Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Eighteen

Elizabeth stared at her breakfast with loathing and frustration.

At least she had expanded the range of experiences with which she was familiar. She now could claim to know what it felt like to be both very hungry and yet too nauseated to dare eat anything. Not even the toast.

For the past week she'd had very bad morning sickness, casting up her accounts most mornings into a chamber pot or that overly fancy water closet which could be flushed with water at the pull of a string.

A week after Darcy had left for London, matters had reached the stage where Mrs. Reynolds insisted on having the apothecary called. A personable man, and he'd offered a variety of powders that did reduce the nausea. It had been his opinion, as well as that of everyone aware of her symptoms, that the most likely cause by far was that she was with child.

Mrs. Reynolds had afterwards asked her if she had told Mr. Darcy about this, and she had begged the old housekeeper to say nothing of it to her master, as she wished to announce it in person to him. In any case it was not so rare for the courses to resume after a month or two, and as a result her mother never made a to-do of these occasions until she was further along.

The real reason she did not wish to send a letter announcing this to Darcy was that she both was scared that it would draw him home at once — and that he would treat her with coldness, or with demands, or perhaps he would not even come home.

She missed him. She wished to speak with him about what he'd written in his letter. She wanted to discover what their marriage might become, now that he knew that she had not come to it willingly. But she was frightened.

What had he meant when he said that he now knew how to act?

He'd sent her no further letters in the two weeks since he must have arrived in London.

An hour or so after breakfast Elizabeth settled sufficiently for a walk. Most days she walked about with Georgiana who had traveled far on the path to being a fervent convert to the habit of long walks.

Of course, unlike Elizabeth, Georgiana was a splendid horsewoman.

Afterwards they practiced together on the piano for an hour after Georgiana's master came. Then Georgiana privately practiced with him until a late luncheon.

Two letters came in the post for Elizabeth today, one from her father and one from Jane.

Silver tray, placed down before her.

Seeing the manner in which she stared at his letter and knowing of the tension that Elizabeth felt towards her father, Georgiana suggested that she read the letters now, and that they could have their walk after their luncheon instead.

Elizabeth nodded.

Anything could have come from Papa's pen. Or almost so.

As for Jane, it was a little coincidence that the letters had arrived from the both on the same day. Jane was now in London with the Gardiners, and Elizabeth had received one letter from her since she'd arrived there. It had been more cheerful, but still with a strong tone of melancholy.

Oddly, that had not renewed Elizabeth's anger towards Mr. Darcy.

She believed him. He had honestly believed Jane's heart to be untouched. And she could understand where that belief had come from.

Perhaps she was inclined to think kindly of Mr. Darcy because he had now explained himself to her. She'd read and reread the letter from her husband — the one letter that she had received since he left — a hundred times. She'd read it until she could say many passages by heart. She now understood him.

But despite her love for Jane, Elizabeth expected to find little joy in what she would write.

Despite that, Elizabeth wished to put off reading Papa's letter. There was still a loud echo in Elizabeth of a girl betrayed in her most serious crisis by a father who she only learned then was not perfect in essentials.

Dear, dear, dear Lizzy!

You shall scarce credit what has happened!

I am to be married to Mr. Bingley!

My joy is nearly complete, and it only misses your presence to make it so.

I can scarcely write, my hand trembles with happiness. A part of me does not believe my happiness, but it is real. We have kissed, held hands, gained Papa's blessing, and even a date for the happy event has been set. However complete you can imagine my happiness, it is greater.

Given the state of affairs subsisting at the time of my last letter to you, this must be a shock. We had after all had no word of Bingley or the nature of the business that drew him from Netherfield in two months. There was no expectation of seeing him, and while we had called on his sisters upon reaching London, they had not returned the call after a duration of three weeks.

He came to call this evening when we had already sat down to dinner. The servants were shocked and surprised to have a caller, and Sarah tried to stop him from entering, but he was determined, and would not be gainsaid, and when Mrs. Gardiner went to the door to see what the hubbub was about, she allowed him entry and an interview with me.

The way he looked when he entered the room — oh, I think I shall never forget his hair, his coat, and his eyes. He was quite serious and nervous, but also fatigued and stained with dirt from the road.

Miss Bingley had not informed him that we were in London, so he rode to Longbourn this morning just to call on me! And then after speaking with Papa, who gave a letter of consent conditional upon my own consent, my Mr. Bingley — Charles. He tells me to call him Charles! — rode back to London without any further rest. I had… I admit it, I had been greatly hurt by how he left so suddenly, right when you married — but now! Now! I am all that can be happy. I cannot cease to smile.

Can you believe it? He had been wholly convinced of my indifference. It was only that he had believed that it was hopeless to win my love that led him to leave. When I inquired after matters were settled between us, about what had led him to act now, he informed me that it was your husband's counsel, based on information that he had received from YOU , that gave him the ability to hope once more.

My dear Lizzy, you have been most indiscreet! And quite sly!

And you of course ought not have done it, and I am most embarrassed, but also thank you, thank you, and thank you once more! Thank you, a thousand times!

I have never been so happy, it is as though I am flying.

But also tired, and I must sleep.

Please give my gratitude and thanks to Mr. Darcy when he returns to Pemberley from this business that has kept him in London.

Your loving sister, J Bennet

PS: I can only write a line, as the letter must be sealed this minute to make the post, but Mr. Darcy himself called upon us here at Gracechurch Street. And you had said to Mrs. Gardiner that he would never do so. But he did. And he was most polite and gave every indication that he enjoyed his visit very much. I liked him more than when he was at Netherfield, I believe it must be your influence upon him — he invited Bingley and I to make a long visit to Pemberley this summer, so we shall see you then, though I hope that you shall be present at our wedding, even though it is a long journey.

This letter threw Elizabeth into an agitation of spirits that took her some minutes to recover from.

Jane was to marry Mr. Bingley?

And Mr. Darcy had arranged it?

A glow of happiness suffused through Elizabeth. He must have done it in hopes of making her happy.

A further thought pushed that notion away.

Her husband was a man of honor, and once he had understood that he had caused harm through his error, he would see it as his duty to do his best to correct matters. That was all.

But even that was a thought which left Elizabeth with a glow in her heart towards him. Surely, he could not be truly cold towards her, and determined to have nothing further to do with her, when he had arranged for her dear sister to marry the man she admired?

No, Mr. Darcy really could do this solely because it was his duty, and for the sake of his friend. It proved nothing of his feelings towards her.

After a while contemplating this insoluble question, Elizabeth turned to her father's letter, with some curiosity, as he must have written it after Mr. Bingley's visit to Longbourn.

Dear Lizzy,

I ought to write at great length upon what you informed me of in your last letter, but I confess that I have not wholly settled in my mind how to speak, or even what to think of myself. I feel my own mistake yet more keenly than I had before. I had written my first letter in an awareness that I had been harsh and unkind, but there had yet been a self-righteous sense of my own superior judgement. I know that you admire your own judgement to a sufficient extent to be able to empathize with the pain of realizing that you had made a serious mistake with great consequences, and especially in a case where you ought to have known better.

My poor girl. I cannot think of the matter without pain and great self-reproach.

Of course you did not mean to entrap Mr. Darcy. The instant I read your letter, I knew that it had been nothing of the sort. You no doubt behaved foolishly, but it was not the sort of foolishness deserving of these consequences. And I now cannot help you, except by telling you that I was deeply, deeply wrong, and that I regret that I was not the refuge you needed. I cannot even explain the nature of my mistake, for the obviousness of the fact that it was a mistake has written over whatever reasoning led me to think you could have acted in this way.

The one part of it that I understand, and that I have sworn to myself to never repeat, is that in my anger I did not listen to you. I did not give you an opportunity to explain yourself. Had you been given that opportunity, you would have told me the truth, and I hope I would have believed you. Perhaps I then could have acted in a way that would have saved us from the dissatisfaction and unhappiness we all have experienced since.

I also confess that I am deeply worried by what you said about your quarrel with Mr. Darcy. That also delayed my letter, for I wished to give you some tangible aid, but though I have wracked my brains, I have fallen upon no scheme to do so with any likelihood of success.

He is a commanding man, the sort who expects to receive anything he condescends to ask. But I also have always thought him to be honorable and responsible. He offered to marry you, when he must have known that I would never have challenged him to a duel, and that he could easily escape without any serious consequences, spoke well of his character. And the recent information that we have received gives me more hope for you and the future happiness of your connection to your husband.

And now let my pen turn to happier matters: You will smile to hear of the true comedy of errors that we have lately experienced.

You can well imagine my surprise when Mr. Bingley rode up to Longbourn yesterday not long after noon — especially as the racket and commotion around how he'd decamped so suddenly from his estate had at last settled and ceased to be your mother's chief entertainment at the dinner table.

When Mr. Bingley had first come to the neighborhood, your mother had suggested that his principal purpose in settling here was to offer himself as a husband to one of you girls. I confess I had taken the skeptical point of view on the matter, thinking that he may have had a different goal in mind when he took an estate on the first sight of it.

It now is evident that your mother judged more soundly — an easy enough error to explain, as I had not met the man at the time and judged him as a wholly ordinary fellow. I have seldom been so pleased to be proven incorrect.

This fine gentleman appeared outside our door begging for a chance to speak to Jane.

The poor man had ridden three hours out from London, in a gloomy rain, only to be told that the woman he wished to speak to was in London herself.

We of course did what we could to refresh him, but the poor boy insisted on riding back at once to London, as soon as we gave him her address. I believe that he would not have given his poor horse a half hour's rest if I had not insisted that the two of us speak. Fatherly duty and all — especially as I have a guilty conscience from how I mishandled a similar matter. I had him in the study, and I was in a proper mood to enjoy that ancient ritual of fatherhood, giving the suitor to my daughter's hand as many anxious palpitations as his nature permitted.

By the way, that is no doubt the real reason for my annoyance over your marriage. Mr. Darcy's character has too much of what the French call sang froid.

After offering a glass of brandy, and making him drink it, and a cigar, and making him smoke it, I asked our Mr. Bingley what his intentions towards my daughter, Miss Jane Bennet, were. Since he is to be our relation, I think it proper to claim him as "ours", though he chiefly is Jane's Mr. Bingley. He turned a delightful shade of red, looked down, looked up, looked to the side, looked at the ceiling, looked at me, and then said that he wished to talk to her.

"I had deduced that information, from your begging to see her," replied I. "But upon which subject did you hope the conversation to revolve?"

The following involved too much hemming, hawing, and yet more embarrassed blushing to impose upon you in writing, or myself in memory — our Mr. Bingley has more of the temperament of a schoolgirl than a man of twenty and four ought to have, but besides that, I can make no complaint about him — After a long course of suffering, he managed to stammer out his hope to marry her, if she would say that she loved him, and that she would have him, and further he wished me to understand that his intentions were wholly honorable.

I questioned him about his disappearance — not simply for reasons of form, but because I was concerned. Mr. Bingley then confessed to having become convinced, for reasons he did not wish to specify, that Jane had been wholly indifferent to him, but that he had heard of late reason to think that was not true, and that he wished to ask her himself to find the truth.

"And what," I asked, "had given you the notion that my daughter was in fact indifferent to you, and what, further, had given you now the notion that she was not."

What followed was a matter of staring.

I managed to adopt the visage of the eagle-eyed father, prepared to defend his daughter with musket, ill-tempered hounds and muscled footmen. It was a delightful feeling. At last, he revealed that it was your husband Mr. Darcy who gave him both of these notions. Both !

What a delightful fellow.

And that shows another comedy of errors. Mr. Darcy first convinced his friend to abandon Jane, and then learning of his own mistake, and he had to journey three days, instead of three hours, to make matters correct.

This revelation also relieved some anxiety on my part, for I hold myself as having deduced what prompted that indecipherable line in your last letter to me saying "we have quarreled upon a matter that would only cause pain if more widely known." I am sure you thought I would either understand, or at least not be concerned by that. Your assumption was incorrect, and I was most concerned.

You learned about your husband's first interference with Jane, and as consequence of the quarrel he went off to correct matters, which he now has, after some dithering. And we all are very grateful to him for doing so, even though the whole difficulty was his fault in the first place.

A good memory in such cases may be unpardonable, but you must decide for yourself whether you will remember the whole tale, or just its happy conclusion.

Mr. Darcy had sought Bingley out that very morning to inform him that he had been mistaken about Jane's indifference, and the instant Bingley heard this, he set off to Longbourn to court the girl.

And so, I am now the one to inform you that Mr. Darcy's matter of business which called him away from your side was real. A journey of three days solely, I assume, to tell Mr. Bingley that our Jane was not wholly insensible to Bingley's charms. A task he might have avoided entirely had he been more cautious at first, and which he might have executed via letter had he been more sensible.

I fear that Mr. Bingley can be convinced to near anything by the influence of Mr. Darcy. Alas, Jane is also easily susceptible to the influence of those who she loves and trusts. They shall be so generous that they will go deeply into debt, and they will constantly be imposed upon by their friends, acquaintances, and even, I would say, enemies, except both members of the couple are too universally likable to have such creatures in their lives.

After having heard this from Bingley — and after I'd enforced sufficient delay for his horse to recover sufficiently to undertake a second journey in one day — I gave Bingley my blessing, contingent on Jane's far more important approval, and penned a note for Bingley to take to Mr. Gardiner saying as much. I asked your uncle to negotiate the settlement as far as he could, as he is far better at such matters than I.

Bingley was off at once, no delay, no visit to the estate he held in the neighborhood, simply back to London, and straight to Cheapside.

He had struck me as generally indecisive, but he put a partial lie to the notion yesterday. We received by post this afternoon a letter filled with Jane's happy ecstasies on the promise of marriage between her and Bingley, and now I am obliged by your mother to take her and the girls to London to aid Jane in buying her trousseau. I had imagined Jane to be fully capable of buying her own clothes, especially with Mrs. Gardiner's help, but I have been informed most firmly by your mother that I am wholly mistaken in the matter.

Alas, I cannot avoid town this year. If there is any book you cannot find in the famous library of Pemberley, tell me by writing, and I would take it as a kindness if you let me hunt it down in the bookstores of town, and send it as a gift to you.

We shall settle in town for several weeks, as your youngest sisters have had their heads too turned by those young officers that hang about the neighborhood. I have an eager longing for that day this summer when the regiment is to heigh off to new flirting grounds.

That Wickham fellow is the worst of them, making love to all and sundry, and especially to Lydia and Kitty, while spreading stories about your husband. I view his stories as unlikely to be true, but I should not spread them about myself, since he always insists that he would never wish to have these stories spread, because of his love for old Mr. Darcy.

If you think it wise, I will make a ruckus when we return to Longbourn, and ban Wickham from the village, on the strength of my universally known respect for your husband. I at least do not believe your Mr. Darcy to be any worse than the usual run of rich men, and this most recent matter makes me think him to be rather better than most. That is what I mean to say.

I know your quarrel is what in fact sent him to London, and that he did not come solely to speak to Mr. Bingley. I am sincerely sorry to see you at odds with your husband, and I sincerely hope that you will with time find a good way of living with him. A better one than the one that I have led with your mother. It works well enough for our temperaments, and I am happy enough, and I think she is as well, but I always hoped for you, my beloved daughter, to have a true companionship of friendship and love with the partner of your life.

Perhaps this can be found with Mr. Darcy.

From Jane's letter received yesterday, it appears he called at the Gardiners, and made a polite showing of himself. That you visited them three times, and him zero, in the time you were in London was a pointed message. Now that he has visited them strikes me as an attempt to send a different message — and he must hope for you to hear this new message.

Whatever resentment he may have had following your disagreements has not governed him to the point that he is unwilling to do us a great favor. We now know Mr. Darcy to be a man who listens to you, who can change his mind, and who will take solid and substantial action to repair the damage of his errors.

All these points speak well of him.

I do not know the substance of your quarrel, not beyond my guess that Jane and Mr. Bingley featured prominently in it, and I do not know the details of Mr. Darcy's mind or character. And I have lost the moral authority a parent ought to have with their child. I simply write as an observer of character — there are those who hold onto their resentments, even when the other party made an effort to show themselves open to reconciliation, and there are those who respond to gestures of forgiveness with their own gestures. As a general, though by no means universal, rule, the persons who are more apt to forgive, and who turn towards friendly gestures with friendliness seem to be happier.

Your loving father,

T Benne t