An Englishwomans Love-Letters | Page 9

heart will feel itself to yours! It feels close now: but it is to your feet I am nearest, as yet. Lift me! There, there, Beloved, I kiss you with all my will. Oh, dear heart, forgive me for being no more than I am: your freehold to all eternity!

LETTER XI
Oh, Dearest: I have danced and I have danced till I am tired! I am dropping with sleep, but I must just touch you and say good-night. This was our great day of publishing, dearest, ours: all the world knows it; and all admire your choice! I was determined they should. I have been collecting scalps for you to hang at your girdle. All thought me beautiful: people who never did so before. I wanted to say to them, "Am I not beautiful? I am, am I not?" And it was not for myself I was asking this praise. Beloved, I was wearing the magic rose--what you gave me when we parted: you saying, alas, that you were not to be there. But you were! Its leaves have not dropped nor the scent of it faded. I kiss you out of the heart of it. Good-night: come to me in my first dream!

LETTER XII.
Dearest: It has been such a funny day from post-time onwards:-- congratulations on the great event are beginning to arrive in envelopes and on wheels. Some are very kind and dear; and some are not so--only the ordinary seemliness of polite sniffle-snaffle. Just after you had gone yesterday, Mrs. ---- called and was told the news. Of course she knew of you: but didn't think she had ever seen you. "Probably he passed you at the gates," I said. "What?" she went off with a view-hallo; "that well-dressed sort of young fellow in gray, and a mustache, and knowing how to ride? Met us in the lane. Well, my dear, I do congratulate you!"
And whether it was by the gray suit, or the mustache, or the knowing how to ride that her congratulations were so emphatically secured, I know not!
Others are yet more quaint, and more to my liking. Nan-nan is Nan-nan: I cannot let you off what she said! No tears or sentiment came from her to prevent me laughing: she brisked like an old war-horse at the first word of it, and blessed God that it had come betimes, that she might be a nurse again in her old age! She is a true "Mrs. Berry," and is ready to make room for you in my affections for the sake of far-off divine events, which promise renewed youth to her old bones.
Roberts, when he brought me my pony this morning, touched his hat quick twice over to show that the news brimmed in his body: and a very nice cordial way of showing, I thought it! He was quite ready to talk when I let him go; and he gave me plenty of good fun. He used to know you when he was in service at the H----s, and speaks of you as being then "a gallous young hound," whatever that may mean. I imagine "gallous" to be a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up in equal parts of callousness and gallantry, which most boys are, at some stage of their existence.
What tales will you be getting of me out of Nan-nan, some day behind my back, I wonder? There is one I shall forbid her to reveal: it shall be part of my marriage-portion to show you early that you have got a wife with a temper!
Here is a whole letter that must end now,--and the great Word never mentioned! It is good for you to be put upon maigre fare, for once. I hold my pen back with both hands: it wants so much to give you the forbidden treat. Oh, the serpent in the garden! See where it has underlined its meaning. Frailty, thy pen is a J pen!
Adieu, adieu, remember me.

LETTER XIII.
The letters? No, Beloved, I could not! Not yet. There you have caught me where I own I am still shy of you.
A long time hence, when we are a safely wedded pair, you shall turn them over. It may be a short time; but I will keep them however long. Indeed I must ever keep them; they talk to me of the dawn of my existence,--the early light before our sun rose, when my love of you was growing and had not yet reached its full.
If I disappoint you I will try to make up for it with something I wrote long before I ever saw you. To-day I was turning over old things my mother had treasured for me of my childhood--of days spent with her: things of laughter as well as of tears; such a dear selection,