Page 21 of My Feelings for You Will Not Be Repressed

Her father had known. That was the thing she could not quite swallow. He had sat in the library at Longbourn and watched five girls grow up in the shadow of a wall he might have built, and had made a joke of it. She stood up. She went to the window, and found that her breathing had grown short and shallow, as it did when she was frightened.

The thought came to her then, quite unbidden, with the whole force of a cold hand laid on the back of her neck, that there was one man in the world who could mend it. He could do it in an afternoon. Mr. Darcy could do it between his breakfast and his letters. A word to a solicitor; the mortgage on the meadows bought up; the debts discharged; a sum paid into the Bank in the names of five young women who had never asked for it. It would cost him less than a good horse. And it would be done, and she would never see it, and the whole of that cold sick dread that had come over her in the last quarter of an hour would be lifted from every Bennet in England.

She stood quite still. How easily it could be done. How very easily. It was the thing she had thought of in the road outside Tarrant’s farm, with a dazed uncertainty that she had not liked; and now it came back to her sharpened to a point. She could not accept a gift of that kind. She could not accept it from anyone. And she was not such a fool as to suppose that the man in question would offer it, in so many words; she knew, now, that he would not. She had been told as much, in the lane, and in the road, and in the particular nervous deference with which he had bowed to her at the end of the accident, as if there were a window between them that he dared not break.

But it would be there. Under everything. If she took him, if she were ever so ill-advised, then every favour he did her, every kindness, every grave and generous gesture, would carry upon its back the weight of what he had been given the power to do. She would never be certain. She would never know, when she opened her mouth to disagree with him, whether it was permitted her by right or by sufferance. If she quarrelled, would he say nothing, as a gentleman, and think of Longbourn? If she was angry, would she not, in some small ugly corner of her heart, hear the word ingratitude before it was spoken? She had seen marriages built upon that foundation. She had seen what grew in them.

“I am not angry with you for it,” said Elizabeth aloud, quite suddenly, to the empty room; and then, in the same breath, with a rush of heat, “I am so very angry with you for it that I could scream.” She did not know whom she addressed. She did not much want to know.

It was Mr. Collins, of course, who carried the news to Rosings. He did not mean any harm. He never did. He was merely so full of Lady Catherine’s visit, and so anxious to explain to the gentlemen the mortifying misapprehension under which his cousin Elizabeth must have laboured with respect to the condescension she had received, that he told it all at dinner, in the intervals of the soup: the entail, the debts, the sale of the meadows, the single deplorable letter which his poor cousins had received that afternoon, and which Mrs. Collins had mentioned to him in confidence. The young ladies, said Mr. Collins, with a tender, regretful, wholly complacent sigh, are, I fear, very precariously circumstanced.

Darcy had put down his fork. He sat at the far end of the table, on Lady Catherine’s left, with his eyes on his plate, and he did not look up for the rest of the meal. The Colonel, watching him from across the epergne, saw no change in his face. It was a trick he had learned, the Colonel thought, as a boy, that the harder a thing struck him, the stiller he grew. But when the ladies had risen, and the three men were left alone with the port, Darcy got up without a word and walked to the far window and stood there a long time, with one hand gripping the shutter.

The Colonel sent Mr. Collins away on an invented errand, which took him ten minutes.

“Mr. Kendrick,” said Darcy aloud.

The Colonel said, “I beg your pardon?”

“I could write to him tonight. He has a man in Hertford. I would have the mortgage on the meadows, and the wine-merchant, and every debt that stands against Longbourn, in my hands within the week.” He gave a short hard laugh. “It would cost me less than the Marlborough diamonds cost my father in a morning. I could do it before supper.” He paused and then added, “I could do it so that she never knew.”

Richard shook his head. “She would know.”

“How?” said Darcy, savagely. He swung round. “How would she know? A note to an attorney in Hertford. A change of name on a deed. I am not a child, Richard, I know how it is done.”

“She would know,” said the Colonel, “because she is clever, and because she is not a fool, and because within the year some perfectly honest person would tell her. And then she would look at every moment she had spent with you since Hunsford and ask herself whether it had been bought.”

Darcy was silent. He stood in the half-light with his fists clenched, and Richard saw that his face, in profile, was running with a kind of dark, shamed, unwilling rage. The look was not directed at his cousin, and it was not even directed at Mr. Collins who had been sent away.

“Three weeks,” said Darcy, between his teeth. “I have kept your rules for twelve days. I have done everything. I have been civil to my aunt. I have been civil to Collins. And she sits in that parsonage reading a letter that tells her she has nothing, and I could mend it with my little finger, and I am not to touch it.”

The Colonel considered Darcy’s point, but ultimately disagreed. “No.”

“Then what am I to do? How is a man to show he means well?” He stopped, and began again, more quietly. His voice had gone rough. “How does a man show good intentions, Richard, without making a woman feel purchased? Tell me that. You are the strategist. Tell me how it is done.”

The Colonel did not answer at once. He looked at his cousin for some while, at the grey, hard, tired face, and he thought, not for the first time that month, that he had never known him until now. “I do not think it can be done,” he said at last. “Not with certainty. That is the horror of it. You cannot control how she receives you. You can be as clean as glass, and if she chooses to think you are buying her, then she will think so, and nothing that you do will undo it.”

“Then what is the use?” Darcy sounded hopeless.

“The only thing you can do,” said the Colonel slowly, “is to make sure she remains free to refuse.”

Darcy turned his head.

“That is all,” said Richard. “That is the whole of the art. Not that she will accept. That she could say no, at any hour, and lose nothing by it. No debts, nor obligations. No weight upon her side of the scale that was not put there by her own heart. The moment she can no longer say no, Fitz, you have lost, whatever she says.”

It was very quiet in the dining-room. A log shifted in the grate, and the long windows, black with night, gave back two tall figures and a table covered with the ruin of a dinner. Darcy did not move.

He was thinking of the road on the Westerham hill. He was thinking of a small cool hand under his, holding a splint, and of a voice that had said I noticed. He was thinking of every woman who had ever looked at him across a ballroom with her eyes on his rent-roll; of the thousand slow dishonest ways in which a man in his position is loved. He had despised it, all his life. He had despised it, God help him, with such thoroughness that when the real thing at last came walking up the road in a muslin gown and a muddy hem, with her chin up and not one particle of interest in his fortune, he had not known it for what it was, and had told it so.

And now it was asking him, in the plainest possible terms, to put down the one weapon he had never in his life been without, and leave it where it lay. It was the most difficult thing he had ever been asked to do. It was also, he began slowly to understand, the only gift in his power that was worth giving. Not the money. Not the name. Not the acres, nor the house, nor the great slow weight of Pemberley. The one thing in the world he could offer her that nobody else could was the power to turn him away, and to feel no fear, and to owe him nothing.

He thought, suddenly, I must love her enough to let her choose without me. He did not say it. It was not a thing that could be said aloud, in a dining-room, to a Colonel of the line. But he stood a long time at the window, with the night pressing against the glass, and when at last he turned, the Colonel saw that the rage had gone out of his face, and left something behind it that was quieter and a great deal harder to look at.

CHAPTER 12

Elizabeth sent the message, but it took her three days to do so. She had written the letter four times. The first draft had been too stiff, and the second too warm, and the third had so nearly the tone of a summons that she had burnt it in the grate and gone out to the garden to look at the beans. In the end she said it to Charlotte aloud, in the vestry, with her back turned, in six words. Tell him I will walk, if he wishes.

Charlotte had said nothing at all. She had only gone, and come back, and said, “Saturday. After the evening at Rosings. In the lower garden, by the sundial. He asks that no one be told, and says that he will not be offended if you do not come.”