The Romance of Zion Chapel Part 14

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 repet.i.tions 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 s.p.a.ce 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, _she_ who 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.

CHAPTER XXV

JENNY'S POSTE RESTANTE

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 little _poste 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 n.o.ble.

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!

CHAPTER XXVI

FURTHER CONCERNING THEOPHIL'S LIFE AFTER THE DEATH OF JENNY

Knowing the quick but little love Much 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 coa.r.s.e tastes and literal pleasures, a _bourgeois_ who 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 n.o.bler 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 funeral _cortege_ pa.s.sed 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 grat.i.tude. And, since Jenny died, he seemed to be always meeting that phantom procession in the streets.

Once, as he pa.s.sed 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 repa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ser-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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 a.s.sociations 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 G.o.dspeed some new emigrant to its distant sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sages 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 kiss Than mine was wont to be, Or have you gone to some far bliss And 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.