Yeats. Chapter 7.

Link to Chapter 1

Needless to say, the wedding got cancelled, Percieval's mother convinced him to never marry her.

Few months after the incident, a parcel post marked from Ireland arrived into the mail. Keeping it aside, she painted for next few days to gather the guts she needed to open that brown package, because already she could smell in the contents inside his blue, blue eyes. Finally a fortnight later, she tore open the package in the belief that this particular incident of destiny might remind her who she was, and how that version of herself had so gracelessly abandoned the entirely honourable love of a young man, and his hesitant poetry recitations.

My dear Painter,

Apologies for the delay of my response to you, but the last few months have been absolutely chaotic and have altered my life in a way I had never foreseen. The same, I imagine, must hold true for you: married and settled, you must have moved into your new life with great enthusiasm. Hearty congratulations on your wedding ! I am writing to you from a wee little apartment in a house. The amazing bit of news is I throughly detested Trinity - so campy and crooker - and we are leaving Dublin for England in a week. It took a while, to come to terms with how I could want something for all of my life - and then when I finally had it, I realised that its reality was for too bitter to be swallowed.

Last week, Mother, who is doing plenty better here, got a canary for herself. I dont know where I will go. You were right, we walked into the path of other people's violations. Some nights I sit next to the window, and look at the clouds moving away from here. Turning into tears in between, and sometimes into snow. I believe someday they will reach where ever you are, and you will be able to feel the touch of those drops, and for a brief moment we will be together. Unfettered by time and distance and fact. How odd are the ways heart finds its intimacy. I wish you infinite happiness with Percieval, and wish that your art finds its discerning audience, its reasonable critics. 

This will be my last letter to you.

Did you ever wonder why I was so bent on finding a cure for Cian Incurablis. I'd never imagined it could be so difficult. I'd never known its incurable and it runs in family. Farewell and all that. The moon here has, as Yeats rightly pointed out, 'dark leopards' which no one can reach. Far away and fierce, its beauty brightens the closer you get to them: but come too close and you leave blinded. Underneath the ounce of regret, guilt and the grief, there is a clearing I know for you. A place to come to after everything, when you need nothing at all and everything too. I leave you now, hoping you find faith in the morning, and compassion at the dusk.

 Yours,

Irishman.

Along with the letter came the finest pair of black felt gloves with the message: For Paris; and a copy of The Complete Works of Verse: W.B. Yeats with an inscription, For life.

She opened it at the page where deckle edge had been folded over, and it was written there.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face...