The Romance of Zion Chapel Part 6

"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," a.s.sented 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 50 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, la.s.s, but I was noddin' and no mistake," said the old man, struggling drowsily with the heaviness, and presently succ.u.mbing 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 m.u.f.fled drums in the front parlour, and pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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."