Work Text:
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome - Anne Bradstreet
When Elizabeth looks towards her future, she sees a hazy cloud of the unknown. If it’s a good day, she sees warm summer evenings and children with Jane’s eyes and soft smiles, running around and playing. She sees all her sisters happily married and well, and even herself, perhaps just as happy.
On the bad days, she sees loneliness and grey clouds that hide the sun from her vision, and she has to shake her head to get rid of the vision, of the possibility that she, one day, will have to do completely without her family, without her beloved Jane.
It is, in truth, not a bad day when she sees Mr. Darcy for the first time. It doesn’t turn to the worse, not even when he snubs her and all in all, she can think of the evening and night with a certain fondness, if nothing else than for the pure joy on Jane’s face that seemed to last for several days. Looking back on it, maybe that had been a sign: the sun had been shining more bright than it usually did and she’d had a certain feeling of lightness in her chest, a spring in her steps. As if she’d known that something pleasant was coming.
Well. She’d have to admit that ‘pleasant’ was perhaps stressing it. Several months had, had to go by before the hard knot of dread in her stomach had fully disappeared: it seemed to have lodged there ever since the words ‘ardently admire and love you’ had slipped past a certain pair of lips and it hadn’t dissipated before those lips had actually been pressed against her own.
Yes – it was definitely not a bad day when she saw Mr. Darcy for the first time.