Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Are You Sure?, Page 10
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1. Mr. Bennet is settled in the olive-green armchair with a tablet face-down on his knee. He looks up as Lizzie stops in the living-room doorway. Panel 2. Close on Mr. Bennet, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, brows raised, entirely unamused for once. MR. BENNET: Lizzie. Are you out of your senses? Panel 3. Lizzie stands very straight just inside the door, hands at her sides, saying nothing. Panel 4. Mr. Bennet leans back, studying her with real bewilderment. MR. BENNET: Have you not always hated this man? Panel 5. Lizzie's face in close-up, steady, accepting the hit. LIZZIE: Yes. I did. Panel 6. Mr. Bennet glances off toward the window, dry and flat. MR. BENNET: He is rich, certainly.
Image description
Six panels in the lamplit living room. Mr. Bennet, glasses pushed up on his forehead, asks his daughter whether she is out of her senses and whether she has not always hated this man. Lizzie stands straight and says yes, she did.
About this chapter
Lizzie comes home from the leafy lane engaged to the one man nobody in that house would believe she could want, and discovers the hardest part is not saying yes: it is being believed. Jane laughs, certain it is a joke, until the whole reordered story comes out in the dark of their bedroom, and asks the one question Lizzie has never let herself answer out loud. The next morning Darcy is at the front door in his charcoal overcoat asking, of all people, for her father. Behind a closed living-room door two men have a conversation Lizzie is not in, while her mother speculates about lawsuits and Mary offers wisdom nobody requested. Then it is her turn, and Mr. Bennet, dry and unbothered for twenty-two chapters, is not dry at all: he wants to know whether his sharpest daughter has sold herself to a rich man she cannot respect. So Lizzie tells him everything, including the part that was never hers to tell, and says the words she has never once said about anybody. Her father takes off his glasses. Downstairs, Mrs. Bennet goes silent for three unprecedented seconds before the house detonates, and the chapter closes where it opened: the same porch steps at golden hour, except she is not walking up them alone.