Part 8
She sees him start at this terrible home-thrust, and she is not inclined to be magnanimous in pursuing her advantage. “You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it,” she adds. Surely this is enough. But the obvious astonishment with which he hears her, the expression of mingled incredulity and mortification with which he looks at her, spurs on the intrepid, wrathful girl to explain further that from the very beginning--from the first moment of their acquaintance almost--his manners have impressed her with the fullest belief in his arrogance and conceit. She speaks out the disapprobation which has ended in invincible dislike, and winds up with the somewhat gratuitous statement that she had not known him a month before she felt that he was the last man in the world whom she could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Rash, foolish--if perfectly sincere--words can go no further.
“You have said quite enough, madam,” Darcy puts an end to the altercation. “I perfectly comprehend your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness.”
So the stormy interview terminates, and Elizabeth is left to recover from the tumult of her feelings, though it is too soon for her to be sorry for having spoken so many vehement words in her anger.
Of course, Elizabeth keeps an honourable silence on what has befallen her. She has no confidante save her own thoughts, and she is reduced next morning to walking out alone to indulge them in peace, when again she sees a gentleman in the distance. This time she retreats from him, but she hears Mr. Darcy’s voice repeat her name. She has no choice save to stop and face him.
He comes up, holds out a letter, and saying quietly and haughtily, “Will you do me the honour of reading that letter?” bows himself off.
With the strongest curiosity, though with no expectation of pleasure, Elizabeth opens the letter, and is still more surprised to find it contains two sheets (the old, spacious sheets) written quite through in a close hand, with the cover also full.
The letter is not a love-letter, or a letter of apology; it is simply a vindication of the writer’s character from the charges which Elizabeth had impulsively brought against it.
In the first part, which deals with the accusation against Darcy for having deliberately separated Bingley and Jane, he begins by making the small atonement of emphatically declaring that he had acted under a mistaken impression. He has been persuaded that, while his friend was rapidly becoming attached to Miss Bennet, she, on her part, was still sufficiently indifferent to him to prevent her happiness being seriously implicated in the affair. In this light, Darcy has thought himself at liberty to take all lawful means to hinder the marriage for his friend’s sake, while he himself was still successfully struggling with his admiration for Elizabeth.
In recapitulating the objections to the marriage, the writer sins afresh, and worse than ever where his reader’s feelings are concerned. He writes some very plain and hard words of the Bennet family which, in the middle of his strong determination to clear himself, he must have known would wound Elizabeth to the quick. He says that the inferiority of her mother’s origin, however much to be regretted, is nothing in comparison with that total want of propriety so frequently--almost so uniformly--betrayed by Mrs. Bennet herself, by Elizabeth’s three younger sisters, and occasionally even by her father.
Apparently, Darcy has relented a little after writing these harsh words, for in the next sentence he does ask her shortly to pardon him. He protests it pains him to offend her. He even goes a little out of his way, to bid her, in her concern for the defects of her relations, and her displeasure with him for unreservedly pointing them out, take comfort from the consideration that she and her elder sister have so conducted themselves as to escape any share of the censure liberally bestowed on the others. He says, with lurking tenderness, under the guise of stern justice, that the exemption is honourable to the sense and disposition both of Jane and Elizabeth.
In proceeding to dispose of her violent advocacy of Wickham’s cause and consequent severe aspersions of his own character, Darcy treats the subject as more serious, and here the higher nature of the man comes in. In proportion to the greater injury done him, he grows calmer, more reasonable, almost magnanimous. With a manly self-restraint and absence of all invective, which are in themselves proofs of his honesty of purpose, he consents to make plain to her, at whatever sacrifices of his pride and reserve, how very different from what she supposes have been his relations with Wickham. He even puts himself to the pain of entrusting to her honour a portion of the story which involves another member of his family, the young sister to whom he is confessedly the best of brothers, in order to complete the exposure of the wholesale misrepresentation, the tangled web of truth and falsehood, with which Wickham has deceived her.
While young men at college together, Darcy knew how far Wickham fell short of the elder Darcy’s good opinion, without attempting to deprive the lad of his patron’s favour. In those days Wickham had shown himself as disinclined, as he was unfit, to take orders; and at the death of his godfather, who had only recommended him to the family living conditionally--on his proving suitable, and on the younger Darcy’s approbation of the presentation--Wickham had announced his objections to the step proposed, and had accepted £3,000 as an equivalent. It was not till after he had failed in studying for the bar, and when he had wasted the money he had received, that he had again applied to Darcy with cool effrontery, professing his readiness to comply with the necessary conditions, and claiming the presentation to the living.
On Darcy’s refusal, Wickham had attempted to revenge himself, and at the same time to secure Georgiana Darcy’s fortune of £30,000 by renewing his acquaintance with Darcy’s sister, and making use of her childish affection for him, until he had sufficiently ingratiated himself with the inexperienced girl of fifteen, to induce her to believe herself in love, and to consent to an elopement with him. Georgiana was only saved from a miserable fate by the affection for the elder brother who had been like a second father to her, which caused her, at the last moment, to refuse to go any further in deceiving and defying him, and to confess to him her foolish intention.
Darcy ends his letter by referring Elizabeth Bennet for confirmation of his account, should she be inclined to question it, to his cousin. Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is acquainted with the entire particulars, and who can have no motive in misleading her.
Then with the revived regret and charity with which a man will say farewell to the woman he has loved--and loves still, in spite of her cruel treatment of him--he bids God bless her, before he signs himself Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Elizabeth reads eagerly, with a throng of conflicting emotions. She commences by being incredulous. “This could not be true,” she says of his assertion that he has thought Jane free from any special partiality for Bingley, while she writhes under the cutting references to her other relations and their exhibition of themselves at the Netherfield ball.
Again she cries out with still more energy, “This must be false,” when she comes to the temperate statement of Wickham’s misconduct and absolute untrustworthiness.
But as she reads, and re-reads, and reflects on the contents of the letter, the girl’s good sense, her own fairness and truthfulness come to her aid against the rooted prejudice which had so blinded her judgment--finding ample food as it did in the besetting sin of Darcy, which reflected itself in his unpopular and unconciliatory manner, in contrast with the superficially pleasant address, masking the unprincipled selfishness of Wickham.
Elizabeth is forced to see how completely she has been taken in, how little ground she has had to go upon in either case, save vanity piqued on the one hand and gratified on the other. She shrinks abashed before her own errors of observation and reasoning--she who has been so proud of her penetration and cleverness.
She hates to remember her zealous support of Wickham, of whom she had literally known nothing, except that he was handsome and agreeable, and from the stories he has told her himself with a frankness which, even if he had been perfectly sincere, would have been imprudent and indelicate in so recent an acquaintance.
She recoils from the recollection of her sharpness and uncalled-for taunts to Darcy, and is brought to admit that his warm, constant regard for her, in the teeth of her unconcealed dislike to him, has been no common compliment from such a man; though she must still think that he urged his suit in an improper and unamiable manner.
When Elizabeth returns to Longbourn, she is doubtful whether or not she ought to tell so much of what she has learned of Wickham’s real character as to open the eyes of their common acquaintances; but hearing, to her immense relief, that the militia regiment stationed at Meryton is under orders to go into camp at Brighton, and that Wickham must leave the neighbourhood, in company with the rest of the officers, in the course of a fortnight, she resolves, with the approval of her sister Jane, who has been the astonished listener to all Elizabeth’s adventures, to leave Wickham the opportunity of redeeming the past, by refraining from the uncongenial task of exposing him to his associates.
The two younger Miss Bennets, in company with the more thoughtless girls of their immediate circle, are sunk in the depths of despair at the prospect of the loss of liveliness in their society, which the removal of the regiment involves. But Lydia, who has been loudest in her lamentations, is more than consoled, for the present, by an invitation from the wife of the colonel of the regiment, a newly-married woman, little older and hardly less empty-headed than Lydia herself, to accompany her on a visit to Brighton.
As Lydia’s ideas of felicity are summed up in flirting noisily with six officers at once, Brighton and its camp appear like Paradise to her.
In some respects, Lydia Bennet and George Wickham are not unlike the fast heroine and lady-killing hero of many modern novels. It is edifying to contemplate the unqualified contempt and reprobation with which Jane Austen viewed the couple.
Elizabeth Bennet is so conscious of the risk and harm to Lydia, in allowing her to go to a town which combines all the disadvantages of a watering-place and regimental quarters with such slender guardianship as that of her friend, Mrs. Foster, that the elder sister feels bound to risk giving mortal offence to Lydia, and incurring the indignation of their mother, who is nearly as bent on her daughter’s paying the undesirable visit, as is the forward, spoilt girl of sixteen on her own account. So Elizabeth goes to her father, and urges him to keep her youngest sister at home.
But Mr. Bennet will not be stirred up to exercise his authority. He is as convinced as anybody can be of the silliness and folly of Lydia, but, acting on his usual plan, he is more inclined to laugh at her than to try to restrain her. Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself at some public place, and she could never do it at less expense and inconvenience to her family. They will have no peace at Longbourn if she does not go to Brighton. As the officers will find women better worth their notice there, let her relations hope Lydia may be taught her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorising them in locking her up for the rest of her life.
III.
Elizabeth has a gratification in store for her, to which she has long looked forward, so simple and common a one in this generation, that it is refreshing to hear how much, even in anticipation, a trip to the Lakes or to Derbyshire has been to the untravelled girl, with her fresh, unjaded tastes. In the same way, it is touching to read in some of the last published letters of Charlotte Brontë how the gifted, hard-faring woman was disposed to think a week by the sea, which she had not seen before, in the company of a congenial friend, implied almost too much happiness for this world.
The Bennets have an uncle and aunt in London, in trade, like the rest of their mother’s relations, inhabiting a house in the City region of Gracechurch Street, but who are in all other respects different from Mrs. Bennet and the Philips in Meryton. Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner are sensible, intelligent, amiable people, much esteemed by their elder nieces. The couple have promised to take Elizabeth with them on a summer tour of a month’s duration to the Lakes; the idea cheers and consoles the girl under a hundred depressing and mortifying influences.
As it happens, Mr. Gardiner cannot go so far as the Lakes, and the expedition is limited to Derbyshire, with its dales, towns, and great houses, its Peak, and its caverns. Elizabeth enjoys herself heartily, without an _arrière pensée_, till the excursion brings the party to the little town of Lambton, where Mrs. Gardiner had once lived for several years, and where she has still old acquaintances. Elizabeth is aware that Lambton is within a mile or two of Mr. Darcy’s estate and house of Pemberley. She cannot be without some curiosity to see the fine place, of which, had she so chosen, she might have been by this time mistress. Therefore, when her companions, who are in complete ignorance of their niece’s special interest in Pemberley, propose to drive to it, as one of the show-places of the neighbourhood, Elizabeth, having carefully ascertained that not one of the family is at home, willingly consents to accompany her uncle and aunt.
Jane Austen hardly ever describes scenery. The criticism on a recent tale, that there is not much of human nature but a great deal about the weather in the book, could never have been spoken of her stories. The fashion in the fiction of her day tended to two extremes--to the gorgeous ideal foreign landscape of Mrs. Radcliffe, or to the ignoring of inanimate nature in all save the barest accessories, practised by Mrs. Inchbald and Fanny Burney. Jane Austen preferred the latter style of treatment; her interest is not merely centred in her men and women, it is monopolised by them. As in the old tragic ballads, which were yet so far removed from her stories, there seems no time for elaborate analyses of earth, sea, and sky, with the moulding of these mute forces into subtle sympathy, or clashing discord with men’s moods, a tendency which belongs to artificial and self-conscious art.
Yet we receive the impression that Jane Austen loved the country and country walks. Once and again she paints little landscape pictures which indicate her taste and feeling. As might have been expected in her generation, she shows her preference for rich, cultivated, smiling, or at most prettily picturesque, thoroughly domestic scenery. Her description of Pemberley Park is one of her rare bits of landscape. She dwells with much approbation--not only on the large, handsome stone building (the age which revels in mellow brick, and puts Queen Anne, not to say Queen Elizabeth, houses, far before Georgian mansions, had not yet arrived), standing well on a rising ground--but also on the ridge of wooded hills which forms the background, and on the stream of some natural importance, and “swelled” into still greater, but without any artificial appearance, with banks which are neither formal nor falsely adorned, that constitutes the foreground. One has no difficulty in conjuring up the place--somewhat heavy, yet stately and tranquil, with its stretches of fine wood, its open vistas contrived for “prospects,” and its careful adaptation of the fall of the ground to “a valley narrowing into a glen,” according to the principles of the landscape gardening of the period.
Elizabeth is disinterestedly delighted. She feels that to be mistress of Pemberley might have been something. She is no less pleased with the house, and its lofty, well-proportioned rooms, each window commanding a charming view; the furniture suitable to the fortune of the owner, but neither gaudy nor needlessly fine, with less splendour but more real elegance than the furniture at Rosings. “And of this place,” thinks Elizabeth, with some pardonable hankering, “I might have been mistress. With these rooms I might have been familiarly acquainted. Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But, no--” a wholesome recollection stops the current of her thoughts in time--“I should not have been allowed to invite them.”
The housekeeper, an elderly, respectable-looking woman, much more civil and less fine than Elizabeth had expected, shows the visitors over the house. After Elizabeth has recovered from a momentary alarm, and made a mental note of thanksgiving that they have not come a day later, on the servant’s observing that she expects her master the next morning with a large party of friends, the girl is able to listen with a mixture of feelings, in which wonder and bewilderment are not the least, to the talk which goes on among the others as the family pictures are being looked at. The housekeeper, on finding by some words which drop from Mrs. Gardiner that Elizabeth is acquainted with her master, begins to speak of him with honest pride and warmth. How good a master and landlord he is! How affectionate a brother! How kind to the poor! Does the young lady not think him a very handsome gentleman?
“Very handsome,” answers poor Elizabeth briefly.
One example of the praise thus freely bestowed strikes Elizabeth as of all others the most extraordinary. “I have never had a cross word from him in his life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old,” declares the old servant. And yet, if there was one fault more than another which Elizabeth Bennet had been accustomed to ascribe unhesitatingly to the lordly bear, Darcy, it was a bad temper; but, according to this credible witness, the bear abroad must be a lamb at home.
As Elizabeth digests the reflections aroused by this evidence, and looks at a full-length portrait of the master of the house, in which the face wears such a smile as she had noticed sometimes on the lips of the living man when he looked at her, she feels a deeper sentiment of gratitude than she has yet experienced for the love which had been so strong, though there was little of the courtier in the lover.
The little party are consigned to the gardener, who is conducting them across the lawn to the river. Elizabeth has turned back to look again. Her uncle and aunt have stopped also, and are conjecturing the date of the house, when its owner comes suddenly forward from the road leading to the stables.
The two so much interested are within twenty yards of each other, and cannot avoid an encounter. Their eyes meet; both grow crimson. He absolutely starts, and for a moment seems immovable with surprise, but shortly recovering himself, advances and speaks to Elizabeth with perfect civility, if not perfect composure.
Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner recognise Mr. Darcy from his resemblance to his picture and from the exclamation of the gardener. They stand a little aloof, while the new comer and their niece exchange greetings.
In the meantime Elizabeth is reduced to a state of extreme confusion and discomfort. She scarcely dares lift her eyes to her quondam lover’s face. She cannot forget, and she knows he must recall with equal vividness, the circumstances under which they parted at Hunsford.
She is keenly alive to the impropriety, the indelicacy of his finding her at Pemberley. Why did she come? or why has he thus returned a day before he was expected? How strange her being there must appear to him! In what a disgraceful light may it not strike so vain a man! For Elizabeth still holds forlornly to the last rag of the mental and moral habiliments in which she clothed him. She clings to the conviction of his high opinion of himself and his deserts. But, in spite of herself, amidst all the jumble of sensations which his appearance has excited, none is more distinct or strikes her more forcibly, than the realisation that he is heaping coals of fire on her head, by behaving to the girl who had rejected him--well-nigh with contumely--with the greatest, most sedulous courtesy that a true gentleman could show on such a trying occasion. More than that, there is a complete alteration in his whole tone, which she cannot fail to observe, that might have been perceptible even to a stranger. He has overcome his old aversion to the small polite forms and genialities of social intercourse, along with his old stiffness and coldness. He puts himself to the trouble of inquiring for the very relations he stigmatised, as well as for herself. He asks when she has left home, and how long she means to stay in Derbyshire. He is interested in her answers. He is animated and agreeable, in the middle of his evident agitation, for the first time since she has known him. His words only fail him when his last idea deserts him, and, after standing a moment silent, he recollects himself, and takes his leave.
Elizabeth is full of astonishment in her distress, and all the time she walks about the grounds, mechanically responding to their praises on the part of her companions, and hearing the gardener triumphantly announce that the park is ten miles round, she is puzzling out the riddle, asking herself what Mr. Darcy thinks of her; whether she is still dear to him, in defiance of everything? She cannot tell, not even from her own heart, if he has felt most pain or pleasure in seeing her again; but certainly he has not been at ease.
While the visitors are still wandering about, Elizabeth is again surprised by seeing Darcy at a little distance coming towards them. For a moment she thinks he will strike into another path, but when a turn of the road shows him still advancing, and preparing to greet them with all his newly-acquired cordiality, she determines to emulate him, and gets out the words “delightful,” “charming,” when it strikes her that praise of Pemberley from her may be misconstrued, and she colours and is silent.
Darcy asks if she will do him the honour of introducing her friends.
This is a stroke of civility which even yet Elizabeth did not expect. She cannot suppress a smile at his seeking the acquaintance of some of the very people against whom, viewed as her connections, his pride had revolted. “What will be his surprise,” she thinks, with girlish glee in her reviving spirits, “when he knows who they are? He takes them now for people of fashion.”
As she names the Gardiners’ relationship to herself, she steals a mischievous glance at Darcy, to see how he bears it. She is not without a suspicion that he will decamp, as fast as he can, from such disgraceful companions.
On the contrary, though he is surprised, he bears the news with apparent fortitude, and, so far from going away, turns and walks with them, entering into conversation with Mr. Gardiner.
Elizabeth cannot but be pleased--cannot but triumph. It is consoling that Darcy should know she has some relations for whom there is no need to blush. She listens attentively to all that passes, and glories in every sentence of her uncle’s which marks his intelligence, his taste, or his good manners.