An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 20

Even now to me the thought of you is a peace pa.s.sing _all_ understanding.

Beloved, Beloved, Beloved, all the greetings I ever gave you gather here, and are hungry to belong to you by a better way than I have ever dreamed.

I am yours, till something more than death swallows me up.

LETTER Lx.x.xII.

Dearest: If you will believe any word of mine, you must not believe that I have died of a broken heart should science and the doctors bring about a fulfillment of their present prophesyings concerning me.

I think my heart has held me up for a long time, not letting me know that I was ill: I did not notice. And now my body snaps on a stem that has grown too thin to hold up its weight. I am at the end of twenty-two years: they have been too many for me, and the last has seemed a useless waste of time. It is difficult not to believe that great happiness might have carried me over many more years and built up for me in the end a renewed youth: I asked that quite frankly, wis.h.i.+ng to know, and was told not to think it.

So, dearest, whatever comes, whatever I may have written to fill up my worst loneliness, be sure, if you care to be, that though my life was wholly yours, my death was my own, and comes at its right natural time.

Pity me, but invent no blame to yourself. My heart has sung of you even in the darkest days; in the face of everything, the blankness of everything, I mean, it has clung to an unreasoning belief that in spite of appearances all had some well in it, above all to a conviction that-- perhaps without knowing it--you still love me. Believing _that,_ it could not break, could not, dearest. Any other part of me, but not that.

Beloved, I kiss your face, I kiss your lips and eyes: my mind melts into kisses when I think of you. However weak the rest of me grows, my love shall remain strong and certain. If I could look at you again, how in a moment you would fill up the past and the future and turn even my grief into gold! Even my senses then would forget that they had ever been starved. Dear "share of the world," you have been out of sight, but I have never let you go! Ah, if only the whole of me, the double doubting part of me as well, could only be so certain as to be able to give wings to this and let it fly to you! Wish for it, and I think the knowledge will come to me!

Good-night! G.o.d brings you to me in my first dream: but the longing so keeps me awake that sometimes I am a whole night sleepless.

LETTER Lx.x.xIII.

I am frightened, dearest, I am frightened at death. Not only for fear it should take me altogether away from you instead of to you, but for other reasons besides,--instincts which I thought gone but am not rid of even yet. No healthy body, or body with power of enjoyment in it, wishes to die, I think: and no heart with any desire still living out of the past. We know nothing at all really: we only think we believe, and hope we know; and how thin that sort of conviction gets when in our extremity we come face to face with the one immovable fact of our own death waiting for us! That is what I have to go through. Yet even the fear is a relief: I come upon something that I can meet at last; a challenge to my courage whether it is still to be found here in this body I have worn so weak with useless lamentations. If I had your hand, or even a word from you, I think I should not be afraid: but perhaps I should. It is all one. Good-by: I am beginning at last to feel a meaning in that word which I wrote at your bidding so long-ago. Oh, Beloved, from face to feet, good-by! G.o.d be with you wherever you go and I do not!

LETTER Lx.x.xIV.

Dearest: I am to have news of you. Arthur came to me last night, and told me that, if I wished, he would bring me word of you. He goes to-morrow. He put out the light that I might not see his face: I felt what was there.

You should know this of him: he has been the dearest possible of human beings to me since I lost you. I am almost not unblessed when I have him to speak to. Yet we can say so little together. I guess all he means. An endless wish to give me comfort:--and I stay selfish. The knowledge that he would stolidly die to serve me hardly touches me.

Oh, look kindly in his eyes if you see him: mine will be looking at you out of his!

LETTER Lx.x.xV.

Good-morning, Beloved; there is sun s.h.i.+ning. I wonder if Arthur is with you yet?

If faith could still remove mountains, surely I should have seen you long ago. But if I were to see you now, I should fear that it meant you were dead.

That the same world should hold you and me living and unseen by each other is a great mystery. Will love ever explain it?

I wish I could bid the sun stand still over your meeting with Arthur so that I might know. We were so like each other once. Time has worn it off: but he is like what I was. Will you remember me well enough to recognize me in him, and to be a little pitiful to my weak longing for a word this one last time of all? Beloved, I press my lips to yours, and pray--speak!

LETTER Lx.x.xVI.

Dearest: To-day Arthur came and brought me your message: I have at my heart your "profoundly grateful remembrances." Somewhere else unanswered lies your prayer for G.o.d to bless me. To answer that, dearest, is not in His hands but in yours. And the form of your message tells me it will not be,--not for this body and spirit that have been bound together so long in truth to you.

I set down for you here--if you should ever, for love's sake, send and make claim for any message back from me--a profoundly grateful remembrance; and so much more, so much more that has never failed.

Most dear, most beloved, you were to me and are. Now I can no longer hold together: but it is my body, not my love that has failed.