An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 4

But, Dearest: When I think of you I never question whether what I think would be true or false in the eyes of others. All that concerns you seems to go on a different plane where evidence has no meaning or existence: where n.o.body exists or means anything, but only we two alone, engaged in bringing about for ourselves the still greater solitude of two into one.

Oh, Beloved, what a company that will be! Take me in your arms, fasten me to your heart, breathe on me. Deny me either breath or the light of day: I am yours equally, to live or die at your word. I shut my eyes to feel your kisses falling on me like rain, or still more like suns.h.i.+ne,--yet most of all like kisses, my own dearest and best beloved!

Oh, we two! how wonderful we seem! And to think that there have been lovers like us since the world began: and the world not able to tell us one little word of it:--not well, so as to be believed--or only along with sadness where Fate has broken up the heavens which lay over some pair of lovers. Oenone's cry, "Ah me, my mountain shepherd," tells us of the joy when it has vanished, and most of all I get it in that song of wife and husband which ends:--

"Not a word for you, Not a lock or kiss, Good-by.

We, one, must part in two; Verily death is this: I must die."

It was a woman wrote that: and we get love there! Is it only when joy is past that we can give it its full expression? Even now, Beloved, I break down in trying to say how I love you. I cannot put all my joy into my words, nor all my love into my lips, nor all my life into your arms, whatever way I try. Something remains that I cannot express. Believe, dearest, that the half has not yet been spoken, neither of my love for you, nor of my trust in you,--nor of a wish that seems sad, but comes in a very tumult of happiness--the wish to die so that some unknown good may come to you out of me.

Not till you die, dearest, shall I die truly! I love you now too much for your heart not to carry me to its grave, though I should die now, and you live to be a hundred. I pray you may! I cannot choose a day for you to die. I am too grateful to life which has given me to you to say--if I were dying--"Come with me, dearest!" Though, how the words tempt me as I write them!--Come with me, dearest: yes, come! Ah, but you kiss me more, I think, when we say good-by than when meeting; so you will kiss me most of all when I have to die:--a thing in death to look forward to! And, till then,--life, life, till I am out of my depth in happiness and drown in your arms!

Beloved, that I can write so to you,--think what it means; what you have made me come through in the way of love, that this, which I could not have dreamed before, comes from me with the thought of you! You told me to be still--to let you "wors.h.i.+p": I was to write back acceptance of all your dear words. Are you never to be at my feet, you ask. Indeed, dearest, I do not know how, for I cannot move from where I am! Do you feel where my thoughts kiss you? You would be vexed with me if I wrote it down, so I do not. And after all, some day, under a bright star of Providence, I may have gifts for you after my own mind which will allow me to grow proud.

Only now all the giving comes from you. It is I who am enriched by your love, beyond knowledge of my former self. Are _you_ changed, dearest, by anything I have done?

My heart goes to you like a tree in the wind, and all these thoughts are loose leaves that fly after you when I have to remain behind. Dear lover, what short visits yours seem! and the Mother-Aunt tells me they are most unconscionably long.--You will not pay any attention to _that_, please: forever let the heavens fall rather than that a hint to such foul effect should grow operative through me!

This brings you me so far as it can:--such little words off so great a body of--"liking" shall I call it? My paper stops me: it is my last sheet: I should have to go down to the library to get more--else I think I could not cease writing.

More love than I can name.--Ever, dearest, your own.

LETTER XVII.

Dearest: Do I not write you long letters? It reveals my weakness. I have thought (it had been coming on me, and now and then had broken out of me before I met you) that, left to myself, I should have become a writer of books--I scarcely can guess what sort--and gone contentedly into middle-age with that instead of _this_ as my _raison d'etre_.

How gladly I lay down that part of myself, and say--"But for you, I had been this quite other person, whom I have no wish to be now"! Beloved, your heart is the shelf where I put all my uncut volumes, wondering a little what sort of a writer I should have made; and chiefly wondering, would _you_ have liked me in that character?

There is one here in the family who considers me a writer of the darkest dye, and does not approve of it. Benjy comes and sits most mournfully facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write: and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of--"What has come between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat's-claw scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me through damp places?"

Having written this sentimental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and took him to see his mother's grave. At the bottom of the long walk is our dog's cemetery:--no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy as a child to have it planted: and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it _knew_ that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping. Benjy, too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there, as he does in other places. What horror, were I to find him digging up his mother's skeleton! Would my esteem for him survive?

When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking what I had brought him _there_ for. I pointed out to him the precise mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered you these buds. Are they not a deep color for wild ones?--if their blush remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you.

Through what flower would you best like to be pa.s.sed back, as regards your material atoms, into the spiritualized side of nature, when we have done with ourselves in this life? No single flower quite covers all my wants and aspirations. You and I would put our heads together underground and evolve a new flower--"carnation, lily, lily, rose"--and send it up one fine morning for scientists to dispute over and give diabolical learned names to. What an end to our cozy floral collaboration that would be!

Here endeth the epistle: the elect salutes you. This week, if the authorities permit, I shall be paying you a flying visit, with wings full of eyes,--_and_, I hope, healing; for I believe you are seedy, and that _that_ is what is behind it. You notice I have not complained.

Dearest, how could I! My happiness reaches to the clouds--that is, to where things are not quite clear at present. I love you no more than I ought: yet far more than I can name. Good-night and good-morning.--Your star, since you call me so.

LETTER XVIII.

Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to tell you what I _do_ all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my telling you what I _think_? Yet you get more of me this way than that.

What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always different. However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain, here I start telling you.

I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the blinds: wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;--discover new beauties in it, and run to the gla.s.s to discover new beauties in myself,--find them; Benjy comes up with the post's latest, and behold, my day is begun!

Is that the sort of thing you want to know? My days are without an action worth naming: I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of them: if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink race to tell you. No, it is man who _does_ things; a woman only diddles (to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good, fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living: and that is not me!

I feel sometimes as if a real bar were between me and a whole conception of life; because I have carpets and curtains, and Nan-nan, and Benjy, and last of all you--shutting me out from the realities of existence.

If you would all leave me just for one full moon, and come back to me only when I am starving for you all--for my tea to be brought to me in the morning, and all the paddings and cus.h.i.+onings which bolster me up from morning till night--with what a sigh of wisdom I would drop back into your arms, and would let you draw the rose-colored curtains round me again!

Now I am afraid lest I have become too happy: I am leaning so far out of window to welcome the dawn, I seem to be tempting a fall--heaven itself to fall upon me.

What do I _know_ truly, who only know so much happiness?

Dearest, if there is anything else in love which I do not know, teach it me quickly: I am utterly yours. If there is sorrow to give, give it me!

Only let me have with it the consciousness of your love.

Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think of you so much. What would life have without you in it? The sun would drop from my heavens. I see only by you! you have kissed me on the eyes. You are more to me than my own poor brain could ever have devised: had I started to invent Paradise, I could not have invented _you_. But perhaps you have invented me: I am something new to myself since I saw you first. G.o.d bless you for it!

Even if you were to shut your eyes at me now--though I might go blind, you could not unmake me:--"The G.o.ds themselves cannot recall their gifts." Also that I am yours is a gift of the G.o.ds, I will trust: and so, not to be recalled!

Kiss me, dearest; here where I have written this! I am yours, Beloved. I kiss you again and again.--Ever your own making.

LETTER XIX.

Dearest, Dearest: How long has this happened? You don't tell me the day or the hour. Is it ever since you last wrote? Then you have been in pain and grief for four days: and I not knowing anything about it! And you have no hand in the house kind enough to let you dictate by it one small word to poor me? What heartless merrymakings may I not have sent you to worry you, when soothing was the one thing wanted? Well, I will not worry now, then; neither at not being told, nor at not being allowed to come: but I will come thus and thus, O my dear heart, and take you in my arms. And you will be comforted, will you not be? when I tell you that even if you had no legs at all, I would love you just the same. Indeed, dearest, so much of you is a superfluity: just your heart against mine, and the sound of your voice, would carry me up to more heavens than I could otherwise have dreamed of. I may say now, now that I know it was not your choice, what a void these last few days the lack of letters has been to me. I wondered, truly, if you had found it well to put off such visible signs for a while in order to appease one who, in other things more essential, sees you rebellious. But the wonder is over now; and I don't want you to write--not till a consultation of doctors orders it for the good of your health. I will be so happy talking to you: also I am sending you books:--those I wish you to read; and which now you _must_, since you have the leisure!

And I for my part will make time and read yours. Whose do you most want me to read, that my education in your likings may become complete? What I send you will not deprive me of anything: for I have the beautiful complete set--your gift--and shall read side by side with you to realize in imagination what the happiness of reading them for the first time ought to be.

Yesterday, by a most unsympathetic instinct, I went out for a long tramp on my two feet; and no ache in them came and told me of you! Over Sillingford I sat on a bank and looked downhill where went a carter. And I looked uphill where lay something which might be nothing--or not his.

Now, shall I make a fool of myself by pursuing to tell him he may have dropped something, or shall I go on and see? So I went on and saw a coat with a fat pocket: and by then he was out of sight, and perhaps it wasn't his; and it was very hot and the hill steep. So I minded my own business, making Cain's motto mine; and now feel so had, being quite sure that it was his. And I wonder how many miles he will have tramped back looking for it, and whether his dinner was in the pocket.

These unintentional misdoings are the "sins" one repents of all one's life long: I have others stored away, the bitterest of small things done or undone in haste and repented of at so much leisure afterwards. And always done to people or things I had no grudge against, sometimes even a love for. They are my skeletons: I will tell you of them some day.

This, dearest, is our first enforced absence from each other; and I feel it almost more hard on me than on you. Beloved, let us lay our hearts together and get comforted. It is not real separation to know that another part of the world contains the rest of me. Oh, the rest of me, the rest of me that you are! So, thinking of you, I can never be tired.

I rest yours.

LETTER XX.

Yes, Dearest, "Patience!" but it is a virtue I have little enough of naturally, and used to be taught to pray for as a child. And I remember once really hurting clear Mother-Aunt's feelings by trying to repay her for that teaching by a little iniquitous laughter at her expense. It was too funny for me to feel very contrite about, as I do sometimes over quite small things, or I would not be telling it you now (for there are things in me I would conceal even from you). I dare say you wouldn't guess it, but the M.-A. is a most long person over her private devotions. Perhaps it was her own habit, with the cares of a household sometimes conflicting, which made her recite to me so often her pet legend of a saintly person who, constantly interrupted over her prayers by mundane matters, became a pattern in patience out of these snippings of her G.o.dly desires. So, one day, angels in the disguise of cross people with selfish demands on her time came seeking to know where in her composition or composure exasperation began: and finding none, they let her return in peace to her missal, where for a reward all the letters had been turned into gold. "And that, my dear, comes of patience," my aunt would say, till I grew a little tired of the saying. I don't know what experience my uncle had gathered of her patience under like circ.u.mstances: but I notice that to this day he treads delicately, like Agag, when he knows her to be on her knees; and prefers then to send me on his errands instead of doing them himself.

So it happened one day that he wanted a particular coat which had been put away in her clothes-closet--and she was on her knees between him and it, with the time of her Amen quite indefinite. I was sent, said my errand briefly, and was permitted to fumble out her keys from her pocket while she continued to kneel over her morning psalms.

What I brought to him turned out to be the wrong coat: I went back and knocked for readmittance. Long-sufferingly she bade me to come in. I explained, and still she repressed herself, only saying in a tone of affliction, "Do see this time that you take the right one!"