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I
_February 20, 1890._ There is not a moment of my life that you have
shared with me which I cannot recall with a distinctness fairly sunlit.
My joys and my sorrows, my triumphs and my failures, have faded one by
one from emotions into memories, quickening neither pulse nor thought
when they recur to me, while you alone can set both throbbing. And
though for years I have known that if you enshrined any one in your
heart it would be some one worthier of you, yet I have loved you truly,
and whatever I have been in all else, in that one thing, at least, I
have been strong. Nor would I part with my tenderness for you, even
though it has robbed me of contentment; for all the pleasures of which
I can dream cannot equal the happiness of loving you. To God I owe
life, and you, Maizie, have filled that life with love; and to both I
bow my spirit in thanks, striving not to waste his gift lest I be
unworthy of the devotion I feel for you.
If I were a stronger man, I should not now be sobbing out my heart’s
blood through the tip of a pen. Instead of writing of my sorrow, I
should have battled for my love despite all obstacles. But I am no
Alexander to cut the knot of entanglements which the fates have woven
about me, and so, Midas-like, I sit morbidly whispering the hidden
grief, too great for me to bear in silence longer.
I can picture my first glimpse of you as vividly as my last. That dull
rainy day of indoor imprisonment seems almost to have been arranged as
a shadowbox to intensify the image graved so deeply on my memory. The
sun came, as you did, towards the end of the afternoon, as if light and
warmth were your couriers. When I shyly entered the library in answer
to my father’s call, you were standing in the full sunlight, and the
thought flashed through my mind that here was one of the angels of whom
I had read. You were only a child of seven,—to others, I suppose,
immature and formless; yet even then your eyes were as large and as
serious as they are to-day, and your curling brown hair had already a
touch of fire, as if sunshine had crept thereinto, and, liking its
abiding-place, had lingered lovingly.
“Don,” cried my father, as I stood hesitating in the doorway, “here’s a
new plaything for you. Give it a welcome and a kiss.”
I hung back, half in shyness, and half in fear that you were of heaven,
and not of earth, but you came forward and kissed me without the
slightest hesitation. The details are so clear that I remember you
hardly had to raise your head, though I was three years the older. Your
kiss dispelled all my timidity, and from the moment of that caress I
loved you. Not that I am so foolish as to believe I then felt for you
what now I feel, but by the clear light of retrospect I can see that
your coming brought a new element into my life,—an element which I
loved from the first, though with steadily deepening intensity, and I
cannot even now determine at what point a boy’s devotion became a
lover’s.
To the silent and lonely lad you were an inspiration. What I might have
grown to be had you not been my father’s ward I do not like to think,
for I was not a strong boy, and my shyness and timidity had prompted me
to much solitude and few friends, to much reading and to little play.
But it was decreed that you were to be the controlling influence of my
life, and in the first week you worked a revolution in my habits. I
wonder if now, when you see so many men eager to gratify your slightest
wish, you ever think of your earliest slave, whom you enticed to the
roof to drop pebbles or water on the passers-by, and into the cellar to
bury a toy soldier deep in the coal? Does memory ever bring back to you
how we started to paint the illustrations in Kingsborough’s Mexican
Antiquities, or how we built a fire round a doll on the library rug, in
imitation of the death of an Inca of Peru as pictured in dear old
Garcilasso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries? You were a lazy child about
reading, but when not tempting me into riotous mischief, you would sit
by me in the library and let me show you the pictures in the old books,
and I smile now to think what my running versions of the texts must
have been. Our favorite books were the Nuremberg Chronicle and De Bry’s
Voyages, for the pictures of which, since the Latin was beyond me, I
invented explanations and even whole stories,—stories over which you
grew big-eyed and sleepless, and which we both came to believe so
firmly that we never dreamed them to be the cause for the occasional
outburst of laughter from my father, when he was in the library.
Even in those days you veiled your witchery and mischief-loving nature
behind that serious face with its curved but unsmiling mouth. Keen as
many of our pleasures were and blithe as were our pranks, I can
scarcely remember a smile upon your face. Now and then the merriest of
laughs rang out, fairly infectious in its happiness and joy, but of so
rare recurrence as to win for you the sobriquet of “Madam Gravity.”
Your inscrutability allured and charmed me then as I have seen it
fascinate others since. I shall never understand you, and yet I think I
misunderstand you less than others do, for you cannot hide from me the
quick thought and merry nature which you keep so well hidden from them;
and often when others think you most abstracted or sedate, I know you
are holding high carnival with Puck and Momus. Again and again I have
noted your gravity in the most humorous situations or with the most
ridiculous of persons, and have smiled in secret with you. Last summer,
when my mother won such a laugh by telling, as something that had
happened to her personally, the old story from Peele’s “Merrie
Conceits” which we had read as children, you looked grave, though the
incident had twice the humor to you that it had to the others. In my
own merriment I could not help glancing at you, and though neither of
us laughed, we understood each other’s amusement. Evidently you were
not used to having your mood comprehended, for after a moment you
seemed to realize that I was responding to what you had thought unknown
to all. You looked startled and then puzzled, and I suppose that I
became even more of a mystery to you than ever. You could not know that
my knowledge of you came from those early days when your nature was
taking shape. Without my memory of you as a child you would be as great
an enigma to me as to the rest of your friends, and so no doubt it is a
small thing in which to glory. But it gives me joy to feel that I
understand you better, and at this very moment know more of your
thoughts than your husband ever will.
I owe to you many dark closetings and whippings that I never deserved.
My mother complained that from being a troublesome child I had become a
fiend of mischief, but my father laughed and predicted that you would
make a man of me. I wonder if you ever think of him, and what your
thought is? We both so loved him that I cannot believe he has passed
entirely out of your heart. How ready he was to be our comrade! Whether
tired or busy he would join us, not as mentor but as playfellow; and
now that I know what there was to depress his spirits at that time, I
marvel at his cheer and courage. Would that I had one half of the
bravery with which he met his troubles!
Perhaps he was right in his assumption that you would have made a man
of me. I do not recollect any act of mine which bore the semblance of
courage except the rescue of the street dog from those boys. I hated to
see the poor beast tortured, but I feared the roughs, and so stood
faltering while you charged among them. Not till one of them struck you
was I driven to help, but I can still feel the fury which then took
possession of me. I was blind with rage, and a great weight seemed
pressing on my chest as I rushed among the boys and fought, hardly
conscious of the blows I gave or received; indeed, the whole thing was
a haze until I found myself sitting on the sidewalk, crying. For days I
went about with a bandage over my eye; but my father drank my health
that night, and I remember his pat of approval, and hear his “Bravo,
Donald, I’m proud of you.” It was significant that I received all the
praise, and you none; my courage was questionable, yours was not.
Those happy, thoughtless years! The one kill-joy was my mother, and she
made your life and mine so grievous with her needless harshness, quick
temper, and neglect of our comfort that I think she must have made my
father’s equally miserable. Dimly I can recollect her sudden gusts of
temper, and his instant dismissal of us from the room when they began.
Do you remember how he used to come up to the nursery to smoke, often
staying till our bedtime, and then how we could hear him go downstairs
and out of the front door? We did not know that he went to his club,
nor at what hour he returned; and if we had it would have meant nothing
to us. But we both knew he found no pleasure with my mother, and we
felt he was right, for in avoiding her he was but doing what was our
chief endeavor. I have heard many express admiration for her beauty,
for her church and charitable work, for her brilliancy in society, for
her executive ability, and for her general public spirit. Her neglect
of family duties, her extravagance, her frequent absences, and her
fatigued petulance when at home were known only to her household. Our
servants rarely remained a month with us,—were changed so often as to
destroy all possibility of comfort; but we three were not free to
follow their example, and so our misery made us the dearer to one
another. I am proud to think that, close as we drew together, my father
never uttered in my presence a single word of criticism or complaint
against my mother, and I should be the better man if, instead of
writing these unfilial words, I left them unsaid. Indeed, I will not
spend more of my evening on these old memories, but begin on my work.
Do you remember, Maizie, how my father taught us to give him and each
other a parting word? “Good-night, father. Good-night, Maizie. God
bless you both,” it used to be. He sleeps now in his grave, and three
years ago you barred your door to me, but still I can say as of old,
“Good-night, Maizie. God bless and keep you, dear.”