And downstairs in the study, where the lamps were still burning, Theophil was sitting by the fire in just the same curiously wrought and withdrawn way, with just the same eyes.

Isabel's room was over his. Presently she heard him moving about; then she heard him coming upstairs. For a moment the air seemed to grow warm, as she heard him softly pass her room; then she heard him close his door.

She shook her reverie from her, as though it had been a black veil full of stars, and began to undress. Presently her eyes fell on a little pile of handkerchiefs, with needle and cotton, and little letters printed on dainty tapes, beside it. Jenny had forgotten to put away her sewing.

Isabel took up one of the handkerchiefs, to which the needle and thread were still attached, and read "Jenny Lond ..." (Don't you know that's bad luck, Jenny?)

"So soon as that! Is it so soon as that?" she sighed.

Happy Jenny!



CHAPTER XIII

IN WHICH JENNY KISSES MR. MOGGRIDGE

Isabel was leaving very early next morning for London, so good-byes must be brief. Jenny and Theophil saw her off at the station, but before leaving Zion Place there had been a moment in which for the second time in their lives she and Theophil had been alone.

They had stood together in the little study and taken each other's hands, without a word, and they had looked into each other's faces as those look whom a look must last a long time.

They didn't even say good-bye, for, if they were never to meet again, the look was not good-bye. And meet again it was not unlikely they would, for it had been already arranged that Isabel was to lead off the autumn entertainments; but the look did not mean that, either. As life had been planned for them, all subsequent meetings must be merely trivialities. They had met once, and fate had decided that they must never meet like that again. In that long look each knew that they met and parted for ever, autumn arrangements notwithstanding.

Each came out of that look as out of a great cathedral, and from that moment till the train left Theophil, with an unwonted sense of loneliness, by Jenny's side, they entered that cathedral no more. Their devotions were done for that day, and they must resume their secular duties, rippling idly over the great deeps of themselves.

One always leaves a station from which a dear friend has just gone with a certain subdued air, a certain bereaved hush in the voice, and even Jenny felt a momentary loneliness too. But it was not long before the doors of home opened again for her in the sound of Theophil's voice; and in the sense of the old familiar nearness to him she was back again safe in the only world she ever wished to dwell in.

It was more of an effort with Theophil, and the voice that made home for Jenny had a strange sound in his own ears, as though it were still talking to Isabel; but the effort was soon made, and though Jenny teased him a little and said she believed he had quite lost his, that was to say her, heart to Isabel, of course she believed no such thing. Doubt is too terrible a toy for true love to play with. You only dare to doubt as you must sometimes face the fear of death.

"I wish next October were here," said Jenny, artlessly; "it seems such a long time to wait to see her again."

Did Theophil wish the same? He hardly knew.

"Distance is such a silly thing," went on Jenny. "It seems to have been invented just to separate those who want to be together. It seems so arbitrary, so unnecessary."

"I suppose death is a form of distance," said Theophil, irrelevantly.

"Life too, I'm afraid," said Jenny.

"Yes, indeed, life too," assented Theophil, dreamily.

"If I were to die," said Jenny, suddenly, "would you still do what we said?"

"Why do you ask that, dear? You're a very serious little woman this morning. Of course I would. You know. But why do you ask me now?"

"Oh, only, dear, because I wonder whether we really ought to. Somehow Isabel's visit has made me feel that life is a bigger, fuller thing than I had dreamed, and that men like you, at all events, have duties towards it even greater than your love for a little thing like me."

"Jenny dear, don't talk like that. Why should you? You don't surely doubt my love!"

"Of course not, Theophil. It was only my silly little brain thinking for once in a while,—and I don't mean to be unkind, but really I rather mean it. Are you still quite sure there is nothing in the world more important than love?"

"Quite sure," he answered; "surer than ever—if that were possible. You are not beginning to doubt that? Certainly it is a silly little brain, if that's what its thinking is coming to."

"I don't mean it for myself. Little women have nothing but love to think of; but great men, men with a mission in the world ..."

"Please, Jenny!"

"Well, dear, I mean it; and I sometimes think that perhaps, perhaps, I'm hindering your life; that if you were to be bothered with love at all, you should have married some clever, wonderful woman,—woman, say, like Isabel."

"Jenny!"

"Of course, dear, I know you don't think so," she continued; and he realised that it was all artless accident on her part—"Still I cannot help thinking it for you sometimes, dear, and sometimes I feel very selfish to have your love,—as though, so to say, I was wearing someone else's crown."

"Jenny dear, will you promise never to talk like that again? A clever woman! To be a woman is to be a genius, but to be a clever woman is to be another man of talent."

"That wouldn't be fair to Isabel."

"No," assented Theophil, "Isabel is different too."

And that brought them to Theophil's office and good-bye till the evening.

For the evening there had been fixed an important church meeting, the first annual business meeting of minister and deacons since Londonderry had come to New Zion. It was an occasion of jubilation all round, particularly for Mr. Moggridge, who gave voice to New Zion's general satisfaction, you may be sure, in no uncertain terms of praise.

New Zion was, indeed, New Zion once more, he said, thanks to their indefatigable young pastor,—a play on words which was received with the applause due to so unmistakable a union of wit and truth.

Nor did the proceedings result in mere compliments. The church found itself rich enough to increase its minister's stipend; and when Theophil took Mr. Moggridge back to supper, another surprise awaited him, in the form of a suspicious-looking letter, which, being opened, revealed a quite unexceptionable L50 note, enclosed in a sheet of note-paper, on which was written—"From never mind who."

The writing was unknown to Londonderry, but there could be only one culprit.

"Of course, Mr. Moggridge, this is from you. Really ..."

"No, sir, indeed; you make a mistake there," protested Moggridge, lying badly, and growing purple.

"Who do you suspect, Jenny?"

"Why, of course, it's Mr. Moggridge!"

"Mr. Moggridge!" exclaimed Jenny impulsively, throwing her arms round Mr. Moggridge's surprised shoulders, and kissing him somewhere in his whiskers,—"Mr. Moggridge! you are the dearest, kindest man in the world!"

And Jenny was not far wrong.

"Mr. Londonderry," said Mr. Moggridge, by way of changing the subject, and warmly grasping the young man's hand, "New Zion's proud of you, sir—and so is Eli Moggridge."

And that moment would have been as good for all three, even without the fifty-pound note.



CHAPTER XIV

THE GREAT EVENT OF MR. TALBOT'S LIFE

I realize that any attempt henceforth to enchain the reader's interest with church meetings, or the like enthralments, will be more than hopeless. That is the worst of allowing love to creep into one's story. He insists on having the stage to himself, and in that determination the audience is entirely with him. Previously you may have been interested in all kinds of peaceable, unexciting things, far more good for you, but enter love, and all the rest is suddenly fallen tame beyond endurance.

It is of no use to urge that life's bill of the play includes many hardly less brilliant and attractive performers. They are all well enough in their way, till the eternal Paganini is there with his old fiddle once more at his shoulder; then there is an end of all seriousness, or a beginning, as you please.

Well, I'll do my best to get over the six months between March and October as quickly as possible; and, indeed, it will not be very difficult, after all, for very little happened, to speak of, during that time to any of the chief actors engaged in making this history.

Perhaps it was this consideration that prompted old Mr. Talbot—O, bother old Mr. Talbot!—that prompted old Mr. Talbot, I say, to take the important step of dying, when, poor old man! his death would give the least possible trouble.

There seemed as little reason for his dying as there had seemed for his living, for as far as anyone knew there was nothing the matter with him, except an extreme sleepiness of an evening, which was but natural in an old weary man who still kept at his stone-masonry though he was full seventy.

Night after night, for some weeks, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier.

"Why, dad, I never saw such an old sleepy-head"—his wife had rallied him good-naturedly one night, looking at him with a sudden odd expression in her face.

"Eh, lass, but I was noddin' and no mistake," said the old man, struggling drowsily with the heaviness, and presently succumbing once more.

"He's off again," said Mrs. Talbot to herself, as she lifted the lid of a pent saucepan in which some boiled onions were mightily bubbling in a wild little world of steam.

Presently the old man sighed deeply,—so you would have thought; but Mrs. Talbot, hurrying to him, knew that he had tried to say "Jane," and had said it for the last time.

Yes, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier; all his life he had been trying to sleep, and at last he slept.

To most people Mr. Talbot's death was the first intimation of his ever having lived, and one rather resents for the old man the one day's publicity which death enforced upon him. It was indeed well for him that he was dead, for such unwonted excitement would surely have killed him. This important coming and going of undertakers; this populous invasion of friends talking like muffled drums in the front parlour, and passing up and down and up and down the stairs, in and out and in and out of his still room; this throng of neighbours awaiting him in the streets; these plumed impatient horses, and these carriages of dark grandeur—"Jane, why ever didn't you bury me by the back door?" would surely have been the old man's pitiful complaint could he have known.

However, the day passed and the old man was safe at last, where no front-parlour visitors should affright him more, and where no one would trouble his old brains for speech any more; and to all, save one, his death was but as though he had moved a little farther into the kitchen.

It seemed almost strange that even his wife should miss him. One had thought so little of them as man and wife. One could hardly, even by process of thinking, realise that between these rinded and wrinkled beings love had once hung like a rosy cloud, from which one day had sprung Jenny.

On one or two occasions, indeed, they had been surprised in an uncanny semblance of a caress, and once in a while an almost supernatural retrospect had lit up and vanished again in an unaccustomed tender word; and to have been present then was to feel somehow frightened.

Ah! the gay young leaves no longer kiss across in the morning sun, but the stern old trees have meetings you know not of far beneath the ground. Their roots are twisted and twined in a wonderful embrace there; there in the dark they are very close together, and shall not be wrenched apart without groanings that cannot be uttered.

Jenny can hardly be said to have missed her father, except through her mother, who seemed suddenly to grow a little deafer, a little more dim-sighted, just a trifle less brisk and busy than before, and with a touch about her of that old-age awesomeness that mutters to itself in corners and seems to know strange things.

Yes, Jane missed her John. Her old heart knew that he was no longer sitting in the kitchen.



CHAPTER XV

JENNY'S BOTTOM DRAWER

Jenny and her old mother began to grow closer to each other at this time. Perhaps it was because the old woman felt lonelier, and perhaps, too, because the loss of her old man had sent her thoughts wandering among the enchanted fields of her young days, that she began to talk sometimes to Jenny about her marriage, and to give her quaint advice on the subject of "managing" husbands; "as if," Jenny smilingly said to herself, "an old man like father was the same, belonged even to the same race, as Theophil."

Perhaps Mrs. Talbot scented some such reflection in Jenny's expression; at all events, she answered it with an "Eh, but all men are alike, my dear, under their skins,—all alike, and they need humouring and managing just in the same way, prince or peasant."

The idea of "managing" Theophil had something repulsive in it for Jenny; there was an element of deceit, of cunning, implied which didn't go with her ideas of true love and the life beautiful of which she was dreaming. She didn't believe that men and women who loved were really different from each other, and perhaps she was right.

About this time, too, Mrs. Talbot began to produce from mysterious treasure-caves, entered apparently from an old press in her bedroom, all kinds of wonderful things which would be useful to Jenny some day in her house: terrible little ornaments,—very sacred, though,—sad quaintnesses of the spirit of beauty pathetically fumbling about in country brains; wool mats worked in the primary colours; and such wool wonders as a wool basket of flowers, in which real wool flowers grew out of a wool basket which you held by an over-arching wool handle, the whole worked with undeniable but how forlorn ingenuity,—a prehistoric relic of Mrs. Talbot's legendary school-days: survivals from a period which is best summed up in the one wonderful word "antimacassar," a period when for some unrecorded reason men and women had to protect their furniture against their oleaginous selves, and beautiful locks were guarded from lover's fingers by coats of triple oil.

But these were things worth having, too,—bits of old lace and prim embroidery, that bore the stamp of a refinement that is never old-fashioned; and when Mrs. Talbot descended from the beautiful she could show you real treasures.

I don't think there was any word in the language, not even Bible words, which Mrs. Talbot pronounced with such an accent of solemnity as the word "linen." The words "China" and "cut glass," and perhaps "silver," ran it close, but "linen" was undoubtedly the word in which all Mrs. Talbot's sense of the seriousness of living, her sense of household distinction, her deep sense of the importance of prosperity, and her stern love of cleanliness found most impressive utterance.

Mrs. Talbot could never have smiled as she said "linen."

And the linen she had been storing for Jenny might indeed have been the very stuff of which lilies are made, lilies smelling of lavender.

Such pairs of sheets! A queen might even fear to await her lord lying amid such linen; for white indeed must be the body that dares rivalry with Mrs. Talbot's sheets,—sheets which might indeed be said to settle that old question of the snows of yester-year.

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

Surely they have been settling, flake on flake, year after year, in Mrs. Talbot's linen-press, till at last there is quite a snowdrift of fair white linen for Jenny and Theophil to lie in.

Yes! another six months and Christmas will be here; and, after Christmas is turned, the weeks till February the 12th—the second anniversary of Theophil's coming to New Zion—will fly by in no time.

Meanwhile Mrs. Talbot and Jenny—with occasional contributions from Theophil—began to busy themselves with Jenny's bottom drawer.

Translated into the language of those more magnificent circles in which this simple-hearted romance has no desire to move, a "bottom drawer" might be described as a trousseau, though such translation would be only partially correct. A bottom drawer is a good deal more than a trousseau. It is the corner of a girl's wardrobe, usually its bottom drawer, where the home that is to be begins to take shape in deposits of various kissed objects, minor articles of apparel, of ornament or use,—handkerchiefs such as we have already seen Jenny marking, in defiance of the old prophecy that the bride who dares even to write her married name before her marriage will never know a wedding day; quaint candlesticks that had to be picked up in some old curiosity shop as come upon or be missed altogether; pretty shoes of a pattern you weren't likely to meet with again; occasionally, perhaps, even an anticipatory wedding present, that some friend who would be far away in Australia when the day came had already contributed; a pretty tea-service Theophil had suddenly taken a fancy to buy for Jenny one day,—"any straw will help a nest;" a sweet and rather naughty picture that must never be hung anywhere but in their little sacred bedroom,—"O love, our little room!"

How often did Jenny bend lovingly over that drawer, which by now had spread itself over a whole chest of drawers,—for home was growing, growing,—only a few more months and it would have grown so big and real that nothing but a little house would hold it. And Theophil was brought sometimes to peep in too,—"O love, think of it—our little home."



CHAPTER XVI

THEOPHIL ALL THIS TIME

Have I seemed to shirk the subject of Theophil's feelings all this time?

Well, I confess I have rather shrunk from writing down in so many words that he was in love with Isabel,—obvious as the fact has been,—just as he himself shrank from admitting the same truth even to his own soul.

When he had sat up in his study that night of the recital, he had looked the whole sad splendid truth in its wonderful face, had loved it wildly for an hour, and then shut his eyes to it for ever.

He knew that Isabel was the woman God had made for him, sweet, dear Jenny the woman he had made for himself, and he bowed before the work of the greater artist.

Never voice nor look nor touch of woman had affected Theophil before as the least tone or glance or movement of Isabel stirred him to the centre of his being. To meet her eyes was to release a music that went shuddering through the whole world; her lightest word was filled with echoes of infinite things. Not a lover only, but anyone with instincts for such perceptions, looking at Isabel, would have said: There is a woman who is needed to make some man a great poet, a great artist, some kind of great man! She belongs to the history-making women. Hundreds of women will attract men by the hundred where she will attract comparatively few, but that few will be the pick of men; and some day, when the other women have gone the way of all sweet roses, she will still remain (if she has found an artist to understand her face) the frontispiece of some distinguished biography, or hang in a gallery of the period among the few faces that were indestructibly personal; not the faces that have lived, but the faces that still go on living, the faces that are influences still, the unique, daemonic faces.

Isabel was indeed a muse that waited for her poet. The mere idea of such a woman, cherished across dividing seas and separating years, will help a man be great. To grow great near or far is the one way to be hers, and to pile up great work for her sake is perhaps the best way to love her. She could never be his wife, but she might still be his muse, resolved Theophil, feigning in that reflection for the moment a more human comfort than, alas! there really was.

But was there to be no loss to Jenny in this?

"True love in this differs from gold or clay, That to divide is not to take away."

It is the convenient old plea of the poets, and yet it is sometimes true. It was true here. There is, I know, a sort of primitive man or woman—I believe they will some day be exhibited in menageries—who cannot be on with a new love without being ungratefully off with the old. All depends of what the two loves are made. If it is bodily fire and no more, of course the new love will put out the old as the great sun puts out a little smouldering fire; and the majority of so-called love-stories are merely disastrous conflagrations of that sort. In such cases the new love is no sooner found than the old becomes grievous, a burden; by a malignant witchcraft the old charms have grown veritably repellent, and "all the heaven that was" irretrievably disenchanted. Which is the illusion, one wonders,—the original enchantment or the final disenchantment?

When, however, love can give a better account of its preferences than this, and point out, say in Jenny, many good reasons why she was at first and must for ever remain love-worthy, whatever rival reasons for love another woman may bring; when too there is added to those reasons for loving Jenny the dear habit of loving her, the gratitude—love must forgive the word—which has accumulated interest upon the original love, the beauties that have been gained by becoming familiarities, and the familiarities that have become beauties by very use,—well, really, is it such a hardship, after all, for a man to be expected to keep true to his Jenny?

Oh! but passion doesn't reason like this. Indeed, O passionate reader! Is passion, then, merely a wild beast, a savage, a blind fire? Must it forfeit its fine name if it remembers mercy or owns duty? Is it any less passion because it refuses sometimes to glut itself, and dares to go hungry all its days instead; any less passion because it chooses to burn up its own heart in an agony of its own consuming fire?

Mere violence is not a strength but a weakness in passion, and sometimes there is more passion in patience than in anything else in the world. A passion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should be taken to the madhouse.

I confess that there is nothing in the world more amazing to me than the easy brutality with which one hears of some men doing what is called "breaking off their engagements." Only a new face has to show itself, and the old face at once disappears with a blow and a wail.

Murder, of course, is one way out of many difficult situations, and the worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences. It is true that all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all that made her woman stabbed to the quick of life.

Yet no one who knows anything of women can have failed to remark that women themselves are even more brutal in this matter. Nothing could exceed the executioner-like promptitude with which a woman will despatch a man for whom she has ceased to care. But in her case there is to be urged that, though fundamentally love is of equal importance to man and woman, it does not so often mean the absolute saving or wrecking of a man's life as it does a woman's. It is not a disgrace to a man to be jilted; it is to a woman. For a woman to be jilted is for her to have failed,—as a woman; and for a woman to have failed as a woman is for her to value no other success.

All this to maintain, in spite of the reader, that Londonderry is no milksop because he is not going to jilt—that is, murder—poor little Jenny, throw up New Zion, and seek his new love on the wild winds. But the agony of it none the less! O Jenny! Jenny! sweet and true and good and dear as ever,—if only you would just take a sudden fancy for someone else!

Meanwhile the months were going by, and the day drawing nearer when, for a brief moment of fire, the orbits of those two separated lives were to touch once more.

What of Isabel during these months? The woman whom God had created for Theophilus Londonderry did not forget her promise to write to the woman whom Theophilus Londonderry had created in his own image. Wonderful letters, of course! Why don't women publish volumes of their letters, as men collect their scattered essays? There is no writing in the world more immediately, conqueringly personal than a really clever woman's letters; and they are not always compromising.

Isabel's letters were the perfection of self-expression. Her handwriting swept across the page just as she would walk down a street, at once eager and yet stately and subtle-rhythmed; the shape of some of the words reminded you of her hats,—hats everyone thought she paid guineas for, but which she made for herself at a cost perhaps of five shillings: hats which were Paris with a touch of fairyland, somewhere an unobtrusive feather of the fantastic, somewhere a personal magic in the inimitable twist or lie of a bow—; her face looked out at you from a g or an x, a gesture flashed back to you in a sudden distinguished stroke of the pen, and her voice was somewhere, everywhere, among the words, like a violin.

Without any apparent literary device she contrived to make you, while you read her letters, do what she was doing, see what she was seeing, and form, as though acted on by some magic property in the words, pictures of all she told you.

One piece of news you would not expect her to have told. I have said that women are both executioners of the tiresome. In this Isabel, I fear, was no exception to her sex. Like most independent girls in London, she had a little theatre-guard of devoted men friends, who took it in turn to companion her to plays or picture-galleries; and these, with admirable tact, she contrived to keep in, to them, the unsatisfactory relation of brothers. One of these, however, had of late been growing dangerously unfraternal. His presents had been growing expensive. Cigarettes and chocolates, and pretty editions, like gloves, and boxes of flowers, are every pretty woman's lawful spoils; but costlier gifts are to be looked on with suspicion. Besides, the doomed man's letters had been growing warmer. Indeed, Isabel remembered with something like a shudder, so soon as she was back in her little room, with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement, that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been together. The reminiscence decided her. Theophil could never be hers; but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place. So at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, a lovely fan it was hard, Isabel, to part with,—and there is an end of that.

"Not after Theophil!" she sighed, as she took up her great Persian cat, and, like it, sat gazing into the fire that flickered dreamily among her fantastic possessions,—a mystery gazing idly into a mystery.



CHAPTER XVII

"O THAT 'T WERE POSSIBLE ..."

Well, the months have at last gone by,—dark solid bodies of absence, not a day mercifully lost count of by the old calendar-maker, not an hour of the long sentence remitted for a brave patience in the waiting. They are reckoning by weeks at last, and now, excitedly, by days, breathlessly now by little fast-dispersing hours.

The blackness that filled the world was a month ago streaked with gray; three weeks ago there was a line of faint colour in the east; a fortnight, and there are scarlet plumes in the far heaven, and a faint twitter of song; a week, and the whole sky is a commotion of glory and birds.

To meet again! O to meet again, just to look at each other again! We are philosophers, we are brave, we shall remember Jenny, but O! the rapture of just beholding each other again.

"Thank God, you are alive! you are real! O Theophil, there is the little scar on your forehead I've been longing to see."

"Yes! it is Isabel! She walks just as she did a thousand years ago. I am carrying her rugs. How well I remember her umbrella!"

"How fantastic absence is!" said Isabel, as the three friends sat once more that evening in the little study where nothing seemed to have changed, and where they seemed to have been sitting all the hours of those now quite disrespectfully forgotten months.

"Yes, but how real!" said Jenny. It was Jenny who said "how real!"

How fantastic, too, is the present! Sometimes, perhaps nearly always, it tortures us with the unreality, the unrealisability of precious moments that are flying, flying, and can never come again; and at other times it equally eludes us with a sense of their indestructibility. To-night the present had chosen to seem real. Theophil felt, as he looked at Isabel, that this wonderful nearness could never pass away. Her dress, her coiled cendre hair, her soft smile, her very attitudes, seemed to wear a curious expression of everlastingness. Yes, she would sit just like that, and he and Jenny would sit near her for ever and ever. No mere abstractions like Time and Space could fill with emptiness the place where she now sat and smiled. In some mystical way eternity had breathed upon this hour and given it immortality. It had been suddenly touched with a wand into an enchanted permanence. Theosophists tell of an astral light, where every moment of time endures in strange paintings upon space. Isabel and Theophil and Jenny were sitting together in the astral light.

And yet the hours had already been flying, for, the recital was already over,—New Zion more in love with Isabel than ever. The same little supper as six months ago had been merry and come to an end, the guests had gone, the house was quiet, and this hour that seemed so real was the frail last of that day of dreams.

Yes! but an arrangement had been made which perhaps accounts for the security of that hour. Isabel's agents had planned for her a little circular tour in northern towns comparatively adjacent to Coalchester, and when a fortnight of such recitals was ended, she was to return and give still another recital at New Zion. Then there must be parting, real black parting again. Meanwhile, the fortnight that lay between the two days of meeting gained a curious sense of being really spent together. As two walking together on a long road may separate, and one walk till almost out of sight of the other and then slowly return, but the two endure no sense of parting, feeling together all the time, so Isabel and Theophil felt about this fortnight.

But did they speak no word, look no look all these hours, of all their hearts cried out to say? Was Jenny there all the time? Nearly. Still there was a moment granted them, which, added to the two moments previously recorded, made a total perhaps of four minutes, which life so far generously allowed them to be alone together in. Yet such is love's miraculous velocity that it had said all it needed to say, given all, in those four minutes. All it had to say to-night was just two Christian names, said so solemnly, so tenderly, so honestly. Just "Isabel," just "Theophil," and a long quiet clasp of hand and eyes. It was enough. It is written.



CHAPTER XVIII

ONE DAY OUT OF ALL THE YEARS

It was not enough!

If you would safely renounce a joy, you had best enjoy something of it first. Renunciation must have something to live on. You can "take up the whole of love and utter it," and then "say adieu for ever," but not before.

I have asked mercy for Jenny, though it was perhaps hardly necessary, for the world always pities Jenny. Now I would ask it for Isabel and Theophil, who are thus quietly to sacrifice the greatest thing in their lives, the one reality for which they have come into existence, for Jenny's sake. Great is their love for each other, but even greater and stranger must be their involuntary love for an invisible goodness, an ideal of ineffable pity. They are going to die that Jenny may live.

Strange, this gentle heroism of human creatures one for the other. Would it be unfair to ask that each should support the anguish of his own destiny, and that when Jenny's turn has come she should take her lightning? Hers, had she known it, was the cup of anguish here; for Theophil and Isabel had been decreed the cup of joy. But will they drink it? No, they will change the cups; perhaps the bitter cup will grow sweet near the dregs, being drunk together.

Yet this love of theirs, this perilous chance for Jenny, was none of their making. Their joy had been given to them by unseen hands. It is fairly theirs. Next time, perhaps, it will be their turn to suffer. It is Jenny's now...

But no! the good heart of humanity will defeat the cruel ruling of the gods. Let the lightning come upon them—not little Jenny.

Yet for this, Jenny, you will not grudge them their piteous reward. Yours are all the years, Jenny. You will spare them one day out of all the years. Think, Jenny, of the hours and hours and hours you and Theophil have spent in careless happiness, and they—one almost laughs to think of it—have just so far been granted four minutes. For four minutes out of infinite time life has privileged them to be alone together.

It will be far safer too. Otherwise you know not with what fearful flame love will fill the chasms under ground, circling and seething in the fiery darkness. Theophil loves you, but some day your home will suddenly be rent from cope to base, unless his poor heart may speak, yea, babble itself, just once in Isabel's ears.

A temptation had come to Theophil. At first he put it aside. Then passion, wiser for once than reason, told him that it was a necessity, and he knew that passion was right. A week of the fortnight had gone, and Theophil remembered that Isabel would now be in the neighbourhood of certain famous woods where in his boyhood he had often wandered, and he remembered that she was to have the Monday quite free. That Monday they should spend together in those enchanted woods. His secular business often took him to towns thirty or forty miles away, and it was not startling for him not to return till late at night. Thus Isabel and he should steal their one day out of all the years.

So there went a note without one word of love in it to tell Isabel that love was coming by the morning train; and so on that morning Isabel stood waiting for love at that little wayside station, and presently, with a mighty rushing sound of iron and brass, love came and stood very quietly by her side, and looked into her eyes.

They took each other's hands quietly, and left the station without a word; nor did they speak for a long while, walking blissfully side by side through a village street which was to take them to the green and lonely woods. Soon the houses were passed, and they still walked on silent, listening to the song of their nearness.

Now, as they drank each other's presence through every feasting nerve, they knew how starved they had been. As the lane narrowed and gloomed green, dipping through caverns of bright leaves, they drew closer, and smiled gently on each other; but they were not going to speak for a long while yet. Had they not come away into this loneliness that they might be silent together, that they might sit, hour after hour, and just watch each other, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation, a trance of recognition, a fascination that was almost fearful, that was so kind and yet so cruel in its very power?

The woods are very still, but there is nothing in the world so still as these two lovers, as they lie down on the green earth and gaze on each other, hour after hour. When they find a word as great as their silence, they will speak it—but they will find none except it be "Isabel," except it be "Theophil."

And great passion has as little use for caresses as for words, and kisses, which gay sensual love gathers greedily like little golden flowers, and pays for nimbly with little, pretty words, will be almost as rare as words.

Kisses! it is not to eat bonbons that these two have come out into the woods.

Kisses! what kiss of the blind lips could match the kiss of those rapt tragic eyes!

Kisses are but the diminutives of the great word "love;" they are but the small change of passion, meteorites, star-dust of the great and terrible planet.

Their souls are swung high above time and space in one never-ending kiss,—the kiss of that predestined irrefragable union, of which meetings and partings and kisses and caresses and words, and every other fragmentary mode of expression, are but trivial accidents, to which distance is still nearness, and nearness is still distance.

Their love is a property of eternal elements. It is fated as the union of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination. They are Isabel and Theophil,—that is their love; they are in the world together,—that is their marriage.

But passion will not be all day a tragedian. He has many moods. He is a great wit,—how bright, how bright, he makes the brain!—a merry comrade, a little, tender, silly child; and these two sad ones laughed together, too, in the still woods,—for was not the most exquisite humourist in the world their companion, love, who is all things by turns, and all things wise?

And they feasted together, wine and great grapes, spread out on the earth's green table; and they called each other silly, beautiful names, and they feigned sad little glad stories—and called the wood their home: this was their breakfast-oak, and that glade should be their great hall, and high, high up in yonder beech, where the squirrel was sitting, should be their secret little bed-chamber, hung in blue and green, with a ceiling of stars. They should climb it each night on a ladder of moonlight, and slide down from it each morning on the first strong rays of the sun. And sometimes if it frightened them with being too near heaven, they would seek out a dell of fine moss and creep close together into the arms of the kind earth-mother, and then sleep while the stars kept watch.

O, yes, it would be a wonderful life together.

Then suddenly the child's play would cease, as the birds stop singing with the coming of the stars, and silence would sweep over them again, and a great kiss would leap out of the silence, like a flame that lights up heaven from north to south, and they would hang together, lost in an anguish of desire.

The setting sun was turning the wood into halls of strange light, and spreading golden couches here and there in its deep recesses.

"Theophil..." sighed Isabel.

"Wife..." sighed Theophil—(ah! Jenny!) and then a voice that seemed to be neither's, and yet seemed to be the voice of both,—a voice like a dove smothered in sweetness between their breasts,—said, "Let us go deeper into the wood."

Later, when the stars had come, two white faces came glimmering from the innermost chancel of the wood's green darkness. They passed close together, still as phantoms among the trees, and when they came out on to the lane they stood still.

"Theophil," said one voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send for you, will you promise me to come?"

"Isabel," said another voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send for you, will you promise me to come?"

And each voice vowed to the other, and said, "I would come, and I would go with you."

And all these words had once been Jenny's, but they had been Isabel's first.



CHAPTER XIX

PREPARATIONS FOR A FAST AND OTHER SADNESS

As the sharing of a cruel or unworthy secret must be the most terrible of all human relationships, the sharing of a beautiful secret is the most blest. Thus, for the week following this day of days, Theophil and Isabel went about their daily lives with all heaven in their hearts, and, divided though they were, possessed by a mystical certitude of inner union which they felt no extension of space or endurance of time could destroy.

Such a marriage as theirs is, of course, the dream of all separated lovers, "the love that waited and in waiting died" the theme of many poets; and there have been great historic love-stories to prove such love a possibility of human hearts; yet, alas! for the experiment that must so often fail, for the weak wills of loving that will so truly and yet must loose their holds,—the fire that promised itself food in memory for a thousand years, but needs the sensual fuel of sight and touch after all; the love that believed it could go on trusting through centuries of silence, yet dies at last of little earthly doubts!

For this tremendous fast which you are to make believe a feast, trust in each other is the one condition that may avail. This trust must come of no mere exchange of vow or deeply-sworn and eloquent promise; it must be knowledge one heart of the other, clear and absolute; and such knowledge in your short hour of revelation you must have learned so passionately that, like poetry learnt in childhood, it is henceforth no longer a forgettable, detachable part of your mind's furniture, but a well-spring of instinct for ever. Is your lady true? You will ask that only when you ask: Is she beautiful?

Such confidence as this is comparatively common in friendship, but it is very rare in love: whether it was to be justified in the case of Isabel and Theophil, time alone could show. Meanwhile they felt calm and happy, as only two can feel who have discovered in each other the one unchanging reality in a world of flowing shadow.

It was very wonderful, in quite a new way, to meet again. Their love was no longer hunger and unrest, it had gained the impassioned peace of great accepted realities. It was married love now. As the quiet firm hands held each other again, there seemed to be long retrospects of tried and tender intercourse in their very touch. Their eyes held a past in them as well as a future. There was no hurry of the emotions now, no reason for haste in the seeking and giving of tenderness, no need to snatch and clutch the good gifts of love as though there was but a short day for the giving. Their love had grown conscious of its eternity.

It held but one lasting sadness,—that it might not be revealed to Jenny. So little did they regard their love as one essentially for concealment, that the temptation to include Jenny in their bond was at moments a danger. It was so beautiful, and actually, though unconsciously, she was so integral a part of its beauty.

Theirs was that dream of a threefold union, in which, so to say, jealousy shall be so taken into the confidence of, so held to the heart of, love, that it shall transform itself into love too; and, from being the lonely tragic third, become, as the other two, one of an indivisible trinity. Such unions of natures of especial grace have been born under like conditions of fated intercourse, and they have been unions of a strange beauty, the more blest by the sense of a conquest over love's one unworthiness, its egoism. As the egoisme a deux is finer than an egoism of one, so this egoisme a trois, if you will, is again finer by its additional inclusiveness.

Perhaps it had proved wiser in the end to yield to this temptation too. But the tragic risk was one to dismay experiment. The strength of such a union is literally the strength of its weakest link. Jenny loved both Isabel and Theophil, and both Isabel and Theophil loved Jenny; and in the love of the two girls, there was an element of affection that was more impassioned than friendship. Jenny indeed loved Isabel so much that it might well have proved that her love, with nothing but gladness, could have added its volume to Theophil's, and the three loves, meeting in one river of love, flowed on together to the eternal sea.

But the tragic risk! The alternative was—heart-break, death. They had vowed to save Jenny from the lightning. Perhaps it would not destroy, but only transfigure, after all,—yet the test was lightning; and for whom that we love dare we venture such an ordeal, though it were to win them Paradise?

No! Jenny must never know. And yet, perhaps, if Jenny had been told... Well, the greatest love for another cannot guard all the gates of chance. And, alas! these two, loyal as they were, for one unguarded moment were to leave open a gate of their Paradise,—when we withdraw into Paradise we should see that all the gates are closed,—and Jenny, by a like chance, was to take into her soul one blinding glimpse of them there.

It was the evening of the last recital, and Theophil and Isabel had gone down, to "Zion" a few minutes before the hour arranged, Jenny, who for some trivial reason was detained, to meet them at the hall. An audience was already gathered there; but this Theophil and Isabel avoided, entering the building by the minister's private entrance into his vestry, which communicated by a dark staircase with the chapel and the lecture-hall where the recital was to be given. There was a light in the vestry, but no one was there, though they might have expected Mr. Moggridge. For a moment, to their eternal sorrow, they forgot all but that they were once more alone and together; and as they sought each other's arms, standing in the centre of that grim little room, a weak anguish came over Theophil, and he exclaimed,—

"Oh, Isabel, to think that I have lost you! lost you!"

But Isabel was stronger: "No, dear, you have not lost, you have found me. To have lost each other would have been never to have met. Dear, I love to think that you might be weak for my sake. No woman can help a man be strong who cannot first make him weak. Ah, love, how weak I could be for your sake,—and how strong!... but be strong for mine, be strong for Jenny's sake. I love that best." Then for a moment they stood lost once more, locked in an embrace so touchingly kind, so sheltering, so calm, that their very attitude was home; and, had they had ears or eyes for a world outside that home, they might have seen, at that dark half-opened staircase door, a little face look in happy and draw back dead; for Jenny had followed them more quickly than she or they had expected, and, not finding them in the lecture-hall, had sought them here with a light heart. She had heard none of their words; she had only seen that look of home upon their faces and written across their arms.

Very quietly she stole away. She felt very dazed and tired. The shock had been so swift that already it seemed half unreal. She felt she must sit down, and, passing into the silent chapel, lit only with dim reflections from without, she sank on to a seat and thought of little but that it was good to be sitting down, and that the darkness was good, and that there looming out of the shadow was Theophil's pulpit, and beneath was her little harmonium,—to-morrow night would be her choir-practice, she mustn't forget that; no, she mustn't forget that—and then the darkness began to frame flashing pictures of that dreadful glimpse of brightness—were they still standing like that?—how happy they looked!—and would they always go on standing together in brightness like that, while she sat here in the darkness. Well, the darkness was good; how she should dread brightness for the future. If only she need not go to the recital!—might she not be spared that? No! she must have courage, she must go, they must not know she had seen them, not yet, not till she had thought what must be done, not till she had made her plans. It would have to be talked of if she let them know. That would be terrible. Isabel would be gone to-morrow, and then she might speak to Theophil, might set him free. But now she must go,—she must not be later than they; they would be passing down to the hall presently, she must be there before them,—she must be quick,—she must go now....

As Isabel and Theophil entered the hall together, and smiled a recognising smile at Jenny already in her place, she was able to smile back at them, though there were some who thought she looked very white, and found her very quiet when they tried to talk to her.

She couldn't help remarking to herself how little of the common resentment she felt towards the two on whose faces she now saw a happiness which she wondered she had not seen before. But her anguish was too great for resentment. She felt towards their love as she might have felt towards death,—it was a terrible fact, and in her good heart there was already the beginning of pity for them too. Perhaps she felt that it was a little unkind of them not to have trusted her,—just as a child might who had felt worthy of our trust, but had been deemed too young to share it. If they had only told her, might she not have loved their love? (Ah! if we would only trust the deeps in those we love!)

Had Isabel only seen that white face in the dark doorway, she would have spared Jenny one of her recitations that night. It was a poem of Mrs. Browning's, perhaps the most poignant poem of renunciation ever written, and Isabel had chosen it, as love will choose a song, for the fearful joy of singing it where all may hear but one only may understand. It was the poem of a like renunciation to theirs, though for different reasons; but there was sufficient literal application to them for Jenny now to understand it too. It was called a "Denial," and began:—

"We have met late—it is too late to meet, O friend, not more than friend! Death's forecome shroud is tangled round my feet, And if I step or stir, I touch the end.

In this last jeopardy Can I approach thee,—I, who cannot move? How shall I answer thy request for love? Look in my face and see.

"I might have loved thee in some former days. Oh, then, my spirits had leapt As now they sink, at hearing thy love-praise! Before these faded cheeks were overwept, Had this been asked of me, To love thee with my whole strong heart and head,— I should have said still...Yes, but smiled and said, 'Look in my face and see!'

"But now...God sees me, God, who took my heart And drowned it in life's surge. In all your wide warm earth I have no part— light song overcomes me like a dirge. Could love's great harmony The saints keep step to when their bonds are loose, Not weigh me down? am I a wife to choose? Look in my face and see—

"While I behold, as plain as one who dreams, Some woman of full worth, Whose voice, as cadenced as a silver stream's, Shall prove the fountain-soul which sends it forth

One younger, more thought-free And fair and gay, than I, thou must forget, With brighter eyes than these ... which are not wet— Look in my face and see!

"So farewell thou, whom I have known too late To let thee come so near. Be counted happy while men call thee great, And one beloved woman feels thee dear!— Not I!—that cannot be, I am lost, I am changed,—I must go farther where The change shall take me worse, and no one dare Look in my face and see."

The agony of this verse as one reads it is heart-breaking, but as Isabel recited it, it was unbearable, and others in that audience besides Jenny felt the personal cry in the voice, though none but Jenny knew its destination. But to Jenny's ears the exquisite wifeliness of the last verse was fuller of pain than all the rest,—

"Meantime I bless thee. By these thoughts of mine I bless thee from all such! I bless thy lamp to oil, thy cup to wine, Thy hearth to joy, thy hand to an equal touch

Of loyal troth. For me, I love thee not, I love thee not!—away! There's no more courage in my soul to say 'Look in my face and see.'"

When Isabel sat down, amid hushed clapping, it was observed that Miss Jenny Talbot had fainted. Theophil sprang with others to her assistance, and Jenny, being carried into an ante-room for air and water, presently reviving, asked faintly for Mr. Moggridge to take her home, the thought of the big kind man coming into her mind with a sense of homely refuge.

"There, there," he said, "you'll be better in a minute;" and when she was strong enough to walk, he took her home, Theophil, filled with sudden misgivings, having to see the evening's entertainment to its close.

Mr. Moggridge blamed the bad ventilation, as he tenderly helped Jenny along the few yards to home.

"No," said Jenny, with a big tearing sigh, "I don't think it was that. It was that last poem, I think. It seemed so terrible to think of two people having to part like that; don't you think so, Mr. Moggridge?"

Mr. Moggridge did. "And then," he said, "Miss Strange has such a way of giving it out, it's almost more than human nature can bear."

"Yes; her voice," said Jenny, "seemed like a stream of tears."

When Theophil and Isabel returned from Zion, they seemed so full of real anxiety, as indeed they were, that Jenny's poor heart felt just a passing ray of warmth, a little less cast out into eternal loneliness. She gave the same explanation as to Mr. Moggridge, not significantly, but half intending a kind veiled message to them. "It seemed so terrible to think of two people having to part like that," she said again.

And presently she pleaded weariness to go to bed earlier than usual.

"But don't you hurry, Isabel," said Jenny. "You and Theophil will not see each other for a long time again."

"Sleep well," said Isabel, kissing her; and as she did so, she thought there was a curious convulsiveness in Jenny's embrace.

When she had gone, the two looked at each other. "She seemed strange," said Isabel.

"I think I will go and see her for a moment," said Theophil.

So it was that, tapping at Jenny's door, he found her lying across her bed with the gas still down. "Crying, dear!" he exclaimed.

"O Theophil dear, don't come," she said; "it's only silly nerves. Go back to Isabel; I shall be better when I've had a sleep. Do go, dear, like a kind boy. I'm better by myself. No ... it is nothing,—nothing but nerves. Do go, dear. Good-night."

And with a foreboding heart Theophil went back to Isabel. Yet, as Jenny had said, they were not to see each other for a long time again; and if presently Theophil forgot Jenny crying upstairs, was it not because he did not know the reason of her tears?

On the morrow Jenny pleaded weariness and stayed in bed, so that Theophil saw Isabel off to London alone, and he did not see Jenny again till the evening.



CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH JENNY CRIES

Jenny was not at the door that evening to welcome Theophil home, as she usually was, and she made some excuse not to join him at dinner; but at last, when the quiet secure hour which had always been theirs between dinner and bedtime had come, she came into his room quietly and sat in her accustomed chair.

She had been fighting all day to gain strength for this hour, and her will was bravely set to speak what must be spoken. But she must firmly choke back all the sweetness of the memories which sprang to her with kind eyes, as the familiar little room that had not changed opened its arms to her, alas! an ironical symbol of unchangeableness. One touch of tenderness too vivid and she would break down.

And here was Theophil rising from his desk and coming to her with true love in his eyes, as he had done so many, many happy nights.

Was it, after all, a dream—that terrible picture of two lighted figures that was for ever in her eyes? No, there was a voice that went day and night with the dream, a voice of terrible tenderness that kept crying: "Meantime I bless thee ... "—"I bless thy lamp to oil, thy cup to wine ..." Ah, no, it was real, real. The trial was not to pass from her in a dream.

Theophil had knelt down at her side and taken her hand gently and would have kissed her, but that her eyes were so full of pain as she turned them to meet his. Besides, strange words to hear! she was asking him not to kiss her.

"Theophil dear, don't kiss me yet. I have something to say, and if you kiss me I shall have no strength to say it."

"Jenny!"

"Dear," she began with a voice that seemed to bleed at every word, "I want to be so kind. I don't want to hurt you with a single word. You'll believe that, won't you?"

Theophil pressed her hand for assent, but already in a flash the whole revelation was upon him. Jenny knew he loved Isabel. This awful pain that was all over her was the lightning from which they had willed to save her.

"Theophil," Jenny had gone on, and there seemed a death in every word, "I know that you love Isabel."

"O Jenny!"

"I saw you together, dear, in the vestry last night. It was an accident. You didn't hear me."

"O my Jenny! I would rather have died than this."

"Yes, I think you would, dear. But you must not be too sad. Life is terrible,—like this. I understand it now. I know it was not you, or Isabel, or me. It was just fate—and we must try and help each other. Don't think I have been only sorry for myself. Don't think that of me. But I think you should have trusted me, dear."

"We longed to tell you," said Theophil, with his head bowed in distress in Jenny's lap, while she softly stroked his hair with an absent tenderness, though her eyes looked straight in front of her, and her voice was as if she were talking to herself.

"We longed to tell you," he repeated.

"O I wish you had."

"We feared it, dear."

"Yes, yes, I know. I was only a little child the day before yesterday. I have never been worthy to be your wife, dear. I have known it all the time. I should never have taken your love. It has never been mine...."

"But ..." she continued, "I will give it all back now. It is not too late. I have kept it pure ... for Isabel. I can give it to her, darling, with a kind heart—for she is worthy. She was born for you, dear. We were not born for each other, after all—were we, dear? I am the woman of that poem, not Isabel. It is I who must say good-bye. I can do it. I am a woman now, love—not a little child any more. 'Look in my face and see.'"

The tangle of Theophil's emotions and thoughts, as he listened to Jenny in silence, was a revelation to him of the strange heart of love, and of the insufficiency of those formulas by which we image ourselves to ourselves. How little we know of ourselves till we are tested by the powerful reagents of love and danger, and in how many ways must those tests be applied before we learn anything of the elements of which we are composed!

One love will reveal to us one side of our natures and its needs, another will reveal to us another with its needs; and till we grow old we can never be certain that there are not other sides to us that have never been illuminated, other needs that have never been awakened, by an emotion.

A man may love two women equally: the woman he most needs and the woman who needs him most,—and in a crisis of choice he will probably choose the latter.

Again, the power of the woman we have loved first has wonderful reserves to draw upon, humble pawns of feelings, memories, associations, not so brilliant to the imagination as the royalties of romance and sentiment on the other side, but incalculably useful in a battle. Too humble are some of these to gain acknowledgment; indeed they are often so submerged in a total of vague impulses that they escape any individualisation.

In the very hour where all seemed lost to Jenny, Theophil's love for her was passing in the fire of this ordeal from a love whose elements had never, perhaps, quite combined, into that miraculous metal of true love, which can never again be separated into anything but itself,—the true gold of love which, in some magical second of projection, has suddenly sprung out of those troubled ingredients of earth and iron, silver, honey, and pearl.

This does not mean that Theophil's love for Isabel had grown any less real, but that his love for Jenny had grown more real. For the first time in its history it moved on the stage of the heroic. Up till now it had lived secure, domestic days; there had been no danger to test its truth, no lights of tragedy or romance thrown across it, it had seemed a simple little earthborn love; whereas Theophil's love for Isabel had, from its very conditions, walked from the first the high heaven of dreams.

Isabel, indeed, still remained the heavenly love, but those who understand will know the strength of Jenny when I say that she became confirmed in this hour of trial as the household love of Theophil's life. Isabel remained the Muse, but it was Jenny, after all, in spite of those solemn words in the Wood of Silence, that was the wife; and if, at first sound, there seems less of heaven in such a love, it is surely only because when heaven has become incarnated upon earth we forget to call it heaven.

In the few moments of silence which followed Jenny's words, it was some such turmoil of feelings and thoughts, questionings and conclusions, which passed through Theophil's mind, at last resolving itself into words that sounded unexpected even in his own ears.

"Jenny," he said, "it is quite true that I love Isabel and that she loves me. But it is true that I love you too, love you more truly in this moment than I have ever loved you, and that no other woman can ever take your place. If you give me up for Isabel's sake, it will be no gain to her, for I would not go to her. I love you, indeed I love you, and I want no other woman to be my wife."

Jenny's face brightened for a moment; they were good words, and they sounded real. But then that embrace, how real that was; nothing again could ever be so real as that!

"Ah, Theophil dear; but you stood as though you loved her so; your arms were so tender, it was just as though they said 'wife.' You are deceiving yourself, dear, believe me, you are. God knows how I love you; I have nothing in the world but you, and if...if..."

"Jenny, try and believe; let me show you how I can love you. I seem never to have shown you before. Let us begin our love over again from to-night. I know your heart is bleeding, but let me heal it, dear. I know this sorrow must lie heavy upon us for a long while yet, but it will pass, you shall see. O you shall see how I love you. Let us be married soon, dear; let us wait no longer..."

Theophil had raised his head, and as he spoke poured on Jenny all the appeal of his strong eyes; with all the might of his soul he willed her back to happiness, as Orpheus strove by his singing to bring back Eurydice from the shades. She could not look into his set longing face without feeling that he was speaking true words. Hope flickered for a moment in her sad eyes; yes! he wanted to come back to her; he wanted to be hers again.

But was it not too late? Hadn't something gone forever, something been killed? Could even Theophil himself ever make her happy any more? Then the misery flooded over her again in an irresistible sea, in which all kind words fell powerless as snowflakes; her resolution broke down, and with terrible sobs she flung herself into Theophil's arms.

"O Theophil, my heart is breaking, my heart is breaking."

Theophil was to feel her crying thus against his bosom till the end of his life. He shuddered with dread at this terrible crying—it was as though all her life was leaving her in sobs, as though she were bleeding to death in tears. It was grief piteously prostrate, wild, convulsive, unutterable. Jenny was right. Her heart was breaking. Theophil's terror was right. It was too late to love her. This was the death-crying of a broken heart.



CHAPTER XXI

IN WHICH JENNY IS MYSTERIOUSLY HONOURED

Still a moment did at last come when the sobs subsided, and Jenny dried her tears. She was going to try, try to be happy again, try to forget it; and she tried so well that in a few days her face had grown even bright again,—bright as silver. It could never again be bright as gold.

And Theophil's love was like a sun pouring down upon her day by day. Yes, he loved her. She could not doubt that, though there were times when his true words and caresses suddenly seemed to wear a torturing falsity, as she thought of Isabel.

But such feelings she put from her bravely. Jealous of Isabel in the common way she had not been. She herself loved her too well, and soon she was able to talk of her again to Theophil. They had agreed that Isabel should not know what Jenny had seen that night of the recital. For Jenny could not bear to think of the letters it would mean. "Let that be our secret, dear," she said to Theophil; and thus, when Isabel wrote, she wrote back in her usual way. Theophil and Isabel never wrote to each other. It was no part of their love to deceive Jenny in letters. Their love was vowed to silence and absence, and in Theophil's life it must be more and more of a starlit background.

So the weeks went by, and the marriage of Theophil and Jenny was now finally fixed for the 12th of February. On second thoughts, as their love grew serene once more, they had decided not to anticipate that date, for old Mrs. Talbot's sake; and meanwhile Jenny was admonished by that old mother to make haste and get that flesh on her bones.

The admonition was not without cause, for it presently became noticeable that Jenny was not merely negatively disobeying her old mother in this. Not only was she not growing fatter, but, indeed, she was, for one reason or another, slowly and almost imperceptibly growing thinner. It was not those at home who noticed this first, but outside friends, who, suddenly meeting her, would remark that she wasn't looking half the girl she used to be.

She had already begun to remark it herself, as with her bare arms she would coil up her hair, standing before her mirror; and she thought nothing of it till one day, as she stood there, she noticed a curious expression flash into her face and go again almost before she could mark it. Her face, which had always been round and plump, seemed suddenly to gaze back at her, very narrow and pinched and white, strangely sunken, too, and rigid. It was all a mere flash and gone again, and her real face was presently back once more. But the look filled her with solemn thoughts, in which she was surprised to find a certain comfort, as of a sad wish fulfilling itself.

She spoke to no one of that look, but it must have been the same look that Theophil saw, a few nights after, as she sat listening to him reading in her usual chair. Suddenly, as he looked up at her, he threw down the book, and with concern, almost terror, in his voice, exclaimed, "Good God, Jenny! are you ill, dear? What is that terrible white look in your face?"

He sprang across and took her hands. The look had gone again before he had finished speaking, but it was a look he was never to forget.

One day Jenny put out her arm, and asked him to feel how thin it was growing.

"It is thin, dear; but you mustn't be anxious. Perhaps you're a trifle run down. You must see the doctor."

Mrs. Talbot did not believe in doctors, and suggested nourishing soups and port wine as a substitute. These, however, made those dear arms no fatter, they put none of that promised flesh on Jenny's bones. (Why did Theophil rather creep one day as Mrs. Talbot made use of that expression?)

And Jenny was growing tired too. She was not so ready on her feet as she used to be. Small exertions exhausted her. Her breath was not so available for running up and down stairs as it had been.

Then Theophil would have a doctor, who sounded Jenny, and looked a little grave, but finally, reassured, asked her if she had had a shock,—Jenny smiled rather knowingly, but denied it,—declared her a little run down and in need of bracing and nourishment, prescribed phosphites and steel.

Then Jenny got very wet one day on her way from school, and she began to cough. She had to stay at home, and bed was perhaps the best place for her. So Jenny went to bed, and looked very pretty there, and was quite merry of an evening when Theophil, bringing her flowers,—he was already bringing her flowers,—would draw up the arm-chair by her side, and read to her. Those were very sweet hours, perhaps the sweetest their love had ever known, so cosy and homelike, and yet without fear.

But one evening, when Jenny had been coughing, there was blood on the bosom of her nightdress, and as Theophil saw it, his heart stood still with terror. Jenny grew very white, too, as she saw it, though the awful thought which was behind the still look they gave each other was not quite new to her. Sometimes she might have been heard softly saying over to herself,—

"I am lost, I am changed, I must go farther, where The change shall take me worse, and no one dare Look in my face and see."

Yet although Death's voice calling us from afar may seem all sweetness, his voice coming nearer has a note of dread in it that appals the most death-desirous heart. And in that silence those poor lovers both heard him singing, it seemed not many streets away.

"I must be very ill, dear," said Jenny. "O my love, O my love...!"

Theophil strove with himself to say words with a real ring of the future in them, when this cloud should have passed away; and for his sake Jenny pretended to believe them. Yes, this very week he would take her away to bright skies and healing air,—though Jenny felt a little tired at the thought of rising any more from the bed to which she was growing curiously accustomed.

Then there came a new doctor to see Jenny. He was a very clever specialist from a distant town; but for him the business of death had not yet obscured its tragedy,—though words like "tragedy" were not often on his tongue. Consumption was a strong enough word for him.

His heart went out to that little household; and when he saw Jenny, it ached for that young man downstairs. It was more than a professional contempt for the "general practitioner" that made him silently curse what he called the "death-doctor," as he looked at Jenny, "Jack of all diseases, and master of none."

"Two months ago, a month," he thought, as he listened and listened for a sound of hope that might come to his ear through Jenny's wasted side,—"even a month, and I could have saved her." And yet as he talked to her he was not so sure, after all. He missed something in her voice. It was the will to live.

"Have you had a shock at any time?" he said.

Jenny was taken by surprise for a moment,—the other doctor had asked her that, too,—and she did not deny it so convincingly as she tried to.

"O, that's all right," said the doctor aloud to Jenny and her mother, who stood by, though inwardly he said, "I see. That's the reason;" and again he said, "I'm afraid you mustn't get up just yet. That chest of yours has to be taken care of, but you needn't be anxious. In a month or six weeks you'll be all right again."

"Only a month or six weeks," said Jenny, with a sinking voice. She meant—was that all that was left to her of life and love?

Downstairs Theophil stood waiting with a beating heart. He sprang to the door and drew the doctor into his room. The doctor laid a kind hand upon his arm, and there was a look in his face that made Theophil's heart die within him.

"You mean she is going to die?" he said with fearful calmness. "You mean that?"

"My poor fellow, God knows what I would give to deny it."

"She—is—going—to—die—to die! It is impossible! Not Jenny!" and between that exclamation and his first stunned cry it seemed as though bells had been tolling a thousand years. It seemed as though he had been sitting there as in a cave since the beginning of time, saying over and over to himself, "Jenny is going to die."

There was a decanter on the sideboard. The doctor poured some spirit into a glass. "Drink this," he said. Theophil drank it raw, as though it had been water; and presently a certain illusive hope began to stir like an opening rose in his brain, and when the doctor had gone he turned to that decanter again. Perhaps if he drank enough he would find that Jenny was not to die, after all. At all events, the spirit gave him nerve, which else he could not have found, to go and sit by Jenny once more. It helped him even to be gay, so that Jenny said to herself, "The doctor has not told him that I am going to die."

"The doctor said I shall be better in a month or six weeks," she said aloud, and tried to look as though she were happy.

"Didn't I say so, dearie?" said old Mrs. Talbot, whom, curiously, love made blind instead of prophet-sighted.

"Yes; and then we'll go together to those blue skies and that bright air," said Theophil.

"Yes, dear," said Jenny, closing her eyes wearily.

Presently she opened them again, and said, "Won't you read something to me, Theophil?"

"What shall I read, dear?"

"Something amusing, love. 'Alice in the Looking-Glass,' eh? It's such a long time since we read that. Don't you remember how once long ago we could never get the Walrus and the Carpenter out of our heads?"

So Theophil read the hallowed nonsense once again, struck with the fantastic incongruity of the moment. Even the dying have to go on living, and must be treated like living folks,—for a little while longer; and, though they are slipping away, slipping away, under your very eyes, there are merciful hours when you forget that they are dying. You read to them, talk to them, gossip about neighbours,—they are going to die, and yet they are quite interested in Mrs. Smith's new baby,—you laugh together over little jokes in the newspapers, and then suddenly the bell of your thoughts goes tolling: "They are going to die—have you forgotten they are going to die?—Think! there is so much to say before they go—O, think of it all—miss nothing, watch their faces every moment of the day—for soon you shall torture yourself in vain to remember just that curve of the mouth, that droop of the chin. Ask them everything now—tell them all—delay not—take farewell of that voice, that laugh, those living eyes—for they—are going to die."

Death was kind as long as he might be to Jenny's face, so that for some days old Mrs. Talbot still failed to see his shadowy mark there; but at last she knew what Jenny and Theophil had both striven to hide from her and from each other.

"My poor little girl, my poor boy!" she said over and over to herself from that time, but she did not cry or break down.

It was a pathetic sign of what was coming, that she now allowed Theophil sometimes to be Jenny's nurse through the night hours. There was to be no bridal bed for these lovers, but thus the tender quiet hours of the night were theirs even in so sad a fashion.

One night, in the haunted hushed middle of it, the old mother had softly pushed open the door to ask if all went well, and in a whisper Theophil had assured her. A night-light gave an uncanny shadow-breeding light in the room. Jenny was sleeping peacefully, her tired ivory face, with her dark elf-locks falling about it, framed on the pillow. Theophil raised himself softly in his chair and looked at her. She would sleep some while yet. Then from sheer weariness—grief's best friend—he too fell into a light sleep. From this he was awakened with a start. Jenny was sitting up and bending over him. With her dark hair hanging about her face, and in that light, there was something weird and unearthly about her, as though she were already dead and had risen in her shroud. Something of a shiver went through him, as she put her thin arms round his neck and clutched him in a sudden agony of longing. All the strength of her poor little body seemed to pass into that kiss, so eager, so convulsive. "Jenny dear, it will make you so ill; lie down, little girl"—and Jenny fell back on her pillow exhausted and coughing, and with eyes unearthly bright.

"Theophil," she said suddenly, in that startling way sick people have, "you know that I am going to die!"

He could not answer, his voice would have choked in sobs. He leaned his head close to Jenny and pressed her hand, and in spite of himself two great tears fell upon Jenny's cheek.

But Jenny was curiously calm. There was almost a note of scolding in her voice, as she said, "It's no use crying, Theophil—it's got to be borne."

She was already growing strangely wise, and a little removed from earth. The first fears of her dark journey were passing, as she was more and more sinking among the shadows. In moments there seemed to be something almost trivial in earthly grief. But there was still one earthly joy, one earthly pride, of which her soul began to conceive the desire. It had come with the thought of her grave that one day took her, less with fear, than of a new home to which she would presently be going. In her fancy she had seen her name: "Jenny Talbot, the beloved daughter of John and Jane Talbot, aged twenty-one years" and it had struck her that the name was wrong.

Talbot? that was not her name. This was not the legend of her days. The world would be all wrong about her if it only read that in after days. No, her tomb could only bear one inscription—and what sweetness amid all the bitterness of death there was to say it over and over again to herself: "Jenny Londonderry, the beloved wife of Theophilus Londonderry, aged twenty-one years."

Only twenty-one years—she thought of those who would perhaps some day stand and read those words and think "What a sad little life!"—and yet all that mattered of life had been lived in those short years, aye, in two of them, and the violet breath of young love would come up to those who read from her young grave, as it would never breathe from the earth of long-wed, late-dying lovers.

Perhaps it was a beautiful chance for love to end like theirs; their love had never grown old, so it would remain forever young, a spring sign, a star in the front of love's year for ever.

Jenny spoke her wish to Theophil in the quiet of that night. The wish had been in his heart too, and the wish was presently fulfilled. Brides have seldom been happier than Jenny as she looked on the wife's ring that hung loose on her thin finger, and brides have often been sadder.

Death was coming very near now, so near that Jenny began to forget that she was going to die. She forgot too that she was married to Theophil, and would sometimes babble her heart-breaking fancies of the little home that was so near now, till sometimes Theophil had to hurry away with his unbearable grief to some other room.

And Jenny's once rosy apple of a face made one's heart ache to look on now. It made one frightened, too: it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so thin and full of inky shadows. She would sit up in her bed a wizened little goblin, and laugh a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself,—a laugh like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the "unwilling sleep" of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know, was not to know. How was one to talk to her—talk of being well again, and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done with all these things? How bear it, when she, with a half-sad, half-amused smile, showed her thin wrists? How say that they would soon be strong and round again? Ugh! she was already beginning to be different from us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and putting on the fearful garments of death, changing from ruddy familiar humanity into a being of another element,—an element we dread as the fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to her. Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the flesh crept. She was going to die.

It was a bitterly cold night toward the end of January when Jenny died. She had been curiously alert and restless all the afternoon. Once when Theophil and she had been alone, she beckoned him with a grave, significant gesture to her side. She was lying down, and she made as if she would sit up. Humouring her, Theophil raised her and packed up the pillows at her back. Then, with indescribable solemnity, she took his face in her hands and kissed him. "Do you love me, Theophil?" she said. "Will you ever forget me?"

"I will love you for ever. I will never forget you."

He took her gently in his arms, and with terrible tenderness she held him close to her for a moment, and then sank back with a sigh. For a moment he thought she was dead; but presently she revived, though that was the last flicker of Jenny's conscious life.

Towards evening she began to take strange fancies, which had to be humoured. She complained of intruding faces in the room, she called with dreadful peevishness to unseen people who would not leave her bedside, and even sat at its foot. Then she forgot them, and imagined she was picking daisies on the counterpane. Then she begged Theophil to go downstairs and see Isabel. It was a shame to keep her waiting all that time by herself in the study. And when Theophil tried to persuade her that Isabel was not there, she shook her head and said: "You must not mind me, Theophil, dear. I'm not unhappy about her now. I'm not a silly little girl any more. I'm a woman now. 'Look in my face and see.'"

Then towards midnight a sudden accession of strength came to her, and she said she would get up. They tried to dissuade her; she grew angry, and struggled so hard to rise, that it seemed best to humour her once more. So, wrapt round with blankets, Theophil lifted her from the bed into a great chair by the fire. Then she asked to be taken to look into her bottom drawer. So they lifted her across to it, and opened it. She dabbled with her hands aimlessly among its piteous treasures, laughing low to herself.

Suddenly a fit of coughing took her, and a great choking was in her throat. She was seen to be battling for her breath. For an instant she drew herself up, and lifted her hand as though she would wave farewell, smiled a faint little smile at Theophil, making, too, as if she would speak. Then she fell back, her whole body relaxed, she had ceased coughing, and a wonderful sweetness was stealing over her face. She had gone all alone into the darkness, and Theophil was alone in the world.



CHAPTER XXII

THE TRYST LETHEAN

Jenny had gone into the darkness, and she had gone alone. Theophil had not gone with her.

That he had remained behind meant certainly no selfish clinging to life, and indeed there was a sense, as was presently to appear, in which very really he had kept young love's old promise and died with Jenny. That he had not literally fulfilled it was due to those physical conditions of dying of which in the hour of that promise young love is happily ignorant; for the promise is usually made in moments of keenly conscious physical life. Dying together is then figured, perhaps, as climbing hand in hand the radiant topmost peak of life, with a last splendid leap together into some immortal morning; and such a marriage in death, a last union of two lives in some fiery consummation of dying, has been the lot of some lovers supremely blest.

Some indeed there are whose last earthly moment is a vivid reassertion of the glory and loveliness of life. They drink the great cup to its last golden drain, and by their death-beds we seem to be standing at the laughing founts of being. They are radiant, victorious, even witty, to the last, when at one swoop of blackness they are extinguished like a light plunged into a stream.

But for others the cold mists that hang low by Lethe's banks have already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first step into the dark water. To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but with a sad unrecognising meeting. To lie together in oblivion, with sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless hands,—that was not love's meaning.

And not only are the dying thus drugged out of knowledge before they die, but those who stand near them grow drowsed, too, by the fumes of the poppies of death. The dying have forgotten; the living are numb and foolish and in a dream. All they love on earth is passing away beneath their very eyes, and they cannot understand,—cannot realise that this, this is death.

Except in moments of piercing agony, days and weeks afterwards, moments that were similarly soothed away again by that mysterious narcotic property which pain at its highest brings with it (pain at its highest being its own anaesthetic), Theophil never realised that Jenny had died, and least of all at the moment when she was dying. Long after he remembered how he had said to himself: "There is Jenny dying, dying. A few more seconds and she will be beyond the sound of your voice for ever. Call to her; she can still, perhaps, hear you. O my Jenny, my Jenny! Louder, louder,—hold her tighter, tighter,—she is slipping away. O God, she is slipping away. No love can hold her back. My Jenny, my Jenny!"

And all the time he had been curiously calm, almost unfeeling,—as one standing stupefied in the presence of fate. The air seemed full of boding sounds, echoes of low thunder, as from a distant world in the throes of portentous change; and he told himself mechanically that he should know the meaning of those sounds some day. He should wake up soon from this unnatural torpor of pain to an empty house of life, through the cold halls of which he would seek in vain for Jenny for evermore.

Meanwhile, he suddenly found himself standing with his back to the fire in the lighted study, talking to Mr. Moggridge, who, late as was the hour, had called for news, and had stayed on from a perception that the young minister had best have some one to talk to as far into the morning as he would go on talking. They were talking in a business-like way of Zion; and Theophil was smoking cigarette after cigarette. He was terribly clear-headed and bright-witted, and Mr. Moggridge looked at him sometimes with a sort of fear.

It was about three in the morning when the door was softly opened by Mrs. Talbot.

"Will you come now, and see our little girl?" she said, with a voice that could say no more.

Theophil followed her, and, still in a dream, he stood in Jenny's room, grown strangely solemn and sweet since he was last there,—was it a thousand years ago? And there was Jenny lying asleep with a wonderful smile on her face. She had a little gold chain round her neck and a white crysanthemum in the bosom of her night-gown, and you thought of some princess lying in enchanted sleep in an Arabian night. It seemed so light a sleep and yet somehow so eternal. You stept softly, you spoke low, lest you should awaken her—not carelessly shall one disturb that imperious slumber.

Yes, the distinction of death sat like an invisible crown upon Jenny's brow. She was no longer little Jenny, but a mysterious princess upon whose sleep it was permitted thus to gaze. The pain which had filled these weeks with bitter human anguish had been the process of some mysterious ennoblement. She had been found "worthy to die." In the peerage of God's creatures, she had now outsoared those whom she loved. The nature of it was a mystery, but no one could look on her face and doubt that a great honour had come to little Jenny.

But, O Jenny, may it be your gain indeed, for the loss to us is greater than we can bear—greater than we can bear. Not Theophil only—not young love, that, for all his smitten heart, has somewhere hidden away the potencies of his unspent life, and will still have his dream, though sorrow itself should become that dream—but this poor old mother, all the force of her days spent, the sap of her spirit dried up. Hers is the terrible sorrow of age, with not a hope left betwixt her and death.

Pity her, Jenny—speak one word to her. Hearken to her sobs as she kneels by your side, and can you not hear the hard crying of his heart that knows no tears?

Are you become as the gods, Jenny, that you still smile on at the sound of mortal tears? Will you not stretch out one of those folded hands to each and lead them away with you? They are praying to follow you, only to be with you, wherever you are.

And it did seem as though in some strange way the soul of the mother had still some sure communication with the soul of her dead child. Motherhood had given her a nearness in the hour which no love of a lover could gain. She alone spoke to the dead girl as though she were still really alive, as one speaking to the deaf whom only one voice can reach.

But Theophil was conscious in his wildest, most heartbroken, words that Jenny could not hear them. He talked to her as though she were a picture of herself, and as one would implore a picture to answer us, he symbolised the cry of his soul in cries that he knew were vain.

Yet though Jenny were sculpture now, Theophil could not forget that this icy marble had once been the flesh he had loved. O God! that little tender body, whose every part was sweetly joined together like the words of a song, it was marble now.

"Ah! Jenny, are you smiling to think of what you and I know, you and I, and no one else in the world? Jenny, we shall never forget, never forget, shall we? And you will not breathe our secrets even in heaven. Do you really hear me, after all, but are forbidden to say? Are you glad somewhere to see how I love you, and are you at this moment looking into my face wildly for a sign, as I into yours? Is it I who seem dead, Jenny? and are you beating wildly at the gates of life to win back to me, as I am beating at the gates of death? But, Jenny, we shall find each other, must find each other some day. I shall be so true, Jenny,—will you be true to me in heaven?"

Then would sweep across his soul a pitiless vista of the long cold years that lay between him and Jenny. He was not twenty-five; through what a weary pilgrimage of useless years must he journey on, before there was Jenny's face shining at the end. How he envied the old woman whose sorrow was in this alone less cruel than his, that she was already fifty years farther on the road to Jenny. Perhaps another year or two and she would meet her. To meet so soon—was hardly to have parted at all.

But, why live those years? Have you forgotten that old promise? Is it too late to follow? Surely little Jenny will not speed so swiftly from the earth she loved but that you shall overtake her. Who knows but she is fluttering still at the gate of death, putting off the heavenward journey hour after hour, in hope that the face she waits for will at last light up the dark portal—

"I'll take his hand and go with him To the deep wells of light; As unto a stream we will step down, And bathe there in God's sight."

But was this the way to find Jenny? The universe was so full of dark traps for lovers' feet. To lie down cold as Jenny by Jenny's side, was that the way to find her? When death's gate opened for Jenny, had Theophil at that very instant, hand in her hand, eyes fixed upon her eyes, slipped through too, then surely they had been together. But the door had closed, and whither on the other side Jenny had already wandered, who could tell? Perhaps that was the very way to miss her.

When two have lost each other in a crowd, it is best that one should stand still and await the other. Perhaps it were best for him to stand still here in life. Jenny would know where to seek him then—and maybe the dead had mysterious ways of bringing news to the living. He could wait a little while and see. For a little he could live—and listen.