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Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER X.</h2> Dearest: Did you find your letter? The quicker I post, the quicker I need to sit down and write again. The grass under love's feet never stops growing: I must make hay of it while the sun shines. You say my metaphors make you giddy.—My clear, you, without a metaphor in your composition, do that to me! So it is not for you to complain; your curses simply fly back to roost. Where do you pigeon-hole them? In a pie? (I mean to write now until I have made you as giddy as a dancing dervish!) Your letters are much more like blackbirds: and I have a pie of them here, twenty-four at least; and when I open it they sing "Chewee, chewee, chewee!" in the most scared way! Your last but three said most solemnly, just as if you meant it, "I hope you don't keep these miserables! Though I fill up my hollow hours with them, there is no reason why they should fill up yours." You added that I was better occupied—and here I am "better occupied" even as you bid me. But one can jump best from a spring-board: and how could I jump as far as your arms by letter, if I had not yours to jump from? So you see they are kept, and my disobedience of you has begun: and I find disobedience wonderfully sweet. But then, you gave me a law which you knew I should disobey:—that is the way the world began. It is not for nothing that I am a daughter of Eve. And here is our world in our hands, yours and mine, now in the making. Which day are the evening and the morning now? I think it must be the birds'—and already, with the wings, disobedience has been reached! Make much of it! the day will come when I shall wish to obey. There are moments when I feel a wish taking hold of me stronger than I can understand, that you should command me beyond myself—to things I have not strength or courage for of my own accord. How close, dearest, when that day comes, my heart will feel itself to yours! It feels close now: but it is to your feet I am nearest, as yet. Lift me! There, there, Beloved, I kiss you with all my will. Oh, dear heart, forgive me for being no more than I am: your freehold to all eternity! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XI</h2> Oh, Dearest: I have danced and I have danced till I am tired! I am dropping with sleep, but I must just touch you and say good-night. This was our great day of publishing, dearest, ours: all the world knows it; and all admire your choice! I was determined they should. I have been collecting scalps for you to hang at your girdle. All thought me beautiful: people who never did so before. I wanted to say to them, "Am I not beautiful? I am, am I not?" And it was not for myself I was asking this praise. Beloved, I was wearing the magic rose—what you gave me when we parted: you saying, alas, that you were not to be there. But you were! Its leaves have not dropped nor the scent of it faded. I kiss you out of the heart of it. Good-night: come to me in my first dream! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XII.</h2> Dearest: It has been such a funny day from post-time onwards:—congratulations on the great event are beginning to arrive in envelopes and on wheels. Some are very kind and dear; and some are not so—only the ordinary seemliness of polite sniffle-snaffle. Just after you had gone yesterday, Mrs. —— called and was told the news. Of course she knew of you: but didn't think she had ever seen you. "Probably he passed you at the gates," I said. "What?" she went off with a view-hallo; "that well-dressed sort of young fellow in gray, and a mustache, and knowing how to ride? Met us in the lane. Well, my dear, I do congratulate you!" And whether it was by the gray suit, or the mustache, or the knowing how to ride that her congratulations were so emphatically secured, I know not! Others are yet more quaint, and more to my liking. Nan-nan is Nan-nan: I cannot let you off what she said! No tears or sentiment came from her to prevent me laughing: she brisked like an old war-horse at the first word of it, and blessed God that it had come betimes, that she might be a nurse again in her old age! She is a true "Mrs. Berry," and is ready to make room for you in my affections for the sake of far-off divine events, which promise renewed youth to her old bones. Roberts, when he brought me my pony this morning, touched his hat quick twice over to show that the news brimmed in his body: and a very nice cordial way of showing, I thought it! He was quite ready to talk when I let him go; and he gave me plenty of good fun. He used to know you when he was in service at the H——s, and speaks of you as being then "a gallous young hound," whatever that may mean. I imagine "gallous" to be a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up in equal parts of callousness and gallantry, which most boys are, at some stage of their existence. What tales will you be getting of me out of Nan-nan, some day behind my back, I wonder? There is one I shall forbid her to reveal: it shall be part of my marriage-portion to show you early that you have got a wife with a temper! Here is a whole letter that must end now,—and the great Word never mentioned! It is good for you to be put upon maigre fare, for once. I hold my pen back with both hands: it wants so much to give you the forbidden treat. Oh, the serpent in the garden! See where it has underlined its meaning. Frailty, thy pen is a J pen! Adieu, adieu, remember me. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XIII.</h2> The letters? No, Beloved, I could not! Not yet. There you have caught me where I own I am still shy of you. A long time hence, when we are a safely wedded pair, you shall turn them over. It may be a short time; but I will keep them however long. Indeed I must ever keep them; they talk to me of the dawn of my existence,—the early light before our sun rose, when my love of you was growing and had not yet reached its full. If I disappoint you I will try to make up for it with something I wrote long before I ever saw you. To-day I was turning over old things my mother had treasured for me of my childhood—of days spent with her: things of laughter as well as of tears; such a dear selection, so quaint and sweet, with moods of her as I dimly remember her to have been. And among them was this absurdity, written, and I suppose placed in the mouth of my stocking, the Christmas I stayed with her in France. I remember the time as a great treat, but nothing of this. "Nilgoes" is "Nicholas," you must understand! How he must have laughed over me asleep while he read this! <div class="blockquot">"Cher père Nilgoes. S'il vous plait voulez vous me donné plus de jeux que des oranges des pommes et des pombons parc que nous allons faire l'arbre de noel cette anné et les jeaux ferait mieux pour l'arbre de Noel. Il ne faut pas dire à petite mere s'il vous plait parce que je ne veut pas quelle sache sil vous voulez venir ce soir du ceil pour que vous pouvez me donner ce que je vous demande Dites bon jour á la St. Viearge est à l'enfant Jeuses et à Ste Joseph. Adieu cher St. Nilgoes." </div> I haven't altered the spelling, I love it too well, prophetic of a fault I still carry about me. How strange that little bit of invocation to the dear folk above sounds to me now! My mother must have been teaching me things after her own persuasion; most naturally, poor dear one—though that too has gone like water off my mind. It was one of the troubles between her and my father: the compact that I was to be brought up a Catholic was dissolved after they separated; and I am sorry, thinking it unjust to her; yet glad, content with being what I am. I must have been less than five when I penned this: I was always a letter-writer, it seems. It is a reproach now from many that I have ceased to be: and to them I fear it is true. That I have not truly ceased, "witness under my hand these presents,"—or whatever may be the proper legal terms for an affidavit. What were you like, Beloved, as a very small child? Should I have loved you from the beginning had we toddled to the rencounter; and would my love have passed safely through the "gallous young hound" period; and could I love you more now in any case, had I all your days treasured up in my heart, instead of less than a year of them? How strangely much have seven miles kept our fates apart! It seems uncharacteristic for this small world,—where meetings come about so far above the dreams of average—to have played us such a prank. This must do for this once, Beloved; for behold me busy to-day: with what, I shall not tell you. I would like to put you to a test, as ladies did their knights of old, and hardly ever do now—fearing, I suppose, lest the species should altogether fail them at the pinch. I would like to see if you could come here and sit with me from beginning to end, with your eyes shut: never once opening them. I am not saying whether I think curiosity, or affection, would make the attempt too difficult. But if you were sure you could, you might come here to-morrow—a day otherwise interdicted. Only know, having come, that if you open those dear cupboards of vision and set eyes on things not yet intended to be looked at, there will be confusion of tongues in this Tower we are building whose top is to reach heaven. Will you come? I don't say "come"; I only want to know—will you? To-day my love flies low over the earth like a swallow before rain, and touching the tops of the flowers has culled you these. Kiss them until they open: they are full of my thoughts, as the world, to me, is full of you. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XIV.</h2> Own Dearest: Come I did not think that you would, or mean that you should seriously; for is it not a poor way of love to make the object of it cut an absurd or partly absurd figure? I wrote only as a woman having a secret on the tip of her tongue and the tips of her fingers, and full of a longing to say it and send it. Here it is at last: love me for it, I have worked so hard to get it done! And you do not know why and what for? Beloved, it—this—is the anniversary of the day we first met; and you have forgotten it already or never remembered it:—and yet have been clamoring for "the letters"! On the first anniversary of our marriage, if you remember it, you shall have those same letters: and not otherwise. So there they lie safe till doomsday! The M.-A. has been very gracious and clear after her little outbreak of yesterday: her repentances, after I have hurt her feelings, are so gentle and sweet, they always fill me with compunction. Finding that I would go on with the thing I was doing, she volunteered to come and read to me: a requiem over the bone of contention which we had gnawed between us. Was not that pretty and charitable? She read Tennyson's Life for a solid hour, and continued it to-day. Isn't it funny that she should take up such a book?—she who "can't abide" Tennyson or Browning or Shakespeare: only likes Byron, I suppose because it was the right and fashionable liking when she was young. Yet she is plodding through the Life religiously—only skipping the verses. I have come across two little specimens of "Death and the child" in it. His son, Lionel, was carried out in a blanket one night in the great comet year, and waking up under the stars asked, "Am I dead?" Number two is of a little girl at Wellington's funeral who saw his charger carrying his boots, and asked, "Shall I be like that after I die?" A queer old lady came to lunch yesterday, a great traveler, though lame on two crutches. We carefully hid all guide-books and maps, and held our peace about next month, lest she should insist on coming too: though I think Nineveh was the place she was most anxious to go to, if the M.-A. would consent to accompany her! Good-by, dearest of one-year-old acquaintances! you, too, send your blessing on the anniversary, now that my better memory has reminded you of it! All that follow we will bless in company. I trust you are one-half as happy as I am, my own, my own. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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