“If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it,” Elizabeth answers.
Lady Catherine brings forward another imperative reason why such a proceeding can never take place: Mr. Darcy is engaged to her daughter.
“If he is so,” says the unshaken Elizabeth, “you can have no reason to suppose he will make an offer to me.”
Lady Catherine is forced to hesitate, and to condescend to an explanation. The engagement is a family arrangement, based on perfect suitability of rank, fortune, and character. It had been planned by the two mothers, when the cousins were still children in their cradles. Can Elizabeth, a young woman of inferior birth, and of no importance in the world, be so lost to every feeling of propriety and delicacy as to disregard the wishes of Mr. Darcy’s friends, and presume to alter the destiny which, from his earliest years, has united him with his cousin?
Yes; Elizabeth is intrepid enough to do it, and to tell the domineering woman that if there were no other objection to her—Elizabeth’s—marrying Lady Catherine’s nephew, she would certainly not be kept from it by knowing that his mother and aunt had wished him to marry Miss de Bourgh.
It is useless for Lady Catherine to threaten the penalties which the outraged family will inflict, ending in that direst indignity of all, that Elizabeth’s name will never be mentioned by any one of them; Elizabeth assures the speaker, almost airily, that though these may be heavy misfortunes, the wife of Mr. Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness, that upon the whole she could have no cause to complain.
No wonder the incensed great lady is reduced to the somewhat undignified alternative of calling Elizabeth names—“obstinate, headstrong girl;” to telling her she is ashamed of her; to sitting down and crying—well-nigh piteously, waxing childish and maudlin, like many another baulked, irrational tyrant—that she will carry out her purpose; she has not been used to any person’s whims; she has not been in the habit of brooking disappointment; and it is not to be endured that her nephew and daughter are to be divided by the upstart pretensions of a young woman who, if she were sensible of her own good, would not wish to quit the sphere in which she had been brought up.
Elizabeth ventures to suggest that she is a gentleman’s daughter.
“True,” grants Lady Catherine; only to add, “but who was your mother? who are your uncles and aunts?”
“Whatever my connexions may be, if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you,” says Elizabeth. She could not have been without a tingling recollection that he had objected to them pretty strongly, though she had just been marvelling how she could ever have imagined a resemblance between him and his aunt—the fact being that Lady Catherine presents a striking caricature of Darcy’s original defects, without any of his redeeming virtues.