The Romance of Zion Chapel Part 5

Well, we can talk of Theophil again. Meanwhile Jenny was as much in love with her herself, and he held Jenny's hand and loved her, O yes, so dearly--and was quite safe. Fear not, little Jenny; it was only death, you remember, that was to separate Jenny and Theophil.

Mrs. Talbot--if she won't bore you--had made an interesting remark. She had not escaped Isabel's charm, but there was "something," something a little alarming about her,--a little like that wicked wall-paper.

Jenny divulged this criticism over supper when her mother was out of ear-shot.

"How very clever of her!" exclaimed Isabel.

"She said the same of Dvorak's music," said Jenny.

"Good again," said Isabel. "How clever of her! Don't you feel how right she is? We are all like that wall-paper, and everything we care about is like it. The New Spirit--that is, the devil--is in that wall-paper. A psychometrist could detect Wagner and Keats, and Schopenhauer, and Rossetti and Swinburne, and all the rest of them in that wall-paper, just as surely as he could have detected Tupper and Eliza Cook in the wall-papers of 1851. Am I not right?"

"If we could only paper New Zion like this!" exclaimed Theophil, a curious new feeling of joy and pain shooting through him to hear a woman thus expressing herself as an independent brain.

"Yes! New Zion! I'd quite forgotten all about New Zion. It seems impossible to think of you together."

"And a little absurd, I suppose," said Theophil.

"It is uncouth material, I admit," he continued, "and yet somehow it amuses us to mould it all the more; and then you mustn't forget that we had been given no other--but I don't suppose you can understand?"

(Theophil often used "we" in this imperatorial sense, meaning himself, as of course he had every right to mean.)

"O yes, but I can," Isabel hastened to correct. "I understand power."

"Beauty always does," was the young minister's reply.

"Besides," he presently resumed, "we are glad to have been Nonconformists--once. A Puritan training is a good thing--to look back upon. You are all the more thorough in your pleasures, the truer humanist, for something of it still lurking in your blood."

"Yes, of course you're right. I don't like the word 'pagan'; but for want of a better, we might say that the best pagans have come of Puritan stock. Besides, it is half the romance of life to have something to escape from, isn't it?"

"And someone to escape with the other half," responded Theophil, nimble as a real town wit.

O it was a wonderful night. Let us build five tabernacles!

"Good-night, dear Jenny."

"Good-night, dear wonderful Isabel."

So at last the two girls bade each other good-night at the door of Jenny's bedroom, where Isabel was to sleep.

Masterful youth! So wild to take, so eager to surrender, the Christian name. Strange, what pa.s.sion sometimes can be put into a _Christian_ name!

When the door was shut on Isabel, she made no haste to undress. Indeed, she sat down on the side of the bed as though she had been waiting to sit down for ever so long, sat very still as in a dream, and an hour went by and she was still sitting and gazing in front of her.

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 pa.s.s 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," a.s.sented 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."