Love Letters

I came across this in an anthology of English Prose. It’s from Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. I found it moving.

Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of looking over all the old family letters, and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers; for she had often spoken of the necessity of this task, but had always shrunk from it, with a timid dread of something painful.  To-night, however, she rose up after tea and went for them—in the dark; for she piqued herself on the precise neatness of all her chamber arrangements, and used to look uneasily at me when I lighted a bed-candle to go to another room for anything.  When she returned there was a faint, pleasant smell of Tonquin beans in the room.  I had always noticed this scent about any of the things which had belonged to her mother; and many of the letters were addressed to her—yellow bundles of love-letters, sixty or seventy years old.
Miss Matty undid the packet with a sigh; but she stifled it directly, as if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time, or of life either.  We agreed to look them over separately, each taking a different letter out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before destroying it.  I never knew what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why.  The letters were as happy as letters could be—at least those early letters were.  There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth.  I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so.  I saw the tears stealing down the well-worn furrows of Miss Matty’s cheeks, and her spectacles often wanted wiping.  I trusted at last that she would light the other candle, for my own eyes were rather dim, and I wanted more light to see the pale, faded ink; but no, even through her tears, she saw and remembered her little economical ways.