CHAPTER XVIII.

UNITED.

(From the Manuscript.)

On the twelfth of May, 1859, the entry in the pocketbook is in his handwriting. "Mr. Smith arrived by the 11.12 train. We walked by the river were out three hours. He came in the evening at six. We walked beyond Inver. I went to see his room at Mrs. Christie's. Mr. S. returned with me." One flash of his light-heartedness that morning I remember. I had been reading "Thorndale," and said something about it to which he replied by a delicious anachronism: "Oh, dear, it's your book!" I see his very smile in saying this, as we turned. into the broad grass walk that then led from Birnam past the great trees sole relics of the ancient woods along the deep rapid flow of the Tay.

And now it is difficult to know how much to tell of the next four months. I have only the records in my pocketbook, and the fond memories too sacred for utterance. I was busily occupied just then in translating, compiling, etc., and he was ever ready to help in his own incomparable way so simply and spontaneously and as it were unconsciously, that help from him was pure help, could never become obligation, could never weigh on memory.

The entries in my journal, however, are seldom unqualifiedly cheerful. They are full of extremes — morning walks all brightness and present joy, but evenings that closed in all gloomy and gray, and told upon the sensitive. organism of my "sun spirit," as I sometimes called him;

evenings when the future seemed all isolation and failure; - or else mornings when the talk would run into painful channels, let it begin ever so abstractedly, but evenings of intense, silent joy, that left their deep traces in the consciousness of both.

. . We did not much vary our walks at Dunkeld, any more than at Patterdale. The summer was a fine one, we sat out much, and almost always had a book with us, though I think it was less and less read. There was no subject on which he did not talk to me, however unfamiliar to my ignorance. And all his depression, his sad anticipation, his discouragement, he shared with me. more and more unreservedly. . . . He brought me Tennyson's "Idylls of the King;" and oh, how beautiful they were when read by him those who heard them often in after years will never forget. So the summer glided by. It had brought us nearer, but no ray of further hope appeared. Indeed, when I think of our circumstances as they were then, I cannot well imagine anything more discouraging. And yet, a new phrase became current toward the end of our mutual life, "There is no saying what may happen," and to both it meant not only possible future meetings, but what was confessedly, demonstrably, the impossible! Good-by, then, my sweet memories of Dunkeld - of our long rests, half buried in heather and ferns, watching the waving of the well-loved birches on the common, watching the great clouds above the Grampians, watching once the delicious gambols of a large family of white goats, who had no suspicion of our presence 1 watching always, dearer and more important to me than all earth and sky, the least change that passed over his face, least shadow overcasting the radiant smile, least hint of sadness in the dark, far-gazing eyes. On the sixteenth of September we had our last walk- - he went with us to the station, but I would not let him stay till the train. moved. I saw him off - and the joy that had been,

words he had said, and the intimate sense that nothing could sever our hearts and minds, supported me; so that only on the following day the already familiar anguish fastened on me the want of everything.

[Soon afterward, he had a slight illness at Keswick. The letters soon told of health improving, but the spirits flagged.] "Yes, yes - you know that you hold a place in my mind and affections that no one else holds, and that no one will ever hold again. But you know also what manner of man it is who says this, and from what sort of hopeless environment he says it. This illness would be enough to humble me if I wanted such a lesson. Weak, weak-body and mind, body and mind. Too late, too late! Ye cannot enter now!' I will not let hope get into my mind, but will just fold my old cloak round me, and walk as quietly and cheerfully as I can down this long lane that has no turning." And then he plunges into other subjects -my translations, tales, and the rest, which he revised for me; financial matters concerning me; my health, etc. I was not well at this time; had sudden attacks, of no significance as the sequel proved, but I am sure they helped me. To die seemed sweeter than to live on without him, and if I died I could be of some little use. Accordingly I made my will, and supported my spirits somewhat thereby!

[A passing visit was made by Lucy and her mother at Keswick, which yielded a happy fortnight.] But though I tell in my pocket-book of "happiest hours — nature and him," there were some sad hours in which I strove against his firm resolve against spending the winter in Edinburgh. That he would not do-not, he said, from want of affection; he loved me "quite enough, too much;" but for reasons that he did not then give. I think the horror of the observation he would excite, the sense of utter hopelessness, making all comment upon the situation painful, had a good deal to do with it. Yet it was hard

for the hope to quite die in my heart. A singular little incident comes in here. I had changed a ten-pound note on the morning of our departure, and after paying our little weekly bill put the purse into my pocket. It was a very wet day. At the coach office, settling myself in the wretched vehicle and looking for my purse in order to pay the fare, I discovered that the pocket was empty. Kind Miss Buchan, who was "seeing us off," at once rushed back to our lodging to see whether peradventure it had been left there, and, passing Mr. Smith in a sheltering doorway, "ready to take off his wide-awake in the most graceful manner he could" when the coach should pass, she told him of the disaster. Instantly he was with us, and the contents of his purse poured into my mother's lap -no counting, scarce any knowing what he did. A little thing, and yet done in a way - his way- which my dear mother, herself the most generous of women, pronounced special and never to be forgotten. How earnest the dark eyes were! "Was there enough?" "Oh, too much, too much!" And the coach rolled away. The loss was inexplicable, for we had met no one in the deluged streets. The crier was sent out at once to "cry the purse," and on the Monday following he wrote a few hurried lines to say he had heard something of a purse found he was "so distressed to think of the pretty story"-I had earned that ten pounds-"going that way." The end of it was that he, the most truthful human being I ever knew, deliberately concocted a tale which entirely took me in; which never wakened in my mother or myself an instant's surprise; which was cleverly circumstantial, freeing from suspicion the one around whom my suspicion had flitted; involving no one but some unknown girl in the fault of having found and kept the money and done away with the purse as a precautionary measure. It was a great relief to me at the time to recover that little sum, and only when we were married, when I could not repay him, did the

real truth transpire! Oh, I like to think how brightly he must have smiled to himself over the success of his ruse!

After these matters of finance, repayment, transmission of the supposed balance, had been got through, he sits down a week after our departure to write "a very long letter," after a "dreary, solitary day and no particular task in hand." Most of this letter consists of sympathizing comment upon my family perplexities, which rather overwhelmed me just then. (I thankfully acknowledge they were not too great. How they enhanced- but that did not need enhancing - how they taught me to measure, to realize, the bliss of the after years!) He says: "Ah me! what a multitude of things the dear head has to think of! I don't know whether to congratulate you or not on being so indispensable. Who could take your place? Yet it is hard that the dear bird, like a bird carved in stone, should be fixed and prisoned because it is the keystone of the arch. To be of no use to any one too much use I know not which is better, no, not I,' or rather which is worse."

or of

[He withstood the proposed Edinburgh visit.] He wrote: "All I know is that I for my own part feel my heart going out toward a certain impossibility, and that cannot be wise that is a sort of insanity. I don't want to be insane I want to keep my head must have a little use and possession of this bit of brain—it is all I have for occupation or for pleasure."

Again he says: "Be generous, and do not use all your power." But I suffered, and I fear I was not generous in hiding it. He writes: "I have such a heart of lead! I cannot attempt to describe the pain which your pain gives me and I have my own too. Indeed it will be with a very sad heart that I shall bend next week toward Brighton. I feel something of the same strange pang that I had in parting with you at Edinburgh. I am not