Back Aa

Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER XV.</h2> You told me, dearest, that I should find your mother formidable. It is true; I did. She is a person very much in the grand pagan style: I admire it, but I cannot flow in that sort of company, and I think she meant to crush me. You were very wise to leave her to come alone. I like her: I mean I believe that under that terribleness she has a heart of gold, which once opened would never shut: but she has not opened it to me. I believe she could have a great charity, that no evil-doing would dismay her: "stanch" sums her up. But I have done nothing wrong enough yet to bring me into her good graces. Loving her son, even, though, I fear, a great offense, has done me no good turn. Perhaps that is her inconsistency: women are sure to be inconsistent somewhere: it is their birthright. I began to study her at once, to find you: it did not take long. How I could love her, if she would let me! You know her far far better than I, and want no advice: otherwise I would say—never praise me to her; quote my follies rather! To give ground for her distaste to revel in will not deepen me in her bad books so much as attempts to warp her judgment. I need not go through it all: she will have told you all that is to the purpose about our meeting. She bristled in, a brave old fighting figure, announcing compulsion in every line, but with all her colors flying. She waited for the door to close, then said, "My son has bidden me come, I suppose it is my duty: he is his own master now." We only shook hands. Our talk was very little of you. I showed her all the horses, the dogs, and the poultry; she let the inspection appear to conclude with myself: asked me my habits, and said I looked healthy. I owned I felt it. "Looks and feelings are the most deceptive things in the world," she told me; adding that "poor stock" got more than its share of these. And when she said it I saw quite plainly that she meant me. I wonder where she gets the notion: for we are a long-lived race, both sides of the family. I guessed that she would like frankness, and was as frank as I could be, pretending no deference to her objections. "You think you suit each other?" she asked me. My answer, "He suits me!" pleased her maternal palate, I think. "Any girl might say that!" she admitted. (She might indeed!) This is the part of our interview she will not have repeated to you. I was due at Hillyn when she was preparing to go: Aunt N—— came in, and I left her to do the honors while I slipped on my habit. I rode by your mother's carriage as far as the Greenway, where we branched. I suppose that is what her phrase means that you quote about my "making a trophy of her," and marching her a prisoner across the borders before all the world! I do like her: she is worth winning.—Can one say warmer of a future mother-in-law who stands hostile? All the same it was an ordeal. I believe I have wept since: for Benjy scratched my door often yesterday evening, and looked most wistful when I came out. Merely paltry self-love, dearest:—I am so little accustomed to not being—liked. I think she will be more gracious in her own house. I have her formal word that I am to come. Soon, not too soon, I will come over; and you shall meet me and take me to see her. There is something in her opposition that I can't fathom: I wondered twice was lunacy her notion: she looked at me so hard. My mother's seclusion and living apart from us was not on that account. I often saw her: she was very dear and sweet to me, and had quiet eyes the very reverse of a person mentally deranged. My father, I know, went to visit her when she lay dying; and I remember we all wore mourning. My uncle has told me they had a deep regard for each other: but disagreed, and were independent enough to choose living apart. I do not remember my father ever speaking of her to us as children: but I am sure there was no state of health to be concealed. Last night I was talking to Aunt N—— about her. "A very dear woman," she told me, "but your father was never so much alive to her worth as the rest of us." Of him she said, "A dear, fine fellow: but not at all easy to get on with." Him, of course, I have a continuous recollection of, and "a fine fellow" we did think him. My mother comes to me more rarely, at intervals. Don't talk me down your mother's throat: but tell her as much as she cares to know of this. I am very proud of my "stock" which she thinks "poor"! Dear, how much I have written on things which can never concern us finally, and so should not ruffle us while they last! Hold me in your heart always, always; and the world may turn adamant to me for aught I care! Be in my dreams to-night! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XVI.</h2> But, Dearest: When I think of you I never question whether what I think would be true or false in the eyes of others. All that concerns you seems to go on a different plane where evidence has no meaning or existence: where nobody exists or means anything, but only we two alone, engaged in bringing about for ourselves the still greater solitude of two into one. Oh, Beloved, what a company that will be! Take me in your arms, fasten me to your heart, breathe on me. Deny me either breath or the light of day: I am yours equally, to live or die at your word. I shut my eyes to feel your kisses falling on me like rain, or still more like sunshine,—yet most of all like kisses, my own dearest and best beloved! Oh, we two! how wonderful we seem! And to think that there have been lovers like us since the world began: and the world not able to tell us one little word of it:—not well, so as to be believed—or only along with sadness where Fate has broken up the heavens which lay over some pair of lovers. &OElig;none's cry, "Ah me, my mountain shepherd," tells us of the joy when it has vanished, and most of all I get it in that song of wife and husband which ends:— <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Not a word for you, Not a lock or kiss, Good-by. We, one, must part in two; Verily death is this: I must die." </div> </div> It was a woman wrote that: and we get love there! Is it only when joy is past that we can give it its full expression? Even now, Beloved, I break down in trying to say how I love you. I cannot put all my joy into my words, nor all my love into my lips, nor all my life into your arms, whatever way I try. Something remains that I cannot express. Believe, dearest, that the half has not yet been spoken, neither of my love for you, nor of my trust in you,—nor of a wish that seems sad, but comes in a very tumult of happiness—the wish to die so that some unknown good may come to you out of me. Not till you die, dearest, shall I die truly! I love you now too much for your heart not to carry me to its grave, though I should die now, and you live to be a hundred. I pray you may! I cannot choose a day for you to die. I am too grateful to life which has given me to you to say—if I were dying—"Come with me, dearest!" Though, how the words tempt me as I write them!—Come with me, dearest: yes, come! Ah, but you kiss me more, I think, when we say good-by than when meeting; so you will kiss me most of all when I have to die:—a thing in death to look forward to! And, till then,—life, life, till I am out of my depth in happiness and drown in your arms! Beloved, that I can write so to you,—think what it means; what you have made me come through in the way of love, that this, which I could not have dreamed before, comes from me with the thought of you! You told me to be still—to let you "worship": I was to write back acceptance of all your dear words. Are you never to be at my feet, you ask. Indeed, dearest, I do not know how, for I cannot move from where I am! Do you feel where my thoughts kiss you? You would be vexed with me if I wrote it down, so I do not. And after all, some day, under a bright star of Providence, I may have gifts for you after my own mind which will allow me to grow proud. Only now all the giving comes from you. It is I who am enriched by your love, beyond knowledge of my former self. Are you changed, dearest, by anything I have done? My heart goes to you like a tree in the wind, and all these thoughts are loose leaves that fly after you when I have to remain behind. Dear lover, what short visits yours seem! and the Mother-Aunt tells me they are most unconscionably long.—You will not pay any attention to that, please: forever let the heavens fall rather than that a hint to such foul effect should grow operative through me! This brings you me so far as it can:—such little words off so great a body of—"liking" shall I call it? My paper stops me: it is my last sheet: I should have to go down to the library to get more—else I think I could not cease writing. More love than I can name.—Ever, dearest, your own. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XVII.</h2> Dearest: Do I not write you long letters? It reveals my weakness. I have thought (it had been coming on me, and now and then had broken out of me before I met you) that, left to myself, I should have become a writer of books—I scarcely can guess what sort—and gone contentedly into middle-age with that instead of this as my raison d'être. How gladly I lay down that part of myself, and say—"But for you, I had been this quite other person, whom I have no wish to be now"! Beloved, your heart is the shelf where I put all my uncut volumes, wondering a little what sort of a writer I should have made; and chiefly wondering, would you have liked me in that character? There is one here in the family who considers me a writer of the darkest dye, and does not approve of it. Benjy comes and sits most mournfully facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write: and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of—"What has come between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat's-claw scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me through damp places?" Having written this sentimental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and took him to see his mother's grave. At the bottom of the long walk is our dog's cemetery:—no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy as a child to have it planted: and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it knew that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping. Benjy, too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there, as he does in other places. What horror, were I to find him digging up his mother's skeleton! Would my esteem for him survive? When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking what I had brought him there for. I pointed out to him the precise mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered you these buds. Are they not a deep color for wild ones?—if their blush remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you. Through what flower would you best like to be passed back, as regards your material atoms, into the spiritualized side of nature, when we have done with ourselves in this life? No single flower quite covers all my wants and aspirations. You and I would put our heads together underground and evolve a new flower—"carnation, lily, lily, rose"—and send it up one fine morning for scientists to dispute over and give diabolical learned names to. What an end to our cozy floral collaboration that would be! Here endeth the epistle: the elect salutes you. This week, if the authorities permit, I shall be paying you a flying visit, with wings full of eyes,—and, I hope, healing; for I believe you are seedy, and that that is what is behind it. You notice I have not complained. Dearest, how could I! My happiness reaches to the clouds—that is, to where things are not quite clear at present. I love you no more than I ought: yet far more than I can name. Good-night and good-morning.—Your star, since you call me so. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XVIII.</h2> Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to tell you what I do all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my telling you what I think? Yet you get more of me this way than that. What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always different. However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain, here I start telling you. I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the blinds: wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;—discover new beauties in it, and run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself,—find them; Benjy comes up with the post's latest, and behold, my day is begun! Is that the sort of thing you want to know? My days are without an action worth naming: I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of them: if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink race to tell you. No, it is man who does things; a woman only diddles (to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good, fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living: and that is not me! I feel sometimes as if a real bar were between me and a whole conception of life; because I have carpets and curtains, and Nan-nan, and Benjy, and last of all you—shutting me out from the realities of existence. If you would all leave me just for one full moon, and come back to me only when I am starving for you all—for my tea to be brought to me in the morning, and all the paddings and cushionings which bolster me up from morning till night—with what a sigh of wisdom I would drop back into your arms, and would let you draw the rose-colored curtains round me again! Now I am afraid lest I have become too happy: I am leaning so far out of window to welcome the dawn, I seem to be tempting a fall—heaven itself to fall upon me. What do I know truly, who only know so much happiness? Dearest, if there is anything else in love which I do not know, teach it me quickly: I am utterly yours. If there is sorrow to give, give it me! Only let me have with it the consciousness of your love. Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think of you so much. What would life have without you in it? The sun would drop from my heavens. I see only by you! you have kissed me on the eyes. You are more to me than my own poor brain could ever have devised: had I started to invent Paradise, I could not have invented you. But perhaps you have invented me: I am something new to myself since I saw you first. God bless you for it! Even if you were to shut your eyes at me now—though I might go blind, you could not unmake me:—"The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts." Also that I am yours is a gift of the gods, I will trust: and so, not to be recalled! Kiss me, dearest; here where I have written this! I am yours, Beloved. I kiss you again and again.—Ever your own making. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.