Chapter 46: Actual, Real, Bona Fide Ado
Elizabeth receives a letter from Jane; two letters, actually, as the first had been delayed in the mail.
The first goes like this: "Hey, so uh Lydia and Mr. Wickham are running away to Scotland so they can get married. So that's pretty wild. But not a catastrophe!"
And the second goes like this: "Okay so it's a catastrophe. Somebody saw them get off the train in London and take an Uber instead, which means they definitely didn't get on their transfer to Scotland."
Well, really the only reason that a man ever runs away with a woman is because he wants to have sex with her; it's just that you hope he at least has the decency to marry her first. But Mr. Wickham can't get any money out of Lydia if they wed, and there's no other reason in the world to do so, so that's not looking real promising. Of course, not only would shacking up like this make Lydia a social pariah, the scandal of it all would pretty much bring the entire Bennet family down with her.
So naturally Mr. Darcy shows up at the inn as Elizabeth is panicking. He tries to calm her down as she explains the situation, but she's really upset, because she KNEW that Wickham was perfectly capable of pulling a stunt like this after hearing how he tried to elope with Darcy's sister; but she didn't say anything about it to anybody because she didn't think it was right for her to do so. But if she had... maybe she could have prevented this.
Darcy paces around for a while, lost in thought. Then he says, uhh, so I can't really be useful here. I think I'm going to go?
Elizabeth figures, well, there goes that friendship, of course he can't be associated with this family drama or he'd be dragged down too. And it's in that moment that she's like, shit, now that he's not going to be in my life anymore I finally recognize how much that sucks.
But, I guess we can't justify continuing the road trip while the rest of the family is in crisis mode, so... vacation over, everybody.