It was a very short distance. Aunt Gardiner took Uncle Gardiner’s arm, and they contrived, with a skill Elizabeth could only admire, to be both present and not quite between her and Mr. Darcy. Miss Bingley watched from the doorway, satisfied enough to watch them go and too satisfied, evidently, to wonder why Aunt Gardiner remained so composed.
At the carriage, Uncle Gardiner handed Aunt Gardiner infirst. “My dear,” he said, “if I speak of the fish more than twice on the road to Lambton, you have my permission to stop the carriage and set me down.”
“I should not dream of it,” said Aunt Gardiner. “You would only walk beside us and continue.”
He laughed and climbed in after her.
Elizabeth remained upon the gravel.
For one moment there was no one between herself and Mr. Darcy but the carriage door and the proprieties of the entire world.
He offered his hand.
She put hers into it.
It was only assistance into a carriage. It did not mean anything, not on its own.
“Miss Bennet,” he said, very low, as she gathered her damp skirts.
“Mr. Darcy.”
The names seemed to stand in place of everything they could not say.
His hand tightened—not enough for anyone to see, perhaps not even enough for him to have intended it. Then he released her, and she took her seat beside her aunt.
Aunt Gardiner was looking out at the drive with an expression of perfect innocence. Uncle Gardiner was not looking innocent at all, but he had the kindness to study his hat.
Mr. Darcy stepped back. “I hope your return to Lambton is a safe one.”
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth. “And I hope Pemberley has suffered no lasting harm from our visit.”
“None,” he said, “that I would wish undone.”
She could not tell whether he knew what he had said until the words were past recall. His face gave her only that samegrave restraint which she had misread before and was determined not to misread again.
The carriage door closed.
Elizabeth looked back as they began to move.
Mr. Darcy stood upon the gravel, still bareheaded, and though the distance between them widened with every turn of the wheels, his eyes did not leave her.
Then they were through the gate and heading up from the valley towards Lambton, and she could see him no longer. She sat back against the carriage cushions, wet, tired, and very far from calm.
She had her answer about his character, at the least. She had been gathering it all day, piece by patient piece. There was the lemonade, the way he treated his sister with such kindness, Master Henry snatched from peril, Miss Atherton answered upon the subject of her own shyness as seriously as such a girl could wish to be answered, Elizabeth’s uncle and aunt welcomed with respect where others might have made them feel out of place, and her own discomfort at the folly noted and corrected without pause.
He was a very good man.
She had said as much to Jane once, in the dark at Longbourn, before she had the smallest right to the thought, and had wished then only to be proved right.
She had not understood that being proved right could feel so very much like being too late.
CHAPTER 11
The Gardiners’ carriage was long gone from the Pemberley drive, and after a convivial dinner and farewelling his other guests, Darcy had spent the better part of the evening at the window, looking at the place where it was not.
It was an absurd way for a grown man to pass an evening, and he knew it.
If he turned to the left, he could see the lawn sloping down to the line of the river. It appeared almost exactly as it had that morning, before anything had happened.