Mr. Darcy's Diary

This was to be the end of all my struggles? To be rejected? And in such a manner! I! A Darcy! To be answered as though I was a fortune-hunter or an undesirable suitor. My astonishment quickly gave way to resentment. So resentful did I feel that I would not open my lips until I believed I had mastered my emotion.

‘And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of expecting!’ I said at last. ‘I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small importance.’

‘I might as well enquire,’ replied she heatedly, ‘why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason and even against your character? Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil? But I have other provocations. You know I have. Had not my own feelings decided against you, had they been indifferent, or had they even been favourable, do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?’

I felt myself change colour. So she had heard of that.

I hoped she had not. It could not be expected to make her think well of me. But I had nothing to be ashamed of. I had acted in the best interests of my friend.

‘I have every reason in the world to think ill of you.

No motive can excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted there,’ she went on.

I felt my expression hardening. Unjust? Ungenerous?

No indeed.

‘You dare not, you cannot deny that you have been the principal, if not the only means of dividing them from each other, of exposing one to the censure of the world for caprice and instability, the other to its derision for disappointed hopes, and involving them both in misery of the acutest kind.’

I could not believe what I was hearing. Caprice and instability? Who would judge Bingley capricious for removing to London when he had business to attend to?

Derision for disappointed hopes? Miss Bennet had had no hopes, unless they had been planted in her mind by her mother, who could see no further than Bingley’s five thousand pounds a year.

Misery of the acutest kind? Yes, that was what Bingley would have suffered if he had voiced his feelings. He would have been joined to a woman who was beneath him.

‘I have no wish to deny that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.’

Elizabeth ignored my remark and said, ‘But it is not merely this affair on which my dislike is founded. Long before it had taken place my opinion of you was decided.

Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received many months ago from Mr Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself? Or under what misrepresentation can you here impose upon others?’

Wickham! She could not have found a name more calculated to wound and, at the same time, disgust me.

‘You take an eager interest in that gentleman’s concerns,’ I remarked in agitation.

I regretted the words as soon as they were spoken.

What was it to me if she showed an interest in George Wickham? After her refusal of my hand, nothing about Elizabeth had any right to interest me ever again.

And yet the mortification I felt intensified, and I found a new emotion in my breast, a most unwelcome one. Jealousy. I found it intolerable that she should prefer George Wickham to me! That she should be unable to see through his smiling exterior to the black heart beneath.

‘Who that knows what his misfortunes have been, can help feeling an interest in him?’

‘His misfortunes!’ I repeated. What tale had he been spinning her? Wickham, who had had everything. Who had been spoilt and petted in childhood and, despite that, had turned into one of the most dissolute, profligate young men of my acquaintance.

As I thought of the money my father had lavished on him, the opportunities he had had and the help I myself had given him, I could not help my lip’s curling. ‘Yes, his misfortunes have been great indeed.’

‘And of your infliction,’ she said angrily. ‘You have reduced him to his present state of poverty, comparative poverty. You have withheld the advantages, which you must know to have been designed for him. You have deprived the best years of his life, of that independence which was no less his due than his desert. You have done all this! And yet you can treat the mention of his misfortunes with contempt and ridicule.’