A/N: A new story, a preludial chapter. A character study and a love story.
Darcy's Struggle
In understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means deficient, but Darcy was clever...
— Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The way up and the way down is one and the same.
— Heraclitus
Chapter One: Mud and Vision
Like a dull actor now,
I have forgot my part, and I am out
Even to a full disgrace.
— Shakespeare
Wednesday, November 13, 1811
Tolerable?
The word sounded inside Fitzwilliam Darcy's head as if it had been spoken there but not as the expression of any thought of his.
The word seemed alien, foreign. A scrap of dialogue from a play. Perhaps a tragedy.
Tolerable?
Again. Except this time, the word was inflected as a sneer, a sneer directed at him. At himself
He felt a stab of something uncomfortable; it might have been dishonor.
Miss Elizabeth Bennet was standing upright in the entranceway to Netherfield, upright but ringed in mud. — Or rather, the hem of her skirt was a ring of mud. The dull mud on her skirt contrasted not by shade but by shine with her lustrous brown hair and her flashing dark eyes. Her color was high, almost rose-petal, and her chin was high too. Miss Bingley's stammering, outraged, "Miss Elizabeth, how…how could you?" spoken in response to muddy footprints leading from the door to the spot where Miss Elizabeth stood had caused the lift of her chin, the brightness in her eyes.
"I am sorry," she said, not sounding as apologetic as Miss Bingley's outrage demanded, "but I have come to care for (her eyes shifted quickly to Mr. Bingley and then back to his sister) — that is, to help care for — Jane."
Darcy stared at Miss Elizabeth.
Miss Bingley began giving order to servants to help Miss Elizabeth with her boots and then Miss Bingley suggested that they all — herself, her brother and Darcy, the assembled audience for the dirty, dramatic arrival — move into the parlor to allow Elizabeth the privacy needed to take off her boots, have them cleaned, and to dab at her muddy skirts.
But Darcy did not move, not even when Miss Bingley carefully touched her hand to his arm. "Mr. Darcy, did you not hear me? We should allow Miss Eliza privacy." She walked on, expecting him to follow.
Miss Elizabeth had already bent down to begin unbuckling her boots when she glanced up in obvious, surprised irritation at Miss Bingley's 'Eliza'. The diminutive framed Miss Elizabeth as a child, as childish, inconsequential. A bumpkin.
Of nothing was Miss Bingley more sure than her own sophistication, her accomplishments, that she was a London woman in full. She wanted the contrast between her and Elizabeth to strike Darcy. Town and country. Her long wait for Darcy to recognize her as his connubial destiny was beginning to wear on her; she had hoped that this time in the country might finally awaken Darcy to his future. Her future. She would be joined to Pemberley.
Darcy knew all this — and studiously ignored it.
What struck Darcy was the peculiar brightness of Miss Elizabeth's eyes.
He had seen it before.
Darcy had entered the Meryton assembly with Bingley, Miss Bingley, Mr. and Mrs. Hurst (Bingley and Miss Bingley's brother-in-law and sister), and he had entered thoroughly sick of balls.
He had spent almost ten years as one of the most eligible bachelors in London. He would not deny that at the beginning of that time, especially the first few weeks of the first year, the attention had been heady, intoxicating. The beauties of London were arrayed before him, paraded before him, all intent on attracting him, pleasing him.
He had believed he could overcome his native shyness, his reticence — and for the space of two balls he managed well enough. But then it all became too much. He never excelled at polite conversation and at first it had not mattered: the eagerness of the women who conversed with him, danced with him, who were willing to overlook his long silences, his awkward entrances to and exits from talk. He was handsome, rich, and he could dance; his silence was, for almost all the women he interacted with, completely forgivable. They were not interested in what he had to say, his poverty of words. They were interested in what he had to give, his riches, his ten thousand a year.
(It was more now. London gossip was notoriously behindhand, and Darcy exerted himself to keep his private affairs private.)
Those first few dancing weeks quickly disenchanted him. He kept participating because it was expected of him, and because he was (painfully) alive to expectation, social duty — and because, he supposed, he had never entirely despaired, never entirely yielded hope that he might meet her, whoever she was, the woman.
Never entirely.
But he had been close to despair, close to hopelessness. He met so many women and liked so few, none romantically. Their minds were invariably as corseted as their persons. Trimmed to please, specifically to please him. He had started to believe that Pemberly itself was destined to be his only lifetime companion. At some point, even his sister Georgiana would wed and leave him, and then Darcy would have only his extensive grounds for companionship.
He loved Pemberley dearly — but not like that.
As he walked into the Meryton assembly with the rest of his party, he suffered a fresh upwelling of the pointlessness of it all. The empty ceremony, the weary rotations of the same. What was more lonely than this forced politeness, this idle chatter?
He had not found her in London; he would not find her here, in Hertfordshire.
He knew ahead of time that no one he might meet that night would pass muster. Whoever she was, if she was, she would have to be a woman with true elegance of mind and sweetness of character, a woman whose situation and connections were above all possible reproach. His equal. A woman who could fittingly be installed as the Mistress of Pemberley, installed in his family home.
Installed in Darcy's heart.
His attendance at the assembly was a grudging favor to Bingley and nothing more; Darcy would rather have taken his chances and spent the evening alone in Netherfield's skeletal library. And then Miss Bingley had spent the carriage ride to the assembly describing in lingering detail the anticipated spectacle: Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy attending a ball in Meryton, surrounded by family nests of country mothers and young ladies chirping and gaping at him like starving baby birds.
"A perfect collision of high and low, will it not be? Within five minutes, mark my words, Mr. Darcy, five minutes, rumors about you will claim the room, and you will be their sole object. All attention will be fixed on you."
Darcy did not react.
But Darcy physically felt the eyes of the room on him as soon as he entered. He was displeased with Meryton, displeased with his party, and displeased with himself.
He felt himself become wooden under the gaze and whispers of strangers as he always did, but Miss Bingley's preludial descriptions made it worse; her image of chirping and gaping birds would not leave his mind. He drew himself up and up and into himself, rendering himself invulnerable by thinking meanly of the whole affair, holding himself aloof, above his company, perched on some apex in himself. A perfect collision of high and low.
He had been raised to be proud, and in the last years, pride had become his best defense, his refuge.
Bingley did what Bingley always did in such situations. He flourished.
Darcy watched.
In mere moments, Bingley had met and charmed practically everyone, the entire room, weaving through the crowd as if socializing itself were a dance, and declared the ball all he could have wished. Soon after that, he was dancing with the one obviously handsome country girl in the room. Not for the first time, Darcy envied his friend. The world seemed to open itself to Bingley, providing him scope and freedom of movement; it closed itself to Darcy, crowded him.
Darcy disliked dancing but he did ask to dance with Caroline and with her sister. Caroline was all delight; Mrs. Hurst was pleased enough. Darcy danced with each out of duty not inclination.
He was never inclined to dance.
Bingley caught at Darcy's elbow as he walked across the floor, having finished his dance with Mrs. Hurst.
"Darcy, are you going to allow my sister to poison an evening of pleasure? There are many very pretty girls here, and I would have you dance. Please, be willing to be pleased; don't stand about in this stupid way. It will not harm you or your dignity."
"No? I have danced with the only women in the room with whom dancing would not be a punishment and a lowering. Well, there is one other — but you have monopolized her."
Bingley smiled and glanced at that young woman across the room, a lovely, soft-eyed blonde with a beaming, celestial smile. "I know," Bingley effused, smiling back, "she is the most perfect creature I have ever beheld. — But look, her sister is not dancing. She is just behind you and is most agreeable. Let me ask my partner to introduce you."
Standing straighter still, stiffening more, Darcy nonetheless managed to turn and look. He turned back to face Bingley. Bingley was grinning, poised to ask for the introduction, and he took a step toward his partner.
"No," Darcy said, annoyed by Bingley's presumption that agreeability would be enough to compel him to dance with a stranger. Although he had noticed her before Bingley pointed her out, Darcy had not looked closely at the lady, attended to her. But he did not need to look closely.
He repeated his answer as Bingley reluctantly stopped and stepped back toward him.
"No, she is tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me. And she is not dancing; I am in no mood to confer consequence on young women who have been slighted by other men." I am no woman's hero, especially not here. "Go and dance with your partner; you are wasting her smiles and your precious time."
Bingley frowned but took Darcy's advice, and Darcy, unable to keep himself from doing so, turned to look at the sister again. She was looking at him now, he discovered, and her eyes were peculiarly bright.
He worried suddenly that he had spoken more loudly than he intended. Although his words had been about the young woman, they had been aimed at Bingley, a rebuke, an expression of annoyance with his claim that Darcy was unwilling to be pleased, and with Bingley's having called his manner stupid.
Darcy's manner was never stupid.
He turned away. If the young woman heard him, that was his mistake (annoyance had perhaps increased his volume) — but he was no more likely to apologize to her than he was to dance with her. Darcy was utterly scrupulous about saying what was true, and, so long as he did that, he deemed it to free him from any concern about how his expression of those truths might affect others.
Still, reluctantly, he turned to glance at her yet again.
She was smiling faintly to herself, the object of her attention apparently the floor. Her slightly lowered eyes, lidded, kept him from knowing if they were still peculiarly bright.
The servants closed rank in front of Elizabeth, both shielding her as she took off her boots and waiting to clean them.
And still Darcy stared.
Tolerable?
Darcy took moral and religious matters seriously. Their solemnities centered his understanding of himself. He recalled a scripture reading he had heard recently at church in London, a story of Jesus and a man born blind. Jesus had spat on the ground, created mud, anointed the blind man's eyes with it and sent him to wash the mud away in the pool of Siloam. The man did as told. He returned to Jesus whole, able to see.
Elizabeth's skirt was muddy but Darcy was the one who felt that he was seeing for the first time.
Mud and vision.
Elizabeth stood and handed her boots to one of the servants, but after she did, her eyes met Darcy's. She arched an eyebrow and the peculiar brightness of her eyes increased, becoming an open challenge, a challenge he did not understand.
He started. "Mr. Darcy," Caroline said from behind him, "we must give Miss Eliza a moment."
Darcy shook himself but stared at Miss Elizabeth one moment longer.
Her. Her?
A/N: More soon. Love to hear from you!