennet remained silent, he continued. “I cannot any longer imagine wanting anything so much as I want her for my wife, and because I believe, though I would not presume to speak for her own feeling until she has had the chance to speak it herself, that she has come, this last week at least, to want something of the same in return."

Mr. Bennet was quiet a long while studying him. He had thought Mr. Darcy, like his daughter had once thought him, a proud and rather distant figure, the first evening the young man walked into a Meryton assembly the previous autumn and stood the whole night through without troubling himself to dance.

It was a judgment he had not, in the months since, found much occasion to revise, for the man had given the neighbourhood precious little else to go on. Mr. Bennet found, considering that old impression now against the man sitting opposite him, that he could no longer make the two accounts agree.

Whatever pride Mr. Darcy had once worn as his only visible feature, a single terrible week had worn a good deal of it away, and left standing in its place someone Mr. Bennet found he could regard, examining his own daughter's evident happiness alongside the evidence of the man's own conduct.

"I will tell you something I do not know that I have said aloud to anyone, Mr. Darcy, not even my wife," he said, at last. "I have not always been the father I ought to have been to my daughters; indeed, I have found it easier, across a great many years, to laugh at the world's absurdities than to trouble myself with correcting them, and I have let a great deal go unaddressed in my own household that a more diligent man would have seen to properly.”

This time, Mr. Bennet took a deep breadth before continuing. “I very nearly lost Elizabeth, and I will tell you plainly that it has taught me a great deal about my own failings. I do not say this to burden you with my own regrets. I say it because I find I would rather give my daughter to a man who has done the hard work of correcting himself than to one who has never had cause to discover what wanted correcting in the first place. You have my leave, and my blessing besides, for whatever either is worth to a man who does not, I think, much require either to proceed regardless."

He rose, and something that was almost his old dryness returned. "Go and find her. She is in the garden, I believe, testing that ankle against her mother's express instructions to the contrary, which I gather you will come to learn is rather characteristic of her."

Darcy thanked him briefly, and left the library with a haste that he made no particular effort to disguise. His gloves were forgotten on the chair behind him, as his whole mind was already three rooms and a garden path ahead of his own feet.

He found Elizabeth exactly where her father had promised, seated on the low stone bench near the rose beds that had nothing left to offer but bare, thorned canes and the memory of what they had been in summer.

Her injured foot was propped up with careful disregard for the doctor's orders. She had a thick shawl drawn close against the morning's lingering chill. She looked up at his approach, and he saw in her face that she had already guessed something of his errand.

"Good morning, Mr, Darcy. I am glad to see you recovering,” she said, offering a warm smile, and demure look, as her own heart began to beat in rapid succession.

He came and sat beside her on the bench, his breadth showing in the cold morning light. He was close enough that their shoulders touched, and found, now that the moment had actually arrived, that all the careful phrases he had rehearsed across a sleepless night had deserted him entirely.

"I do not know that I have anything left to offer you beyond what I have already, in one fashion or another, told you these last days.” He took her gloved hand, and said, looking into her glowing eyes, “I love you, Elizabeth. I have loved you a great while, and I do not intend to let caution or pride delay me a moment further. Will you marry me?"

He watched her face in the pale morning light, and found himself, even now, even after everything the last week had settled between them, holding his breath for her answer as though some part of him had not yet fully trusted that it would come.

"Had you asked me before this ordeal of ours, Mr. Darcy, I would have refused you, and I imagine in rather sharp terms." She felt him go still beside her at that, saw the sudden flicker of real alarm cross his face, his mouth parting as though to protest or to plead his case afresh, and she could not entirely suppress the small, warm laugh that rose in her at having caught him so thoroughly off his guard. She squeezed his hand, gently, to steady him before the fear could take proper root.

"However,” she went on, relenting at last, though she let the pause stretch a moment longer, "We have both been altered, I believe this last week, by rather more than either of us would have chosen, and I find that I do not wish to be anywhere in the world so much as I wish to be wherever you are." She turned her hand in his, so that her fingers closed properly around it. "Yes. I will marry you, Mr. Darcy"

For a moment he did not answer her at all, and she watched, with tenderness, as his eyes went bright in a manner she did not think he would have permitted himself to shew her a fortnight before, before this whole terrible, transforming event had stripped away whatever reserve had once stood between his feeling and its shewing.

"You will forgive me," he said, at last, his voice not entirely steady, "if I do not immediately trust myself to answer that as it deserves. I had prepared, I think, for every outcome of this morning except the one now actually before me, and find myself, for perhaps the first time in my life, entirely without a prepared response to draw upon."

"I did not ask for a prepared response," she said. "I do not think I should have believed one, from you, half so readily as I believe whatever this surprise may be," she added with a rueful smile.

He raised her hand to his lips then, and held it there a long moment, his eyes closed, and when he opened them again some of the earlier alarm had gone out of his face entirely. "I do not think that I have ever wanted anything so completely, as I want the whole of the life you have just agreed to share with me. I mean to spend a very great deal of what remains of my own life proving myself worthy of having asked for it at all."

"You need not prove anything," she said. "You have already shewn me the man I am agreeing to marry. I do not require any further proof of it, only the ordinary, unremarkable business of getting on with the marrying."

He laughed at that; it was a real laugh, unguarded, the sound of it surprising them both. And then, he drew her hand to rest against his chest, over the heart she could feel beating hard and fast beneath her palm, and neither of them said anything further for a long moment, content, at last, to let the cold garden and the pale morning light stand witness to a thing that had taken the whole of a terrible week, and a good deal more courage than either of them had known themselves to possess.

She did not wait for him to recover before she leaned in and kissed him. She did it briefly, and a little clumsily, for she had not, in truth, very much practice at the art, and found her own courage rather outrunning her execution. Fortunately, he did not seem to mind, from the way his free hand came up at once to cradle the side of her face, to think the execution wanted anything at all.

When she drew back, breathless and a little astonished at her own boldness, she found him looking at her with an expression of such unguarded tenderness, that she instantly felt a warmth rising to her cheeks that had nothing to do with the winter cold.

She had teased him a hundred times across this last autumn and never once found herself at a loss for the next thing to say to him; but, this time, she found herself at something very like a loss now, and covered it, in the only way she could presently think to, by dropping her gaze to their still-joined hands and saying something rather bold in return.

"You may return that properly, if you like. I do not think either of us need stand on so very much ceremony with each other any longer, given the whole of what we have already survived together."