Ever After

5

Plymouth, 12th April 1869

My Dearest Elizabeth,

I beg you to forgive this liberty in writing and in reawakening the pain of some nine years ago. Yet I take the further liberty of presuming that perhaps in those nine years I have not been wholly absent from your thoughts (as you, indeed, have lodged permanently in mine) and that you may agree with me, at least on our little private scale of things, that the past is not easily to be dismissed.

Such a dismissal is what I must now seem to be attempting, since I find myself here in Plymouth with a trunk containing the residue of my possessions, which I will shortly accompany to the New World. New Life also, I would say, but I do not know whether the one thing confers the other — nor, if it does, whether I am fit subject for the metamorphosis.

In deference to Old Life — our old life — I send you, since they have no place, I think, in the trunk, the notebooks that I began to keep after our poor Felix died, and kept, intermittently, until the dissolution of our marriage. What you will do with them — read them, ignore them, keep or destroy them — will not be for me to know. But I could not offer you this my last farewell (for that is what it is, my dear Liz) without offering you also the testimony of the man you once knew and (this is no presumption) loved. Perhaps it may reconcile you to the pain I caused you, perhaps only revive that pain. For you may charge me with the fact that had I confided to you, at an earlier stage, the things I confided only to these notebooks, then matters might never have reached their fatal pitch between us, and I might never have become, even before they did so, increasingly a stranger to you.

Yet I am not the first, I imagine, to have had a conscience about having a conscience, and to have struggled to keep doubts under guard while maintaining a sanguine face to the world, like a sick person wishing not to infect others.

What good, you will say, was my well-intentioned deception, if it served only to tear me, and us, apart? But at least I return to you now that part of me of which you had every right to be jealous — though never once, my long-suffering Liz, did you upbraid me with my private and late-night assignations at my desk.

I have added, excised, changed nothing. As to the temerity of my affronting you with what I might have spared you, I can only hope that as we grow older, we grow more forgiving, and plead that I still believe what I came to believe then — was this not the root of the matter? — that though ignorance may be bliss, happiness is not to be purchased by a refusal of knowledge. Where there is evidence, so we must look, so we must examine.

Keep them, burn them — they are evidence of me.

I sail in the Juno on tomorrow’s evening tide. Plymouth Sound will be my last picture of England. I mean to take the train to Saltash and take one final look at the Bridge: that for particular memories, and my small part in its construction.

Do not ask what I shall do in the New World. In a new world there should be work enough for surveyors (if I still have credit as a surveyor). And I am not alone, it seems, in being drawn thither. The streets of Plymouth, as also, they say, of Falmouth and Fowey, are full of miners awaiting passages, some with their wives and children still about them, all putting a brave face on their exodus.

Times have changed. I do not mean to wound you. I have heard that Wheal Talbot is all but finished and no capital is left to explore for tin. You will think I write only out of vengefulness. True, I am human; I can summon few tender thoughts for the man who has taken my place with you. Yet I pray (ah, you will say, me—pray?) that fate — let me use that word — will not be unkind to you in these harsh times.

The same prayer for our little ones, though I know they are little ones no longer. They are grown up and old enough to have families of their own — is it so? I had hoped that they — but enough of that. Bid them farewell from me. May they be a comfort to you. I miss my Lucy.

The same prayer, if they will accept it, for the Rector and his dear Emily. They age well, I trust. Your father owes to me not a few of his white hairs. But white hairs become a clergyman, and he is a good shepherd, who is rid now of the black sheep of his flock. Salute my old adversary!

I should tell you — but perhaps you know — that my own father breathed his last in Launceston some four months ago. Since then only the necessity of putting his affairs in order has kept me from my present purpose. I was at his side at the end, as I have been these last years. We had become friends once more, after the cooling of our relations. In truth, I always loved my mother more than I loved him, and he had always known it, though only in his last days could we freely acknowledge this to each other, as he could acknowledge what his whole life, for all its lapses, has manifested: his undying faithfulness to her memory. There is no justice or logic in our favouring, in certain circumstances, the dead over the living (who surely have greater claim to our benevolence) and crediting the flame of remembrance more than the warmth of life. But perhaps in these last years I have done something to restore the balance.

We were not so different, perhaps, he and I. We came to the same place, he by the road of that early loss, I by the road of my own thoughts. Who is the more blameworthy? Yet, at the very end, he confounded me utterly. Bade me rummage in the depths of an old, locked cupboard, where I found the little old, leather-bound clasp Bible — I supposed I would never see it again — from which my mother used regularly to read to me and which I had thought, in the wilfulness of his bereavement all those years ago, he had thrown away. Then he confessed, if not in so many words, that he was always jealous of the faith that I had kept but which he in his innermost heart had lost. Jealous, furthermore, of the good Rector, in whom he thought I had found a father — since a spiritual father — preferable to him. Yet surely it was my father who, if anyone, found me my father-in-law and steered you and me (happy, ill-fated steersman-ship!) into wedlock. And if he supposed that I found thereby a sanctuary he could not provide, I did not refuse, in the end, the sad sanctuary of his own neglected hearth.

You are wondering, perhaps, how much his habit of the bottle hastened his death. I must tell you that for at least eighteen months before he died he touched not a drop, though I would not have begrudged him a dash of brandy in his milk, if it had eased the wretchedness of his illness. He died the devotee of temperance he was when my mother lived. All his confessions were soberly made. We said no prayers (how could we?), and what inward prayers he may have uttered I do not know. But my mother’s Bible, which now I keep, was beside him. Death is a strange breeder both of truth and of superstition.

It is late. Rain is falling, and there is scarcely a footstep in the street. Part of me feels — a fine confession for a man who has just turned fifty — like some small boy running away to sea, with as yet no better conception of the perils of the ocean than the comfortable sound of rain beating on a window-pane. My dear, dear Liz. How many voyagers, how many ocean-goers have sat up late in this town, penning letters to their loved ones?

Superstition? Yes, I must say that. There has been no counter-reversal, no retracting of retraction. I hold to my groundless ground. And yet as I sit here, a traveller about to submit himself to the deeps, my mother’s Bible is with me. It has a place in my trunk — I clutch it to me as a savage must clutch his talisman — while my notebooks do not.

Fifty years! What is fifty years? Life is short, we say. And we guess not (but I will not harp on my theme) how infinitesimally brief, how as nothing, as a “twinkling of the eye,” is the span of human life within the great duration of the aeons. Yet life is long too. We feel it so. We feel ourselves become part of the ages. I remember, when I was a small boy, my poor mother telling me of her own visits to this town when she herself was a girl. How she had been in Plymouth when it was red with the coats of Sir John Moore’s army bound for Spain, and how again she had gone with her father and mother to behold with her own eyes the fallen Emperor of the French, who was then a captive on the Bellerophon, anchored in the Sound, and daily drew out crowds in boats to observe him.

These things seemed to me to belong to some distant era, even to the realms of legend, and I confused in my mind Sir John Moore’s army with the gathered bands of the Israelites at Hebron, which must have been at the time the subject of my Scripture readings with my mother. As for the Emperor of the French—“Boney,” as he was called then — he seemed to me a figure entirely out of fable, out of commedia dell’arte or Punch and Judy. And this, perhaps, was how my mother conceived of him even as she beheld him, for she would insist — and I will never know if this were some nice embellishment on her part — that as she was rowed with my grandparents by the stern of the warship, the Emperor, in full view on the quarter-deck, raised his hat and smiled, expressly at her.

“How are the mighty fallen” was her gloss on this little digression. So we continued on our path through the Old Testament. How strange to think that three times as many years have now passed since she related these things as had elapsed then from the events which she recounted. And what an age it seems since I heard her voice and since I sat beside her at our parlour table with the Bible between us.

The time may come, my dear Liz — perhaps it has come for you already — when it will seem just as long ago, just such a thing of fable, that we ever married and shared life together. But come what may, dearest Liz, you may trust that, as I revere still in my memory my poor mother — who showed me the way to a world that can no longer be mine — so will you always be remembered by

Your loving

Matthew