LETTER XIX.
Dearest, Dearest: How long has this happened? You don't tell me the day or the hour. Is it ever since you last wrote? Then you have been in pain and grief for four days: and I not knowing anything about it! And you have no hand in the house kind enough to let you dictate by it one small word to poor me? What heartless merrymakings may I not have sent you to worry you, when soothing was the one thing wanted? Well, I will not worry now, then; neither at not being told, nor at not being allowed to come: but I will come thus and thus, O my dear heart, and take you in my arms. And you will be comforted, will you not be? when I tell you that even if you had no legs at all, I would love you just the same. Indeed, dearest, so much of you is a superfluity: just your heart against mine, and the sound of your voice, would carry me up to more heavens than I could otherwise have dreamed of. I may say now, now that I know it was not your choice, what a void these last few days the lack of letters has been to me. I wondered, truly, if you had found it well to put off such visible signs for a while in order to appease one who, in other things more essential, sees you rebellious. But the wonder is over now; and I don't want you to write—not till a consultation of doctors orders it for the good of your health. I will be so happy talking to you: also I am sending you books:—those I wish you to read; and which now you must, since you have the leisure! And I for my part will make time and read yours. Whose do you most want me to read, that my education in your likings may become complete? What I send you will not deprive me of anything: for I have the beautiful complete set—your gift—and shall read side by side with you to realize in imagination what the happiness of reading them for the first time ought to be.
Yesterday, by a most unsympathetic instinct, I went out for a long tramp on my two feet; and no ache in them came and told me of you! Over Sillingford I sat on a bank and looked downhill where went a carter. And I looked uphill where lay something which might be nothing—or not his. Now, shall I make a fool of myself by pursuing to tell him he may have dropped something, or shall I go on and see? So I went on and saw a coat with a fat pocket: and by then he was out of sight, and perhaps it wasn't his; and it was very hot and the hill steep. So I minded my own business, making Cain's motto mine; and now feel so had, being quite sure that it was his. And I wonder how many miles he will have tramped back looking for it, and whether his dinner was in the pocket.
These unintentional misdoings are the "sins" one repents of all one's life long: I have others stored away, the bitterest of small things done or undone in haste and repented of at so much leisure afterwards. And always done to people or things I had no grudge against, sometimes even a love for. They are my skeletons: I will tell you of them some day.
This, dearest, is our first enforced absence from each other; and I feel it almost more hard on me than on you. Beloved, let us lay our hearts together and get comforted. It is not real separation to know that another part of the world contains the rest of me. Oh, the rest of me, the rest of me that you are! So, thinking of you, I can never be tired. I rest yours.
LETTER XX.
Yes, Dearest, "Patience!" but it is a virtue I have little enough of naturally, and used to be taught to pray for as a child. And I remember once really hurting clear Mother-Aunt's feelings by trying to repay her for that teaching by a little iniquitous laughter at her expense. It was too funny for me to feel very contrite about, as I do sometimes over quite small things, or I would not be telling it you now (for there are things in me I would conceal even from you). I dare say you wouldn't guess it, but the M.-A. is a most long person over her private devotions. Perhaps it was her own habit, with the cares of a household sometimes conflicting, which made her recite to me so often her pet legend of a saintly person who, constantly interrupted over her prayers by mundane matters, became a pattern in patience out of these snippings of her godly desires. So, one day, angels in the disguise of cross people with selfish demands on her time came seeking to know where in her composition or composure exasperation began: and finding none, they let her return in peace to her missal, where for a reward all the letters had been turned into gold. "And that, my dear, comes of patience," my aunt would say, till I grew a little tired of the saying. I don't know what experience my uncle had gathered of her patience under like circumstances: but I notice that to this day he treads delicately, like Agag, when he knows her to be on her knees; and prefers then to send me on his errands instead of doing them himself.