An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 6

"All I believed is true!

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 superst.i.tion 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 sh.e.l.l. 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--const.i.tutionally, 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 quant.i.ty 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 p.r.o.ng 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d 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 gra.s.s, and youth slain in its high places.