Dear Highness: I begin not to be able to name you anything, for there is
not a word for you that will do! "Highness" you are: but that leaves gaps
and coldnesses without end. "Royal," yet much more serene than royal:
though by that I don't mean any detraction from your royalty, for I never
saw a man carry his invisible crown with so level a head and no
haughtiness at all: and that is the finest royalty of look possible.
I look at you and wonder so how you have grown to this--to have become
king so quietly without any coronation ceremony. You have thought more
than you should for happiness at your age; making me, by that one line
in your forehead, think you were three years older than you really are.
I wish--if I dare wish you anything different--that you were! It makes
me uncomfortable to remember that I am--what? Almost half a year your
elder as time flies:--not really, for your brain was born long before
mine began to rattle in its shell. You say quite _old_ things, and
quietly, as if you had had them in your mind ten years already. When you
told me about your two old pensioners, the blind man and his wife, whom
you brought to so funny a reconciliation, I felt ("mir war, ich wuszte
nicht wie") that I would like very much to go blindfold led by you: it
struck me suddenly how happy would be a blindfoldness of perfect trust
such as one might have with your hands on one. I suppose that is what in
religion is called faith: I haven't it there, my dear; but I have it in
you now. I love you, beginning to understand why: at first I did not. I
am ashamed not to have discovered it earlier. The matter with you is
that you have goodness prevailing in you, an integrity of goodness, I
mean:--a different thing from there being a whereabouts for goodness in
you; _that_ we all have in some proportion or another. I was quite right
to love you: I know it now,--I did not when I first did.
Yesterday I was turning over a silly "confession book" in which a rose was
everybody's favorite flower, manliness the finest quality for a man, and
womanliness for a woman (which is as much as to say that pig is the best
quality for pork, and pork for pig): till I came upon one different from
the others, and found myself saying "Yes" all down the page.
I turned over for the signature, and found my own mother's. Was it not a
strange sweet meeting? And only then did the memory of her handwriting
from far back come to me. She died, dear Highness, before I was seven
years old. I love her as I do my early memory of flowers, as something
very sweet, hardly as a real person.
I noticed she loved best in men and women what they lack most often: in a
man, a fair mind; in a woman, courage. "Brave women and fair men," she
wrote. Byron might have turned in his grave at having his dissolute
stiff-neck so wrung for him by misquotation. And she--it must have been
before the eighties had started the popular craze for him--chose Meredith,
my own dear Meredith, for her favorite author. How our tastes would have
run together had she lived!
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.