Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/95

 and Darcy, feeling bound to clear himself, writes her an explanation which opens her eyes to see that she has cruelly misjudged and needlessly insulted him. Upon a generous nature like Elizabeth's this knowledge can have but one result—she is gradually drawn over, first to admire, then to esteem him, and so reaches the brink of love, though he has no suspicion of her change of feeling, and is determined never again to try his fate. Circumstances, which seem likely to separate him and Elizabeth for ever, prove to be the chain which draws them together at last.

Lydia, the youngest of the five Bennet sisters, a foolish, spoilt, flirting girl, makes a disreputable elopement with a young officer, named Wickham, of whom Elizabeth had seen a good deal. He is the son of a former steward of Mr. Darcy, handsome, plausible, and unprincipled, and, having been thwarted by his employer in a disgraceful attempt to take Holy Orders, had revenged himself first by attempting an elopement with Miss Darcy, a girl of fifteen, to whom her brother is guardian, and afterwards by spreading abroad scandalous stories of Darcy, all absolutely false, although concocted with skill. Elizabeth, at the time when her feelings against Mr. Darcy were most hostile, had heard and believed these stories, and it is to these she made allusion when rejecting him. To clear himself he is obliged to tell her of his sister's narrow escape, which, he entreats, she will tell to no one but her sister Jane, and she obeys the injunction. Now, in the first agony at Lydia's shameful elopement, she reproaches herself bitterly for not having warned her own family against Wickham. Darcy, generously taking the blame upon himself, sets off in pursuit of