While the heart beats (mine!) I am your own.
I am going in the carriage presently and shall write again to-night. Won’t that be three times in a day according to order?
E.B.B. to R.B.
Tuesday Evening.
[Post-mark, June 17, 1846.]
Best, ... best, you are, to write to me when you were tired, and so! When I am tired and write to you, it is too apt to be what may trouble you. With you, how different! In nothing do you show your strength more than in your divine patience and tenderness towards me, till ... not being used to it, I grow overwhelmed by it all, and would give you my life at a word. Why did you love me, my beloved, when you might have chosen from the most perfect of all women and each would have loved you with the perfectest of her nature? That is my riddle in this world. I can understand everything else ... I was never stopped for the meaning of sorrow upon sorrow ... but that you should love me I do not understand, and I think that I never shall.
Do I remember? Yes indeed, I remember. How I recurred and wondered afterwards, though at the moment it seemed very simple and what was to be met with in our philosophy every day. But there, you see, there’s the danger of using mala verba! The Fates catch them up and knit them into the web! Then I remember all the more (though I should at any rate) through an imprudence of my own (or a piece of ill-luck rather ... it shall not be called an imprudence) of which I will tell you. I was writing to Miss Mitford and of you—we differed about you often, ... because she did not appreciate you properly, and was fond of dwelling on the ‘obscurity’ when I talked of the light,—and I just then writing of you, added in my headlong unreflecting way that I had had a real letter from you which said that you loved me—‘Oh—but,’ I wrote on, ‘you are not to mistake this, not to repeat it—for of course, it is simply the purest of philanthropies’ ... some words to that effect—and if yours was the purest of philanthropies, mine was the purest of innocences, as you may well believe, ... for if I had had the shadow of a foresight, I should not have fallen into the snare. So vexed I was afterwards! Not that she thought anything at the time, or has referred to it since, or remembers a word now. Only I was vexed in my innermost heart ... and am ... do you know? ... that I should have spoken lightly of such an expression of yours—though you meant it lightly too. Dearest! It was a disguised angel and I should have known it by its wings though they did not fly.
But I foresaw nothing, ... looked to you for nothing, ... nothing can prove better to myself, than my having mentioned the quaint word at all. For I know, and I hope you know, how impossible it always has been to me to choose for a subject of conversation and jest, things which never should be spoken to friend or sister. But how was I to foresee? So the quaintness passed as quaintness with me. And never from that time (you grew sacred too soon!), never again from that moment, did I mention you to Miss Mitford—oh yes, I did, when she talked of introducing Mr. Chorley, and when I replied that, being a woman, I would have my wilful way, and that my wilful way was to see you instead. But except then ... and when I sent her Mr. Landor’s verses on you ... not a word have I spoken ... except in bare response. She thinks perhaps that my old fervour about you has sunk into the socket—she suspects nothing—in fact she does not understand what love is ... and I never should think of asking her for sympathy. She is one of the Black Stones, which, when I climb up towards my Singing Tree and Golden Water, will howl behind me and call names.
You had my second letter to-day, speaking of Landor, and of Mr. Kenyon’s visit. At half-past six came Miss Bayley, talking exceeding kindnesses of Italy, and entreating me to use her ... to let her go with me and take care of me and do me all manner of good. What kindness, really, in a woman whom I have not seen six times in all! I am very grateful to her. She held my hands, and told me to write to her if ever I had need of her—she would come at a moment, go for a year!—she would do anything for me I desired! And this woman to believe of herself that she has no soul! Help me to thank her in your thoughts of her! She said, by the way, that Mrs. Jameson had talked to her of wishing to take me, ... but she thought (Miss Bayley thought) that she (Mrs. Jameson) had too many objects and too much vivacity ... it would not do so well, she thought. In reply—I could just thank her, and scarcely could do that, ... only I am sure she saw and felt that I was grateful to her aright, let the words come ever so wrong. To-morrow she leaves London for an indefinite time.
She told me too that a friend of hers, calling on Mrs. Jameson, had found her on the point of coming to me to-day, to drive out ... but she suffered from toothache and was going to Cartwright’s first ... and last, I suppose. I dare say he put her to torture, to be classified with ‘the thumbscrew and the gadge’ ... some disabling torture, for I have not seen her at all. So as at half-past seven Henrietta was going out to dinner, Lizzie and I and Flush took our places by her in the carriage, and went to Hyde Park ... drove close by the Serpentine, and saw by the ruffling of the water that there was a breath of wind more than we felt. The shadows were gathering in quite fast, shade upon shade; and at last the silvery water seemed to hold all the light left, as on the flat of a hand. Very much I liked and enjoyed it. And, as we came home, the gas was in the shops ... another strange sight for me—and we all liked everything. Flush had his head out of the window the whole way ... except when he saw a long whip, ... or had a frightful vision at the water of somebody washing a little dog ... which made him draw back into the carriage with dilated eyes and quivering ears, and set about licking my hands, for an ‘Ora pro nobis.’ And Lizzie confided to me, that, when she is ‘grown up,’ she never will go out to dinners like Henrietta, but drive in the park like Ba, instead ... unless she can improve upon both, and live in a cottage covered with roses, in the country. I, in the meantime, between my companions, thought of neither of them more than was necessary, but of somebody whom I had been teazing perhaps ... dearest, was it so, indeed? ... but I avenge you by teazing myself back again! A long rambling letter, with nothing in it! ‘Passages, that lead to nothing’—and staircases, too! May I be loved nevertheless, as usual? and forgiven for my ‘secret faults?’ You are the whole world to me—and the stars besides!
And I am your very own