She went to the writing-table, unlocked a drawer,—the key hung on a ribbon around her neck, under her bodice,—and took out a thick packet of closely written papers. Sitting there, hesitating a moment, she wondered if she would look back at those records of hope and suffering—more than a whole year of beautiful suffering, beautiful hope. The rising of tears again warned her that such a retrospect would make her more unfit for writing the last letter as it must be written—with full possession of her best and deepest meaning. She must be her most courageous self to write now. The writer of those past records seemed a little sister half playing with her grief, beside the self that sat here now, stricken and determined.
Drawing pen and paper to her, she wrote:
My Dearest—My best Beloved: This is the last of the letters. I am going to send them all to you now, so that you may know all. I read this morning in the paper that you were to be married. And now there is nothing left for me but to die. When you read this I shall be dead.
You must not blame me, or think me too cowardly. I am a fragile person, I know, and my life hung on you. Without hope it can't go on; it's too feeble to find anything else to live for. And you could never, never blame yourself. How could you have helped it? How could you have dreamed that I loved you? If you had you could have done nothing but be sorry—and irked. But it comforts me in dying to let you know how I have loved you; it is like a dying gift I make you,—do you see?—all the love that I have hidden. If I had lived I could never have made the gift. Had you guessed, or had I told you, it would have been a burden, a ludicrous burden. But as you read this, knowing that I am dead, my love must come to you as a blessing; you must feel it as something, in its little way beautiful, and care for it; for any love that only gives and makes no claim is beautiful, is it not? I think I find dying so much easier than living because in dying I can give you the gift.
All these letters, written from the first day I met you, almost a year and a half ago, will tell you step by step what I have felt. Don't let the hopes that flickered up sometimes hurt you; the strength of my feeling made the flame, nothing that you ever said or did.
How I remember that first day, in the country, at the Ashwells', when mamma and I came on to the lawn where you were all sitting, and mamma laughed at me for stumbling over a chair—and you smiled at me. From the moment I saw you then, I loved you. You were like some dream come true. You never knew what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain was in not being with you) when we walked together and talked; the letters will tell you that. But to-day it all comes back, even the little things that I hardly knew I was seeing or hearing—the late white roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the garden wall (we stopped to look at it, and it sat still, looking at us: I wonder if you remember the robin); and the distant song some labourers were singing in the fields far away.
And here in London, the dinners we met at, the teas you came to, the one or two books you gave me and that we wrote about—what I felt about it all, these meteors through my gray life, I have written it all down. Did I not act well? You could never have guessed, under my composure and cheerfulness, could you? I am a little proud of myself when I think of it.
And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason you will see, too, from the growing hopelessness, of emptiness in the last months, when I have not seen you. In the bottom of my heart I had always the little hope that some day I might give you these myself, that we might read them together, you and I, smiling over my past sorrow. And if I had died, and you had not loved me, you were to have had them, as I told you, for I wanted to give you my love; I could not bear that it should go out and that you should never know.
I wish that I could have died, and need not have killed myself; I am so afraid that that may give you pain, though it ought not to, if you think justly of it all.
Of course you will be sorry for me—I am afraid that I want you to be sorry; but don't be too sad. I am so much happier in dying than I could have been in living; and in loving you I have felt so much, I have lived so much—more perhaps than many people in a whole lifetime.
See the gift you have given me, dearest one. Good-bye. Good-bye.
Allida.
It was over,—the last link with life, her last word spoken or written,—and the echo of it seemed to come to her already as across a great abyss that separated her from the world of the living.
With the signing of her name she had drawn the shroud over her face.
Only the mechanical things now remained to be done: dying was really over; she really was dead.
She wrapped this last letter around all the others, kissed it, and sealed it in a large envelope; then, putting on her hat and coat and holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left her room and went down the stairs.
The house was a typically smart, flimsy London house, of the cheaper Mayfair sort—a narrow box set on end and fitted with chintz and gilt and white mouldings; a trap to Allida's imagination—an imagination that no longer shrank from the contemplation of the facts of her life; for they, too, were seen from across that abyss.
In the drawing-room, among shaded lamps, cushions, and swarming bric-à-brac, her mother had flirted and allured—unsuccessfully—for how many years? She had felt, since the time when, as a very little girl, she had gone by the room every day coming in from her walk at tea-time with her governess, and heard inside the high, smiling, artificial voice, with its odd appealing quality, its vague, waiting pauses, the shrinking from her mother and her mother's aims. Later on the aims had been for her, too, and their determination had been partly, Allida felt, hardened by the fact of a grown-up daughter being such a deterrent—so in the way of a desperate, fading beauty who had never made the brilliant match she hoped for. That she had never, either, made even a moderate match for her, Allida, the girl felt, with a firmer closing of her hand on the letter, she perhaps owed to him. What might her weakness and her hatred of her home not have urged her into had not that ideal—that seen and recognized ideal—armed her? The vision of old Captain Defflin, his bruised-plum face and tight, pale eyes, rose before her, and the vacuous, unwholesome countenance of young Sir Alfred Cutts. How often had she been dexterously left alone with them in the drawing-room! Thank God! all that was far, far behind her. Death was dignified, sweet-smelling in its peace, when she thought of all that the gilt-and-chintz drawing-room stood for in her memories. Death was sweet when life was so ugly.
Now she was in the street, the door closed behind her, and no servant had seen her.