Beloved: I wish you could have been with me to look out into this garden last night when the spirit moved me there. I had started for bed, but became sensitive of something outside not normal. Whether my ear missed the usual echoes and so guessed a muffled world I do not know. To open the door was like slicing into a wedding-cake; then,—where was I to put a foot into that new-laid carpet of ankle-deepness? I hobbled out in a pair of my uncle's. I suppose it is because I know every tree and shrub in its true form that snow seems to pile itself nowhere as it does here: it becomes a garden of entombments. Now and then some heap would shuffle feebly under its shroud, but resurrection was not to be: the Lawson cypress held out great boxing-glove hands for me to shake and set free; and the silence was wonderful. I padded about till I froze: this morning I can see my big hoof-marks all over the place, and Benjy has been scampering about in them as if he found some flavor of me there. The trees are already beginning to shake themselves loose, and the spell is over: but it had a wonderful hold while it lasted. I take a breath back into last night, and feel myself again full of a romance without words that I cannot explain. If you had been there, even, I think I could have forgotten I had you by me, the place was so weighed down with its sense of solitude. It struck eleven while I was outside, and in that, too, I could hear a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry lattices and lay even on the outer edge of the bell itself. Across the park there are dead boughs cracking down under the weight of snow; and it would be very like you to tramp over just because the roads will be so impossible.
I heard yesterday a thing which made me just a little more free and easy in mind, though I had nothing sensibly on my conscience. Such a good youth who two years ago believed I was his only possible future happiness, is now quite happy with a totally different sort of person. I had a little letter from him, shy and stately, announcing the event. I thought it such a friendly act, for some have never the grace to unsay their grievances, however much actually blessed as a consequence of them.
With that off my mind I can come to you swearing that there have been no accidents on anybody's line of life through a mistake in signals, or a flying in the face of them, where I have had any responsibility. As for you, and as you know well by now, my signals were ready and waiting before you sought for them. "Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you!" was their giveaway attitude.
I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy. Good-by. If you come you will find this letter on the hall table, and me you will probably hear barking behind the rhododendrons.—So much your most loving.
LETTER LIV.
Beloved: We have been having a great day of tidyings out, rummaging through years and years of accumulations—things quite useless but which I have not liked to throw away. My soul has been getting such dusty answers to all sorts of doubtful inquiries as to where on earth this, that, and the other lay hidden. And there were other things, the memory of which had lain quite dead or slept, till under the light of day they sprouted hack into life like corn from the grave of an Egyptian mummy.
Very deep in one box I found a stealthy little collection of secret playthings which it used to be my fond belief that nobody knew of but myself. It may have been Anna's graspingness, when four years of seniority gave her double my age, or Arthur's genial instinct for destructiveness, which drove me into such deep concealment of my dearest idols. But, whether for those or more mystic reasons, I know I had dolls which I nursed only in the strictest privacy and lavished my firmest love upon. It was because of them that I bore the reproach of being but a lukewarm mother of dolls and careless of their toilets; the truth being that my motherly passion expended itself in secret on certain outcasts of society whom others despised or had forgotten. They, on their limp and dissolute bodies, wore all the finery I could find to pile on them: and one shady transaction done on their behalf I remember now without pangs. There was one creature of state whom an inconsiderate relative had presented to Anna and myself in equal shares. Of course Anna's became more and more lionlike. I had very little love for the bone of contention myself, but the sense of injustice rankled in me. So one day, at an unclothing, Anna discovered that certain undergarments were gone altogether away. She sat aghast, questioned me, and, when I refused to disgorge, screamed down vengeance from the authorities. I was morally certain I had taken no more than my just share, and resolution sat on my lips under all threats. For a punishment the whole ownership of the big doll was made over to Anna: I was no worse off, and was very contented with my obstinacy. To-day I found the beautifully wrought bodice, which I had carried beyond reach of even the supreme court of appeal, clothing with ridiculous looseness a rag-doll whose head tottered on its stem like an over-ripe plum, and whose legs had no deportment at all: and am sending it off in charitable surrender to Anna to be given, bag and rag, to whichever one of the children she likes to select.
Also I found:—would you care to have a lock of hair taken from the head of a child then two years old, which, bright golden, does not match what I have on now in the least? I can just remember her: but she is much of a stranger to both of us. Why I value it is that the name and date on the envelope inclosing it are in my mother's handwriting: and I suppose she loved very much the curly treasure she then put away. Some of the other things, quite funny, I will show you the next time you come over. How I wish that vanished mite had mixed some of her play-hours with yours:—you only six miles away all the time: had one but known!—Now grown very old and loving, always your own.