His very own Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Sunday Afternoon.
[Post-mark, August 24, 1846.]
This time, they brought me your letter at six o’clock yesterday evening: was I startled, or no, do you think, as I received it? But all proved right, and kind as ever, or kinder. By the post-mark, I see you did go out. Can you care in this way for my disappointments and remedy them? If I did not love you, how I would begin now! Every day shows me more to love in you, dearest, and I open my arms as wide as I can ... ‘incomprehensible’ Ba, as Donne would say! Also he would say much better things, however.
What a visitation! Miss Martineau is the more formidable friend, however—Mrs. Jameson will be contented with a little confidence, you see, and ask no questions—but I doubt if you arrange matters so easily with the new-comer. Because no great delicacy can be kept alive with all that conceit—and such conceit! A lady told me a few weeks ago that she had seen a letter in which Miss M. gave as her reason for not undertaking then, during the London season, this very journey which empty London is to benefit from now, ‘that at such a time she should be mobbed to death’: whereupon the lady went on to comment, ‘Miss M. little knows what London is, and how many nearly as notable objects may be found to divert its truculence from herself’—Tom Thumb, and Ibrahim Pacha, to wit.
Why do you suspect that you ‘teaze’ me when you say ‘there will remain too much use for the word “painful”’? Do you not know more of me by this time, my own Ba? When I have spoken of the probable happiness of our future life—of the chances in our favour from a community of tastes and feelings,—I have really done it on your account, not mine. I very well know that there would be an exquisite, secret happiness through pain with you, or for you—but it is not for me to insist on that, with that divine diffidence in your own worth which meets me wherever I turn to approach you, and puts me so gently aside ... so I rather retire and content myself with occupying the ground you do concede ... and since you will only hear of my being happy in the obvious, ordinary way, I tell you, with perfect truth, that you, and only you, can make me thus—that only you, of all women, look in the direction that I look, and feel as I feel, and live for the ends of my life; and beside that, see with my eyes the most natural and immediate way of reaching them, through a simple life, retirements from the world here (not from the real world), travel, and the rest. But all the while I know ... do not you know, Ba? ... that the joy’s essence is in the life with you, for the sake of you, not of the mere vulgar happiness; and that if any of our calculations should fail, it will be a surprise, a delight, a pride to me to take the new taste you shall prescribe, or leave the old one you forbid. My life being yours, what matters the change which you effect in it?
Here, you mean not even so much as this by your ‘painful’—‘Elopement’! Let them call it ‘felony’ or ‘burglary’—so long as they don’t go to church with us, and propose my health after breakfast! Now you fancy this a gratuitous piece of impertinence, do you not, Ba? You are wrong, sweet: I speak from directest experience—having dreamed, the night before last, that we were married, and that on adjourning to the house of a friend of mine, his brother, a young fop I know slightly, made a speech, about a certain desk or dressing-case, which he ended by presenting to me in the name of the house! Whereto I replied in a strain of the most alarming fluency ( ... all in the dream, I need not tell you)—‘and then I woke.’ Oh can I have smiled, higher up in the letter, at Miss Martineau’s over-excitability on the subject of ‘mobbing’ here? The greatest coward is the wisest man ... even the suspicion of such mobs ought to keep people at their lakes, or send them to their Pisas.
By the way, Byron speaks of plucking oranges in his garden at Pisa ... I saw just a courtyard with a high wall—which may have been a garden ... but a gloomier one than the palace, even, warrants. They have painted the front fresh staring yellow and changed its name ... there being another Casa Lanfranchi on the other side of the Arno.
Now I will kiss you, dearest: used you to divine that at the very beginning, I have sometimes shortened the visit in order to arrive at the time of taking your hand?