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For all her confidence in making the proposal of the previous week, Catherine had, from the moment she began the letter which succeeded it, cherished no hopes of Miss Elizabeth Bennet making any reply to it. She had received it then with nothing more than civility—with more civility, Catherine supposed, than she had received that earlier offering, but no more enough to encourage than to console. Catherine had made the demand of her justice, and it had been that—not any tenderness, nor partiality, nor even compassion—which admitted Catherine’s letter into her hands. That her judgement of Miss Elizabeth’s feelings had not always been so sound as her judgement in general, Catherine now had evidence enough to allow; but that she should actually have gone from affronted stupefaction to writing a reply in the space of a week so far exceeded the bounds of common benevolence, it seemed almost incredible to her. For it to affirm little more than resentment seemed, therefore, the more—the most —probable conjecture, and Catherine resolved to accept it. With this first and last letter would their acquaintance be for ever closed. It was the best, most natural outcome to a course of events unsettling in the extreme; to imagine, to wish for, any other must be folly.
All the same, even Catherine’s reason could not overlook that Miss Elizabeth had done more in refusing her than many women might. That she had, after the delicate if imprecise explanation Catherine had considered necessary in putting forth her offer, comprehended her meaning, Catherine was pretty sure, and it had seemed at times that she was even taking care to exclude the nature of the question from her objection to its being asked. She had blamed her, in fact, for everything but that which might reasonably have occasioned the better part of it. Still, whether such an arrangement had ever occurred to her before, whether Catherine had misread her in that broader question of feeling as she had done in the narrower, was most strenuously avoided. For all this, astonishment had predominated, with anger no very distant second,—but there had been in her look, too, a sort of consciousness which spoke, perhaps, to an understanding of more than the mind.
It was under this belief that Catherine had felt herself compelled to answer those objections actually raised by the lady, and deliver them to her on the morning before her departure. Had this explanation been truly repugnant to her, no reply, she was all but certain, would have been made. The very fact of the letter now in her possession, of her name upon the envelope in a deliberate, lightly angular hand, declared that she had not, at least, written in vain. Something in Elizabeth Bennet had not been unmoved by her words. The question of what, however, remained, and Catherine thus opened it, if not quite in expectation of an absolute answer, at least in hopes of a hint.
Upon so doing, she discovered at once that the letter was tolerably long, filling a little over three sides, and, though its dispatch was quick, it seemed not to have been written in haste. On immediate examination, Catherine was convinced that it was the result of considerable thought. There was, to be sure, more charity in its very existence than she had dared suppose possible on their last meeting—but to see, in every word, such proof of attention was almost overpowering. She read, therefore, in spirits unusually agitated, no less by hope than by dread. What she found was as follows:
Hunsford, April 24.
Dear Miss Darcy,—
You called upon my justice to read your letter, and it is my justice, too, which believes it to be owed a response. That it will set your mind at any more ease than yours did my own, I can hardly promise; nor can I say, in the spirit of absolute honesty which has been your guide in this situation—and, so you say, in general—that I have particularly endeavoured to make it so. Had I all the time at Hunsford your aunt has asked me to take here, I might, perhaps, have come to produce a tolerably pleasant answer for you; but I am wanted at home, and I do not foresee a very soon opportunity of reply if I fail to make one here. You, at any rate, afforded yourself little privilege of extended consideration in your own composition, and so to prepare my own reply at a similar disadvantage should, I hope, cause you no great offence.
I comprehend the considerable risk undertaken in relating the events concerning Mr Wickham, and the risk perhaps greater still in relating those sentiments which were last week the subject of our interview, and I thank you for your confidence. Though I cannot say it has given me much pleasure either to read or to hear what you have seen fit to disclose, yet I am gratified to have received it, and assure you that it shall be kept so far as it is in my power to keep it.
My surprise, I believe, at your owning to such an intervention as you did in the attachment of Mr Bingley to my sister, need not be detailed; it is pretty equal to that I felt at the previous day’s confession, and owing, I dare say, very nearly as much to it as to any other event. You have taken some care in your letter to remind me of some failures in right conduct, which might, in your view, impede the happiness of your friend; and where absolute propriety is a condition of happiness, your objection, of course, must be sound. Whether you actually believe this to be true—for you could not, I believe, have entirely forgotten all of the impropriety of your own attachment, even when removed from the common source—remains for me a matter of less certainty. You present yourself most vigorously as an enemy of imprudent attachment, and you have, at least, proved yourself to be as disinterested a party in dissolving it as any young woman could. The dissolution of another such attachment, therefore, in which you must have still greater concern, cannot be any great trial, and I hope that it occasions you less pain than your first attempt has my sister. It cannot, at least, be more; I was gratified to discover your generosity in allowing it to be possible that I should understand her feelings better than yourself, and trust that you will now comprehend the severity of the pain caused by your earlier assessment of them. The attachment of a few weeks, indeed, may be relatively little; and I trust that you will find it so as much in one case as the other.
I have said, I believe, more on this subject than perfectly necessary, and will exhaust it no more. Against what you will call the more serious of these claims, you have made a case proportionate to its gravity. You must, I believe, know quite as well as I that I could not apply to your cousin as you proposed; and if Mr Wickham’s account be a good one, I could hardly imagine Colonel Fitzwilliam able to counter one word of yours. The expectations of your family concerning yourself and that gentleman, I believe, are pretty widely known; and though some recent events have given me reason enough to question your wish of satisfying such expectations, it remains that the chief accusation made against you has been of undue influence over that very person to whom you now expect me to apply for confirmation, in interest of protecting your pride. The nature of this accusation, you may find on further reflection, is not very far from the character you have given yourself in the acknowledgment of that later transgression. You argue well, are esteemed both generally and particularly, and have, as you acknowledge, no scruple in offering your opinion in cases of a similar weight; you have, in short, all the influence, connection, and disposition required to effect that very scheme which has been laid before you. For my part, however, in our short acquaintance, I cannot say I find much likeness in the characters of Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Bingley beyond a general sort of good humour. That you have exercised your capacity to persuade the latter cannot prove the same of the former. Had I much choice in believing you, I would certainly choose not—and indeed, on my first perusal of your letter, I did choose not,—but your account, with no more corroboration than its very near resemblance to Mr Wickham’s own, leaves my judgement too little room for further doubt.
Little more, I believe, is much worth being said on this subject, but that I am exceedingly sorry that your sister should have been so far involved in this matter as you tell me she was. Whatever it is you may think of mine,—or indeed of my success in carrying it off—I understand very well the wish of preserving one’s sisters from harm. That you have undertaken all in your power to do so, both in general and more particularly last summer, is perfectly clear; and here, at least, you have earned every praise of yourself. You have, indisputably, been a most dutiful sister.
That you have written nothing on that other question, I must understand as your allowing it to be closed, and I will not cause you unnecessary pain by reopening it here. All the same, I feel that, in giving you my answer, I allowed my frankness on one subject to obscure my feelings on what, to you, must have seemed the principal. You have, perhaps, apologised as well as any woman in your position, in the space of half a day, might apologise, and for my part in the misunderstandings of the last six weeks, I feel that I must apologise in turn. I did not act to mislead you; had I fancied such a misconstruction of my conduct at all possible, I should, I believe, have done all in my power to avoid it. In behaving as I did, I believed myself to be understood, and in some sense, I confess, I believe you did understand me. I ask you now to understand, as you must then have understood, that you are in no danger from me except that to which you once supposed yourself already to have succumbed.
For the sake of avoiding the same accusation once levelled against you, I must own that if your aunt’s account of your journey hence is as faithful as I have been given to believe, you and I are to be a few more days in the same country. Miss Lucas and I leave Kent on Saturday morning, and shall remain with my sister a little above a week in town before going home. As I understand that my aunt has arranged a great deal in anticipation of our stay, I do not know that there shall be, in the course of our visit, great opportunity to call upon any of our acquaintance yet in town. That Gracechurch Street is a considerable departure from your own house in town, I am sure, has long been an object of some unhappy thought to you, and I will not distress you now by proposing that you call upon us instead. You must, in any case, have sufficient duties of your own to attend to as would make it no extraordinary event should we fail to meet in so short a period. Should you happen to be engaged for the concert on Wednesday, or the theatre on Saturday next, it may remain possible that we should meet there. Beyond that, I believe, it is for you to judge what you find necessary and acceptable; unlike some others of our acquaintance, you, at least, may be said to have been given sufficient information to do so.
I thank you again for your candour, and wish you every happiness, within or without the bounds of propriety, that you might wish for yourself, and wish too that it might not, when next you are tempted to exert your influence, be at the expense of the happiness of any other person.
Yours, &c.,
Elizabeth Bennet
If Catherine, when she first perceived the letter’s source, did not expect it to mark an absolute end to her acquaintance with Miss Elizabeth Bennet, she had formed no expectation at all of its contents. But such as they were, it may be well supposed how eagerly she went through them, and what a contrariety of emotion they excited. There was more contained in it, and yet less of immediate purpose, than she could immediately determine, and she was for some time engaged in making out the motive of its composition. Miss Elizabeth’s feelings were plainly warm—warmer, perhaps, than they had been on their last meeting; and though it seemed more often the warmth of anger than affection, there were lines, too, which seemed almost to leave open the possibility, though distant, of something not unlike friendship.
It was a prospect to inspire no inconsiderable degree of hope, but Catherine was not of a nature to be so blinded by it as to ignore the more immediate proofs of less amiable feelings. In her allusion to Catherine’s honesty, for all her conviction of its error, Catherine could not but see a reproof. She could not yet persuade herself, in full consideration of these words, that a more flattering manner of overture might not have yielded something far nearer acceptance than she had got in reality.—But perhaps her meaning had been exactly to the contrary; perhaps, far from expressing too much, her admonition had rather been for concealing it. Miss Elizabeth, after all, could not have apprehended the nature of the arrangement proposed without perceiving likewise the secrecy comprehended in it. Had she meant, then, to blame Catherine for it? Was Catherine, in speaking frankly with the one most intimately concerned with that truth, now to be blamed that not every truth was fit to be spoken, nor every person fit to receive it? Here were thoughts to inspire some indignation, and while it was at its height, Catherine dwelt with some energy on the senseless naïveté which could find hypocrisy in discernment and insensibility in caution.
Such feelings, however, could not withstand a second examination of the letter; she could not see all that had been written without consciousness of what had not. Wherever they might disagree, the fact remained that Elizabeth Bennet had evidently composed her letter with more than usual deliberation, and she had made, probably, fewer errors in discretion than Catherine herself had done in determining to raise the issue at all. There was in all of her words—in the most spiteful of them no less than the sympathetic—a degree of care that Catherine could call little else but love.
Still, she did not love her, or, at least, she would not; that she could not, Catherine hardly knew—nor, if pressed, could she have said which she would have preferred. For Elizabeth Bennet to be absolutely incapable of loving her, or any woman, would, perhaps, be such a mark against Catherine’s penetration as she was loath to admit; but it would, more than any of her misplaced reproofs, have closed the issue of her affections for ever. As it was, however, Catherine could not accept that she had misjudged. Certain words, to which Catherine’s eyes were drawn repeatedly, seemed almost to suggest that she was not.—To what, if not that very question, could that “understand” possibly refer? It was the simplest, most natural explanation to believe that her own heart was not dissimilarly disposed. That it could ever be won by her, after so decided a rebuke, was a question yet harder to decide.
Again and again, Catherine studied the lines before her, determined against a second error in the style of the first, and on each perusal, her conviction grew. She would not venture that Miss Elizabeth regretted her choice, nor even the incivility of its expression; but a change of heart, already begun or still to be, seemed to Catherine a nearer possibility by far than she had, until now, suspected. Could she, perhaps, arrange some meeting between Miss Bennet and Mr Bingley, and Miss Elizabeth and herself?—Was it not, indeed, the very thing suggested in her close? It was an invitation, to be sure, of which there could be no possible misconstruction.
Catherine’s resolution was firm. The only decision that remained was whether first to pick up her pen, or to call at Grosvenor Street and propose attendance at the concert on Wednesday evening. Both were accomplished in the course of the morning.