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Page 20
Well, I know you fair, and believe myself brave--constitutionally, so
that I can't help it: and this, therefore, is not self-praise. But
fairness in a man is a deadly hard acquirement, I begin now to discover.
You have it fixed fast in you.
You, I think, began to do just things consciously, as the burden of
manhood began in you. I love to think of you growing by degrees till you
could carry your head _so_--and no other way; so that, looking at you, I
can promise myself you never did a mean thing, and never consciously an
unjust thing except to yourself. I can just fancy that fault in you.
But, whatever--I love you for it more and more, and am proud knowing you
and finding that we are to become friends. For it is that, and no less
than that, now.
I love you; and me you like cordially: and that is enough. I need not
look behind it, for already I have no way to repay you for the happiness
this brings me.
I.
Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear; and it takes long thinking. Not
merely such a quantity of thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a
day's work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. Bless me, dearest; all
to-day has belonged to you; and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours
without the asking: just as without the asking I too am yours. I wish it
were more possible for us to give service to those we love. I am most glad
because I see you so often: but I come and go in your life empty-handed,
though I have so much to give away. Thoughts, the best I have, I give you:
I cannot empty my brain of them. Some day you shall think well of me.--That
is a vow, dear friend,--you whom I love so much!
J.
I have not had to alter any thought ever formed about you, Beloved; I have
only had to deepen it--that is all. You grow, but you remain. I have heard
people talk about you, generally kindly; but what they think of you is
often wrong. I do not say anything, but I am glad, and so sure that I know
you better. If my mind is so clear about you, it shows that you are good
for me. Now for nearly three months I may not see you again; but all that
time you will be growing in my heart; and at the end without another word
from you I shall find that I know you better than before. Is that strange?
It is because I love you: love is knowledge--blind knowledge, not wanting
eyes. I only hope that I shall keep in your memory the kind place you have
given me. You are almost my friend now, and I know it. You do not know
that I love you.
K.
Beloved: You love me! I know it now, and bless the sun and the moon and
the stars for the dear certainty of it. And I ask you now, O heart that
has opened to me, have I once been unhappy or impatient while this good
thing has been withheld from me? Indeed my love for you has occupied me
too completely: I have been so glad to find how much there is to learn in
a good heart deeply unconscious of its own goodness. You have employed me
as I wish I may be employed all the days of my life: and now my beloved
employer has given me the wages I did not ask.
You love me! Is it a question of little or much? Is it not rather an
entire new thought of me that has entered your life, as the thought of you
entered mine months that seem years ago? It was the seed then, and seemed
small; but the whole life was there; and it has grown and grown till now
it is I who have become small, and have hardly room in me for the roots:
and it seems to have gone so far up over my head that I wonder if the
stars know of my happiness.
They must know of yours too, then, my Beloved: they are no company for me
without you. Oh, to-day, to-day of all days! how in my heart I shall go on
kissing it till I die! You love me: that is wonderful! You love me: and
already it is not wonderful in the least! but belongs to Noah and the ark
and all the animals saved up for an earth washed clean and dried, and the
new beginnings of time which have ever since been twisting and turning
with us in safe keeping through all the history of the world.
"We came over at the Norman conquest," my dear, as people say trailing
their pedigree: but there was no ancestral pride about us--it was all for
the love of the thing we did it: how clear it seems now! In the hall hangs
a portrait in a big wig, but otherwise the image of my father, of a man
who flouted the authority of James II. merely because he was so like my
father in character that he could do nothing else. I shall look for you
now in the Bayeux tapestries with a prong from your helmet down the middle
of your face--of which that line on your forehead is the remainder. And
you love me! I wonder what the line has to do with that?
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