An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 16

Every day tells me I am different from the thing I wish to be--your love, the woman you approve.

I love you, I love you! Can I get no nearer to you ever for all this straining? If I love you so much, I must be moving toward what you would have me be. In our happiest days my heart had its growing pains,--growing to be as you wished it.

Dear, even the wisest make mistakes, and the tenderest may be hard without knowing: I do not think I am unworthy of you, if you knew all.

Writing to you now seems weakness: yet it seemed peace to come in here and cry to you. And when I go about I have still strength left, and try to be cheerful. n.o.body knows, I think n.o.body knows. No one in the house is made downcast because of me. How dear they are, and how little I can thank them! Except to you, dearest, I have not shown myself selfish.

I love you too much, too much: I cannot write it.

LETTER LXI.

You are very ill, they tell me. Beloved, it is such kindness in them to have regard for the wish they disapprove and to let me know.

Knowledge is the one thing needful whose lack has deprived me of my happiness: the express image of sorrow is not so terrible as the foreboding doubt of it. Not because you are ill, but because I know something definitely about you, I am happier to-day: a little nearer to a semblance of service to you in my helplessness. How much I wish you well, even though that might again carry you out of my knowledge! And, though death might bring you nearer than life now makes possible, I pray to you, dearest, not to die. It is not right that you should die yet, with a mistake in your heart which a little more life might clear away.

Praying for your dear eyes to remain open, I realize suddenly how much hope still remains in me, where I thought none was left. Even your illness I take as a good omen; and the thought of you weak as a child and somewhat like one in your present state with no brain for deep thinking, comes to my heart to be cherished endlessly: there you lie, Beloved, brought home to my imagination as never since the day we parted. And the thought comes to the rescue of my helpless longing--that it is as little children that men get brought into the kingdom of Heaven. Let that be the medicine and outcome of your sickness, my own Beloved! I hold my breath with hope that I shall have word of you when your hand has strength again to write. For I know that in sleepless nights and in pain you will be unable not to think of me. If you made resolutions against that when you were well, they will go now that you are laid weak; and so some power will come back to me, and my heart will never be asleep for thinking that yours lies awake wanting it:--nor ever be at rest for devising ways by which to be at the service of your conscious longing.

Ah, my own one Beloved, whom I have loved so openly and so secretly, if you were as I think some other men are, I could believe that I had given you so much of my love that you had tired of me because I had made no favor of it but had let you see that I was your faithful subject and servant till death: so that after twenty years you, chancing upon an empty day in your life, might come back and find me still yours;--as to-morrow, if you came, you would.

My pride died when I saw love looking out of your eyes at me; and it has not come back to me now that I see you no more. I have no wish that it should. In all ways possible I would wish to be as I was when you loved me; and seek to change nothing except as you bid me.

LETTER LXII.

So I have seen you, Beloved, again, after fearing that I never should. A day's absence from home has given me this great fortune.

The pain of it was less than it might have been, since our looks did not meet. To have seen your eyes shut out their recognition of me would have hurt me too much: I must have cried out against such a judgment. But you pa.s.sed by the window without knowing, your face not raised: so little changed, yet you have been ill. Arthur tells me everything: he knows I must have any word of you that goes begging.

Oh, I hope you are altogether better, happier! An illness helps some people: the worst of their sorrow goes with the health that breaks down under it; and they come out purged into a clearer air, and are made whole for a fresh trial of life.

I hear that you are going quite away; and my eyes bless this chance to have embraced you once again. Your face is the kindest I have ever seen: even your silence, while I looked at you, seemed a grace instead of a cruelty. What kindness, I say to myself, even if it be mistaken kindness, must have sealed those dear lips not to tell me of my unworth!

Oh, if I could see once into the brain of it all! No one but myself knows how good you are: how can I, then, be so unworthy of you? Did you think I would not surrender to anything you fixed, that you severed us so completely, not even allowing us to meet, and giving me no way to come back to you though I might come to be all that you wished? Ah, dear face, how hungry you have made me!--the more that I think you are not yet so happy as I could wish,--as I could make you,--I say it foolishly:--yet if you would trust me, I am sure.

Oh, how tired loving you now makes me! physically I grow weary with the ache to have you in my arms. And I dream, I dream always, the shadows of former kindness that never grow warm enough to clasp me before I wake.--Yours, dearest, waking or sleeping.

LETTER LXIII.

Do you remember, Beloved, when you came on your birthday, you said I was to give you another birthday present of your own choosing, and I promised?

And it was that we were to do for the whole day what _I_ wished: you were not to be asked to choose.

You said then that it was the first time I had ever let you have your way, which was to see me be myself independently of you:--as if such a self existed.

You will never see what I write now; and I did not do then any of the things I most wished: for first I wished to kneel down and kiss your hands and feet; and you would not have liked that. Even now that you love me no more, you would not like me to do such a thing. A woman can never do as she likes when she loves--there is no such thing until he shows it her or she divines it. I loved you, I loved you!--that was all I could do, and all I wanted to do.

You have kept my letters? Do you read them ever, I wonder? and do they tell you differently about me, now that you see me with new eyes? Ah no, you dare not look at them: they tell too much truth! How can love-letters ever cease to be the winged things they were when they first came? I fancy mine sick to death for want of your heart to rest on; but never less loving.

If you would read them again, you would come back to me. Those little throats of happiness would be too strong for you. And so you lay them in a cruel grave of lavender,--"Lavender for forgetfulness" might be another song for Ophelia to sing.

I am weak with writing to you, I have written too long: this is twice to-day.

I do not write to make myself more miserable: only to fill up my time.

When I go about something definite, I can do it:--to ride, or read aloud to the old people, or sit down at meals with them is very easy; but I cannot make employment for myself--that requires too much effort of invention and will: and I have only will for one thing in life--to get through it: and no invention to the purpose. Oh, Beloved, in the grave I shall lie forever with a lock of your hair in my hand. I wonder if, beyond there, one sees anything? My eyes ache to-day from the brain, which is always at blind groping for you, and the point where I missed you.

LETTER LXIV.

Dearest: It is dreadful to own that I was glad at first to know that you and your mother were no longer together, glad of something that must mean pain to you! I am not now. When you were ill I did a wrong thing: from her something came to me which I returned. I would do much to undo that act now; but this has fixed it forever. With it were a few kind words. I could not bear to accept praise from her: all went back to her! Oh, poor thing, poor thing! if I ever had an enemy I thought it was she! I do not think so now. Those who seem cold seldom are. I hope you were with her at the last: she loved you beyond any word that was in her nature to utter, and the young are hard on the old without knowing it. We were two people, she and I, whose love clashed jealously over the same object, and we both failed.

She is the first to get rest.

LETTER LXV.

My Dear: I dream of you now every night, and you are always kind, always just as I knew you: the same without a shadow of change.

I cannot picture you anyhow else, though my life is full of the silence you have made. My heart seems to have stopped on the last beat the sight of your handwriting gave it.

I dare not bid you come back now: sorrow has made me a stranger to myself. I could not look at you and say "I am your Star":--I could not believe it if I said it. Two women have inhabited me, and the one here now is not the one you knew and loved: their one likeness is that they both have loved the same man, the one certain that her love was returned, and the other certain of nothing. What a world of difference lies in that!

I lay hands on myself, half doubting, and feel my skeleton pus.h.i.+ng to the front: my gla.s.s shows it me. Thus we are all built up: bones are at the foundations of our happiness, and when the happiness wears thin, they show through, the true architecture of humanity.

I have to realize now that I have become the greatest possible failure in life,--a woman who has lost her "share of the world": I try to shape myself to it.

It is deadly when a woman's s.e.x, what was once her glory, reveals itself to her as an all-containing loss. I realized myself fully only when I was with you; and now I can't undo it.--You gone, I lean against a shadow, and feel myself forever falling, drifting to no end, a Francesca without a Paolo. Well, it must be some comfort that I do not drag you with me. I never believed myself a "strong" woman; your lightest wish shaped me to its liking. Now you have molded me with your own image and superscription, and have cast me away.

Are not the die and the coin that comes from it only two sides of the same form?--there is not a hair's breadth anywhere between their surfaces where they lie, the one inclosing the other. Yet part them, and the light strikes on them how differently! That is a mere condition of light: join them in darkness, where the light cannot strike, and they are the same--two faces of a single form. So you and I, dear, when we are dead, shall come together again, I trust. Or are we to come back to each other defaced and warped out of our true conjunction? I think not: for if you have changed, if soul can ever change, I shall be melted again by your touch, and flow to meet all the change that is in you, since my true self is to be you.

Oh, you, my Beloved, do you wake happy, either with or without thoughts of me? I cannot understand, but I trust that it may be so. If I could have a reason why I have so pa.s.sed out of your life, I could endure it better. What was in me that you did not wish? What was in you that I must not wish for evermore? If the root of this separation was in you, if in G.o.d's will it was ordered that we were to love, and, without loving less, afterwards be parted, I could acquiesce so willingly. But it is this knowing nothing that overwhelms me:--I strain my eyes for sight and can't see; I reach out my hands for the sunlight and am given great handfuls of darkness. I said to you the sun had dropped out of my heaven.--My dear, my dear, is this darkness indeed you? Am I in the mold with my face to yours, receiving the close impression of a misery in which we are at one? Are you, dearest, hungering and thirsting for me, as I now for you?

I wonder what, to the starving and drought-stricken, the taste of death can be like! Do all the rivers of the world run together to the lips then, and all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste when the long deprivation ceases to be a want? Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and thirst--an antidote to it all?

I may know soon. How very strange if at the last I forget to think of you!