Anne heard her mother’s familiar complaints in silence. However, for the first time in her life, she experienced the satisfaction that could derive from what, in the common cant, is known as “having the whip-hand” at last. Lady Catherine’s fate was now in her daughter’s power, a circumstance yet a stranger to the mother’s suspicions. Anne felt a wholly new sensation of actual felicity, emanating from the certain knowledge of her mother’s vulnerability. She did not see the letter which was despatched by Sir William to Lady Catherine a few days later, but was left in no doubt as to its success. She arrived home after an afternoon spent at the Pump Room to find Sir William comfortably seated beside her mother in the sitting room, Lady Catherine looking radiantly happy, and Sir William doing his best to appear so. Their own engagement could not yet be discussed, but Anne felt certain that, before the passage of many weeks, Sir William could successfully exchange the delusion of the mother for the hand of the daughter. In the interim, Anne rejoiced in the wisdom that her mother was soon to understand the unhappy alternative of either living as just another poor widow in greatly reduced circumstances amongst her acquaintance in Bath, or banished to the old, worn-out Dower Cottage (which it had never been thought necessary to repair), as just another poor widow at Hunsford.

CH AP. 22.

THE DARCYS WERE ALL in a great bustle, making ready to leave for the continent. Colonel Fitzwilliam remained some weeks more at Pemberley, assisting with their preparations and seeing his cousins off, and then spent a few weeks with his father and step-mother, before returning to the north. Without the steady pleasures of good conversation and the diversions of the family party at Pemberley, the colonel returned to his regiment in unusually low spirits. His pursuit of Mary Crawford had been conducted with such diffidence and respect for propriety that only the two principals—and then only because Colonel Fitzwilliam had at last resolved on the temerity of speech—knew that there was a courtship in progress. Accordingly, there was no danger of his being importuned by his fellow officers for his disappointed hopes to exasperate his melancholy. The weather was uncommonly mild, so there was hunting and exercise to contribute to his happiness, but it answered not. Remaining with his regiment only long enough to cause himself the inconvenience and expense of a long, cold journey, and seeing to his own comforts and provisioning, which he then immediately abandoned, the Colonel abruptly changed course and resolved on a stay at Tunbridge Wells to fill the days prior to his departure for the anticipated rendezvous at Geneva with the Darcys some weeks hence.