Letters From My Aunt Eleanor [180] To Her Daughter Sophia, And A Fragment From My Aunt’s Diary.
January 31, 1837.
My dearest Child,—It is now a month since your father died. It was a sore trial to me that you should have broken down, and that you could not be here when he was laid in his grave, but I would not for worlds have allowed you to make the journey. I am glad I forced you away. The doctor said he would not answer for the consequences unless you were removed. But I must not talk, not even to you. I will write again soon.
Your most affectionate mother,
Eleanor Charteris.
February 5, 1837.
I have been alone in the library from morning to night every day. How foolish all the books look! There is nothing in them which can do me any good. He is not: what is there which can alter that fact? Had he died later I could have borne it better. I am only fifty years old, and may have long to wait. I always knew I loved him devotedly; now I see how much I depended on him. I had become so knit up with him that I imagined his strength to be mine. His support was so continuous and so soft that I was unconscious of it. How clear-headed and resolute he was in difficulty and danger! You do not remember the great fire? We were waked up out of our sleep; the flames spread rapidly; a mob filled the street, shouting and breaking open doors. The man in charge of the engines lost his head, but your father was perfectly cool. He got on horseback, directed two or three friends to do the same; they galloped into the town and drove the crowd away. He controlled all the operations and saved many lives and many thousands of pounds. Is there any happiness in the world like that of the woman who hangs on such a husband?
February 10, 1837.
I feel as if my heart would break if I do not see you, but I cannot come to your Aunt’s house just now. She is very kind, but she would be unbearable to me. Have patience: the sea air is doing you good; you will soon be able to walk, and then you can return. O, to feel your head upon my neck! I have many friends, but I have always needed a human being to whom I was everything. To your father I believe I was everything, and that thought was perpetual heaven to me. My love for him did not make me neglect other people. On the contrary, it gave them their proper value. Without it I should have put them by. When a man is dying for want of water he cares for nothing around him. Satisfy his thirst, and he can then enjoy other pleasures. I was his first love, he was my first, and we were lovers to the end. I know the world would be dark to you also were I to leave it. Perhaps it is wicked of me to rejoice that you would suffer so keenly. I cannot tell how much of me is pure love and how much of me is selfishness. I remember my uncle’s death. For ten days or so afterwards everybody in the house looked solemn, and occasionally there was a tear, but at the end of a fortnight there was smiling and at the end of a month there was laughter. I was but a child then, but I thought much about the ease and speed with which the gap left by death was closed.
February 20, 1837.
In a fortnight you will be here? The doctor really believes you will be able to travel? I am glad you can get out and taste the sea air. I count the hours which must pass till I see you. A short week, and then—“the day after to-morrow, and the day after to-morrow of that day,” and so I shall be able to reach forward to the Monday. It is strange that the nearer Monday comes the more impatient I am.
March 3, 1837.
With what sickening fear I opened your letter! I was sure it contained some dreadful news. You have decided not to come till Wednesday, because your cousin Tom can accompany you on that day. I know you are quite right. It is so much better, as you are not strong, that Tom should look after you, and it would be absurd that you should make the journey two days before him. I should have reproved you seriously if you had done anything so foolish. But those two days are hard to bear. I shall not meet you at the coach, nor shall I be downstairs. Go straight to the library; I shall be there by myself.
Diary.
January 1, 1838.—Three days ago she died. Henceforth there is no living creature to whom my existence is of any real importance. Crippled as she was, she could never have married. I might have held her as long as she lived. She could have expected no love but mine. God forgive me! Perhaps I did unconsciously rejoice in that disabled limb because it kept her closer to me. Now He has taken her from me. I may have been wicked, but has He no mercy? “I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God.” An answer in anger could better be borne than this impregnable silence.
January 3rd.—A day of snow and bitter wind. There were very few at the grave, and I should have been better pleased if there had been none. What claim had they to be there? I have come home alone, and they no doubt are comforting themselves with the reflection that it is all over except the half-mourning. Her death makes me hate them. Mr. Maxwell, our rector, told me when my child was ill to remember that I had no right to her. “Right!” what did he mean by that stupid word? How trouble tries words! All I can say is that from her birth I had owned her, and that now, when I want her most, I am dispossessed. “Self, self”—I know the reply, but it is unjust, for I would have stood up cheerfully to be shot if I could have saved her pain. Doubly unjust, for my passion for her was a blessing to her as well as to me.
January 6th.—Henceforth I suppose I shall have to play with people, to pretend to take an interest in their clothes and their parties, or, with the superior sort, to discuss politics or books. I care nothing for their rags or their gossip, for Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, or Mr. James Montgomery. I must learn how to take the tip of a finger instead of a hand, and to accept with gratitude comfits when I hunger for bread—I, who have known—but I dare say nothing even to myself of my hours with him—I, who have heard Sophy cry out in the night for me; I, who have held her hand and have prayed by her bedside.
January 10th.—I must be still. I have learned this lesson before—that speech even to myself does harm. If I admit no conversation nor debate with myself, I certainly will not admit the chatter of outsiders. Mr. Maxwell called again to-day. “Not a syllable on that subject,” said I when he began in the usual strain. He then suggested that as this house was too large for me, and must have what he called “melancholy associations,” I should move. He had suggested this before, when my husband died. How can I leave the home to which I was brought as a bride? how can I endure the thought that strangers are in our room, or in that other room where Sophy lay? Mr. Maxwell would think it sacrilege to turn his church into an inn, and it is a worse sacrilege to me to permit the profanation of the sanctuary which has been consecrated by Love and Death. I do not know what might happen to me if I were to leave. I have been what I am through shadowy nothings which other people despise. To me they are realities and a law. I shall stay where I am. “A villa,” forsooth, on the outskirts of the town! My existence would be fractured: it will at least preserve its continuity here. Across the square I can see the house in which I was born, and I can watch the shadow of the church in the afternoon slowly crossing the churchyard. The townsfolk stand in the street and go up and down it just as they did forty years ago—not the same persons, but in a sense the same people. My brother will call me extravagant if I remain here. He buys a horse and does not consider it extravagant, and my money is not wasted if I spend it in the only way in which it is of any value to me.
January 12th.—I had thought I could be dumb, but I cannot. My sorrow comes in rushes. I lift up my head above the waves for an instant, and immediately I am overwhelmed—“all Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over me.” My nights are a terror to me, and I fear for my reason. That last grip of Sophy’s hand is distinctly on mine now, palpable as the pressure of a fleshly hand could be. It is strange that without any external circumstances to account for it, she and I often thought the same things at the same moment. She seemed to know instinctively what was passing in my mind, so that I was afraid to harbour any unworthy thought, feeling sure that she would detect it. Blood of my blood was she. She said “goodbye” to me with perfect clearness, and in a quarter of an hour she had gone. In that quarter of an hour there could not be the extinction of so much. Such a creature as Sophy could not instantaneously not be. I cannot believe it, but still the volume of my life here is closed, the story is at an end; what remains will be nothing but a few notes on what has gone before.
January 21st.—I went to church to-day for the first time since the funeral. Mr. Maxwell preached a dull, doctrinal sermon. Whilst my husband and Sophy lived, I was a regular attendant at church, and never thought of disputing anything I heard. It did not make much impression on me, but I accepted it, and if I had been asked whether I believed it, I should have said, “Certainly.” But now a new standard of belief has been set up in me, and the word “belief” has a different meaning.
February 3rd.—Whenever I saw anything beautiful I always asked Tom or Sophy to look. Now I ask nobody. Early this morning, after the storm in the night, the sky cleared, and I went out about dawn through the garden up to the top of the orchard and watched the disappearance of the night in the west. The loveliness of that silent conquest was unsurpassable. Eighteen months ago I should have run indoors and have dragged Tom and Sophy back with me. I saw it alone now, and although the promise in the slow transformation of darkness to azure moved me to tears, I felt it was no promise for me.
March 1st.—Nothing that is prescribed does me any good. I cannot leave off going to church, but the support I want I must find out for myself. Perhaps if I had been born two hundred years ago, I might have been caught by some strong enthusiastic organisation and have been a private in a great army. A miserable time is this when each man has to grope his way unassisted, and all the incalculable toil of founders of churches goes for little or nothing. . . . I do not pray for any more pleasure: I ask only for strength to endure, till I can lie down and rest. I have had more rapture in a day than my neighbours and relations have had in all their lives. Tom once said to me that he would sooner have had twenty-four hours with me as his wife than youth and manhood with any other woman he ever knew. He said that, not when we were first married, but a score of years afterwards. I remember the place and the hour. It was in the garden one morning in July, just before breakfast. It was a burning day, and massive white clouds were forming themselves on the horizon. The storm on that day was the heaviest I recollect, and the lightning struck one of our chimneys and dashed it through the roof. His passion was informed with intellect, and his intellect glowed with passion. There was nothing in him merely animal or merely rational. . . . To endure, to endure! Can there be any endurance without a motive? I have no motive.
March 10th.—My sister and my brother-in-law came to-day and I wished them away. Now that my husband is dead I discover that the frequent visitors to our house came to see him and not me. There must be something in me which prevents people, especially women, from being really intimate with me. To be able to make friends is a talent which I do not possess, and if those who call on me are prompted by kindness only, I would rather be without them. The only attraction towards me which I value is that which is irresistible. Perhaps I am wrong, and ought to accept with thankfulness whatever is left to me if it has any savour of goodness in it. I have no right to compare and to reject. . . I provide myself with little maxims, and a breath comes and sweeps them away. What is permanent behind these little flickerings is black night: that is the real background of my life.
April 24th.—I have been to London, and on Easter Sunday I went to High Mass at a Roman Catholic Church. I was obliged to leave, for I was overpowered and hysterical. Were I to go often my reason might be drowned, and I might become a devotee. And yet I do not think I should. If I could prostrate myself at a shrine I should want an answer. When I came out into the open air I saw again the plainness of the world: the skies, the sea, the fields are not in accord with incense or gorgeous ceremonies. Incense and ceremonies are beyond the facts, and to the facts we must cleave, no matter how poor and thin they may be.
May 5th.—If I am ill, I shall depend entirely on paid service. God grant I may die suddenly and not linger in imbecility. So much of me is dead that what is left is not worth preserving. Nearly everything I have done all my life has been done for love. I shall now have to act for duty’s sake. It is an entire reconstruction of myself, the insertion of a new motive. I do not much believe in duty, nor, if I read my New Testament aright, did the Apostle Paul. For Jesus he would do anything. That sacred face would have drawn me whither the Law would never have driven me.
May 7th.—It is painful to me to be so completely set aside. When Tom was alive I was in the midst of the current of affairs. Few men, except Maxwell, come to the house now. My property is in the hands of trustees. Tom continually consulted me in business matters. I have nothing to look after except my house, and I sit at my window and see the stream of life pass without touching me. I cannot take up work merely for the sake of taking it up. Nobody would value it, nor would it content me. How I used to pity my husband’s uncle, Captain Charteris! He had been a sailor; he had fought the French; he had been in imminent danger of shipwreck, and from his youth upwards perpetual demands had been made upon his resources and courage. At fifty he retired, a strong, active man; and having a religious turn, he helped the curate with school-treats and visiting. He pined away and died in five years. The bank goes on. I have my dividends, but not a word reaches me about it.
October 10th.—Five months, I see, have passed since I made an entry in my diary. What a day this is! The turf is once more soft, the trees and hedges are washed, the leaves are turning yellow and are ready to fall. I have been sitting in the garden alone, reading the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis. I must copy the closing verses. It does me good to write them.
“And Jacob charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a burying-place. There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah. The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was from the children of Heth. And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.” There is no distress here: he gathers up his feet and departs. Perhaps our wild longings are unnatural, and yet it seems but nature not to be content with what contented the patriarch. Anyhow, wherever and whatever my husband and Sophy are I shall be. This at least is beyond dispute.
October 12th.—I do not wish to forget past joys, but I must simply remember them and not try to paint them. I must cut short any yearning for them.
October 20th.—We do not say the same things to ourselves with sufficient frequency. In these days of book-reading fifty fine thoughts come into our heads in a day, and the next morning are forgotten. Not one of them becomes a religion. In the Bible how few the thoughts are, and how incessantly they are repeated! If my life could be controlled by two or three divine ideas, I would burn my library. I often feel that I would sooner be a Levitical priest, supposing I believed in my office, than be familiar with all these great men whose works are stacked around me.
October 22nd.—Sometimes, especially at night, the thought not only that I personally have lost Tom and Sophy, but that the exquisite fabric of these relationships, so intricate, so delicate, so highly organised, could be cast aside, to all appearance so wastefully, is almost unendurable. . . . I went up to the moor on the top of the hill this morning, where I could see, far away, the river broaden and lose itself in the Atlantic. I lay on the heather looking through it and listening to it.
October 23rd.—The 131st Psalm came into my mind when I was on the moor again. “Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of its mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.”
October 28th—Tom once said to me that reasoning is often a bad guide for us, and that loyalty to the silent Leader is true wisdom. Wesley, when he was in trouble, asked himself “whether he should fight against it by thinking, or by not thinking of it,” and a wise man told him “to be still and go on.” A certain blind instinct seems to carry me forward. What is it? an indication of a purpose I do not comprehend? an order given by the Commander-in-Chief which is to be obeyed although the strategy is not understood?
November 3rd.—Palmer, my maid, who has been with me ever since I began to keep house, was very good-looking at one-and-twenty. When she had been engaged to be married about a twelvemonth, she burned her face and the burn left a bad scar. Her lover found excuses for breaking off the engagement. He must have been a scoundrel, and I should like to have had him whipped with wire. She was very fond of him. She had an offer of marriage ten years afterwards, but she refused. I believe she feared lest the scar, seen every day, would make her husband loathe her. Her case is worse than mine, for she never knew such delights as mine. She has subsisted on mere friendliness and civility. “Oh,” it is suggested at once to me, “you are more sensitive than she is.” How dare I say that? How hateful is the assumption of superior sensitiveness as an excuse for want of endurance!
November 4th.—Ellen Charteris, my husband’s cousin, belongs to a Roman Catholic branch of the family, and is an abbess. I remember saying to her that I wondered that she and her nuns could spend such useless lives. She replied that although she and all good Catholics believe in the atonement of Christ, they also believe that works of piety in excess of what may be demanded of us, even if they are done in secret, are a set-off against the sins of the world. In this form the doctrine has not much to commend itself to me, and it is assumed that the nuns’ works are pious. But in a sense it is true. “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” The fall of a grain of dust is recorded.
November 7th—A kind of peace occasionally visits me. It is not the indifference begotten of time, for my husband and my child are nearer and dearer than ever to me. I care not to analyse it. I return to my patriarch. With Joseph before him, the father, who had refused to be comforted when he thought his son was dead, gathered up his feet into the bed and slept.
