Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one quite quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence; yet I wish it so much—to exist again outside all this failure of my life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.
And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say—Send him these, it will be almost like living again: for surely you will love me again when you see how much I have suffered,—and suffered because I would not let thought of you go.
Could you dream, Beloved, reading this that there is bright sunlight streaming over my paper as I write?
LETTER LXVII.
Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved? I do not know in what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps without knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received? Dearest, I trust those I send reach you: I send them, wishing till I grow weak. My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to you: and I am glad of that weariness—it seems to be some virtue that has gone out of me. If all my body could go out in the effort, I think I should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at last.
I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love's cenotaph, among all my thoughts of you. It comes from a graveyard full of "little deaths." I remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was still fortunate with us. I must have been reckless in my happiness to do that!
Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my thoughts, till I had emptied myself of them, I feel that I should rest. But there is no emptying the brain by thinking. Things thought come to be thought again over and over, and more and fresh come in their train: children and grandchildren, generations of them, sprung from the old stock. I have many thoughts now, born of my love for you, that never came when we were together,—grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some of them are set down here, but others escape and will never see your face!
If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life): still, if you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want, to know something of the life in between,—I could put these letters that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day have I been truly, that is to say willingly, out of your heart. When Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes him to see their child, which till then he had never seen—and its likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to you in all that I leave here written?