Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Blocked, Page 3
By Suha · Published
Transcript
Panel 1: The warm, comfortably cluttered Bennet living room. MS. DE BOURGH stands stiffly upright on the worn patterned rug, hands folded in front of her, refusing to sit, her pale heavy-lidded eyes travelling over the crowded bookshelves and the faded cream floral sofa. MRS. BENNET hovers beside the olive-green armchair, desperate to please. LIZZIE BENNET stands in the doorway with her arms folded, watching. MRS. BENNET: 'Please — sit, do sit, anywhere at all—' Panel 2: Medium close-up of MS. DE BOURGH in the amber lamplight, chin lifted, one eyebrow faintly raised as she takes in the low ceiling. Her expression is perfectly polite and perfectly withering. MS. DE BOURGH: 'This is a very small room.'
Image description
Ms. de Bourgh stands stiffly in the middle of the cluttered Bennet living room refusing to sit while Mrs. Bennet fusses and Lizzie watches from the doorway; below, a close-up as she calls the room very small.
About this chapter
Two days after Jane says yes to Charles, a long black car noses up the flagstone path of the Bennet house and does not belong there. Out of it steps Ms. de Bourgh — Darcy's aunt, the imperious matriarch of the estate where Lizzie once refused him — who has driven all this way on the strength of a rumour: that her nephew is about to be engaged to Elizabeth Bennet. She dismisses the household, marches Lizzie out to the garden, and lays out the case with surgical contempt: the family's disgrace, Lydia's patched-up marriage, a match that was planned for Darcy since he was a boy. Then she asks for a promise — never, under any circumstances, to accept him. Lizzie, who has spent weeks certain she'd already lost him, refuses. Not because she has any claim on him, but because she will not be told whom she's allowed to want. Every threat de Bourgh throws — censure, exile from his world, being despised by everyone connected to him — Lizzie meets and out-argues, until the old woman leaves in cold fury, taking no leave and sending no compliments to her mother. Lizzie stands in the wreckage of the conversation while her mother demands to know who that was, and then, at the kitchen window, watching the car dwindle down the leafy street, the real meaning arrives: nobody drives two hours to forbid a thing that was never going to happen. Somebody told that woman something. Which means Darcy has not, after all, closed the tab on her.