Page 38 of I Have Faults Enough

He smiled again, and replied in a low voice. "I begin to think that I have never in my life been given an invitation I was less inclined to refuse," and this time it was he who closed the distance, unhurried, his hand still warm against her cheek, and kissed her properly, slowly, and with none of her own earlier clumsiness, though a great deal of the same feeling behind it, until the cold of the garden, and the ache in her ankle, and every other small discomfort of the morning had receded to something scarcely worth remarking upon at all.

It was Elizabeth, at last, who drew back, laughing softly at her own breathlessness. "We ought to go in," she said, "before my mother concludes we have both perished of the cold out here, and comes out to conduct the search herself."

"I do not think I should mind the search," he teased, "so long as it found us exactly as we are presently situated," but he rose regardless, and drew her up with him, and offered his arm for the short walk back toward the house, which she took gladly, leaning rather more of her weight against him than the ankle required.

They went in together, and Elizabeth found, crossing the frost-silvered lawn she had crossed only a quarter hour earlier, in that same cold morning air which had cut so sharply through her shawl on the way out now seemed to have lost the greater part of its bite; not because the day itself had warmed, for the frost still lay thick and undisturbed upon the grass at the garden's far edges, but because she carried, walking back, a warmth of her own that no winter morning was equal to touching.

EPILOGUE

Four Months Later

They were married in the spring, on a morning bright enough to make a mockery of the whole hard winter that had come before it, in the same small Longbourn church that had, not three and a half months earlier, given Jane to Bingley with none of the drama that had since attached itself to her sister's own road to the altar.

Mrs. Bennet wept through the whole of the service and pronounced it, afterward, the very best day of her life, a claim she had made with equal conviction at Jane's wedding before and did not appear to consider any contradiction in repeating; and if the neighbourhood's talk that day ran more to highwaymen and rivers in spate than to the ordinary business of lace and settlements, Elizabeth found she minded it a great deal less than she once might have supposed she would, for the story, however wildly Meryton chose to embellish it, was at least a true one at its core, which was more than most such stories could generally claim.

Two sisters married within the same twelvemonth, to two gentlemen who could not, upon closer acquaintance, have been more different in their courtship nor more alike in the constancy of their affection.

Jane and Bingley's happiness won easily, in the ordinary daylight way that asked nothing terrible of either of them to prove it real; Elizabeth and Darcy's earned by a harder road than either had ever imagined walking, tested by danger neither would have chosen and neither, in the end, entirely regretted, for what it had taught them both about the other and about themselves.

Mr. Bennet, giving his second daughter away with rather less dry commentary than his usual custom, remarked to his wife afterward, in a rare moment of unguarded sentiment, that he did not know he had ever seen two people arrive at a wedding day more thoroughly certain of what they were promising each other, having already, between them, tested the promise against considerably worse than any ordinary marriage was ever like to ask of it.

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It was above a year later, at Pemberley, in the particular golden light of a late summer afternoon, that Elizabeth witnessed the small domestic scene she would come, turning it over privately in the weeks that followed, to think of as the truest measure of how far the man she had married had travelled from the one she had first taken a firm dislike.

A letter had arrived that morning from the steward's office concerning some mismanagement of the home farm's accounts; it was nothing of great consequence, a clerk's honest error rather than any dishonesty, but the kind of small vexation that would once, she knew, have sent her husband into exactly the cold, wordless withdrawal she had spent a whole autumn observing in pure disdain.

She watched him read the letter through a second time at his study desk, and watched the familiar tightness begin to gather at his jaw, the old signal she had once misread so thoroughly and now recognised, instantly, for exactly what it was.

And then, she watched, with a satisfaction she did not trouble to disguise, as he set the letter down, and drew one long, deliberate breath, and said aloud, to the empty room and to her both, "I find I am considerably more irritated by this.” He rubbed his eyes, and then looked up from his letter to her. “And, I suppose I had rather say so than carry it about the house all afternoon making everyone else answer for a clerk's mistake in Derbyshire."

"Well," she said, from the window seat where she had been watching him, not troubling to hide her own smile, "that is certainly an improvement my dear, rather than simply going silent for the better part of a week and leaving the rest of us to guess at the cause."

He offered her a smirk. "I have had a very patient teacher." He then stood and crossed to where she sat, and took her hand, and pressed it briefly to his lips in the particular gesture that had, across a year of marriage, had come to mean considerably more to her than any more elaborate speech could have managed.

Darcy then added, "I am going to write the steward a civil letter asking the matter be corrected.” He then moved to press a gentle kiss to his wife’s brow. “And, I am going to be irritated about it for perhaps another quarter hour, and then I am going to be entirely recovered."

She did not answer that directly, only watched him return and settle back to his desk with his irritation worn plainly and briefly on his face. Elizabeth had found that she no longer needed to guess at anything in his silences, for there were fewer of them now worth guessing at, and the ones that remained she had learned, by slow and hard-won victories, to read for exactly what they were, not disdain or withheld cruelty, but simply a man who felt deeply and sometimes spoke in a language of stillness.

Elizabeth herself rose from her seat near the window and crossed to her husband's desk. He looked up at her approach with a warmth that had, by now, become as ordinary to her as breathing, and she took his clean-shaven face between both her hands and kissed him soundly, without the smallest ceremony.

She felt, beneath her palms, whatever remained of the morning's irritation ease out of his jaw entirely, and drew back to find him regarding her with an expression considerably lighter than the one she had found him wearing not five minutes before.

It was Georgiana, arriving some while later to fetch them both for a walk in the late afternoon light, who found them so; Darcy was still at his desk, the offending letter answered and set aside, Elizabeth returned to her window seat with some needlework she was not, in truth, attended to with any great diligence; and, instead, wore a very ready smile.

They all went out together into the gold of the late afternoon, the three of them, down toward the lake that caught the light in a long unbroken sheet of brightness, and Elizabeth, walking a little behind the other two, watched her husband's hand find Georgiana's arm to steady her over some uneven ground.

It was the same he had used to steady Elizabeth herself across a bog in a storm neither of them had ever spoken of since without some private, wordless understanding passing between them; and thought, watching it, that she did not need any closing statement to know what she had married, nor any grand pronouncement to carry the knowledge forward into whatever years remained to them both.

It was enough, she thought, to watch him offer his hand, without thinking, to whoever near him needed it; enough to know that the man who had once gone silent rather than speak his own anger aloud now caught it, named it, and let it go within the quarter hour he had promised; enough to walk on beside him into the gold light with nothing more remarkable between them than the ordinary, hard-won ease of two people who had learned, at considerable cost, exactly how to read each other rightly at last.

She had grown to love him rather quickly, in the end, for all the resistance she had first put up against it; whereas he, she had since come to understand, had loved her a great deal longer, and had contrived, across the whole of that long unspoken interval, to make a remarkably poor business of shewing it, until an argument about her want of connexions and family carried them both, in the heat of it, out into a garden neither of them had any proper business entering that night.

What followed, she would reflect afterward, was history in the plainest and least figurative sense the word could carry; for a night that had begun in nothing more dramatic than wounded pride had gone on, by the time it concluded, to furnish the two of them with rather more of an actual, eventful history than either had ever bargained for.

Though, it had resulted, in the end, in a deep and nourishing love, of a kind she did not think either of them would have arrived at by any gentler or more ordinary road; a love tested early and properly, against real hardship rather than imagined slights, and found, in the testing, considerably sturdier than either of them had any right to have expected it to be.

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