The depth and tenderness of Mary's but half requited love for her mother and the long years of daily and nightly devotion to her which had borne witness to it and been the immediate cause of the catastrophe, took the sting out of her grief and gave her an unfaltering sense of innocence. They even shed round her a peaceful atmosphere which veiled from her mind's eye the dread scene in all its naked horror, as it would seem from Lamb's next letter:--
"Mary continues serene and cheerful. I have not by me a little letter she wrote to me; for though I see her almost every day yet we delight to write to one another, for we can scarce see each other but in company with some of the people of the house. I have not the letter by me but will quote from memory what she wrote in it: 'I have no bad, terrifying dreams. At midnight, when I happen to awake, the nurse sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the poor mad people around me, I have no fear. The spirit of my mother seems to descend and smile upon me and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which the Almighty has given me. I shall see her again in heaven; she will then understand me better. My grandmother, too, will understand me better, and will then say no more as she used to do, 'Polly, what are those poor, crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking of always?'"
And again, in another of her little letters, not itself preserved, but which Charles translated "almost literally," he tells us, into verse, she said:--
Thou and I, dear friend, With filial recognition sweet, shall know One day the face of our dear mother in heaven; And her remembered looks of love shall greet With answering looks of love, her placid smiles Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse.
And after speaking, in words already quoted, of how his mother "had never understood Mary right," Lamb continues:--
"Every act of duty and of love she could pay, every kindness (and I speak true when I say to the hurting of her health, and most probably in great part to the derangement of her senses), through a long course of infirmities and sickness, she could show her she ever did." "I will, some day as I promised, enlarge to you upon my sister's excellences; 'twill seem like exaggeration, but I will do it."