One day the mail brought a large envelope with an English postage stamp, addressed in a strong, masculine hand, even and regular, and utterly without adornment, but yet of a strikingly peculiar expression, if a handwriting may be said to have an expression.
"CUNARD S.S. Servia, Sept. 15th.
"My Beloved Lady—Were it not for the possibility of writing to you, this voyage would be an impossible task to me; and even as it is, the feeling that what I write must travel away from you for many days before it travels towards you again makes me half suspect it is a mockery after all. After these wonderful months of converse it seems incredible that I should be thus taken out of your hearing and out of the power of seeing you. That I long for a sight of your dear face, that I hunger for your touch and for your sweet voice, I need not tell you or further asseverate. I am constantly looking curiously at the passengers, vainly thinking that you must appear among them. The sea without you is not the sea, any more than heaven would be heaven were you not there.
"I cannot describe to you, my dear lady, how detestable the life on board is to me. I loathe the people with their inane chatter, and the idiotic children, and the highly-correct and gentlemanly captain, all equally. The philistine father, the sea-sick mother, the highly-cultured daughter, and the pipe-smoking son, are equally objects of disgust. When I go on deck the little children make a circle round me, because I am so big, and the sailors will not let me go on to forecastle under three shillings—which I paid cheerfully, however, because I can be alone there and think of you, without being contemplated as an object of wonder by about two hundred idiots. I have managed to rig a sort of table in my cabin at last, and here I sit, under the dubious light of the port-hole, wishing it would blow, or that we might meet an iceberg, or anything, to scare the people into their dens and leave me a little open-air solitude.
"It seems so strange to be writing to you. I never wrote anything but little notes in the old days at Baden, and now I am writing what promises to be a long letter, for we cannot be in under six days, and in all that time there is nothing else I can do—nothing else I would do, if I could. And yet it is so different. Perhaps I am incoherent, and you will say, different from what? It is different from what it used to be, before that thrice-blessed afternoon in the Newport fog.
"The gray mist came down like a curtain, shutting off the past and marking where the present begins. It seems to me that I never lived before that moment, and yet those months were happy while they lasted, so that it sometimes seemed as though no greater happiness could be possible. How did it all happen, most blessed lady?
"The lazy, good-natured sea, that loves us well, washes up and glances through my port-hole as I write, as if in answer to my question. The sea knows how it happened, for he saw us, and bore us, and heard all the tale; and even in Newport he was there, hidden under the fog and listening, and he is rejoicing that those who loved are now lovers. It is not hard to see how it happened. They all worship you, every human being that comes near you falls down and acknowledges you to be the queen. For they must. There is no salvation from that, and it is meet and right that it should be so. And I came, like the others, to do homage to the great queen, and you deigned to raise me up and bid me stand beside you.
"You are my first allegiance and my first love. I thank Heaven that I can say it honestly and truly, without fear of my conscience pricking. You know too, for I have told you, how my boyhood and manhood have been passed, and if there is anything you do not know I will tell you hereafter, for I would always hate to feel that there was anything about me you did not know—I could not feel it. But then, say you, he should have told me what he was going to do abroad. And so I have, dear lady; for though I have not explained it all to you, I have placed all needful knowledge in safe hands, where you can obtain it for the asking, if ever the least shadow of doubt should cross your mind. Only I pray you, as suing a great boon, not to doubt—that is all, for I would rather you did not know yet.
"This letter is being written by degrees. I have not written all this at once, for I find it as hard to express my thoughts to you on paper as I find it easy by word of mouth. It seems a formal thing to write, and yet there should be nothing less marred by formality than such a letter as mine. It is only that the choice is too great. I have too much to say, and so say nothing. I would ask, if I were so honoured by Heaven, the tongues of men and of angels, and all the mighty word-music of sage and prophet, that I might tell you how I love you, my heart's own. I would ask that for one hour I might hold in my hand the bâton of heaven's choir. Then would I lead those celestial musicians through such a grand plain chant as time has never dreamt of, nor has eternity yet heard it; so that rank on rank of angels and saints should take up the song, until the arches of the outer firmament rang again, and the stars chimed together; and all the untold hierarchy of archangelic voice and heavenly instrument should cry, as with one soul, the confession of this heart of mine—'I love.'
"Another day has passed, and I think I have heard in my dreams the bursts of music that I would fain have wafted to your waking ears. Verily the lawyers in New York say well, that I am not Claudius. Claudius was a thing of angles and books, mathematical and earthy, believing indeed in the greatness of things supernal, but not having tasted thereof. My beloved, God has given me a new soul to love you with, so great that it seems as though it would break through the walls of my heart and cry aloud to you. This new Claudius is a man of infinite power to rise above earthly things, above everything that is below you—and what things that are in earth are not below you, lady mine?