Back Aa

Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER XXIII.</h2> Saving your presence, dearest, I would rather have Prince Otto, a very lovable character for second affections to cling to. Richard Feverel would never marry again, so I don't ask for him: as for the rest, they are all too excellent for me. They give me the impression of having worn copy-books under their coats, when they were boys, to cheat punishment: and the copy-books got beaten into their systems. You must find me somebody who was a "gallous young hound" in the days of his youth—Crossjay, for instance:—there! I have found the very man for me! But really and truly, are you better? It will not hurt your foot to come to me, since I am not to come to you? How I long to see you again, dearest! it is an age! As a matter of fact, it is a fortnight: but I dread lest you will find some change in me. I have kept a real white hair to show you, I drew it out of my comb the other morning: wound up into a curl it becomes quite visible, and it is ivory-white: you are not to think it flaxen, and take away its one wee sentiment! And I make you an offer:—you shall have it if, honestly, you can find in your own head a white one to exchange. Dearest, I am not hurt, nor do I take seriously to heart your mother's present coldness. How much more I could forgive her when I put myself in her place! She may well feel a struggle and some resentment at having to give up in any degree her place with you. All my selfishness would come to the front if that were demanded of me. Do not think, because I leave her alone, that I am repaying her coldness in the same coin. I know that for the present anything I do must offend. Have I demanded your coming too soon? Then stay away another day—or two: every day only piles up the joy it will be to have your arms round me once more. I can keep for a little longer: and the gray hair will keep, and many to-morrows will come bringing good things for us, when perhaps your mother's "share of the world" will be over. Don't say it, but when you next kiss her, kiss her for me also: I am sorry for all old people: their love of things they are losing is so far more to be reverenced and made room for than ours of the things which will come to us in good time abundantly. To-night I feel selfish at having too much of your love: and not a bit of it can I let go! I hope, Beloved, we shall live to see each other's gray hairs in earnest: gray hairs that we shall not laugh at, as at this one I pulled. How dark your dear eyes will look with a white setting! My heart's heart, every day you grow larger round me, and I so much stronger depending upon you! I won't say—come for certain, to-morrow: but come if, and as soon as, you can. I seem to see a mile further when I am on the lookout for you: and I shall be long-sighted every day until you come. It is only doubtful hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. I am as happy as the day is long waiting for you: but the day is long, dearest, none the less when I don't see you. All this space on the page below is love. I have no time left to put it into words, or words into it. You bless my thoughts constantly.—Believe me, never your thoughtless. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XXIV.</h2> Dearest: How, when, and where is there any use wrangling as to which of us loves the other the best ("the better," I believe, would be the more grammatical phrase in incompetent Queen's English), and why in that of all things should we pretend to be rivals? For this at least seems certain to me, that, being created male and female, no two lovers since the world began ever loved each other quite in the same way: it is not in nature for it to be so. They cannot compare: only to the best that is in them they do love each after their kind,—as do we for certain! Be sure, then, that I am utterly contented with what I get (and you, Beloved, and you?): nay, I wonder forever at the love you have given me: and if I will to lay mine at your feet, and feel yours crowning my life,—why, so it is, you know; you cannot alter it! And if you insist that your love is at my feet, I have only to turn Irish and reply that it is because I am heels over head in love with you:—and, mark you, that is no pretty attitude for a lady that you have driven me into in order that I may stick to my "crown"! Go to, dearest! There is one thing in which I can beat you, and that is in the bandying of words and all verbal conjurings: take this as the last proof of it and rest quiet. I know you love me a great great deal more than I have wit or power to love you: and that is just the little reason why your love mounts till, as I tell you, it crowns me (head or heels): while mine, insufficient and groveling, lies at your feet, and will till they become amputated. And I can give you, but won't, sixty other reasons why things are as I say, and are to be left as I say. And oh, my world, my world, it is with you I go round sunwards, and you make my evenings and mornings, and will, till Time shuts his wings over us! And now it is doleful business I have to write to you.... I have dropped to sleep over all this writing of things, and my cheek down on the page has made the paper unwilling to take the ink again:— what a pretty compliment to me: and, if you prefer it, what an easy way of writing to you! I can send you such any day and be as idle as I like. And you will decide about all the above exactly as you and I think best (or should it be "better" again, being only between us two?). When you get this, blow your beloved self a kiss in the glass for me,—a great big shattering blow that shall astonish Mercury behind his window-pane. Good-night, my best—or "better," for that is what I most want you to be. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XXV.</h2> My Own Beloved: And I never thanked you yesterday for your dear words about the resurrection pie; that comes of quarreling! Well, you must prove them and come quickly that I may see this restoration of health and spirits that you assure me of. You avoid saying that they sent you to sleep; but I suppose that is what you mean. Fate meant me only to light upon gay things this morning: listen to this and guess where it comes from: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "When March with variant winds was past, And April had with her silver showers Ta'en leif at life with an orient blast; And lusty May, that mother of flowers, Had made the birds to begin their hours, Among the odours ruddy and white, Whose harmony was the ear's delight: </div> <div class="stanza"> "In bed at morrow I sleeping lay; Methought Aurora, with crystal een, In at the window looked by day, And gave me her visage pale and green; And on her hand sang a lark from the splene, 'Awake ye lovers from slumbering! See how the lusty morrow doth spring!'" </div> </div> Ah, but you are no scholar of the things in your own tongue! That is Dunbar, a Scots poet contemporary of Henry VII., just a little bit altered by me to make him soundable to your ears. If I had not had to leave an archaic word here and there, would you ever have guessed he lay outside this century? That shows the permanent element in all good poetry, and in all good joy in things also. In the four centuries since that was written we have only succeeded in worsening the meaning of certain words, as for instance "spleen," which now means irritation and vexation, but stood then for quite the opposite—what we should call, I suppose, "a full heart." It is what I am always saying—a good digestion is the root of nearly all the good living and high thinking we are capable of: and the spleen was then the root of the happy emotions as it is now of the miserable ones. Your pre-Reformation lark sang from "a full stomach," and thanked God it had a constitution to carry it off without affectation: and your nineteenth century lark applying the same code of life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, and not poetry at all as we try to make it out to be. I have no news for you at all of anyone: all inside the house is a simmer of peace and quiet, with blinds drawn down against the heat the whole day long. No callers; and as for me, I never call elsewhere. The gossips about here eke out a precarious existence by washing each other's dirty linen in public: and the process never seems to result in any satisfactory cleansing. I avoid saying what news I trust to-morrow's post-bag may contain for me. Every wish I send you comes "from the spleen," which means I am very healthy, and, conditionally, as happy as is good for me. Pray God bless my dear Share of the world, and make him get well for his own and my sake! Amen. This catches the noon post, an event which always shows I am jubilant, with a lot of the opposite to a "little death" feeling running over my nerves. I feel the grass growing under me: the reverse of poor Keats' complaint. Good-by, Beloved, till I find my way into the provender of to-morrow's post-bag. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XXVI.</h2> Oh, wings of the morning, here you come! I have been looking out for you ever since post came. Roberts is carrying orders into town, and will bring you this with a touch of the hat and an amused grin under it. I saw you right on the top Sallis Hill: this is to wager that my eyes have told me correctly. Look out for me from far away, I am at my corner window: wave to me! Dearest, this is to kiss you before I can. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XXVII.</h2> Dearest: I have made a bad beginning of the week: I wonder how it will end? it all comes of my not seeing enough of you. Time hangs heavy on my hands, and the Devil finds me the mischief! I prevailed upon myself to go on Sunday and listen to our new lately appointed vicar: for I thought it not fair to condemn him on the strength of Mrs. P——'s terrible reporting powers and her sensuous worship of his full-blown flowers of speech—"pulpit-pot-plants" is what I call them. It was not worse and not otherwise than I had expected. I find there are only two kinds of clerics as generally necessary to salvation in a country parish—one leads his parishioners to the altar and the other to the pulpit: and the latter is vastly the more popular among the articulate and gad-about members of his flock. This one sways himself over the edge of his frame, making signals of distress in all directions, and with that and his windy flights of oratory suggests twenty minutes in a balloon-car, till he comes down to earth at the finish with the Doxology for a parachute. His shepherd's crook is one long note of interrogation, with which he tries to hook down the heavens to the understanding of his hearers, and his hearers up to an understanding of himself. All his arguments are put interrogatively, and few of them are worth answering. Well, well, I shall be all the freer for your visit when you come next Sunday, and any Sunday after that you will: and he shall come in to tea if you like and talk to you in quite a cultured and agreeable manner, as he can when his favorite beverage is before him. I discover that I get "the snaps" on a Monday morning, if I get them at all. The M.-A. gets them on the Sunday itself, softly but regularly: they distress no one, and we all know the cause: her fingers are itching for the knitting which she mayn't do. Your Protestant ignores Lent as a Popish device, a fond thing vainly invented: but spreads it instead over fifty-two days in the year. Why, I want to know, cannot I change the subject? Sunday we get no post (and no collection except in church) unless we send down to the town for it, so Monday is all the more welcome: but this I have been up and writing before it arrives—therefore the "snaps." Our postman is a lovely sight. I watched him walking up the drive the other morning, and he seemed quite perfection, for I guessed he was bringing me the thing which would make me happy all day. I only hope the Government pays him properly. I think this is the least pleasant letter I have ever sent you: shall I tell you why? It was not the sermon: he is quite a forgivable good man in his way. But in the afternoon that same Mrs. P—— came, got me in a corner, and wanted to unburden herself of invective against your mother, believing that I should be glad, because her coldness to me has become known! What mean things some people can think about one! I heard nothing: but I am ruffled in all my plumage and want stroking. And my love to your mother, please, if she will have it. It is only through her that I get you.—Ever your very own. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XXVIII.</h2> Dearest: Here comes a letter to you from me flying in the opposite direction. I won't say I am not wishing to go; but oh, to be a bird in two places at once! Give this letter, then, a special nesting-place, because I am so much on the wing elsewhere. I shut my eyes most of the time through France, and opened them on a soup-tureen full of coffee which presented itself at the frontier: and then realized that only a little way ahead lay Berne, with baths, buns, bears, breakfast, and other nice things beginning with B, waiting to make us clean, comfortable, contented, and other nice things beginning with C. Through France I loved you sleepy fashion, with many dreams in between not all about you. But now I am breathing thoughts of you out of a new atmosphere—a great gulp of you, all clean-living and high-thinking between these Alpine royal highnesses with snow-white crowns to their heads: and no time for a word more about anything except you: you, and double-you,—and treble-you if the alphabet only had grace to contain so beautiful a symbol! Good-by: we meet next, perhaps, out of Lucerne: if not,—Italy. What a lot I have to go through before we meet again visibly! You will find me world-worn, my Beloved! Write often. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER XXIX.</h2> Beloved: You know of the method for making a cat settle down in a strange place by buttering her all over: the theory being that by the time she has polished off the butter she feels herself at home? My morning's work has been the buttering of the Mother-Aunt with such things as will Lucerne her the most. When her instincts are appeased I am the more free to indulge my own. So after breakfast we went round the cloisters, very thick set with tablets and family vaults, and crowded graves inclosed. It proved quite "the best butter." To me the penance turned out interesting after a period of natural repulsion. A most unpleasant addition to sepulchral sentiment is here the fashion: photographs of the departed set into the stone. You see an elegant and genteel marble cross: there on the pedestal above the name is the photo:—a smug man with bourgeois whiskers,—a militiaman with waxed mustaches well turned up,—a woman well attired and conscious of it: you cannot think how indecent looked the pretension of such types to the dignity of death and immortality. But just one or two faces stood the test, and were justified: a young man oppressed with the burden of youth; a sweet, toothless grandmother in a bonnet, wearing old age like a flower; a woman not beautiful but for her neck which carried indignation; her face had a thwarted look. "Dead and rotten" one did not say of these in disgust and involuntarily as one did of the others. And yet I don't suppose the eye picks out the faces that kindled most kindness round them when living, or that one can see well at all where one sees without sympathy. I think the Mother-Aunt's face would not look dear to most people as it does to me,—yet my sight of her is the truer: only I would not put it up on a tombstone in order that it might look nothing to those that pass by. I wrote this much, and then, leaving the M.-A. to glory in her innumerable correspondence, Arthur and I went off to the lake, where we have been for about seven hours. On it, I found it become infinitely more beautiful, for everything was mystified by a lovely bloomy haze, out of which the white peaks floated like dreams: and the mountains change and change, and seem not all the same as going when returning. Don't ask me to write landscape to you: one breathes it in, and it is there ever after, but remains unset to words. The T——s whittle themselves out of our company just to the right amount: come back at the right time (which is more than Arthur and I are likely to do when our legs get on the spin), and are duly welcome with a diversity of doings to talk about. Their tastes are more the M.-A.'s, and their activities about halfway between hers and ours, so we make rather a fortunate quintette. The M—— trio join us the day after to-morrow, when the majority of us will head away at once to Florence. Arthur growls and threatens he means to be left behind for a week: and it suits the funny little jealousy of the M.-A. well enough to see us parted for a time, quite apart from the fact that I shall then be more dependent on her company. She will then glory in overworking herself,—say it is me; and I shall feel a fiend. No letter at all, dearest, this; merely talky-talky.—Yours without words. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.