If every inclination of his heart had not desired it too, Theophil would have gone on living at 3 Zion Place, for old Mrs. Talbot's sake; for now he was literally all she had left in the world, and what greater joy remained for either than just to sit close by the fire and talk of Jenny?
3 Zion Place was now a little chapel of memory, where a bowed ancient woman and a sad-faced young man kept up perpetual services to the holy dead. A woman of her own years, also acquainted with grief, came to companion the old woman, a sort of lay sister in this little monastery of grief. It was so piety began, and thus piety is purest and tenderest in the worship of the dead. Everything in that house which had taken the impress of Jenny's fingers, been Jenny's to use or handle, remained exactly as and where Jenny had placed it. They were as yet as fragrant of Jenny as a fresh-gathered flower of its own perfume. In a very real sense indeed Jenny had not died, or she was coming to life again as she had never lived before; and it was no merely idealised Jenny who was henceforward to fill up all her lover's thoughts and speak to him in every sight and sound, but just the human Jenny, with her faults and all.
On these--such little faults!--Theophil ever loved to dwell. They saved Jenny from becoming an abstraction, a saint. Even those bitter little quarrels which all lovers must suffer,--how sweet they seemed now!
The old mother's method was no doubt again different from her son-in-law's. She would never have admitted that Jenny had a fault. Such is the difference in reality between the new idealism and the old.
In such small matters as the minutiae of mourning that difference was again illustrated. Theophil could permit himself no outward insignia of sorrow which he could not wear for ever. Already his profession had clothed him in black, and it was only for him that his black seemed now to gain a deeper distinction; but such ugly symbols of beautiful memory as that note-paper whose diminishing edge of blackness is rather a cynical witness of a graduated forgetfulness, were not for a real grief like his. As if sorrow, while it may and will change, can ever end! Why, in the world of faithful hearts, men and women have not yet dried their tears for Romeo and Juliet!
Theophil conceived this grief that had come to him as one more activity added to his life till life should end. He knew that it would not outcast joy, but that it would live side by side with it, that it must alternate with joy for it to go on living. Jenny's death was not going to be less sad, less a factor of the eternal tragedy, at the end of a year,--that he might go to a theatre once more, as some widows joyously don colours, when the clock strikes the end of a year of lost dances.
For it was not Jenny alone that had died, but it was a consolation to Theophil in those hours of self-torture which are among the earliest and most cruel developments of grief, to realise how much of himself had died with her, after all. It was not merely the apathy of the first weeks that told him this, the sense of vacuity, of uselessness in all things, but the sense that never left him, even when he had awakened to an activity he had never known before, that nothing really mattered, however vigorously he might seem to act to the contrary, since Jenny had gone.
It was with difficulty sometimes that he could take important issues with necessary seriousness, for, whatever the odds of life henceforward might be, what was there worth gaining now that Jenny was lost? Could any energy or haste save Jenny from dying? That had happened. The worst had happened. All the terror life had to appal the human spirit had been faced, in that moment when the doctor's hand upon his shoulder had told him Jenny was to die. His eyes had looked on the Medusa-face of life that turns the bravest to stone, and he was no longer vulnerable humanity.
On the battle-field of existence he bore a charmed life, and sometimes as he moved among his fellows he felt a certain sense of the unfairness of his advantage in this respect, and paused to pity those who could still be so eager, so tragically set upon, this little issue. The virulence of those enemies whom he was already making and who were to multiply as his activities awakened again, seemed particularly pathetic, and he would smile in sad amusement at their quaint little efforts to hurt him. (No man is so strong for this world's fight as he who has laid up his treasure in heaven; and when the mystic condescends to the common trades of life he is an easy master.) It meant so much to them, so little to him. He was a humbug, he was a hypocrite, he wasn't even a good speaker, he was an ignoramus! Was he? All right. They might think so if they chose. It hardly interested him. He had been sitting drawing angels, and somehow their irrelevant voices had broken in upon him. "Another was with me."
Really, even for Jenny's sake, it seemed hardly worth while to fight so poor a world! Was the fame that such a world could give a distinction one would seek for Jenny? Would not Jenny smile in heaven at the toy honours of such a world?
On the other hand, there was something repellent to his once ambitious soul, in the thought that such a world might seem to have the victory; and, therefore, when the first numbness had left him and the colours and sounds of things were once more coming back, he threw himself with galvanic vitality into the work that lay to his hand, and particularly into those political activities for which his gift of speech and his power of organisation fitted him.
Two months after Jenny's death, having spoken at a great meeting on some momentous question of the hour, he found himself the acknowledged leader of the Radical, rather forlorn, hope in Coalchester, and before long invitations were coming to him to help on the same hope in other towns. Never in his life--and he used often to meditate on the fact with wonder--had he been so vital, so efficient, so brilliant. His powers had acquired a firmness, an alertness, a force of influence and attraction, they had never possessed before. Of a sudden he found himself mature, a calm master of his gifts.
Yet those who sat near him at those meetings might have noticed that as he sat down, pale amid plaudits, and crossed his hands upon his knees, and while his political colleagues were complimenting him to the audience on the mellow thunder of his political oratory, he was smiling furtively to himself. "It's all very funny, isn't it, Jenny?" he was saying in his heart.
Indeed it was hardly recognisable to himself as a fancy that whenever he spoke Jenny was somewhere in the audience. Sometimes a remote face might bear a chance resemblance to her, and he would humour himself with the thought that that was Jenny. For, with that self-consciousness which no modern mind can escape, he found a certain sad pleasure sometimes in noting the tricks grief played with him, loving and encouraging all its fancies--if fancies indeed they were.
When at other times he tried to think clearly, to strip himself of the illusions, as others would no doubt call them, in which he now lived, his thinking rather confirmed than dispersed them; and the more he pondered, the more he failed to realise that Jenny was dead, the surer became his consciousness that she was nearer to him (a very part of him as it were) than she had ever been in the days when others could still hear her voice and note her presence in a room. Her very death had given him a paradoxical certitude of her immortality.
Yet this recognition of her presence, on some plane of spiritual apprehension, was none the less consistent with a piercing sense of her loss on the plane where love once moved in visible beauty. That heavenly lover in him was able to give none of the comfort of its assurance to the earthly lover. That the eyes of the spirit could touch her, brought no healing to the eyes that at midnight would look up from the desk in Theophil's study to Jenny's empty chair, no touch of her to the hands that were so idle and empty now.
Yet there were little services these hands might still do for her. There in her own little room her own books still stood in their places. These could be taken care of, her little desk could still be kept as she had left it, with her pen laid down as she had last laid it. There were note-paper and envelopes, and ink and blotting-paper, all ready, if some day, by a miracle--who could tell?--she might steal into that room and want to leave a message. There should be fresh flowers for her to find there too if she did come.
And that new edition of Scott which was not finished issuing when she went away, she would find that complete when she came back. Her little collection of fairy books too--she was sure to glance at that! and then she would find two or three new ones there finer than any of the old ones; alas! so many beautiful books kept coming out now that she had gone.
Yet somehow she might see them, after all, if they were taken softly to that little room and laid on that table altar. When it was quite sure that no one was looking or listening, the shy soul might steal out of the air and turn the pages with a sigh.
Just so some savage lover might bring gifts of fruit and coloured beads, and bright plumed birds, to the grave of his dead love, for the future anthropologist to draw his moral of the childishness of all human idealisms.
One day, as Theophil had stolen quietly into that room on some such votive errand, an impulse had come to him to open the drawer of the desk. There might be some message for him there. Any writing of the dead we have never read before is a message.
Among various odds and ends, he came first upon one of those little tradesmen's account-books interleaved with bad blotting-paper in which the housewife writes her orders week by week.
It was full of Jenny's writing, and though the entries were merely weekly repetitions of the same string of groceries:--"2 lbs. of the best tea," "6 lbs. loaf sugar," "6 nutmegs," and so on,--yet, "the hand being hers," they made a record that could only be read through blinding tears; and one page which bore a severe little note, to the effect that the tea had been far from good of late, read almost like a personal revelation.
Theophil kissed the page, and, replacing the book, took up another, and his heart leapt to find it was a little diary.
He hesitated for a moment. It seemed wrong to read it, and yet he knew that Jenny's soul held nothing she would not have shared with him, and he was so hungry for a word from her though it were only a word out of the past.
The entries were not many nor long, but it smote his heart to find how large a space his name, his interests, his successes, filled there. The entries of honour were little heart-notes of evenings together especially happy; there were two birthdays still singing for joy, and sometimes there was a saying of his she had put down because it was so helpful, or a poem she had copied out; and also there were clever little criticisms of books she had read, and sometimes a wise little reflection of her own,--which brought home to him, with a certain pang, that the little child who had seemed so dependent on him had been an independent personality, after all.
As he came to the last entry, he put the book down with a gesture of pain. The last entry had been made the day after Jenny had discovered Theophil's love for Isabel. It was very brief, just a sob: "Have realised that I am no fit wife for Theophil. And yet how I love him!"
As Theophil read this, all that sad night came back to him with unbearable vividness, and he felt once more a little sobbing body crying its heart out against his. At that moment he would have endured centuries of torment just to have undone what could never be undone; and an awful thought that he had not dared allow into the daylight of his mind, suddenly sprang hideous in full view of his stricken soul: the thought that, however he might soothe its intolerable pain, he it was who had--killed Jenny. "She seems to have had a shock," a voice was saying over and over again, "she seems to have had a shock."
A shock! Yes! and Isabel, whom all this time, he had kept thrust in the outer darkness of thought, forbidding his soul to breathe her name, now sprang into vivid light again in company with that thought. In that moment he felt to hate her, and it was with a cruel mental oath he hurled her back again into the dark. It was she,shewho had made him--kill Jenny!
But this was a thought that either must kill him, or be made endurable by some advocate of the stricken conscience; and it was with no wish to deceive himself, or to escape from his sin, that Theophil told himself that this murder of a soul, to which he pleaded guilty, was indeed no wilful act, but the accident of two tragically conditioned souls, who had planned, at their own agony, a fate of happiest life for Jenny.
Yet, the accuser urged, are not theories of life which thus jeopardise the happiness of human souls theories which it is criminal to hold? Shall you try your new ways to heaven at the risk of broken hearts?
But a voice said--was it Jenny's?--this poor Theophil and Isabel love by reason of no theory. It is yours, O ruling Fates of men, whatever you be, who must support that accusation. Theophil and Isabel loved by the compelling dispensation of the stars. They fought their destiny, and had conquered it. It was you, ye stars, not they, that killed Jenny.
And this was true: but still the little figure sobbed at Theophil's side, as again and again it would come and sob there, till Theophil's own heart broke,--that old death-crying of Jenny's broken heart.
After Jenny's death two letters had come for her from Isabel, who had no knowledge of what had been happening to her friends of New Zion.
There is something peculiarly sad about the letters that for a little time go on coming for the dead. Perhaps nothing more simply brings home the fact that they are no longer with us. Even little bills, circulars offering new spring goods at sale prices, come charged with pathos, and Theophil smiled at his own folly as he kept them all. Sad littleposte restante! Will the letters ever be called for?
Theophil did not open the letters, but as days went by and no more came, he sometimes found himself taking them from their drawer and looking at them. Isabel's handwriting, though his soul would not confess it to himself, still held the power of a rune over his heart.
Had no traitor thought ever whispered deep down in the darkness of his consciousness that the way was now open to Isabel? Such thoughts indeed had come to him, but unwelcomed, involuntarily, as those foul thoughts which will sometimes torture the pure, or those base thoughts which may appal the noble.
The mind, like the body, has its foul humours, which can only be accepted with patience as a part of the inscrutable mechanism of human organisms. In moments of anger this filth and poison of the mind sometimes comes to the surface to wrong us--for it is not us, it is in truth just all that we are not.
Thus at times in Theophil's mind, that was one prayer of faithful love for Jenny, the thought of Isabel would steal, like--so his stern faithfulness pictured it--a fair devil in a church. Yet, if he opened one of those letters he knew there would ascend from it a cloud of subtle incense, which would ... well, which he must never again breathe.
So he would replace them in their drawer, and again, some other day, take them out once more.
Perhaps, after all, it might be his duty, the mere duty of a friend, to open them. What if Isabel should be ill, should be needing him ... should be dying!
But still the fanaticism of his sorrow conquered, and still week after week they remained unread.
Meanwhile, Isabel was living her life as she had lived it before she had heard of New Zion, with the difference of an internal sense of completion which her love had brought. Need one say that she had her hours of loneliness and longing, when she would have exchanged a thousand years of love in heaven for a touch of Theophil's hand upon earth; but these she knew how to conquer, and for most days that union of two separated hearts remained to her as real as when it had been vowed in those silent woods.
At the very moment when Jenny was dying, and Theophil had thrust Isabel away into the furthest, highest, starlight of memory, she was thinking how real their union was, how near he seemed!
Knowing the quick but little loveMuch mention of the dead.
I hesitate further to continue that history of a grief of which, nevertheless, this book has now little heart or purpose to be other than the record, and, as what I shall write in this chapter must seem meaningless and wearisome to all but those who belong to the great Secret Society of Sorrow, it were no doubt just as well that those who have known nothing but joy should follow their natural impulse and leave it unread. I confess, too, that I should feel the more comfortable without the regard of their happy, ignorant eyes.
Sorrow is a mysticism, and to talk of it to those who have never known the initiation of tears is like talking alchemy to a child. Sorrow, too, is an aristocracy, and when Theophil came to realise that, as Jenny had been found worthy to die, he had been found worthy to suffer, it seemed to him almost vulgar only to have been happy. Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, abourgeoiswho has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world. Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of much--but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.
No consciousness of his gifts had ever given Theophil any such sense of his belonging to the chosen and dedicated minority of mankind as this initiation into the Secret Society of Sorrow. He had been chosen to represent a sacred order. He stood for no lesser interests than those of Love and Death. Though he were to represent Coalchester in the House of Commons, what honour were there in that to one already so mysteriously honoured?
Tears bring a strange new sight to the eyes, and "a new perception both of grieving love" made Theophil see, and love to see, many things in the world he had never noticed before. His eyes were opened to behold the many mourners who go about the streets, the widows who walk in darkness, and all the shapes of blackness moving phantom-like through the coloured traffic; not all true children of sorrow, indeed, though wearing its habit, but, true or not, symbols of the power and majesty of death in the world. For the involuntary honour paid to death even by the ignorantly busy, and happy, he kept ever a grateful and a jealous eye; and as some funeralcortègepassed like a dream, Charon's barge amid all the motley craft of merchandise and pleasure, he would watch sternly to see if the fat and prosperous moment would do honour to the carriages of the king. For a bowed head or a doffed hat he felt a personal gratitude. And, since Jenny died, he seemed to be always meeting that phantom procession in the streets.
Once, as he passed along the High Street, he had noticed a crowd round a dying horse. He stood with the crowd a moment, and then went on his way. In an hour's time he repassed the place, and there was the dead horse lying solitary on the side of the street; but he noted with a curious gladness that some hand had covered it reverently with a horse-cloth. "So honoured is death," he mused to himself, "that even the humblest animal on which he shall have set his seal is held sacred from the common day, and shall not be gazed upon heedlessly by the passer-by." This seemed the greatest honour he had known paid to the king!
The fascination with which from this time death and all that related to or remotely suggested it absorbed him, was, he reflected one day with a surprised recognition of the paradox, no longer the fascination of hate or dread, but almost love. Death, the arch-enemy of joy, the assassin of youth, the murderer of Jenny,--Death had robbed him of his life's one treasure, and here was he loving him, watching for his face, listening for his step, like a lover.
Surely this was the strangest of conclusions; but perhaps the explanation was very simple. Theophil loved death because Jenny had died, as he would have loved anything Jenny had chosen to do, as he would have loved life had Jenny gone on living. By dying Jenny had made death beautiful, and its gloomiest associations were but so many allusions to Jenny.
Death was to Theophil as a foreign land of which before he had only heard the name, and heard it almost without interest, as one hears listlessly of Peru. But now that Jenny had gone to Peru, the books of the world could not tell him enough about the new land where Jenny had gone, and everyone who had friends there was at once his friend, and every little dark-robed company gathered sadly to godspeed some new emigrant to its distant shore was dear to him for Jenny's sake. Besides, some of these might have heard from their friends there, might have news to tell him of the dark land. One would walk far, would listen late for such precious tidings.
Did such tidings ever come? Yes, some had even seen their loved ones again, shining strangely on the air. Why did Jenny never come like that? How he had prayed and called to her for just one sign out of the silence, one swift uplifting of the veil; but none, except that dream, had ever come. Yet one could never be sure by what common unnoticed sights and sounds the dead might fumblingly be striving to reach us in the deaf and dumb language of the dead. Perhaps it was they who led us to passages in books we had never noticed before, pointed their fingers to bright pages of faith, and left us here and there many a message of hope we never dreamed had come from them. Or might it not happen that the dead, like the living, could be unfaithful:--
"Is death's long kiss a richer kissThan mine was wont to be,Or have you gone to some far blissAnd straight forgotten me?"
Perhaps Jenny already loved another in heaven, and his gift of faithfulness might some day be a burden to her...
This love of death was no mere morbid absorption. It was but one of the activities of a faithfulness to which the trees about the temple had become "dear as the temple's self," and his jealousy for those honours paid to death was only one expression of his eager watchfulness for the signs of human faithfulness.
Not all unrewarded was that watch. The world held some faithful hearts,--let us not ask how many,--lovers of invisible faces and voices heard no more, men and women who still shared their joys and sorrows with unseen comrades, and drank the cup of life as a sacrament of remembrance.
This sharing with the dead seemed to Theophil the essential of faithfulness,--faithfulness taking many forms, sometimes maybe misrepresentative of itself, and seldom perhaps informing its conventional externals.
A time will come in the profoundest griefs when those rituals to which young grief is so eager to vow itself will grow lifeless and conventional, the daily tasks of remembrance become as the told beads of pattered prayers. Let the worshipper of relics beware lest his treasures some day turn on his hands to so much irksome lumber, and true sorrow be thus humiliated.
No! the service for the dead which is most likely to remain a vital offering of the heart is not the ceremonial sorrow of specially consecrated times and seasons, but rather the simple longing in hours of joy thattheycould have been with us. To think of our dead friends as always in their shrouds is a way of remembrance which we shall not long have heart or even interest to follow. It is only by taking them to our feasts, keeping up with them the same old human companionship, that we may hope to keep the dead as friends. A modern poet has written eight lines which were of great comfort to Theophil,--
"You go not to the headstoneAs aforetime every day,And I who died, I do not chide,Because, dear friend, you play;"But in your playing think of himWho once was kind and dear,And if you see a beauteous thing,Just say: 'He is not here.'"
Here it seemed to Theophil was the whole duty of faithfulness. The dead know that if we remember them in our hours of joy, they are indeed remembered; and if they know anything at all, they will understand the waywardness of sad hearts better than sad hearts understand themselves.
Yet, indeed, save in the exercise of his faculties, Theophil had no joy to reproach himself with. Surely returning spring, with its terrible exuberance of warm life, was no joy. Perhaps he had looked on Jenny lying dead with less anguish than he one day beheld an apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun. Yes! the world had the heart to go on, to bud and build, and sing,--though Jenny was gone. And in that bright spring, see horrible and useless age still hobbling out into the beam! What was life but one huge Mephistopheles laugh beneath the windows of our dreams!
That spring James Whalley persuaded Theophil to walk with him for a week of country lanes far beyond Coalchester, letting him talk of Jenny all the time. Jenny had never been here! If only Jenny could have seen that view! Jenny had never known that flower! Did he remember those verses from James Thomson:--
"The chambers of the mansions of my heart,In every one whereof thine image dwells,Are black with grief eternal for thy sake."The inmost oratory of my soul,Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,Is black with grief eternal for thy sake."I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,With eyes for ever fixed upon that face,So beautiful and dreadful in its calm."I kneel here patient as thou liest there;As patient as a statue carved in stone,Of adoration and eternal grief."While thou dost not awake I cannot move;And something tells me thou wilt never wake,And I alive feel turning into stone."
Strange joy of sad poetry for sad hearts!
Experience indeed was now divided for Theophil into what Jenny had not seen or known and into what she had seen and known; and it was one of the tricks of his grief, as time went on, to confuse the two. Sometimes he would think that Jenny had been with him at a certain place, or perhaps had read a certain book which, on taking thought, he knew she could never have seen.
Allied perhaps to this confusion was the fancy that possessed him on certain days that he caught glimpses of Jenny in little flitting figures of women about the streets. A sudden poise of the head, the way of doing the hair, a trick of walk,--just a flash and gone again; though sometimes he was haunted with more persistent resemblances, which brought him a curious mixture of joy and pain. And this perhaps is the place to record what only those acquainted with grief will understand, and not all of those,--for grief has many contradictory fashions.
Till he had loved Jenny, women had played little or no part in Theophil's life; but with Jenny's death he found, to his surprise, that the idea of woman was strangely sweet to him. His eyes were drawn after women in the street, and he found himself longing sometimes for some woman on whose shoulder he might lean his head and weep out his grief for Jenny! He loved death because Jenny had died; was he to love women because Jenny had been a woman? Perhaps his feet had wandered in dangerous paths at this time, had it not been for the restrictions which his calling laid upon him.
These, however, did not deny him the theatre, which it had been part of his programme at New Zion to advocate, though there was seldom anything worth seeing at Coalchester Theatre Royal. Yet sometimes a good London company would call there on its provincial progress, and it chanced one day, looking into a shop window, that Theophil caught sight of a photograph of a woman that startled him with its remarkable resemblance to Jenny. It was the prima donna of a Gaiety burlesque. Such was the strange shape Jenny had for the moment taken!
For the first time after her death Theophil was at the theatre that evening. The bright lights and the music pierced him as with swords. Once more he saw that apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun. Yet his fancy found grim spells to lay the insolent ghost of life, and death ever at his side whispered that all this light and music and dancing was for but a little while; that those gay rouged faces, so confident in laughing beauty, and all those nimble shapes, were to the eye that had looked beyond life already stark in their coffins, with chin-cloths about their nerveless jaws. Surely the lover would trip in the shroud that was plainly to be seen from his feet to his lips!
Like sudden snow on a summer meadow, a white silence fell from his imagination across that fiddling, jigging, gleaming atmosphere, and everywhere the dead sat around him, watching in a trance strange antics of the grimacing dead. Curiously, in these moods, he never thought of himself as dead. Alas! life was too cruel to release him so soon to death and Jenny.
Suddenly the theatre sprang back to life again with the entrance of the prima donna. Yes, the resemblance was even greater than in the photograph. She was a little taller and more heavily built than Jenny, and it was not Jenny's voice; but for the rest, shewasJenny. The fascination of watching her was terrible. It seemed impossible that one form could so mockingly resemble another, and yet be so hopelessly someone else. Theophil could hardly bring himself to believe that the woman yonder with Jenny's eyes and mouth and hair had never even heard of Jenny's name. Surely, if he were to come and look into her face, she would recognise him at once, and the old common interests would rise to her lips as of old.
Theophil went again to the theatre the next night, and again the next, which was the last of the company's stay in the town; and the spell of the false Florimel grew so strong upon him that at the close of the final performance he sent up his card to the actress, and presently, as in a dream, found himself stumbling among scenery and dipping under beams on his way to the actress's room. If she were only as like Jenny close to, he felt he must follow her to the end of the world; and indeed the illusion still held as he entered the little mirrored room, smelling of powder and littered with laces and silks,--fancy little Jenny here among the grease-paints and the bouquets! It was only with the lack of recognition in the polite welcome the actress gave him that the illusion began to waver, or was it only that Jenny had forgotten him?
So possessed had he been with the hallucination, that he had not thought what excuse he would have to make to the actress for his visit, and it was with an embarrassing shock that the necessity of speech came to him, when he had stumbled through some mechanical words of salutation. She looked at him with a little air of bewilderment, and motioned to her attendant to leave them alone. As the door closed, Theophil had determined to tell her the simple truth.
"I have to ask your pardon," he began, "for a very strange intrusion. The reason of it is simply this. You are so like someone I love who is dead that I felt I could not rest till I had spoken to you. I trust you will excuse me, and try to understand. Yes! you are terribly like her!"
The story appealed to the actress's instinct for romance, and she entered into its spirit. Besides, the young clergyman was very interesting to look at, and the charm of sorrow was on his face.
"An actress can hardly complain," she answered, "of being taken for someone else, and though I don't know you, I feel that you have done me an honour. Am I indeed so like her? How strange it must seem to you!"
"It is very strange," said Theophil, still fascinated. Then he told this image of Jenny the story of how Jenny had died. The tears came into the actress's eyes as he talked, and it was as though Jenny shed tears for Jenny's death.
"Poor little girl!" she said; "I am so sorry for you both."
"But," she continued presently, "you should both be very happy too--for it would be worth while to suffer for so beautiful a love.... I feel happy," she added half gaily, "even to resemble a woman who is so wonderfully loved."
Theophil lingered on, still fascinated, till the actress suggested that he should walk with her to her hotel. Arrived there, Theophil, to the possible scandalising of Coalchester, accepted her invitation to a further chat over supper; and when at last he was back at Zion Place, his heart was aware of a new comfort and a new pain. He had leaned his head on a woman's kind shoulder, and she had let him talk and talk about Jenny; but her shoulder had been warm, and it had been sweet to be near her ...
"A creature might forget to weep who bore;Thy comfort long" ...
and Theophil went to sleep that night with the taste of honey upon his lips.
But with the morning there came to him remorseful misgivings, and he told himself that it had been one of the sophistries of the flesh, a call of the senses taking in vain the sacred name of Jenny; and then for his comfort he remembered how the greatest of all lovers, Dante, had craved in like manner for the solace of "a very pitiful lady, very young," and had been similarly remorseful on account of his momentary preoccupation with her.
Taking down his "Vita Nuova," he read: "At length, by the constant sight of this lady, mine eyes began to be gladdened overmuch with her company; through which thing many times I had much unrest, and rebuked myself as a base person: also, many times I cursed the unsteadfastness of mine eyes, and said to them inwardly: 'Was not your grievous condition of weeping wont one while to make others weep? And will ye now forget this thing because a lady looketh upon you? who so looketh merely in compassion of the grief ye then showed for your own blessed lady. But what so ye can, that do ye, accursed eyes! many a time will I make you remember it! for never, till death dry you up, should ye make an end of your weeping.'"
Moreover, Dante had married Gemma within a year of the death of Beatrice, and had even lived so scandalously meanwhile as to bring down upon him the stern reproof of his friend Guido Calvancanti; yet the world still regards him as the type of all faithful lovers. Faithfulness is an attitude of the mind, and all it touches turns to Beatrice. Yet--
"Except by death, we must not any wayForget our lady who is gone from us."
If women were thus henceforth to influence Theophil, why might not Isabel, the woman whom Jenny had loved, be counted amongst them?
Isabel was the one woman in the whole world whom Theophil's faithfulness could not transform into Jenny. That it had been his fatal love for her that had brought Jenny to her death, his reason, except in moments of self-injustice, was robust enough to put aside.
There are excuses that we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences. A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences. The best repentance for our sins is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of destiny with which we chance to have been involuntarily associated, is one to be resisted in the interests of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of self-development. Before we take the scourge in hand for our own shoulders let us be quite sure that we have sinned.
There were hours, particularly those hours of sudden wakefulness in the middle of the night when our minds lose their sense of proportion, in which Theophil agonised beyond endurance, and, as on that afternoon when he had found Jenny's diary, said to himself with merciless reiteration, "She seems to have had a shock"--"It was you who killed Jenny."
These hours had to be supported as we support hours of purely physical pain. The morning brought a saner, larger view. The tragedy of Jenny's death was not to be so easily explained. In it were implicated more august responsible causes, it was part of a more general tragedy; as the original instinct to blame himself and Isabel was part of man's ancient theological habit of making man the scapegoat of the universe.
But as the thought of Isabel thus became bearable once more, it became for that very reason a thought the more faithfully to be resisted.
It might become sweet.
It was sweet!
One day the casuistry of grief brought Theophil the reflection that, as Isabel was the only woman he knew whom Jenny had known too, and that as Jenny had loved her also, she was thus destined for him even by Jenny herself. Besides, as he had realised no unfaithfulness to Jenny in his love for Isabel during Jenny's life, there could equally be no unfaithfulness now that she was dead. Moreover, if Jenny still in some mysterious way kept watch over his life, she would understand his heart as she could never have understood it when she was alive...
These thoughts brought deep sorrow to him for many days, during which once more he rebuked himself as "a base person," but, curiously enough, in one who so despised the world and its opinion, it was an apparently superficial consideration that was the mainstay of his faithfulness, against these disloyal suggestions of a life that was thus reawakening in spite of himself.
There were moments when he could conceive his going to Isabel, and asking her to share his life with him; but never could he endure the thought of her bearing that name which seemed so inviolably Jenny's. Even though Jenny had come to him in a dream and asked him to give her name to Isabel, there was still the world. Though Jenny might understand, the world would think he had forgotten Jenny. The minority of faithful hearts would grow sadder by his seeming apostasy, and the cynic would strengthen his pessimism by one more illustration of human inconstancy. The world might hear that he was loving Isabel in some Aegean isle, and still deem him faithful; for grief is allowed mistresses, but with a wife it is understood to die.
No! so long as the world lasted no other woman should steal her name from Jenny's grave.
And this was an unassailable symbol. Here the vital principle of his faithfulness was entrenched as in an impregnable fortress. He would see Isabel's heart break ere she should bear Jenny's name.
Yet while he made the vow, his love for Isabel was musical as spring within his soul, and he dared to tell himself that in God's sight he was still Isabel's as well as Jenny's.
Thus it came about that one autumn day, when Isabel's letters had lain unopened through spring and summer, in one sudden impulse of mere desire he had opened and read them,--not as Jenny's letters, but as messages for which he himself was hungering. He had released the incense, and as he kissed the dear writing, he momentarily forgot that it was written to Jenny, and only remembered that it had come from Isabel. In the snare of the incense he even accused himself for having left them unread so long, and then to think that nearly six months had gone by since the second letter had brought its half-playful reproach for forgetfulness.... "Ah! Jenny, I'm afraid you're a fickle little person, after all."
How strange it seemed to hear Jenny talked to like that--now.... Yes, of course, Jenny was dead. Jenny was dead ... and Isabel was calling.
Was Jenny losing her power in this intoxicating fragrance of Isabel's words--as though for once the cross should lose its virtue in some subtle air of hellish sweetness?
O lilies from Jenny's white coffin, O little chrysanthemum that lay in her bosom, O violets from Jenny's tomb, pierce with your faithful breath this cloud of incense that is enwrapping Jenny's lover.
Alas! the power of the dead is but the power of the ideal, at once the strongest and the weakest force in the world,--a power, indeed, that prevails, but which may in some moments be shattered by the frailest whisper of the real.
Isabel was calling, and Theophil was mad to go. Come back he might, but go he must, he would. Yes! he was going.
There was only one possible way of spending that fevered night--in the train; and it was in the train, speeding on to London and to Isabel, his heart on fire, his eager eyes wasting themselves on the flying darkness, that Theophil spent it. Purposes he had none, only a desire,--just to see Isabel again. That immediate future was too effulgent for him to think of anything beyond it.
He would see Isabel again!
From a distant starry name, withdrawn into the abysses of heaven, she would turn again to woman and a wonderful nearness.
The thought of being once again in a little room together enveloped him in a cloud of sweetness, as though the train were passing through hidden orchards.
Isabel! Isabel! don't you hear love's wings beating towards you across the night? Have you not just awakened suddenly from your first sleep in the rosebush where you lie, and said: "Surely out there across the silent woods and meadows, where the night swallows London like a camp-fire, a train, a moving street of lighted windows, is speeding through the darkness and the dew, and in one of those little travelling rooms sits Theophil with his eyes fixed on me"?
Was it Jenny's name that Theophil was thus taking to Isabel?
No, not Jenny's name. Never Jenny's name!
He was going to look on Isabel again--that was all. Perhaps he would die with the mere joy of seeing her again--and then he would not need to think of the future. Yes! the deeps of his soul had wanted her as much as that.
It was about half-past six as he reached London; and though it was impossible to call on her for some hours yet, Theophil drove straight to Isabel's little square, shuttered and still in the early-risen London morning. His eyes chose the second storey for hers, and picked out two dainty windows as her rooms. He half expected to see the blind suddenly drawn aside and her face, a sleepy flower, bloom through the curtains.
He lingered awhile, loving each individual brick of the house with his eyes, and then, kissing his hands to the sleeping windows, he rejoined his cab, which he had left at the street corner, shy of awaking the hushed square with its clatter.
He gave Isabel till ten o'clock, which was perhaps hardly enough for a young London lady's toilette and breakfast, and then called. A pleasant housemaid answered the bell, and told him that Miss Strange was away, and was not expected till to-morrow.
Here was a surprise. He had never even thought of that possibility.
Begging leave to write Miss Strange a note, he presently found himself in Isabel's room. It was the same his eyes had blessed from the street.
So this was Isabel's room! So evidently hers, her very self!
Isabel pictures, Isabel wall-paper, Isabel chairs, Isabel cushions, Isabel desk, Isabel books, Isabel bibelots, Isabel litter,--all Isabel.
And there hung an arras portière over a doorway to the right of the fireplace. That was her bedroom! Dare he peep in? That was her little bed. Would the housemaid catch him if he slipped in and left a kiss on her pillow? By the mirror was a grotesque little china monster with his mouth full of hat-pins. He stole one for a memory. Over a chair lay a little dressing-jacket. He took it up and kissed it.
Then he sat down to write to her. What a tidy, methodical little desk! Everything in its place. Dear, business-like, sea-witch Isabel! Here was her engagement book. He mustn't begin reading her letters!
After his first disappointment, he was half-glad he would have to wait till to-morrow to see her,--for, of course, he would wait. To have thus sat in her room was almost enough for a first meeting. It was like stealing upon her while she slept.
Then he began a letter; but as he wrote, who was this suddenly standing at his side? Was it Isabel? No...it was a little sobbing body quite near to his, crying as if its heart would break...
Oh, Jenny, Jenny--God forgive me!
The spell was broken, the fit was over. Theophil left no letter for Isabel, and no message, and the same evening he was once more back in his little study in Zion Place, wild with remorse. O for the scourge and the fire! But what penance shall avail to ease that poor little creature's broken-hearted crying?
"She seems to have had a shock!--She seems to have had a shock!"