A matter less of belief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant was one of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense of tragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her less the fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, of consoling, and of compensating.
With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full—over-full, some of us thought—of the affairs of other folk, she never appeared worried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their business to her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dear bluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or her solely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion, not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of space and rest in this world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heaven closed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, how many shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; or rather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what, that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!
I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because she was such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, like those brown corridors, full of books, at Paraÿs; or that bedroom of hers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look of a library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I had long guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, the consecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it to you, all those years ago, that life must be begun many times anew. And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death at all.
Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!
It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I bade each other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though none of us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris; and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, at leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a November day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy. I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I, when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course we must have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces of departure, of packing, were cleared away at her bidding, and when they had carried her on to her sofa, and placed by its side the little table with our books, and also my chair, she bade the dear Southern maids light a fine blaze of vine stumps, and fill all the jars with fresh roses—china roses, so vivid, surely none have ever smelt so sweet and poignant. We amused ourselves, a little sadly, burning some olive and myrtle branches I had brought for her from Corsica, and watching their frail silver twigs and leaves turn to embers and fall in fireworks of sparks and a smoke of incense. And we read together in one of my books (alas! that book has just come back this very same day, sent by her daughter), and looked up at the loose grey clouds suffused with rose and orange as the day drew to its end. Then the children shouted from below that the carriage was there, that I must go. We closed the books, marking the place, and I broke a rose from the nosegay on the fireplace. And we said farewell.
Thus have we remained, she and I. With the mild autumn day drawing to an end outside; and within, the fresh roses, the bright fire she had asked for; remained reading our books, watching those dried leaves turn to showers of sparks and smoke of incense. She and I, united beyond all power of death to part, in the loving belief that, even like that afternoon of packing up and bidding adieu, and rain and early twilight, life also should be made serene and leisurely, and simple and sweet, and akin to eternity.
And now I am going to put those volumes she and I had read together, on my own shelves, here in this house she never entered; and to correct the proofs of this new little book, which should have been hers, nay, rather is, and which is also, my dear Madame Blanc, for that reason, yours.
I am, meanwhile, your grateful and affectionate friend,
VERNON LEE.