Villebecq Mademoiselle, who would play melodrama, was achieving much
less in her chosen way of business than still slumbering Bear Lawn
Mary, who had played at life. And now, in these last days (as they were
to prove) of the Villebecq existence as I had known it, she was to shew
herself quite unequal to a rôle of garish prominence she was suddenly
called upon to play. She quitted the stage, unaccompanied by plaudits
or pity, and died of an empty heart.
The circumstances were these.
The first day or so after I left my bedroom I spent in writing up my
Diary: making the notes on which the last three chapters are based.
The Countess' arrangements as to de Fouquier's successor were
completed; the gentleman in question, a Monsieur de Beaurepaire, was
ready to take up his duties in three days' time. De Fouquier knew
nothing.
The day before the morning fixed upon for his dismissal I was sitting
alone in the library, writing in my Diary. The door opened, I drew the
blotting-paper protectively over the page. It was Monsieur de Fouquier,
and he knew: knew everything. There was a look in his eyes--a look
I have only seen once besides, many years later, on the face of a
Russian nobleman, the night before he shot himself in the bedroom of a
St. Petersburgh hotel--of wolfish desperation; desperate and wolfish
as only the eyes of a selfish luxurious well-fed man can become. His
voice, however, was still suave, unpleasantly suave.
"Ah, good day, Mademoiselle. I have come to say Good-bye. I am glad to
have had the pleasure of knowing you so well."
"I am sorry," I replied (I think sincerely), "though, despite the long
time I have been here, I could hardly agree with you that we have known
each other well. We have so little to do with each other."
"_Directly_, perhaps," he said meaningly. "_De vive voix_, it is true,
you have given me but sparingly of your thoughts and views. I have been
able to learn to appreciate them, nevertheless, thanks to an occasional
perusal of that charming book before you now. Oh, I read your language
if I do not speak it. _Vot vud Jesus do? Vot vud Jesus do?_"--in
mocking horrible English.
Shame flooded me, and hate. This monster, who for months had been
peering into the secret places of my soul!
"Vat vud Jesus do?" he was repeating, with a sneer again and again.
"Stop!" I cried. "I will not listen to blasphemy."
"You will listen awhile to me," and he stood against the door, barring
possible egress. "You have had a large share in the filthy campaign
of lies and intrigues which has at last succeeded in turning me out
of this house. I shall at least make sure that you are bundled out
yourself. Before I go, this very day, I am going to supply this amiable
and grateful family with a brief account of yourself and who you
really are,--your dirty little shopkeeper relations in England, your
common sailor of a grandfather, your vulgar canting old grandmother,
your boozing aunt. Then a few words about your dear father, and your
frankness with Madame la Comtesse on the subject of his recent visit:
how odd that he did not live with your mother, how odd the little hints
Monsieur Greeber was so good as to give me as to whether he was your
dear father at all, how odd the charm of bastardy--"
"Monsieur," I broke in, "if ever I have a husband, he shall exact full
payment for this. Go on insulting me, however. It will achieve nothing,
it leaves me cold."
"A husband, ah yes--dear 'R'! How tender your many references to him.
Strange though it should seem, this world is small, and suppose so
seemingly irrelevant an event as my forced departure from this house in
France should have some effect on dear 'R' in England? There is my dear
friend Monsieur Greeber. Don't alarm yourself, there's a brave girl--"
"Get out!" I cried.
"When I have done. There are still other results of your handiwork
to consider. The family's name, for instance? It will benefit, you
think, from my departure? Monsieur le Comte--his honourable doings.
Mademoiselle Elise--her passion for her sister--so pure, so natural, so
sisterly--"
"Ten seconds, and if you're not gone, I shall shriek for help." I rose,
pale with anger.
He came forward, seized me, glued his mouth to mine.
It was no stage-play now. In a strange flooding moment Mary the lover
of Robbie reconquered the fortress of my soul. Thirty years later I can
summon the odd physical-spiritual sensation as the selves did battle
within me. Mine eyes beheld love, and this nightmare moment was its
negation.
I only record the moment, shutting the spirit's memory as I write;
think of it I will not, cannot. I struggled, for a second or two,
without avail, wild with a nameless sickening fear; prayed in shame and
desperation "Lord, deliver me: Robbie, forgive!" Then with a desperate
movement I freed my face from the foul impact, and gave as heartrending
a shriek as was ever achieved by virgin in distress.
He made swiftly to free himself, but now I held him tight, clipped him
to me with such a new savagery and strength that although he knee'd
and wriggled brutally he could not struggle free. Footsteps were
approaching--I knew whose--and I managed, during one more second of
supreme endeavour and complex anticipatory delight, to hold on.
Lord Tawborough entered, took him by the scruff of the neck, wrenched
him away from me, and flung him out of the room.
I liked Lord Tawborough.
"_Les hommes!_" commented Elise. "So that's the end of friend Fouquier."
It was. That same day he disappeared from the Château for ever.
It seemed as though the house had been cleansed of a foul atmosphere.
The Countess, though already worrying about troubles and dangers ahead,
seemed for the first time mistress in her own house.
"Let him do his worst," said Elise, "it isn't very much."
Only Suzanne was nowhere about, seen by none of us. At dinner that
night she was not present. Her bedroom door was locked, and she would
reply to no one, admit no one. Next day we burst open the door, found
the room empty.
Suzanne had fled.
* * * * * * *
It was the end.
It was the end of the Château Villebecq I had known, the end of the
easeful days of bright comfort shot through with gay melodrama, the end
of the Interlude. For two other women, mother and sister, it was the
end for ever of this world's happiness; for the other herself too, as I
learned long afterwards.
Madame de Florian crumpled up under the blow. All she had lived
for--the honour of her name, the worldly success of her daughters--was
lost. All her employment--the day-to-day strivings towards these two
ends--was gone. In one night she seemed to shrivel up; to become at
a stroke five times more wizened, more futile, more plaintive than
before. Life, perhaps, had never had much to give her; now it held
nothing. Her days were divided between regrets and self-reproachings,
complaints, servant-scoldings and tears.
To me alone she confided her woe. I was the one kind soul she had ever
known; Heaven had meant me to be her daughter! I gave her nothing from
my soul--except pity, poor pity, and even this soon lost its first
spontaneity; became conscious, conscientious--yet always I could see
she was getting what I did not give: a sense of boundless sympathy and
affection. In every mood and every mope she came to me for comfort,
and--though I knew full well in my actress-heart that I was giving her
nothing at all, no real love, no healing sympathy, only the shams and
simulacra of these, served up with pity, luxurious self-comforting
pity--always I saw that my shadow was her substance. She returned
me a boundless gratitude; pathetic, delicious to my palate, cruelly
undeserved.
"Ah Mademoiselle, there are not many like you! My life is over. I
am a poor old woman alone. Only you understand. Stay with me, dear
Mademoiselle."
And I did.
Elise took to her room, asked no comfort, refused what I proffered,
railed at me for being the real cause of her losing her dear one, spent
long days alone in her bedroom weeping, and would not be comforted.
After a few weeks, when no news came of Suzanne, she took really ill.
When sufficiently recovered to travel, she went for a long stay in the
South of France, Gabrielle accompanying her. At leaving she refused to
see me, even to say Good-bye.
The new steward did not live in the house, now a deserted place, damp
and cold in the long winter that followed, inhabited by memories,
haunted by fugitive joys. Through the long days and nights, echoes
of happiness would ring aloud through the emptiness, and sometimes I
heard Suzanne's laugh on the staircase or the quick feet of friendly
approaches in the corridor. Now that joy had taken flight, the great
house became, like Bear Lawn of old, an atmosphere I understood and
responded to. It is thus that I have chiefly remembered it ever since,
it is thus that I remember it now.
I had no plans except--vaguely "soon"--to go back to Devonshire for
good. When I mooted this to the Countess, her pleadings were so
pitiful, so flattering, that I registered then and there the vow that I
would stay as long as she wanted me. It was the one return I could give
for the kindness I had received, the one way I could display loyalty to
the good past of yesterday: quite a good way also, maybe, of laying up
for myself treasure in Heaven.
So for many long and lonely months I stayed. Except the Countess I saw
no one. I was as lonely as in the far-away days of my childhood, and
soon it was to my childhood that I returned. Imperceptibly, just as a
year or two back the Bear Lawn life had vanished, the present glory of
Villebecq taking its place, so now it was Villebecq (though my body
remained there) that vanished, and Bear Lawn again that took its place.
In bed at night, if my soul was thinking of Mary, the old dining-room
or the cold blue attic formed the physical setting in which, as a
person detached, I always saw her. In the darkness my bed would always
revert to the Bear Lawn position, with the wall facing me as I lay
on my right side, although in reality in the Villebecq room it was
behind me. Even awake and in the day-time, the articles of furniture
in my boudoir often changed as I watched them to the furniture of the
old dining-room, the sense came over me that Villebecq was but a
dream I had dreamt one night at Tawborough, a dream from which I was
at this moment waking up, a dream that already I could not properly
remember.... But--Bear Lawn too was a dream--I had only dreamt that I
was Mary. Who was I? Was I any one? Oh, terror, was I God Himself? With
a cry I fell on to my knees.... The fear passed, it was the Villebecq
boudoir, I was rising awkwardly to my feet. (Had anybody seen?)
Even in normal and placid moods, the first two years of my life in
France soon appeared as a faded memory, the remembrance of something
I had been told rather than something I had lived myself. The whole
mosaic of new glittering impressions, storm and stage-play, ease and
luxury and chatter and intrigue, seemed something insubstantial and
unlived: something very distant, too, for--by a puzzling experience
not usual in the young--I could only see clearly the days that lay
farther away. The Villebecq life had been a thin shadow of life, the
Villebecq drama a puppet drama, the Villebecq Me a pale and partial
Me. There was a slow battle spread over weeks in which Bear-Lawn Mary
fought her way back to chief place within me. I remember the odd
physical moment--sitting on my bed at three o'clock one morning, still
undressed--in which she won the victory and in which Mary the gossiper,
Mary the worldling, Mary the Fouquier-fighter faded like a wraith into
the tomb of my sub-conscious self.
The older habits of mind returned. Now that there was no one to talk
to, I talked, as of old, to myself. There was no present to occupy
me, so I returned to my pasts and my futures. There were differences,
of course, and developments: I was older, a little farther away
from madness (which is sanity), a little nearer the world, a little
farther from the Lord. My past was seen in worldlier, if not truer,
perspective; my ambitions were more concrete. The old habits were
fainter, and the old fears. Hope had gained appreciably on Despair. At
ten I had dwelt morbidly on my few happinesses, knowing that they would
be paid for: God gets even. Now, at twenty, happier days had tilted the
balance; I dwelt cheerfully on the manifold unhappinesses of my life,
feeling sure they would all be recompensed me: Christ gets even.
Not but what Gloom made a good fight for his old supremacy. After all,
_Eternity was on his side_.
And the Rapture never returned. I would pray sometimes for hours, beg
for one instant's flowing through my heart of Taw-water and the Holy
Ghost. HE did not come.
There was a reason. I knew the reason, though for a long time I dared
not formulate it, even in prayer, even alone with myself, or more
utterly alone--with God.
Coming from the innermost place of my being, gaining at last my
conscious brain and soul, and soon possessing them utterly, was the
knowledge that my only way to ultimate happiness lay not through
religion, but through ROBBIE.
For many days and nights the agonized struggle fought itself out within
me: God's love revealing Itself directly, God Immanent, versus God's
Love revealing itself in human shape, God-in-Robbie: memories of Jordan
Morning, my honeymoon with God, versus hopes of earthly ecstacy, my
honeymoon with _him_.
I have never wished, even if I were able, to fit in this story of my
life with wise men's theories of human conduct and development. But the
psychologist or the modern novelist would I think label this struggle
in my soul as the turning-battle between Environment and Heredity, in
which the massed beliefs of my holy upbringing contended against the
call of my woman's blood and the needs of my woman's heart.
At last--when I had given God His last chance, telling Him in an agony
of passionate prayer that if He would send me but once again the
perfect miracle-moment of Jordan it would quench for ever within me all
need of human love--and when no answer came--I knew that the battle was
over. Robbie had won.
Had won in my heart. But what were the chances that I should taste the
fruits of his victory, that the love I had declared for would, in this
actual physical world, one day be mine?
I faced the whole question, "dispassionately."
What were the facts? Years ago, a sentimental and unhappy child had,
in a moment of crude (though not contemptible) romantic fervour, grown
morbidly fond of another child, and he of her. They had vowed together
to seek to perpetuate their experience when away from each other by
mutual self-suggestion, especially on that particular night of every
year when the childish emotion had culminated. It was all very pretty,
quite pathetic too in its way, but what else?
What else? Everything. These were the cowardly picturings of
Common-Sense: Heart put them swiftly to flight. The only realities
are the realities of the spirit, and Robbie in the visions I now had,
not only every Christmas, but every day--near every hour--was a warm
divine reality in my soul. He was with me, kissing my face. Where the
human body of the living twenty-one-year-old Robbie might be I did not
know--though I constructed for myself a hundred different stories as to
his whereabouts and doings--but that his spirit was with me whenever
mine was with him I knew in the authentic uttermost way, beyond all
knowledge and reason, in which I had once known God. Sometimes the
whole night through his Presence enveloped me, his face was mirrored
in my soul. Yet always the ultimate Rapture evaded me; I would reach
the mystical moment when the lips of the vision-Robbie upon mine were
changing into the dear desired lips of the real-life Robbie, when
vision-reality and this-world-reality were merging magically into
one--then always, on the threshold of realization, the Vision faded,
and I was left empty and desolate and cold.
The mere physical longing, though less intense than the spiritual, was
newer and more baffling: for I understood my body much less well than
my soul. Oh for him to put his arms around me, crush me tenderly to
him, while I should clasp him to my breast and pour out my heart upon
him! I would kiss the miserable pillow (and say it was his throat) and
clasp it and cover it with tears. When bearing-point was passed, I
would burst into half-hysterical prayer: Send him now, oh Lord Jesus,
or banish the tormenting vision from my eyes!--the while I would
savagely stop the eyes and ears of my spirit, until God's answer came,
and for a space the hunger passed away.
Doubt trod hard upon Desire. Fool-Mary as always! You loved the little
boy then, and he you. It was a child's moment, gracious for the child's
sorrow that it eased, but over at once and for ever. Love comes not
back again. All the rest, all these fantastic years of mystical
repeatal are but the wraiths of your own disordered imagination. The
Presence is a phantom presence of your own creating.
"It is no phantom," I replied. "If anything in God's universe is real,
that is real."
"Real to him? For if not, the presence is not real at all."
"It is real to him."
"Are you so sure? You are quite, quite certain: that at the same moment
in which you possess his Presence, he is possessing yours?"
"Yes, I know it. God tells me so."
"But where is real Robbie? Why does he not come to you?"
"He is coming soon."
And with valiant words I chased Doubt away, knowing him for the
destroyer of everything that he encompasses, who can make things that
are true untrue, just as Faith, his enemy, can make of things that are
not things that are. Faith makes facts, not facts faith. If you believe
that Robbie is with you, he is with you. If you doubt his presence, you
destroy it.
If the Sun and Moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out.
Balked of his actual physical presence in one way I would seek it in
another. Memory would essay where Visualization had at the ultimate
instant always failed, and would guide me moment by moment through the
whole of the old Torribridge time, from the first glimpse, and Uncle
Simeon's introduction, through egg-day and fight-day to the supreme
midnight hour; at last I found I could reconstruct our happiness
together so vividly that _it was actually happening again_. Eternity
had turned backwards, the past had become the living present, I was
sore from the cruel flogging, I was twelve-year-old Mary again, and
Robbie's arms were around me. Then Memory in his turn failed me;
in a swift physical way I felt inside me the years scuttling back
into their place: it was the old eternal present, and the ideal
unconsummated, and the loneliness.
Then doubt and fear and need would all together assail me, pressing in
unison the chief question. When he is real to you, are you as real to
him? The answer was always Yes, and the answer was always No. In either
case I fell to sorrowing for him: if he wanted me, because of his need;
if he did not know he wanted me, because of his need also. And I would
forget myself altogether, and think only of his need of love. How
could I give him most, give myself to him most? How could I discover
and lay at his feet the wild unimagined sacrifices for which my heart
was aching? I knew I could give him everything, live for him only,
destroy my own happiness for him, give him my heart, my life, my hope
of everlasting death. Ah, for his sake I would take God's nameless gift
of immortality, if He would but set Robbie free, grant him the eternal
sleep. I would do the far greater thing than die for him; for him I
would live for ever.
Ah, no, no, no!--Robbie asleep for ever, and me for ever alive. Ah, no,
oh loving Heavenly Father, that alone I could not bear.
In two months I filled three large new volumes of Diary: all with
Robbie.
Much of it was in the form of a series of letters between us. The
first letter was addressed from me to him: a tremulous self-conscious
composition, asking him to excuse my taking the liberty of writing,
feeling certain that he would doubtless remember who I was, recalling
that we had been rather good friends, _n'est-ce-pas_?, in that short
period when we had been together as children, etc., etc. I tortured
myself for a whole fortnight awaiting, in fear and delicious hope,
his reply. This I composed--as I wanted to compose it: friendly,
enthusiastically reminiscent, but not (being his first letter) so
affectionate as to damage my scheme of a long _crescendo_ of ever more
affectionate letters to come. Then my reply, and his reply, till soon
the floodgates were opened.
"Oh, Robbie (at last I wrote), Tell me you are the same Robbie;
that now, as a man, you are not some strange man I should not know,
but that you have the same loving heart, only more passionate
and tender than before; the same loving arms, only manlier and
even more ready to embrace me; the same loving boy's face, only
transfigured, developed, ennobled by the long lonely years of the
love you have given me. Tell me that in body as well as spirit you
are coming soon, to love me for ever as I do you."
He replied:
"Post haste I write, because I must speak back to you. I got your
letter this morning, and ever since then have been full of it,
and full of joy. Never in all the letters you have written me
have I felt so much of you in it, never have I felt you so near,
so completely in sympathy and understanding, so exquisitely, so
utterly in love. (I cannot restrain myself from uttering this.) As
I read and re-read your letter, I feel, at this very moment as I
write, that we are alone, alone and together; I can hear you crying
out and I send back the echo; but it is no echo now, for we are so
near: only distances echo, my Mary dear. Tonight I am fuller than
I have ever been before, full because of your inspiration, of your
influence; but not this alone, because I am my own influence, and
it is this which sways me now. The outer world is a great silence,
a mere waste of towns and cities, empty and desolate as a city of
the dead, a place of graves. All the people around me are shadows,
are only for themselves, but we are for each other, and all all
else is dead.
"The Christmas promise has come true for ever. Now it is a great
joy to live, and not to live has no terrors. Everything is at the
highest point of its change; all is changed by this thing we know,
this secret we have discovered, and I am glad. We alone are its
guardian, but it needs no guardian, because Mary and Robbie before
discovered it, and have guarded it ever since.
"I shall come very soon now. But do not fret: this long absence in
form has meant a more palpable presence in spirit. For the soul
needs space: it flies, like a kite, and you hold the line; the line
is of interminable distance, the kite of immeasurable power. It
flies happy, among the life-giving, high breezes; and it makes you
happy, a child at the other end, a child with a kite--the child
whom I loved that night long ago and who loved me, the dear Mary
whom I will love and who will love me for ever. She is the child
who has not changed--it is the same face, though a woman's now, and
it is with me by day and by night...."
"Robin," I answered, "your letter is the goodliest yet: it has
given me a day and a waking night of celestial happiness--for I had
it yesterday only, and like you I reply 'post-haste.' You bring
me to the house of happiness, and your banner over me is Love:
but when will your left hand be under my head and your right hand
embrace me? My letters bring you happiness too: but when will you
read them with the eyes of the flesh as well as the eyes of the
spirit? You say you will come to me 'very soon:' but you will come
before the ink on these pages has faded? (If it can ever fade, for
it is the blood of my aching heart.)
"Now dear, I kiss your brow, your dear eyes, your mouth; I place my
lips upon your dear glorious little heart. All the love that was in
the beginning of the world, that is in the universe now, that will
people Paradise through all the everlasting years, is in me now; I
assemble and concentrate it into this moment, into the kiss that
I am giving you at this moment as I write. From face to feet, my
heart's beloved, Good-night!"
At last, after two or three months of these imaginary letters, I wrote
the real one which was the necessary condition of their ever becoming
real: I wrote to Aunt Martha. I always wrote to her on her birthday:
it was near birthday-time, so no other pretext was needed. I made
my letter rather longer than usual, introducing the one thing that
mattered with appropriately naïve and casual abruptness. "By-the-way,"
I asked, as careful after-thought, "do you ever hear anything now of
Robert Grove. He was a nice boy, and I have often wondered what became
of him?" And I made a Special Temporary Resolution to shut the door of
my spirit as far as possible (weak proviso) till Aunt Martha should
have given me some news.
It was only a day or two after writing this letter that a letter I
received--from Lord Tawborough, now back in England--ushered in a new
phase of spiritual trouble. Robbie had vanquished Almighty God: was
he to be vanquished now by a mere peer of England? Very vividly the
Stranger re-entered my imagination. He had thought it discreet and
kinder to leave the Château almost immediately after the Fouquier
crisis and Suzanne's flight, and in the turmoil of those days and of
Elise's bitterness and then in the long loneliness and the following
period of return to religion and to Robbie, he had been very little
in my thoughts. This letter brought him gladly, warmly back. My heart
brightened as I mused upon the well-loved features, the manifold
gentleness, the secret sympathy, the goodness he had shown me,
the delight I knew he found when near me. And this was no kindly
benefactor's letter, no tenderest of distant cousin's letter, no
7th of the Title's letter. It was but a Best Friend's letter. For a
moment my heart recoiled from immediate irrepressible "Is it a Lover's
letter?" Some one said "No": it was the Mary who wrote the mad missives
to Robbie and the mad missives from Robbie to herself. Some one else
said "Yes": it was the this-world Mary whom every one (save Mary) knew.
At that instant of time, I think, more surely and more strangely than
at any other time in my life, I knew and in spiritual-physical fashion
felt and understood that there was no such thing as "I": that there
were many living and disparate beings inside me. As I mused pleasurably
and lovingly on Tawborough (Quick! What was his Christian name?--I
had never heard it, I must learn it, or invent it, find swiftly some
endearing name to give him in my thoughts), not only Robbie, but the
Mary who loved him beyond all heaven and earth, was some one far away,
some one I had been, should be yet again, but was not now; some one
else whom the present-moment "I" could contemplate from the outside,
but from the inside not at all.
Thus there was no sense of conflict or contradiction. Simple souls say:
You cannot love two people at once. Shrewder souls add: Not in the
same way. Both miss the point, ignore the real mystery: that _you_ is
two folks and not one, a divine self and a human self: with two loves
accordingly, a human love and a divine love. At the selfsame moment of
time the two selves cannot both be in possession, and the two loves
cannot be felt together. There is no clash and no conflict.
I reasoned out my hope. That the real Robbie, when I met him, would
conquer utterly the human me, win all my liking, answer all my needs.
Real Robbie and Dream Robbie would become one: real Mary and dream Mary
would become one. Love would be everywhere, the two selves would mingle
and make at last one Mary, the world would be revealed--God was in me,
around me--I am the Universe--. There are no words....
But if chance--I dared not say Death--decreed that in this world I
should never see Robbie? Then the human liking and earthly possibility
could never merge into the divine romance. The quest my soul was
created for would be over: Eternity would not be Love. Yet, I was a
woman--and I loved the word "marry"--and the Stranger was my chief
human liking and earthly possibility--and this world's happiness was
worth possessing even though emptiness lay beyond.
So if Robbie is not given to you, said Reason, the Stranger will be
a glorious second-best. "Glorious Second-Best." dinned Reason in my
heart, and a whole crowd took up the echo: snobbery and sanity, and
pride and probability, and intellectual sympathy and physical delight.
But first I would search the world for Robbie.
* * * * * * *
Suddenly my heart learned that Robbie, wherever he was, knew that I
was musing thus: knew that I was toying with notions of Tawborough,
and over _his_ deathbed was meditating eventual treason. Suddenly my
heart understood how his own was aching. The magnitude of my vileness
sickened me. I could find no sleep, nor heart to sleep. All night I
heard him crying out, saw his dear face wistful with doubt. I told him
it was not true, that I loved him and him only. He did not hear me; I
could not make him hear me; I knew that his heart was still aching.
I got out of bed, wrapped my dressing-gown around me, went through
into the boudoir, and wrote in my Diary this following letter. (The
inkpot was empty, and even if I had had the courage to take my candle
and to go through the long dark corridor and down the stairs in search
of ink, I should not have gone. For time was precious. I knew that,
magically, each word as I wrote it would bring ease and comfort to
Robbie somewhere far away, and my heart could not abide that his own
should suffer for one moment longer. So I snatched a pencil, glad for
Robbie's sake to mar the neat inky well-beloved uniformity of my eight
years' diaries, and scrawled feverishly at the frantic dictation of my
passionate heart. Today, as I copy, the pencil is faded, and the page
the hardest to decipher in all the record):
_To Robert Grove_,
_Wheresoever You Are, my Dear!_--
How sorrowful you are tonight, how evil am I since I am the cause!
But I write post-haste to send you tidings of comfort, to tell you
there is no other in my heart but you, to send you my everlasting
love. You came to me Christmas Night, and you came for ever. There
has been no other, nor ever can. _What can the man do that cometh
after the king?_
My friend who is causing you such grief, you know who he is--tho'
'tis nine years now since the moment I knew you--tho' you have
never seen him nor (in earthly way) even heard his name--I know
that you know. He is Lord Tawborough, my cousin and my benefactor,
and my very dear friend, tho' much older and cleverer than I. But
do understand, dear Robbie, that the respect and affection in which
I hold him are _only_ the reflection of his generosity and loving
kindness to me. It is he who gave me my education, gave me my good
fortune, who has always been far, far too kind to me. And now that,
here in this land, I have met with him again, I like him better
than ever. How could I not?
There is "like" for him and for you my whole girl's aching LOVE.
Even when I am looking at my kind friend's face, suddenly I will
stop the working of my mind and will turn to look for you, trying
to grope out where in this world at the exact moment you are; and
God always helps me to make a picture which I know is near reality.
At this moment I can see you--vaguely--dreamily--in a bright city
whose name I do not know, but where often I have sojourned in
dreams. I cannot actually _touch_ you now: for our meeting-place
is not in cities or houses or streets or fields; rather we go to
meet each other in the skies and oh! Robbie! my spirit! my soul!
what a meeting we have, how happy, how jubilant, how full of the
glory which is not of the earth, unutterable, something I cannot
speak, or say, or write; something only which tears my heart into
a thousand particles of agony, which is the divinest, wildest,
fiercest, holiest, sweetest joy of all. The agony of love, Robbie,
how it wounds! The moments when, in vision, I cannot invoke your
face, how cruelly long they seem! Then betimes your dear face
forms among the mists of all my wildness and restlessness and
smiles upon me in a peace that is infinite, and passeth all men's
understanding. Now, Robbie, know that this is no earthly thing I
have, you have, but a thing entirely of the soul, a gift entirely
of God. It should leave us tolerant and truthful, ever knowing that
no other friends (however dear) can ever endanger it, even conceive
of its meaning; and ever waiting for its supreme fulfilment.
Can I have this for any but you? Can any but you have this for me?
Why, my Robbie, can you ask?
I stretch out my arms through the unknown to reach you. I would
comfort you, cover you with eternal kisses. Stretch your dear arms
out too, put them around me, crush me against your breast.
Come to me now, and come to me soon for the time that will be for
ever.
Mary of Christmas Night.