How Do I Love Thee? (30 page)

I looked at his eyes, so full of sincere caring for me, and I longed to reach out and touch his hair or cup his face in my hand. But to do so would be the essence of impropriety and would encourage his feelings beyond what I could allow. But I
could
acquiesce to his assessment. “I do feel myself growing. It’s miraculous, this feeling of sprouting life in me and out of me. And recently, I have even begun to sleep better, and—as you yourself have said—I look altogether another person.”

“I admire you and care for you, in sickness or health.”

His words made me think of marriage vows. . . .

He may have realized the train of my thoughts, for he smiled and added, “Though I will say I do enjoy the benefits of the latter—for both of us. Lately, you have had much more energy.”

“I have. And I am determined to get on, and hold on, as the summer progresses.” But after summer came the autumn, and the winter. . . . I was reminded of a new twist in my future, one I had been eager to share with Robert. “I may be taking a trip—much further than my cousin’s house or Regent’s Park.”

He pulled the chair close. “Do tell.”

“Dr. Chambers has told me—and Papa—that he does
not
wish for me to spend the winter here in London. With all the strides that have been made towards better health, he fears they will be for naught if I remain here.”

“Well, well,” Robert said. “I think I like this doctor of yours. Where does he wish you to go?”

I tried to hold back a smile but could not. “Pisa.”

Robert’s mouth gagged open. “Pisa is magic. It’s the blush of a bride, the smile of a child, the song of the wind. I just returned from there the weeks before I first wrote to you.”

“I know,” I said. “It is a city that has always intrigued me.” And had so even more since I’d heard of his love for it.

“What does your father say?”

Ah. There was the rub. “He is against it.”

“Then you must convince him!”

The exuberance I had experienced in telling him slipped away. “Dr. Chambers has been trying to get me to go away for years.”

“Then why have you not gone?”

I wished I could blame it all upon Papa, but I could not. “When I was much younger, Papa sent me to Torquay for my health. For three years I—” Suddenly, as it often did without warning, the grief of Torquay sprang upon me, and tears were released from their tenuous bondage.

Once again, Robert rushed to my side. “Oh my, oh dearest. What’s wrong?”

Even amid my angst, I gloried in the term of endearment that had recently been exchanged:
Dearest.
He to me, and I to him . . .

Robert handed me his handkerchief, and even as I dabbed my eyes, I wondered how could I ever . . . should I ever speak of this wound within me?

He took my hand and whispered, “Please, dearest. I wish to help.”

With his words and with the strength and compassion in his countenance, I believed him completely and utterly. And so . . . I began.

“I have never said any of this—I never could talk or even write of it. I have asked no question from the moment when my last hope went, and since then . . . it has been impossible for me to speak about what was in me. What remains in me.”

“You are obviously wounded.”

“Deeply. Irrevocably.” I realized if I were to do this, I could not ask him to remain as he was, kneeling in so uncomfortable a position. “Please be seated, Robert. If I am to continue—and I am fairly stunned to think that I am—I must know you to be comfortable.”

He sat in the chair but added, “I imagine I will find little comfort in anything that upsets you so keenly.”

“Thank you.” I looked away from him, towards the window, letting my memories rush southward, to that place, that bay, that city by the sea, that unforgiving and unforgiven sea. . . .

“Due to my illness, and from doctor’s orders, I was sent to Torquay with my sister, and he, my brother whom I loved so, was sent also, to take us there and return. Bro—for we always called him so—was the dearest of friends and brothers in one . . . the only one of my family who—” I grasped another breath in order to continue. “Let it be enough to tell you that he was above us all, better than us all, and kindest and noblest and dearest to me, beyond comparison,
any
comparison.” I paused, hoping Robert would understand that I had held Bro even above my father. I did not want to state it so plainly—I could never voice it so—but I wished for him to understand.

I continued. “When the time came for him to go back to London, I, weakened by illness, could not master my spirits or drive back my tears. I assured Papa that he would break my heart if he persisted in calling my brother away—as if hearts were broken so.”

“I too am close to my sister,” Robert said. “I understand the bond between siblings. You wanted him to stay. That is not a bad thing to desire.”

A harsh laugh escaped. “Papa’s answer was burnt into me, as with fire, that he considered it very wrong for me to exact such a thing. So there was no separation then, and month after month passed—and sometimes I was better and sometimes worse, and the medical men continued to say that they would not answer for my life if I were agitated, and so there was no more talk of a separation.”

Robert smiled tentatively. “And so, Bro was with you—with your father’s permission.”

I raised a hand to stop his encouragement, for what would come next would dispel all happiness and harmony from his opinion. “Once, Bro held my hand—how I remember!—and said that he loved me better than them all and that he would not leave me till I was well.”

Robert made effort to speak, but wisely thought better of it, for by the tone of my telling, he could surely sense a
but
suspended in the air between us that would lead from the good thing to something very bad. And so . . . to move along . . .

“But ten days from that day a boat left the shore which never returned, never. And he had . . . left me. Gone. For three days we waited—and I hoped while I could, oh, that awful agony of three days!”

“He was not gone as in a trip away, but . . . he was capsized?”

I looked again to the window, to the sun, the same sun . . . “And the sun shone as it shines today, and there was no more wind than now.” I set my hand upon the table nearby. “And the sea under my windows was like this paper for smoothness—and my sisters drew the curtains back that I might see for myself how smooth the sea was, and how it could hurt nobody. And other boats came back one by one.”

“Oh dear . . .”

I thought of something else, some bond that could help explain. . . . “Remember how you wrote in your ‘Gismond’ . . .” I closed my eyes and recited the poem. “ ‘What says the body when they spring, some monstrous torture-engine’s whole strength on it? No more says the soul.’ ” I opened my eyes to gaze on him. “You never wrote anything which lived with me more than that. It is such a dreadful truth. But you knew it for truth, I hope, by your genius, and not by such proof as mine. I, who could not speak or shed a tear, but lay for weeks and months half conscious, half unconscious, with a wandering mind, and too near to God, under the crushing of His hand, to pray at all. I expiated all my weak tears before, by not being able to shed one tear—and yet my family was forbearing, and no voice declared, ‘You have done this.’ ”

“They would not dare!” he said. “You did not sail the ship, you did not force your brother to go upon it, you did not control the weather or the tide or the captain or whatever caused the tragedy.”

But I forced the issue, making him stay. . . .

I could not heap such guilt upon poor Robert. He, who had suffered so little, did not need to descend to the depths of my despair. I offered him a reassuring smile. “I do not now reproach myself with such acrid thoughts as before—I know that I would have died ten times over for him, and that, though it was wrong of me to be weak, I have suffered for it and shall learn by it. Remorse is not precisely the word for me—not in its full sense. Still I hope you will comprehend from what I have told you, how the spring of life seemed to break within me then; and how natural it has been for me to loath the living on—and even without the loathing, to lose faith in myself. This, I have done on some points utterly.”

Robert sat close by, his head shaking no, no, and another time no. He had no words for me, and so I offered a few more of my own. “You will comprehend too that I have strong reasons for being grateful for the forbearance of my family. It would have been cruel, you think, to reproach me. Perhaps so. Yet the kindness and patience of the desisting from reproach are positive things.”

Robert glanced towards the door, and I feared he wished to rush away from me, my pain and regret too heady for him to bear within our friendship. Yet as soon as he spoke, I knew the reason for his look to the door.

“Is this why your family lives together under one roof? Why your father is so . . . so . . .”

I guessed what he was thinking, and I chastised myself for previously feeding his opinion of a harsher father than dear Papa deserved. “You must
not
make an unjust opinion out of what I said today. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not said it apart from all context in that way. But you could not long be a friend of mine without knowing and seeing what lies upon the surface and hides below.”

“And I am truly grateful that you trust me enough to share what sits so heavily upon your heart. But your family should not blame—”

I interrupted, ignored his accusation, and attempted to explain our unique situation. “Living all together as we do . . . every now and then there must of course be a crossing and vexation—but in one’s mere pleasures and fantasies, one would rather be crossed and vexed a little than vex a person one loves. And it is possible to get used to the harness and run easily in it.” I looked to the books upon the shelves. “There is a side-world to hide one’s thoughts in, and the word
literature
has, with me, covered a good deal of liberty which is never inquired about.”

“Are you saying they leave you alone?”

“Within my work I am my own mistress.”

“But the rest . . . ?”

“It has happened throughout my life by accident—as far as anything is by accident—that my own sense of right and happiness on any important point has never run contrary to the way of obedience required of me. While in things of lesser import, I and all of us are apt to act with shut doors and windows, without waiting for discernment or permission.” My thoughts flew upon the times my siblings and I had wanted to ask Papa for something but had chosen not to. And yet sometimes, at rare times, we had continued on within our own will—aside from Papa’s knowledge. “And this last is the worst of it all. To be forced into concealments from the heart naturally nearest to us, and forced away from the natural source of counsel and strength is . . .” I could not say more.

“I do not like hiding my presence from your family, your father in particular,” Robert said. “I do not wish to be covert or cause you to be.”

He still did not understand the necessity of it. The delicate nature of it all, the fragile balance. “All my brothers are constrained bodily into submission—apparent submission at least—by that worst and most dishonouring of necessities, the necessity of living. Every one of them all, except myself, is dependent in money matters on the inflexible will of . . . Do you see?”

“I think I see very clearly. You are beholden. Obligated.”

Yes, and yet
. . . “But what you do not see, what you cannot see, is the deep tender affection behind and below all those patriarchal ideas of governing grown-up children ‘in the way they must go.’ There never was—under the strata—a truer affection in a father’s heart, nor a worthier heart in itself, a heart loyaler and purer, and more compelling to gratitude and reverence, than his.”

Robert looked at me askance, not believing.

“The evil is in the system, and Papa simply takes it to be his duty to rule, and to make us happy according to his own views of the propriety of happiness. He takes it to be his duty to rule like the kings of Christendom, by divine right. But he loves us through and through it—and I, for one . . .” I paused. “I love him.”

“That is laudable. You are a good daughter.”

I shook my head to negate his compliment. “When, five years ago, I lost what I loved best in the world beyond comparison and rivalship . . . everyone who knew me also knew Bro was my first and chiefest affection. When I lost that, I felt that Papa stood the nearest to me on the closed grave, or by the unclosing sea.”

“It is natural to lean on relatives amidst a crisis.”

No! Robert still did not understand! “I will tell you that not only has Papa been kind and patient and forbearing to me through the tedious trial of this illness—far more trying to standers-by like you than one can imagine—but that he was generous and forbearing in that hour of bitter trial, and never reproached me as he might have done. My own soul has not spared me as much. Never once has he said to me, then or since, that if it had not been for me, the crown of his house would not have fallen. He never did . . . and he might have said it, and more, and I could not have answered except to say that I had paid my own price, and that the price I paid was greater than his loss.”

“Of course he did not condemn you. Your brother’s death was not your fault!”

“You must see how it was, Robert. I said horrible things to him that day. I told him I had no need for him. So you see, not with my hand but my heart I
was
the cause of that misery. I am the one who made him flee in anger. And though not with the intention of my heart, but with its weakness . . . I
am
to blame. That no one has accused me face-to-face is their virtue.”

Robert stood, his head shaking again. “No, I think—you will pardon me, Miss Barrett—but I think you have it all wrong. That you wished for your brother to stay on with you in Torquay reveals your love for each other, your devotion. I am certain he enjoyed your time together as much as you. That he suffered a horrible fate is neither due to your desire to have him with you, nor his choice to go upon the boat that day—on a lovely, still sea. It just happened. And that your family, knowing of your guilt and pain, has not added to the pain by accusing you directly . . . ? Do you not realize by their silence they cause pain enough? For if they truly loved you—as I love you—they would not allow your guilt to exist in any form. They would have dispelled it upon the first embrace and tear. And that . . .” He blinked a few times and seemed to come out of his anger and return to me fully. He sat by my side. “I apologize for being so forthright and bold. I have no right. I only do it from a sincere desire to see you happy and free from this burden.”