“‘Are you going as high as Belmont? Are you going near Camden Place? Because if you are, I shall have no scruple in asking you to take my place, and give Anne your arm to her father’s door. She is rather done for this morning, and must not go so far without help, and I ought to be at that fellow’s in the Market Place. He promised me the sight of a capital gun he is just going to send off; said he would keep it unpacked to the last possible moment, that I might see it; and if I do not turn back now, I have no chance. By his description it is a good deal like the second-sized double-barrel of mine which you shot with one day round Winthrop.’[83]
“There could be no objection. There could only be a most proper alacrity, a most obliging compliance for public view; and smiles reined in and spirits dancing in private rapture. In half a minute Charles was at the bottom of Union Street again, and the other two proceeding together; and soon words enough had passed between them to decide their direction towards the comparatively quiet and retired gravel walk, where the power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed, and prepare it for all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future life could bestow. There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement. There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting. And there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, all the little variations of the last week were gone through, and of yesterday and to-day there could scarcely be an end.
“At last Anne was at home again, happier than any one in that house could have conceived.
“The evening came, the drawing-rooms were lighted up, the company assembled. It was but a card party; it was but a mixture of those who had never met before, and those who had met too often; a commonplace business, too numerous for intimacy, too small for variety; but Anne had never found an evening shorter. Glowing and lovely in sensibility and happiness, and more generally admired than she thought about or cared for, she had cheerful or forbearing feelings for every creature around her; with Captain Wentworth some moments of communication constantly occurring and always the hope of more, and always the knowledge of his being there.
“It was in one of these short meetings, each apparently occupied in admiring a fine display of green-house plants, that she told him, with that candour and fairness to herself and everybody which no passion, and no submission to his influence could warp:
“‘I have been thinking over the past, and I must believe that I am right, much as I suffered from it, in being guided by the friend who to me was in the place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying she did not err in her advice. I mean I was right in submitting to it; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.’[84]
“He looked at her, looked at Lady Russell, and looking again at her, replied as if in cool deliberation, ‘Not yet. But there are hopes of her being forgiven in time. But I, too, have been thinking over the past, and a question has suggested itself, whether there may not have been one person more my enemy even than that lady. My own self. Tell me, if when I returned to England in the year ’eight, with a few thousand pounds,[85] and was posted into the Laconia, if I had then written to you, would you have answered my letter? Would you, in short, have renewed the engagement then?’
“‘Would I?’ was all her answer; but the accent was decisive.
“‘Good God!’ he cried, ‘you would! It is not that I did not think of it, or desire it, as what could alone crown all my other success; but I was proud, too proud to ask again. I did not understand you. Six years of separation and suffering might have been spared. I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses,’ he added, with a smile, ‘I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.’”
“Who can doubt what followed?” Jane Austen begins the last chapter. Sir Walter made no objection, and Elizabeth did nothing worse than look cold and unconcerned. Captain Wentworth, with five-and-twenty thousand pounds, and as high in his profession as merit and activity could place him, was no longer a nobody.