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 passed 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.