“Wherever you go or sit down at last,” it said, “think of us as being with you in our minds’ eye at least, and if it shall please God that, in the course of time, we ever meet again, it will be truly a day of joy here, for from hence I move no more.”
His son, the young Lord Ramsay, had jestingly promised to be Willis’s groomsman some day at Niagara, and the former now reminded him of it, and asked him to stand up with him, and Ramsay sent the following excuses some three weeks after the wedding:—
Yester, October 23, 1835.
I promised to play my part as best man, my dear Willis, at Niagara, and to have descended from that to Woolwich would have been a sad bathos, so that it was perhaps as well that your notice was too short to allow of the possibility of my being with you before the 1st of October. Still I can congratulate you as well at a distance as with my own lips, and though the romance which we proposed for ourselves is gone, I am very happy to congratulate you on the prose reality.
I had written all this to you three weeks ago, and directed my frank to the Athenæum Club, a place which I took it into my head you frequented, when, this morning, the letter was returned by the porter with a “non est inventus” written on it. This to save my character.
Furthermore, your example was so good an one, and, fortunately, so contagious, that I have fallen a victim, and am going to be married, and as this is not a lady’s letter, it will be as well not to keep the most important part of the intelligence for the postscript, but to tell you at once that it is to Lady Susan Hay. If I were to dash out into a rhapsody you, whose experience of such a situation is of so recent a date, might easily forgive me, but I will take mercy even on you. I am happy,—happy now, and if I am not happy always in time to come, Heaven knows how utterly it will be my own fault.
When next summer brings visiting time we shall meet, I trust, in Scotland, and exchange at once news, visits, and congratulations.
May I beg, even though a stranger, my compliments to Mrs. Willis, and believe me
Ever yours sincerely,
Ramsay.