"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.
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 God, 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 pass away. Her dress,
her coiled _cendré_ hair, her soft smile, her very attitudes, 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 Space 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 space. 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.