These Three Remain

tone had evoked, but he continued somberly, “But most of all the recovery of the last twenty-four hours so that I could spend them more profitably. I should have heeded your advice.”

Coloring at the praise, his valet looked away. Darcy pulled at his cuffs and then at his waistcoat. “Am I ready for Miss Darcy?”

“Assuredly, sir.” Fletcher bowed and left at his master’s nod.

Strolling back into his bedchamber, Darcy was greeted by a bored and yawning Trafalgar. Although the dressing room door was no obstacle to him, the hound had acquired a healthy respect for his master’s valet and that man’s active opinion of the presence of animals within his artistic realm. Therefore, as fascinating as all his master’s activities in that most sacrosanct of rooms were, Trafalgar exercised a rare discretion where it was concerned and waited without the door for Darcy to emerge. Seeing him come at last, he scrambled to his feet, his eyes fixed in hope upon his master’s face.

“No, not today, Monster!” Darcy was forced to dash Trafalgar’s simple canine hopes. “I must see Miss Darcy…” The hound’s ears wilted even as Darcy reached down to scratch them, and with a sharp snort, he stalked over to the door, nosed it open, and left Darcy staring after him in dismay. Even to his hound, it appeared, he was a sad disappointment!

Following in Trafalgar’s offended wake, Darcy strode down the hall and then the steps of an Erewile House frozen in silence. The clatter of his shoes upon the stairs so sullied the unnatural quiet that the sound brought Witcher out into the hall with a harsh reprimand upon his lips before he realized who it was that had transgressed his orders.

“Oh! It is you, sir! I beg your pardon, sir.” The elderly butler’s eyes widened in embarrassment at nearly ringing a peal over his master. In both their younger days, such peals had occasionally been rung, but that had been many a year ago. Witcher’s stolid demeanor reasserted itself as he bowed and held himself in readiness for his master’s orders for what remained of this very strange day.

Darcy gestured in dismissal of the offense. “You would do me a courtesy by lifting the ban, Witcher, and relieve the staff as well, I imagine.” He cast about then for something, anything, that smacked of his normal course. The more quickly his household fell back into its accustomed patterns, the sooner this aberration would be forgotten. “And send coffee to the Small Parlor, please,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir. At once,” his butler answered, but then continued. “Mr. Darcy, sir, Lord Brougham called earlier and left his card for you with instructions that you read his note. I placed it on your desk, sir.”

“When did he call?” Darcy asked in surprise. Come and gone already, had he?

“Two o’clock, sir. Miss Darcy passed by the hall and spoke to him briefly, but he stayed no more than ten minutes, sir, as was proper.”

“Thank you, Witcher.” Darcy turned in the direction of his study, his curiosity awakened. “And send round that coffee, if you will.”

“Very good, sir.”

Free to satisfy the mystery of Dy’s early visit, Darcy entered his study, and striding past Georgiana’s portrait, which sat there on an easel until Unveiling Day, he went directly to his desk, where an elegant, gilt-edged calling card rested in a silver tray. Snatching it up, he sank into his chair and flicked it over.

Fitz,

Will call again later and for dinner as Miss Darcy has invited me to dine tonight! I strongly advise you to stay home today. Trust your sister to receive the truth aright. She, also, is an exceptional young woman!

Dy

Darcy grimaced at the message, a hot flush creeping up the back of his neck. “An exceptional young woman!” Yes, he had bled quite freely in the pub last night, there was no question. By turns, Dy’s wit and sympathy had teased everything of consequence out of him save the dangerous knowledge of Elizabeth’s identity. Sighing, he tossed the card onto the desk and then sat back, his fingers working at his temples. He had felt such a relief at the time finally to tell aloud the entire chronicle of the wretched affair, but the discordance of his own perception of the tale as he told it and the memories of his friend’s responses to it preyed on his mind.

Yes, yes, that would be the Darcy approach, wouldn’t it? Dy had skewered him with sarcasm. Only you, my friend, would make the lady’s general unfitness the leading topic in a proposal of marriage! Darcy winced. Was that what he had done? His memory ranged over the first minutes of that awful interview once more. What had he said in that ill-fated suit so undesired by its object? Good Lord! He remembered it so plainly now! He had plunged straightway into an examination of the injurious deficiencies of station and consequence her family represented. He had spoken of degradation and social censure, following it with a warm description of the certain wounds to his family that would be incurred as a result of his surrender to inclination. In short, he had talked only of himself, his family, his consequence, and her “unfitness,” then claimed a fastidious abhorrence of disguise as his justification! Darcy sucked in his breath. He had insulted her abominably, then excused the recitation of his vaunted scruples on the grounds that they were natural and just! He closed his eyes and saw again how her eyes had flashed as she had rejected his insolent proposal.

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 all: 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