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Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER LV.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LVI.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LVII.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LVIII.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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