LXI.
Woodbridge: Sept. 28, [1879.]
Dear Mrs. Kemble:—
I cannot be sure of your Address: but I venture a note—to say that—If you return to London on Wednesday, I shall certainly run up (the same day, if I can) to see you before you again depart on Saturday, as your letter proposes. [157]
But I also write to beg you not to leave your Daughter for ever so short a while, simply because you had so arranged, and told me of your Arrangement.
If this Note of mine reach you somehow to morrow, there will be plenty of time for you to let me know whether you go or not: and, even if there be not time before Wednesday, why, I shall take no harm in so far as I really have a very little to do, and moreover shall see a poor Lady who has just lost her husband, after nearly three years anxious and uncertain watching, and now finds herself (brave and strong little Woman) somewhat floored now the long conflict is over. These are the people I may have told you of whom I have for some years met here and there in Suffolk—chiefly by the Sea; and we somehow suited one another. [158] He was a brave, generous, Boy (of sixty) with a fine Understanding, and great Knowledge and Relish of Books: but he had applied too late in Life to Painting which he could not master, though he made it his Profession. A remarkable mistake, I always thought, in so sensible a man.
Whether I find you next week, or afterward (for I promise to find you any time you appoint) I hope to find you alone—for twenty years’ Solitude make me very shy: but always your sincere
E. F.G.
LXII.
Little Grange: Woodbridge. October 7, [1879]
Dear Mrs. Kemble,
When I got home yesterday, and emptied my Pockets, I found the precious Enclosure which I had meant to show, and (if you pleased) to give you. A wretched Sketch (whether by me or another, I know not) of your Brother John in some Cambridge Room, about the year 1832-3, when he and I were staying there, long after Degree time—he, studying Anglo-Saxon, I suppose—reading something, you see, with a glass of Ale on the table—or old Piano-forte was it?—to which he would sing very well his German Songs. Among them,
Do you remember? I afterwards associated it with some stray verses applicable to one I loved.
‘Heav’n would answer all your wishes,
Were it much as Earth is here;
Flowing Rivers full of Fishes,
And good Hunting half the Year.’
Well:—here is the cause of this Letter, so soon after our conversing together, face to face, in Queen Anne’s
Mansions. A strange little After-piece to twenty years’ Separation.
And now, here are the Sweet Peas, and Marigolds, sown in the Spring, still in a faded Blossom, and the Spirit that Tennyson told us of fifty years ago haunting the Flower-beds, [160] and a Robin singing—nobody else.
And I am to lose my capital Reader, he tells me, in a Fortnight, no Book-binding surviving under the pressure of Bad Times in little Woodbridge. ‘My dear Fitz, there is no Future for little Country towns,’ said Pollock to me when he came here some years ago.
But my Banker here found the Bond which he had considered unnecessary, safe in his Strong Box:—and I am your sincere Ancient
E. F.G.
Burn the poor Caricature if offensive to you. The ‘Alexander’ profile was become somewhat tarnished then.