My dearest Mrs. Martin,—I am ashamed not to have written before, and yet have courage enough to ask you to write to me as soon as you can. Day by day I have had good intentions enough (the fact is) about writing, to seem to deserve some good deeds from you, which is contrary to all wisdom and reason, I know, but is rather natural, after all. What my deeds have been, you will be apt to ask. Why, all manner of idleness, which is the most interrupting, you know, of all things. The Hedleys have been flitting backwards and forwards, staying, some of them, for a month at a time in London, and then going, and then coming again; and I have had other visitors, few but engrossing 'after their kind.' And I have been getting well—which is a process—going out into the carriage two or three times a week, abdicating my sofa for my armchair, moving from one room to another now and then, and walking about mine quite as well as, and with considerably more complacency than, a child of two years old. Altogether, I do think that if you were kind enough to be glad to see me looking better when you were in London, you would be kind enough to be still gladder if you saw me now. Everybody praises me, and I look in the looking-glass with a better conscience. Also, it is an improving improvement, and will be, until, you know, the last hem of the garment of summer is lost sight of, and then—and then—I must either follow to another climate, or be ill again—that I know, and am prepared for. It is but dreary work, this undoing of my Penelope web in the winter, after the doing of it through the summer, and the more progress one makes in one's web, the more dreary the prospect of the undoing of all these fine silken stitches. But we shall see....
Ever your affectionate
BA.
To Mrs. Martin
Tuesday [October 1845].
My dearest Mrs. Martin,—Do believe that I have not been, as I have seemed, perhaps, forgetful of you through this silence. This last proof of your interest and affection for me—in your letter to Henrietta—quite rouses me to speak out my remembrance of you, and I have been remembering you all the time that I did not speak, only I was so perplexed and tossed up and down by doubts and sadnesses as to require some shock from without to force the speech from me. Your verses, in their grace of kindness, and the ivy from Wordsworth's cottage, just made me think to myself that I would write to you before I left England, but when you talk really of coming to see me, why, I must speak! You overcome me with the sense of your goodness to me.
Yet, after all, I will not have you come! The farewells are bad enough which come to us, without our going to seek them, and I would rather wait and meet you on the Continent, or in England again, than see you now, just to part from you. And you cannot guess how shaken I am, and how I cling to every plank of a little calm. Perhaps I am going on the 17th or 20th. Certainly I have made up my mind to do it, and shall do it as a bare matter of duty; and it is one of the most painful acts of duty which my whole life has set before me. The road is as rough as possible, as far as I can see it. At the same time, being absolutely convinced from my own experience and perceptions, and the unhesitating advice of two able medical men (Dr. Chambers, one of them), that to escape the English winter will be everything for me, and that it involves the comfort and usefulness of the rest of my life, I have resolved to do it, let the circumstances of the doing be as painful as they may. If you were to see me you would be astonished to see the work of the past summer; but all these improvements will ebb away with the sun—while I am assured of permanent good if I leave England. The struggle with me has been a very painful one; I cannot enter on the how and wherefore at this moment. I had expected more help than I have found, and am left to myself, and thrown so on my own sense of duty as to feel it right, for the sake of future years, to make an effort to stand by myself as I best can. At the same time, I will not tell you that at the last hour something may not happen to keep me at home. That is neither impossible nor improbable. If, for instance, I find that I cannot have one of my brothers with me, why, the going in that case would be out of the question. Under ordinary circumstances I shall go, and if the experiment of going fails, why, then I shall have had the satisfaction of having tried it, and of knowing that it is God's will which keeps me a prisoner, and makes me a burden. As it is, I have been told that if I had gone years ago I should be well now; that one lung is very slightly affected, but the nervous system absolutely shattered, as the state of the pulse proves. I am in the habit of taking forty drops of laudanum a day, and cannot do with less, that is, the medical man told me that I could not do with less, saying so with his hand on the pulse. The cold weather, they say, acts on the lungs, and produces the weakness indirectly, whereas the necessary shutting up acts on the nerves and prevents them from having a chance of recovering their tone. And thus, without any mortal disease, or any disease of equivalent seriousness, I am thrown out of life, out of the ordinary sphere of its enjoyment and activity, and made a burden to myself and to others. Whereas there is a means of escape from these evils, and God has opened the door of escape, as wide as I see it!
In all ways, for my own happiness's sake I do need a proof that the evil is irremediable. And this proof (or the counter-proof) I am about to seek in Italy.
Dr. Chambers has advised Pisa, and I go in the direct steamer from the Thames to Leghorn. I have good courage, and as far as my own strength goes, sufficient means.
Dearest Mrs. Martin, more than I thought at first of telling you, I have told you. Much beside there is, painful to talk of, but I hope I have determined to do what is right, and that the determination has not been formed ungently, unscrupulously, nor unaffectionately in respect to the feelings of others. I would die for some of those, but there, has been affection opposed to affection.
This in confidence, of course. May God bless both of you! Pray for me, dearest Mrs. Martin. Make up your mind to go somewhere soon—shall you not?—before the winter shuts the last window from which you see the sun.