The Lesson in the LIbrary

To Mr. Darcy it was welcome intelligence—Elizabeth had been at Netherfield long enough. She attracted him more than he liked— and Miss Bingley was uncivil to her, and more teasing than usual to himself. He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration should now escape him, nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity; sensible that if such an idea had been suggested, his behaviour during the last day must have material weight in confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and though they were at one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most conscientiously to his book and would not even look at her.

Pride & Prejudice, Chapter XII of Volume I

The Lie They Believe: The Lesson in the Library

For the third time in the last thirty minutes, Elizabeth Bennet glanced to where Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy sat writing in his journal, only to catch his eyes upon her person. For a certainty, he was studying her with the same attention as a scientist with a bug under his lens.

Dropping her gaze to her book with serene indifference, she wondered what the man was about. Mr. Darcy was, she privately conceded, extremely handsome — tall, broad-shouldered, firm jaw, and dark eyes that seemed to glimpse her soul. Her observation was of the most clinical variety, entirely divorced from sentiment. In truth, she loathed him.

Since the first evening at the Meryton assembly, she had sketched his character in the single damning remark he made when he believed himself beyond hearing: She is tolerable, I suppose, but not handsome enough to tempt me.

There it was. The whole man in a single sentence. Too proud to dance, too arrogant to be civil, too rude to be considered truly attractive. And now he sat across from her and catalogued her deficiencies with the thoroughness of a man compiling accounting records. She was being inventoried and found wanting.

Well. She would not give him the satisfaction of appearing discomfited. She was Elizabeth Bennet, possessed of a mind she had always trusted — acute, clear-eyed, and rather quicker than most men. Her wit was, perhaps, the truest thing she owned. She prided herself upon it considerably.

He looked up again.

She looked down again, turning the page with great dignity, reading the same sentence four times. She could not have said what it contained.

Footsteps approached the library. Mr. Bingley rushed into the room. “Darcy, Mr. Morris handed me the accounts, and I cannot make heads or tails of the steward’s notes. I am certain you will take one look at it and recognize the problem. Only for a moment, I promise.”

Mr. Darcy set his pen aside, then stood. He paused, his fingers brushing the cover of his journal. Appearing to make a swift calculation, he stepped away from the desk. He left without closing the journal.

Against her reason, against her will, Elizabeth looked at the book lying open on the writing table.

She looked at her own book.

She looked at the door.

She looked at the journal.

This was, she told herself, temptation at its worst. She was a gentleman’s daughter. She understood that a person’s journal was private. To read it would be beneath her.

But.

She was also, she could not help but notice, entirely alone in the room.

Before she consciously decided anything, she was on her feet. Her mind was thoroughly convinced that she should remain seated, even vacate the room. Her heart, on the other hand, was treacherous.

Light from the window fell directly upon the journal’s pages, adding to the gravitational pull of her curiosity. She stepped closer, noting that the page was almost full of Mr. Darcy’s firm, clean script — the handwriting of a man who never doubted the permanence of anything he committed to paper.

She knew what the writing would say — a list of the Bennet family’s many insufficiencies. Her mother’s nerves and vulgar screeching. Kitty and Lydia’s improprieties. Her own impertinence, which she did not doubt he had registered.

She leaned forward. She read.

At first, she failed to comprehend Mr. Darcy’s thoughts, still half-occupied with the awareness that her current conduct was irrevocable. She read them again, and a third time. The beating of her heart seemed to stop.

E.B. — clever, kind — her presence would serve Georgiana more than any governess I might employ. My sister needs someone who will laugh at her when she is solemn and be serious when she requires it. She has an ease in company, a gentleness when provoked —

Elizabeth’s hand pressed against her chest. Clever? Kind? Where was the insult? Where were the strong opinions he held against her person?

And then lower:

— the complete disaster at Ramsgate might have been averted if Georgiana had had such a friend. Wickham — what an embarrassment to his father and mine. Though those wise men failed to see Wickham’s true nature, his utter lack of morals, Elizabeth Bennet, peerless amongst women, would have quickly seen through him. She has eyes. She uses them, which is rarer than one might suppose —

Elizabeth stood quite still, dimly aware of the fire making a small sound.

Her name, written with such unguarded plainness, stunned her.

She would have quickly seen through him.

Mr. George Wickham, with his easy manners and his handsome face. His story of Mr. Darcy’s cruelty — a story she had absorbed willingly because it confirmed everything she had already decided to believe. His flattery, she now realized, was like stepping onto a stair that was not there.

Drawing a breath that suddenly seemed in short supply, Elizabeth admitted that she had been entirely, magnificently wrong. The certainty she had carried so comfortably, the conviction that she saw clearly when others were deceived, was deeply flawed.

She had built an entire portrait of a man upon one unguarded remark at a country assembly. Even worse, she had defended that portrait cheerfully against every subsequent contradiction. In Mr. Wickham, she had seen the mirror of her own ready dislike for Mr. Darcy. She had called it perception. She had been proud of it.

And all the while, she had seen nothing at all.

Elizabeth stepped back from the journal, her hands unsteady, her breathing jagged. Returning to her chair, a very uncomfortable realization settled over her like cold water.

She had spent considerable energy these past weeks condemning Mr. Darcy for the very sin she had just discovered in herself. She had announced to anyone who would listen that his pride was insufferable, his certainty in his own judgment unpardonable. He looked upon others and found them wanting without troubling himself to look more carefully, and Elizabeth had found this character defect so thoroughly contemptible that she had catalogued it, examined it, and held it up to the light with the relish of someone who believed herself entirely free of the same affliction.

And yet.

She had done precisely the same. She had heard one remark at one assembly and had known him — known him — with the easy confidence of a woman who trusted her own swift intelligence above all else. She had heard Wickham’s practiced story and had believed it whole, because it pleased her to believe it, because it confirmed the portrait she had already painted. She had congratulated herself on her discernment while being, in fact, thoroughly and completely deceived.

The laughter that rose in her throat was not the comfortable kind. It was the laughter of genuine humiliation — the only honest response available to a woman who had just discovered that the quality she most prided in herself was, upon examination, a very elegant species of blindness.

She closed her eyes. She, who had found arrogance so unforgivable in others. She, who had believed her own mind a finely calibrated instrument of perception — she was nothing more than an ignorant miss. She had never known Mr. Darcy at all. She had never known Mr. Wickham at all. She had never, it now appeared with mortifying clarity, known herself at all.

She has eyes, and she uses them.

He had written that about her. He had credited her with the very quality she had just proven herself entirely to lack. The irony was so complete, so perfectly constructed, that had it appeared in a novel, she would have found it almost too neat.

Hearing footsteps in the corridor, Elizabeth composed her expression and opened her book to a random page.

The door opened. Mr. Darcy entered. He crossed directly to the writing table, retrieved his journal without reading it, and closed it. He sat in the chair across from her in silence, taking up the agricultural text that had been left on the table beside him.

Elizabeth looked down at her own pages and understood, with a humility entirely new to her, that she had a very great deal to learn — about Mr. Darcy, about Mr. Wickham, and most urgently of all, about herself.