Chapter XXIX: A Letter From the Dead

I was living alone at the Willard.

Soon after the death of Burbank's wife, his sister and brother-in-law, the Gracies, had come with their three children to live with him and to look after his boy and girl. Trouble between his family and mine, originating in some impertinences of the oldest Gracie girl, spread from the children to the grown people until, when he went into the White House, he and I were the only two on speaking terms. I see now that this situation had large influence on me in holding aloof and waiting always for overtures from him. At the time I thought, as no doubt he thought also, that the quarrel was beneath the notice of men.

At any rate my family decided not to come to Washington during his first winter in the White House. I lived alone at the Willard. One afternoon toward the end of February I returned there from the Senate and found Woodruff, bad news in his face. "What is it?" I asked indifferently, for I assumed it was some political tangle.

"Your wife--was taken--very ill--very suddenly," he said. His eyes told me the rest.

If I had ever asked myself how this news would affect me, I should have answered that it would give me a sensation of relief. But, instead of relief, I felt the stunning blow of a wave of sorrow which has never wholly receded. Not because I loved her--that I never did. Not because she was the mother of my children--my likes and dislikes are direct and personal. Not because she was my wife--that bond had been galling. Not because I was fond of her--she had one of those cold, angry natures that forbid affection. No; I was overwhelmed because she and I had been intimates, with all the closest interests of life in common, with the whole world, even my children whom I loved passionately, outside that circle which fate had drawn around us two. I imagine this is not uncommon among married people,--this unhealable break in their routine of association when one departs. No doubt it often passes with the unthinking for love belatedly discovered.

"She did not suffer," said Woodruff gently. "It was heart disease. She had just come in from a ride with your oldest daughter. They were resting and talking in high spirits by the library fire. And then--the end came--like putting out the light."

Heart disease! Often I had noted the irregular beat of her heart--a throb, a long pause, a flutter, a short pause, a throb. And I could remember that more than once the sound had been followed by the shadowy appearance, in the door of my mind, of one of those black thoughts which try to tempt hope but only make it hide in shame and dread. Now, the memory of those occasions tormented me into accusing myself of having wished her gone. But it was not so.

She had told me she had heart trouble; but she had confided to no one that she knew it might bring on the end at any moment. She left a letter, sealed and addressed to me:

Harvey--

I shall never have the courage to tell you, yet I feel you ought to
know. I think every one attributes to every one else less
shrewdness than he possesses. I know you have never given me the
credit of seeing that you did not love me. And you were so kind and
considerate and so patient with my moods that no doubt I should
have been deceived had I not known what love is. I think, to have
loved and to have been loved develops in a woman a sort of sixth
sense--sensitiveness to love. And that had been developed in me,
and when it never responded to your efforts to deceive me, I knew
you did not love me.

Well, neither did I love you, though I was able to hide it from
you. And it has often irritated me that you were so unobservant.
You know now the cause of many of my difficult moods, which have
seemed causeless.

I admired you from the first time we met. I have liked you, I have
been proud of you, I would not have been the wife of any other man
in the world, I would not have had any other father for my
children. But I have kept on loving the man I loved before I met
you.

Why? I don't know. I despised him for his weaknesses. I should
never have married him, though mother and Ed both feared I would. I
think I loved him because I knew he loved me. That is the way it is
with women--they seldom love independently. Men like to love; women
like to be loved. And, poor, unworthy creature that he was, still
he would have died for me, though God had denied him the strength
to live for me. But all that God gave him--the power to love--he
gave me. And so he was different in my eyes from what he was in any
one's else in the world. And I loved him.

I don't tell you this because I feel regret or remorse. I don't;
there never was a wife truer than I, for I put him completely
aside. I tell you, because I want you to remember me right after
I'm gone, Harvey dear. You may remember how I was silly and jealous
of you, and think I am mistaken about my own feelings. But jealousy
doesn't mean love. When people really love, I think it's seldom
that they're jealous. What makes people jealous usually is
suspecting the other person of having the same sort of secret they
have themselves. It hurt my vanity that you didn't love me; and it
stung me to think you cared for some one else, just as I did.

I want you to remember me gently. And somehow I think that, after
you've read this, you will, even if you did love some one else. If
you ever see this at all, Harvey--and I may tear it up some day on
impulse--but if you ever do see it, I shall be dead, and we shall
both be free. And I want you to come to me and look at me and--

It ended thus abruptly. No doubt she had intended to open the envelope and finish it--but, what more was there to say?

I think she must have been content with the thoughts that were in my mind as I looked down at her lying in death's inscrutable calm. I had one of my secretaries hunt out the man she had loved--a sad, stranded wreck of a man he had become; but since that day he has been sheltered at least from the worst of the bufferings to which his incapacity for life exposed him.

There was a time when I despised incapables; then I pitied them; but latterly I have felt for them the sympathetic sense of brotherhood. Are we not all incapables? Differing only in degree, and how slightly there, if we look at ourselves without vanity; like practice-sketches put upon the slate by Nature's learning hand and impatiently sponged away.