Beloved: I wish you could have been with me to look out into this garden
last night when the spirit moved me there. I had started for bed, but
became sensitive of something outside not normal. Whether my ear missed
the usual echoes and so guessed a muffled world I do not know. To open the
door was like slicing into a wedding-cake; then,--where was I to put a
foot into that new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness? I hobbled out in a pair
of my uncle's. I suppose it is because I know every tree and shrub in its
true form that snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here: it
becomes a garden of entombments. Now and then some heap would shuffle
feebly under its shroud, but resurrection was not to be: the Lawson
cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for me to shake and set free;
and the silence was wonderful. I padded about till I froze: this morning I
can see my big hoof-marks all over the place, and Benjy has been
scampering about in them as if he found some flavor of me there. The trees
are already beginning to shake themselves loose, and the spell is over:
but it had a wonderful hold while it lasted. I take a breath back into
last night, and feel myself again full of a romance without words that I
cannot explain. If you had been there, even, I think I could have
forgotten I had you by me, the place was so weighed down with its sense of
solitude. It struck eleven while I was outside, and in that, too, I could
hear a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices and lay even on
the outer edge of the bell itself. Across the park there are dead boughs
cracking down under the weight of snow; and it would be very like you to
tramp over just because the roads will be so impossible.
I heard yesterday a thing which made me just a little more free and easy
in mind, though I had nothing sensibly on my conscience. Such a good youth
who two years ago believed I was his only possible future happiness, is
now quite happy with a totally different sort of person. I had a little
letter from him, shy and stately, announcing the event. I thought it such
a friendly act, for some have never the grace to unsay their grievances,
however much actually blessed as a consequence of them.
With that off my mind I can come to you swearing that there have been no
accidents on anybody's line of life through a mistake in signals, or a
flying in the face of them, where I have had any responsibility. As for
you, and as you know well by now, my signals were ready and waiting
before you sought for them. "Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you!" was
their giveaway attitude.
I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy. Good-by. If you come you
will find this letter on the hall table, and me you will probably hear
barking behind the rhododendrons.--So much your most loving.