An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 15

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 s.h.i.+ning 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 G.o.dhead 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d-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.

LETTER LVII.

Come to me! I will not understand a word you have written till you come.

Who has been using your hand to strike me like this, and why do you lend it? Oh, if it is she, you do not owe her _that_ duty! Never write such things:--speak! have you ever found me not listen to you, or hard to convince? Dearest, dearest!--take what I mean: I cannot write over this gulf. Come to me,--I will believe anything you can _say_, but I can believe nothing of this written. I must see you and hear what it is you mean. Dear heart, I am blind till I set eyes on you again! Beloved, I have nothing, nothing in me but love for you: except for that I am empty!

Believe me and give me time; I will not be unworthy of the joy of holding you. I am nothing if not _yours_! Tell this to whoever is deceiving you.

Oh, my dearest, why did you stay away from me to write so? Come and put an end to a thing which means nothing to either of us. You love me: how can it have a meaning?

Can you not hear my heart crying?--I love n.o.body but you--do not know what love is without you! How can I be more yours than I am? Tell me, and I will be!

Here are kisses. Do not believe yourself till you have seen me. Oh, the pain of having to _write_, of not having your arms round me in my misery!

I kiss your dear blind eyes with all my heart.--My Love's most loved and loving.

LETTER LVIII.

No, no, I cannot read it! What have I done that you will not come to me? They are mad here, telling me to be calm, that I am not to go to you. I too am out of my mind--except that I love you. I know nothing except that. Beloved, only on my lips will I take my dismissal from yours: not G.o.d himself can claim you from me till you have done me that justice. Kiss me once more, and then, if you can, say we must part.

You cannot!--Ah, come here where my heart is, and you cannot!

Have I never told you enough how I love you? Dearest, I have no words for all my love: I have no pride in me. Does not this alone tell you?--You are sending me away, and I cry to you to spare me. Can I love you more than that? What will you have of me that I have not given? Oh, you, the sun in my dear heavens--if I lose you, what is left of me?

Could you break so to pieces even a woman you did not love? And me you _do_ love,--you _do_. Between all this denial of me, and all this silence of words that you have put your name to, I see clearly that you are still my lover.--Your writing breaks with trying not to say it: you say again and again that there is no fault in me. I swear to you, dearest, there is none, unless it be loving you: and how can you mean that? For what are you and I made for unless for each other? With all our difference people tell us we are alike. We were shaped for each other from our very birth. Have we not proved it in a hundred days of happiness, which have lifted us up to the blue of a heaven higher than any birds ever sang? And now you say--taking on you the blame for the very life-blood in us both--that the fault is yours, and that your fault is to have allowed me to love you and yourself to love me!

Who has suddenly turned our love into a crime? Beloved, is it a sin that here on earth I have been seeing G.o.d through you? Go away from me, and He is gone also. Ah, sweetheart, let me see you before all my world turns into a wilderness! Let me know better why,--if my senses are to be emptied of you. My heart can never let you go. Do you wish that it should?

Bring your own here, and see if it can tell me that! Come and listen to mine! Oh, dearest heart that ever beat, mine beats so like yours that once together you shall not divide their sound!

Beloved, I will be patient, believe me, to any words you can say: but I cannot be patient away from you. If I have seemed to reproach you, do not think that now. For you are to give me a greater joy than I ever had before when you take me in your arms again after a week that has spelled dreadful separation. And I shall bless you for it--for this present pain even--because the joy will be so much greater.

Only come: I do not live till you have kissed me again. Oh, my beloved, how cruel love may seem if we do not trust it enough! My trust in you has come back in a great rush of warmth, like a spring day after frost. I almost laugh as I let this go. It brings you,--perhaps before I wake: I shall be so tired to-night. Call under my window, make me hear in my sleep. I will wake up to you, and it shall be all over before the rest of the world wakes. There is no dream so deep that I shall not hear you out of the midst of it. Come and be my morning-glory to-morrow without fail. I will rewrite nothing that I have written--let it go! See me out of deep waters again, because I have thought so much of you! I have come through clouds and thick darkness. I press your name to my lips a thousand times.

As sure as sunrise I say to myself that you will come: the sun is not truer to his rising than you to me.

Love will go flying after this till I sleep. G.o.d bless you!--and me also; it is all one and the same wish.--Your most true, loving, and dear faithful one.

LETTER LIX.

I have to own that I know your will now, at last. Without seeing you I am convinced: you have a strong power in you to have done that! You have told me the word I am to say to you: it is your bidding, so I say it--Good-by.

But it is a word whose meaning I cannot share.

Yet I have something to tell you which I could not have dreamed if it had not somehow been true: which has made it possible for me to believe, without hearing you speak it, that I am to be dismissed out of your heart.--May the doing of it cost you far less pain than I am fearing!

You did not come, though I promised myself so certainly that you would: instead came your last very brief note which this is to obey. Still I watched for you to come, believing it still and trusting to silence on my part to bring you more certainly than any more words could do. And at last either you came to me, or I came to you: a bitter last meeting.

Perhaps your mind too holds what happened, if so I have got truly at what your will is. I must accept it as true, since I am not to see you again. I cannot tell you whether I thought it or dreamed it, but it seems still quite real, and has turned all my past life into a mockery.

When I came I was behind you; then you turned and I could see your face--you too were in pain: in that we seemed one. But when I touched you and would have kissed you, you shuddered at me and drew back your head. I tell you this as I would tell you anything unbelievable that I had heard told of you behind your back. You see I am obeying you at last.

For all the love which you gave me when I seemed worthy of it I thank you a thousand times. Could you ever return to the same mind, I should be yours once more as I still am; never ceasing on my side to be your lover and servant till death, and--if there be anything more--after as well.

My lips say amen now: but my heart cannot say it till breath goes out of my body. Good-by: that means--G.o.d be with you. I mean it; but He seems to have ceased to be with me altogether. Good-by, dearest. I kiss your heart with writing for the last time, and your eyes, that will see nothing more from me after this. Good-by.

Note.--All the letters which follow were found lying loosely together. They only went to their destination after the writer's death.

LETTER LX.

To-day, dearest, a letter from you reached me: a fallen star which had lost its way. It lies dead in my bosom. It was the letter that lost itself in the post while I was traveling: it comes now with half a dozen postmarks, and signs of long waiting in one place. In it you say, "We have been engaged now for two whole months; I never dreamed that two moons could contain so much happiness." Nor I, dearest! We have now been separated for three; and till now I had not dreamed that time could so creep, to such infinitely small purpose, as it has in carrying me from the moment when I last saw you.

You were so dear to me, Beloved; _that_ you ever are! Time changes nothing in you as you seemed to me then. Oh, I am sick to touch your hands: all my thoughts run to your service: they seem to hear you call, only to find locked doors.

If you could see me now I think you would open the door for a little while.

If they came and told me--"You are to see him just for five minutes, and then part again"--what should I be wanting most to say to you? Nothing-- only "Speak, speak!" I would have you fill my heart with your voice the whole time: five minutes more of you to fold my life round. It would matter very little what you said, barring the one thing that remains never to be said.

Oh, could all this silence teach me the one thing I am longing to know!-- why am I unworthy of you? If I cannot be your wife, why cannot I see you still,--serve you if possible? I would be grateful.

You meant to be generous; and wis.h.i.+ng not to wound me, you said that "there was no fault" in me. I realize now that you would not have said that to the woman you still loved. And now I am never to know what part in me is hateful to you. I must live with it because you would not tell me the truth!