My Own, Own Beloved: Say that my being away does not seem too long? I have not had a letter yet, and that makes me somehow not anxious but compunctious; only writing to you of all I do helps to keep me in good conscience. Not the other foot gone to the mender's, I hope, with the same obstructive accompaniments as went to the setting-up again of the last? If I don't hear soon, you will have me dancing on wires, which cost as much by the word as a gondola by the hour.
Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio at his best in San Giorgio di Schiavone: two are St. George pictures, three St. Jeromes, and two of some other saint unknown to me. The St. Jerome series is really a homily on the love and pathos of animals. First is St. Jerome in his study with a sort of unclipped white poodle in the pictorial place of honor, all alone on a floor beautifully swept and garnished, looking up wistfully to his master busy at writing (a Benjy saying, "Come and take me for a walk, there's a good saint!"). Scattered among the adornments of the room are small bronzes of horses and, I think, birds. So, of course, these being his tastes, when St. Jerome goes into the wilderness, a lion takes to him, and accompanies him when he pays a call on the monks in a neighboring monastery. Thereupon, holy men of little faith, the entire fraternity take to their heels and rush upstairs, the hindermost clinging to the skirts of the formermost to be hauled the quicker out of harm's way. And all the while the lion stands incorrectly offering the left paw, and Jerome with shrugs tries to explain that even the best butter wouldn't melt in his dear lion's mouth. After that comes the tragedy. St. Jerome lies dying in excessive odor of sanctity, and all the monks crowd round him with prayers and viaticums, and the ordinary stuffy pieties of a "happy death," while Jerome wonders feebly what it is he misses in all this to-do for which he cares so little. And there, elbowed far out into the cold, the lion lies and lifts his poor head and howls because he knows his master is being taken from him. Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, a queer, nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs out the length of its tether to comfort the disconsolate beast: but la bête humaine has got the whip-hand of the situation. In another picture is a parrot that has just mimicked a dog, or called "Carlo!" and then laughed: the dog turns his head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly as a sensitive dog does when you make fun of him.
These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt through all the Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!
Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you! What I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you to share everything.
Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face! Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I think you have some southern blood in you.
Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, "But you are not quite English, are you?" And I swore by the nine gods of my ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look is in us: my father had a foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N. used to call him "John Bull let loose."
My love to England. Is it showing much autumn yet? My eyes long for green fields again. Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one until the other day from the top of St. Giorgio Maggiore, where one lies in hiding under the monastery walls.
All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts of you. Yet do not expect me to come back wiser: my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with you, and there I stopped for good and all. There I am still, everything included: what do you want more? My letter and my heart both threaten to be over-weight, so no more of them this time. Most dearly do I love you.
Beloved: If two days slip by, I don't know where I am when I come to write; things get so crowded in such a short space of time. Where I left off I know not: I will begin where I am most awake—your letter which I have just received.
That is well, dearest, that is well indeed: a truce till February! And since the struggle then must needs be a sharp one—with only one end, as we know,—do not vex her now by any overt signs of preparation as if you assumed already that her final arguments were to be as so much chaff before the wind. You do not tell me what she argues, and I do not ask. She does not say I shall not love you enough!
To answer businesslike to your questions first: with your forgiveness we stay here till the 25th, and get back to England with the last of the month. Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date? Others have the wish to stay even longer, and it would be no fairness to hurry them beyond a certain degree of reasonableness with my particular reason for impatience, seeing, moreover, that in your love I have every help for remaining patient. It is too much to hope, I suppose, that the "truce" sets you free now, and that you could meet us here after all, and prolong our stay indefinitely? I know one besides myself who would be glad, and would welcome an outside excuse dearly.
For, oh, the funniness of near and dear things! Arthur's heart is laid up with a small love affair, and it is the comicalest of internal maladies. He is screwing up courage to tell me all about it, and I write in haste before my mouth is sealed by his confidences. I fancy I know the party, an energetic little mortal whom we met at Lucerne, where Arthur lingered while we came on to Florence. She talked vaguely of being in Venice some time this autumn; and the vagueness continues. Arthur, in consequence, roams round disconsolately with no interest but in hotel books. And for fear lest we should gird up his loins and drag him away with us out of Paradisal possibilities, he is forever praising Venice as a resting-place, and saying he wants to be nowhere else. The bathing just keeps him alive; but when put to it to explain what charms him since pictures do not, and architecture only slightly, he says in exemplary brotherly fashion that he likes to see me completing my education and enthusiasms,—and does not realize with how foreign an air that explanation sits upon his shoulders.
I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, and for your sake transferred a kiss to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and the sign of the cross. I hope it will do you good. Also, I have been up among the galleries of St. Mark's, and about the roof and the west front where somebody or another painted his picture of the bronze horses.
The pigeons get to recognize people personally, and grow more intimate every time we come. I even conceive they make favorites, for I had three pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing to take it in any other fashion, and they coo and say thank you before and after every seed they take or spill. They are quite the pleasantest of all the Italian beggars—and the cleanest.
Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday: I think less for the sake of giving us tea than that we should see his palace, or rather his first floor, in which alone he seems to lose himself. I have no idea for measurements, but I imagine his big sala is about eighty feet long and perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed roof, windows at each end, and portières along the walls of old blue Venetian linen: a place in which it seems one could only live and think nobly. His face seems to respond to its teachings. What more might not an environment like that bring out in you? Come and let me see! I have hopes springing as I think of things that you may be coming after all; and that that is what lay concealed under the gayety of your last paragraph. Then I am more blessed even than I knew. What, you are coming? So well I do love you, my Beloved!
Dearest: This letter will travel with me: we leave to-day. Our movements are to be too restless and uncomfortable for the next few days for me to have a chance of quiet seeing or quiet writing anywhere. At Riva we shall rest, I hope.
Yesterday a storm began coming over towards evening, and I thought to myself that if it passed in time there should be a splendid sunset of smolder and glitter to be seen from the Campanile, and perhaps by good chance a rainbow.
I went alone: when I got to the top the rain was pelting hard; so there I stayed happily weather-bound for an hour looking over Venice "silvered with slants of rain," and watching umbrellas scuttering below with toes beneath them. The golden smolder was very slow in coming: it lay over the mainland and came creeping along the railway track. Then came the glitter and the sun, and I turned round and found my rainbow. But it wasn't a bow, it was a circle: the Campanile stood up as it were a spoke in the middle,—the lower curve of the rainbow lay on the ground of the Piazzetta, cut off sharp by the shadow of the Campanile. It was worth waiting an hour to see. The islands shone mellow and bright in the clearance with the storm going off black behind them. Good-by, Venice!
Verona began by seeming dull to me; but it improves and unfolds beautiful corners of itself to be looked at: only I am given so little time. The Tombs of the Della Scalas and the Renaissance façade of the Consiglio are what chiefly delight me. I had some quiet hours in the Museo, where I fell in love with a little picture by an unknown painter, of Orpheus charming the beasts in a wandering green landscape, with a dance of fauns in the distance, and here and there Eurydice running;—and Orpheus in Hades, and the Thracian women killing him, and a crocodile fishing out his head, and mermaids and ducks sitting above their reflections reflecting.
Also there is one beautiful Tobias and the Angel there by a painter whose name I most ungratefully forget. I saw a man yesterday carrying fishes in the market, each strung through the gills on a twig of myrtle: that is how Tobias ought to carry his fish: when a native custom suggests old paintings, how charming it always is!
We have just got here from Verona. In the matter of the garden at least it is a Paradise of a place. A great sill of honeysuckle leans out from my window: beyond is a court grown round with creepers, and beyond that the garden—such a garden! The first thing one sees is an arcade of vines upon stone pillars, between which peep stacks of roses, going off a little from their glory now, and right away stretches an alley of green, that shows at the end, a furlong off, the blue glitter of water. It is a beautifully wild garden: grass and vegetables and trees and roses all grow in a jungle together. There are little groves of bamboo and chestnut and willow; and a runnel of water is somewhere—I can hear it. It suggests rest, which I want; and so, for all its difference, suggests you, whom also I want,—more, I own it now, than I have said! But that went without saying, Beloved, as it always must if it is to be the truth and nothing short of the truth.
While this has been waiting to go, your letter has been put into my hands. I am too happy to say words about it, and can afford now to let this go as it is. The little time of waiting for you will be perfect happiness now; and your coming seems to color all that is behind as well. I have had a good time indeed, and was only wearying with the plethora of my enjoyment: but the better time has been kept till now. We shall be together day after day and all day long for at least a month, I hope: a joy that has never happened to us yet.
Never mind about the lost letter now, dearest, dearest: Venice was a little empty just one week because of it. I still hope it will come; but what matter?—I know you will. All my heart waits for you.—Your most glad and most loving.
Dearest: I saw an old woman riding a horse astride: and I was convinced on the spot that this is the rightest way of riding, and that the sidesaddle was a foolish and affected invention. The horse was fine, and so was the young man leading it: the old woman was upright and stately, with a wide hat and full petticoats like a Maximilian soldier.
This was at Bozen, where we stayed for two nights, and from which I have brought a cold with me: it seems such an English thing to have, that I feel quite at home in the discomfort of it. It had been such wonderful weather that we were sitting out of doors every evening up to 9.30 P.M. without wraps, and on our heads only our "widows' caps." (The M.-A. persists in a style which suggests that Uncle N. has gone to a better world.) Mine was too flimsy a work of fiction, and a day before I had been for a climb and got wet through, so a chill laid its benediction on my head, and here I am,—not seriously incommoded by the malady, but by the remedy, which is the M.-A. full of kind quackings and fierce tyranny if I do but put my head out of window to admire the view, whose best is a little round the corner.
I had no idea Innsbruck was so high up among the mountains: snows are on the peaks all around. Behind the house-tops, so close and near, lies a quarter circle of white crests. You are told that in winter creatures come down and look in at the windows: sometimes they are called wolves, sometimes bears—any way the feeling is mediæval.
Hereabouts the wayside shrines nearly always contain a crucifix, whereas in Italy that was rare—the Virgin and Child being the most common. I remarked on this, which I suppose gave rise to a subsequent observation of the M.-A.'s: "I think the Tyrolese are a good people: they are not given over to Mariolatry like those poor priest-ridden Italians." I think, however, that they merely have that fundamental grace, religious simplicity, worshiping—just what they can get, for yesterday I saw two dear old bodies going round and telling their beads before the bronze statues of the Maximilian tomb—King Arthur, Charles the Bold, etc. I suppose, by mere association, a statue helps them to pray.
The national costume does look so nice, though not exactly beautiful. I like the flat, black hats with long streamers behind and a gold tassel, and the spacious apron. Blue satin is a favorite style, always silk or satin for Sunday best: one I saw of pearl-white brocade.
Since we came north we have had lovely weather, except the one day of which I am still the filterings: and morning along the Brenner Pass was perfect. I think the mountains look most beautiful quite early, at sunrise, when they are all pearly and mysterious.
We go on to Zurich on Thursday, and then, Beloved, and then!—so this must be my last letter, since I shall have nowhere to write to with you rushing all across Europe and resting nowhere because of my impatience to have you. The Mother-Aunt concedes a whole month, but Arthur will have to leave earlier for the beginning of term. How little my two dearest men have yet seen of each other! Barely a week lies between us: this will scarcely catch you. Dearest of dearests, my heart waits on yours.
My Dearest: See what an effect your "gallous young hound" episode has had on me. I send it back to you roughtly done into rhyme. I don't know whether it will carry; for, outside your telling of it, "Johnnie Kigarrow" is not a name of heroic sound. What touches me as so strangely complete about it is that you should have got that impression and momentary romantic delusion as a child, and now hear, years after, of his disappearing out of life thus fittingly and mysteriously, so that his name will fix its legend to the countryside for many a long day. I would like to go there some day with you, and standing on Twloch Hill imagine all the country round as the burial-place of the strong man on whose knees my beloved used to play when a child.
It must have been soon after this that your brother died: truly, dearest, from now, and strangely, this Johnnie Kigarrow will seem more to me than him; touching a more heroic strain of idea, and stiffening fibers in your nature that brotherhood, as a rule, has no bearing on.
A short letter to-day, Beloved, because what goes with it is so long. This is the first time I have come before your eyes as anything but a letter-writer, and I am doubtful whether you will care to have so much all about yourself. Yet for that very reason think how much I loved doing it! I am jealous of those days before I knew you, and want to have all their wild-honey flavor for myself. Do remember more, and tell me! Dearest heart, it was to me you were coming through all your scampers and ramblings; no wonder, with that unknown good running parallel, that my childhood was a happy one. May long life bless you, Beloved!
(Inclosure.)
Dearest: I have been doing something so wise and foolish: mentally wise, I mean, and physically foolish. Do you guess?—Disobeying your parting injunction, and sitting up to see eclipses.
It was such a luxury to do as I was not told just for once; to feel there was an independent me still capable of asserting itself. My belief is that, waking, you hold me subjugated: but, once your godhead has put on its spiritual nightcap, and begun nodding, your mesmeric influence relaxes. Up starts resolution and independence, and I breathe desolately for a time, feeling myself once more a free woman.
'Twas a tremulous experience, Beloved; but I loved it all the more for that. How we love playing at grief and death—the two things that must come—before it is their due time! I took a look at my world for three most mortal hours last night, trying to see you out of it. And oh, how close it kept bringing me! I almost heard you breathe, and was forever wondering—Can we ever be nearer, or love each other more than we do? For that we should each want a sixth sense, and a second soul: and it would still be only the same spread out over larger territory. I prefer to keep it nesting close in its present limitations, where it feels like a "growing pain"; children have it in their legs, we in our hearts.
I am growing sleepy as I write, and feel I am sending you a dull letter,—my penalty for doing as you forbade.
I sat up from half-past one to a quarter to five to see our shadow go over heaven. I didn't see much, the sky was too piebald: but I was not disappointed, as I had never watched the darkness into dawn like that before: and it was interesting to hear all the persons awaking:—cocks at half-past four, frogs immediately after, then pheasants and various others following. I was cuddled close up against my window, throned in a big arm-chair with many pillows, a spirit-lamp, cocoa, bread and butter, and buns; so I fared well. Just after the pheasants and the first querulous fidgetings of hungry blackbirds comes a soft pattering along the path below: and Benjy, secretive and important, is fussing his way to the shrubbery, when instinct or real sentiment prompts him to look up at my window; he gives a whimper and a wag, and goes on. I try to persuade myself that he didn't see me, and that he does this, other mornings, when I am not thus perversely bolstered up in rebellion, and peering through blinds at wrong hours. Isn't there something pathetic in the very idea that a dog may have a behind-your-back attachment of that sort?—that every morning he looks up at an unresponsive blank, and wags, and goes by?
I heard him very happy in the shrubs a moment after: he and a pheasant, I fancy, disputing over a question of boundaries. And he comes in for breakfast, three hours later, looking positively fresh, and wants to know why I am yawning.
Most mornings he brings your letter up to my room in his mouth. It is old Nan-nan's joke: she only sends up yours so, and pretends it is Benjy's own clever selection. I pretend that, too, to him; and he thinks he is doing something wonderful. The other morning I was—well, Benjy hears splashing: and tires of waiting—or his mouth waters. An extra can of hot water happens to stand at the door; and therein he deposits his treasure (mine, I mean), and retires saying nothing. The consequence is, when I open three minutes after his scratch, I find you all ungummed and swimming, your beautiful handwriting bleared and smeared, so that no eye but mine could have read it. Benjy's shame when I showed him what he had done was wonderful.
How it rejoices me to write quite foolish things to you!—that I can helps to explain a great deal in the up-above order of things, which I never took in when I was merely young and frivolous. One must have touched a grave side of life before one can take in that Heaven is not opposed to laughter.
My eye has just caught back at what I have written; and the "little death" runs through me, just because I wrote "grave side." It shouldn't, but loving has made me superstitious: the happiness seems too great; how can it go on? I keep thinking—this is not life: you are too much for me, my dearest!
Oh, my Beloved, come quickly to meet me to-day: this morning! Ride over; I am willing it. My own dearest, you must come. If you don't, what shall I believe? That Love cannot outdo space: that when you are away I cannot reach you by willing. But I can: come to me! You shall see my arms open to you as never before. What is it?—you must be coming. I have more love in me after all than I knew.
Ah, I know: I wrote "grave side," and all my heart is in arms against the treason. With us it is not "till death us do part": we leap it altogether, and are clasped on the other side.
My dear, my dear, I lay my head down on your heart: I love you! I post this to show how certain I am. At twelve to-day I shall see you.
Beloved: I look at this ridiculous little nib now, running like a plow along the furrows! What can the poor thing do? Bury its poor black, blunt little nose in the English language in order to tell you, in all sorts of roundabout ways, what you know already as well as I do. And yet, though that is all it can do, you complain of not having had a letter! Not had a letter? Beloved, there are half a hundred I have not had from you! Do you suppose you have ever, any one week in your life, sent me as many as I wanted?
Now, for once, I did hold off and didn't write to you: because there was something in your last I couldn't give any answer to, and I hoped you would come yourself before I need. Then I hoped silence would bring you: and now—no!—instead of your dear peace-giving face I get this complaint!
Ah, Beloved, have you in reality any complaint, or sorrow that I can set at rest? Or has that little, little silence made you anxious? I do come to think so, for you never flourish your words about as I do: so, believing that, I would like to write again differently; only it is truer to let what I have written stand, and make amends for it in all haste. I love you so infinitely well, how could even a year's silence give you any doubt or anxiety, so long as you knew I was not ill?
"Should one not make great concessions to great grief even when it is unreasonable?" I cannot answer, dearest: I am in the dark. Great grief cannot be great without reasons: it should give them, and you should judge by them:—you, not I. I imagine you have again been face to face with fierce, unexplained opposition. Dearest, if it would give you happiness, I would say, make five, ten, twenty years' "concession," as you call it. But the only time you ever spoke to me clearly about your mother's mind toward me, you said she wanted an absolute surrender from you, not covered only by her lifetime. Then though I pitied her, I had to smile. A twenty years' concession even would not give rest to her perturbed spirit. I pray truly—having so much reason for your sake to pray it—"God rest her soul! and give her a saner mind toward both of us."
Why has this come about at all? It is not February yet: and our plans have been putting forth no buds before their time. When the day comes, and you have said the inevitable word, I think more calm will follow than you expect. You, dearest, I do understand: and the instinct of tenderness you have toward a claim which yet fills you with the sense of its injustice. I know that you can laugh at her threat to make you poor; but not at hurting her affections. Did your asking for an "answer" mean that I was to write so openly? Bless you, my own dearest.
Dearest: To-day I came upon a strange spectacle: poor old Nan-nan weeping for wounded pride in me. I found her stitching at raiment of needlework that is to be mine (piles of it have been through her fingers since the word first went out; for her love asserts that I am to go all home-made from my old home to my new one—wherever that may be!). And she was weeping because, as I slowly got to understand, from one particular quarter too little attention had been paid to me:—the kow-tow of a ceremonious reception into my new status had not been deep enough to make amends to her heart for its partial loss of me.
Her deferential recognition of the change which is coming is pathetic and full of etiquette; it is at once so jealous and so unselfish. Because her sense of the proprieties will not allow her to do so much longer, she comes up to my room and makes opportunity to scold me over quite slight things:—and there I am, meeker under her than I would be to any relative. So to-day I had to bear a statement of your mother's infirmities rigorously outlined in a way I could only pretend to be deaf to until she had done. Then I said, "Nan-nan, go and say your prayers!" And as she stuck her heels down and refused to go, there I left the poor thing, not to prayer, I fear, but to desolate weeping, in which love and pride will get more firmly entangled together than ever.
I know when I go up to my room next I shall find fresh flowers put upon my table: but the grievous old dear will be carrying a sore heart that I cannot comfort by any words. I cannot convince her that I am not hiding in myself any wounds such as she feels on my behalf.
I write this, dearest, as an indirect answer to yours,—which is but Nan-nan's woe writ large. If I could persuade your two dear and very different heads how very slightly wounded I am by a thing which a little waiting will bring right, I could give it even less thought than I do. Are you keeping the truce in spirit when you disturb yourself like this? Trust me, Beloved, always to be candid: I will complain to you when I feel in need of comfort. Be comforted yourself, meanwhile, and don't shape ghosts of grief which never do a goose-step over me! Ah well, well, if there is a way to love you better than I do now, only show it me! Meantime, think of me as your most contented and happy-go-loving.
Dearest: I am haunted by a line of quotation, and cannot think where it comes from:
Can you help me to what follows? If it is a true poem it ought now to be able to sing itself to me at large from an outer world which at this moment is all gray and roaring. To-day the year is bowing itself out tempestuously, as if angry at having to go. Dear golden year! I am sorry to see its face so changed and withering: it has held so much for us both. Yet I am feeling vigorous and quite like spring. All the seasons have their marches, with buffetings and border-forays: this is an autumn march-wind; before long I shall be out into it, and up the hill to look over at your territory and you being swept and garnished for the seven devils of winter.
"Roaring gray" suggests Tennyson, whom I do very much associate with this sort of weather, not so much because of passages in "Maud" and "In Memoriam" as because I once went over to Swainston, on a day such as this when rooks and leaves alike hung helpless in the wind; and heard there the story of how Tennyson, coming over for his friend's funeral, would not go into the house, but asked for one of Sir John's old hats, and with that on his head sat in the garden and wrote almost the best of his small lyrics:
The "old hat" was mentioned as something humorous: yet an old glove is the most accepted symbol of faithful absence: and why should head rank lower than hand? What creatures of convention we are!
There is an old notion, quite likely to be true, that a nightcap carries in it the dreams of its first owner, or that anything laid over a sleeper's head will bring away the dream. One of the stories which used to put a lump in my throat as a child was of an old backwoodsman who by that means found out that his dog stole hams from the storeroom. The dog was given away in disgrace, and came to England to die of a broken heart at the sight of a cargo of hams, which, at their unpacking, seemed like a monstrous day of judgment—the bones of his misdeeds rising again reclothed with flesh to reproach him with the thing he had never forgotten.
I wonder how long it was before I left off definitely choosing out a story for the pleasure of making myself cry! When one begins to avoid that luxury of the fledgling emotions, the first leaf of youth is flown.
To-day I look almost jovially at the decay of the best year I have ever lived through, and am your very middle-aged faithful and true.
Dearest: If anybody has been "calling me names" that are not mine, they do me a fine injury, and you did well to purge the text of their abuse. I agree with no authority, however immortal, which inquires "What's in a name?" expecting the answer to be a snap of the fingers. I answer with a snap of temper that the blood, boots, and bones of my ancestors are in mine! Do you suppose I could have been the same woman had such names as Amelia or Bella or Cinderella been clinging leechlike to my consciousness through all the years of my training? Why, there are names I can think of which would have made me break down into side-ringlets had I been forced to wear them audibly.
The effect is not so absolute when it is a second name that can be tucked away if unpresentable, but even then it is a misfortune. There is C——, now, who won't marry, I believe, chiefly because of the insane "Annie" with which she was smitten at the baptismal font by an afterthought. She regards it as a taint in her constitution which orders her to a lonely life lest worse might follow. And apply the consideration more publicly: do you imagine the Prince of Wales will be the same sort of king if, when he comes to the throne, he calls himself King Albert Edward in florid Continental fashion, instead of "Edward the Seventh," with a right hope that an Edward the Eighth may follow after him, to make a neck-and-neck race of it with the Henries? I don't know anything that would do more to knit up the English constitution: but whenever I pass the Albert Memorial I tremble lest filial piety will not allow the thing to be done.
Now of all this I had an instance in the village the day before yesterday. At the corner house by the post-office, as I went by, a bird opened his bill and sang a note, and down, down, down, down he went over a golden scale: pitched afresh, and dropped down another; and then up, up, up, over the range of both. Then he flung back his shaggy head and laughed. "In all my father's realm there are no such bells as these!" It was the laughing jackass. "Who gave you your name?" "My godfathers and my godmothers in my baptism." Well, his will have that to answer for, however safely for the rest he may have eschewed the world, the flesh, and the devil. Poor bird, to be set to sing to us under such a burden:—of which, unconscious failure, he knows nothing.
Here I have remembered for you a bit of a poem that took hold of me some while ago and touched on the same unkindness: only here the flower is conscious of the wrong done to it, and looks forward to a day of juster judgment:—
Now I am on sentiment and unjust judgments: here is another instance, where evidently in life I did not love well enough a character nobler than this capering and accommodating boy Benjy, who toadies to all my moods. Calling at the lower farm, I missed him whom I used to nickname "Manger," because his dog-jaws always refused to smile on me. His old mistress gave me a pathetic account of his last days. It was the muzzling order that broke his poor old heart. He took it as an accusation on a point where, though of a melancholy disposition, his reputation had been spotless. He never lifted his head nor smiled again. And not all his mistress' love could explain to him that he was not in fault. She wept as she told it me.
Good-by, dearest, and for this letter so full of such little worth call me what names you like; and I will go to Jemima, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch for the patience in which they must have taken after their father when he so named them, I suppose for a discipline.
My Beloved, let my heart come where it wants to be. Twilight has been on me to-day, I don't know why; and I have not written it off as I hoped to do.—All yours and nothing left.
Dearest: I suppose your mother's continued absence, and her unexplanation of her further stay, must be taken for unyielding disapproval, and tells us what to expect of February. It is not a cordial form of "truce": but since it lets me see just twice as much of you as I should otherwise, I will not complain so long as it does not make you unhappy. You write to her often and kindly, do you not?
Well, if this last letter of hers frees you sufficiently, it is quite settled at this end that you are to be with us for Christmas:—read into that the warmest corners of a heart already fully occupied. I do not think of it too much, till I am assured it is to be.
Did you go over to Pembury for the day? Your letter does not say anything: but your letters have a wonderful way with them of leaving out things of outside importance. I shall hear from the rattle of returning fire-engines some day that Hatterling has been burned down: and you will arrive cool the next day and say, "Oh yes, it is so!"
I am sure you have been right to secure this pledge of independence to yourself: but it hurts me to think what a deadly offense it may be both to her tenderness for you and her pride and stern love of power. To realize suddenly that Hatterling does not mean to you so much as the power to be your own master and happy in your own way, which is altogether opposite to her way, will be so much of a blow that at first you will be able to do nothing to soften it.
February fill-dyke is likely to be true to its name, this coming one, in all that concerns us and our fortunes. Meanwhile, if at Pembury you brought things any nearer settlement, and are not coming so soon as to-morrow, let me know: for some things of "outside importance" do affect me unfavorably while in suspense. I have not your serene determination to abide the workings of Kismet when once all that can be done is done.
The sun sets now, when it does so visibly, just where Pembury is. I take it as an omen. In your diary to-morrow you may write down in the business column that you have had a business letter from me, or as near to one as I can go:—chiefly for that it requires an answer on this matter of "outside importance," which otherwise you will altogether leave out. But you will do better still to come. My whole heart goes out to fetch you: my dearest dear, ever your own.
Beloved: No, not Browning but Tennyson was in my thoughts at our last ride together: and I found myself shy, as I have been for a long time wishing to say things I could not. What has never entered your head to ask becomes difficult when I wish to get it spoken. So I bring Tennyson to tell you what I mean:—
The tune of this kept me silent all the while we galloped: this and Pembury, a name that glows to me now like the New Jerusalem.
And do you understand, Beloved? or must I say more? My freedom has made its nest under my uncle's roof: but I am a quite independent person in other ways besides character.
Well, Pembury was settled on your own initiative: and I looked on proud and glad. Now I have my own little word to add, merely a tail that wags and makes merry over a thing decided and done. Do you forgive me for this: and for the greater offense of being quite shy at having to write it?
My Aunt thanks you for the game: for my part I cannot own that it will taste sweeter to me for being your own shooting. And please, whatever else you do big and grand and dangerous, respect my superstitions and don't shoot any larks this winter. In the spring I would like to think that here or there an extra lark bubbles over because I and my whims find occasional favor in your sight. When I ask great favors you always grant them; and so, Ahasuerus, grant this little one to your beautifully loving.
Give me the credit of being conscious of it, Beloved: postscripts I never do write. I am glad you noticed it. If I find anything left out I start another letter: this is that other letter: it goes into the same envelope merely for company, and signs itself yours in all state.
Dearest: It was so nice and comedy to see the Mother-Aunt this morning importantly opening a letter from you all to herself with the pleasure quite unmixed by any inclosure for me, or any other letter in the house to me so far as she was aware. I listened to you with new ears, discovering that you write quite beautifully in the style which I never get from you. Don't, because I admire you in your more formal form, alter in your style to me. I prefer you much, for my own part, formless: and feel nearer to your heart in an unfinished sentence than in one that is perfectly balanced. Still I want you to know that your cordial warmed her dear old heart and makes her not think now that she has let me see too much of you. She was just beginning to worry herself jealously into that belief the last two days: and Arthur's taking to you helped to the same end. Very well; I seem to understand everybody's oddities now,—having made a complete study of yours.
Best Beloved, I have your little letter lying close, and feel dumb when I try to answer. You with your few words make me feel a small thing with all my unpenned rabble about me. Only you do know so very well that I love you better than I can ever write. This is my first letter of the new year: will our letter-writing go on all this year, or will it, as we dearly dream, die a divine death somewhere before autumn?
In any case, I am, dearest, your most happy and loving.
My Dearest: Arthur and the friend went off together yesterday. I am glad the latter stayed just long enough after you left for me to have leisure to find him out human. Here is the whole story: he came and unbosomed to me three days ago: and he said nothing about not telling, so I tell you. As water goes from a duck's back, so go all things worth hearing from me to you.
Arthur had said to him, "Come down for a week," and he had answered, "Can't, because of clothes!" explaining that beyond evening-dress he had only those he stood in. "Well," said Arthur, "stand in them, then; you look all right." "The question is," said his friend, "can I sit down?" However, he came; and was appalled to find that a man unpacked his trunk, and would in all probability be carrying away his clothes each night to brush them. He, conscious of interiors, a lining hanging in rags, and even a patching somewhere, had not the heart to let his one and only day-jacket go down to the servants' hall to be sniffed over: and so every evening when he dressed for dinner he hid his jacket laboriously under the permanent layers of a linen wardrobe which stood in his room.
I had all this in the frankest manner from him in the hour when he became human: and my fancy fired at the vision. Graves with a fierce eye set on duty probing hither and thither in search after the missing coat; and each night the search becoming' more strenuous and the mystery more baffling than ever. It had a funny likeness to the Jack Raikes episode in "Evan Harrington," and pleased me the more thus cropping up in real life.
Well, I demanded there and then to be shown the subject of so much romance and adventure: and had the satisfaction of mending it, he sitting by in his shirt-sleeves the while, and watching delighted and without craven apologies.
I notice it is not his own set he is ashamed of, but only the moneyed, high-sniffing servant-class who have no understanding for honorable poverty: and to be misunderstood pricks him in the thinnest of thin places.
He told me also that he brought only three white ties to last him for seven days: and that Graves placed them out in order of freshness and cleanliness night after night:—first three new ones consecutively, then three once worn. After that, on the seventh day, Graves resigned all further responsibility, and laid out all three of them for him to choose from. On the last three days of his stay he did me the honor to leave his coat out, declaring that my mendings had made it presentable before an emperor. Out of this dates the whole of his character, and I understand, what I did not, why Arthur and he get on together.
Now the house is empty, and your comings will be—I cannot say more welcome: but there will be more room for them to be after my own heart.
Heaven be over us both. Faithfully your most loving.
Beloved: I wish you could have been with me to look out into this garden last night when the spirit moved me there. I had started for bed, but became sensitive of something outside not normal. Whether my ear missed the usual echoes and so guessed a muffled world I do not know. To open the door was like slicing into a wedding-cake; then,—where was I to put a foot into that new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness? I hobbled out in a pair of my uncle's. I suppose it is because I know every tree and shrub in its true form that snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here: it becomes a garden of entombments. Now and then some heap would shuffle feebly under its shroud, but resurrection was not to be: the Lawson cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for me to shake and set free; and the silence was wonderful. I padded about till I froze: this morning I can see my big hoof-marks all over the place, and Benjy has been scampering about in them as if he found some flavor of me there. The trees are already beginning to shake themselves loose, and the spell is over: but it had a wonderful hold while it lasted. I take a breath back into last night, and feel myself again full of a romance without words that I cannot explain. If you had been there, even, I think I could have forgotten I had you by me, the place was so weighed down with its sense of solitude. It struck eleven while I was outside, and in that, too, I could hear a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices and lay even on the outer edge of the bell itself. Across the park there are dead boughs cracking down under the weight of snow; and it would be very like you to tramp over just because the roads will be so impossible.
I heard yesterday a thing which made me just a little more free and easy in mind, though I had nothing sensibly on my conscience. Such a good youth who two years ago believed I was his only possible future happiness, is now quite happy with a totally different sort of person. I had a little letter from him, shy and stately, announcing the event. I thought it such a friendly act, for some have never the grace to unsay their grievances, however much actually blessed as a consequence of them.
With that off my mind I can come to you swearing that there have been no accidents on anybody's line of life through a mistake in signals, or a flying in the face of them, where I have had any responsibility. As for you, and as you know well by now, my signals were ready and waiting before you sought for them. "Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you!" was their giveaway attitude.
I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy. Good-by. If you come you will find this letter on the hall table, and me you will probably hear barking behind the rhododendrons.—So much your most loving.
Beloved: We have been having a great day of tidyings out, rummaging through years and years of accumulations—things quite useless but which I have not liked to throw away. My soul has been getting such dusty answers to all sorts of doubtful inquiries as to where on earth this, that, and the other lay hidden. And there were other things, the memory of which had lain quite dead or slept, till under the light of day they sprouted hack into life like corn from the grave of an Egyptian mummy.
Very deep in one box I found a stealthy little collection of secret playthings which it used to be my fond belief that nobody knew of but myself. It may have been Anna's graspingness, when four years of seniority gave her double my age, or Arthur's genial instinct for destructiveness, which drove me into such deep concealment of my dearest idols. But, whether for those or more mystic reasons, I know I had dolls which I nursed only in the strictest privacy and lavished my firmest love upon. It was because of them that I bore the reproach of being but a lukewarm mother of dolls and careless of their toilets; the truth being that my motherly passion expended itself in secret on certain outcasts of society whom others despised or had forgotten. They, on their limp and dissolute bodies, wore all the finery I could find to pile on them: and one shady transaction done on their behalf I remember now without pangs. There was one creature of state whom an inconsiderate relative had presented to Anna and myself in equal shares. Of course Anna's became more and more lionlike. I had very little love for the bone of contention myself, but the sense of injustice rankled in me. So one day, at an unclothing, Anna discovered that certain undergarments were gone altogether away. She sat aghast, questioned me, and, when I refused to disgorge, screamed down vengeance from the authorities. I was morally certain I had taken no more than my just share, and resolution sat on my lips under all threats. For a punishment the whole ownership of the big doll was made over to Anna: I was no worse off, and was very contented with my obstinacy. To-day I found the beautifully wrought bodice, which I had carried beyond reach of even the supreme court of appeal, clothing with ridiculous looseness a rag-doll whose head tottered on its stem like an over-ripe plum, and whose legs had no deportment at all: and am sending it off in charitable surrender to Anna to be given, bag and rag, to whichever one of the children she likes to select.
Also I found:—would you care to have a lock of hair taken from the head of a child then two years old, which, bright golden, does not match what I have on now in the least? I can just remember her: but she is much of a stranger to both of us. Why I value it is that the name and date on the envelope inclosing it are in my mother's handwriting: and I suppose she loved very much the curly treasure she then put away. Some of the other things, quite funny, I will show you the next time you come over. How I wish that vanished mite had mixed some of her play-hours with yours:—you only six miles away all the time: had one but known!—Now grown very old and loving, always your own.
Beloved: I am getting quite out of letter-writing, and it is your doing, not mine. No sooner do I get a line from you than you rush over in person and take the answer to it out of my mouth!
I have had six from you in the last week, and believe I have only exchanged you one: all the rest have been nipped in the bud by your arrivals. My pen turns up a cross nose whenever it hears you coming now, and declares life so dull as not to be worth living. Poor dinky little Othello! it shall have its occupation again to-day, and say just what it likes.
It likes you while you keep away: so that's said! When I make it write "come," it kicks and tries to say "don't." For it is an industrious minion, loves to have work to do, and never complains of overhours. It is a sentimental fact that I keep all its used-up brethren in an inclosure together, and throw none of them away. If once they have ridden over paper to you, I turn them to grass in their old age. I let this out because I think it is time you had another laugh at me.
Laugh, dearest, and tell me that you have done so if you want to make me a little more happy than I have been this last day or two. There has been too much thinking in the heads of both of us. Be empty-headed for once when you write next: whether you write little or much, I am sure always of your full heart: but I cannot trust your brain to the same pressure: it is such a Martha to headaches and careful about so many things, and you don't bring it here to be soothed as often as you should—not at its most needy moments, I mean.
Have you made the announcement? or does it not go till to-day? I am not sorry, since the move comes from her, that we have not to wait now till February. You will feel better when the storm is up than when it is only looming. This is the headachy period.
Well. Say "well" with me, dearest! It is going to be well: waiting has not suited us—not any of us, I think. Your mother is one in a thousand, I say that and mean it:—worth conquering as all good things are. I would not wish great fortune to come by too primrosy a way. "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" Even so, for size, is the share of the world which we lay claim to, and for that we must be toilers of the deep.—Always, Beloved, your truest and most loving.
My Own Own Love: You have given me a spring day before the buds begin,—the weather I have been longing for! I had been quite sad at heart these cold wet days, really down;—a treasonable sadness with you still anywhere in the world (though where in the world have you been?). Spring seemed such a long way off over the bend of it, with you unable to come; and it seems now another letter of yours has got lost. (Write it again, dearest,—all that was in it, with any blots that happened to come:—there was a dear smudge in to-day's, with the whirlpool mark of your thumb quite clear on it,—delicious to rest my face against and feel you there.)
And so back to my spring weather: all in a moment you gave me a whole week of the weather I had longed after. For you say the sun has been shining on you: and I would rather have it there than here if it refuses to be in two places at once. Also my letters have pleased you. When they do, I feel such a proud mother to them! Here they fly quick out of the nest; but I think sometimes they must come to you broken-winged, with so much meant and all so badly put.
How can we ever, with our poor handful of senses, contrive to express ourselves perfectly? Perhaps,—I don't know:—dearest, I love you! I kiss you a hundred times to the minute. If everything in the world were dark round us, could not kisses tell us quite well all that we wish to know of each other?—me that you were true and brave and so beautiful that a woman must be afraid looking at you:—and you that I was just my very self,—loving and—no! just loving: I have no room for anything more! You have swallowed up all my moral qualities, I have none left: I am a beggar, where it is so sweet to beg.—Give me back crumbs of myself! I am so hungry, I cannot show it, only by kissing you a hundred times.
Dear share of the world, what a wonderful large helping of it you are to me! I alter Portia's complaint and swear that "my little body is bursting with this great world." And now it is written and I look at it, it seems a Budge and Toddy sort of complaint. I do thank Heaven that the Godhead who rules in it for us does not forbid the recognition of the ludicrous! C—— was telling me how long ago, in her own dull Protestant household, she heard a riddle propounded by some indiscreet soul who did not understand the prudish piety which reigned there: and saw such shocked eyes opening all round on the sound of it. "What is it," was asked, "that a common man can see every day but that God never sees?" "His equal" is the correct answer: but even so demure and proper a support to thistly theology was to the ears that heard it as the hand of Uzzah stretched out intrusively and deserving to be smitten. As for C——, a twinkle of wickedness seized her, she hazarded "A joke" to be the true answer, and was ordered into banishment by the head of that God-fearing household for having so successfully diagnosed the family skeleton.
As for skeletons, why your letter makes me so happy is that the one which has been rubbing its ribs against you for so long seems to have given itself a day off, or crumbled to dissolution. And you are yourself again, as you have not been for many a long day. I suppose there has been thunder, and the air is cleared: and I am not to know any of that side of your discomforts?
Still I do know. You have been writing your letters with pressed lips for a month past: and I have been a mere toy-thing, and no helpmate to you at all at all. Oh, why will she not love me? I know I am lovable except to a very hard heart, and hers is not: it is only like yours, reserved in its expression. It is strange what pain her prejudice has been able to drop into my cup of happiness; and into yours, dearest, I fear, even more.
Oh, I love you, I love you! I am crying with it, having no words to declare to you what I feel. My tears have wings in them: first semi-detached, then detached. See, dearest, there is a rain-stain to make this letter fruitful of meaning!
It is sheer convention—and we, creatures of habit—that tears don't come kindly and easily to express where laughter leaves off and a something better begins. Which is all very ungrammatical and entirely me, as I am when I get off my hinges too suddenly.
Amen, amen! When we are both a hundred we shall remember all this very peaceably; and the "sanguine flower" will not look back at us less beautifully because in just one spot it was inscribed with woe. And if we with all our aids cannot have patience, where in this midge-bitten world is that virtue to find a standing?
I kiss you—how? as if it were for the first or the last time? No, but for all time, Beloved! every time I see you or think of you sums up my world. Love me a little, too, and I will be as contented as I am your loving.