"Cher père Nilgoes. S'il vous plait voulez vous me donné plus de jeux que des oranges des pommes et des pombons parc que nous allons faire l'arbre de noel cette anné et les jeaux ferait mieux pour l'arbre de Noel. Il ne faut pas dire à petite mere s'il vous plait parce que je ne veut pas quelle sache sil vous voulez venir ce soir du ceil pour que vous pouvez me donner ce que je vous demande Dites bon jour á la St. Viearge est à l'enfant Jeuses et à Ste Joseph. Adieu cher St. Nilgoes."
I haven't altered the spelling, I love it too well, prophetic of a fault I still carry about me. How strange that little bit of invocation to the dear folk above sounds to me now! My mother must have been teaching me things after her own persuasion; most naturally, poor dear one—though that too has gone like water off my mind. It was one of the troubles between her and my father: the compact that I was to be brought up a Catholic was dissolved after they separated; and I am sorry, thinking it unjust to her; yet glad, content with being what I am.
I must have been less than five when I penned this: I was always a letter-writer, it seems.
It is a reproach now from many that I have ceased to be: and to them I fear it is true. That I have not truly ceased, "witness under my hand these presents,"—or whatever may be the proper legal terms for an affidavit.
What were you like, Beloved, as a very small child? Should I have loved you from the beginning had we toddled to the rencounter; and would my love have passed safely through the "gallous young hound" period; and could I love you more now in any case, had I all your days treasured up in my heart, instead of less than a year of them?
How strangely much have seven miles kept our fates apart! It seems uncharacteristic for this small world,—where meetings come about so far above the dreams of average—to have played us such a prank.
This must do for this once, Beloved; for behold me busy to-day: with what, I shall not tell you. I would like to put you to a test, as ladies did their knights of old, and hardly ever do now—fearing, I suppose, lest the species should altogether fail them at the pinch. I would like to see if you could come here and sit with me from beginning to end, with your eyes shut: never once opening them. I am not saying whether I think curiosity, or affection, would make the attempt too difficult. But if you were sure you could, you might come here to-morrow—a day otherwise interdicted. Only know, having come, that if you open those dear cupboards of vision and set eyes on things not yet intended to be looked at, there will be confusion of tongues in this Tower we are building whose top is to reach heaven. Will you come? I don't say "come"; I only want to know—will you?
To-day my love flies low over the earth like a swallow before rain, and touching the tops of the flowers has culled you these. Kiss them until they open: they are full of my thoughts, as the world, to me, is full of you.
LETTER XIV.
Own Dearest: Come I did not think that you would, or mean that you should seriously; for is it not a poor way of love to make the object of it cut an absurd or partly absurd figure? I wrote only as a woman having a secret on the tip of her tongue and the tips of her fingers, and full of a longing to say it and send it.
Here it is at last: love me for it, I have worked so hard to get it done! And you do not know why and what for? Beloved, it—this—is the anniversary of the day we first met; and you have forgotten it already or never remembered it:—and yet have been clamoring for "the letters"!
On the first anniversary of our marriage, if you remember it, you shall have those same letters: and not otherwise. So there they lie safe till doomsday!
The M.-A. has been very gracious and clear after her little outbreak of yesterday: her repentances, after I have hurt her feelings, are so gentle and sweet, they always fill me with compunction. Finding that I would go on with the thing I was doing, she volunteered to come and read to me: a requiem over the bone of contention which we had gnawed between us. Was not that pretty and charitable? She read Tennyson's Life for a solid hour, and continued it to-day. Isn't it funny that she should take up such a book?—she who "can't abide" Tennyson or Browning or Shakespeare: only likes Byron, I suppose because it was the right and fashionable liking when she was young. Yet she is plodding through the Life religiously—only skipping the verses. I have come across two little specimens of "Death and the child" in it. His son, Lionel, was carried out in a blanket one night in the great comet year, and waking up under the stars asked, "Am I dead?" Number two is of a little girl at Wellington's funeral who saw his charger carrying his boots, and asked, "Shall I be like that after I die?"
A queer old lady came to lunch yesterday, a great traveler, though lame on two crutches. We carefully hid all guide-books and maps, and held our peace about next month, lest she should insist on coming too: though I think Nineveh was the place she was most anxious to go to, if the M.-A. would consent to accompany her!
Good-by, dearest of one-year-old acquaintances! you, too, send your blessing on the anniversary, now that my better memory has reminded you of it! All that follow we will bless in company. I trust you are one-half as happy as I am, my own, my own.
LETTER XV.
You told me, dearest, that I should find your mother formidable. It is true; I did. She is a person very much in the grand pagan style: I admire it, but I cannot flow in that sort of company, and I think she meant to crush me. You were very wise to leave her to come alone.
I like her: I mean I believe that under that terribleness she has a heart of gold, which once opened would never shut: but she has not opened it to me. I believe she could have a great charity, that no evil-doing would dismay her: "stanch" sums her up. But I have done nothing wrong enough yet to bring me into her good graces. Loving her son, even, though, I fear, a great offense, has done me no good turn.
Perhaps that is her inconsistency: women are sure to be inconsistent somewhere: it is their birthright.
I began to study her at once, to find you: it did not take long. How I could love her, if she would let me!
You know her far far better than I, and want no advice: otherwise I would say—never praise me to her; quote my follies rather! To give ground for her distaste to revel in will not deepen me in her bad books so much as attempts to warp her judgment.
I need not go through it all: she will have told you all that is to the purpose about our meeting. She bristled in, a brave old fighting figure, announcing compulsion in every line, but with all her colors flying. She waited for the door to close, then said, "My son has bidden me come, I suppose it is my duty: he is his own master now."
We only shook hands. Our talk was very little of you. I showed her all the horses, the dogs, and the poultry; she let the inspection appear to conclude with myself: asked me my habits, and said I looked healthy. I owned I felt it. "Looks and feelings are the most deceptive things in the world," she told me; adding that "poor stock" got more than its share of these. And when she said it I saw quite plainly that she meant me.
I wonder where she gets the notion: for we are a long-lived race, both sides of the family. I guessed that she would like frankness, and was as frank as I could be, pretending no deference to her objections. "You think you suit each other?" she asked me. My answer, "He suits me!" pleased her maternal palate, I think. "Any girl might say that!" she admitted. (She might indeed!)
This is the part of our interview she will not have repeated to you.
I was due at Hillyn when she was preparing to go: Aunt N—— came in, and I left her to do the honors while I slipped on my habit. I rode by your mother's carriage as far as the Greenway, where we branched. I suppose that is what her phrase means that you quote about my "making a trophy of her," and marching her a prisoner across the borders before all the world!
I do like her: she is worth winning.—Can one say warmer of a future mother-in-law who stands hostile?
All the same it was an ordeal. I believe I have wept since: for Benjy scratched my door often yesterday evening, and looked most wistful when I came out. Merely paltry self-love, dearest:—I am so little accustomed to not being—liked.
I think she will be more gracious in her own house. I have her formal word that I am to come. Soon, not too soon, I will come over; and you shall meet me and take me to see her. There is something in her opposition that I can't fathom: I wondered twice was lunacy her notion: she looked at me so hard.
My mother's seclusion and living apart from us was not on that account. I often saw her: she was very dear and sweet to me, and had quiet eyes the very reverse of a person mentally deranged. My father, I know, went to visit her when she lay dying; and I remember we all wore mourning. My uncle has told me they had a deep regard for each other: but disagreed, and were independent enough to choose living apart.
I do not remember my father ever speaking of her to us as children: but I am sure there was no state of health to be concealed.
Last night I was talking to Aunt N—— about her. "A very dear woman," she told me, "but your father was never so much alive to her worth as the rest of us." Of him she said, "A dear, fine fellow: but not at all easy to get on with." Him, of course, I have a continuous recollection of, and "a fine fellow" we did think him. My mother comes to me more rarely, at intervals.
Don't talk me down your mother's throat: but tell her as much as she cares to know of this. I am very proud of my "stock" which she thinks "poor"!
Dear, how much I have written on things which can never concern us finally, and so should not ruffle us while they last! Hold me in your heart always, always; and the world may turn adamant to me for aught I care! Be in my dreams to-night!
LETTER XVI.
But, Dearest: When I think of you I never question whether what I think would be true or false in the eyes of others. All that concerns you seems to go on a different plane where evidence has no meaning or existence: where nobody exists or means anything, but only we two alone, engaged in bringing about for ourselves the still greater solitude of two into one. Oh, Beloved, what a company that will be! Take me in your arms, fasten me to your heart, breathe on me. Deny me either breath or the light of day: I am yours equally, to live or die at your word. I shut my eyes to feel your kisses falling on me like rain, or still more like sunshine,—yet most of all like kisses, my own dearest and best beloved!
Oh, we two! how wonderful we seem! And to think that there have been lovers like us since the world began: and the world not able to tell us one little word of it:—not well, so as to be believed—or only along with sadness where Fate has broken up the heavens which lay over some pair of lovers. Œnone's cry, "Ah me, my mountain shepherd," tells us of the joy when it has vanished, and most of all I get it in that song of wife and husband which ends:—
Not a lock or kiss,
Good-by.
We, one, must part in two;
Verily death is this:
I must die."
It was a woman wrote that: and we get love there! Is it only when joy is past that we can give it its full expression? Even now, Beloved, I break down in trying to say how I love you. I cannot put all my joy into my words, nor all my love into my lips, nor all my life into your arms, whatever way I try. Something remains that I cannot express. Believe, dearest, that the half has not yet been spoken, neither of my love for you, nor of my trust in you,—nor of a wish that seems sad, but comes in a very tumult of happiness—the wish to die so that some unknown good may come to you out of me.
Not till you die, dearest, shall I die truly! I love you now too much for your heart not to carry me to its grave, though I should die now, and you live to be a hundred. I pray you may! I cannot choose a day for you to die. I am too grateful to life which has given me to you to say—if I were dying—"Come with me, dearest!" Though, how the words tempt me as I write them!—Come with me, dearest: yes, come! Ah, but you kiss me more, I think, when we say good-by than when meeting; so you will kiss me most of all when I have to die:—a thing in death to look forward to! And, till then,—life, life, till I am out of my depth in happiness and drown in your arms!
Beloved, that I can write so to you,—think what it means; what you have made me come through in the way of love, that this, which I could not have dreamed before, comes from me with the thought of you! You told me to be still—to let you "worship": I was to write back acceptance of all your dear words. Are you never to be at my feet, you ask. Indeed, dearest, I do not know how, for I cannot move from where I am! Do you feel where my thoughts kiss you? You would be vexed with me if I wrote it down, so I do not. And after all, some day, under a bright star of Providence, I may have gifts for you after my own mind which will allow me to grow proud. Only now all the giving comes from you. It is I who am enriched by your love, beyond knowledge of my former self. Are you changed, dearest, by anything I have done?
My heart goes to you like a tree in the wind, and all these thoughts are loose leaves that fly after you when I have to remain behind. Dear lover, what short visits yours seem! and the Mother-Aunt tells me they are most unconscionably long.—You will not pay any attention to that, please: forever let the heavens fall rather than that a hint to such foul effect should grow operative through me!
This brings you me so far as it can:—such little words off so great a body of—"liking" shall I call it? My paper stops me: it is my last sheet: I should have to go down to the library to get more—else I think I could not cease writing.
More love than I can name.—Ever, dearest, your own.
LETTER XVII.
Dearest: Do I not write you long letters? It reveals my weakness. I have thought (it had been coming on me, and now and then had broken out of me before I met you) that, left to myself, I should have become a writer of books—I scarcely can guess what sort—and gone contentedly into middle-age with that instead of this as my raison d'être.
How gladly I lay down that part of myself, and say—"But for you, I had been this quite other person, whom I have no wish to be now"! Beloved, your heart is the shelf where I put all my uncut volumes, wondering a little what sort of a writer I should have made; and chiefly wondering, would you have liked me in that character?
There is one here in the family who considers me a writer of the darkest dye, and does not approve of it. Benjy comes and sits most mournfully facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write: and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of—"What has come between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat's-claw scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me through damp places?"
Having written this sentimental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and took him to see his mother's grave. At the bottom of the long walk is our dog's cemetery:—no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy as a child to have it planted: and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it knew that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping. Benjy, too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there, as he does in other places. What horror, were I to find him digging up his mother's skeleton! Would my esteem for him survive?
When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking what I had brought him there for. I pointed out to him the precise mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered you these buds. Are they not a deep color for wild ones?—if their blush remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you.
Through what flower would you best like to be passed back, as regards your material atoms, into the spiritualized side of nature, when we have done with ourselves in this life? No single flower quite covers all my wants and aspirations. You and I would put our heads together underground and evolve a new flower—"carnation, lily, lily, rose"—and send it up one fine morning for scientists to dispute over and give diabolical learned names to. What an end to our cozy floral collaboration that would be!
Here endeth the epistle: the elect salutes you. This week, if the authorities permit, I shall be paying you a flying visit, with wings full of eyes,—and, I hope, healing; for I believe you are seedy, and that that is what is behind it. You notice I have not complained. Dearest, how could I! My happiness reaches to the clouds—that is, to where things are not quite clear at present. I love you no more than I ought: yet far more than I can name. Good-night and good-morning.—Your star, since you call me so.
LETTER XVIII.
Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to tell you what I do all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my telling you what I think? Yet you get more of me this way than that. What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always different. However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain, here I start telling you.
I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the blinds: wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;—discover new beauties in it, and run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself,—find them; Benjy comes up with the post's latest, and behold, my day is begun!
Is that the sort of thing you want to know? My days are without an action worth naming: I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of them: if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink race to tell you. No, it is man who does things; a woman only diddles (to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good, fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living: and that is not me!
I feel sometimes as if a real bar were between me and a whole conception of life; because I have carpets and curtains, and Nan-nan, and Benjy, and last of all you—shutting me out from the realities of existence.
If you would all leave me just for one full moon, and come back to me only when I am starving for you all—for my tea to be brought to me in the morning, and all the paddings and cushionings which bolster me up from morning till night—with what a sigh of wisdom I would drop back into your arms, and would let you draw the rose-colored curtains round me again!
Now I am afraid lest I have become too happy: I am leaning so far out of window to welcome the dawn, I seem to be tempting a fall—heaven itself to fall upon me.
What do I know truly, who only know so much happiness?
Dearest, if there is anything else in love which I do not know, teach it me quickly: I am utterly yours. If there is sorrow to give, give it me! Only let me have with it the consciousness of your love.
Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think of you so much. What would life have without you in it? The sun would drop from my heavens. I see only by you! you have kissed me on the eyes. You are more to me than my own poor brain could ever have devised: had I started to invent Paradise, I could not have invented you. But perhaps you have invented me: I am something new to myself since I saw you first. God bless you for it!
Even if you were to shut your eyes at me now—though I might go blind, you could not unmake me:—"The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts." Also that I am yours is a gift of the gods, I will trust: and so, not to be recalled!
Kiss me, dearest; here where I have written this! I am yours, Beloved. I kiss you again and again.—Ever your own making.
LETTER XIX.
Dearest, Dearest: How long has this happened? You don't tell me the day or the hour. Is it ever since you last wrote? Then you have been in pain and grief for four days: and I not knowing anything about it! And you have no hand in the house kind enough to let you dictate by it one small word to poor me? What heartless merrymakings may I not have sent you to worry you, when soothing was the one thing wanted? Well, I will not worry now, then; neither at not being told, nor at not being allowed to come: but I will come thus and thus, O my dear heart, and take you in my arms. And you will be comforted, will you not be? when I tell you that even if you had no legs at all, I would love you just the same. Indeed, dearest, so much of you is a superfluity: just your heart against mine, and the sound of your voice, would carry me up to more heavens than I could otherwise have dreamed of. I may say now, now that I know it was not your choice, what a void these last few days the lack of letters has been to me. I wondered, truly, if you had found it well to put off such visible signs for a while in order to appease one who, in other things more essential, sees you rebellious. But the wonder is over now; and I don't want you to write—not till a consultation of doctors orders it for the good of your health. I will be so happy talking to you: also I am sending you books:—those I wish you to read; and which now you must, since you have the leisure! And I for my part will make time and read yours. Whose do you most want me to read, that my education in your likings may become complete? What I send you will not deprive me of anything: for I have the beautiful complete set—your gift—and shall read side by side with you to realize in imagination what the happiness of reading them for the first time ought to be.
Yesterday, by a most unsympathetic instinct, I went out for a long tramp on my two feet; and no ache in them came and told me of you! Over Sillingford I sat on a bank and looked downhill where went a carter. And I looked uphill where lay something which might be nothing—or not his. Now, shall I make a fool of myself by pursuing to tell him he may have dropped something, or shall I go on and see? So I went on and saw a coat with a fat pocket: and by then he was out of sight, and perhaps it wasn't his; and it was very hot and the hill steep. So I minded my own business, making Cain's motto mine; and now feel so had, being quite sure that it was his. And I wonder how many miles he will have tramped back looking for it, and whether his dinner was in the pocket.
These unintentional misdoings are the "sins" one repents of all one's life long: I have others stored away, the bitterest of small things done or undone in haste and repented of at so much leisure afterwards. And always done to people or things I had no grudge against, sometimes even a love for. They are my skeletons: I will tell you of them some day.
This, dearest, is our first enforced absence from each other; and I feel it almost more hard on me than on you. Beloved, let us lay our hearts together and get comforted. It is not real separation to know that another part of the world contains the rest of me. Oh, the rest of me, the rest of me that you are! So, thinking of you, I can never be tired. I rest yours.
LETTER XX.
Yes, Dearest, "Patience!" but it is a virtue I have little enough of naturally, and used to be taught to pray for as a child. And I remember once really hurting clear Mother-Aunt's feelings by trying to repay her for that teaching by a little iniquitous laughter at her expense. It was too funny for me to feel very contrite about, as I do sometimes over quite small things, or I would not be telling it you now (for there are things in me I would conceal even from you). I dare say you wouldn't guess it, but the M.-A. is a most long person over her private devotions. Perhaps it was her own habit, with the cares of a household sometimes conflicting, which made her recite to me so often her pet legend of a saintly person who, constantly interrupted over her prayers by mundane matters, became a pattern in patience out of these snippings of her godly desires. So, one day, angels in the disguise of cross people with selfish demands on her time came seeking to know where in her composition or composure exasperation began: and finding none, they let her return in peace to her missal, where for a reward all the letters had been turned into gold. "And that, my dear, comes of patience," my aunt would say, till I grew a little tired of the saying. I don't know what experience my uncle had gathered of her patience under like circumstances: but I notice that to this day he treads delicately, like Agag, when he knows her to be on her knees; and prefers then to send me on his errands instead of doing them himself.
So it happened one day that he wanted a particular coat which had been put away in her clothes-closet—and she was on her knees between him and it, with the time of her Amen quite indefinite. I was sent, said my errand briefly, and was permitted to fumble out her keys from her pocket while she continued to kneel over her morning psalms.
What I brought to him turned out to be the wrong coat: I went back and knocked for readmittance. Long-sufferingly she bade me to come in. I explained, and still she repressed herself, only saying in a tone of affliction, "Do see this time that you take the right one!"
After I had made my second selection, and proved it right on my uncle's person, the parallelism of things struck me, and I skipped back to my aunt's door and tapped. I got a low wailing "Yes?" for answer—a monosyllabic substitute for the "How long, O Lord?" of a saint in difficulties. When I called through the keyhole, "Are your psalms written in gold?" she became really angry:—I suppose because the miracle so well earned had not come to pass.
Well, dearest, if you have been patient with me over so much about nothing, I pray this letter may appear to you written in gold. Why I write so is, partly, that, it is bad for us both to be down in the mouth, or with hearts down at heel: and so, since you cannot, I have to do the dancing;—and, partly, because I found I had a bad temper on me which needed curing, and being brought to the sun-go-down point of owing no man anything. Which, sooner said, has finally been done; and I am very meek now and loving to you, and everything belonging to you—not to come nearer the sore point.
And I hope some day, some day, as a reward to my present submission, that you will sprain your ankle in my company (just a very little bit for an excuse) and let me have the nursing of it! It hurts my heart to have your poor bones crying out for comfort that I am not to bring to them. I feel robbed of a part of my domestic training, and may never pick up what I have just lost. And I fear greatly you must have been truly in pain to have put off Meredith for a day. If I had been at hand to read to you, I flatter myself you would have liked him well, and been soothed. You must take the will, Beloved, for the deed. I kiss you now, as much as even you can demand; and when you get this I will be thinking of you all over again.—When do I ever leave off? Love, love, love till our next meeting-, and then more love still, and more!—Ever your own.
LETTER XXI.
Dearest: I am in a simple mood to-day, and give you the benefit of it: I shall become complicated again presently, and you will hear from me directly that happens.
The house only emptied itself this morning; I may say emptied, for the remainder fits like a saint into her niche, and is far too comfortable to count. This is C——, whom you only once met, when she sat so much in the background that you will not remember her. She has one weakness, a thirst between meals—the blameless thirst of a rabid teetotaler. She hides cups of cold tea about the place, as a dog its bones: now and then one gets spilled or sat on, and when she hears of the accident, she looks thirsty, with a thirst which only that particular cup of tea could have quenched. In no other way is she any trouble: indeed, she is a great dear, and has the face of a Madonna, as beautiful as an apocryphal gospel to look at and "make believe" in.
Arthur, too, like the rest of them, when he came over to give me his brotherly blessing, wished to know what you were like. I didn't pretend to remember your outward appearance too well,—told him you looked like a common or garden Englishman, and roused his suspicions by so careless a championship of my choice. He accused me of being in reality highly sentimental about you, and with having at that moment your portrait concealed and strung around my neck in a locket. Mother-Aunt stood up for me against him, declaring I was "too sensible a girl for nonsense of that sort." (It is a little weakness of hers, you know, to resent extremes of endearment towards anyone but herself in those she has "brooded," and she has thought us hitherto most restrained and proper—as, indeed, have we not been?) Arthur and I exchanged tokens of truce: in a little while off went my aunt to bed, leaving us alone. Then, for he is the one of us that I am most frank with: "Arthur," cried I, and up came your little locket like a bucket from a well, for him to have his first sight of you, my Beloved. He objected that he could not see faces in a nutshell; and I suppose others cannot: only I.
He, too, is gone. If you had been coming he would have spared another day—for to-day was planned and dated, you will remember—and we would have ridden halfway to meet you. But, as fate has tripped you, and made all comings on your part indefinite, he sends you his hopes for a later meeting.
How is your poor foot? I suppose, as it is ill, I may send it a kiss by post and wish it well? I do. Truly, you are to let me know if it gives you much pain, and I will lie awake thinking of you. This is not sentimental, for if one knows that a friend is occupied over one's sleeplessness one feels the comfort.
I am perplexed how else to give you my company: your mother, I know, could not yet truly welcome me; and I wish to be as patient as possible, and not push for favors that are not offered. So I cannot come and ask to take you out in her carriage, nor come and carry you away in mine. We must try how fast we can hold hands at a distance.
I have kept up to where you have been reading in "Richard Feverel," though it has been a scramble: for I have less opportunity of reading, I with my feet, than you without yours. In your book I have just got to the smuggling away of General Monk in the perforated coffin, and my sense of history capitulates in an abandonment of laughter. I yield! The Gaul's invasion of Britain always becomes broad farce when he attempts it. This in clever ludicrousness beats the unintentional comedy of Victor Hugo's "John-Jim-Jack" as a name typical of Anglo-Saxon christenings. But Dumas, through a dozen absurdities, knows apparently how to stalk his quarry: so large a genius may play the fool and remain wise.
You see I have given your author a warm welcome at last: and what about you and mine? Tell me you love his women and I will not be jealous. Indeed, outside him I don't know where to find a written English woman of modern times whom I would care to meet, or could feel honestly bound to look up to:—nowhere will I have her shaking her ringlets at me in Dickens or Thackeray. Scott is simply not modern; and Hardy's women, if they have nobility in them, get so cruelly broken on the wheel that you get but the wrecks of them at last. It is only his charming baggages who come to a good ending.
I like an author who has the courage and self-restraint to leave his noble creations alive: too many try to ennoble them by death. For my part, if I have to go out of life before you, I would gladly trust you to the hands of Clara, or Rose, or Janet, or most of all Vittoria; though, to be accurate, I fear they have all grown too old for you by now.
And you? have you any men to offer me in turn out of your literary admirations, supposing you should die of a snapped ankle? Would you give me to d'Artagnan for instance? Hardly, I suspect! But either choose me some proxy hero, or get well and come to me! You will be very welcome when you do. Sleep is making sandy eyes at me: good-night, dearest.
LETTER XXII.
Why, my Beloved: Since you put it to me as a point of conscience (it is only lying on your back with one active leg doing nothing, and the other dying to have done aching, which has made you take this new start of inquiring within upon everything), since you call on me for a conscientious answer, I say that it stands to reason that I love you more than you love me, because there is so much more of you to love, let alone fit for loving.
Do you imagine that you are going to be a cripple for life, and therefore an indifferent dancer in the dances I shall always be leading you, that you have started this fit of self-depreciation? Or is it because I have thrown Meredith at your sick head that you doubt my tact and my affection, and my power patiently to bear for your sake a good deal of cold shoulder? Dearest, remember I am doctoring you from a distance: and am not yet allowed to come and see my patient, so can only judge from your letters how ill you are. That you have been concealing from me almost treacherously: and only by a piece of abject waylaying did I receive word to-day of your sleepless nights, and so get the key to your symptoms. Lay by Meredith, then, for a while: I am sending you a cargo of Stevenson instead. You have been truly unkind, trying to read what required effort, when you were fit for nothing of the sort.
And lest even Stevenson should be too much for you, and wanting very much, and perhaps a little bit jealously, to be your most successful nurse, I am letting my last large bit of shyness of you go; and with a pleasant sort of pain, because I know I have hit on a thing that will please you, I open my hands and let you have these, and with them goes my last blush: henceforth I am a woman without a secret, and all your interest in me may evaporate. Yet I know well it will not.
As for this resurrection pie from love's dead-letter office, you will find from it at least one thing—how much I depended upon response from you before I could become at all articulate. It is you, dearest, from the beginning who have set my head and heart free and made me a woman. I am something quite different from the sort of child I was less than a year ago when I wrote that small prayer which stands sponsor for all that follows. How abundantly it has been answered, dearest Beloved, only I know: you do not!
Now my prayer is not that you should "come true," but that you should get well. Do this one little thing for me, dearest! For you I will do anything: my happiness waits for that. As yet I seem to have done nothing. Oh, but, Beloved, I will! From a reading of the Fioretti, I sign myself as I feel.—Your glorious poor little one.
THE CASKET LETTERS.
A.
Pray God bless —— —— and make him come true for my sake. Amen.
R.S.V.P.
[1] The MS. contained at first no name, but a blank; over it this has been written afterwards in a small hand.
B.
Dear Prince Wonderful: Now that I have met you I pray that you will be my friend. I want just a little of your friendship, but that, so much, so much! And even for that little I do not know how to ask.
Always to be your friend: of that you shall be quite sure.
C.
Dear Prince Wonderful: Long ago when I was still a child I told myself of you: but thought of you only as in a fairy tale. Now I am afraid of trusting my eyes or ears, for fear I should think too much of you before I know you really to be true. Do not make me wish so much to be your friend, unless you are also going to be true!
Please come true now, for mine and for all the world's sake:—but for mine especially, because I thought of you first! And if you are not able to come true, don't make me see you any more. I shall always remember you, and be glad that I have seen you just once.
D.
Dear Prince Wonderful: Has God blessed you yet and made you come true? I have not seen you again, so how am I to know? Not that it is necessary for me to know even if you do come true. I believe already that you are true.
If I were never to see you again I should be glad to think of you as living, and shall always be your friend. I pray that you may come to know that.
E.
Dear Highness: I do not know what to write to you: I only know how much I wish to write. I have always written the things I thought about: it has been easy to find words for them. Now I think about you, but have no words:—no words, dear Highness, for you! I could write at once if I knew you were my friend. Come true for me: I will have so much to tell you then!
F.
Dear Highness: If I believe in fairy tales coming true, it is because I am superstitious. This is what I did to-day. I shut my eyes and took a book from the shelf, opened it, and put my fingers down on a page. This is what I came to:
I am able yet
All I want to get
By a method as strange as new:
Dare I trust the same to you?"
Fate says, then, you are to be my friend. Fate has said I am yours already. That is very certain. Only in real life where things come true would a book have opened as this has done.
G.
Dear Highness: I am sure now, then, that I please you, and that you like me, perhaps only a little: for you turned out of your way to ride with me though you were going somewhere so fast. How much I wished it when I saw you coming, but dared not believe it would come true!
"Come true": it is the word I have always been writing, and everything has:—you most of all! You are more true each time I see you. So true that now I will write it down at last,—the truth for you who have come so true.
Dear Highness and Great Heart, I love you dearly, though you don't know it,—quite ever so much; and am going to love you ever so much more, only—please like me a little better first! You on your dear side must do something: or, before I know, I may be wringing my hands all alone on a desert island to a bare blue horizon, with nothing in it real or fabulous.
If I am to love you, nothing but happiness is to be allowed to come of it. So don't come true too fast without one little wee corresponding wish for me to find that you are! I am quite happy thinking you out slowly: it takes me all day long; the longer the better!
I wonder how often in my life I shall write down that I love you, having once written it (I do:—I love you! there [it] is for you, with more to follow after!); and send you my love as I do now into the great emptiness of chance, hoping somehow, known or unknown, it may bless you and bring good to you.
Oh, but 'tis a windy world, and I a mere feather in it: how can I get blown the way I would?
Still I have a superstition that some star is over me which I have not seen yet, but shall,—Heaven helping me.
And now good-night, and no more, no more at all! I send out an "I love you" to be my celestial commercial traveler for me while I fold myself up and become its sleeping partner.
Good-night: you are the best and truest that I ever dreamed yet.
H.
Dear Highness: I begin not to be able to name you anything, for there is not a word for you that will do! "Highness" you are: but that leaves gaps and coldnesses without end. "Royal," yet much more serene than royal: though by that I don't mean any detraction from your royalty, for I never saw a man carry his invisible crown with so level a head and no haughtiness at all: and that is the finest royalty of look possible.
I look at you and wonder so how you have grown to this—to have become king so quietly without any coronation ceremony. You have thought more than you should for happiness at your age; making me, by that one line in your forehead, think you were three years older than you really are. I wish—if I dare wish you anything different—that you were! It makes me uncomfortable to remember that I am—what? Almost half a year your elder as time flies:—not really, for your brain was born long before mine began to rattle in its shell. You say quite old things, and quietly, as if you had had them in your mind ten years already. When you told me about your two old pensioners, the blind man and his wife, whom you brought to so funny a reconciliation, I felt ("mir war, ich wuszte nicht wie") that I would like very much to go blindfold led by you: it struck me suddenly how happy would be a blindfoldness of perfect trust such as one might have with your hands on one. I suppose that is what in religion is called faith: I haven't it there, my dear; but I have it in you now. I love you, beginning to understand why: at first I did not. I am ashamed not to have discovered it earlier. The matter with you is that you have goodness prevailing in you, an integrity of goodness, I mean:—a different thing from there being a whereabouts for goodness in you; that we all have in some proportion or another. I was quite right to love you: I know it now,—I did not when I first did.
Yesterday I was turning over a silly "confession book" in which a rose was everybody's favorite flower, manliness the finest quality for a man, and womanliness for a woman (which is as much as to say that pig is the best quality for pork, and pork for pig): till I came upon one different from the others, and found myself saying "Yes" all down the page.
I turned over for the signature, and found my own mother's. Was it not a strange sweet meeting? And only then did the memory of her handwriting from far back come to me. She died, dear Highness, before I was seven years old. I love her as I do my early memory of flowers, as something very sweet, hardly as a real person.
I noticed she loved best in men and women what they lack most often: in a man, a fair mind; in a woman, courage. "Brave women and fair men," she wrote. Byron might have turned in his grave at having his dissolute stiff-neck so wrung for him by misquotation. And she—it must have been before the eighties had started the popular craze for him—chose Meredith, my own dear Meredith, for her favorite author. How our tastes would have run together had she lived!
Well, I know you fair, and believe myself brave—constitutionally, so that I can't help it: and this, therefore, is not self-praise. But fairness in a man is a deadly hard acquirement, I begin now to discover. You have it fixed fast in you.
You, I think, began to do just things consciously, as the burden of manhood began in you. I love to think of you growing by degrees till you could carry your head so—and no other way; so that, looking at you, I can promise myself you never did a mean thing, and never consciously an unjust thing except to yourself. I can just fancy that fault in you. But, whatever—I love you for it more and more, and am proud knowing you and finding that we are to become friends. For it is that, and no less than that, now.
I love you; and me you like cordially: and that is enough. I need not look behind it, for already I have no way to repay you for the happiness this brings me.
I.
Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear; and it takes long thinking. Not merely such a quantity of thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a day's work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. Bless me, dearest; all to-day has belonged to you; and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours without the asking: just as without the asking I too am yours. I wish it were more possible for us to give service to those we love. I am most glad because I see you so often: but I come and go in your life empty-handed, though I have so much to give away. Thoughts, the best I have, I give you: I cannot empty my brain of them. Some day you shall think well of me.—That is a vow, dear friend,—you whom I love so much!
J.
I have not had to alter any thought ever formed about you, Beloved; I have only had to deepen it—that is all. You grow, but you remain. I have heard people talk about you, generally kindly; but what they think of you is often wrong. I do not say anything, but I am glad, and so sure that I know you better. If my mind is so clear about you, it shows that you are good for me. Now for nearly three months I may not see you again; but all that time you will be growing in my heart; and at the end without another word from you I shall find that I know you better than before. Is that strange? It is because I love you: love is knowledge—blind knowledge, not wanting eyes. I only hope that I shall keep in your memory the kind place you have given me. You are almost my friend now, and I know it. You do not know that I love you.
K.
Beloved: You love me! I know it now, and bless the sun and the moon and the stars for the dear certainty of it. And I ask you now, O heart that has opened to me, have I once been unhappy or impatient while this good thing has been withheld from me? Indeed my love for you has occupied me too completely: I have been so glad to find how much there is to learn in a good heart deeply unconscious of its own goodness. You have employed me as I wish I may be employed all the days of my life: and now my beloved employer has given me the wages I did not ask.
You love me! Is it a question of little or much? Is it not rather an entire new thought of me that has entered your life, as the thought of you entered mine months that seem years ago? It was the seed then, and seemed small; but the whole life was there; and it has grown and grown till now it is I who have become small, and have hardly room in me for the roots: and it seems to have gone so far up over my head that I wonder if the stars know of my happiness.
They must know of yours too, then, my Beloved: they are no company for me without you. Oh, to-day, to-day of all days! how in my heart I shall go on kissing it till I die! You love me: that is wonderful! You love me: and already it is not wonderful in the least! but belongs to Noah and the ark and all the animals saved up for an earth washed clean and dried, and the new beginnings of time which have ever since been twisting and turning with us in safe keeping through all the history of the world.
"We came over at the Norman conquest," my dear, as people say trailing their pedigree: but there was no ancestral pride about us—it was all for the love of the thing we did it: how clear it seems now! In the hall hangs a portrait in a big wig, but otherwise the image of my father, of a man who flouted the authority of James II. merely because he was so like my father in character that he could do nothing else. I shall look for you now in the Bayeux tapestries with a prong from your helmet down the middle of your face—of which that line on your forehead is the remainder. And you love me! I wonder what the line has to do with that?
By such little things do great things seem to come about: not really. I know it was not because I said just what I did say, and did what I did yesterday, that your heart was bound to come for mine. But it was those small things that brought you consciousness: and when we parted I knew that I had all the world at my feet—or all heaven over my head!
Ah, at last I may let the spirit of a kiss go to you from me, and not be ashamed or think myself forward since I have your love. All this time you are thinking of me: a certainty lying far outside what I can see.
Beloved, if great happiness may be set to any words, it is here! If silence goes better with it,—speak, silence, for me when I end now!
Good-night, and think greatly of me! I shall wake early.
L.
Dearest: Was my heart at all my own,—was it my own to give, till you came and made me aware of how much it contains? Truly, dear, it contained nothing before, since now it contains you and nothing else. So I have a brand-new heart to give away: and you, you want it and can't see that there it is staring you in the face like a rose with all its petals ready to drop.
I am quite sure that if I had not met you, I could have loved nobody as I love you. Yet it is very likely that I should have loved—sufficiently, as the way of the world goes. It is not a romantic confession, but it is true to life: I do so genuinely like most of my fellow-creatures, and am not happy except where shoulders rub socially:—that is to say, have not until now been happy, except dependently on the company and smiles of others. Now, Beloved, I have none of your company, and have had but few of your smiles (I could count them all); yet I have become more happy filling up my solitude with the understanding of you which has made me wise, than all the rest of fate or fortune could make me. Down comes autumn's sad heart and finds me gay; and the asters, which used to chill me at their appearing, have come out like crocuses this year because it is the beginning of a new world.
And all the winter will carry more than a suspicion of summer with it, just as the longest days carry round light from northwest to northeast, because so near the horizon, but out of sight, lies their sun. So you, Beloved, so near to me now at last, though out of sight.
M.
Beloved: Whether I have sorry or glad things to think about, they are accompanied and changed by thoughts of you. You are my diary:—all goes to you now. That you love me is the very light by which I see everything. Also I learn so much through having you in my thoughts: I cannot say how it is, for I have no more knowledge of life than I had before:—yet I am wiser, I believe, knowing much more what lives at the root of things and what men have meant and felt in all they have done:—because I love you, dearest. Also I am quicker in my apprehensions, and have more joy and more fear in me than I had before. And if this seems to be all about myself, it is all about you really, Beloved!
Last week one of my dearest old friends, our Rector, died: a character you too would have loved. He was a father to the whole village, rather stern of speech, and no respecter of persons. Yet he made a very generous allowance for those who did not go through the church door to find their salvation. I often went only because I loved him: and he knew it.
I went for that reason alone last Sunday. The whole village was full of closed blinds: and of all things over him Chopin's Funeral March was played!—a thing utterly unchristian in its meaning: wild pagan grief, desolate over lost beauty. "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!" it cried: and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all. Too many thorns have been in your life, but not the mistletoe stroke dealt by a blind god ignorantly. Yet in all great joy there is the Balder element: and I feared lest something might slay it for me, and my life become a cry like Chopin's march over mown-down unripened grass, and youth slain in its high places.
After service a sort of processional instinct drew people up to the house: they waited about till permission was given, and went in to look at their old man, lying in high state among his books. I did not go. Beloved, I have never yet seen death: you have, I know. Do you, I wonder, remember your father better than I mine:—or your brother? Are they more living because you saw them once not living? I think death might open our eyes to those we lived on ill terms with, but not to the familiar and dear. I do not need you dead, to be certain that your heart has mine for its true inmate and mine yours.
I love you, I love you: so let good-night bring you good-morning!
N.
At long intervals, dearest, I write to you a secret all about yourself for my eyes to see: because, chiefly because, I have not you to look at. Thus I bless myself with you.
Away over the world west of this and a little bit north is the city of spires where you are now. Never having seen it I am the more free to picture it as I like: and to me it is quite full of you:—quite greedily full, Beloved, when elsewhere you are so much wanted! I send my thoughts there to pick up crumbs for me.
It is a strange blend of notions—wisdom and ignorance combined: for you I seem to know perfectly; but of your life nothing at all. And yet nobody there knows so much about you as I. What you do matters so much less than what you are. You, who are the clearest heart in all the world, do what you will, you are so still to me, Beloved.
I take a happy armful of thoughts about you into all my dreams: and when I wake they are there still, and have done nothing but remain true. What better can I ask of them?
You do love me: you have not changed? Without change I remain yours so long as I live.
O.
And you, Beloved, what are you thinking of me all this while? Think well of me, I beg you: I deserve so much, loving you as truly as I do!
So often, dearest, I sit thinking my hands into yours again as when we were saying good-by the last time. Then it was, under our laughter and light words, that I saw suddenly how the thing too great to name had become true, that from friends we were changed into lovers. It seemed the most natural thing to be, and yet was wonderful—for it was I who loved you first: a thing I could never be ashamed of, and am now proud to own—for has it not proved me wise? My love for you is the best wisdom that I have. Good-night, dearest! Sleep as well as I love you, and nobody in the world will sleep so soundly.
P.
A few times in my life, Beloved, I have had the Blue-moon-hunger for something which seemed too impossible and good ever to come true: prosaic people call it being "in the blues"; I comfort myself with a prettier word for it. To-day, not the Blue-moon itself, but the Man of it came down and ate plum-porridge with me! Also, I do believe that it burnt his mouth, and am quite reasonably happy thinking so, since it makes me know that you love me as much as ever.
If I have had doubts, dearest, they have been of myself, lest I might be unworthy of your friendship or love. Suspicions of you I never had.
Who wrote that suspicions among thoughts are like bats among birds, flying only by twilight?
But even my doubts have been thoughts, Beloved,—sure of you if not always of myself. And if I have looked for you only with doubtful vision, yet I have always seen you in as strong a light as my eyes could bear:—blue-moonlight. Beloved, is not twilight: and blue-moonlight has been the light I saw you by: it is you alone who can make sunlight of it.
This I read yesterday has lain on my mind since as true and altogether beautiful, with the beauty of major, not of minor poetry, though it was a minor poet who wrote it. It is of a wood where Apollo has gone in quest of his Beloved, and she is not yet to be found: