February 8, 1891.
I tried this morning to look through some of the old letters and papers in Maud's cabinet. There were my own letters, carefully tied up with a ribbon; letters from her mother and father; from the children when we were away from them. I began to read, and was seized with a sharp, unreasoning pain, surprised by sudden tears. I seemed dumbly to resent this, and I put them all away again. Why should I disturb myself to no purpose? "There shall be no more sorrow nor crying, for the former things are passed away"—so runs the old verse, and I had almost grown to feel like that. Why distrust it? Yet I could not forbear. I got the papers out again, and read late into the night, like one reading an old and beautiful story. Suddenly the curtain lifted, and I saw myself alone, I saw what I had lost. The ineffectual agony I endured, crying out for very loneliness! "That was all mine," said the melting heart, so long frozen and dumb. Grief, in waves and billows, began to beat upon me like breakers on a rock-bound shore. A strange fever of the spirit came on me, scenes and figures out of the years floating fiercely and boldly past me. Was my strength and life sustained for this, that I should just sleep awhile, and wake to fall into the pit of suffering, far deeper than before?
If they could but come back to me for a moment; if I could feel Maud's cheek by mine, or Maggie's arms round my neck; if they could but stand by me smiling, in robes of light! Yet as in a vision I seem to see them leaning from a window, in a blank castle-wall rising from a misty abyss, scanning a little stairway that rises out of the clinging fog, built up through the rocks and ending in a postern gate in the castle-wall. Upon that stairway, one by one emerging from the mist, seem to stagger and climb the figures of men, entering in, one by one, and the three, with smiles and arms interlaced, are watching eagerly. Cannot I climb the stair? Perhaps even now I am close below them, where the mist hangs damp on rock and blade? Cannot I set myself free? No, I could not look them in the face, they would hide their eyes from me, if I came in hurried flight, in passionate cowardice. Not so must I come before them, if indeed they wait for me.
The morning was coming in about the dewy garden, the birds piping faint in thicket and bush, when I stumbled slowly, dizzied and helpless, to my bed. Then a troubled sleep; and ah, the bitter waking; for at last I knew what I had lost.