E.B.B. to R.B.
Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, July 14, 1846.]
I must write ... even if you come to-morrow. Dearest, if I told you all that nonsense on Saturday, it was for the sake of telling you all and of hearing you say ‘What nonsense’ afterwards. I never began by disguising anything from you ... did I? I always wished you to see how the arrows would strike out at us from that bush and this bush. At us. For, granting that you seriously thought it possible for such motives to divide me from you, ... ah, granting it, ... and you may well ask my pardon!
The world! the world could as soon catch me with a ‘line’ so baited, as you could catch a trout with a silver sixpence at the end of a string. Not only do I think with you entirely on that subject, but I always thought like you. Always I have hated all their worldly systems, and not merely now, and since I have loved you. With a hundred a year between us, I would have married you, if you had not been afraid. And so, think whether directly or ‘indirectly’ I am likely to be frightened into the breach of an engagement by what I repeated to you or by what is like unto it. No—my weaknesses are of a different class altogether.
The talk I talked over again to you, seemed to burn in my ears the longer on that Saturday, because, while it was being originally talked between Papa and my aunt (touching Arabella Hedley’s marriage), he had brought a paper for me to sign about some money placed on a railway, (not speculatively) ... and my aunt, by way of saying a lively thing, exclaimed, ‘Is that your marriage-settlement, my dear?’ ... which made me so nervous that I wrote my name wrong and vexed Papa into being almost cross with me. So one word got entwined with another, and all seemed to hang around me—Do you understand?
But you do not, how you pained me when you said that. Ah—I thought I saw you gone ... ‘so far, so far,’ as you said ... and myself left.
Yet I should deserve it of course, if I were to give you up for the sake of that! ... or for any other motive, ... except your advantage ... your own. I should deserve everything in such a case, but should feel nothing ... not even my punishment. Could I? ... being without a heart?
Ah—after all my mistrust, did I ever mistrust you so? I have doubted your power to love me as you believed you loved me, perhaps—but your will to be true to one you loved, without reference to worldly influences, I never doubted, nor could. I think I will let you beg my pardon; you unjust, dearest....
To so much over-praise, there should be a little wronging, too ... and therefore you are not, after all, ‘unjust’ ... only ‘dearest’!...
Such a letter, besides, you have written, ... and there are two of them to-day! You will not go from me, I think, ‘so far, so far.’ You will not leave me behind, with the harpoon in me, to make red the salt wilderness of waters.