The Magnificent Adventure by Emerson Hough (best ereader under 100 txt) 📕

Sir and My Friend:

Almost I am in despair. This is my fifth letter; you receive it, perhaps, some months after your start. I think you would have come back before now, if that had been possible. I had no news of you, and now I dread news. Should you still be gone a year from the time I write this, then I shall know that you were dead. Dead? Yes, I have written that word!

The swift thought comes to me that you will never see this at all—that it may, it must, arrive too late. Yet I must send it, even under that chance. I must write it, though it ruin all my happiness. Shall it come to you too late, others will take it to my husband. Then this secret—the one secret of my life—will be known. Ah, I hope this may come to your eyes, your living eyes; but should it not, none the less I must write it.

What matter? If it should be read by any after your death, that would be too late to make difference with you, or any difference for me. After that I should not care for anything—not even that then others would know what I would none might ever know save you and my Creator, so long as we both still lived.

This wilderness which you love, the wilderness to which you fled for your comfort—what has it done for you? Have you found that lonely grave which is sometimes the reward of the adventurer thither? If so, do you sleep well? I shall envy you, if that is true. I swear I often would let that thought come to me—of the vast comfort of the plains, of the mountains—the sweep of the untiring winds, sweet in the trees and grasses—or the perpetual sound of water passing by, washing out, to the voice of its unending murmurs, all memory of our trials, of our sins.

What need now to ask you to come back? What need to reproach you any further? How could I—how can I—with this terrible thought in my soul that I am writing to a man whose eyes cannot see, whose ears cannot hear?

Still, what difference, whether or not you be living? Have not your eyes thus far been blind to me? Have not your ears been deaf to me, even when I spoke to you direct? It was the call of your country as against my call. Was ever thinking woman who could doubt what a strong man would do? I suppose I ought to have known. But oh, the longing of a woman to feel that she is something greater in a man’s life even than his deeds and his ambitions—even than his labors—even than his patriotism!

It is hard for us to feel that we are but puppets in the great game of life, of so small worth to any man. How can we women read their hearts—what do we know of men? I cannot say, though I am a married woman. My husband married me. We had our honeymoon—and he went away about the business of his plantations. Does every girl dream of a continuous courtship and find a dull answer in the facts? I do not know.

How freely I write to you, seeing that you are blind and deaf, of that wish of a woman to be the one grand passion of a strong man’s life—above all—before even his country! What may once have been my own dream of my capacity to evoke such emotions in the soul of any man I have flung into the scrap-heap of my life. The man, the one man—no! What was I saying, Meriwether Lewis, to you but now, even though you were blind and deaf? I must not—I must not!

Nay, let me dream no more! It is too late now. Living or dead, you are deaf and blind to all that I could ever do for you. But if you be still living, if this shall meet your living eyes, however cold and clear they may be, please, please remember it was not for myself alone that I took on the large ambitions of which I have spoken to you, the large risks engaged with them. Nay, do not reproach me; leave me my woman’s right to make all the reproaches. I only wanted to do something for you.

I have not written so freely to any man in all my life. I could not do so now did I not feel in some strange way that by this time—perhaps at this very time—you are either dead or in some extreme of peril. If I knew that you would see this, I could not write it. As it is, it gives me some relief—it is my confessional. How often does a woman ever confess her own, her inner and real heart? Never, I think, to any man—certainly not to any living, present man.

I married; yes. It seemed the ordinary and natural thing to do, a useful, necessary, desirable thing to do. I should not complain—I did that with my eyes well opened and with full counsel of my father. My eyes well opened, but my heart well closed! I took on my duties as one of the species human, my duties as wife, as head of a household, as lady of a certain rank. I did all that, for it is what most women would do. It is the system of society. My husband is content.

What am I writing now? Arguing, justifying, defending? Ah, were it possible that you would read this and come back to me, never, never, though it killed me, would I open my heart to you! I write only to a dead man, I say—to one who can never hear. I write once more to a man who set other things above all that I could have done. Deeds, deeds, what you call your country—your own impulses—these were the things you placed above me. You placed above me this adventuring into the wilderness. Yes, I know what are the real impulses in your man’s life. I know what you valued above me.

But you are dead! While you lived, I hoped your conscience was clean. I hope that never once have you descended to any conduct not belonging to Meriwether Lewis