In the following spring Elizabeth Bennet accompanies Sir William
Lucas and his daughter Maria, travelling post, to pay her old friend
Charlotte a visit in her Kent parsonage.
Any little awkwardness and coolness--there never was
estrangement--between the friends have died out; “a good memory is
inexcusable in such a case.” Elizabeth only recollects that she was Mr.
Collins’ first choice when she has a passing comical impression that he
is showing off his excellent garden and comfortable house, not without
a design of letting her feel all she has lost.
But Mr. Collins is well content, as he may be, with the sensible,
good-tempered wife who, in making the best of the home she has secured
for herself, fully recognises that it is for her dignity to keep up
his; though she encourages him to spend a great part of his time
in working in his garden, and has her sitting-room at the back of
the house, since, if it had commanded a view of the lane, and the
passers-by, it would have been apt to entail on her a large portion of
her husband’s spare time and company.
Elizabeth has the honour of being included along with the Lucases in
the Collins summons, twice a week, to relieve the dulness of Lady
Catherine de Bourgh’s family party at Rosings, and of being patronised
and dictated to by Lady Catherine, a domineering, self-sufficient
woman, who tells Mr. Collins how to manage his parish, Mrs. Collins how
to keep her house and rear her poultry, Elizabeth how to practise her
music, and Maria Lucas how to pack her trunk.
With the exception of Charlotte and Elizabeth, the recipients of
these favours are overwhelmed, and awed into the humblest gratitude
and obedience. Charlotte looks over Lady Catherine’s foibles, because
they belong “to a superior woman and kind neighbour,” exactly as the
judicious young matron takes care to value at the highest rate all
the advantages of her position, and to ignore as far as possible its
drawbacks, thus contriving to remain tolerably satisfied with her lot.
Elizabeth, entirely undazzled by the assumption and splendour which
prevail at Rosings, amuses herself with detecting a resemblance between
Mr. Darcy and his aunt, and feels satisfied that Lady Catherine’s
only child, Miss de Bourgh, a sickly, supercilious girl, with a large
fortune, who is designed for her cousin, will make him a fit wife.
Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam, another nephew of Lady Catherine’s,
arrive on a visit at Rosings, while Elizabeth and Maria Lucas are still
staying at Hunsford Vicarage, which is only divided by the lane and the
park palings from the great house.
Naturally, the two young men, whatever the aristocratic trammels under
which they labour, are attracted daily to the more congenial society of
the parsonage. For that matter, Colonel Fitzwilliam, though the younger
son of an earl, is agreeable and unassuming, likely to make himself
happy among any fairly well-born and well-educated young people, and
especially with a pretty, witty young girl like Elizabeth Bennet.
But even Darcy, under stress of circumstances, thaws considerably. He
pays his homage unmistakably in the same quarter as that which attracts
his cousin, and betrays considerable annoyance and shame when his
aunt’s impertinence is directed at Elizabeth.
With regard to the great lady, she is so firmly convinced of her own
supreme deserts and those of her daughter, that she does not so much as
see the strong inclination to defection on the part of the gentlemen.
Elizabeth Bennet likes Colonel Fitzwilliam, and is rather surprised
to find that he is on cordial cousinly terms with Darcy. It does not
mollify her in the least to discover that the latter seeks to renew
their acquaintance on a more intimate footing, and perplexes Mrs.
Collins by the extent of his civilities to the parsonage.
Elizabeth avoids the man she detests as much as she can; and when
she has the ill luck to encounter him in the pretty country walks,
and the strolls in Rosings Park, of which she is the only lady in
the house to avail herself, she expressly mentions to him, without a
grain of coquetry, her favourite path, that no untoward accident may
occur again. She attributes the circumstance that she still meets
Mr. Darcy to his letting himself come in the way, as a resource for
sheer idleness, if not with the express purpose of spoiling her walk.
He turns and walks with her without getting any encouragement, asks
odd questions as to her opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Collins’ happiness,
and--most unaccountable eccentricity of all--seems to imply, when they
are talking of the rooms at Rosings, that the next time he and she are
in Kent, she too will be staying at the great house, instead of at the
parsonage. Elizabeth wonders, is momentarily put out, and thinks no
more of it.
In a conversation between Elizabeth and Colonel Fitzwilliam, just
before the two gentlemen are to take their departure, after the Colonel
has mentioned that they would have been gone long ago, if Darcy had
not, again and again, put off their leaving Rosings, and Elizabeth
has hinted that Mr. Darcy has no objection to direct his friends’
movements, the talk turns on Darcy’s well-known influence over his
great friend Bingley. Fitzwilliam, in his ignorance, refers to a
service which Darcy has done this friend, and of which the benefactor
has spoken to his cousin, without, however, mentioning names. Darcy has
congratulated himself on having been able to rescue a friend from the
misfortune of contracting a very undesirable marriage.
Elizabeth, understanding the allusion, feels her blood boil at what
she regards as a heartless boast thus unconsciously repeated to one
interested in the transaction. After she has parted from her innocent
informant, she occupies herself with re-reading Jane’s last letters,
and imagines she sees in them proofs of broken spirits and impaired
tranquillity.
Elizabeth is herself so troubled that she pleads with reason a violent
headache to excuse her from accompanying the Collins’ and Maria Lucas
to dine at Rosings. Elizabeth feels she cannot encounter Darcy with
calmness, after this confirmation of the injury he has inflicted on her
sister.
In the course of the evening Elizabeth Bennet is startled by a ring at
the door-bell. To her utter amazement, Mr. Darcy walks in. He has left
the party at Rosings, and he at once imputes his visit to a wish to
hear that she is better.
Elizabeth answers with cold civility.
He rises and walks about the room, comes towards her in an agitated
manner, and bursts forth “In vain have I 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!”
Elizabeth’s astonishment is beyond expression. She stares, colours,
doubts, and is silent. “For once a young lady is incredulous on the
subject of a proposal made to her.”
Darcy treats her silence as sufficient encouragement, and proceeds to
plead his cause--speaking well, like the able man he is.
But, unfortunately, there are other feelings than love to be described,
and he is as eloquent on his pride--of which he has never learnt to be
ashamed--on the contrary, he has always been proud of his pride--as
on his tenderness. With great candour, but little tact, he expatiates
on the obstacles his attachment has had to overcome, refers to her
inferior position, and lets it be plainly seen he considers an alliance
with her family in one sense a degradation.
In short, Mr. Darcy pays his addresses in a high and mighty fashion,
which belonged as much to the privileges of the great “quality” of the
period as to the man.
Little wonder that, though he urges with some justice the strength of
a regard which has been proof against such trials, and claims its due
reward in her acceptance of his hand--speaking of apprehension and
anxiety, but with his countenance expressing real security, so that
it is evident he has no doubt of a favourable answer--a high-spirited
girl like Elizabeth Bennet, who already looks upon herself as aggrieved
by this man, her sister’s worst enemy, should become exasperated into
forgetting her first sense of the compliment of Darcy’s affection, and
pity for his inevitable disappointment.
With hardly more humility than he has displayed, she gives him his
answer. She waives with disdain the usual expressions of obligation.
She declares she cannot thank him. She has never desired his good
opinion, and it is certain he has bestowed it most unwillingly. She is
sorry to cause pain to any one. It has been most unconsciously done,
however, and she hopes will be of short duration. The feelings which he
has just told her have long prevented the acknowledgment of his regard,
can have little difficulty in overcoming it after this explanation.
Mr. Darcy, who is leaning against the mantelpiece with his eyes fixed
on her face, hears her with as much resentment as surprise or pain. In
fact, it is with the white heat of anger, rather than the extremity of
grief, that his complexion grows pale; and when he has put just enough
force on himself to speak calmly, it is with imperiousness and not
with despair--above all, without the most distant idea of stooping to
implore her mercy--that he demands, “And this is all the reply which
I am to have the honour of expecting? I might, perhaps, wish to be
informed why, with so little endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected.
But it is of small importance.”
Thus pressed and goaded, Elizabeth speaks her mind with passionate,
youthful freedom as well as dignity and scorn. She accuses him of a
design to offend and insult her, by choosing to tell her he likes her
against his will, against his reason, even against his character.
She asks if he could think that, though her feelings had not decided
against him, though they had been indifferent, even favourable, any
consideration could ever induce her to marry a man who has destroyed
the happiness of a beloved sister?
He is guilty of saying that he has been kinder to Bingley than to
himself.
She retorts that she has long ago known his character from Mr. Wickham,
and dares him to contradict what she has heard.
His hasty exclamation, “You take an eager interest in that gentleman’s
concerns!” betrays that jealousy is the first emotion aroused by her
reproach.
But when she goes on to protest against the injuries he has inflicted
on his father’s godson, in withholding from him what Darcy must have
known to be his due, other feelings are awakened in her hearer.
“And this,” he cries, as he walks 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 freely. My faults, according to this
calculation, are heavy indeed.”
But he is not so much hurt that pride and resentment are not to have
the last word. He stops his indignant cry, to assert that perhaps his
offences might have been overlooked if he had not wounded her pride by
the honest confession of his scruples. Her bitter accusations might
have been suppressed if he had flattered her with the belief that he
was impelled by unqualified inclination. But he is not ashamed of the
feelings he has related. They were natural and just. Could she expect
him to rejoice in the inferiority of her connexions?
Here is the most masterful of incensed lovers. But he meets his match
in the most resolute of indignant girls.
“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy,” Elizabeth says, with all the calmness
she can summon to her aid, “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 gentlemanlike manner.”
She sees him start at this terrible home-thrust, and she is not
inclined to be magnanimous in pursuing her advantage. “You could not
have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would
have tempted me to accept it,” she adds. Surely this is enough. But
the obvious astonishment with which he hears her, the expression of
mingled incredulity and mortification with which he looks at her, spurs
on the intrepid, wrathful girl to explain further that from the very
beginning--from the first moment of their acquaintance almost--his
manners have impressed her with the fullest belief in his arrogance
and conceit. She speaks out the disapprobation which has ended in
invincible dislike, and winds up with the somewhat gratuitous statement
that she had not known him a month before she felt that he was the last
man in the world whom she could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Rash, foolish--if perfectly sincere--words can go no further.
“You have said quite enough, madam,” Darcy puts an end to the
altercation. “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.”
So the stormy interview terminates, and Elizabeth is left to recover
from the tumult of her feelings, though it is too soon for her to be
sorry for having spoken so many vehement words in her anger.
Of course, Elizabeth keeps an honourable silence on what has befallen
her. She has no confidante save her own thoughts, and she is reduced
next morning to walking out alone to indulge them in peace, when again
she sees a gentleman in the distance. This time she retreats from him,
but she hears Mr. Darcy’s voice repeat her name. She has no choice save
to stop and face him.
He comes up, holds out a letter, and saying quietly and haughtily,
“Will you do me the honour of reading that letter?” bows himself off.
With the strongest curiosity, though with no expectation of pleasure,
Elizabeth opens the letter, and is still more surprised to find it
contains two sheets (the old, spacious sheets) written quite through in
a close hand, with the cover also full.
The letter is not a love-letter, or a letter of apology; it is simply a
vindication of the writer’s character from the charges which Elizabeth
had impulsively brought against it.
In the first part, which deals with the accusation against Darcy for
having deliberately separated Bingley and Jane, he begins by making
the small atonement of emphatically declaring that he had acted under
a mistaken impression. He has been persuaded that, while his friend
was rapidly becoming attached to Miss Bennet, she, on her part, was
still sufficiently indifferent to him to prevent her happiness being
seriously implicated in the affair. In this light, Darcy has thought
himself at liberty to take all lawful means to hinder the marriage for
his friend’s sake, while he himself was still successfully struggling
with his admiration for Elizabeth.
In recapitulating the objections to the marriage, the writer sins
afresh, and worse than ever where his reader’s feelings are concerned.
He writes some very plain and hard words of the Bennet family which, in
the middle of his strong determination to clear himself, he must have
known would wound Elizabeth to the quick. He says that the inferiority
of her mother’s origin, however much to be regretted, is nothing in
comparison with that total want of propriety so frequently--almost
so uniformly--betrayed by Mrs. Bennet herself, by Elizabeth’s three
younger sisters, and occasionally even by her father.
Apparently, Darcy has relented a little after writing these harsh
words, for in the next sentence he does ask her shortly to pardon him.
He protests it pains him to offend her. He even goes a little out of
his way, to bid her, in her concern for the defects of her relations,
and her displeasure with him for unreservedly pointing them out, take
comfort from the consideration that she and her elder sister have so
conducted themselves as to escape any share of the censure liberally
bestowed on the others. He says, with lurking tenderness, under the
guise of stern justice, that the exemption is honourable to the sense
and disposition both of Jane and Elizabeth.
In proceeding to dispose of her violent advocacy of Wickham’s cause and
consequent severe aspersions of his own character, Darcy treats the
subject as more serious, and here the higher nature of the man comes
in. In proportion to the greater injury done him, he grows calmer, more
reasonable, almost magnanimous. With a manly self-restraint and absence
of all invective, which are in themselves proofs of his honesty of
purpose, he consents to make plain to her, at whatever sacrifices of
his pride and reserve, how very different from what she supposes have
been his relations with Wickham. He even puts himself to the pain of
entrusting to her honour a portion of the story which involves another
member of his family, the young sister to whom he is confessedly the
best of brothers, in order to complete the exposure of the wholesale
misrepresentation, the tangled web of truth and falsehood, with which
Wickham has deceived her.
While young men at college together, Darcy knew how far Wickham fell
short of the elder Darcy’s good opinion, without attempting to deprive
the lad of his patron’s favour. In those days Wickham had shown himself
as disinclined, as he was unfit, to take orders; and at the death
of his godfather, who had only recommended him to the family living
conditionally--on his proving suitable, and on the younger Darcy’s
approbation of the presentation--Wickham had announced his objections
to the step proposed, and had accepted £3,000 as an equivalent. It
was not till after he had failed in studying for the bar, and when
he had wasted the money he had received, that he had again applied to
Darcy with cool effrontery, professing his readiness to comply with the
necessary conditions, and claiming the presentation to the living.
On Darcy’s refusal, Wickham had attempted to revenge himself, and
at the same time to secure Georgiana Darcy’s fortune of £30,000 by
renewing his acquaintance with Darcy’s sister, and making use of her
childish affection for him, until he had sufficiently ingratiated
himself with the inexperienced girl of fifteen, to induce her to
believe herself in love, and to consent to an elopement with him.
Georgiana was only saved from a miserable fate by the affection for the
elder brother who had been like a second father to her, which caused
her, at the last moment, to refuse to go any further in deceiving and
defying him, and to confess to him her foolish intention.
Darcy ends his letter by referring Elizabeth Bennet for confirmation
of his account, should she be inclined to question it, to his cousin.
Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is acquainted with the entire particulars, and
who can have no motive in misleading her.
Then with the revived regret and charity with which a man will say
farewell to the woman he has loved--and loves still, in spite of her
cruel treatment of him--he bids God bless her, before he signs himself
Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Elizabeth reads eagerly, with a throng of conflicting emotions. She
commences by being incredulous. “This could not be true,” she says of
his assertion that he has thought Jane free from any special partiality
for Bingley, while she writhes under the cutting references to her
other relations and their exhibition of themselves at the Netherfield
ball.
Again she cries out with still more energy, “This must be false,”
when she comes to the temperate statement of Wickham’s misconduct and
absolute untrustworthiness.
But as she reads, and re-reads, and reflects on the contents of the
letter, the girl’s good sense, her own fairness and truthfulness come
to her aid against the rooted prejudice which had so blinded her
judgment--finding ample food as it did in the besetting sin of Darcy,
which reflected itself in his unpopular and unconciliatory manner,
in contrast with the superficially pleasant address, masking the
unprincipled selfishness of Wickham.
Elizabeth is forced to see how completely she has been taken in, how
little ground she has had to go upon in either case, save vanity piqued
on the one hand and gratified on the other. She shrinks abashed before
her own errors of observation and reasoning--she who has been so proud
of her penetration and cleverness.
She hates to remember her zealous support of Wickham, of whom she had
literally known nothing, except that he was handsome and agreeable,
and from the stories he has told her himself with a frankness which,
even if he had been perfectly sincere, would have been imprudent and
indelicate in so recent an acquaintance.
She recoils from the recollection of her sharpness and uncalled-for
taunts to Darcy, and is brought to admit that his warm, constant regard
for her, in the teeth of her unconcealed dislike to him, has been no
common compliment from such a man; though she must still think that he
urged his suit in an improper and unamiable manner.
When Elizabeth returns to Longbourn, she is doubtful whether or not
she ought to tell so much of what she has learned of Wickham’s real
character as to open the eyes of their common acquaintances; but
hearing, to her immense relief, that the militia regiment stationed at
Meryton is under orders to go into camp at Brighton, and that Wickham
must leave the neighbourhood, in company with the rest of the officers,
in the course of a fortnight, she resolves, with the approval of her
sister Jane, who has been the astonished listener to all Elizabeth’s
adventures, to leave Wickham the opportunity of redeeming the past, by
refraining from the uncongenial task of exposing him to his associates.
The two younger Miss Bennets, in company with the more thoughtless
girls of their immediate circle, are sunk in the depths of despair
at the prospect of the loss of liveliness in their society, which
the removal of the regiment involves. But Lydia, who has been
loudest in her lamentations, is more than consoled, for the present,
by an invitation from the wife of the colonel of the regiment, a
newly-married woman, little older and hardly less empty-headed than
Lydia herself, to accompany her on a visit to Brighton.
As Lydia’s ideas of felicity are summed up in flirting noisily with six
officers at once, Brighton and its camp appear like Paradise to her.
In some respects, Lydia Bennet and George Wickham are not unlike
the fast heroine and lady-killing hero of many modern novels. It is
edifying to contemplate the unqualified contempt and reprobation with
which Jane Austen viewed the couple.
Elizabeth Bennet is so conscious of the risk and harm to Lydia, in
allowing her to go to a town which combines all the disadvantages of a
watering-place and regimental quarters with such slender guardianship
as that of her friend, Mrs. Foster, that the elder sister feels bound
to risk giving mortal offence to Lydia, and incurring the indignation
of their mother, who is nearly as bent on her daughter’s paying the
undesirable visit, as is the forward, spoilt girl of sixteen on her own
account. So Elizabeth goes to her father, and urges him to keep her
youngest sister at home.
But Mr. Bennet will not be stirred up to exercise his authority. He is
as convinced as anybody can be of the silliness and folly of Lydia,
but, acting on his usual plan, he is more inclined to laugh at her than
to try to restrain her. Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed
herself at some public place, and she could never do it at less expense
and inconvenience to her family. They will have no peace at Longbourn
if she does not go to Brighton. As the officers will find women better
worth their notice there, let her relations hope Lydia may be taught
her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees
worse, without authorising them in locking her up for the rest of her
life.