The parsonage is quiet.
Charlotte and Mr Collins have gone to Rosings and Maria with them. Elizabeth stayed behind with a headache.
She takes out Jane’s letters.
Sentences From London
There are several. Three months of them.
There is no complaint in them and no reproach. There is news of keeping well, there are questions after her sisters, there is weather.
She used to read these and think her sister brave.
Read again after what she heard this morning, the sentences change. They read like the careful work of a person who has decided to say nothing.
The bell rings.
The Man Crossing the Room
Darcy comes in.
He asks quickly after her health. Is she better. Elizabeth answers coldly.
He sits. He sits a moment and stands again. He walks a few paces and turns.
And then he speaks.
“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” (Chapter 34)
Elizabeth stares. She colours, and no words come.
He reads that as encouragement.
So he goes on.
What Came Attached to the Word Love
The speech lengthens.
Had he spoken only of feeling it would have been short. Instead he speaks of the feeling together with everything that stood against it.
That her family is beneath his. That the situation does not answer. That he knows perfectly well what such a match would mean for a man in his position.
He believes that concealing none of it is honesty. So he leaves nothing out.
He says every unflattering word of it without his voice once wavering, and that is because he is not troubled about the answer.
Throughout the speech he treats consent as a thing already arranged.
Elizabeth’s face hardens as she listens.
No
He waits for her answer.
There is no doubt in the waiting face. It is not the face of a man in suspense. It is the face of a man who knows the result.
She refuses him.
His expression changes. Astonishment comes first, and anger after it.
Instead of asking why, he asks this. May he know why he is rejected with so little effort at civility.
And she asks in return. Then she might ask too. He has told her he came against his will and against his judgement, and why should she be civil after that.
It breaks open.
She names her sister. It was he who divided them. She heard it this morning.
Darcy does not deny it. He says the thing is his, and he adds one line more. Towards his friend he had been kinder than towards himself.
Wickham’s name comes up. A man’s whole prospects ruined, she says, and you hear his name and smile.
Darcy turns white.
The Last Man in the World
At the end she says it.
In whatever manner he had offered, she could not have been tempted to accept. He is the last man in the world whom she could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Darcy says nothing.
He apologises briefly. He has taken up her time. He wishes her health and happiness.
And he goes.
The door sounds behind him.
Today, the Man Who Read the Answer First
Elizabeth sits down and cries for half an hour.
The person who misread in this chapter is Darcy.
He calculated everything accurately. The difference in fortune, the state of her family, what such a marriage would cost him in the world. All of it was reckoned. Exactly one thing was left out of the reckoning.
Her answer.
He had examined his own feeling for years and fought hard to master it. The fight was so long and so difficult that he believed the telling of it would move her. He had paid a great price, and he assumed the person receiving it would see the price.
But a story about what something cost is moving only to the one who paid.
What the listener kept was different. There was a declaration of love, and beside it an account of how hard that love had been to bear, and the two things sat in the same room.
Has liking arrived together with a statement about what someone would have to bear?