An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 17

LETTER LXVI.

Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need--for the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what _unanswerable_ things they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily!

There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it now feels and waits.

All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now: only _seems_, dearest, for I still say, I _do_ say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I, who know nothing else, know that! So I look every day at one of these monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes reconciled with the pain that is there always.

Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words which I took so much for granted then have a strange force now that I look back at them. You did love: and I who did not realize it enough then, realize it now when you no longer do.

And the commentary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray: "There is no fault in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did. All that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only right thing is to say good-by without meeting. I know you will not forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I cause you. You are the most generous woman I have known. If it would comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it: but I know you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, G.o.d knows, I was once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me you remain, what I always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet."

This, dearest, I say and say: and write down now lest you have forgotten it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes with me to my grave. How superst.i.tious we are of our own bodies after death!--I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain things shall go with me to dissolution.

Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one quite quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence; yet I wish it so much--to exist again outside all this failure of my life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.

And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say--Send him these, it will be almost like living again: for surely you will love me again when you see how much I have suffered,--and suffered because I would not let thought of you go.

Could you dream, Beloved, reading _this_ that there is bright sunlight streaming over my paper as I write?

LETTER LXVII.

Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved? I do not know in what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps without knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received?

Dearest, I trust those I send reach you: I send them, wishing till I grow weak. My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to you: and I am glad of that weariness--it seems to be some virtue that has gone out of me. If all my body could go out in the effort, I think I should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at last.

I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love's cenotaph, among all my thoughts of you. It comes from a graveyard full of "little deaths." I remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was still fortunate with us. I must have been reckless in my happiness to do that!

Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my thoughts, till I had emptied myself of them, I feel that I should rest. But there is no _emptying_ the brain by thinking. Things thought come to be thought again over and over, and more and fresh come in their train: children and grandchildren, generations of them, sprung from the old stock. I have many thoughts now, born of my love for you, that never came when we were together,--grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some of them are set down here, but others escape and will never see your face!

If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life): still, IF you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want, to know something of the life in between,--I could put these letters that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day have I been truly, that is to say _willingly_, out of your heart. When Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes him to see their child, which till then he had never seen--and its likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to you in all that I leave here written?

If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer glimpse of your mind, and am sure of what you would wish, I will leave word that these shall be sent to you. If not, I must suppose knowledge is still delayed, not that it will not reach you.

Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For my poor body's sake I wish Well to have its last chance of coming to pa.s.s. It is the unhappy unfulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its share of things set ghosts to walk: mists which rise out of a ground that has not worked out its fruitfulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I leave a ghost, it will take _your_ shape, not mine, dearest: for it will be "as trees walking" that the "lovers of trees" will come back to earth.

Browning did not know that. Someone else, not Browning, has worded it for us: a lover of trees far away sends his soul back to the country that has lost him, and there "the traveler, marveling why, halts on the bridge to hearken how soft the poplars sigh," not knowing that it is the lover himself who sighs in the trees all night. That is how the ghosts of real love come back into the world. The ghosts of love and the ghosts of hatred must be quite different: these bring fear, and those none.

Come to me, dearest, in the blackest night, and I will not be afraid.

How strange that when one has suffered most, it is the poets (those who are supposed to _sing_) who best express things for us. Yet singing is the thing I feel least like. If ever a heart once woke up to find itself full of tune, it was mine; now you have drawn all the song out of it, emptied it dry: and I go to the poets to read epitaphs. I think it is their cruelty that appeals to me:--they can sing of grief! O hard hearts!

Sitting here thinking of you, my ears have suddenly become wide open to the night-sounds outside. A night-jar is making its beautiful burr in the stillness, and there are things going away and away, telling me the whereabouts of life like points on a map made for the ear. You, too, are _somewhere_ outside, making no sound: and listening for you I heard these. It seemed as if my brain had all at once opened and caught a new sense. Are you there? This is one of those things which drop to us with no present meaning: yet I know I am not to forget it as long as I live.

Good-night! At your head, at your feet, is there any room for me to-night, Beloved?

LETTER LXVIII.

Dearest: The thought keeps troubling me how to give myself to you most, if you should ever come back for me when I am no longer here. These poor letters are all that I can leave: will they tell you enough of my heart?

Oh, into that, wish any wish that you like, and it is there already! My heart, dearest, only moves in the wish to be what you desire.

Yet I am conscious that I cannot give, unless you shall choose to take: and though I write myself down each day your willing slave, I cry my wares in a market where there is no bidder to hear me.

Dearest, though my whole life is yours, it is little you know of it.

My wish would be to have every year of my life blessed by your consciousness of it. Barely a year of me is all that you have, truly, to remember: though I think five summers at least came to flower, and withered in that one.

I wish you knew my whole life: I cannot tell it: it was too full of infinitely small things. Yet what I can remember I would like to tell now: so that some day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood may here and there be warmed long after its death by your knowledge coming to it and discovering in it more than you knew before.

How I long, dearest, that what I write may look up some day and meet your eye! Beloved, _then_, however faded the ink may have grown, I think the spirit of my love will remain fresh in it:--I kiss you on the lips with every word. The thought of "good-by" is never to enter here: it is _A reviderci_ for ever and ever:--"Love, love," and "meet again!"--the words we put into the thrush's song on a day you will remember, when all the world for us was a garden.

Dearest, what I can tell you of older days,--little things they must be--I will: and I know that if you ever come to value them at all, their littleness will make them doubly welcome:--just as to know that you were once called a "gallous young hound" by people whom you plagued when a boy, was to me a darling discovery: all at once I caught my childhood's imaginary comrade to my young spirit's heart and kissed him, brow and eyes.

Good-night, good-night! To-morrow I will find you some earliest memory: the dew of Hermon be on it when you come to it--if ever!

Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, or I into yours, time would grow to nothing for us; and my childhood would stay unwritten!

From far and near I gather my thoughts of you for the kiss I cannot give. Good-night, dearest.

LETTER LXIX.

Beloved: I remember my second birthday. I am quite sure of it, because my third I remember so infinitely well.--Then I was taken in to see Arthur lying in baby bridal array of lace fringes and gauze, and received in my arms held up for me by Nan-nan the awful weight and imperial importance of his small body.

I think from the first I was told of him as my "brother": cousin I have never been able to think him. But all this belongs to my third: on my second, I remember being on a floor of roses; and they told me if I would go across to a clipboard and pull it open there would be something there waiting for me. And it was on all-fours that I went all eagerness across great patches of rose-pattern, till I had b.u.t.ted my way through a door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of bright tinsel and flowers two little wax babes in the wood lying.

I think they gave me my first sense of color, except, perhaps, the rose-carpet which came earlier, and they remained for quite a long time the most beautiful thing I knew. It is strange that I cannot remember what became of them, for I am sure I neither broke nor lost them,--perhaps it was done for me: Arthur came afterward, the tomb of many of my early joys, and the maker of so many new ones. He, dearest, is the one, the only one, who has seen the tears that belong truly to you: and he blesses me with such wonderful patience when I speak your name, allowing that perhaps I know better than he. And after the wax babies I had him for my third birthday.

LETTER LXX.

Beloved: I think that small children see very much as animals must do: just the parts of things which have a direct influence on their lives, and no memory outside that. I remember the kindness or frowns of faces in early days far more than the faces themselves: and it is quite a distinct and later memory that I have of standing within a doorway and watching my mother pa.s.s downstairs unconscious of my being there,--and _then_, for the first time, studying her features and seeing in them a certain solitude and distance which I had never before noticed:--I suppose because I had never before thought of looking at her when she was not concerned with me.

It was this un.o.bservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing those who called, except generically as callers--people who kissed me, and whom therefore I liked to see.