And her voice was gentle.
I did not know how a man asks a woman to become his wife.
There is generally a parent, whose consent must first be given.
Or if no parent, then there is courtship, there is all the give and take of some preceding conversation.
None of this applied to her and me.
And it was midnight, and talk of love and marriage had never passed between us.
I could say to her, bluntly, plainly,
“Rachel, I love you, will you be my wife?”
I remembered that morning in the garden, when we had jested about my dislike of the whole business, and I had told her that I asked for nothing better than my own house to comfort me.
I wondered if she could understand, and remember too.
“I told you once,” I said, “that I had all the warmth and the comfort that I needed within four walls.
Have you forgotten?”
“No,” she said, “I have not forgotten.”
“I spoke in error,” I said,
“I know now what I lack.”
She touched my head, and the tip of my ear, and the end of my chin.
“Do you?” she said.
“Are you so very sure?”
“More sure,” I answered, “than of anything on earth.”
She looked at me.
Her eyes seemed darker in the candlelight.
“You were very certain of yourself upon that morning,” she said, “and stubborn too.
The warmth of houses…”
She put out her hand to snuff the candle, and she was laughing still.
When I stood upon the grass at sunrise, before the servants had wakened and come down to open the shutters and let in the day, I wondered if any man before me had been accepted in marriage in quite so straight a fashion.
It would save many a weary courtship if it was always so.
Love, and all its trappings, had not concerned me hitherto; men and women must do as best they pleased, I had not cared.
I had been blind, and deaf, and sleeping; now, no longer.
What happened on those first hours of my birthday will remain.
If there was passion, I have forgotten it.
If there was tenderness, it is with me still.
Wonder is mine forever, that a woman, accepting love, has no defense.
Perhaps this is the secret that they hold to bind us to them.
Making reserve of it, until the last.
I would not know, having no other for comparison.
She was my first, and last.
22
I remember the house waking to the sunlight, and seeing the round ball of it appear over the trees that fringed the lawn.
The dew had been heavy, and the grass was silver, as though touched with frost.
A blackbird started singing, and a chaffinch followed, and soon the whole spring chorus was in song.
The weather vane was the first to catch the sun, and gleaming gold against the sky, poised above the belfry tower, it swung to the nor’west and there remained, while the gray walls of the house, dark and somber at first sight, mellowed to the morning light with a new radiance.
I went indoors and up to my room, and dragging a chair beside the open window sat down in it, and looked towards the sea.
My mind was empty, without thought.
My body calm and still.
No problems came swimming to the surface, no anxieties itched their way through from the hidden depths to ruffle the blessed peace.
It was as though everything in life was now resolved, and the way before me plain.
The years behind me counted for nothing.
The years to come were no more than a continuation of all I now knew and held, possessing; it would be so, forever and ever, like the amen to a litany.
In the future only this; Rachel and I.
A man and his wife living within themselves, the house containing us, the world outside our doors passing unheeded.