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Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER LXXIII.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXXIV.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXXV.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXXVI.</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXXVII.</h2> 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! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXXVIII.</h2> 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 unforgetable 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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