Page 2 of Mr. Darcy Forgot I Said No

He does not even look away.

“Can you deny that you have done it?” I ask.

“I have no wish of denying that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister.” His voice is perfectly steady. “Or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.”

“Kinder,” I say.

“Yes.”

I could throw Charlotte’s clock at him. I shall not. It was a wedding present.

“It is not merely this affair on which my dislike is founded,” I say. “Long before it had taken place, my opinion of you was decided. Your character was unfolded to me many months ago, by Mr. Wickham.”

That strikes home. I watch it strike.

“Mr. Wickham,” he says, and there is an edge in his tone at last.

“You have reduced him to poverty. You have withheld what you must know was designed for him.” I hear myself growing louder and do not care. “And you can speak of his misfortunes with contempt.”

“His misfortunes.” He laughs. It is a short, terrible sound, and nothing like a laugh. “Yes. His misfortunes have been great indeed.”

He walks away from me, the whole length of the room. When he turns, his face is closed like a shuttered house.

“And this is your opinion of me,” he says quietly. “I thank you for explaining it so fully. Perhaps these offences 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.”

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way,” I say, and lift my chin, “than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.”

He flinches. He truly flinches, as if I had struck him.

Good, says a small, hot voice within me.

The rest of me goes quiet and cold.

But I am not finished. I have been not-finished since the Meryton assembly, since tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and the words come out in one long rush.

“From the very beginning, from the first moment of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressed me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others. 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.”

The clock ticks.

He looks at me for a long moment. I cannot read his face. For once I do not try.

“You have said quite enough, madam,” he says. “I perfectly comprehend your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own have been.”

He takes up his hat from the side table. His hand is not steady. I notice it, and wish I had not.

“Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time,” he says at the door, “and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness.”

And he is gone.

***

I sit down. I do not decide to. My knees simply cease to hold me, and Charlotte’s chair is there.

Mr. Darcy has made me an offer.

Mr. Darcy, who looked at me for six months as if I were a stain upon the carpet. Who said, in my hearing, that I was not handsome enough to dance with. Who parted Jane from the man she loves, and rejoices in it.

He has been in love with me since the autumn.