I shall never have the courage to tell you, yet I feel you ought to
know. I think every one attributes to every one else less
shrewdness than he possesses. I know you have never given me the
credit of seeing that you did not love me. And you were so kind and
considerate and so patient with my moods that no doubt I should
have been deceived had I not known what love is. I think, to have
loved and to have been loved develops in a woman a sort of sixth
sense--sensitiveness to love. And that had been developed in me,
and when it never responded to your efforts to deceive me, I knew
you did not love me.
Well, neither did I love you, though I was able to hide it from
you. And it has often irritated me that you were so unobservant.
You know now the cause of many of my difficult moods, which have
seemed causeless.
I admired you from the first time we met. I have liked you, I have
been proud of you, I would not have been the wife of any other man
in the world, I would not have had any other father for my
children. But I have kept on loving the man I loved before I met
you.
Why? I don't know. I despised him for his weaknesses. I should
never have married him, though mother and Ed both feared I would. I
think I loved him because I knew he loved me. That is the way it is
with women--they seldom love independently. Men like to love; women
like to be loved. And, poor, unworthy creature that he was, still
he would have died for me, though God had denied him the strength
to live for me. But all that God gave him--the power to love--he
gave me. And so he was different in my eyes from what he was in any
one's else in the world. And I loved him.
I don't tell you this because I feel regret or remorse. I don't;
there never was a wife truer than I, for I put him completely
aside. I tell you, because I want you to remember me right after
I'm gone, Harvey dear. You may remember how I was silly and jealous
of you, and think I am mistaken about my own feelings. But jealousy
doesn't mean love. When people really love, I think it's seldom
that they're jealous. What makes people jealous usually is
suspecting the other person of having the same sort of secret they
have themselves. It hurt my vanity that you didn't love me; and it
stung me to think you cared for some one else, just as I did.
I want you to remember me gently. And somehow I think that, after
you've read this, you will, even if you did love some one else. If
you ever see this at all, Harvey--and I may tear it up some day on
impulse--but if you ever do see it, I shall be dead, and we shall
both be free. And I want you to come to me and look at me and--
It ended thus abruptly. No doubt she had intended to open the envelope
and finish it--but, what more was there to say?
I think she must have been content with the thoughts that were in my
mind as I looked down at her lying in death's inscrutable calm. I had
one of my secretaries hunt out the man she had loved--a sad, stranded
wreck of a man he had become; but since that day he has been sheltered
at least from the worst of the bufferings to which his incapacity for
life exposed him.
There was a time when I despised incapables; then I pitied them; but
latterly I have felt for them the sympathetic sense of brotherhood. Are
we not all incapables? Differing only in degree, and how slightly there,
if we look at ourselves without vanity; like practice-sketches put upon
the slate by Nature's learning hand and impatiently sponged away.