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Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER LXV.</h2> 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! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXVI.</h2> 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? <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXVII.</h2> 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? <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXVIII.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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