An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 19

LETTER LXXVI.

Dearest: I feel constantly that we are together still: I cannot explain.

When I am most miserable, even so that I feel a longing to fly out of reach of the dear household voices which say shy things to keep me cheerful,--I feel that I have you in here waiting for me. Heart's heart, in my darkest, it is you who speak to me!

As I write I have my cheek pressed against yours. None of it is true: not a word, not a day that has separated us! I am yours: it is only the poor five senses part of us that spells absence. Some day, some day you will answer this letter which has to stay locked in my desk. Some day, I mean, an answer will reach me:--without your reading this, your answer will come. Is not your heart at this moment answering me?

Dearest, I trust you: I could not have dreamed you to myself, therefore you must be true, quite independently of me. You as I saw you once with open eyes remain so forever. You cannot make yourself, Beloved, not to be what you are: you have called my soul to life if for no other reason than to bear witness of you, come what may. No length of silence can make a truth once sounded ever cease to be: borne away out of our hearing it makes its way to the stars: dispersed or removed it cannot be lost. I too, for truth's sake, may have to be dispersed out of my present self which shuts me from you: but I shall find you some day,--you who made me, you who every day make me! A part of you cut off, I suffer pain because I _am_ still part of you. If I had no part in you I should suffer nothing. But I do, I do. One is told how, when a man has lost a limb, he still feels it,--not the pleasure of it but the pain. Dearest, are you aware of me now?

Because I am suffering, you shall not think I am entirely miserable. But here and now I am all unfinished ends. Desperately I need faith at times to tell me that each shoot of pain has a point at which it a.s.suages itself and becomes healing: that pain is not endurance wasted; but that I and my weary body have a goal which will give a meaning to all this, somehow, somewhere: never, I begin to fear, here, while this body has charge of me.

Dearest, I lay my heart down on yours and cry: and having worn myself out with it and ended, I kiss your lips and bless G.o.d that I have known you.

I have not said--I never could say it--"Let the day perish wherein Love was born!" I forget nothing of you: you are clear to me,--all but one thing: why we have become as we are now, one whole, parted and sent different ways. And yet so near! On my most sleepless nights my pillow is yours: I wet your face with my tears and cry, "Sleep well."

To-night also, Beloved, sleep well! Night and morning I make you my prayer.

LETTER LXXVII.

My own one beloved, my dearest dear! Want me, please want me! I will keep alive for you. Say you wish me to live,--not come to you: don't say that if you can't--but just wish me to live, and I will. Yes, I will do anything, even live, if you tell me to do it. I will be stronger than all the world or fate, if you have any wish about me at all. Wish well, dearest, and surely the knowledge will come to me. Wish big things of me, or little things: wish me to sleep, and I will sleep better because of it.

Wish anything of me: only not that I should love you better. I can't, dearest, I can't. Any more of that, and love would go out of my body and leave it clay. If you would even wish _that_, I would be happy at finding a way to do your will below ground more perfectly than any I found on it.

Wish, wish: only wish something for me to do. Oh, I could rest if I had but your little finger to love. The tyranny of love is when it makes no bidding at all. That you have no want or wish left in you as regards me is my continual despair. My own, my beloved, my tormentor and comforter, my ever dearest dear, whom I love so much!

LETTER LXXVIII.

To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is too much for me.

Come to me somehow, dear ghost of all my happiness, and take me in your arms! I ache and ache, not to belong to you. I do: I must. It is only our senses that divide us; and mine are all famished servants waiting for their master. They have nothing to do but watch for you, and pretend that they believe you will come. Oh, it is grievous!

Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses? They go out of me in sharp stabs of pain: they must go _somewhere_ for me to be delivered of them only with so much suffering. Oh, how this should make me hate you, if that were possible: how, instead, I love you more and more, and shall, dearest, and will till I die!

I _will_ die, because in no other way can I express how much I love you.

I am possessed by all the despairing words about lost happiness that the poets have written. They go through me like ghosts: I am haunted by them: but they are bloodless things. It seems when I listen to all the other desolate voices that have ever cried, that I alone have blood in me. n.o.body ever loved as I love since the world began.

There, dearest, take this, all this bitter wine of me poured out until I feel in myself only the dregs left: and still in them is the fire and the suffering.

No: but I will be better: it is better to have known you than not. Give me time, dearest, to get you to heart again! I cannot leave you like this: not with such words as these for "good-night!"

Oh, dear face, dear unforgettable lost face, my soul strains up to look for you through the blind eyes that have been left to torment me because they can never behold you. Very often I have seen you looking grieved, shutting away some sorrow in yourself quietly: but never once angry or impatient at any of the small follies of men. Come, then, and look at me patiently now! I am your blind girl: I must cry out because I cannot see you. Only make me believe that you yet think of me as, when you so unbelievably separated us, you said you had always found me--"the dearest and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet." Beloved, if in your heart I am still that, separation does not matter. I can wait, I can wait.

I kiss your feet: even to-morrow may bring the light. G.o.d bless you! I pray it more than ever; because to me to-night has been so very dark.

LETTER LXXIX.

Dearest: I have not written to you for three weeks. At last I am better again. You seem to have been waiting for me here: always wondering when I would come back. I do come back, you see.

Dear heart, how are you? I kiss your feet; you are my one only happiness, my great one. Words are too cold and cruel to write anything for me.

Picture me: I am too weak to write more, but I have written this, and am so much better for it.

Reward me some day by reading what is here. I kiss, because of you, this paper which I am too tired to fill any more.

Love, nothing but love! Into every one of these dead words my heart has been beating, trying to lay down its life and reach to you.

LETTER Lx.x.x.

A secret, dearest, that will be no secret soon: before I am done with twenty-three I shall have pa.s.sed my age. Beloved, it hurts me more than I can say that the news of it should come to you from anyone but me: for this, though I write it, is already a dead letter, lost like a predestined soul even in the pains that gave it birth. Yes, it does pain me, frightens me even, that I must die all by myself, and feeling still so young. I thought I should look forward to it, but I do not; no, no, I would give much to put it off for a time, until I could know what it will mean for me as regards you. Oh, if you only knew and _cared,_ what wild comfort I might have in the knowledge! It seems strange that if I were going away from the chance of a perfect life with you I should feel it with less pain than I feel this. The dust and the ashes of life are all that I have to let fall: and it is bitterness itself to part with them.

How we grow to love sorrow! Joy is never so much a possession--it goes over us, incloses us like air or sunlight; but sorrow goes into us and becomes part of our flesh and bone. So that I, holding up my hand to the sunshine, see sorrow red and transparent like stained gla.s.s between me and the light of day, sorrow that has become inseparably mine, and is the very life I am wishing to keep!

Dearest, will the world be more bearable to you when I am out of it? It is selfish of me not to wish so, since I can satisfy you in this so soon!

Every day I will try to make it my wish: or wish that it may be so when the event comes--not a day before. Till then let it be more bearable that I am still alive: grant me, dearest, that one little grace while I live!

Bearable! My sorrow _is_ bearable, I suppose, because I do bear it from day to day: otherwise I would declare it not to be. Don't suffer as I do, dearest, unless that will comfort you.

One thing is strange, but I feel quite certain of it: when I heard that I carried death about in me, scarcely an arm's-length away, I thought quickly to myself that it was not the solution of the mystery. Others might have thought that it was: that because I was to die so soon, therefore I was not fit to be your wife. But I know it was not that. I know that whatever hopes death in me put an end to, you would have married me and loved me patiently till I released you, as I am to so soon.

It is always this same woe that crops up: nothing I can ever think can account for what has been decreed. That too is a secret: mine comes to meet it. When it arrives shall I know?

And not a word, not a word of this can reach you ever! Its uses are wrung out and drained dry to comfort me in my eternal solitude.

Good-night; very soon it will have to be good-by.

LETTER Lx.x.xI.

Beloved: I woke last night and believed I had your arms round me, and that all storms had gone over me forever. The peace of your love had inclosed me so tremendously that when I was fully awake I began to think that what I held was you dead, and that our reconciliation had come at that great cost.

Something remains real of it all, even now under the full light of day: yet I know you are not dead. Only it leaves me with a hope that at the lesser cost of my own death, when it comes, happiness may break in, and that whichever of us has been the most in poor and needy ignorance will know the truth at last--the truth which is an inseparable need for all hearts that love rightly.