And now dear Love, only one phrase of all that poem shall ring in my ears,—that solemn nox perpetua, that long unending night, for every joy you promised. Ah, would you have thrust me away so easily if I had not seemed to you wrapt up in a strange shadow life into which no reality of passion could enter? And was your love, too, only a shadow? God help me then! Yet I would not reproach you, for, after all, the choice must have cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have brought only misery to me—and this is the fruit of love’s battle with religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that resounding line, “So much of ill religion could persuade”? Do you know Landor’s telling of that story, “O father! I am young and very happy”? And so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the poets; and the bitterness of all this evil wrought by religion has troubled my brain till I know not what to say. Only this, sweet girl, that no tears of separation and long waiting can wash away the love I bear you. And, yes, I will not believe that you can forget me. Come to me when you will, now or many years hence, and the chamber of my heart shall be garnished and ready to receive you, the latch hanging from the door, and within, on the hearth, the fire burning unquenched and unquenchable. Will you remember this? There is no woman in the whole earth to me, but Jessica. It will be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world, and wait—wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name. But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflecting after the day’s toil is done—that something shall go forth from me to you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses. And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting loves. And once again, good-bye.
| (Enclosed with the foregoing) |
Dear Sir:
My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you, sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step in where my daughter’s happiness was concerned and have commanded her to cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and esteem.
Faithfully yours,
Ezra Doane.
XLIV
EXTRACT FROM PHILIP’S DIARY
I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of anxiety in them from the first, “some consequence yet hanging in the stars,” which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself that they were anything more than some broken memory of “old, unhappy, far-off things,” a single, sobbing note of love’s tragic song that has been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of sorrows—for out of it, in one way or another, whether through gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?