“She is not my Elizabeth, but you are correct” — he sighed — “she is an extraordinary young woman.”
“So you have said. Pardon me, but I take it from your opening salvo that, despite your manifold reservations and doubts, you did offer marriage.”
“Yes,” he stated. “After I had committed myself to forgetting her, we were thrown together in Kent. Her closest friend had wed my aunt’s parson several months before, and Elizabeth had come for a visit not knowing that I would be attending Lady Catherine during that same time. You can imagine my shock to find her there, neatly lodged on the edge of my aunt’s park and already quite Her Ladyship’s favorite.”
“Shock! I would say panic as well! You were in a hopeless position! In love against your better judgment, only recently committed to putting her out of your mind, and there she is!” Brougham shook his head. “And so easily to hand!”
There was a long silence then, but not an awkward one. Dy merely nodded his head in commiseration and then looked away, the tired lines of his face growing deeper as he seemed to withdraw into private contemplations. In time he rose and called to the serving girl for a pot of strong coffee and cups, then taking his seat, he turned again to his friend with a single word. “Then?”
Darcy took a deep breath. “Then, after nights of wrestling with what I owe to my name and station, the prospect of the justifiable disapprobation of my family and Society, and the consequences of allying myself and Georgiana with a family of questionable propriety, I succumbed. Life, a future without her seemed an impossibility. ‘Part of my soul’ since we are quoting Milton.” Dy nodded. “I began to court her, or at least I thought that was what I was doing. At the time, I thought her subdued responses were due to modesty and her consciousness of the disparity in our stations; but in that, as in so much else, I was completely mistaken.” He laughed grimly. “I had made up my mind to ask for her hand, you understand, but found it difficult to finally come to the point. Eventually, an opportunity presented itself, and I leapt upon it. She was alone at the parsonage; I went to her.”
The coffee arrived, delivered by the pub’s owner himself, who cast a questioning glance at Dy as he laid out the cups. Brougham responded with a weary smile. “I will close up for you.” Waving the publican away, he then poured them both deep cups. By this time, they were almost alone, closing time having past. “You went to her,” Dy prodded.
“And she refused me,” Darcy responded grimly.
“There is more to the story than that!” Dy returned.
Darcy closed his eyes, his jaw working as the scene, so oft remembered, sprang easily into even his inebriated consciousness. “More? Oh, yes, there is more,” he answered bitterly. “I professed my love in the strongest terms and, with even more vigor, gave her to know all the struggles I had overcome before appearing at her door to tell her so.”
“Your struggles,” Dy repeated slowly. “Pardon me, but did I hear you aright? You gave her to know all the reasons you should not be making her an offer of marriage?” Setting down his coffee, Brougham regarded his old friend in fascination. But after a moment’s reflection, the corners of his mouth hinted at an upward turn and he began to nod his head in agreement. “Yes, yes, that would be the Darcy approach, wouldn’t it? No need to pander to the lady’s sensibilities now, is there?” he offered in tart sarcasm. “Her attractions had prevailed over the inflexible Darcy canon, and what was more natural than that she be made to know her extreme good fortune and how little she deserved it!” Laughing humorlessly into the dangerously narrowed eyes Darcy set upon him, he smacked the table, setting the coffee to dancing. “Yes, only you, my friend, would make the lady’s general unfitness the leading topic in a proposal of marriage. Pray, enlighten me! Which of your scruples led you into such a confession?”
“Honesty…honor…pride — call it what you will!” he bit back angrily.
“To be sure, it was one of them, but it is for you to call, not I!” Dy retrieved his cup and settled back. “Please, continue. How did the lady respond?”
Darcy hesitated, fallen as he was under Brougham’s satirical eye, but the conviction that relating the painful events would release him from the tangled confusion that gripped him body and soul propelled him on. “She sat in utter silence.” He closed his eyes as he spoke, the scene vividly alive in his mind. “Her color high, neither looking at me nor replying to my suit. I was stunned at such a response,” he continued, looking up at the smoky beams of the pub’s ceiling. “It was hardly what I expected. Perhaps she did not believe me, I thought, or perhaps the prospect was too much for her.” His gaze returned to meet his friend’s. “I pressed my suit, desiring her to know that I had considered our proposed union from every conceivable angle for months, that my offer of marriage was not the result of a schoolboy’s infatuation but a well-considered proposal that took into account our relative situations in life.”
Whistling low, Brougham shook his head. “Why, I would venture there is scarcely a woman in all England who would refuse you an offer to become mistress of Pemberley no matter how pompously you came or how insensitively the offer was made! With all that before her, within her very grasp, yet she was silent! Extraordinary!” He paused, allowing them both time to ponder it before concluding, “And then, despite the immeasurable advantages she and her family would gain, she refused you! She had taken a very great offense, I imagine?”
Darcy laughed grimly. “She took not only offense but the offensive as well! My character was called into blackest question due to Wickham’s lies to her months before and then —”
“Wickham! The son of your father’s steward Wickham?” Dy asked in surprise. “Odd that he should turn up after all this time and in Hertfordshire! Is he the red coat — but of course, he is. In the military now, is he?” Darcy nodded and drank a bit of the coffee. “Go on,” Dy encouraged.
“Then she laid into me about her sister and Bingley.”
“Ah, so this is where Bingley comes in! The Unsuitable Hertfordshire Miss about whom you enlisted my help at Lady Melbourne’s is your Elizabeth’s sister?” Darcy had nodded again and then waited for Brougham’s laugh. It did not come.
“She blames you for her sister’s disappointed hopes,” he stated flatly.
“And she is right to do so, although I had considerable help from Bingley’s own sisters. They did not want any Hertfordshire relations of that sort, and I could not but agree…at the time.”
“I remember,” Brougham replied, then sitting up straighter, he continued. “It is most unfortunate that she discovered your hand in the matter. The death knell of your hopes, I suppose?”
“Death of them? Hardly!” Darcy cried. “She gave me to know in what light she had held me from our very first encounter, which had convinced her that, of all men, I exhibited the epitome of arrogance and conceit. This charming sketch of my character furnished her primary objection to me and laid the ground for her later summation: I am an unfeeling monster who ruins men at whim and dashes the hopes of virtuous maidens.”
“Such animosity! And you never suspected?” Dy’s brows furrowed deeply.
“No, fool that I am!” Darcy slumped back into the chair. “As I was saying when you came in, ‘the World’s Greatest Fool.’ ”
“Well…well,” Brougham repeated with a sigh. “I believe that is enough for tonight. You need to go home. I need to go home! It has been a very long day and night, my friend, and ranks among the most interesting in my experience. But you need to go home,” he emphasized again. Darcy could not but agree. Struggling up out of the chair, he swayed and blinked until Brougham reached out and steadied him. He managed to walk to the door, but while he waited for his friend to close up the pub for its owner, the night air hit him like a blow to the head, and his stomach heaved.