There is a party at her aunt’s house. The officers they met in the road the day before are there.
Wickham is among them. Nearly every woman in the room was looking his way, and the seat he finally took was beside Elizabeth.
The Man in the Next Seat
They begin with the weather and the roads. Even that much is entertaining coming from him.
The talk moves to Netherfield.
Elizabeth asks how long Mr. Darcy has been staying there.
About a month, he says. A noble estate in Derbyshire, a clear ten thousand a year, and nobody could give her surer information on the subject than himself.
He has been connected with that family in a particular manner since his infancy.
Then he asks a question of his own. How long has she known the man?
She can hardly say she knows him, Elizabeth answers. Only that he is not at all liked here, and that everybody is disgusted with his pride.
Wickham does not agree at once. He has known him too long and too well, he says, to be a fair judge.
That one line opens the evening.
The Man Who Should Have Been a Clergyman
He begins the story.
The late Mr. Darcy was one of the best men that ever breathed, he says, and the truest friend he ever had. His voice drops on the name.
The church ought to have been his profession. He was brought up for it, and by now he should have had a valuable living of his own.
The late Mr. Darcy left him the next presentation of the best living in his gift. He was his godfather, excessively attached to him, meant to provide for him amply and died believing he had.
When the living fell vacant it went to someone else.
Elizabeth is astonished. How could that be, she asks. How could a will be disregarded, and why did he not go to law?
There was an informality in the terms, he answers. It left room to read the bequest as a conditional recommendation, and the room was used.
He was said to have forfeited the claim by extravagance and imprudence, he adds. Words like that can mean anything, and they can mean nothing.
Saying He Will Not Expose Him
Elizabeth is indignant. Such a man deserves to be publicly disgraced.
Wickham’s answer is the centre of the evening.
Some day he will be, he says. Only it shall not be by him.
“Till I can forget his father, I can never defy or expose him.” (Chapter 16)
Elizabeth honours him for the feeling. He looked handsomer than ever while he said it.
What happened there is not visible on the night.
Wickham has said he will not attack the man, having already said everything an attack would need. And the restraint made the whole account more believable than it would otherwise have been.
How the Story Closes Up
The conversation goes on.
Asked why Darcy would do it, he names jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy been less fond of him, the son might have borne with him better.
Darcy’s sister comes up too. Very proud, he says.
So does Lady Catherine, who is Darcy’s aunt, and the report that he is to marry her daughter and join the two estates.
At the end he adds one thing more. Darcy can be perfectly agreeable whenever he chooses.
Among people who match him in consequence he is a different man altogether. With the rich he is liberal, just, sincere, rational, honourable, and perhaps even pleasant.
That last remark closes the account.
The neighbourhood’s verdict on a proud man, a history only he knows, and an explanation for why the history has never come out, all fit together in one place. There is no gap left anywhere in it.
Today, What Came from One Person Only
Count what Elizabeth actually gained that evening and it comes to one thing.
The word of a man she had met the day before.
There was no second account, no document, and nobody asked what the other side would say.
Yet she thinks of nothing but him and his story the whole way home. In her mind Darcy has stopped being a rude man and become a bad one.
The axis of this series is at its clearest here. People read each other and are almost always wrong, and the moment of being wrong is usually not the moment with no evidence but the moment a welcome piece of evidence turns up.
Elizabeth is not a foolish woman. She is the quickest mind in her family. And what she did that evening was not to test the account but to accept it.
What this belief goes on to cost is not visible for a long while yet.
Is there anything you hold as fact that came from one person only?