The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 8. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

"I have kept him for you," said my aunt Philips, arriving out of the crush with an officer in tow, "for you are the cleverest of my nieces, and he is much too good for the Miss Longs. Mr. Wickham — my niece, Miss Elizabeth Bennet. There. Now I may see to the negus with my conscience clear."

She was gone on the word, leaving me in possession of a stranger and the better part of a smile I had not yet decided where to bestow.

My aunt had a genius for the kind of evening my mother aspired to: close, loud, overfull, cards laid out in one room and the carpet turned back in the other, the whole of it pitched at exactly the warmth a Meryton parlour holds best. The militia had been quartered among us long enough for novelty to ripen into welcome, and she had gathered as many of the officers as her rooms would hold. She was a happy woman that night. So, very nearly, was everyone.

Mr. Wickham had been in the corps a fortnight, and it took the room about a quarter of an hour to settle that he was the most agreeable man in it. I had reached the verdict five minutes ahead of the room. He had a good face and an easy address, and he listened as though whatever one said to him were the pleasantest thing he had heard that evening; and he turned this upon me so warmly that I gave him my company gladly and counted myself fortunate in the having of it. We fell into the easiest talk I had had in months. He had the happy gift of leaving his companion better pleased with herself than he had found her, and I have never been proof against a man who admires my conversation, thinking rather well of it myself.

Jane was there, and Charlotte too, newly promised and receiving the congratulations of a neighbourhood that had decided, on reflection, to be pleased for her. She wore it well — the composure of a woman who has struck her bargain and means to keep her countenance over it. Mr. Collins attended her closely, fetching and bowing and working in, Lady Catherine de Bourgh wherever she would fit.

It was some way into the evening that the Netherfield party looked in. Mr. Bingley came first through the door, all pleasure, and Mr. Darcy a step behind him, into a room he plainly had no wish to be in. Jane coloured; my mother sat up; and I, having a better object before me than either gentleman, scarcely marked them at all until I saw what passed between Mr. Darcy and the man at my side.

What happened then I saw, and did not understand, and have not since been able to unsee. Mr. Darcy came two steps into the parlour and stopped. Across the heads of the company his eye found Mr. Wickham's, and Mr. Wickham's found his, and for the length of a breath the noise of the room went on without either man in it. Nothing was said. Nothing was done. Mr. Darcy flushed, and his well-cut features grew rigid. Mr. Wickham's smile checked, the colour went out of his face, and he was a moment putting himself to rights. My aunt arrived at Mr. Bingley's elbow, and the moment shut over like water closing.

Mr. Darcy did not cross to Wickham. He crossed to no one. He took a place near the wall and wore there, for the rest of the evening, the look I had seen him wear at the assembly. I was glad to have my low opinion of him so promptly confirmed, and gave the matter no more thought than that. I had pleasanter company to attend to.

When the crowd had closed round us again, Mr. Wickham let his eye follow mine to where Mr. Darcy stood against the wall.

"You are acquainted with the gentleman, I think," he said.

"A little. I cannot say I like him."

Something eased in his face, as though I had spared him the awkwardness of warning me. "You will think it strange in me to say so, but I am not surprised to hear it. I have known him since we were boys. His father was my godfather — the best man I ever knew — and he meant me for the church. There was a living promised me, a good one, that should have been mine when it fell vacant."

"And you did not take orders?"

"I was not suffered to. The living fell in, and was given to another." He turned the glass slowly in his hand. "His father's wishes had been stated plain enough; but a wish is not a bond, and the son and I had never been friends. When the gift of the living came into his hands, he pleased himself. I do not say it to do him harm. For his father's sake I would have the name honoured, and so I hold my tongue, for the most part."

It was the for the most part that undid me — that small, reluctant drawing-back, the discretion of a man who would plainly rather have said nothing at all. I told him it was abominable, and I meant it.

"He has his virtues," Mr. Wickham went on, as though I had not spoken. "He is a good brother; you will hear him called the most attentive of guardians to his sister. I was fond of her once — a sweeter-tempered child never lived, and she would sit an afternoon through for the pleasure of being amused by me. But she is grown now, and they tell me she is very proud, as proud as he is. It is a grief to me. I had hoped the world would leave her as I knew her."

That a man so hardly used should speak of the sister with sorrow and not a word of spite seemed to me the surest token of his own good nature. I had been singled out, from a whole roomful, to be told the truth of a man the rest of the world admired; and there is no flattery to match being trusted, above all by someone whose trust one would like to have. I gave Mr. Wickham the best of my attention for the rest of the evening.

There was an old woman in the corner by the card-room door whom I had marked once already without meaning to. She sat where the chaperones and the visiting aunts sit, a widow by her black, a stranger to me, and she watched the room in a way I had half-noted somewhere before and could not place — openly, letting her look rest on one face and then another and holding it well past the moment a look is removed. It is not a thing women of our sort are suffered to do; we are taught to see sidelong before we are taught much else. I took her for somebody's grand relation down from a part of the world that minded such things less, and I should have forgotten her clean away had I not seen Mr. Wickham see her.

Once his glance went to her corner and stayed a moment before it came back to me. Something there had caught him. He had, as did I, a quick eye for whatever was a little out of the common run. Once, later, the widow's look fell on Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins, discovering himself attended to by an elderly stranger of no introduction, bowed and bobbed and arranged his features into the deference he kept for his betters. She took it as her due, and went on regarding him after he had turned away.

Charlotte found me in the crush by the window, the way she always could, and we had a few minutes out of the noise.

"You have been very well entertained this hour," she said.

"He is the most agreeable man I have met in a twelvemonth, and he has been shamefully used, and I intend to be wholly partial to him. Do not try to make me just; I am enjoying myself far too much."

"I would not dream of trying." She smiled, but her look had gone across the room to Mr. Collins, who stood by the card-tables pressing his conversation on a man who showed no great hunger for it. "You spend your sympathy freely on strangers. I keep mine for the people I shall have to live beside."

"And how does the man you are to live beside?"

"Restless tonight." She watched him a moment. "He does badly in a room he has not the measure of — he likes to know what is owed, and to whom, and to have paid it before anyone can think the worse of him. At Hunsford he will know. He will be easier, with his own walls round him and Lady Catherine by to tell him where the lines fall." She said it without complaint, a thing she had lately added to her stock of facts about him; and I, who kept no such stock and wanted none, heard only a friend making the best of a bad bargain, and said as much.

"You think I am to be pitied," she said. "I am not. I shall have a house of my own, and a garden, and more hours to myself than either of us has now. There is but one bad entry in the whole account, and it is that I shall be in Kent and you will not."

"Then mend it. Kent is not the moon. I can come to you in the spring, and stay till you are heartily tired of me."

"I shall hold you to every word." She pressed my hand. "And before the spring, and before the wedding has quite swallowed me — I mean to call at Longbourn the day after tomorrow, about two, if your mother can spare me the chair by the fire. There are matters I want settled with you while I still can, and I would far rather settle them with you than with my mother at my elbow."

Mr. Wickham had reached us by then with two glasses of my aunt's negus and Mr. Collins was trailing along in his wake. I laughed, and said come at two and welcome. The arrival of the gentlemen put a stop to further private conversation.

It was later, when the carpet had been cleared and one of the officers' sisters set down at the instrument, that Mr. Darcy did the last thing I looked for, and asked me to dance. I was so far from expecting it that I had said yes before I had consulted myself, and Charlotte, passing close behind, gave me a look I did not trouble to read.

We stood some little time without a word. I had made up my mind that the silence should be his to break, the asking having been his, and was on the point of letting it run the whole half-hour out of pure perversity when I relented so far as to make some remark upon the dance. He answered it, and fell silent again. After a minute I tried him afresh.

"It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I have talked of the dance, and you ought to make some remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples."

He smiled, and said that whatever I wished him to say should be said.

"Very well; that will serve for the present. By and by I may observe that private parties are pleasanter than public balls — but for now we may hold our tongues."

"You talk by rule, then, while you dance?"

"Now and again. One must say a little, you know. It would look very odd to stand up half an hour together and never open one's lips; and yet there are some for whose sake a conversation ought to be so contrived that they are put to the trouble of saying as little as may be."

"Are you consulting your own feelings in this, or do you imagine you are gratifying mine?"

"Both," said I, "for I have always seen a great likeness in the turn of our two minds. We are each of us unsocial and out of temper with company, and unwilling to open our mouths but when we expect to say a thing that shall silence the whole room and go down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb."

"This is no very faithful likeness of yourself, I am sure. How near it may come to me, I cannot pretend to judge. You think it a tolerable portrait, no doubt."

"I must not pronounce upon my own performance."

He made no reply, and we went some way down the dance in silence, so that I supposed we had done with talking; until I — not able to leave the temptation alone — remarked that the militia had brought some very pleasant additions to our neighbourhood, and that I had found Mr. Wickham a most agreeable one.

The words did their work, and more thoroughly than I had bargained for. He went away from me without moving a step. I have no better way to tell it: the man who had been crossing wits with me the instant before was simply not in the room, and in his place stood one attending to something a great way off, behind his own eyes, that had no part in the dance or in me. It held him a breath past his mastering of it. Then he said, in a voice that plainly cost him something to keep level, "Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his making friends wherever he goes. Whether he may be equally fortunate in retaining them, is less certain."

"He has been so unlucky as to lose your friendship," I returned, "and in a manner he is likely to suffer from the whole of his life."

He had no answer to give me, or none that he would give, and we finished the figure on nothing at all.

I was well pleased with myself. I had laid a finger on the proud man's raw place and watched him flinch, and a flinch, to my mind that night, came very near a confession. It suited me to believe so. I had wanted him in the wrong about something — a man carrying that much pride ought not to be permitted any sorrows that were not also sins — and here, at last, he had obliged me.

The evening broke up late, and the breaking up was as warm as the rest of it. Mr. Wickham handed me to the carriage and hoped the regiment would keep him in Meryton long enough to enjoy such neighbours; and I rode home with my head full of him and very little else, well satisfied with an evening in which, as I then reckoned it, nothing of any consequence had happened.