The Romance of Zion Chapel Part 7

The idea of "managing" Theophil had something repulsive in it for Jenny; there was an element of deceit, of cunning, implied which didn't go with her ideas of true love and the life beautiful of which she was dreaming.

She didn't believe that men and women who loved were really different from each other, and perhaps she was right.

About this time, too, Mrs. Talbot began to produce from mysterious treasure-caves, entered apparently from an old press in her bedroom, all kinds of wonderful things which would be useful to Jenny some day in her house: terrible little ornaments,--very sacred, though,--sad quaintnesses of the spirit of beauty pathetically fumbling about in country brains; wool mats worked in the primary colours; and such wool wonders as a wool basket of flowers, in which real wool flowers grew out of a wool basket which you held by an over-arching wool handle, the whole worked with undeniable but how forlorn ingenuity,--a prehistoric relic of Mrs. Talbot's legendary school-days: survivals from a period which is best summed up in the one wonderful word "antimaca.s.sar," a period when for some unrecorded reason men and women had to protect their furniture against their oleaginous selves, and beautiful locks were guarded from lover's fingers by coats of triple oil.

But these were things worth having, too,--bits of old lace and prim embroidery, that bore the stamp of a refinement that is never old-fashioned; and when Mrs. Talbot descended from the beautiful she could show you real treasures.

I don't think there was any word in the language, not even Bible words, which Mrs. Talbot p.r.o.nounced with such an accent of solemnity as the word "linen." The words "China" and "cut gla.s.s," and perhaps "silver,"

ran it close, but "linen" was undoubtedly the word in which all Mrs.

Talbot's sense of the seriousness of living, her sense of household distinction, her deep sense of the importance of prosperity, and her stern love of cleanliness found most impressive utterance.

Mrs. Talbot could never have smiled as she said "linen."

And the linen she had been storing for Jenny might indeed have been the very stuff of which lilies are made, lilies smelling of lavender.

Such pairs of sheets! A queen might even fear to await her lord lying amid such linen; for white indeed must be the body that dares rivalry with Mrs. Talbot's sheets,--sheets which might indeed be said to settle that old question of the snows of yester-year.

_Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_?

Surely they have been settling, flake on flake, year after year, in Mrs.

Talbot's linen-press, till at last there is quite a snowdrift of fair white linen for Jenny and Theophil to lie in.

Yes! another six months and Christmas will be here; and, after Christmas is turned, the weeks till February the 12th--the second anniversary of Theophil's coming to New Zion--will fly by in no time.

Meanwhile Mrs. Talbot and Jenny--with occasional contributions from Theophil--began to busy themselves with Jenny's bottom drawer.

Translated into the language of those more magnificent circles in which this simple-hearted romance has no desire to move, a "bottom drawer"

might be described as a trousseau, though such translation would be only partially correct. A bottom drawer is a good deal more than a trousseau.

It is the corner of a girl's wardrobe, usually its bottom drawer, where the home that is to be begins to take shape in deposits of various kissed objects, minor articles of apparel, of ornament or use,--handkerchiefs such as we have already seen Jenny marking, in defiance of the old prophecy that the bride who dares even to write her married name before her marriage will never know a wedding day; quaint candlesticks that had to be picked up in some old curiosity shop as come upon or be missed altogether; pretty shoes of a pattern you weren't likely to meet with again; occasionally, perhaps, even an antic.i.p.atory wedding present, that some friend who would be far away in Australia when the day came had already contributed; a pretty tea-service Theophil had suddenly taken a fancy to buy for Jenny one day,--"any straw will help a nest;" a sweet and rather naughty picture that must never be hung anywhere but in their little sacred bedroom,--"O love, our little room!"

How often did Jenny bend lovingly over that drawer, which by now had spread itself over a whole chest of drawers,--for home was growing, growing,--only a few more months and it would have grown so big and real that nothing but a little house would hold it. And Theophil was brought sometimes to peep in too,--"O love, think of it--our little home."

CHAPTER XVI

THEOPHIL ALL THIS TIME

Have I seemed to shirk the subject of Theophil's feelings all this time?

Well, I confess I have rather shrunk from writing down in so many words that he was in love with Isabel,--obvious as the fact has been,--just as he himself shrank from admitting the same truth even to his own soul.

When he had sat up in his study that night of the recital, he had looked the whole sad splendid truth in its wonderful face, had loved it wildly for an hour, and then shut his eyes to it for ever.

He knew that Isabel was the woman G.o.d had made for him, sweet, dear Jenny the woman he had made for himself, and he bowed before the work of the greater artist.

Never voice nor look nor touch of woman had affected Theophil before as the least tone or glance or movement of Isabel stirred him to the centre of his being. To meet her eyes was to release a music that went shuddering through the whole world; her lightest word was filled with echoes of infinite things. Not a lover only, but anyone with instincts for such perceptions, looking at Isabel, would have said: There is a woman who is needed to make some man a great poet, a great artist, some kind of great man! She belongs to the history-making women. Hundreds of women will attract men by the hundred where she will attract comparatively few, but that few will be the pick of men; and some day, when the other women have gone the way of all sweet roses, she will still remain (if she has found an artist to understand her face) the frontispiece of some distinguished biography, or hang in a gallery of the period among the few faces that were indestructibly personal; not the faces that have lived, but the faces that still go on living, the faces that are influences still, the unique, daemonic faces.

Isabel was indeed a muse that waited for her poet. The mere idea of such a woman, cherished across dividing seas and separating years, will help a man be great. To grow great near or far is the one way to be hers, and to pile up great work for her sake is perhaps the best way to love her.

She could never be his wife, but she might still be his muse, resolved Theophil, feigning in that reflection for the moment a more human comfort than, alas! there really was.

But was there to be no loss to Jenny in this?

"True love in this differs from gold or clay, That to divide is not to take away."

It is the convenient old plea of the poets, and yet it is sometimes true. It was true here. There is, I know, a sort of primitive man or woman--I believe they will some day be exhibited in menageries--who cannot be on with a new love without being ungratefully off with the old. All depends of what the two loves are made. If it is bodily fire and no more, of course the new love will put out the old as the great sun puts out a little smouldering fire; and the majority of so-called love-stories are merely disastrous conflagrations of that sort. In such cases the new love is no sooner found than the old becomes grievous, a burden; by a malignant witchcraft the old charms have grown veritably repellent, and "all the heaven that was" irretrievably disenchanted.

Which is the illusion, one wonders,--the original enchantment or the final disenchantment?

When, however, love can give a better account of its preferences than this, and point out, say in Jenny, many good reasons why she was at first and must for ever remain love-worthy, whatever rival reasons for love another woman may bring; when too there is added to those reasons for loving Jenny the dear habit of loving her, the grat.i.tude--love must forgive the word--which has acc.u.mulated interest upon the original love, the beauties that have been gained by becoming familiarities, and the familiarities that have become beauties by very use,--well, really, is it such a hardship, after all, for a man to be expected to keep true to his Jenny?

Oh! but pa.s.sion doesn't reason like this. Indeed, O pa.s.sionate reader!

Is pa.s.sion, then, merely a wild beast, a savage, a blind fire? Must it forfeit its fine name if it remembers mercy or owns duty? Is it any less pa.s.sion because it refuses sometimes to glut itself, and dares to go hungry all its days instead; any less pa.s.sion because it chooses to burn up its own heart in an agony of its own consuming fire?

Mere violence is not a strength but a weakness in pa.s.sion, and sometimes there is more pa.s.sion in patience than in anything else in the world. A pa.s.sion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should be taken to the madhouse.

I confess that there is nothing in the world more amazing to me than the easy brutality with which one hears of some men doing what is called "breaking off their engagements." Only a new face has to show itself, and the old face at once disappears with a blow and a wail.

Murder, of course, is one way out of many difficult situations, and the worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences. It is true that all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all that made her woman stabbed to the quick of life.

Yet no one who knows anything of women can have failed to remark that women themselves are even more brutal in this matter. Nothing could exceed the executioner-like prompt.i.tude with which a woman will despatch a man for whom she has ceased to care. But in her case there is to be urged that, though fundamentally love is of equal importance to man and woman, it does not so often mean the absolute saving or wrecking of a man's life as it does a woman's. It is not a disgrace to a man to be jilted; it is to a woman. For a woman to be jilted is for her to have failed,--as a woman; and for a woman to have failed as a woman is for her to value no other success.

All this to maintain, in spite of the reader, that Londonderry is no milksop because he is not going to jilt--that is, murder--poor little Jenny, throw up New Zion, and seek his new love on the wild winds. But the agony of it none the less! O Jenny! Jenny! sweet and true and good and dear as ever,--if only you would just take a sudden fancy for someone else!

Meanwhile the months were going by, and the day drawing nearer when, for a brief moment of fire, the orbits of those two separated lives were to touch once more.

What of Isabel during these months? The woman whom G.o.d had created for Theophilus Londonderry did not forget her promise to write to the woman whom Theophilus Londonderry had created in his own image. Wonderful letters, of course! Why don't women publish volumes of their letters, as men collect their scattered essays? There is no writing in the world more immediately, conqueringly personal than a really clever woman's letters; and they are not always compromising.

Isabel's letters were the perfection of self-expression. Her handwriting swept across the page just as she would walk down a street, at once eager and yet stately and subtle-rhythmed; the shape of some of the words reminded you of her hats,--hats everyone thought she paid guineas for, but which she made for herself at a cost perhaps of five shillings: hats which were Paris with a touch of fairyland, somewhere an un.o.btrusive feather of the fantastic, somewhere a personal magic in the inimitable twist or lie of a bow--; her face looked out at you from a _g_ or an _x_, a gesture flashed back to you in a sudden distinguished stroke of the pen, and her voice was somewhere, everywhere, among the words, like a violin.

Without any apparent literary device she contrived to make you, while you read her letters, do what she was doing, see what she was seeing, and form, as though acted on by some magic property in the words, pictures of all she told you.

One piece of news you would not expect her to have told. I have said that women are both executioners of the tiresome. In this Isabel, I fear, was no exception to her s.e.x. Like most independent girls in London, she had a little theatre-guard of devoted men friends, who took it in turn to companion her to plays or picture-galleries; and these, with admirable tact, she contrived to keep in, to them, the unsatisfactory relation of brothers. One of these, however, had of late been growing dangerously unfraternal. His presents had been growing expensive. Cigarettes and chocolates, and pretty editions, like gloves, and boxes of flowers, are every pretty woman's lawful spoils; but costlier gifts are to be looked on with suspicion. Besides, the doomed man's letters had been growing warmer. Indeed, Isabel remembered with something like a shudder, so soon as she was back in her little room, with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement, that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been together. The reminiscence decided her. Theophil could never be hers; but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place. So at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-gla.s.ses, a lovely fan it was hard, Isabel, to part with,--and there is an end of that.

"Not after Theophil!" she sighed, as she took up her great Persian cat, and, like it, sat gazing into the fire that flickered dreamily among her fantastic possessions,--a mystery gazing idly into a mystery.

CHAPTER XVII

"O THAT 'T WERE POSSIBLE ..."

Well, the months have at last gone by,--dark solid bodies of absence, not a day mercifully lost count of by the old calendar-maker, not an hour of the long sentence remitted for a brave patience in the waiting.

They are reckoning by weeks at last, and now, excitedly, by days, breathlessly now by little fast-dispersing hours.

The blackness that filled the world was a month ago streaked with gray; three weeks ago there was a line of faint colour in the east; a fortnight, and there are scarlet plumes in the far heaven, and a faint twitter of song; a week, and the whole sky is a commotion of glory and birds.