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Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER XLIV.</h2> Dearest: I have been doing something so wise and foolish: mentally wise, I mean, and physically foolish. Do you guess?—Disobeying your parting injunction, and sitting up to see eclipses. It was such a luxury to do as I was not told just for once; to feel there was an independent me still capable of asserting itself. My belief is that, waking, you hold me subjugated: but, once your godhead has put on its spiritual nightcap, and begun nodding, your mesmeric influence relaxes. Up starts resolution and independence, and I breathe desolately for a time, feeling myself once more a free woman. 'Twas a tremulous experience, Beloved; but I loved it all the more for that. How we love playing at grief and death—the two things that must come—before it is their due time! I took a look at my world for three most mortal hours last night, trying to see you out of it. And oh, how close it kept bringing me! I almost heard you breathe, and was forever wondering—Can we ever be nearer, or love each other more than we do? For that we should each want a sixth sense, and a second soul: and it would still be only the same spread out over larger territory. I prefer to keep it nesting close in its present limitations, where it feels like a "growing pain"; children have it in their legs, we in our hearts. I am growing sleepy as I write, and feel I am sending you a dull letter,—my penalty for doing as you forbade. I sat up from half-past one to a quarter to five to see our shadow go over heaven. I didn't see much, the sky was too piebald: but I was not disappointed, as I had never watched the darkness into dawn like that before: and it was interesting to hear all the persons awaking:—cocks at half-past four, frogs immediately after, then pheasants and various others following. I was cuddled close up against my window, throned in a big arm-chair with many pillows, a spirit-lamp, cocoa, bread and butter, and buns; so I fared well. Just after the pheasants and the first querulous fidgetings of hungry blackbirds comes a soft pattering along the path below: and Benjy, secretive and important, is fussing his way to the shrubbery, when instinct or real sentiment prompts him to look up at my window; he gives a whimper and a wag, and goes on. I try to persuade myself that he didn't see me, and that he does this, other mornings, when I am not thus perversely bolstered up in rebellion, and peering through blinds at wrong hours. Isn't there something pathetic in the very idea that a dog may have a behind-your-back attachment of that sort?—that every morning he looks up at an unresponsive blank, and wags, and goes by? I heard him very happy in the shrubs a moment after: he and a pheasant, I fancy, disputing over a question of boundaries. And he comes in for breakfast, three hours later, looking positively fresh, and wants to know why I am yawning. Most mornings he brings your letter up to my room in his mouth. It is old Nan-nan's joke: she only sends up yours so, and pretends it is Benjy's own clever selection. I pretend that, too, to him; and he thinks he is doing something wonderful. The other morning I was—well, Benjy hears splashing: and tires of waiting—or his mouth waters. An extra can of hot water happens to stand at the door; and therein he deposits his treasure (mine, I mean), and retires saying nothing. The consequence is, when I open three minutes after his scratch, I find you all ungummed and swimming, your beautiful handwriting bleared and smeared, so that no eye but mine could have read it. Benjy's shame when I showed him what he had done was wonderful. How it rejoices me to write quite foolish things to you!—that I can helps to explain a great deal in the up-above order of things, which I never took in when I was merely young and frivolous. One must have touched a grave side of life before one can take in that Heaven is not opposed to laughter. My eye has just caught back at what I have written; and the "little death" runs through me, just because I wrote "grave side." It shouldn't, but loving has made me superstitious: the happiness seems too great; how can it go on? I keep thinking—this is not life: you are too much for me, my dearest! Oh, my Beloved, come quickly to meet me to-day: this morning! Ride over; I am willing it. My own dearest, you must come. If you don't, what shall I believe? That Love cannot outdo space: that when you are away I cannot reach you by willing. But I can: come to me! You shall see my arms open to you as never before. What is it?—you must be coming. I have more love in me after all than I knew. Ah, I know: I wrote "grave side," and all my heart is in arms against the treason. With us it is not "till death us do part": we leap it altogether, and are clasped on the other side. My dear, my dear, I lay my head down on your heart: I love you! I post this to show how certain I am. At twelve to-day I shall see you. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XLV.</h2> Beloved: I look at this ridiculous little nib now, running like a plow along the furrows! What can the poor thing do? Bury its poor black, blunt little nose in the English language in order to tell you, in all sorts of roundabout ways, what you know already as well as I do. And yet, though that is all it can do, you complain of not having had a letter! Not had a letter? Beloved, there are half a hundred I have not had from you! Do you suppose you have ever, any one week in your life, sent me as many as I wanted? Now, for once, I did hold off and didn't write to you: because there was something in your last I couldn't give any answer to, and I hoped you would come yourself before I need. Then I hoped silence would bring you: and now—no!—instead of your dear peace-giving face I get this complaint! Ah, Beloved, have you in reality any complaint, or sorrow that I can set at rest? Or has that little, little silence made you anxious? I do come to think so, for you never flourish your words about as I do: so, believing that, I would like to write again differently; only it is truer to let what I have written stand, and make amends for it in all haste. I love you so infinitely well, how could even a year's silence give you any doubt or anxiety, so long as you knew I was not ill? "Should one not make great concessions to great grief even when it is unreasonable?" I cannot answer, dearest: I am in the dark. Great grief cannot be great without reasons: it should give them, and you should judge by them:—you, not I. I imagine you have again been face to face with fierce, unexplained opposition. Dearest, if it would give you happiness, I would say, make five, ten, twenty years' "concession," as you call it. But the only time you ever spoke to me clearly about your mother's mind toward me, you said she wanted an absolute surrender from you, not covered only by her lifetime. Then though I pitied her, I had to smile. A twenty years' concession even would not give rest to her perturbed spirit. I pray truly—having so much reason for your sake to pray it—"God rest her soul! and give her a saner mind toward both of us." Why has this come about at all? It is not February yet: and our plans have been putting forth no buds before their time. When the day comes, and you have said the inevitable word, I think more calm will follow than you expect. You, dearest, I do understand: and the instinct of tenderness you have toward a claim which yet fills you with the sense of its injustice. I know that you can laugh at her threat to make you poor; but not at hurting her affections. Did your asking for an "answer" mean that I was to write so openly? Bless you, my own dearest. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XLVI.</h2> Dearest: To-day I came upon a strange spectacle: poor old Nan-nan weeping for wounded pride in me. I found her stitching at raiment of needlework that is to be mine (piles of it have been through her fingers since the word first went out; for her love asserts that I am to go all home-made from my old home to my new one—wherever that may be!). And she was weeping because, as I slowly got to understand, from one particular quarter too little attention had been paid to me:—the kow-tow of a ceremonious reception into my new status had not been deep enough to make amends to her heart for its partial loss of me. Her deferential recognition of the change which is coming is pathetic and full of etiquette; it is at once so jealous and so unselfish. Because her sense of the proprieties will not allow her to do so much longer, she comes up to my room and makes opportunity to scold me over quite slight things:—and there I am, meeker under her than I would be to any relative. So to-day I had to bear a statement of your mother's infirmities rigorously outlined in a way I could only pretend to be deaf to until she had done. Then I said, "Nan-nan, go and say your prayers!" And as she stuck her heels down and refused to go, there I left the poor thing, not to prayer, I fear, but to desolate weeping, in which love and pride will get more firmly entangled together than ever. I know when I go up to my room next I shall find fresh flowers put upon my table: but the grievous old dear will be carrying a sore heart that I cannot comfort by any words. I cannot convince her that I am not hiding in myself any wounds such as she feels on my behalf. I write this, dearest, as an indirect answer to yours,—which is but Nan-nan's woe writ large. If I could persuade your two dear and very different heads how very slightly wounded I am by a thing which a little waiting will bring right, I could give it even less thought than I do. Are you keeping the truce in spirit when you disturb yourself like this? Trust me, Beloved, always to be candid: I will complain to you when I feel in need of comfort. Be comforted yourself, meanwhile, and don't shape ghosts of grief which never do a goose-step over me! Ah well, well, if there is a way to love you better than I do now, only show it me! Meantime, think of me as your most contented and happy-go-loving. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XLVII.</h2> Dearest: I am haunted by a line of quotation, and cannot think where it comes from: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Now sets the year in roaring gray." </div> </div> Can you help me to what follows? If it is a true poem it ought now to be able to sing itself to me at large from an outer world which at this moment is all gray and roaring. To-day the year is bowing itself out tempestuously, as if angry at having to go. Dear golden year! I am sorry to see its face so changed and withering: it has held so much for us both. Yet I am feeling vigorous and quite like spring. All the seasons have their marches, with buffetings and border-forays: this is an autumn march-wind; before long I shall be out into it, and up the hill to look over at your territory and you being swept and garnished for the seven devils of winter. "Roaring gray" suggests Tennyson, whom I do very much associate with this sort of weather, not so much because of passages in "Maud" and "In Memoriam" as because I once went over to Swainston, on a day such as this when rooks and leaves alike hung helpless in the wind; and heard there the story of how Tennyson, coming over for his friend's funeral, would not go into the house, but asked for one of Sir John's old hats, and with that on his head sat in the garden and wrote almost the best of his small lyrics: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "Nightingales warbled without, Within was weeping for thee." </div> </div> The "old hat" was mentioned as something humorous: yet an old glove is the most accepted symbol of faithful absence: and why should head rank lower than hand? What creatures of convention we are! There is an old notion, quite likely to be true, that a nightcap carries in it the dreams of its first owner, or that anything laid over a sleeper's head will bring away the dream. One of the stories which used to put a lump in my throat as a child was of an old backwoodsman who by that means found out that his dog stole hams from the storeroom. The dog was given away in disgrace, and came to England to die of a broken heart at the sight of a cargo of hams, which, at their unpacking, seemed like a monstrous day of judgment—the bones of his misdeeds rising again reclothed with flesh to reproach him with the thing he had never forgotten. I wonder how long it was before I left off definitely choosing out a story for the pleasure of making myself cry! When one begins to avoid that luxury of the fledgling emotions, the first leaf of youth is flown. To-day I look almost jovially at the decay of the best year I have ever lived through, and am your very middle-aged faithful and true. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XLVIII.</h2> Dearest: If anybody has been "calling me names" that are not mine, they do me a fine injury, and you did well to purge the text of their abuse. I agree with no authority, however immortal, which inquires "What's in a name?" expecting the answer to be a snap of the fingers. I answer with a snap of temper that the blood, boots, and bones of my ancestors are in mine! Do you suppose I could have been the same woman had such names as Amelia or Bella or Cinderella been clinging leechlike to my consciousness through all the years of my training? Why, there are names I can think of which would have made me break down into side-ringlets had I been forced to wear them audibly. The effect is not so absolute when it is a second name that can be tucked away if unpresentable, but even then it is a misfortune. There is C——, now, who won't marry, I believe, chiefly because of the insane "Annie" with which she was smitten at the baptismal font by an afterthought. She regards it as a taint in her constitution which orders her to a lonely life lest worse might follow. And apply the consideration more publicly: do you imagine the Prince of Wales will be the same sort of king if, when he comes to the throne, he calls himself King Albert Edward in florid Continental fashion, instead of "Edward the Seventh," with a right hope that an Edward the Eighth may follow after him, to make a neck-and-neck race of it with the Henries? I don't know anything that would do more to knit up the English constitution: but whenever I pass the Albert Memorial I tremble lest filial piety will not allow the thing to be done. Now of all this I had an instance in the village the day before yesterday. At the corner house by the post-office, as I went by, a bird opened his bill and sang a note, and down, down, down, down he went over a golden scale: pitched afresh, and dropped down another; and then up, up, up, over the range of both. Then he flung back his shaggy head and laughed. "In all my father's realm there are no such bells as these!" It was the laughing jackass. "Who gave you your name?" "My godfathers and my godmothers in my baptism." Well, his will have that to answer for, however safely for the rest he may have eschewed the world, the flesh, and the devil. Poor bird, to be set to sing to us under such a burden:—of which, unconscious failure, he knows nothing. Here I have remembered for you a bit of a poem that took hold of me some while ago and touched on the same unkindness: only here the flower is conscious of the wrong done to it, and looks forward to a day of juster judgment:— <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "What have I done?—Man came (There's nothing that sticks like dirt), Looked at me with eyes of blame, And called me 'Squinancy-wort!' What have I done? I linger (I cannot say that I live) In the happy lands of my birth; Passers-by point with the finger: For me the light of the sun Is darkened. Oh, what would I give To creep away, and hide my shame in the earth! What have I done? Yet there is hope. I have seen Many changes since I began. The web-footed beasts have been (Dear beasts!)—and gone, being part of some wider plan. Perhaps in His infinite mercy God will remove this man!" </div> </div> Now I am on sentiment and unjust judgments: here is another instance, where evidently in life I did not love well enough a character nobler than this capering and accommodating boy Benjy, who toadies to all my moods. Calling at the lower farm, I missed him whom I used to nickname "Manger," because his dog-jaws always refused to smile on me. His old mistress gave me a pathetic account of his last days. It was the muzzling order that broke his poor old heart. He took it as an accusation on a point where, though of a melancholy disposition, his reputation had been spotless. He never lifted his head nor smiled again. And not all his mistress' love could explain to him that he was not in fault. She wept as she told it me. Good-by, dearest, and for this letter so full of such little worth call me what names you like; and I will go to Jemima, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch for the patience in which they must have taken after their father when he so named them, I suppose for a discipline. My Beloved, let my heart come where it wants to be. Twilight has been on me to-day, I don't know why; and I have not written it off as I hoped to do.—All yours and nothing left. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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