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 alclass="underline" 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!”