Chapter 25: An Earnest Entreaty
One can only speculate upon the many and fanciful conjectures to which Mary's mind may have leapt at her mother's most unexpected declaration; a great many visions, both pleasant and unpleasant in their vividness, filled her imagination directly. But Mary's character had never been one which was inclined towards allowing the dubious imagination to run unbridled; nor was she inclined to ever allow herself to remain unknowing of that which was perfectly knowable.
Therefore, she did not permit herself any undue time to indulge in such suppositions – she would not allow herself to bear the cruelty of such anticipations – but extricated herself from her distraught mother's grasp, and, with a grave, immoveable determination at what awaited her, entered the parlour directly.
As soon as she had entered, she was most grateful she had not spent any time dithering in indecision or speculation outside the door; for, aside from being, just as she had suspected, not at all the gentleman she would desperately wish it to be, it was, indeed, a gentleman whose name should have never occurred to her, had even an entire hour elapsed in her conjecturing as to his identity in the hall.
Mr. Edmund Benson stood swiftly upon her entrance, giving her a low, dramatic bow. "Good afternoon, Miss Bennet," he said stiffly. "Indeed, I had feared I would miss you entirely." His tone had lost a great deal of its previous condescension, though some traces of it, which had perhaps been so long entrenched as to be unremovable, were yet retained. He was in some measure distraught; this much was clear; his air had all the colourings of an emotional wretchedness; but there was, at the same time, an inherent superiority to his manner, and such a fineness to his clothes, which had the effect of imbuing his address more with petulant impatience than with urgency, and his appearance more with careful vanity than with heedlessness.
"Mr. Benson," said Mary after a moment of recovering from the shock, with a cursory curtsy in greeting.
Mrs. Bennet, meanwhile, was peering in at them from the threshold of the parlour, having swiftly recovered from her previous distress, now that it was clear Mary would be able to receive the gentleman before he grew tired of awaiting her arrival. "Indeed, Mr. Benson, I will be most glad to join you and my daughter shortly," she called cheerfully, "but I am afraid I must first see to some arrangements with tonight's supper. I shall no be more than a few minutes – a half hour at the most." And she winked so overtly at Mary then that her daughter could not help but blush slightly on her mother's behalf, even with how little she cared of Mr. Benson's opinions of her family.
To remove the need to make any reply to this, Mary took a seat on the couch, and Mr. Benson also lowered into his seat once more. She was relieved at least that he had made no efforts thus far to extend any trite, insincere pleasantries, which he had never felt need to extend to her heretofore.
"Miss Bennet," he began, "I am here to see you on a greatly urgent matter, and I request your confidence in it, in knowing that, by gaining your trust, you are one of the very few people who are currently in a position to sway the matter in my favour. Miss Darcy has, I take it, confided in you that I had some months ago extended to her an offer of my hand?"
That Mr. Benson's visit was in some way concerned with Georgiana's affections could be of little surprise to Mary; it had been the only probable reason she could fix upon for his unannounced visit, and she had, indeed, fixed upon it as such almost as soon as she had recovered from the shock of seeing him there at all. However, the impatient directness with which he had begun to pursue the subject was nevertheless somewhat vexing, even to one as naturally blunt as herself.
"And yet, if, indeed, you are incorrect in this, and she had not told me of it, Mr. Benson," Mary said rather coldly, "I think you would be considered in ill form to speak of it so openly among unintimate company, as I undoubtedly am to you."
"Yes, yes, I concede I am not ranked high in your esteem, Miss Bennet," Mr. Benson said heedlessly, "and far be it from me to impose on you any insincere pretense of amiability; however, setting aside for a moment any inherent antipathies you may harbour, I can see little point in continuing to skirt the subject which has brought me here. You are, I understand, one of Miss Darcy's most intimate friends, and I thus desire to apply to your feminine sympathies and seek an audience with you. I have detoured my return from London to here in Hertford expressly to do so, in fact." He paused; the import of such an honor was clearly meant to impress.
"In that case, Mr. Benson, I fear I must inform you that you have wasted a trip, for if you are merely here to request my support in your attentions –"
"No, no, no!" Mr. Benson interrupted. His nature was inevitably such that, once met with the slightest resistance, it could not take long for frustration to be stirred in him. He stood and began to pace, his arms clasped behind his back. "I am not in need of your blind support, Miss Bennet! But I must offer an explanation of my actions heretofore, and seeing as I should have little chance to explain them to Miss Darcy herself, my only hope is to explain them to you, so that you may pass them on to her at your discretion. She will trust it, indeed, if it is to come from you!"
"That much I can understand, but why, precisely, am I to trust it, sir, if it is to come from you?" Mary said drily.
"Ah, we have returned once more to the tempting pursuit of insulting my character, I see," Edmund Benson rejoined scornfully.
"I think you will agree I am hardly in a position to compliment it," Mary replied, and met his gaze steadily.
Mr. Benson reddened, and then quit his pacing suddenly, returning once more to his seat. To Mary's surprise, her remark seemed to have had the effect of steadying him, rather than incensing him further.
"Very well, Miss Bennet, your sympathies shall not be appealed to, I see, but I may at least appeal to your reason, and sense of fairness; I cannot offer anything in the way of evidence, but only my perspective on the whole matter as it has played out. Here, indeed, is how it stands – it has all been a most grave misunderstanding, and, I am afraid, a misunderstanding that has been enacted most intentionally and maliciously.
"You will not, I think, be surprised to know that my sisters have for some time now had an understanding of the interest I had formed for Miss Darcy, and were, as I thought at the time, quite encouraging of it; and being then her most intimate friends, they advised me with certain insights into her temperament, which I had no reason then to mistrust. It was by their insistence that I came to believe that Miss Darcy returned my affections wholeheartedly, and that, furthermore, she was of the disposition where such affections were revealed through coy austerity and indifference – to see her cheeks grow warm in my presence, to see her make no censure of my teasing, were, to me, all confirmation of my sisters' words. It is a natural quirk of my character to teaze, I will concede, Miss Bennet, but in this case, all signs pointed to it being well-received.
"It was not, I believe, until your acquaintanceship with Georgiana that there began to be some reason for doubt. She began to speak to me in a way which implied some sort of injury or pain inflicted, and I thought then perhaps it was a matter that I was not decorous enough towards you, and then perhaps that I had been too long indecisive in securing her affections more permanently. It was settled for me, I thought, when she spent the evening of the ball dancing most gaily with my friends, for there is no greater power at a woman's disposal than her ability to sow jealousy in her suitor. I proposed that very evening, as you know, but was swiftly refused – and immediately my thoughts went to my sisters, and how categorically such a reaction contradicted their own relation of Miss Darcy's sentiments.
"I have known my sisters long enough, I fear, to know of their inclinations towards falsities and scandal; but I was up to then under the rather naïve impression that I was, being their brother, exempt from such manipulations. Clearly, however, such familial loyalty means very little to them, and they have all this time, as I understand, been reaping great pleasure from such intense discordance.
"So, now, Miss Bennet, as it has all been plainly laid out before you, you may see, of course, that the issue has been wholly of my sisters' orchestration, and that I have been most faultless in this entire affair, and that, having this made clear to Miss Darcy will undoubtedly do a great deal in clearing her ill opinion of me."
Mary had listened to all of Mr. Benson's speech gravely, and with serious and dutiful consideration, for however much reason she had to be predisposed against him, it would have gone against her natural meticulousness and thoroughness to have not given him the chance to explicate his actions, particularly where her dear friend Georgiana was concerned. While Mary could not perhaps have foreseen the full extent of the Miss Bensons' involvement, to imagine it all happening precisely as it had been explained to her was quite easy, and indeed, she had been surprised by very little of Mr. Benson's speech, save perhaps his ability to remain so completely and willfully oblivious to Georgiana's naturally tender and timid nature. As it stood, Mary was inclined, despite all previous marks of his character, to believe his current account; his manner of speech had been earnest, his drollness mostly abandoned, and Mary rather thought if it was all an elaborate fabrication, he should have endeavoured to sound more conciliatory; as it was, he sounded only rather vindicated in his own report, and the supposed exculpation of his actions.
Mary considered her reply carefully. "I am afraid I cannot say I see the matter quite so plainly as you do, Mr. Benson," she said at last coolly. "You say you are faultless, and yet I see a great many faults before me. Your greatest offense in all this is, however, is not your obstinate disinclination to admit to even the slightest tarnish of fault upon your character; nor, as a matter of fact, is it even your natural propensity towards ridiculing young ladies for the sake of your own amusement. No - I fear, in fact, in all of this, your most condemning offense is that you have all this time known so pitifully little of Georgiana's character and disposition – so little of a young lady you purport to love and pursue unreservedly – that you could not even realize the pain and distress you were inflicting upon her by your very actions. That, sir, is your greatest misdeed in this whole affair, and to hold hopes yet that I shall speak to Georgiana upon your behalf – well, that is, by the same token, your greatest folly."
It is not unfair, presumably, for one to imagine that Mr. Edmund Benson was a gentleman who was unaccustomed to being reprimanded; most likely, if reprimanded at all, not remotely with such force, or uninhibition, and it is almost a certainty, that no young lady had ever spoken to him thusly, and with such surety in her denouncement. His astonishment at such an address was, in fact, so great, that he forgot entirely to be at all angered by it. He sat for several moments in a stunned silence, and was at last able to procure only the briefest of responses.
"I see," he said stiffly, his hat grasped tightly upon his knee, and Mary could not help but draw the parallel, that this was the second time in as many months where she had served to coldly extinguish a gentleman's hopes.
"Mr. Benson," Mary said, no longer with the same coldness. "It is my sincere advice that you relinquish any remaining hopes you may hold for Miss Darcy, and find a young lady with a disposition more suited to your character. The damage there has already been wrought, and I know her intimately enough to know that no amount of explication will reverse it. Certainly, there must be some unattached young lady who is gay and sure enough in herself so as not to mind either your raillery, or your vanity, and who shall be sufficiently charmed by your titles to forgive any inherent faults of character."
Mary had only meant to speak matter-of-factly, and not with any particular spite or ill will; she thought it to be rather a kindness to bestow upon him such sound advice, in fact; but it just so happened that, perhaps because of this very earnestness, this speech had an even harsher effect upon Mr. Benson than the first one, and he stood hastily, donning his hat.
"Yes, I see," he repeated rather ineffectually. "I - I thank you for your audience today, Miss Bennet." And he gave a low bow. He hesitated a moment, and then said, uncertainly, "Shall you at least – may you at least pass on - my apologies to Miss Darcy? Any distress I caused her – I assure you, it - it was wholly unintentional."
Mary was not certain she could acquiesce to even this request, but there was no need for her to reply; Mrs. Bennet had finally grown impatient, or, alternately, had run out of imaginary preparations for supper, and had come to peek surreptitiously into the parlour. If she had been hoping to see evidence of a joyous reconciliation, or some portents of impending matrimonial bliss, she was sorely disappointed, for she saw only her daughter, as stoic as ever, still sat upon the couch, and the gentleman himself, quite clearly prepared to leave.
"Oh, Mr. Benson," she cried, "you shall at least join us for supper?"
"I am afraid, madam, that my journey has already been delayed long enough." And he gave a firm nod of farewell, and moved unyieldingly towards the door. Mrs. Bennet followed him all the way out to his carriage, plying him with any supplications which occurred to her, but he could not be moved in his resolution, and was soon rattling away into the distance.
When Mrs. Bennet came back into the parlour, it was only to find Mary already occupied in reading.
"Calm yourself, Mama," Mary said serenely. "If we are to make any progress, you must fix upon one desired suitor for me, and remain resolute on him. It shall not do if you are ready to denounce him for every unexpected gentleman that comes to visit. We cannot possibly attain all of them, after all. Best to stick to just the one."
"Oh, how you vex my poor nerves!" cried Mrs. Bennet, and collapsed onto the couch.
A/N: And here we have it, a cliffhanger resolved. I believe I only had one person in the comments who made a correct guess on the identity of the gentleman...yes, unfortunately, it was not our dear Mr. Crawford, but rest assured, he has not been forgotten... ;)
Thanks so much to everyone reading, and hope you enjoyed!