The Romance of Zion Chapel Part 8

To meet again! O to meet again, just to look at each other again! We are philosophers, we are brave, we shall remember Jenny, but O! the rapture of just beholding each other again.

"Thank G.o.d, you are alive! you are real! O Theophil, there is the little scar on your forehead I've been longing to see."

"Yes! it is Isabel! She walks just as she did a thousand years ago. I am carrying her rugs. How well I remember her umbrella!"

"How fantastic absence is!" said Isabel, as the three friends sat once more that evening in the little study where nothing seemed to have changed, and where they seemed to have been sitting all the hours of those now quite disrespectfully forgotten months.

"Yes, but how real!" said Jenny. It was Jenny who said "how real!"

How fantastic, too, is the present! Sometimes, perhaps nearly always, it tortures us with the unreality, the unrealisability of precious moments that are flying, flying, and can never come again; and at other times it equally eludes us with a sense of their indestructibility. To-night the present had chosen to seem real. Theophil felt, as he looked at Isabel, that this wonderful nearness could never pa.s.s away. Her dress, her coiled _cendre_ hair, her soft smile, her very att.i.tudes, seemed to wear a curious expression of everlastingness. Yes, she would sit just like that, and he and Jenny would sit near her for ever and ever. No mere abstractions like Time and s.p.a.ce could fill with emptiness the place where she now sat and smiled. In some mystical way eternity had breathed upon this hour and given it immortality. It had been suddenly touched with a wand into an enchanted permanence. Theosophists tell of an astral light, where every moment of time endures in strange paintings upon s.p.a.ce. Isabel and Theophil and Jenny were sitting together in the astral light.

And yet the hours had already been flying, for, the recital was already over,--New Zion more in love with Isabel than ever. The same little supper as six months ago had been merry and come to an end, the guests had gone, the house was quiet, and this hour that seemed so real was the frail last of that day of dreams.

Yes! but an arrangement had been made which perhaps accounts for the security of that hour. Isabel's agents had planned for her a little circular tour in northern towns comparatively adjacent to Coalchester, and when a fortnight of such recitals was ended, she was to return and give still another recital at New Zion. Then there must be parting, real black parting again. Meanwhile, the fortnight that lay between the two days of meeting gained a curious sense of being really spent together.

As two walking together on a long road may separate, and one walk till almost out of sight of the other and then slowly return, but the two endure no sense of parting, feeling together all the time, so Isabel and Theophil felt about this fortnight.

But did they speak no word, look no look all these hours, of all their hearts cried out to say? Was Jenny there all the time? Nearly. Still there was a moment granted them, which, added to the two moments previously recorded, made a total perhaps of four minutes, which life so far generously allowed them to be alone together in. Yet such is love's miraculous velocity that it had said all it needed to say, given all, in those four minutes. All it had to say to-night was just two Christian names, said so solemnly, so tenderly, so honestly. Just "Isabel," just "Theophil," and a long quiet clasp of hand and eyes. It was enough. It is written.

CHAPTER XVIII

ONE DAY OUT OF ALL THE YEARS

It was not enough!

If you would safely renounce a joy, you had best enjoy something of it first. Renunciation must have something to live on. You can "take up the whole of love and utter it," and _then_ "say adieu for ever," but not before.

I have asked mercy for Jenny, though it was perhaps hardly necessary, for the world always pities Jenny. Now I would ask it for Isabel and Theophil, who are thus quietly to sacrifice the greatest thing in their lives, the one reality for which they have come into existence, for Jenny's sake. Great is their love for each other, but even greater and stranger must be their involuntary love for an invisible goodness, an ideal of ineffable pity. They are going to die that Jenny may live.

Strange, this gentle heroism of human creatures one for the other. Would it be unfair to ask that each should support the anguish of his own destiny, and that when Jenny's turn has come she should take her lightning? Hers, had she known it, was the cup of anguish here; for Theophil and Isabel had been decreed the cup of joy. But will they drink it? No, they will change the cups; perhaps the bitter cup will grow sweet near the dregs, being drunk together.

Yet this love of theirs, this perilous chance for Jenny, was none of their making. Their joy had been given to them by unseen hands. It is fairly theirs. Next time, perhaps, it will be their turn to suffer. It is Jenny's now...

But no! the good heart of humanity will defeat the cruel ruling of the G.o.ds. Let the lightning come upon them--not little Jenny.

Yet for this, Jenny, you will not grudge them their piteous reward.

Yours are all the years, Jenny. You will spare them one day out of all the years. Think, Jenny, of the hours and hours and hours you and Theophil have spent in careless happiness, and they--one almost laughs to think of it--have just so far been granted four minutes. For four minutes out of infinite time life has privileged them to be alone together.

It will be far safer too. Otherwise you know not with what fearful flame love will fill the chasms under ground, circling and seething in the fiery darkness. Theophil loves you, but some day your home will suddenly be rent from cope to base, unless his poor heart may speak, yea, babble itself, just once in Isabel's ears.

A temptation had come to Theophil. At first he put it aside. Then pa.s.sion, wiser for once than reason, told him that it was a necessity, and he knew that pa.s.sion was right. A week of the fortnight had gone, and Theophil remembered that Isabel would now be in the neighbourhood of certain famous woods where in his boyhood he had often wandered, and he remembered that she was to have the Monday quite free. That Monday they should spend together in those enchanted woods. His secular business often took him to towns thirty or forty miles away, and it was not startling for him not to return till late at night. Thus Isabel and he should steal their one day out of all the years.

So there went a note without one word of love in it to tell Isabel that love was coming by the morning train; and so on that morning Isabel stood waiting for love at that little wayside station, and presently, with a mighty rushing sound of iron and bra.s.s, love came and stood very quietly by her side, and looked into her eyes.

They took each other's hands quietly, and left the station without a word; nor did they speak for a long while, walking blissfully side by side through a village street which was to take them to the green and lonely woods. Soon the houses were pa.s.sed, and they still walked on silent, listening to the song of their nearness.

Now, as they drank each other's presence through every feasting nerve, they knew how starved they had been. As the lane narrowed and gloomed green, dipping through caverns of bright leaves, they drew closer, and smiled gently on each other; but they were not going to speak for a long while yet. Had they not come away into this loneliness that they might be silent together, that they might sit, hour after hour, and just watch each other, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation, a trance of recognition, a fascination that was almost fearful, that was so kind and yet so cruel in its very power?

The woods are very still, but there is nothing in the world so still as these two lovers, as they lie down on the green earth and gaze on each other, hour after hour. When they find a word as great as their silence, they will speak it--but they will find none except it be "Isabel," except it be "Theophil."

And great pa.s.sion has as little use for caresses as for words, and kisses, which gay sensual love gathers greedily like little golden flowers, and pays for nimbly with little, pretty words, will be almost as rare as words.

Kisses! it is not to eat bonbons that these two have come out into the woods.

Kisses! what kiss of the blind lips could match the kiss of those rapt tragic eyes!

Kisses are but the diminutives of the great word "love;" they are but the small change of pa.s.sion, meteorites, star-dust of the great and terrible planet.

Their souls are swung high above time and s.p.a.ce in one never-ending kiss,--the kiss of that predestined irrefragable union, of which meetings and partings and kisses and caresses and words, and every other fragmentary mode of expression, are but trivial accidents, to which distance is still nearness, and nearness is still distance.

Their love is a property of eternal elements. It is fated as the union of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination.

They are Isabel and Theophil,--that is their love; they are in the world together,--that is their marriage.

But pa.s.sion will not be all day a tragedian. He has many moods. He is a great wit,--how bright, how bright, he makes the brain!--a merry comrade, a little, tender, silly child; and these two sad ones laughed together, too, in the still woods,--for was not the most exquisite humourist in the world their companion, love, who is all things by turns, and all things wise?

And they feasted together, wine and great grapes, spread out on the earth's green table; and they called each other silly, beautiful names, and they feigned sad little glad stories--and called the wood their home: this was their breakfast-oak, and that glade should be their great hall, and high, high up in yonder beech, where the squirrel was sitting, should be their secret little bed-chamber, hung in blue and green, with a ceiling of stars. They should climb it each night on a ladder of moonlight, and slide down from it each morning on the first strong rays of the sun. And sometimes if it frightened them with being too near heaven, they would seek out a dell of fine moss and creep close together into the arms of the kind earth-mother, and then sleep while the stars kept watch.

O, yes, it would be a wonderful life together.

Then suddenly the child's play would cease, as the birds stop singing with the coming of the stars, and silence would sweep over them again, and a great kiss would leap out of the silence, like a flame that lights up heaven from north to south, and they would hang together, lost in an anguish of desire.

The setting sun was turning the wood into halls of strange light, and spreading golden couches here and there in its deep recesses.

"Theophil..." sighed Isabel.

"Wife..." sighed Theophil--(ah! Jenny!) and then a voice that seemed to be neither's, and yet seemed to be the voice of both,--a voice like a dove smothered in sweetness between their b.r.e.a.s.t.s,--said, "Let us go deeper into the wood."

Later, when the stars had come, two white faces came glimmering from the innermost chancel of the wood's green darkness. They pa.s.sed close together, still as phantoms among the trees, and when they came out on to the lane they stood still.

"Theophil," said one voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send for you, will you promise me to come?"

"Isabel," said another voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send for you, will you promise _me_ to come?"

And each voice vowed to the other, and said, "I would come, and I would go with you."

And all these words had once been Jenny's, but they had been Isabel's first.

CHAPTER XIX

PREPARATIONS FOR A FAST AND OTHER SADNESS

As the sharing of a cruel or unworthy secret must be the most terrible of all human relationships, the sharing of a beautiful secret is the most blest. Thus, for the week following this day of days, Theophil and Isabel went about their daily lives with all heaven in their hearts, and, divided though they were, possessed by a mystical cert.i.tude of inner union which they felt no extension of s.p.a.ce or endurance of time could destroy.