“And then hid the key in a bundle of letters.”
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton._
BERLIN, March 18, 1893.
MY DEAR MOTHER: Really I hardly feel equal to a detailed description of
our trip over the ocean. Why is it that I remember only the painful
things about our journey? Surely there were pleasant people, cultivated
men and graceful women, such as one always meets in these days of free
interchange between different nations. But I have observed that some
temperaments catch first and make most visible the shadows upon the
landscape. Much as I love the hues and tints of the changeful waters, I
seem to remember only the rolling ship, and between me and the thought
of the blue skies and the splendid sunsets which I would have carried
away as a treasured memory, comes some trifling but harassing
recollection. So narrow and individual is the composing-stone upon which
our impressions are made up.
I assume, dear mother, that you remember our serious conversation that
last night before my marriage, as, sitting upon my couch and looking
into my sleepy eyes, you half chided me for that which you called—for
want of a better term—indifference.
Pardon me, ’tis a word with a sex. A woman may love, she may hate, she
may dissemble, but, pose as she will, there is no profile in her
passion. I do not deny I am going to school to my own heart. I am
honestly endeavoring to follow your advice. I am learning to love. Let
me say in the beginning it is a mistake to believe that men love deeply.
If ever they do, the object of their passion is themselves. Is this a
sound foundation to build domestic faith upon? However, as I have said,
I shall try very earnestly to do my part.
The baron told me this morning that as Americans were a nation of
plebeians, I would naturally suffer many disabilities even as the
Baroness Von Eulaw, to which I replied rather hotly that honor and
courage required no purple swaddlings to hide their proportions, and
that we Americans sprang full created from the brain of regenerate
thought, whereupon his manly fist gathered muscle for a moment, then as
speedily relaxed, and he only slammed the door of his dressing-room
between us. Believe me, my dear mother, I was very sorry for the scene,
and I have no excuse to offer save the gaping wound to my patriotism,
which I find much more sensitive over here than at home.
We have constant engagements, and I feel a little worn, though otherwise
quite well. Can you pardon a letter wholly devoted to myself? and in
return will you not tell me all about yourself, dear papa, and everybody
you know?
Always faithfully your own, ELLEN.
_From Mrs. Perces Thornton to the Baroness Von Eulaw._
ROXBURY, Mass., April 2, 1893.
MY DEAR DAUGHTER: I have your first letter written from Berlin, but how
sad! That dreadful sea must have made you bilious. It has always just
such an effect on your father; he sees the whole earth through smoked
glasses.
But I can only imagine you as in a constant succession of raptures. Such
a marriage for an American girl! A baron with such deportment, and such
a delightful accent! I have no doubt, too, he is much richer than he
represented. I assure you, the young ladies of Boston’s high circles
have turned all hues of the rainbow with envy, and you ought to find
great pleasure in that recollection alone. Besides, such opportunities
as you are having to meet crowned heads, and feel yourself as one among
the titled people of Europe! What elevation! What distinction! You must
not forget to make the most copious notes, so that you will be able to
impress your superiority upon the world of society when you return.
Really, you should be, as I know you are, very happy. Of course “scenes”
are unpleasant to one like yourself, not foreign bred. But I am told
that such experiences are the real thing with nobility, especially if
there is an American wife. And it is reasonable to suppose that high
blood should feel intolerant toward all forms of assertiveness on the
part of women, especially American women.
Therefore, be a little discreet, my dear, and remember what an English
woman said to you, that it is not good form to be either clever or
artistic, and above all patriotic.
You speak of shadows in your life. It was only the other day I read from
one of your own books on the Newtonian theory of color, that dark
objects were such as absorbed the light and reflected only somber tints,
and I am sure it is so with your life; it is holding the light within
itself.
I will not write more to-day, for your correspondence will be large, and
time precious with you. How radiant you must look with your graceful
gowns and your classic face; almost equal to a born princess! Believe
me, my dear child, I am very proud of your noble marriage and of your
dutiful conduct in making such an one largely, let me confess, to please
me. And of all things, do not trouble yourself too much about the love
business—that will all come about in good time, and if it does not—well,
I can only say you will have a majority with you.
Greet your noble husband with the pride and joy that I feel in him, and
present your loving father, who so seldom writes. Send fresh photos of
your dear self, the baroness, and the baron, and do not permit them to
exaggerate his nose, which is quite full enough at best, though a true
sign of the blood.
Your devoted mother,
PERCES THORNTON.
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton._
BERLIN, April 20, 1893.
MY DEAR MOTHER: So far from the monopolizing effect of minor matters of
which I complained in my last, I seem to be losing my individuality
altogether. Have you ever possessed your mind of one subject or object
to the absolute exclusion of even yourself? What an unpleasant condition
of mind it is! The baron I find to be a man most peculiarly constituted.
The somewhat dominant manner which you suppose to be foreign breeding,
as you expressed it, seems to have developed into an engrossing
self-consequence, which appears to draw its vitality, if I may be
pardoned for saying so, largely from his new marital connection.
For instance, at the opening of the season we attended the Emperor’s
Easter ball. According to our customs, after concluding the first dance
with the baron, I accepted a waltz with an English nobleman, whom I had
met on some previous occasion. We were resting for a moment after a
round of the spacious ballroom when I felt my arm seized from behind,
and with a muttered oath the baron commanded my instant release and
return home.
What should I have done? Disregard him and precipitate a scandal?
Impossible. I made excuse in some hypothetical disarrangement of my
dress and retired. I am only able to write because it is my left arm
which suffered the accident. The subsequent explanations of the baron
were, of course, frivolous, but I was too relieved by any form of
apology to add words, which, without reference to their significance,
always irritate him. I mention this little incident in order to show you
how it is that my visible life is subordinated, albeit my spirit is in
no way depressed though severely harassed.
As I write I am doubtful if I ought to speak of these things at all. I
do not ask myself what is due to my rank here, for that was conferred by
him, but is it womanly to stand before the world an intelligent and
willing indorser of his character and conduct, having given my public
vows for better or worse, and then, cowering behind his faults, denounce
such acts as only, at worst, affect me? Indeed, I must exercise more
courage and less candor. One thing is certain, I am constantly looking
for the better traits in his nature, and am making every effort to call
them forth. Thus I escape self-reproach at least. But I am self-abashed
at my attitude, for I abhor dissembling. The baron loves to taunt me
with this trait, which he calls rudeness, and declares it to be the
result of my “Yankee training.” I only smile at this, for, as I have
said, he cannot brook discussion.
But, my dear mamma, enough of this, for you will think my marriage a
failure, and contribute my experiences to the building up of Mona
Caird’s theories. By the way, how shocked I felt at reading them,
although I now divine some meanings that I had overlooked! But never can
I tolerate the thought that there are not people—ideal, if you
please—whose marriages might be too sublimated for earthly contract, and
are, therefore—according to the proverb—made in heaven. Dear mother,
pardon me, there is something wanting in your letters. You promised me
to mention everybody we ever knew, or something to that effect. I am
absolutely famishing for news of our old friends. By the way, how
peculiar it is, I seem to remember with singular pertinacity the people
we knew before we came to Boston, and dear, beautiful Denver is ever
before my eyes. Please remember everything, and above all your
affectionate
ELLEN.
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Miss Fanny Fielding, Denver, Colorado._
BERLIN, May 1, 1893.
MY DEAR OLD SCHOOLMATE: Your kind letter makes me homesick. Can you
imagine a homesick bride? Even before fruitage appears from the orange
bloom, dismated for the decking of my nuptial robes, or even the
fragrance departed from the yellowing buds on the garniture laid away to
rest and rust, I am sitting with an unwilling face to the open door of
the future, and groping with a blind but eager hand among the rustling
leaves of a near past, for some familiar touch or sound to summon back
the half-tasted joys which I so ruthlessly flung away.
You ask me for some advice concerning marriage, illumined, as you
tersely put it, by experience. My sweet friend, what a useless task you
impose upon me. Whenever was woman directed by the experiences of
others, however wise or however bitter such experiences may have been?
Always some suggestion or exception to change the verdict. “Mine has
black eyes, yours has blue, which makes all the difference.” Or, “one is
fat, the other lean.” Or, “this one walks, the other rides”—so infinite
the variety of excuses, so single the faith of woman.
What else, then, shall we call marriage but destiny? The heart knows its
wants and we know its plaintive cry, as a mother knows the wail of her
famishing babe; yet for some frivolous fancy or conceit, some wound to
our vanity, some plethoric ambition, or some glittering paste or bauble,
we stifle the natural cry of the human heart, and wait for the mystic
note upon which is to be constructed the music of our future. Alas! in
the metaphor you understand so well, we too often touch only the
diminished seventh, and the sure, complete, resolving chord is never
sounded.
Somewhat, too, our institutions of marriage are at fault, or at least
the laws and customs which control them. With a nation of men, free,
rational, and liberal, we have a nation of women enslaved, dishonest,
and miserable, and it is among her noblest and most common phases of
fate that she goes mutely to her grave, a victim of such weak social
prejudices as have grown to be even a subject of satire among Europeans.
Conscientiousness is a boasted virtue among Boston people of certain
high cult, yet how many of her beautiful women go to the altar with a
lie upon their maidenly lips? Why?—For the reason that there is some man
whom she loves and dares not declare it. For the reason that society
sets a seal upon her lips and turns her life into a drain-channel for
misbegotten vows. For the reason that she cannot break the frost-bound
usages of cowardly error with one stroke of her puny fist, and openly
propose to join fortunes with the man after her own heart and her own
high convictions. And so she rakes over the cold, unfruitful soil in her
own soul, and plants the germ of a falsehood or a folly, and waits for
the accident of some quickening power, in slavish and unheroic patience.
Witness the result: Some masculine hand, more or less clumsy or more or
less cunning, little matter if it bring a wedding ring, sheds ephemeral
warmth upon the unsanctified ground, and the victim starts upon her
lonely, loveless journey toward race building and sacrifice.
As I indicated, dear Fanny, I have not drawn for my picture largely upon
individual experiences, neither are my opinions stimulated by any
observations taken from this side the water. Indeed, I even prefer, of
kindred evils, the insipid method which leaves the marriage question in
the hands of the parents. But let me leave this for subsequent
discussion, for my letter is already too long, and I have not gossiped
at all, and I remember, dear girl, how you do love innocent gossip.
Write to me often and I will fill my letters with the sweetest of
nothings if you will. Love and adieu and think of me as your devoted
friend,
ELLEN.
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton._
BERLIN, May 10, 1893.
DEAREST MOTHER: “Let fate do her worst, there are moments of joy,” and
such moments I owe to my fondness for music. What would have been all
these dreary weeks and months of shallow acting, if the depths of my
soul had not been stirred by the genius of that creative force which,
mocking at our own crude disguises, rehabilitates pain with the fair
seeming of pleasure, which relegates near sorrows to the realms of
tradition, and illusionises common care?
Art, in any form, I conceive to be the benefactor of the human race. If
truth, shorn of its infinitude of possibilities, constitutes the
religion of the civilized world, if the _deus et machina_, as Æschylus
somewhere has it, unlyrical and unleavened by beauty of device, by
rhetoric or action and climax, be persuasive and instructive and
inspiring, then how ineffably shall truth have gained by the development
of its powers through visible forms of dramatic conceit, through
association with the elements of art, through characterization, through
skillful adaptation, through harmonized mediæ of appeal to the sense or
the sentiment, the sympathies or the imagination?
I am reminded here of an incident which occurred in our box at the Grand
Opera House, during a late performance of Die Meistersinger, which
resulted—as is not unusual in these days—unpleasantly. My husband, as
you may remember, affects music solely for the paraphernalia of the
stage, for the glitter and show of boxes and stalls, for the exposed
shoulders of the diamonded dames of fashion, for the numbers of men with
eyeglasses and uniforms—anything, in fact, but the music, which rather
bores him.
Therefore it is I apprehend that he discusses music so
incomprehensibly—to say the least—I would not say irrationally.
Somewhere during the development of the plot I was struck with the
similarity of the dramatic motive with that of the Greek tragedies,
especially the choral odes, where occurs the element of transition which
some scholars call the evolutionary or perhaps the re-incarnating period
of the ancient drama. This similarity—in some ways identical—I
inadvertently alluded to in a more or less critical review of the opera
and its construction, which I ventured between acts, in the presence of
a party of Americans who were our guests for the occasion.
Suddenly as thought, the baron’s face was aflame. But “what it were
unwise to do ’twere weaker to regret,” and I prepared to defend my
position as best became me. “You call my divine countryman a
plagiarist,” he hissed between his teeth. Our male guest glowered, and
the ladies with heightened color looked at the orchestra.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said I, with an assumed smile, “I did not say
so, though I admit that my suggestion was unfortunate in its inference.”
The baron sprang to his feet and stood over me, his arms akimbo and the
well-known look of suppressed rage upon his face.
“You called my divine countryman a plagiarist,” he repeated, gazing out
over the audience, and feeling for my slippered foot with his heel,
which he settled firmly upon my silken-clad instep. The hurt made me
wince, but I could not remove my foot from the vise. Then, in order to
mollify his temper, which I had grown to know too well how to deal with,
I added laughingly, though half wild with pain as he deadened his weight
upon my poor instep:—
“If your countryman were amenable to the charge of plagiarism, so also
is our Shakespeare, for in the comedy of Trinummus, Megaronides says,
‘The evil that we know is best. To venture on an untried ill,’ etc., and
Shakespeare, two thousand years later, said, ‘Rather bear the ills we
have than fly to others that we know not of.’”
“You call my divine countryman a plagiarist,” half-childishly,
half-insanely repeated my noble lord, grinding my foot beneath his heel.
A cry of pain escaped me, which a timely crash of cymbals in the
orchestra had the effect to drown.
“Well, what of it” blurted the American, throwing his full weight, as if
by accident, against the baron’s shoulder, and then turning to me with
an apology resumed his place. Now while I never take refuge in my sex
for at least a verbal retaliation of the wrongs I receive from my
husband, it goes without saying that the man who visits brutality in any
form upon a woman is a coward. But I had never seen the baron insulted,
and was therefore wholly unprepared for the profuseness with which he
apologized to our guests, and the blandness with which he offered his
hand as he bade them good-night. But the most humiliating part of this
humiliating affair was the fact that I was forced to repeat an apology
fashioned by himself, the entire length of our journey home, even until
the carriage stopped at the door.
It is not clear to me, my dear mother, that I am justified in rehearsing
to you, or to anyone, details of my life, which may seem trivial, but
for which I am able to offer no other excuse than your own solicitous
insistence. I am always promising myself that every next letter shall be
dictated in more cheerful spirit. Till then adieu. Present me with
kindest love and beg papa to write me. I do so long for a sight of his
letters. Love to those who love me.
As ever, devotedly yours, ELLEN.
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton._
BERLIN, June 21, 1893.
MY DEAREST MOTHER: How shall we account for our various moods? Yesterday
I was miserable; to-day I am joyful; to-morrow I may be hopeful or
heartbroken, according as—oh! I forgot to say I am all alone; the baron
has gone to St. Petersburg. I am supposed to have accompanied him, and
so nobody comes. But I am not lonely; now that I am left to myself I see
how beautiful is the world about me.
This morning I looked from my windows upon the river. The sharp lights I
had watched so often swiftly changing to shadows, the warring glances
suggestive only of inner strife, with all its complexity of passion,
were lost in the soft peaceful flow of the waters as they hurried on to
the ultimate sea. And I thought how much of this mood is due to fancy,
that untenable, mercurial, and sublimated quality of the mind, half
trickery, half truth, and altogether elusive as vapor. But how
profligate of that precious sense of pleasure so steadily withheld from
my heart these later months! Too precious, indeed, for the operations
and experiments of the mental laboratory to which I seemingly so
recklessly submitted it, and so I dismissed analysis and clung to my
fancies, which at least made me happy in the present.
After my breakfast I prepared myself for a walk, with only my little
fox-terrier for a companion. Poor little Boston, how grateful he seemed!
I could see him laugh with joy as his little brown lips quivered with
flexible feeling. Notwithstanding his many years, he could scarcely find
footing for his bounding steps for looking back at me to search my
laughing eyes. You remember who gave me my terrier, away out in Denver?
how he was brought to me in two strong, guardful arms, a little
loose-skinned, wise-eyed puppy, so quiet and serenely happy in the warm
embrace—where was I? oh, yes! talking about Boston—so we pulled some
roses, Boston and I. But never looked roses so red, or green so tender
or so vivid, and I longed to find the secret of their voluptuous bloom
and half-suffocating fragrance, but that I guessed all was again fancy;
only an easy, translatable pinch of dust and a resolvable stain; a
simple stroke of creative power and a dash of ether—only a rose.
How easy seem the processes of nature with harmonized material for
working out the thought! Nature never experiments; gravitation is her
law, deflection is anarchy, and defiance a destroyer. Love, I deem, is
only obedience to this law. Obscure as are its operations and subtle as
its teachings are, any smallest portion of scholarship, leveled at the
finding out, divested of preconceived ideas and personal bearings, but
persistently and conscientiously agitated by scientific and organized
effort, might revolutionize a world of error, and establish a sure basis
for sentiment and social reform.
For I believe that unhappy marriages are a direct result of ignorance.
Passions called by various names go to make up the system. Sordidness,
vanity, interdependence, weak abeyance to custom, contribute to the sum
of human misery. But ignorance is the basis of the organized error. For
what manner of men or women would deliberately entail upon themselves
the shackled conditions of a loveless marriage, which has no alternative
but subordination or rebellion? For only in love—another name for
harmony—may be found that unity which leaves no room for sacrifice or
misconceit.
But, dearest mother, what can you think of my letters? I began to tell
you of my one happy day and have spread my speculations over the whole
human race. I started to take you for a promenade along Unter den
Linden, and to rest by the cool fountain in the Lustgarten, and have
ended with a few feeble remarks upon the possible sources of sentiment
and sorrow.
But Boston is waiting for his dinner, for he dines with me to-night.
What a jolly day we’ve had, eh, Boston? and we will sleep and dream of
you, dear mamma, and many more, for none but bidden guests must fill my
room to-night. By the way, I do wonder if the poor, weak brain of my
little terrier is in any degree susceptible of being stirred by memories
of his old friends? In any event, I envy him, for he is not amenable to
the necessities of a false life, “a liar of unspoken lies.”
Dear mamma, a sweet good-night. I am sending you a few pictures picked
up at Lepkes. The group I am sure you will enjoy, though I like better
the portrait by Van Dyck. There is a haunting sort of look about it,
reminding me of someone I have known somewhere. I wonder if you will
discern it? Probably it was only a passing fancy, one of such as have
filled my brain all day long.
Again love and good-by. ELLEN.
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton._
MENTONE, Italy, August 10, 1893.
DEAREST MOTHER: How rebellious my heart and impatient my pen as I take
it up to write words which only your mother’s ear should catch from my
lips!
Where shall I begin to tell you the history of the past month? Really,
my memory seems too surcharged with a sense of bitterness and wrong to
do me service. But I must lead you step by step, reluctant as I know you
are to follow me behind the gilded arras.
After his return from St. Petersburg, the baron developed more
pronounced signs of jealousy than had ever appeared hitherto. Perhaps
this feeling was stimulated by my last letter to you, which I
inadvertently left unmailed, and which he opened and read. Suspicious
husbands you know are as jealous of moods as of men, and not to be
miserable “when the Sultan goes to Ispahan” is indeed a crime. I believe
there are few jealous husbands who are themselves guiltless. I do not
think, however, that this test applies to my own sex, albeit I do not
take refuge in the exception—Heaven save the mark!
But the baron came home, as I said, quite confirmed in many unpleasant
ways I had remarked before. Without any apparent cause he stole about my
room in unslippered feet, and listened furtively at the keyholes. He
locked the doors whenever he passed through, and spoke to the servants
through a crevice. Instead of his usual violence he whined his
complaints of my demeanor toward him in the weakest and most supine
fashion. But that which exasperated me most was, and is still, his
unaccountable pertinacity. He would place his chair close by me and hold
his knee against mine, or his elbow, or his foot, while, with purpling
face and hanging mouth, he entreated me not to leave him, until, in half
insane protest, I would break clear of him and throw open a window, or
bathe my hands and face in utter exhaustion, or—I had almost said—sense
of contamination. In his fits of rage there is something genuine from an
animal, if not from a manly, point of view. But how shall I deal with
this new phase? Ah, well! let me get on with my letter, for I have much
to say, and that is why I am dallying.
I consented to come to Mentone on account of my health. Finding myself
growing weak and failing, the physicians ordered an immediate change,
and recommended the old cure virtually—to take myself out of their
hands. The baron loves to play, and I suspect is a little too well known
in gaming circles in Berlin.
Therefore when he proposed Mentone so early in the season, or, indeed,
altogether out of season, I—quite knowing that it meant Monte
Carlo—accepted, and with valet and maid and dear old Boston we came.
Result, financial ruin! The baron played recklessly. Each time when I
saw him he was feverish and abstracted. I did not ask the cause, whether
he were winner or loser, for, like most women, I believe that everybody
finally loses, but I was not prepared for the dénouement, for he has
absolutely lost not only all his ready money, but is heavily in debt,
and will need to resort to further mortgage of his landed estates.
Weak and foolhardy as he was, I pity him, for what must have been his
feelings as, driving down the Corniche road overhanging the old sea, he
reflected how many men had sought forgetfulness for just such acts of
folly in the tideless waters. Only that the baron has other ideas about
reparation, for he came home and first proposed that I write my father
for money to make good his losses. Taking courage from my silence, he
suggested that I cable my message at once.
This latter I proposed not to do, as I informed him in very few words.
He has left the hotel in a terrible fit of rage, vowing revenge with his
last accents. And I am writing this letter while I wait, meanwhile
wondering how much I ought to blame myself for my unhappy life, or if I
ought not to lock the secret in my own breast, even from you, my mother.
But a secret is a dumb devil, and so long as there is another hand to
glance the dart, it rarely wounds to death. I will mail this at once in
order that it shall not fall into his hands.
Dearest mamma, are these letters never to cease? I think I notice that
your replies are more reserved, and I have thought full of pain and
discouragement. But do not feel discouraged. I realize the resources
within me, and I have a fund of reserved power which I may summon in an
exigency. I have not fairly contemplated anything in the future; to deal
with the present has been my purpose. Each joy and each sorrow in its
turn, so shall no preconceived action operate to the ends of injustice
or unfairness. I close this in haste but lasting love.
As always your daughter, ELLEN.
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton._
MENTONE, Italy, September 1, 1893.
O MY BELOVED MOTHER: While I feel always sure of your earnest
sympathies, how shall I expect you to appreciate the sentiment of horror
which this new and fiendish device for torturing my feelings visits upon
me! How can I write it?—my poor little Boston is dead.
That fact, with a few silent tears, and a day or two of depression, I
could have borne as the end of all things mortal. But he was as foully
murdered as ever was the victim of the most infernal plot, for he was
given no poorest or most unequal chance to fight for his life, which was
as dear to him as mine to me—and that is the least possible to be said.
I am in no condition of mind to discuss ethics, or to philosophize upon
the events which led to this tragical termination of differences, of
which poor little Boston’s life paid the forfeit.
It may be that I was wrong, certainly I would have made any terms to
have saved my poor terrier from his terrible fate, few as were the years
he would have lived at most.
I am not unaware that there are certain concessions, and certain acts of
graciousness, which, in a limited sense, may properly be expected of
every wife toward a reasonable husband. Not his boasted superiority by
any means, but the fact that she is measurably relieved from financial
stress or responsibility, constitutes an unwritten law among
well-thinking wives everywhere, I believe, and makes the demand upon
her. But I considered nothing but the enormity of my husband’s
exactions, and erred in my estimate of the possibility of my husband’s
brutality. I wish there were a stronger word which I might politely use.
Shall I give you briefly the harrowing details of this ruffianly act of
cowardice? I think I told you in my last how the baron had left the
house, filled with vindictive rage at my refusal to demand of my father
large sums of money for his gambling losses. In about an hour he
returned and renewed his proposition with increased violence, at the
same time seizing a pen and writing a cablegram, which he commanded me
to sign.
Remembering that I had given him considerable sums of money from time to
time, amounting to many thousands of dollars, I entreated him to wait
for a day, while he should make me understand the condition of his
financial affairs. This proposition he received with the most frightful
oaths. He declared that he would take my life, and would begin by
killing my pet dog. No sooner said than done. He rushed to the veranda,
where poor little Boston lay stretched upon his cushion asleep in the
sun, and, seizing him by the neck, he dashed him violently to the ground
below. A few minutes later my little friend was brought to me still
feebly conscious, but mangled, bleeding, dying.
How can I ever forget, who ever did who has ever witnessed it forget
that last questioning, beseeching look of affection and dumb fright
which a dying animal turns upon the face of someone he has loved? Is it
less than human or more? Not till the mists gathered across his pretty
brown eyes was that last eloquent appeal swept away. “What have I done?”
“What have I done?” was the question he was asking of me. Who shall say
whether he received his answer in some later and easier translatable
speech than mine, in some new and disenthralled state of being? Who
shall say that he did not carry away with him a love which was all love,
with no taint of selfishness or ulterior thought, quickened by no new
speculation, or tradition, or sanction, or human edict? Who shall say
that the attributes of faith, and self-surrender, and charity, and
forgiveness, and loyalty are lost because in one incarnation they were
tongue-tied? For myself I want to see my dogs again. They were my loved
companions, as are my books or my works of art. And if the fire destroy
them, are their contents naught or worthless because an unlettered man
could not read them? At best an after life is a problem, but let us put
the problems together and one may help to solve the other, for half a
truth is oftenest a lie.
I have sought distraction in these comments, but my sorrow returns to
me, dear mother, and my eyes are too full of tears to be able to see the
lines. _Vale_, poor Boston, and a grateful throb of gladness that I have
a dear mother to whom I can tell my grief.
Your loving but unhappy ELLEN.