by Jane Lark
“They walked towards the Lucas’s, because Kitty wished to call upon Maria.”
When they had delivered Kitty to the door of her friend’s, Lizzy was then left to walk alone with Darcy.
At last she might speak. The suspense was over. And she would not shy away from the things she must say. Even if he might deem it cruel of her to bring things into the open. She would be brave and bold, and say what she ought. The words rushed out. “Mr Darcy, I am a very selfish creature; and for the sake of giving relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be wounding yours. I can no longer help thanking you for your unexampled kindness to my poor sister. Ever since I have known it. I have been most anxious to acknowledge to you how gratefully I feel it. Were it known to the rest of my family, I should not have merely my gratitude to express.”
They were walking past cottages, he could not stop and turn. Yet he wished to. The emotion in Darcy was surprise that she knew, and yet for one moment he had thought her words would be something else, when she had feared wounding his feelings… He had not wished her to know the details of his actions, though. He had done everything he could to put the things that he had done wrong, right. He had hated the view of himself through her eyes.
“I am sorry, exceedingly sorry, that you have been informed of what may, in a mistaken light, have given you uneasiness. I did not think Mrs Gardiner so little to be trusted.”
“You must not blame my aunt. Lydia’s thoughtlessness first betrayed to me that you had been concerned in the matter.”
Lizzy had of course then forced the details from her aunt. He ought to have guessed it would be so.
Lizzy spoke the words ‘generous compassion’ to describe his act.
The words whispered through his soul. But he would not take compliments where none were due.
“If you will thank me, let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving to you might add force to the other inducements which led me on I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe I thought only of you.”
Darcy dared to glance at her for a moment, the brim of her bonnet hid her eyes, but he could see her chin, her lips, her cheeks and nose, and they were all very pink.
Did she have feelings for him? She had been more silent. Had she become tongue-tied in his company too? Certainly she was more awkward in nature. There was no sharp wit. No subtle mocking.
He missed those conversations. His heart ached for her gentle manner of scolding.
Darcy swallowed. His throat was dry. He breathed out. Damn the consequences. He could not continue to hold his tongue and restrain his emotions.
Jane turned the page, thrilled by the words she had captured there.
“You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once.” Darcy did not wish to make a fool of himself, and yet he had expressed his feelings poorly before. “My affections and wishes are unchanged;” he said more gently, looking at the brim of her bonnet as they walked on.
Her head turned and those fine eyes stared into his.
“…but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever.”
She remained silent, as the colour of her skin heightened from pink to red. Yet her eyes were not denying him, they looked back into his with a promise he had not dared to hope for. She looked away from him as she began to speak. He looked at the road ahead too.
Jane read on, the image of Darcy and Lizzy walking side by side in her mind’s eye, and their emotions hovering in her chest. “…her sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never felt before.”
He was a man violently in love. Lizzy’s acceptance of him, and yet not only that, her admission that she had developed a return of his feelings, sent a sharp pain racing through his heart, as though cupid had struck him with an arrow. He was slain. When they were clear of the cottages he gripped her fingers for a moment as they walked on, and declared the depth of his feelings. He wished her to know the man he truly was.
“They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said…”
She told him of his aunt’s visit, and he admitted that he knew. She said she had feared and hoped all at once. He assured her that because she had not denied the possibility of an engagement to his aunt, it had led him to hope. It had brought him back to her. Their wedding invitation to his aunt would be sent with a message of gratitude for bringing them together, when she had sought to set them apart. They both laughed. He had longed to hear that laugh again, and now it would be reserved for him and treasured in his home, ringing through the rooms at Pemberley.
When he said to her, “I knew enough of your disposition to be certain, that had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine, frankly and openly.” There was her beautiful laugh again, and the colour in her cheeks.
“Yes, you know enough of my frankness to believe me capable of that. After abusing you so abominably to your face, I could have no scruple abusing your relations.”
He laughed once more too. “What did you say of me that I did not deserve?”
Their conversation then was one of each claiming blame for the other’s distress, and asking forgiveness time and again, and with each word Darcy’s heart swelled bigger and his blood heated with a gentle warmth. He admitted that at Pemberley when he had first seen her he had only desperately wished her to see a man nothing like the one she had been so disgusted by. Then she forced him to admit that within only half an hour he was in love again, and wished to charm her into loving him too.
He had succeeded. She was entirely charmed—by his honesty, kindness and solid, reliable nature.
They were not silent once through the rest of their walk, and they walked who knew where, lost among the narrow, hedge-row lined tracks. When daytime turned to dusk, they realised they ought to return to Longbourn. But they returned to Longbourn with a secret that burned in both their chests. A silent precious knowledge they wished to keep to themselves just for one day. They glanced at one another, sharing a secret smile when they entered the parlour, having stripped off their outdoor things.
Jane read her previous words, and watched the couple in her mind, smiling too.
They had concluded that the securing of their perfect partnership had been Darcy’s doing.
Had he not written that letter which had entirely changed Lizzy’s perceptions and turned everything around…
Would she have continued to believe Wickham a good, wronged, man without it? How much harder, then, would it have been when he had chosen to take off with her sister? Would she have, like her sister, Jane, tried to seek reasons to excuse Wickham’s behaviour? Certainly it would have swept away any thoughts that he had once been interested in her.
Jane turned the page, but then Lizzy did not know that Wickham had taken her sister in the knowledge that Darcy would pay him to do right by Lydia for love of Lizzy, and she never would.
Jane Bennet and Bingley had already returned to the house. “My dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?”
Lizzy teased her sister, saying “they had wandered about till she was beyond her own knowledge…” To anyone of sensible perception surely their situation must be perceived. Warmth rose in Lizzy’s skin. Yet not one member of her family questioned her further, nor looked twice at Darcy. As with her father, they would simply not believe that such a match might happen.
“The evening passed quietly, unmarked by anything extraordinary. The acknowledged lovers talked and laughed; the unacknowledged silent. Darcy was not of a disposition in which happiness overflowed in mirth.” Elizabeth did not mind. She had learned to love him for the man he was, as he was—and yet her family… “Elizabeth agitated and confused, rather knew
she was happy, than felt herself to be so; for besides the immediate embarrassment, there were other evils before her. She anticipated what would be felt in her family when her situation became known; she was aware that no one liked him but Jane, and even feared that with the others it was a dislike which not all his fortune and consequence might do away.”
Jane Bennet was obviously the first one to be told. Lizzy knelt on her sister’s bed in her nightdress and told her all, and while she did so—Jane turned another page and imagined Darcy seated with a glass of brandy in his hand facing Bingley before a roaring fire, in one of the great hearths in Netherfield, declaring himself, and his success to his friend.
“You are joking, Lizzy. This cannot be!”
Perhaps it was the wide smile that Lizzy could no longer contain that made her sister not believe, and yet the knowledge of her happiness, now it had had some hours to recover from the muting of surprise, was growing into a bubbling joy.
“Engaged to Mr Darcy! No, no, you shall not deceive me. I know it to be impossible.” Jane Bennet’s tone said—you do not like him—with a pitch that declared Lizzy’s statement ridiculous.
But it was true, and Lizzy wished to shout it from the top of Longbourn’s roof. “This is a wretched beginning indeed!” She had thought the one person to whom she could trust her joy would be Jane. “I am sure no body else will believe me if you do not… I am earnest. I speak nothing but the truth. He still loves me and we are engaged.”
Jane Bennet’s eyes were wide as she looked at her sister in doubt, and perhaps a little horror. She had never thought her sister a person to marry simply for money. “Oh, Lizzy! It cannot be I know how much you dislike him.”
Lizzy laughed. She had told Jane nothing of her change of heart. They had been fixed upon the issues of a dozen spinning tops set off by Lydia, and then it seemed far too late because Lizzy had believed that there would never be a moment for her to be with Darcy. She had not wished to ruin Jane’s own state of acceptance of her lost Bingley—and then on Bingley’s return, why would Lizzy wish to take away any part of her sister’s happiness by sharing her own miserable tale?
“You know nothing of the matter…” Lizzy declared with another laugh. That perhaps sounded pompous, but it was spoken with a sense of pride over the secret she had carried in her heart. “That is all to be forgot. Perhaps I did not always love him as well I do now. But in such cases as these a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself.”
Oh, she wished to be as foolish as Lydia, jump off the bed and dance about the room. Lizzy smiled to herself then. Darcy had danced well. Would she ever persuade him to dance and smile at her in company? She would work upon the task.
Jane was still looking at her in dismay and disbelief. Lizzy leant forward and gripped Jane’s hands. “It is true, I swear it. I would not lie to you, or tease you, about such a thing. We are engaged. I am to marry Mr Darcy.”
Jane’s hands pulled free of Lizzy’s and in a moment her arms were wrapped about Lizzy’s neck, as she kissed Lizzy’s cheek. “Good Heaven! Can it be really so! Yet now I must believe you.”
She let Lizzy go and sat back. “My dear, dear Lizzy, I would, I do congratulate you—but you are certain—forgive the question—are you quite certain that you can be happy with him?”
Lizzy’s smile made her cheeks ache. “There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us already that we are to be the happiest couple in the world.” She took her sister’s hand again. She wished more than anything, though, that Jane would be happy for her too. “But you are pleased, Jane? Shall you like to have such a brother?”
Jane’s free hand gripped Lizzy’s, holding it firmly. “Very, very much. Nothing could give either Bingley or myself more delight. But we considered it, we talked of it as impossible. And do you really love him quite well enough? Oh, Lizzy! Do anything rather than marry without affection. Are you quite sure that you feel what you ought to do?”
“Oh yes! You will only think I feel more than I ought to do when I tell you all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why I must confess that I love him better than I do Bingley. I am afraid you will be angry.”
Jane laughed, and smacked the back of Lizzy’s hand gently then let her go. “My dearest sister, now be, be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know everything that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?”
“It has been coming on so gradually I hardly know when it began.”
A knock struck the bedchamber door, Jane turned and called out, “Wait a moment, please!” Her fingers clutching the sheets of paper before her, in case she needed to hide them. They had become as valuable as the most expensive diamonds.
These were her last moments at Stoneleigh Abbey, she had only a couple of hours to dress, attend the chapel, eat her breakfast and take one last walk beside the river. The moment she had first seen Stoneleigh Abbey came back into her mind. She had known from that first view of the Jacobean chimneys and then the bright stone of the Georgian wing, that this place would capture a piece of her heart and never let it go.
She looked back down at the paper and picked up the quill. There was another sentence to add, as Lizzy teased her sister about her love for Darcy.
When she saw Pemberley, she had felt the thrilling sensation of such a grand home, owned by a man who she then wished she had known better. She would not have then known the love that awaited within, nor that it would be her future home, and yet… Jane dipped the quill in ink then wrote between two lines.
“But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”
Chapter 27
Jane rested her temple against the side of the carriage, crushing the straw brim of her bonnet so that she could see Stoneleigh Abbey as the carriage drew away.
Lizzy and Darcy were packed away once more, along with her other works and notes. But Lizzy and Darcy had become her favourite characters. Their life had progressed from a simple tale to a complexly woven tapestry.
When she had walked downstairs for their last service in the bright, pretty, yet angular chapel, Jane had stopped to look at the unknown man. She had not slept and yet she did not feel tired, she felt alive today. Her hand had reached up so her fingers could touch the texture of the paint that created his lips. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
In her novel she was certain Lizzy would never thank Wickham, and yet without Wickham’s lies, how might Darcy have been able to speak a truth which would earn him Lizzy’s love in such a way that her readers would immediately turn in favour of Darcy too? Wickham had given Lizzy a reason to forgive Darcy his pride much sooner.
Jane had smiled, and let her fingers fall.
After breakfast she had walked about the house expressing her gratitude to the ancestors who lived in the portraits and had given her imagination a life that had been lost to her for too long. She had walked down to the old gothic cellars too, but there she had said goodbye to the servants, as her mother said goodbye to Mrs Giaaf.
The carriage turned the corner and the Georgian front of Stoneleigh Abbey was no longer in sight. Yet Jane could still see the Jacobean and Elizabethan elements. Her eyes clung to the view as the carriage rode on into the woodland, and then finally she could no longer see Stoneleigh Abbey at all. The ancestors she had previously only known through the spoken words of her mother, to whom she might now put faces and a home, were left behind.
Jane’s head remained resting against the side of the carriage, and she shut her eyes. Lady Saye and Sele was left behind too, and Reverend Leigh, and Mr Butler…
Sleep crept up, longing to claim Jane and slip her away into dreams. But there were the moments first when her imagination was freed to take flight, without the restraint from the need to think about anything in reality… First Impressions…
The name no longer suited the novel. The story stretched far beyond first impressions now.
“…but his perfect indifference, and your pointed dislike…” The judgement of Lizzy’s father rang through Jane’s head.
Darcy’s prideful stance at the moment of his meeting Lizzy. He had considered that he had no need to force himself to associate with or befriend anyone in such insignificant local society.
Pride…
Pride… The word breathed through Jane as the carriage rocked her gently to sleep. She was in darkness, behind her closed eyelids, and yet she saw light. She saw Lizzy looking across the assembly room, dancing, and staring back at Darcy, then whispering to her friends that Darcy was an arrogant man; a man to be avoided. She had only to look at his face, she had not even needed to hear him deny that he would dance.
Prejudice… That word, too, whispered through Jane’s head.
Her breathing slowed, and her head rocked against the side of the carriage, the turn of the wheels and the beat of the horses’ hooves a lullaby.
Epilogue
On Friday 29th January, 1813, Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra from Chawton when First Impressions was finally published under the new title, Pride and Prejudice.
Jane had moved into the large cottage there, provided by Jane’s brother Edward, on 7th July, 1809.
Chawton was the place where Jane returned to a home in the country and began to write prolifically once more. It was the home from which she saw many of her novels published.
She wrote to tell Cassandra that she had received a copy, and she calls the book her own “darling child” in the letter. It was an advance copy, sent by her brother Henry, who had also sent copies to her brothers, Charles and Edward.
Jane relates that she read the first volume of the story to a family friend that evening, without naming the authoress. Her letter rings with excitement and pride as she speaks of how her friend could not but love the story when there were two such wonderful people to fill her with amusement. Her friend truly seemed to admire Elizabeth and Jane then confessed her own partiality, claiming Elizabeth to be the most delightful character to have ever appeared in print. She was so pleased with her character she admits to not knowing how she would respond to anyone who said they did not like Elizabeth, she was not sure she would tolerate them.