The Romance of Zion Chapel Part 3

Mr. Littlejohn could make nothing of it, nor indeed could the artists'

colourman, who had been used to pictures all his life.

No wonder, for it was the first Rossetti that had ever been seen in Coalchester.

And it was the same at the little paperhanger's shop where Theophilus had ordered some pieces of Morris wall-paper for his room.

"Law! what a taste, to be sure!" had exclaimed the paperhanger's wife as they opened the parcel. "How any one dare live with such patterns is beyond me." The paperhanger's wife verbed better than she knew. Few are those indeed who dare live with beauty.

When the paper was hung in Theophil's room, so great was the sensation in the household that even old Mr. Talbot ventured to look in at it, keeping very close to his wife. It was so the old man had stood open-mouthed before the first steam-engine, and here again was the Devil plainly at work.

"Lord a-mercy, Jane," he said to his wife, "what is the world coming to?"

The world was indeed changing beneath the old man's feet, and the heavens opening as never before in his time--with, he might be right, some a.s.sistance from beneath; and--it was undoubtedly safer in the kitchen.

Mrs. Talbot in these matters lived and loved by faith in her boy, as she called him. But even she had her doubts, which she expressed in a way that showed, funny old woman as she was, that she was not without a sort of blind insight.

"I suppose it's all right, boy," she said, "and it sounds silly to say about a lot of harmless lines and flowers, but it seems to your old mother that there's something wrong about that paper,--something almost wicked in it. It reminds me of that nasty music you and Jenny are so fond of playing."

Here Theophil enveloped her in a huge hug, and laughingly mocked her with playful caresses, smiling to himself all the same. For the music she had referred to was Dvorak.

CHAPTER XI

A LITTLE ABOUT JENNY

Meanwhile, as New Zion moved and hummed and whizzed, and as "The Dawn"

went on dawning week by week,--you couldn't expect the dawn oftener than once a week in Coalchester,--the love of Jenny and Theophil grew more and more perfect.

There was a long while to wait yet before Jenny was to bear what seemed to her the finest of all names, for old Mrs. Talbot, easily manageable as a rule, had a way of quietly putting her foot down on occasion that would have surprised you. Jenny was only just pa.s.sed nineteen, and was no fit wife for any man yet, least of all for a great sprawling fellow like that. Let her get a little more flesh on her bones, something more than all spirit and nerves, let her get well turned twenty, and it might be thought of, but not now.

No! it's no use coming with your nonsense, you silly big fellow! You know when the soft old mother says a thing, she means it.

So it proved. Old Mrs. Talbot on this point remained a homely form of adamant. However, the lovers were not badly off. Living in the same house, they saw almost as much of each other as if they had been married, and from the evenings she spent there, Jenny had come to regard Theophil's room and his books as hers too.

She had developed wonderfully in these months, had Jenny. She was a real little great man's wife now; and as Theophil looked at her, with her lit eager face, her whole soul so alive to help him in however humble a way, her whole life his, his, his,--such love seemed almost tragic in its very beauty and joy. It was so irremediably--love. At times he almost trembled before it. He would almost chide her with its divine completeness.

What if he were to be taken from her? Oughtn't she to keep just a little of herself for foothold? We ought all to belong to ourselves as well as to another. It was such a risk. Suppose he were to die, Jenny!

No doubt it was very wise, but Jenny was wiser. She could never belong to herself again. She was his, and his only, for ever; and if he died--if he were to be taken away ...

But he could never be taken from her any other way? No one else, nothing but death, could take him ...

"No, nothing but death--and perhaps not even death."

"You are sure, darling? O, you are quite, quite sure?"

"Sure from my soul, little child. Look in it and see."

A lover's eyes are his soul.

Yes, Theophil loved Jenny, loved her even more with her own dependence on love than he knew of. He was, the reader need scarcely be told, an almost wildly ambitious man, and a few months ago he would have said that there was nothing which was more to him than the expression of the power that was in him. But there was something that was even more to him now, and if it could be imagined that he might some day be asked to choose between his ambition and Jenny, he could honestly have answered from his soul, "Give me Jenny."

Whoever thinks this an easily natural answer to make, may know something about love, but evidently knows little about ambition. Still, life seldom sets us such silly examination questions as that, and need one say that that question was never put to Jenny's lover? He was far too proud of the woman he had made of that little measure of porcelain and that handful of stars.

CHAPTER XII

HOW THE RENAISSANCE CAME IN PERSON TO NEW ZION

The winter months had gone by; all but one of those incendiary lectures had been given, not without storm and tempest; "The Dawn" still came up each week with anger and singing, and the first year of Londonderry's ministry at New Zion neared its close. The lecture season was presently to end, on the last Friday in March, with a concert which was to include a series of recitations by a lady-reciter from London. Londonderry had written to a lecture agency for the name of a likely reciter, man or woman, and they had sent him the name of Isabel Strange.

On the occasion of the last lecture, Mr. Moggridge had not been satisfied with the colour of the platform. It wanted repainting, and I think it very likely that it was a strain of that boyishness which I hope survives in us all, and one of whose quaint fancies is an envy of house-painters, so happy all day with paint-pot and brush and great smooth boards to dab and smooth, that decided him to do the job himself.

Mr. Moggridge had this great element of refinement, that he thought nothing honest beneath him.

It was the Friday of the entertainment, about one o'clock, and though Mr. Moggridge had practically finished the work the day before, he had slipped in during his lunch-hour to give it a final touch or two. He had brought his lunch in the form of a pork-pie, and while with one hand he plunged the pie occasionally among his red whiskers, with the other he would lean forward and touch up a knot or a nail-hole that needed a little more paint. And he was proud as a boy of the simple bit of slap-dashing, and entirely absorbed in it and the pork-pie.

Presently he became aware that he was not alone. Someone had entered the schoolroom at the far end. He turned round, with the paint-brush in one hand and the pork-pie in the other, and became abashed, for a beautiful lady had entered the room and was evidently about to make an enquiry. The surrept.i.tiousness that seems to inhere in pork-pies prompted Mr. Moggridge to slip the pie into his trousers' pocket--for his coat was off, and a white ap.r.o.n had taken its place.

"Just doing a little bit of amateur painting," he explained rather awkwardly, advancing to the lady.

"So I see," said the lady, with a pleasant smile. "This, I believe, is Zion Chapel--and I suppose this is the room where I am to recite. My name is Isabel Strange, and I have come a little earlier, I daresay, than you expected; but I always like to see the room I'm to recite in--just to try my voice in and run over my pieces."

"Certainly, of course," said Mr. Moggridge; "but you have come all the way from London and so early. You will have some refreshment first, and if you'll honour Mrs. Moggridge and me--I may as well explain that I am the chief deacon," said Mr. Moggridge, dexterously slipping off his painter's ap.r.o.n and getting into his coat. So, with a wistful glance at his work of art, Mr. Moggridge carried off the beautiful London lady to Zion View.

But was Isabel Strange beautiful? It was a new sort of beauty if she was--or perhaps a very old sort. Yet beautiful was the first word that had sprung into Mr. Moggridge's mind as she had surprised him in the schoolroom. Perhaps wonderful was the exacter word, wonderful in a way that included beauty,--wonderful, and with a strange air about her that suggested exceptional refinement, exquisite sensitiveness to refined things.

"Beautiful, O dear no!" said Mrs. Moggridge, to whom feminine beauty did not appeal, as the young lady freshened herself up after her travel in Mrs. Moggridge's best bedroom. "Why! she hasn't a regular feature in her face!"

Mrs. Moggridge herself had neat little pretty features set in fat.

"Look at that long upper lip and her nose!"

Mrs. Moggridge omitted mention of eyes singularly powerful and very true and sweet, as also of a long lithe mouth that reminded you of a beautiful serpent, a serpent which the true eyes plainly said would do you no harm.

Presently, however, Mrs. Moggridge had to admit that she was very attractive. She knew she meant fascinating, but she wouldn't admit that to Mr. Moggridge, who had dropped the subject; though a mind which again had a.s.serted its dim preference for new fashions was perhaps groping after expression of some such perplexity as this: why, if a face has the same effect upon you as beauty, may it not be described as beautiful? If Mr. Moggridge really got so far even as cloudily to ponder that, it is evident that he was not far from the kingdom of beauty.

It is, of course, true enough that some faces are spoilt by flaws such as every Mrs. Moggridge can point out,--faces that begin in one style and end in another, half Greek perhaps and half Gothic; yet even such faces, if their individuality is strong enough, have their own rococo charm. For all but supremely great faces, of which perhaps the world has not seen half-a-dozen, absolute regularity, so-called correctness, of features is a calamity, and regular beauty on the ordinary human levels is only another form of mediocrity.

Wonderful English girls! face after face indistinguishable from each other as rose after rose. How sweet you are! how fragrant! what a bloom!

It is a wonderful rose-girl-farm from which you come. How pretty you look laced up one after another on your standards, and how skilfully you are guarded against any form of variation! Perhaps no women potteries in the world produce so exquisite a surface, delicate as a lily and strong as marble. Indeed you are wonderful porcelain, you fair English girls, wonderful porcelain; but where are the stars?

Mrs. Moggridge had also remarked that Miss Strange was "very easy in her manners." This was not always the case with ladies in Coalchester, and Mrs. Moggridge did not mean the remark as an unreserved compliment. She liked a certain stiffness in strangers. It was not, however, in Isabel Strange's nature to oblige her in that particular. Her way of pouring her grace into Mrs. Moggridge's great arm-chair suggested at once that she had lived there for ever so long, and to him particularly she chatted as with an old acquaintance. You could not make a stranger of her. She ate some cold fowl which presently appeared, entirely without embarra.s.sment, though two Miss Moggridges sat like dummies and watched her.