Page 68 of Hard Home

Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil reflection, but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to conciliate her.

"But it is not merely this affair," she continued, "on which my dislike is founded. Long before it had taken place, my opinion of you was decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself? or under what misrepresentation, can you here impose upon others?"

"You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns," said Darcy in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened color.

"Who that knows what his misfortunes have been, can help feeling an interest in him?"

"His misfortunes!" repeated Darcy contemptuously — "yes, his misfortunes have been great indeed."

"And of your infliction," cried Elizabeth with energy. "You have reduced him to his present state of poverty — comparative poverty. You have withheld the advantages, which you must know to have been designed for him. You have deprived the best years of his life, of that independence which was no less his duethan his desert. You have done all this! and yet you can treat the mention of his misfortunes with contempt and ridicule."

"And this," cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, "is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to this calculation, are heavy indeed! But perhaps," added he, stopping in his walk, and turning toward her, "these offenses might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unmixed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by every thing. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? — to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?"

Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment; yet she tried to the utmost to speak with composure when she said,

"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner."

She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she continued,

"You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it."

Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on.

"From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

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She had not intended to say the other thing. She had held it since the lane, all through the tea-things and the letters and the ringing of the bell, and it came out now because there was nothing left to lose by it.

"And there is one more, and then I have done. Your cousin told me why you took your friend out of Hertfordshire."

Mr. Darcy went very still.

"Not the connections," said Elizabeth. "Not my mother, and not Cheapside; I have had those from Miss Bingley at a card table and I found I could bear them. Thecountry, Mr. Darcy. You told Colonel Fitzwilliam that the neighborhood was unhealthy, in a tone he thought worth laughing at, and you removed your friend from it, and you gave up the house, and you would not be got to say another word.

"It is my home. It is the only place I have ever been. There are people in it — there is a girl of fifteen in it — and you sat in this room a week ago and asked me whether I had always been at Longbourn, and I said that I had, and you saidyes, I know, and I have thought about that ever since and I do not understand it and I am sick of not understanding it. What did you mean by it? What is unhealthy in Hertfordshire?"

He opened his mouth.

Elizabeth saw it: she was three feet from him and she was looking at him and she saw the whole of it happen. He drewbreath to speak — his jaw moved, his hand came up an inch from his side — and then his eyes went blank in the way that eyes do when a man is listening to something inside his own head, and his hand went down again, and after a moment he said, in a voice with nothing in it at all:

"I cannot answer you."

"Cannot."

"No."

"Then you will forgive me," said Elizabeth, "if I understand you perfectly."

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"You have said quite enough, madam. 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."

And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth heard him the next moment open the front door and quit the house.

The candles guttered.

Both of them, together, on the mantle-piece and on the table, went down to a blue thread and stood so for perhaps three seconds, and the fire in the grate drew in on itself and sank, and the little parlor at Hunsford went cold — not draughty;cold, all through, the way a church is cold in February — and Elizabeth's ears popped as though she had come down a hill too fast.