Chapter LXXVIII: Letter LXXVIII

To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is too much for me. Come to me somehow, dear ghost of all my happiness, and take me in your arms! I ache and ache, not to belong to you. I do: I must. It is only our senses that divide us; and mine are all famished servants waiting for their master. They have nothing to do but watch for you, and pretend that they believe you will come. Oh, it is grievous!

Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses? They go out of me in sharp stabs of pain: they must go _somewhere_ for me to be delivered of them only with so much suffering. Oh, how this should make me hate you, if that were possible: how, instead, I love you more and more, and shall, dearest, and will till I die!

I _will_ die, because in no other way can I express how much I love you. I am possessed by all the despairing words about lost happiness that the poets have written. They go through me like ghosts: I am haunted by them: but they are bloodless things. It seems when I listen to all the other desolate voices that have ever cried, that I alone have blood in me. Nobody ever loved as I love since the world began.

There, dearest, take this, all this bitter wine of me poured out until I feel in myself only the dregs left: and still in them is the fire and the suffering.

No: but I will be better: it is better to have known you than not. Give me time, dearest, to get you to heart again! I cannot leave you like this: not with such words as these for "good-night!"

Oh, dear face, dear unforgettable lost face, my soul strains up to look for you through the blind eyes that have been left to torment me because they can never behold you. Very often I have seen you looking grieved, shutting away some sorrow in yourself quietly: but never once angry or impatient at any of the small follies of men. Come, then, and look at me patiently now! I am your blind girl: I must cry out because I cannot see you. Only make me believe that you yet think of me as, when you so unbelievably separated us, you said you had always found me--"the dearest and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet." Beloved, if in your heart I am still that, separation does not matter. I can wait, I can wait.

I kiss your feet: even to-morrow may bring the light. God bless you! I pray it more than ever; because to me to-night has been so very dark.