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Page 17
You see I have given your author a warm welcome at last: and what about
you and mine? Tell me you love his women and I will not be jealous.
Indeed, outside him I don't know where to find a written English woman
of modern times whom I would care to meet, or could feel honestly bound
to look up to:--nowhere will I have her shaking her ringlets at me in
Dickens or Thackeray. Scott is simply not modern; and Hardy's women, if
they have nobility in them, get so cruelly broken on the wheel that you
get but the wrecks of them at last. It is only his charming baggages who
come to a good ending.
I like an author who has the courage and self-restraint to leave his noble
creations alive: too many try to ennoble them by death. For my part, if I
have to go out of life before you, I would gladly trust you to the hands
of Clara, or Rose, or Janet, or most of all Vittoria; though, to be
accurate, I fear they have all grown too old for you by now.
And you? have you any men to offer me in turn out of your literary
admirations, supposing you should die of a snapped ankle? Would you give
me to d'Artagnan for instance? Hardly, I suspect! But either choose me
some proxy hero, or get well and come to me! You will be very welcome
when you do. Sleep is making sandy eyes at me: good-night, dearest.
LETTER XXII.
Why, my Beloved: Since you put it to me as a point of conscience (it is
only lying on your back with one active leg doing nothing, and the other
dying to have done aching, which has made you take this new start of
inquiring within upon everything), since you call on me for a
conscientious answer, I say that it stands to reason that I love you more
than you love me, because there is so much more of you to love, let alone
fit for loving.
Do you imagine that you are going to be a cripple for life, and therefore
an indifferent dancer in the dances I shall always be leading you, that
you have started this fit of self-depreciation? Or is it because I have
thrown Meredith at your sick head that you doubt my tact and my affection,
and my power patiently to bear for your sake a good deal of cold shoulder?
Dearest, remember I am doctoring you from a distance: and am not yet
allowed to come and see my patient, so can only judge from your letters
how ill you are. That you have been concealing from me almost
treacherously: and only by a piece of abject waylaying did I receive word
to-day of your sleepless nights, and so get the key to your symptoms. Lay
by Meredith, then, for a while: I am sending you a cargo of Stevenson
instead. You have been truly unkind, trying to read what required effort,
when you were fit for nothing of the sort.
And lest even Stevenson should be too much for you, and wanting very much,
and perhaps a little bit jealously, to be your most successful nurse, I am
letting my last large bit of shyness of you go; and with a pleasant sort
of pain, because I know I have hit on a thing that will please you, I open
my hands and let you have these, and with them goes my last blush:
henceforth I am a woman without a secret, and all your interest in me may
evaporate. Yet I know well it will not.
As for this resurrection pie from love's dead-letter office, you will
find from it at least one thing--how much I depended upon response from
you before I could become at all articulate. It is you, dearest, from
the beginning who have set my head and heart free and made me a woman. I
am something quite different from the sort of child I was less than a
year ago when I wrote that small prayer which stands sponsor for all
that follows. How abundantly it has been answered, dearest Beloved,
only I know: you do not!
Now my prayer is not that you should "come true," but that you should
get well. Do this one little thing for me, dearest! For you I will do
anything: my happiness waits for that. As yet I seem to have done
nothing. Oh, but, Beloved, I will! From a reading of the Fioretti, I
sign myself as I feel.--Your glorious poor little one.
THE CASKET LETTERS.
A.
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