“Do you know, you are teaching me to think? I feel now as if I had never really thought before. I just dreamed, or brooded. If he had lived, I should have learned from him. That is, I should, if our souls hadn’t gone on forever being shy of one another. When I had him with me, I was too busy loving him and being afraid that he wouldn’t love me, to think about anything outside, though his mind had given my mind a great lift, even then. And another thing I want to tell you. Your way of thinking reminds me of him. I believe you must be a little like him—mentally, I mean. Believing this will make me trust and turn to you, as one who knows the things I long to know. You have his name, too, ‘John.’ And I am going to sign my name always after this, not a mere impersonal initial.
“I am yours, oh, so gratefully, Barbara Denin.
“P.S. Strange, I didn’t notice at first where your cable was dated! I suppose, like the help you send me, it seemed just to come out of space! But reading the message again, I broke open the envelope I had already sealed, to tell you what a throb of the heart I had in seeing ‘Santa Barbara.’ Can it be that you live at Santa Barbara? I was christened after that dear old place, because I was born there, or very near. It’s good—it’s wonderful to have your words come to me from home.”
It was a direct question which she asked. Did he live at Santa Barbara? But Denin thought best not to answer it. She would forget, maybe, or would suppose that he had been staying for a short time in California. Each of his letters to her before, though posted not far from the Mirador itself, had been enclosed in an envelope to Eversedge Sibley. In all but one case, other letters to correspondents brought the author by his book had been sent off in the wrapper with Barbara’s. Denin had taken pains to settle the difficulty of writing to Gorston Old Hall in this way, in order that neither the name of the woman nor the name of the place should be remarked by Sibley. He kept this rule with the letter which followed Barbara’s question, but her next broke the plan in pieces. It crossed one from him, and was written after receiving his letter about the garden.
“Dear Friend,” she named him. “Before I say anything else—and I feel that there are a thousand things, each pressing forward to be said first—I must tell you what I have found out. I’ve learned that you are living in the house my father built for me. Of course that won’t be important to you. Why should it be so? I have to remind myself over and over that I am surely just one of many women who have written to you after reading your book; one of many women you are kind to, out of the goodness of your heart, and the knowledge that’s in it. Can knowledge be in a heart? Yes, yours is there, I think, even more than in your brain. I am nothing to you except a poor drowning creature to whom you have held out a firm hand. But the drowning creature feels that your living in a place she knew and loved gives her a kind of personal right in you.
“I read this very morning in a London paper an extract from a New York one—an article about John Sanbourne. Perhaps you never even knew it was written? I’m sure you gave no permission to have it done. I think you would not like the way the man wrote about you; but I felt, in reading, that he tried hard to bring his work up to a high level and make it worthy of the subject. If you realized the good it has done me to know that you cared enough for my dear little Mirador to want it for your own, and to restore it from ruin, why, you could not be so very angry with the newspaper man!
“That time in California, when I was a little girl, seemed a hundred years ago, or even in another state of existence, till I read the description of you in your garden—once my garden. Then that part of my life came back as if it were yesterday. I can see the big olive tree, which had been let grow as it liked, with all sorts of flowing, dancing gestures of its branches and twisting of its trunk, the way olives grow in Italy and the south of France. I used to call it my ‘silver fountain.’ And under it there was always a look of moonlight, even in the brightest noon. I do hope nothing has happened to the tree? Say kind things to the silver fountain from its little friend Barbara. Write me about it, and tell me, please, if it means anything fairylike to you as it did to me. But I know it must, because of what you say about your garden. How little I thought when the letter came four days ago, that my long-ago garden and your garden of now, were one and the same!
“That letter was more than a letter. It was a saving force. Because it was so much to me, and I wanted to think it all over and over, I couldn’t have dared to answer at once in any case. But it came on an anniversary, August 18th, the day of his passing. I can’t say or write the word ‘death,’ since I have begun to learn from you. It was always a dreadful word, like a bludgeon. But now it’s impossible. For me it has gone out of the language.
“As you walk in your little California garden of the Mirador, will it please you at all to know that you have given me back the joy of the English garden, the beautiful garden and the lake, and the sweet, old, history-haunted house which he left to be mine? Because you, who know so much, say that he understands and doesn’t even need to forgive me, I take your word. I am not afraid to walk with his memory now. I can speak to it as I shouldn’t have had the courage to with him, when he was here in the flesh. And because of your letter, August 18th was not a terrible day. It was more like the wedding day of two spirits than the anniversary of a great grief, and one of the spirits—mine—just released from prison. Not that it can stay out of prison forever. It’s too weak, yet, to feel its freedom for long at a time. I’ve had horrible hours, ever since that day. I shall have them often, I know, for the thing I have done has made daily life a torture. But at worst I can steal away by myself sometimes to read your letters over. They, and my new thoughts, will be for me the tonic of courage; and so I can go on from day to day, not looking too far ahead, into the dark.
“If I haven’t trespassed upon your time and imposed upon your great kindness too much already, will you write me little things about the Mirador and your life there? Will you, if you take photographs, send a snapshot of the wee house as it is now, and perhaps the silver fountain, to—Your grateful friend, Barbara Denin?