Try and forget me, dear. I’m not fit to be remembered. Try and forget the waster you treated so well. And don’t think I’m ungrateful. Strange as it sounds, I’m not. I’m so ashamed, Richard, so terribly, bitterly ashamed, that I can hardly lift my head. But Berwick. . . . There’s something, Richard, you and I never knew. I know it now. I’ve found it in Berwick Perowne. And I pray the time will come when you’ll find it, dear, in someone better than me. And then, I think, you’ll understand.
Good-bye, Richard. I’m leaving a bit of me behind—a bit of my heart.
Jo.
I am so thankful Bugle will never know.
There. I have copied it out, word for blinding word. Some of the writing is blurred, but it is beautifully plain and easy to read. I remember the first note she wrote me—how pleased I was to see what a good hand she had . . . nothing bizarre, just simple, downright, strong. Nothing is slurred—nothing.
I perceive I am trying to gain time—to put off recording the truth. I never did that before, never shrank. If I had to report a failure, I always began with the worst. ‘I regret I have failed to secure . . .’ I don’t know why. I think it seemed easier that way. Certainly, putting it off makes it no easier. More difficult, I think.
Jo has left me.
I think I’ll give that sentence a line to itself. Incidentally, I can’t imagine why I’m writing this down. I don’t write things down as a rule—not these sort of things. I suppose I am writing it down because my brain is plunging like a terrified horse and I am hoping to calm it by showing it exactly what it is up against, and so to be able to coax it under this frightful archway and into—into the hell beyond. I suppose, poor brute, it doesn’t like the look of hell, and that’s why it shies and jibs as if it had seen a ghost.
My good fool, you have seen no ghost, but a perfectly plain, crisp fact—the fact that Jo has gone. Those are her gloves on the table: they still smell of her perfume. If you look at the finger-tips, you will see the faint outline of her beautiful nails. And that is her photograph, there, in the silver frame. But the original has gone . . . leaving behind this letter and—other things. Me, for instance. . . .
For God’s sake let’s get down to facts—to see if there isn’t some loophole, some flicker of hope.