These Three Remain (30 page)

It was now half past four, or so had said his pocket watch. He could hardly believe it; he had never before arisen so late in the day. It was an altogether disorienting experience to go about the movements of early morning in the late afternoon. That, along with the queer sensations in his stomach and the slow ordering of his mind, gave the present moment a strange, fantastical air. He did not like it at all.

“Mr. Darcy?” Darcy looked over to his valet, his expression inviting him to continue. “Is there aught else you desire, sir?”

“Oh, a multitude of things!” A smile pulled briefly at his lips at the return of humor to Fletcher’s eyes his wry tone had evoked, but he continued somberly, “But most of all the recovery of the last twenty-four hours so that I could spend them more profitably. I should have heeded your advice.”

Coloring at the praise, his valet looked away. Darcy pulled at his cuffs and then at his waistcoat. “Am I ready for Miss Darcy?”

“Assuredly, sir.” Fletcher bowed and left at his master’s nod.

Strolling back into his bedchamber, Darcy was greeted by a bored and yawning Trafalgar. Although the dressing room door was no obstacle to him, the hound had acquired a healthy respect for his master’s valet and that man’s active opinion of the presence of animals within his artistic realm. Therefore, as fascinating as all his master’s activities in that most sacrosanct of rooms were, Trafalgar exercised a rare discretion where it was concerned and waited without the door for Darcy to emerge. Seeing him come at last, he scrambled to his feet, his eyes fixed in hope upon his master’s face.

“No, not today, Monster!” Darcy was forced to dash Trafalgar’s simple canine hopes. “I must see Miss Darcy…” The hound’s ears wilted even as Darcy reached down to scratch them, and with a sharp snort, he stalked over to the door, nosed it open, and left Darcy staring after him in dismay. Even to his hound, it appeared, he was a sad disappointment!

Following in Trafalgar’s offended wake, Darcy strode down the hall and then the steps of an Erewile House frozen in silence. The clatter of his shoes upon the stairs so sullied the unnatural quiet that the sound brought Witcher out into the hall with a harsh reprimand upon his lips before he realized who it was that had transgressed his orders.

“Oh! It is you, sir! I beg your pardon, sir.” The elderly butler’s eyes widened in embarrassment at nearly ringing a peal over his master. In both their younger days, such peals had occasionally been rung, but that had been many a year ago. Witcher’s stolid demeanor reasserted itself as he bowed and held himself in readiness for his master’s orders for what remained of this very strange day.

Darcy gestured in dismissal of the offense. “You would do me a courtesy by lifting the ban, Witcher, and relieve the staff as well, I imagine.” He cast about then for something, anything, that smacked of his normal course. The more quickly his household fell back into its accustomed patterns, the sooner this aberration would be forgotten. “And send coffee to the Small Parlor, please,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir. At once,” his butler answered, but then continued. “Mr. Darcy, sir, Lord Brougham called earlier and left his card for you with instructions that you read his note. I placed it on your desk, sir.”

“When did he call?” Darcy asked in surprise. Come and gone already, had he?

“Two o’clock, sir. Miss Darcy passed by the hall and spoke to him briefly, but he stayed no more than ten minutes, sir, as was proper.”

“Thank you, Witcher.” Darcy turned in the direction of his study, his curiosity awakened. “And send round that coffee, if you will.”

“Very good, sir.”

Free to satisfy the mystery of Dy’s early visit, Darcy entered his study, and striding past Georgiana’s portrait, which sat there on an easel until Unveiling Day, he went directly to his desk, where an elegant, gilt-edged calling card rested in a silver tray. Snatching it up, he sank into his chair and flicked it over.

Darcy grimaced at the message, a hot flush creeping up the back of his neck. “An exceptional young woman!” Yes, he had bled quite freely in the pub last night, there was no question. By turns, Dy’s wit and sympathy had teased everything of consequence out of him save the dangerous knowledge of Elizabeth’s identity. Sighing, he tossed the card onto the desk and then sat back, his fingers working at his temples. He had felt such a relief at the time finally to tell aloud the entire chronicle of the wretched affair, but the discordance of his own perception of the tale as he told it and the memories of his friend’s responses to it preyed on his mind.

Yes, yes, that would be the Darcy approach, wouldn’t it?
Dy had skewered him with sarcasm.
Only you, my friend, would make the lady’s general unfitness the leading topic in a proposal of marriage!
Darcy winced. Was that what he had done? His memory ranged over the first minutes of that awful interview once more. What had he said in that ill-fated suit so undesired by its object? Good Lord! He remembered it so plainly now! He had plunged straightway into an examination of the injurious deficiencies of station and consequence her family represented. He had spoken of degradation and social censure, following it with a warm description of the certain wounds to his family that would be incurred as a result of his surrender to inclination. In short, he had talked only of himself, his family, his consequence, and her “unfitness,” then claimed a fastidious abhorrence of disguise as his justification! Darcy sucked in his breath. He had insulted her abominably, then excused the recitation of his vaunted scruples on the grounds that they were natural and just! He closed his eyes and saw again how her eyes had flashed as she had rejected his insolent proposal.

Natural and just? Had he ever considered her feelings? No! He raked a hand through his hair and then dropped his head into his hands. Despite all her early signs to the contrary, despite all the wit and vivacious honesty about her that had attracted him, despite even his own deeply held desire for a marriage characterized by love and friendship, he had treated her with a reprehensible condescension and insensitivity. Why? Why had he done so?
Pray, enlighten me!
Dy had jibbed at him.
Which of your scruples led you into such a confession?
His disguise was finally rendered transparent. It was family pride — his pride — that all his life had invariably set at naught those outside his circle and tempted him to think meanly of the sense and worth of the rest of the world. Elizabeth had felt it, called it what anyone outside his concern would agree it to be, what even Dy had seen it to be:
pride
attested by an arrogance of mind, a conceit of class, and a self-absorption that disdained to acknowledge the rightful feelings of others.

Darcy’s chin sank to his chest as the truth fell like hammer blows upon his faltering conscience. Pride, not a refined set of scruples, had been his master in this enterprise from beginning to end! He struck his fist on the desk and, pushing away, threw himself into an agitated pacing of the room. What had he ever said or done that had not been tempered by it or could not be traced back to it? He turned, his eyes coming to rest upon Georgiana’s portrait. Slowly advancing on her beautifully posed image, he halted before it, examining it with new perspective. Yes, his sister had unwittingly given him the key that morning she had questioned him concerning his portrait. She had expressed her discomfort with the untruths she claimed her own presented.
I hoped to God that one day I would
be
the man in the painting,
he had answered her while the keen edge of his failure in Elizabeth’s eyes had flayed away at his estimation of progress toward that goal.

That he was not yet the man in the painting he had that day freely admitted to himself with some pain; but now, as he thought again of that portrait, Elizabeth’s charge came against him with new clarity.
Had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner…
Seething with anger and self-pity since it was delivered, he had retreated into irascibility, yet he had not been able to bring himself to curse her memory for the simple truth that, with those words, she had demanded of him the man depicted in his portrait. His lack in that regard, he now saw with horror, had been not merely in degree, in isolated specifics, or only where Elizabeth was concerned, but in essentials that reached into the core of who he believed himself to be.

An appalling certainty broke upon him that the very path on which he had embarked toward his goal had been, from the beginning, terribly flawed, tainting and distorting everything that had followed. Pride was not a weakness, he had loftily instructed Elizabeth, when under the good regulation of a superior mind. Good God, what arrogance! But it did explain all: his aloofness from others, his reputation in Society, his suffocating hatred of Wickham, his attraction to Sylvanie, his interference in Bingley’s happiness, and most devastatingly, his struggle against his own starkly human need and love for a certain extraordinary gentlewoman of diminished consequence. The pervasiveness of it threatened to overwhelm him. An abhorrence of disguise, had he? Indeed, he was a master of it, having deceived himself utterly!

Ten difficult and humiliating minutes of self-reproof later, Darcy entered the Small Parlor of Erewile House to find his sister curled comfortably on a divan, bent over a book, with the remains of tea lying on the low table in front of her. At the sound of his footstep, she looked up, her face filling with relief that he had at last arrived. “Fitzwilliam!” she exclaimed. Then tempering it with a return of uncertainty, she apologized. “I am sorry; you have missed tea, or rather it has grown cold and stale! Shall I ring for new?”

“No, thank you, Witcher is bringing coffee.” He smiled at her and then, sweeping her feet off the divan, sat down beside her. “But first, I have something I wish to say.”

“Yes, Brother?” Georgiana sat very straight, her countenance solemn.

“My girl…” He reached for her hands and, holding them to his chest with one hand, nudged up her chin with the other. “I have not behaved toward you as an elder brother should and, in so doing, have caused you pain and denied you what is your due.” He breathed in shakily. “I cannot reveal everything that has occasioned my ill behavior, for it involves others; but what is due you, I will.” Bowing his head, he grasped her hands tightly. “I have come to beg your forgiveness, Georgiana, and beg I must; for I have done nothing that would recommend myself to your mercy.”

A tear slipped quickly from his sister’s lashes and traced a path down her cheek to fall upon his hand at her chin. “Dearest Brother.” She gave a small gasp. “Freely and with all my heart!”

“As quickly as that!” He bit his lip, looking down upon her glossy tresses. “Do you ask no penance?”

“No deeds, no penance,” she answered, shaking her head. “Mercy requires neither.” Georgiana’s smile was pure joy. “I would rather tell you a story. Will you hear it?”

“I will listen, dearest, and carefully.” A knock at the door signaled the arrival of his coffee. After Georgiana had poured and he had supplied himself with the first solid food in almost an entire day, he settled back as comfortably as was possible on the divan. “Now, your story,” he prompted, “after which, I beg you will permit me to explain a little concerning my behavior of late and what you saw last night. Is that agreeable?”

“Yes, above all things.” Georgiana nodded, tucking her hand intimately against his arm. She allowed him to pull her head comfortably against his shoulder before drawing a deep, tremulous breath. “There once was a foolish young girl who, save for the mercy of God, nearly ruined her family and her beloved elder brother by putting herself into the power of a wicked man…”

It would have been impossible to keep an account of how many times during her narrative Darcy went hot, then deadly cold. Wickham’s treachery, his smooth and unscrupulous seduction of his generous benefactor’s daughter, Darcy’s own innocent sister, stirred into flames the fury that had lain smoldering in his breast for almost a year. As Georgiana spoke of their meetings under the complacent eye of her companion, Mrs. Younge, anger and guilt very nearly choked him. What he said, what he did when she had finished, he knew to be of the utmost importance. If he had learned anything in the last weeks, it was that he might no longer entertain a careless confidence in his ability to deal rightly with his fellow man. But when his sister related how she had succumbed to the blackguard’s urgent plea that they elope, her words of self-recrimination forced them from him.

“No, Georgiana! Dearest girl!” he remonstrated, holding her close. “What chance did you have against him?” He stroked the curls that tumbled against his shoulder. “You have been too generous with me, for the
world
can see that it is I who am to blame! You had no defenses against him, for neither was I with you to shield you nor have I any credible reason for my absence. I should have taken you to Ramsgate or wherever you desired to go!” Releasing her, he rose and walked blindly to the hearth. Leaning his head against the cool marble, he took a deep, shuddering breath. “I neglected you. And for what? Nothing! Nothing half as important as your well-being. God and you forgive me!”

“No, Fitzwilliam.” Georgiana’s negation vibrated delicately in the air between them. “I lacked nothing in the way of true defenses against his blandishments. Credit me at least with knowing what was right and what was due my family!” She rose and came to him, laying a hand upon his back. “What I lacked was the character to reject his appeals. He played to my sympathy and romantic dreams, yes, but he also encouraged my vanity and fed my discontent with countless pointed insinuations.”

Darcy shook his head and turned away.

“Brother, I have always been encouraged to think so well of myself. Insulated by wealth and rank from any serious demand upon my character, I had little experience of its worth. I have since learned that in those more important things I am poor, helpless, and needy. It was the most important lesson I have in this life to learn.