I am sending you a letter I had from my husband to-day. Have you forgotten us, and that wonderful thing you did out in the Bush? You told me then that you liked to interfere in other people's business, but that they didn't always take the interfering nicely. I want you to know what your interfering has meant to us.
You will gather from Louis's letter what you meant to him. It is more difficult to explain what you meant to me. Can you understand if I say you've been a constant goad to me? It would have been easier for me if I had never seen you, because you have been the censor of my spirit ever since. After you went away I was blazing with misery. I hadn't got so far as you, you see. I was passionately wishing that I'd known you when you were more on my level. And I saw that you had had a vision of me that was very much better than I shall ever be now. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, there are three Marcellas—the one Marcella herself knows, the one the people round about know, and the one God knows. That was the one you saw for a minute and, not to disappoint you, I've had to live up to it. It hasn't been easy. As you will see from his letter, even Louis doesn't need me now. And as for my boy—I know now, that though beasts claw at his life and colds and hungers and desolations come to him, they cannot put out the shine of him. But for me it has been very lonely. I wanted to be the thing of soft corners and seduction that you were sickened of. I had to rip myself to bits and make myself the rather rarefied sort of thing you demanded. I didn't dare not to be brave, because you were so much enthroned in my life that every thought was a deliberate homage to you. I might have got considerably happy, and found many thrills out of thinking about you softly, imagining kisses, adventures, perhaps. Many women would, and I'm sure many men. I couldn't do that because it would have made you less shining, though more dear in my mind. And when I tell you that almost ever since you went away I have been very ill, much of the time in horrible pain, you will see that you gave me something to live up to when you said you needed my courage. There's a fight going on all the time between my spirit and my body. Sometimes, when the pain has been appalling, I have thought I would write to you and ask you to release me from being brave. But I did not want to seem to you a tortured thing—Sometimes, too, I have deliberately pushed the morphia on one side and stuck it out. It was one way of getting my own back on this bundle of nerves and sensations that has played such havoc with me and that, as you scornfully told me, has once or twice cheapened me to an unworthy pleasure—'like a queen going on the streets.' I've been damned, damned, by this overlordship of the body. Now I'm going to get rid of it, and even now I don't want to! I know now I am dying, and there is morphia here under my hand. But I'll be damned in pain rather than be beaten by it! I won't die a cow's death, as the old Norsemen used to call it! I'll fight every inch of the way.—But I wish Aunt Janet would come in and jab the needle in me, forcibly. That would be quite honourable, wouldn't it?
The candle began to flicker and, turning, she saw that it was spending its last dying flame. It was impossible to write. She lay still, watching the glimmering dark square of the window. She could not see another candle there. All she could see was the little phial of tabloids. But she lay back and let the pain fasten on her. The blazing needles that were piercing her, the blazing hammers that were battering her, gathered in fury and for a few merciful hours she lost consciousness.
When she wakened again the pain had completely gone and the first faint cool light was struggling through the mists on Ben Grief. She groped about the counterpane and found her pencil, and went on writing. This time the letters were not so proudly neat. Many of them were shaky and spindlelegged and she knew it.
The candle went out, then. Some hours have passed, and with them the pain. A very beautiful thing has come to me;—the peace that passeth all understanding until you've lost your body. I understand now, very well. Our lives are just God's pathway, and we get in His way and have to be hurt before He can get along us. I was, unconsciously, His pathway to Louis until you came along—and you were a smoother pathway than I. His feet have blazed along my life now, burning out all the roughnesses—crushing me down. It's been a heavy weight to carry—the burden of salvation. It is such a heavy weight that one can't carry anything else. I tried to carry myself, and prides and hungers and love for you. All of them had to be blazed out.—No—not the love. That could not go. That and the courage will go on; pity perhaps will go, for only our bodies are pitiful. But the love is deathless. God's banner over me was love. I think I've read that somewhere His footmarks over my life were love. I've not read that. I had to find it out—slowly, hungrily, painfully, strivingly, because I've always been such a fool. But just this minute I've seen that I've been God's Fool—and God is Love.
The sun came up behind the pines on Ben Grief, golden and silver in the April morning. Very faintly came the voices of the fishermen; in the next room she heard small, busy sounds; two faint falls made her smile. Andrew had mechanically put on his shoes, thought better of it and kicked them off again. She heard him creep along the landing to her door and listen. When she tried to call him to come and kiss her she found that her voice had died. She heard him say, quietly:
"Mummy's fast asleep," and smiled again as she felt that he was running through the unbarred door shrieking and laughing in the delight of the soft air, the dancing sea, the kindly sun. She knew that he had not washed his face, and worried a little about it, and then smiled again.