"What have I done?—Man came (There's nothing that sticks like dirt), Looked at me with eyes of blame, And called me 'Squinancy-wort!' What have I done? I linger (I cannot say that I live) In the happy lands of my birth; Passers-by point with the finger: For me the light of the sun Is darkened. Oh, what would I give To creep away, and hide my shame in the earth! What have I done? Yet there is hope. I have seen Many changes since I began. The web-footed beasts have been (Dear beasts!)—and gone, being part of some wider plan. Perhaps in His infinite mercy God will remove this man!"

Now I am on sentiment and unjust judgments: here is another instance, where evidently in life I did not love well enough a character nobler than this capering and accommodating boy Benjy, who toadies to all my moods. Calling at the lower farm, I missed him whom I used to nickname "Manger," because his dog-jaws always refused to smile on me. His old mistress gave me a pathetic account of his last days. It was the muzzling order that broke his poor old heart. He took it as an accusation on a point where, though of a melancholy disposition, his reputation had been spotless. He never lifted his head nor smiled again. And not all his mistress' love could explain to him that he was not in fault. She wept as she told it me.

Good-by, dearest, and for this letter so full of such little worth call me what names you like; and I will go to Jemima, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch for the patience in which they must have taken after their father when he so named them, I suppose for a discipline.

My Beloved, let my heart come where it wants to be. Twilight has been on me to-day, I don't know why; and I have not written it off as I hoped to do.—All yours and nothing left.



LETTER XLIX.

Dearest: I suppose your mother's continued absence, and her unexplanation of her further stay, must be taken for unyielding disapproval, and tells us what to expect of February. It is not a cordial form of "truce": but since it lets me see just twice as much of you as I should otherwise, I will not complain so long as it does not make you unhappy. You write to her often and kindly, do you not?

Well, if this last letter of hers frees you sufficiently, it is quite settled at this end that you are to be with us for Christmas:—read into that the warmest corners of a heart already fully occupied. I do not think of it too much, till I am assured it is to be.

Did you go over to Pembury for the day? Your letter does not say anything: but your letters have a wonderful way with them of leaving out things of outside importance. I shall hear from the rattle of returning fire-engines some day that Hatterling has been burned down: and you will arrive cool the next day and say, "Oh yes, it is so!"

I am sure you have been right to secure this pledge of independence to yourself: but it hurts me to think what a deadly offense it may be both to her tenderness for you and her pride and stern love of power. To realize suddenly that Hatterling does not mean to you so much as the power to be your own master and happy in your own way, which is altogether opposite to her way, will be so much of a blow that at first you will be able to do nothing to soften it.

February fill-dyke is likely to be true to its name, this coming one, in all that concerns us and our fortunes. Meanwhile, if at Pembury you brought things any nearer settlement, and are not coming so soon as to-morrow, let me know: for some things of "outside importance" do affect me unfavorably while in suspense. I have not your serene determination to abide the workings of Kismet when once all that can be done is done.

The sun sets now, when it does so visibly, just where Pembury is. I take it as an omen. In your diary to-morrow you may write down in the business column that you have had a business letter from me, or as near to one as I can go:—chiefly for that it requires an answer on this matter of "outside importance," which otherwise you will altogether leave out. But you will do better still to come. My whole heart goes out to fetch you: my dearest dear, ever your own.



LETTER L.

Beloved: No, not Browning but Tennyson was in my thoughts at our last ride together: and I found myself shy, as I have been for a long time wishing to say things I could not. What has never entered your head to ask becomes difficult when I wish to get it spoken. So I bring Tennyson to tell you what I mean:—

"Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaaey? Proputty, proputty, proputty—that's what I 'ears 'em saaey."

The tune of this kept me silent all the while we galloped: this and Pembury, a name that glows to me now like the New Jerusalem.

And do you understand, Beloved? or must I say more? My freedom has made its nest under my uncle's roof: but I am a quite independent person in other ways besides character.

Well, Pembury was settled on your own initiative: and I looked on proud and glad. Now I have my own little word to add, merely a tail that wags and makes merry over a thing decided and done. Do you forgive me for this: and for the greater offense of being quite shy at having to write it?

My Aunt thanks you for the game: for my part I cannot own that it will taste sweeter to me for being your own shooting. And please, whatever else you do big and grand and dangerous, respect my superstitions and don't shoot any larks this winter. In the spring I would like to think that here or there an extra lark bubbles over because I and my whims find occasional favor in your sight. When I ask great favors you always grant them; and so, Ahasuerus, grant this little one to your beautifully loving.

* * * * *

Give me the credit of being conscious of it, Beloved: postscripts I never do write. I am glad you noticed it. If I find anything left out I start another letter: this is that other letter: it goes into the same envelope merely for company, and signs itself yours in all state.



LETTER LI.

Dearest: It was so nice and comedy to see the Mother-Aunt this morning importantly opening a letter from you all to herself with the pleasure quite unmixed by any inclosure for me, or any other letter in the house to me so far as she was aware. I listened to you with new ears, discovering that you write quite beautifully in the style which I never get from you. Don't, because I admire you in your more formal form, alter in your style to me. I prefer you much, for my own part, formless: and feel nearer to your heart in an unfinished sentence than in one that is perfectly balanced. Still I want you to know that your cordial warmed her dear old heart and makes her not think now that she has let me see too much of you. She was just beginning to worry herself jealously into that belief the last two days: and Arthur's taking to you helped to the same end. Very well; I seem to understand everybody's oddities now,—having made a complete study of yours.

Best Beloved, I have your little letter lying close, and feel dumb when I try to answer. You with your few words make me feel a small thing with all my unpenned rabble about me. Only you do know so very well that I love you better than I can ever write. This is my first letter of the new year: will our letter-writing go on all this year, or will it, as we dearly dream, die a divine death somewhere before autumn?

In any case, I am, dearest, your most happy and loving.



LETTER LII.

My Dearest: Arthur and the friend went off together yesterday. I am glad the latter stayed just long enough after you left for me to have leisure to find him out human. Here is the whole story: he came and unbosomed to me three days ago: and he said nothing about not telling, so I tell you. As water goes from a duck's back, so go all things worth hearing from me to you.

Arthur had said to him, "Come down for a week," and he had answered, "Can't, because of clothes!" explaining that beyond evening-dress he had only those he stood in. "Well," said Arthur, "stand in them, then; you look all right." "The question is," said his friend, "can I sit down?" However, he came; and was appalled to find that a man unpacked his trunk, and would in all probability be carrying away his clothes each night to brush them. He, conscious of interiors, a lining hanging in rags, and even a patching somewhere, had not the heart to let his one and only day-jacket go down to the servants' hall to be sniffed over: and so every evening when he dressed for dinner he hid his jacket laboriously under the permanent layers of a linen wardrobe which stood in his room.

I had all this in the frankest manner from him in the hour when he became human: and my fancy fired at the vision. Graves with a fierce eye set on duty probing hither and thither in search after the missing coat; and each night the search becoming more strenuous and the mystery more baffling than ever. It had a funny likeness to the Jack Raikes episode in "Evan Harrington," and pleased me the more thus cropping up in real life.

Well, I demanded there and then to be shown the subject of so much romance and adventure: and had the satisfaction of mending it, he sitting by in his shirt-sleeves the while, and watching delighted and without craven apologies.

I notice it is not his own set he is ashamed of, but only the moneyed, high-sniffing servant-class who have no understanding for honorable poverty: and to be misunderstood pricks him in the thinnest of thin places.

He told me also that he brought only three white ties to last him for seven days: and that Graves placed them out in order of freshness and cleanliness night after night:—first three new ones consecutively, then three once worn. After that, on the seventh day, Graves resigned all further responsibility, and laid out all three of them for him to choose from. On the last three days of his stay he did me the honor to leave his coat out, declaring that my mendings had made it presentable before an emperor. Out of this dates the whole of his character, and I understand, what I did not, why Arthur and he get on together.

Now the house is empty, and your comings will be—I cannot say more welcome: but there will be more room for them to be after my own heart.

Heaven be over us both. Faithfully your most loving.



LETTER LIII.

Beloved: I wish you could have been with me to look out into this garden last night when the spirit moved me there. I had started for bed, but became sensitive of something outside not normal. Whether my ear missed the usual echoes and so guessed a muffled world I do not know. To open the door was like slicing into a wedding-cake; then,—where was I to put a foot into that new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness? I hobbled out in a pair of my uncle's. I suppose it is because I know every tree and shrub in its true form that snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here: it becomes a garden of entombments. Now and then some heap would shuffle feebly under its shroud, but resurrection was not to be: the Lawson cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for me to shake and set free; and the silence was wonderful. I padded about till I froze: this morning I can see my big hoof-marks all over the place, and Benjy has been scampering about in them as if he found some flavor of me there. The trees are already beginning to shake themselves loose, and the spell is over: but it had a wonderful hold while it lasted. I take a breath back into last night, and feel myself again full of a romance without words that I cannot explain. If you had been there, even, I think I could have forgotten I had you by me, the place was so weighed down with its sense of solitude. It struck eleven while I was outside, and in that, too, I could hear a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices and lay even on the outer edge of the bell itself. Across the park there are dead boughs cracking down under the weight of snow; and it would be very like you to tramp over just because the roads will be so impossible.

I heard yesterday a thing which made me just a little more free and easy in mind, though I had nothing sensibly on my conscience. Such a good youth who two years ago believed I was his only possible future happiness, is now quite happy with a totally different sort of person. I had a little letter from him, shy and stately, announcing the event. I thought it such a friendly act, for some have never the grace to unsay their grievances, however much actually blessed as a consequence of them.

With that off my mind I can come to you swearing that there have been no accidents on anybody's line of life through a mistake in signals, or a flying in the face of them, where I have had any responsibility. As for you, and as you know well by now, my signals were ready and waiting before you sought for them. "Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you!" was their giveaway attitude.

I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy. Good-by. If you come you will find this letter on the hall table, and me you will probably hear barking behind the rhododendrons.—So much your most loving.



LETTER LIV.

Beloved: We have been having a great day of tidyings out, rummaging through years and years of accumulations—things quite useless but which I have not liked to throw away. My soul has been getting such dusty answers to all sorts of doubtful inquiries as to where on earth this, that, and the other lay hidden. And there were other things, the memory of which had lain quite dead or slept, till under the light of day they sprouted hack into life like corn from the grave of an Egyptian mummy.

Very deep in one box I found a stealthy little collection of secret playthings which it used to be my fond belief that nobody knew of but myself. It may have been Anna's graspingness, when four years of seniority gave her double my age, or Arthur's genial instinct for destructiveness, which drove me into such deep concealment of my dearest idols. But, whether for those or more mystic reasons, I know I had dolls which I nursed only in the strictest privacy and lavished my firmest love upon. It was because of them that I bore the reproach of being but a lukewarm mother of dolls and careless of their toilets; the truth being that my motherly passion expended itself in secret on certain outcasts of society whom others despised or had forgotten. They, on their limp and dissolute bodies, wore all the finery I could find to pile on them: and one shady transaction done on their behalf I remember now without pangs. There was one creature of state whom an inconsiderate relative had presented to Anna and myself in equal shares. Of course Anna's became more and more lionlike. I had very little love for the bone of contention myself, but the sense of injustice rankled in me. So one day, at an unclothing, Anna discovered that certain undergarments were gone altogether away. She sat aghast, questioned me, and, when I refused to disgorge, screamed down vengeance from the authorities. I was morally certain I had taken no more than my just share, and resolution sat on my lips under all threats. For a punishment the whole ownership of the big doll was made over to Anna: I was no worse off, and was very contented with my obstinacy. To-day I found the beautifully wrought bodice, which I had carried beyond reach of even the supreme court of appeal, clothing with ridiculous looseness a rag-doll whose head tottered on its stem like an over-ripe plum, and whose legs had no deportment at all: and am sending it off in charitable surrender to Anna to be given, bag and rag, to whichever one of the children she likes to select.

Also I found:—would you care to have a lock of hair taken from the head of a child then two years old, which, bright golden, does not match what I have on now in the least? I can just remember her: but she is much of a stranger to both of us. Why I value it is that the name and date on the envelope inclosing it are in my mother's handwriting: and I suppose she loved very much the curly treasure she then put away. Some of the other things, quite funny, I will show you the next time you come over. How I wish that vanished mite had mixed some of her play-hours with yours:—you only six miles away all the time: had one but known!—Now grown very old and loving, always your own.



LETTER LV.

Beloved: I am getting quite out of letter-writing, and it is your doing, not mine. No sooner do I get a line from you than you rush over in person and take the answer to it out of my mouth!

I have had six from you in the last week, and believe I have only exchanged you one: all the rest have been nipped in the bud by your arrivals. My pen turns up a cross nose whenever it hears you coming now, and declares life so dull as not to be worth living. Poor dinky little Othello! it shall have its occupation again to-day, and say just what it likes.

It likes you while you keep away: so that's said! When I make it write "come," it kicks and tries to say "don't." For it is an industrious minion, loves to have work to do, and never complains of overhours. It is a sentimental fact that I keep all its used-up brethren in an inclosure together, and throw none of them away. If once they have ridden over paper to you, I turn them to grass in their old age. I let this out because I think it is time you had another laugh at me.

Laugh, dearest, and tell me that you have done so if you want to make me a little more happy than I have been this last day or two. There has been too much thinking in the heads of both of us. Be empty-headed for once when you write next: whether you write little or much, I am sure always of your full heart: but I cannot trust your brain to the same pressure: it is such a Martha to headaches and careful about so many things, and you don't bring it here to be soothed as often as you should—not at its most needy moments, I mean.

Have you made the announcement? or does it not go till to-day? I am not sorry, since the move comes from her, that we have not to wait now till February. You will feel better when the storm is up than when it is only looming. This is the headachy period.

Well. Say "well" with me, dearest! It is going to be well: waiting has not suited us—not any of us, I think. Your mother is one in a thousand, I say that and mean it:—worth conquering as all good things are. I would not wish great fortune to come by too primrosy a way. "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" Even so, for size, is the share of the world which we lay claim to, and for that we must be toilers of the deep.—Always, Beloved, your truest and most loving.



LETTER LVI.

My Own Own Love: You have given me a spring day before the buds begin,— the weather I have been longing for! I had been quite sad at heart these cold wet days, really down;—a treasonable sadness with you still anywhere in the world (though where in the world have you been?). Spring seemed such a long way off over the bend of it, with you unable to come; and it seems now another letter of yours has got lost. (Write it again, dearest,—all that was in it, with any blots that happened to come:—there was a dear smudge in to-day's, with the whirlpool mark of your thumb quite clear on it,—delicious to rest my face against and feel you there.)

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 shining 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 Godhead 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 God 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 God-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 nobody 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 God 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 God 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. God 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—God 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 wishing 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!

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. Nobody knows, I think nobody 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 passed 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 pushing to the front: my glass 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 sex, 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 passed 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 God'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!



LETTER LXVI.

Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need—for the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what unanswerable things they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily! There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it now feels and waits.

All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now: only seems, dearest, for I still say, I do say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I, who know nothing else, know that! So I look every day at one of these monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes reconciled with the pain that is there always.

Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words which I took so much for granted then have a strange force now that I look back at them. You did love: and I who did not realize it enough then, realize it now when you no longer do.

And the commentary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray: "There is no fault in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did. All that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only right thing is to say good-by without meeting. I know you will not forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I cause you. You are the most generous woman I have known. If it would comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it: but I know you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me you remain, what I always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet."

This, dearest, I say and say: and write down now lest you have forgotten it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes with me to my grave. How superstitious we are of our own bodies after death!—I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain things shall go with me to dissolution.

Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one quite quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence; yet I wish it so much—to exist again outside all this failure of my life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.

And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say—Send him these, it will be almost like living again: for surely you will love me again when you see how much I have suffered,—and suffered because I would not let thought of you go.

Could you dream, Beloved, reading this that there is bright sunlight streaming over my paper as I write?



LETTER LXVII.

Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved? I do not know in what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps without knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received? Dearest, I trust those I send reach you: I send them, wishing till I grow weak. My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to you: and I am glad of that weariness—it seems to be some virtue that has gone out of me. If all my body could go out in the effort, I think I should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at last.

I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love's cenotaph, among all my thoughts of you. It comes from a graveyard full of "little deaths." I remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was still fortunate with us. I must have been reckless in my happiness to do that!

Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my thoughts, till I had emptied myself of them, I feel that I should rest. But there is no emptying the brain by thinking. Things thought come to be thought again over and over, and more and fresh come in their train: children and grandchildren, generations of them, sprung from the old stock. I have many thoughts now, born of my love for you, that never came when we were together,—grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some of them are set down here, but others escape and will never see your face!

If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life): still, IF you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want, to know something of the life in between,—I could put these letters that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day have I been truly, that is to say willingly, out of your heart. When Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes him to see their child, which till then he had never seen—and its likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to you in all that I leave here written?

If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer glimpse of your mind, and am sure of what you would wish, I will leave word that these shall be sent to you. If not, I must suppose knowledge is still delayed, not that it will not reach you.

Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For my poor body's sake I wish Well to have its last chance of coming to pass. It is the unhappy unfulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its share of things set ghosts to walk: mists which rise out of a ground that has not worked out its fruitfulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I leave a ghost, it will take your shape, not mine, dearest: for it will be "as trees walking" that the "lovers of trees" will come back to earth. Browning did not know that. Someone else, not Browning, has worded it for us: a lover of trees far away sends his soul back to the country that has lost him, and there "the traveler, marveling why, halts on the bridge to hearken how soft the poplars sigh," not knowing that it is the lover himself who sighs in the trees all night. That is how the ghosts of real love come back into the world. The ghosts of love and the ghosts of hatred must be quite different: these bring fear, and those none. Come to me, dearest, in the blackest night, and I will not be afraid.

How strange that when one has suffered most, it is the poets (those who are supposed to sing) who best express things for us. Yet singing is the thing I feel least like. If ever a heart once woke up to find itself full of tune, it was mine; now you have drawn all the song out of it, emptied it dry: and I go to the poets to read epitaphs. I think it is their cruelty that appeals to me:—they can sing of grief! O hard hearts!

Sitting here thinking of you, my ears have suddenly become wide open to the night-sounds outside. A night-jar is making its beautiful burr in the stillness, and there are things going away and away, telling me the whereabouts of life like points on a map made for the ear. You, too, are somewhere outside, making no sound: and listening for you I heard these. It seemed as if my brain had all at once opened and caught a new sense. Are you there? This is one of those things which drop to us with no present meaning: yet I know I am not to forget it as long as I live.

Good-night! At your head, at your feet, is there any room for me to-night, Beloved?



LETTER LXVIII.

Dearest: The thought keeps troubling me how to give myself to you most, if you should ever come back for me when I am no longer here. These poor letters are all that I can leave: will they tell you enough of my heart?

Oh, into that, wish any wish that you like, and it is there already! My heart, dearest, only moves in the wish to be what you desire.

Yet I am conscious that I cannot give, unless you shall choose to take: and though I write myself down each day your willing slave, I cry my wares in a market where there is no bidder to hear me.

Dearest, though my whole life is yours, it is little you know of it. My wish would be to have every year of my life blessed by your consciousness of it. Barely a year of me is all that you have, truly, to remember: though I think five summers at least came to flower, and withered in that one.

I wish you knew my whole life: I cannot tell it: it was too full of infinitely small things. Yet what I can remember I would like to tell now: so that some day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood may here and there be warmed long after its death by your knowledge coming to it and discovering in it more than you knew before.

How I long, dearest, that what I write may look up some day and meet your eye! Beloved, then, however faded the ink may have grown, I think the spirit of my love will remain fresh in it:—I kiss you on the lips with every word. The thought of "good-by" is never to enter here: it is A reviderci for ever and ever:—"Love, love," and "meet again!"—the words we put into the thrush's song on a day you will remember, when all the world for us was a garden.

Dearest, what I can tell you of older days,—little things they must be—I will: and I know that if you ever come to value them at all, their littleness will make them doubly welcome:—just as to know that you were once called a "gallous young hound" by people whom you plagued when a boy, was to me a darling discovery: all at once I caught my childhood's imaginary comrade to my young spirit's heart and kissed him, brow and eyes.

Good-night, good-night! To-morrow I will find you some earliest memory: the dew of Hermon be on it when you come to it—if ever!

Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, or I into yours, time would grow to nothing for us; and my childhood would stay unwritten!

From far and near I gather my thoughts of you for the kiss I cannot give. Good-night, dearest.



LETTER LXIX.

Beloved: I remember my second birthday. I am quite sure of it, because my third I remember so infinitely well.—Then I was taken in to see Arthur lying in baby bridal array of lace fringes and gauze, and received in my arms held up for me by Nan-nan the awful weight and imperial importance of his small body.

I think from the first I was told of him as my "brother": cousin I have never been able to think him. But all this belongs to my third: on my second, I remember being on a floor of roses; and they told me if I would go across to a clipboard and pull it open there would be something there waiting for me. And it was on all-fours that I went all eagerness across great patches of rose-pattern, till I had butted my way through a door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of bright tinsel and flowers two little wax babes in the wood lying.

I think they gave me my first sense of color, except, perhaps, the rose-carpet which came earlier, and they remained for quite a long time the most beautiful thing I knew. It is strange that I cannot remember what became of them, for I am sure I neither broke nor lost them,—perhaps it was done for me: Arthur came afterward, the tomb of many of my early joys, and the maker of so many new ones. He, dearest, is the one, the only one, who has seen the tears that belong truly to you: and he blesses me with such wonderful patience when I speak your name, allowing that perhaps I know better than he. And after the wax babies I had him for my third birthday.



LETTER LXX.

Beloved: I think that small children see very much as animals must do: just the parts of things which have a direct influence on their lives, and no memory outside that. I remember the kindness or frowns of faces in early days far more than the faces themselves: and it is quite a distinct and later memory that I have of standing within a doorway and watching my mother pass downstairs unconscious of my being there,—and then, for the first time, studying her features and seeing in them a certain solitude and distance which I had never before noticed:—I suppose because I had never before thought of looking at her when she was not concerned with me.

It was this unobservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing those who called, except generically as callers—people who kissed me, and whom therefore I liked to see.

One, I remember, for no reason unless because she had a brown face, I mistook from a distance for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture. And it was my earliest conscious test of politeness, when I found out my mistake, not to cry over it in the kind but very inferior presence to that one I had hoped for.

I suppose, also, that many sights which have no meaning to children go, happily, quite out of memory; and that what our early years leave for us in the mind's lavender are just the tit-bits of life, or the first blows to our intelligence—things which did matter and mean much.

Corduroys come early into my life,—their color and the queer earthy smell of those which particularly concerned me: because I was picked up from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man, but remained good friends after the romance was over. I don't know when the change in my sense of beauty took place as regards him.

Anything unusual that appealed to my senses left exaggerated marks. My father once in full uniform appeared to me as a giant, so that I screamed and ran, and required much of his kindest voice to coax me back to him.

Also once in the street a dancer in fancy costume struck me in the same way, and seemed in his red tunic twice the size of the people who crowded round him.

I think as a child the small ground-flowers of spring took a larger hold upon me than any others:—I was so close to them. Roses I don't remember till I was four or five; but crocus and snowdrop seem to have been in my blood from the very beginning of things; and I remember likening the green inner petals of the snowdrop to the skirts of some ballet-dancing dolls, which danced themselves out of sight before I was four years old.

Snapdragons, too, I remember as if with my first summer: I used to feed them with bits of their own green leaves, believing faithfully that those mouths must need food of some sort. When I became more thoughtful I ceased to make cannibals of them: but I think I was less convinced then of the digestive process. I don't know when I left off feeding snapdragons: I think calceolarias helped to break me off the habit, for I found they had no throats to swallow with.

In much the same way as sights that have no meaning leave no traces, so I suppose do words and sounds. It was many years before I overheard, in the sense of taking in, a conversation by elders not meant for me: though once, in my innocence, I hid under the table during the elders' late dinner, and came out at dessert, to which we were always allowed to come down, hoping to be an amusing surprise to them. And I could not at all understand why I was scolded; for, indeed, I had heard nothing at all, though no doubt plenty that was unsuitable for a child's ears had been said, and was on the elders' minds when they upbraided me.



Dearest, such a long-ago! and all these smallest of small things I remember again, to lay them up for you: all the child-parentage of me whom you loved once, and will again if ever these come to you.

Bless my childhood, dearest: it did not know it was lonely of you, as I know of myself now! And yet I have known you, and know you still, so am the more blest.—Good-night.



LETTER LXXI.

I used to stand at the foot of the stairs a long time, when by myself, before daring to start up: and then it was always the right foot that went first. And a fearful feeling used to accompany me that I was going to meet the "evil chance" when I got to the corner. Sometimes when I felt it was there very badly, I used at the last moment to shut my eyes and walk through it: and feel, on the other side, like a pilgrim who had come through the waters of Jordan.

My eyes were always the timidest things about me: and to shut my eyes tight against the dark was the only way I had of meeting the solitude of the first hour of bed when Nan-nan had left me, and before I could get to sleep.

I have an idea that one listens better with one's eyes shut, and that this and other things are a remnant of our primitive existence when perhaps the ears of our arboreal ancestors kept a lookout while the rest of their senses slept. I think, also, that the instinct I found in myself, and have since in other children, to conceal a wound is a similar survival. At one time, I suppose, in the human herd the damaged were quickly put out of existence; and it was the self-preservation instinct which gave me so keen a wish to get into hiding when one day I cut my finger badly—something more than a mere scratch, which I would have cried over and had bandaged quite in the correct way. I remember I sat in a corner and pretended to be nursing a rag doll which I had knotted round my hand, till Nan-nan noticed, perhaps, that I looked white, and found blood flowing into my lap. And I can recall still the overcoming comfort which fell upon me as I let resolution go, and sobbed in her arms full of pity for myself and scolding the "naughty knife" that had done the deed. The rest of that day is lost to me.

Yet it is not only occasions of happiness and pain which impress themselves. When the mind takes a sudden stride in consciousness,—that, also, fixes itself. I remember the agony of shyness which came on me when strange hands did my undressing for me once in Nan-nan's absence: the first time I had felt such a thing. And another day I remember, after contemplating the head of Judas in a pictorial puzzle for a long time, that I seized a brick and pounded him with it beyond recognition:—these were the first vengeful beginnings of Christianity in me. All my history, Bible and English, came to me through picture-books. I wept tenderly over the endangered eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many kings, princes, and governors who incurred my displeasure, scratching them with pins till only a white blur remained on the paper.

All this comes to me quite seriously now: I used to laugh thinking it over. But can a single thing we do be called trivial, since out of it we grow up minute by minute into a whole being charged with capacity for gladness or suffering?

Now, as I look back, all these atoms of memory are dust and ashes that I have walked through in order to get to present things. How I suffer, how I suffer! If you could have dreamed that a human body could contain so much suffering, I think you would have chosen a less dreadful way of showing me your will: you would have given me a reason why I have to suffer so.

Dearest, I am broken off every habit I ever had, except my love of you. If you would come back to me you could shape me into whatever you wished. I will be different in all but just that one thing.



LETTER LXXII.

Here in my pain, Beloved, I remember keenly now the one or two occasions when as a small child I was consciously a cause of pain to others. What an irony of life that once of the two times when I remember to have been cruel, it was to Arthur, with his small astonished baby-face remaining a reproach to me ever after! I was hardly five then, and going up to the nursery from downstairs had my supper-cake in my hand, only a few mouthfuls left. He had been having his bath, and was sitting up on Nan-nan's knee being got into his bed clothes; when spying me with my cake he piped to have a share of it. I dare say it would not have been good for him, but of that I thought nothing at all: the cruel impulse took me to make one mouthful of all that was left. He watched it go without crying; but his eyes opened at me in a strange way, wondering at this sudden lesson of the hardness of a human heart. "All gone!" was what he said, turning his head from me up to Nan-nan, to see perhaps if she too had a like surprise for his wee intelligence. I think I have never forgiven myself that, though Arthur has no memory of it left in him: the judging remembrance of it would, I believe, win forgiveness to him for any wrong he might now do me, if that and not the contrary were his way with me: so unreasonably is my brain scarred where the thought of it still lies. God may forgive us our trespasses by marvelous slow ways; but we cannot always forgive them ourselves.

The other thing came out of a less personal greed, and was years later: Arthur and I were collecting eggs, and in the loft over one of the out-houses there was a swallow's nest too high up to be reached by any ladder we could get up there. I was intent on getting the eggs, and thought of no other thing that might chance: so I spread a soft fall below, and with a long pole I broke the floor of the nest. Then with a sudden stir of horror I saw soft things falling along with the clay, tiny and feathery. Two were killed by the breakage that fell with them, but one was quite alive and unhurt. I gathered up the remnants of the nest and set it with the young one in it by the loft window where the parent-birds might see, making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my conscience. The parent-birds did see, soon enough: they returned, first up to the rafters, then darting round and round and crying; then to where their little one lay helpless and exposed, hung over it with a nibbling movement of their beaks for a moment, making my miserable heart bound up with hope: then away, away, shrieking into the July sunshine. Once they came back, and shrieked at the horror of it all, and fled away not to return.

I remained for hours and did whatever silly pity could dictate: but of course the young one died: and I—cleared away all remains that nobody might see! And that I gave up egg-collecting after that was no penance, but choice. Since then the poignancy of my regret when I think of it has never softened. The question which pride of life and love of make-believe till then had not raised in me, "Am I a god to kill and to make alive?" was answered all at once by an emphatic "No," which I never afterward forgot. But the grief remained all the same, that life, to teach me that blunt truth, should have had to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of three frail lives on a clay-altar, and bring to nothing but pain and a last miserable dart away into the bright sunshine the spring work of two swift-winged intelligences. Is man, we are told to think, not worth many sparrows? Oh, Beloved, sometimes I doubt it! and would in thought give my life that those swallows in their generations might live again.

Beloved, I am letting what I have tried to tell you of my childhood end in a sad way. For it is no use, no use: I have not to-day a glimmer of hope left that your eyes will ever rest on what I have been at such deep trouble to write.

If I were being punished for these two childish things I did, I should see a side of justice in it all. But it is for loving you I am being punished: and not God himself shall make me let you go! Beloved, Beloved, all my days are at your feet, and among them days when you held me to your heart. Good-night; good-night always now!



LETTER LXXIII.

Dearest: I could never have made any appeal from you to anybody: all my appeal has been to you alone. I have wished to hear reason from no other lips but yours; and had you but really and deeply confided in me, I believe I could have submitted almost with a light heart to what you thought best:—though in no way and by no stretch of the imagination can I see you coming to me for the last time and saying, as you only wrote, that it was best we should never see each other again.

You could not have said that with any sound of truth; and how can it look truer frozen into writing? I have kissed the words, because you wrote them; not believing them. It is a suspense of unbelief that you have left me in, oh, still dearest! Yet never was sad heart truer to the fountain of all its joy than mine to yours. You had only to see me to know that.

Some day, I dream, we shall come suddenly together, and you will see, before a word, before I have time to gather my mind back to the bodily comfort of your presence, a face filled with thoughts of you that have never left it, and never been bitter:—I believe never once bitter. For even when I think, and convince myself that you have wronged yourself—and so, me also,—even then: oh, then most of all, my heart seems to break with tenderness, and my spirit grow more famished than ever for the want of you! For if you have done right, wisely, then you have no longer any need of me: but if you have done wrong, then you must need me. Oh, dear heart, let that need overwhelm you like a sea, and bring you toward me on its strong tide! And come when you will I shall be waiting.



LETTER LXXIV.

Dearest and Dearest: So long as you are still this to my heart I trust to have strength to write it; though it is but a ghost of old happiness that comes to me in the act. I have no hope now left in me: but I love you not less, only more, if that be possible: or is it the same love with just a weaker body to contain it all? I find that to have definitely laid off all hope gives me a certain relief: for now that I am so hopeless it becomes less hard not to misjudge you—not to say and think impatiently about you things which would explain why I had to die like this.

Dearest, nothing but love shall explain anything of you to me. When I think of your dear face, it is only love that can give it its meaning. If love would teach me the meaning of this silence, I would accept all the rest, and not ask for any joy in life besides. For if I had the meaning, however dark, it would be by love speaking to me again at last; and I should have your hand holding mine in the darkness forever.

Your face, Beloved, I can remember so well that it would be enough if I had your hand:—the meaning, just the meaning, why I have to sit blind.



LETTER LXXV.

Dearest: There is always one possibility which I try to remember in all I write: even where there is no hope a thing remains possible:—that your eye may some day come to rest upon what I leave here. And I would have nothing so dark as to make it seem that I were better dead than to have come to such a pass through loving you. If I felt that, dearest, I should not be writing my heart out to you, as I do: when I cease doing that I shall indeed have become dead and not want you any more, I suppose. How far I am from dying, then, now!

So be quite sure that if now, even now,—for to-day of all days has seemed most dark—if now I were given my choice—to have known you or not to have known you,—Beloved, a thousand times I would claim to keep what I have, rather than have it taken away from me. I cannot forget that for a few months I was the happiest woman I ever knew: and that happiness is perhaps only by present conditions removed from me. If I have a soul, I believe good will come back to it: because I have done nothing to deserve this darkness unless by loving you: and if by loving you, I am glad that the darkness came.

Beloved, you have the yes and no to all this: I have not, and cannot have. Something that you have not chosen for me to know, you know: it should be a burden on your conscience, surely, not to have shared it with me. Maybe there is something I know that you do not. In the way of sorrow, I think and wish—yes. In the way of love, I wish to think—no.

Any more thinking wearies me. Perhaps we have loved too much, and have lost our way out of our poor five senses, without having strength to take over the new world which is waiting beyond them. Well, I would rather, Beloved, suffer through loving too much, than through loving too little. It is a good fault as faults go. And it is my fault, Beloved: so some day you may have to be tender to it.



LETTER LXXVI.

Dearest: I feel constantly that we are together still: I cannot explain. When I am most miserable, even so that I feel a longing to fly out of reach of the dear household voices which say shy things to keep me cheerful,—I feel that I have you in here waiting for me. Heart's heart, in my darkest, it is you who speak to me!

As I write I have my cheek pressed against yours. None of it is true: not a word, not a day that has separated us! I am yours: it is only the poor five senses part of us that spells absence. Some day, some day you will answer this letter which has to stay locked in my desk. Some day, I mean, an answer will reach me:—without your reading this, your answer will come. Is not your heart at this moment answering me?

Dearest, I trust you: I could not have dreamed you to myself, therefore you must be true, quite independently of me. You as I saw you once with open eyes remain so forever. You cannot make yourself, Beloved, not to be what you are: you have called my soul to life if for no other reason than to bear witness of you, come what may. No length of silence can make a truth once sounded ever cease to be: borne away out of our hearing it makes its way to the stars: dispersed or removed it cannot be lost. I too, for truth's sake, may have to be dispersed out of my present self which shuts me from you: but I shall find you some day,—you who made me, you who every day make me! A part of you cut off, I suffer pain because I am still part of you. If I had no part in you I should suffer nothing. But I do, I do. One is told how, when a man has lost a limb, he still feels it,—not the pleasure of it but the pain. Dearest, are you aware of me now?

Because I am suffering, you shall not think I am entirely miserable. But here and now I am all unfinished ends. Desperately I need faith at times to tell me that each shoot of pain has a point at which it assuages itself and becomes healing: that pain is not endurance wasted; but that I and my weary body have a goal which will give a meaning to all this, somehow, somewhere: never, I begin to fear, here, while this body has charge of me.

Dearest, I lay my heart down on yours and cry: and having worn myself out with it and ended, I kiss your lips and bless God that I have known you.

I have not said—I never could say it—"Let the day perish wherein Love was born!" I forget nothing of you: you are clear to me,—all but one thing: why we have become as we are now, one whole, parted and sent different ways. And yet so near! On my most sleepless nights my pillow is yours: I wet your face with my tears and cry, "Sleep well."

To-night also, Beloved, sleep well! Night and morning I make you my prayer.



LETTER LXXVII.

My own one beloved, my dearest dear! Want me, please want me! I will keep alive for you. Say you wish me to live,—not come to you: don't say that if you can't—but just wish me to live, and I will. Yes, I will do anything, even live, if you tell me to do it. I will be stronger than all the world or fate, if you have any wish about me at all. Wish well, dearest, and surely the knowledge will come to me. Wish big things of me, or little things: wish me to sleep, and I will sleep better because of it. Wish anything of me: only not that I should love you better. I can't, dearest, I can't. Any more of that, and love would go out of my body and leave it clay. If you would even wish that, I would be happy at finding a way to do your will below ground more perfectly than any I found on it. Wish, wish: only wish something for me to do. Oh, I could rest if I had but your little finger to love. The tyranny of love is when it makes no bidding at all. That you have no want or wish left in you as regards me is my continual despair. My own, my beloved, my tormentor and comforter, my ever dearest dear, whom I love so much!



LETTER LXXVIII.

To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is too much for me. Come to me somehow, dear ghost of all my happiness, and take me in your arms! I ache and ache, not to belong to you. I do: I must. It is only our senses that divide us; and mine are all famished servants waiting for their master. They have nothing to do but watch for you, and pretend that they believe you will come. Oh, it is grievous!

Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses? They go out of me in sharp stabs of pain: they must go somewhere for me to be delivered of them only with so much suffering. Oh, how this should make me hate you, if that were possible: how, instead, I love you more and more, and shall, dearest, and will till I die!

I will die, because in no other way can I express how much I love you. I am possessed by all the despairing words about lost happiness that the poets have written. They go through me like ghosts: I am haunted by them: but they are bloodless things. It seems when I listen to all the other desolate voices that have ever cried, that I alone have blood in me. Nobody ever loved as I love since the world began.

There, dearest, take this, all this bitter wine of me poured out until I feel in myself only the dregs left: and still in them is the fire and the suffering.

No: but I will be better: it is better to have known you than not. Give me time, dearest, to get you to heart again! I cannot leave you like this: not with such words as these for "good-night!"

Oh, dear face, dear unforgettable lost face, my soul strains up to look for you through the blind eyes that have been left to torment me because they can never behold you. Very often I have seen you looking grieved, shutting away some sorrow in yourself quietly: but never once angry or impatient at any of the small follies of men. Come, then, and look at me patiently now! I am your blind girl: I must cry out because I cannot see you. Only make me believe that you yet think of me as, when you so unbelievably separated us, you said you had always found me—"the dearest and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet." Beloved, if in your heart I am still that, separation does not matter. I can wait, I can wait.

I kiss your feet: even to-morrow may bring the light. God bless you! I pray it more than ever; because to me to-night has been so very dark.



LETTER LXXIX.

Dearest: I have not written to you for three weeks. At last I am better again. You seem to have been waiting for me here: always wondering when I would come back. I do come back, you see.

Dear heart, how are you? I kiss your feet; you are my one only happiness, my great one. Words are too cold and cruel to write anything for me. Picture me: I am too weak to write more, but I have written this, and am so much better for it.

Reward me some day by reading what is here. I kiss, because of you, this paper which I am too tired to fill any more.

Love, nothing but love! Into every one of these dead words my heart has been beating, trying to lay down its life and reach to you.



LETTER LXXX.

A secret, dearest, that will be no secret soon: before I am done with twenty-three I shall have passed my age. Beloved, it hurts me more than I can say that the news of it should come to you from anyone but me: for this, though I write it, is already a dead letter, lost like a predestined soul even in the pains that gave it birth. Yes, it does pain me, frightens me even, that I must die all by myself, and feeling still so young. I thought I should look forward to it, but I do not; no, no, I would give much to put it off for a time, until I could know what it will mean for me as regards you. Oh, if you only knew and cared, what wild comfort I might have in the knowledge! It seems strange that if I were going away from the chance of a perfect life with you I should feel it with less pain than I feel this. The dust and the ashes of life are all that I have to let fall: and it is bitterness itself to part with them.

How we grow to love sorrow! Joy is never so much a possession—it goes over us, incloses us like air or sunlight; but sorrow goes into us and becomes part of our flesh and bone. So that I, holding up my hand to the sunshine, see sorrow red and transparent like stained glass between me and the light of day, sorrow that has become inseparably mine, and is the very life I am wishing to keep!

Dearest, will the world be more bearable to you when I am out of it? It is selfish of me not to wish so, since I can satisfy you in this so soon! Every day I will try to make it my wish: or wish that it may be so when the event comes—not a day before. Till then let it be more bearable that I am still alive: grant me, dearest, that one little grace while I live!

Bearable! My sorrow is bearable, I suppose, because I do bear it from day to day: otherwise I would declare it not to be. Don't suffer as I do, dearest, unless that will comfort you.

One thing is strange, but I feel quite certain of it: when I heard that I carried death about in me, scarcely an arm's-length away, I thought quickly to myself that it was not the solution of the mystery. Others might have thought that it was: that because I was to die so soon, therefore I was not fit to be your wife. But I know it was not that. I know that whatever hopes death in me put an end to, you would have married me and loved me patiently till I released you, as I am to so soon.

It is always this same woe that crops up: nothing I can ever think can account for what has been decreed. That too is a secret: mine comes to meet it. When it arrives shall I know?

And not a word, not a word of this can reach you ever! Its uses are wrung out and drained dry to comfort me in my eternal solitude.

Good-night; very soon it will have to be good-by.



LETTER LXXXI.

Beloved: I woke last night and believed I had your arms round me, and that all storms had gone over me forever. The peace of your love had inclosed me so tremendously that when I was fully awake I began to think that what I held was you dead, and that our reconciliation had come at that great cost.

Something remains real of it all, even now under the full light of day: yet I know you are not dead. Only it leaves me with a hope that at the lesser cost of my own death, when it comes, happiness may break in, and that whichever of us has been the most in poor and needy ignorance will know the truth at last—the truth which is an inseparable need for all hearts that love rightly.

Even now to me the thought of you is a peace passing 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 LXXXII.

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, wishing 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! God brings you to me in my first dream: but the longing so keeps me awake that sometimes I am a whole night sleepless.



LETTER LXXXIII.

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! God be with you wherever you go and I do not!



LETTER LXXXIV.

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 LXXXV.

Good-morning, Beloved; there is sun shining. 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 LXXXVI.

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 God 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.

* * * * *

[Transcriber's Notes:

—Though this book was published anonymously, it was later revealed to be by Laurence Housman.

—In Letter XLIII "roughtly" was corrected to "roughly"

—In Letter XXXVI "sort" was corrected to "short"

—In Letter LXX, "elder's" was corrected to "elders'"

—In Letter LXXVIII "unforgetable" was corrected to "unforgettable"]

THE END