_Vailima_, _April_ 1894.
MY DEAR FRIEND,—I have at last got some photographs, and hasten to send
you, as you asked, a portrait of Tusitala. He is a strange person; not
so lean, say experts, but infinitely battered; mighty active again on the
whole; going up and down our break-neck road at all hours of the day and
night on horseback; holding meetings with all manner of chiefs; quite a
political personage—God save the mark!—in a small way, but at heart very
conscious of the inevitable flat failure that awaits every one. I shall
never do a better book than _Catriona_, that is my high-water mark, and
the trouble of production increases on me at a great rate—and mighty
anxious about how I am to leave my family: an elderly man, with elderly
preoccupations, whom I should be ashamed to show you for your old friend;
but not a hope of my dying soon and cleanly, and ‘winning off the stage.’
Rather I am daily better in physical health. I shall have to see this
business out, after all; and I think, in that case, they should have—they
might have—spared me all my ill-health this decade past, if it were not
to unbar the doors. I have no taste for old age, and my nose is to be
rubbed in it in spite of my face. I was meant to die young, and the gods
do not love me.
This is very like an epitaph, bar the handwriting, which is anything but
monumental, and I dare say I had better stop. Fanny is down at her own
cottage planting or deplanting or replanting, I know not which, and she
will not be home till dinner, by which time the mail will be all closed,
else she would join me in all good messages and remembrances of love. I
hope you will congratulate Burne Jones from me on his baronetcy. I
cannot make out to be anything but raspingly, harrowingly sad; so I will
close, and not affect levity which I cannot feel. Do not altogether
forget me; keep a corner of your memory for the exile