Dearest, if I vexed you, teazed you, by that question which proved unnecessary ... forgive me! Had you uncomfortable thoughts in the gardens to-day? Perhaps! And I could not smooth them away, though I drew as near as I dared ... though I was in a carriage at seven o’clock, running a mystical circle round your tents and music. Did you feel me, any more than if I were a ‘quick spider,’ I wonder.
Henrietta and Arabel were going to spend the evening with cousins of ours, and as the carriage waited for the plaiting of Henrietta’s hair, or the twisting of the ringlets, Arabel said to me ‘Will you go for a quarter of an hour?’ And in a minute, we were off ... she and Flush and Lizzie and I. Never did I expect again to see so many people—but I thought of one so much that my head was kept from turning round—and we drove once round the ‘inner circle,’ so called, and looked up to Mr. Kenyon’s windows—and there, or there, you were, certainly!—and either there, or there, you were being disquieted in your thoughts by me, as certainly! Ah forgive me. After all, ... listen ... I love you with the fulness of my nature. Nothing of all this unspeakable goodness and tenderness is lost on me ... I catch on my face and hands every drop of all this dew.
So now ... you are not teazed? we are at one again, and may talk of outside things again?
But first, I must hear how the head is. How is it, best and dearest? And you had my letter at last, had you not? Because I wrote it as usual, of course. May God bless you—and me as I am altogether your own.
Twice (observe) I have been out to-day—the first time, walking. Also, twice have I written to you.
Say how your mother is—and yourself!—
George and Henrietta were asked to meet you at Mr. Kenyon’s—but only to-day, and too late to forestall other engagements. Did you enjoy any of it? Tell me.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Thursday.
[Post-mark, June 4, 1846.]
‘Vex me,’ or ‘teaze me,’ my own Ba, you cannot. I look on it indeed, after a moment, as the only natural effect of your strange disbelief in yourself, and ignorance of our true relation one to the other by every right and reason. Only, Ba, you are wrong—doubly,—that is, you would be wrong if your own estimate of your power over me were the true one—for,—though it is difficult for me to fancy these abstractions and fantastic metamorphoses (as how one could feel without one’s head,—or how I could live without the love of you now I have once got it)—yet, since you make me, I will fancy I love my head and love you no longer ... and then (which is now) now, do you think I am so poor a creature as to go on adding to my faults, and letting you gently down, as the phrase is, with cowardly excuses, ‘postponing’ this, and ‘consenting to delay’ the other,—and perhaps managing to get you to do the whole business for me in the end? I hope and think I should say at once—Oh, no more of this! But see how right I was—‘an instinct, you seem to see.’ So, I have been thinking,—there are but few topics of our conversation from which any such impressions could arise—was it that I have asked more than once, if you could really bear another winter in London, (in all probability a severe one)—and again, if you could get to Italy by any ordinary means without the same opposition you will have to encounter for my sake?... My Ba, as God knows, all that was so much pure trembling attempting to justify myself for the over-greatness of the fortune, the excess of the joy,—if I could but feel that there was a little of your own good in it too—that you would gain that much advantage at least by my own inestimable advantage! If you knew how,—spite of all endeavours,—how happy I have been—which is a shame to confess—but how very happy to hear that you could not without a degree of danger stay here—could no more easily leave England with Miss Bayley than with me! It seemed to justify me, as I say. And so of ‘the wishing I had not mentioned Italy’—I wish your will to be mine, to originate mine, your pleasure to be only mine. Expressed first—it will be my pleasure ... but all is wrong if you take the effect, seek to know it, before the cause. What does it matter that I should prefer Italy to Nova Zembla? So, you ought to have begun by saying ‘we will go there,’ and then my pleasure in obedience had been naturally expressed. Did I not ask you whether you had not, after all, thought of going to Italy first—to Pisa, or Malta,—from the very beginning? Always to justify myself! Always!