IN WHICH JENNY IS MYSTERIOUSLY HONOURED
Still a moment did at last come when the sobs subsided, and Jenny dried
her tears. She was going to try, try to be happy again, try to forget
it; and she tried so well that in a few days her face had grown even
bright again,--bright as silver. It could never again be bright as gold.
And Theophil's love was like a sun pouring down upon her day by day.
Yes, he loved her. She could not doubt that, though there were times
when his true words and caresses suddenly seemed to wear a torturing
falsity, as she thought of Isabel.
But such feelings she put from her bravely. Jealous of Isabel in the
common way she had not been. She herself loved her too well, and soon
she was able to talk of her again to Theophil. They had agreed that
Isabel should not know what Jenny had seen that night of the recital.
For Jenny could not bear to think of the letters it would mean. "Let
that be our secret, dear," she said to Theophil; and thus, when Isabel
wrote, she wrote back in her usual way. Theophil and Isabel never wrote
to each other. It was no part of their love to deceive Jenny in letters.
Their love was vowed to silence and absence, and in Theophil's life it
must be more and more of a starlit background.
So the weeks went by, and the marriage of Theophil and Jenny was now
finally fixed for the 12th of February. On second thoughts, as their
love grew serene once more, they had decided not to anticipate that
date, for old Mrs. Talbot's sake; and meanwhile Jenny was admonished by
that old mother to make haste and get that flesh on her bones.
The admonition was not without cause, for it presently became
noticeable that Jenny was not merely negatively disobeying her old
mother in this. Not only was she not growing fatter, but, indeed, she
was, for one reason or another, slowly and almost imperceptibly growing
thinner. It was not those at home who noticed this first, but outside
friends, who, suddenly meeting her, would remark that she wasn't looking
half the girl she used to be.
She had already begun to remark it herself, as with her bare arms she
would coil up her hair, standing before her mirror; and she thought
nothing of it till one day, as she stood there, she noticed a curious
expression flash into her face and go again almost before she could mark
it. Her face, which had always been round and plump, seemed suddenly to
gaze back at her, very narrow and pinched and white, strangely sunken,
too, and rigid. It was all a mere flash and gone again, and her real
face was presently back once more. But the look filled her with solemn
thoughts, in which she was surprised to find a certain comfort, as of a
sad wish fulfilling itself.
She spoke to no one of that look, but it must have been the same look
that Theophil saw, a few nights after, as she sat listening to him
reading in her usual chair. Suddenly, as he looked up at her, he threw
down the book, and with concern, almost terror, in his voice, exclaimed,
"Good God, Jenny! are you ill, dear? What is that terrible white look in
your face?"
He sprang across and took her hands. The look had gone again before he
had finished speaking, but it was a look he was never to forget.
One day Jenny put out her arm, and asked him to feel how thin it was
growing.
"It _is_ thin, dear; but you mustn't be anxious. Perhaps you're a trifle
run down. You must see the doctor."
Mrs. Talbot did not believe in doctors, and suggested nourishing soups
and port wine as a substitute. These, however, made those dear arms no
fatter, they put none of that promised flesh on Jenny's bones. (Why did
Theophil rather creep one day as Mrs. Talbot made use of that
expression?)
And Jenny was growing tired too. She was not so ready on her feet as she
used to be. Small exertions exhausted her. Her breath was not so
available for running up and down stairs as it had been.
Then Theophil would have a doctor, who sounded Jenny, and looked a
little grave, but finally, reassured, asked her if she had had a
shock,--Jenny smiled rather knowingly, but denied it,--declared her a
little run down and in need of bracing and nourishment, prescribed
phosphites and steel.
Then Jenny got very wet one day on her way from school, and she began to
cough. She had to stay at home, and bed was perhaps the best place for
her. So Jenny went to bed, and looked very pretty there, and was quite
merry of an evening when Theophil, bringing her flowers,--he was already
bringing her flowers,--would draw up the arm-chair by her side, and read
to her. Those were very sweet hours, perhaps the sweetest their love had
ever known, so cosy and homelike, and yet without fear.
But one evening, when Jenny had been coughing, there was blood on the
bosom of her nightdress, and as Theophil saw it, his heart stood still
with terror. Jenny grew very white, too, as she saw it, though the awful
thought which was behind the still look they gave each other was not
quite new to her. Sometimes she might have been heard softly saying over
to herself,--
"I am lost, I am changed, I must go farther, where
The change shall take me worse, and no one dare
Look in my face and see."
Yet although Death's voice calling us from afar may seem all sweetness,
his voice coming nearer has a note of dread in it that appals the most
death-desirous heart. And in that silence those poor lovers both heard
him singing, it seemed not many streets away.
"I must be very ill, dear," said Jenny. "O my love, O my love...!"
Theophil strove with himself to say words with a real ring of the future
in them, when this cloud should have passed away; and for his sake Jenny
pretended to believe them. Yes, this very week he would take her away to
bright skies and healing air,--though Jenny felt a little tired at the
thought of rising any more from the bed to which she was growing
curiously accustomed.
Then there came a new doctor to see Jenny. He was a very clever
specialist from a distant town; but for him the business of death had
not yet obscured its tragedy,--though words like "tragedy" were not
often on his tongue. Consumption was a strong enough word for him.
His heart went out to that little household; and when he saw Jenny, it
ached for that young man downstairs. It was more than a professional
contempt for the "general practitioner" that made him silently curse
what he called the "death-doctor," as he looked at Jenny, "Jack of all
diseases, and master of none."
"Two months ago, a month," he thought, as he listened and listened for a
sound of hope that might come to his ear through Jenny's wasted
side,--"even a month, and I could have saved her." And yet as he talked
to her he was not so sure, after all. He missed something in her voice.
It was the will to live.
"Have you had a shock at any time?" he said.
Jenny was taken by surprise for a moment,--the other doctor had asked
her that, too,--and she did not deny it so convincingly as she tried to.
"O, that's all right," said the doctor aloud to Jenny and her mother,
who stood by, though inwardly he said, "I see. That's the reason;" and
again he said, "I'm afraid you mustn't get up just yet. That chest of
yours has to be taken care of, but you needn't be anxious. In a month or
six weeks you'll be all right again."
"Only a month or six weeks," said Jenny, with a sinking voice. She
meant--was that all that was left to her of life and love?
Downstairs Theophil stood waiting with a beating heart. He sprang to the
door and drew the doctor into his room. The doctor laid a kind hand upon
his arm, and there was a look in his face that made Theophil's heart die
within him.
"You mean she is going to die?" he said with fearful calmness. "_You
mean that?_"
"My poor fellow, God knows what I would give to deny it."
"She--is--going--to--die--_to die!_ It is impossible! Not Jenny!" and
between that exclamation and his first stunned cry it seemed as though
bells had been tolling a thousand years. It seemed as though he had been
sitting there as in a cave since the beginning of time, saying over and
over to himself, "Jenny is going to die."
There was a decanter on the sideboard. The doctor poured some spirit
into a glass. "Drink this," he said. Theophil drank it raw, as though it
had been water; and presently a certain illusive hope began to stir like
an opening rose in his brain, and when the doctor had gone he turned to
that decanter again. Perhaps if he drank enough he would find that Jenny
was not to die, after all. At all events, the spirit gave him nerve,
which else he could not have found, to go and sit by Jenny once more. It
helped him even to be gay, so that Jenny said to herself, "The doctor
has not told him that I am going to die."
"The doctor said I shall be better in a month or six weeks," she said
aloud, and tried to look as though she were happy.
"Didn't I say so, dearie?" said old Mrs. Talbot, whom, curiously, love
made blind instead of prophet-sighted.
"Yes; and then we'll go together to those blue skies and that bright
air," said Theophil.
"Yes, dear," said Jenny, closing her eyes wearily.
Presently she opened them again, and said, "Won't you read something to
me, Theophil?"
"What shall I read, dear?"
"Something amusing, love. 'Alice in the Looking-Glass,' eh? It's such a
long time since we read that. Don't you remember how once long ago we
could never get the Walrus and the Carpenter out of our heads?"
So Theophil read the hallowed nonsense once again, struck with the
fantastic incongruity of the moment. Even the dying have to go on
living, and must be treated like living folks,--for a little while
longer; and, though they are slipping away, slipping away, under your
very eyes, there are merciful hours when you forget that they are dying.
You read to them, talk to them, gossip about neighbours,--they are going
to die, and yet they are quite interested in Mrs. Smith's new baby,--you
laugh together over little jokes in the newspapers, and then suddenly
the bell of your thoughts goes tolling: "They are going to die--have you
forgotten they are going to die?--Think! there is so much to say before
they go--O, think of it all--miss nothing, watch their faces every
moment of the day--for soon you shall torture yourself in vain to
remember just that curve of the mouth, that droop of the chin. Ask them
everything now--tell them all--delay not--take farewell of that voice,
that laugh, those living eyes--for they--are going to die."
Death was kind as long as he might be to Jenny's face, so that for some
days old Mrs. Talbot still failed to see his shadowy mark there; but at
last she knew what Jenny and Theophil had both striven to hide from her
and from each other.
"My poor little girl, my poor boy!" she said over and over to herself
from that time, but she did not cry or break down.
It was a pathetic sign of what was coming, that she now allowed Theophil
sometimes to be Jenny's nurse through the night hours. There was to be
no bridal bed for these lovers, but thus the tender quiet hours of the
night were theirs even in so sad a fashion.
One night, in the haunted hushed middle of it, the old mother had softly
pushed open the door to ask if all went well, and in a whisper Theophil
had assured her. A night-light gave an uncanny shadow-breeding light in
the room. Jenny was sleeping peacefully, her tired ivory face, with her
dark elf-locks falling about it, framed on the pillow. Theophil raised
himself softly in his chair and looked at her. She would sleep some
while yet. Then from sheer weariness--grief's best friend--he too fell
into a light sleep. From this he was awakened with a start. Jenny was
sitting up and bending over him. With her dark hair hanging about her
face, and in that light, there was something weird and unearthly about
her, as though she were already dead and had risen in her shroud.
Something of a shiver went through him, as she put her thin arms round
his neck and clutched him in a sudden agony of longing. All the strength
of her poor little body seemed to pass into that kiss, so eager, so
convulsive. "Jenny dear, it will make you so ill; lie down, little
girl"--and Jenny fell back on her pillow exhausted and coughing, and
with eyes unearthly bright.
"Theophil," she said suddenly, in that startling way sick people have,
"you know that I am going to die!"
He could not answer, his voice would have choked in sobs. He leaned his
head close to Jenny and pressed her hand, and in spite of himself two
great tears fell upon Jenny's cheek.
But Jenny was curiously calm. There was almost a note of scolding in her
voice, as she said, "It's no use crying, Theophil--it's got to
be borne."
She was already growing strangely wise, and a little removed from earth.
The first fears of her dark journey were passing, as she was more and
more sinking among the shadows. In moments there seemed to be something
almost trivial in earthly grief. But there was still one earthly joy,
one earthly pride, of which her soul began to conceive the desire. It
had come with the thought of her grave that one day took her, less with
fear, than of a new home to which she would presently be going. In her
fancy she had seen her name: "_Jenny Talbot, the beloved daughter of
John and Jane Talbot, aged twenty-one years_" and it had struck her
that the name was wrong.
Talbot? that was not her name. This was not the legend of her days. The
world would be all wrong about her if it only read that in after days.
No, her tomb could only bear one inscription--and what sweetness amid
all the bitterness of death there was to say it over and over again to
herself: "_Jenny Londonderry, the beloved wife of Theophilus
Londonderry, aged twenty-one years_."
Only twenty-one years--she thought of those who would perhaps some day
stand and read those words and think "What a sad little life!"--and yet
all that mattered of life had been lived in those short years, aye, in
two of them, and the violet breath of young love would come up to those
who read from her young grave, as it would never breathe from the earth
of long-wed, late-dying lovers.
Perhaps it was a beautiful chance for love to end like theirs; their
love had never grown old, so it would remain forever young, a spring
sign, a star in the front of love's year for ever.
Jenny spoke her wish to Theophil in the quiet of that night. The wish
had been in his heart too, and the wish was presently fulfilled. Brides
have seldom been happier than Jenny as she looked on the wife's ring
that hung loose on her thin finger, and brides have often been sadder.
Death was coming very near now, so near that Jenny began to forget that
she was going to die. She forgot too that she was married to Theophil,
and would sometimes babble her heart-breaking fancies of the little home
that was so near now, till sometimes Theophil had to hurry away with his
unbearable grief to some other room.
And Jenny's once rosy apple of a face made one's heart ache to look on
now. It made one frightened, too: it was so dark and witchlike, so
uncanny, almost wicked, so thin and full of inky shadows. She would sit
up in her bed a wizened little goblin, and laugh a queer, dry, knowing
laugh to herself,--a laugh like the scraping of reeds in a solitary
place. A strange black weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows,
like the "unwilling sleep" of a strong narcotic. She would begin a
sentence and let it wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost
humorously to her straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead
bird lying in the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did
not know, was not to know. How was one to talk to her--talk of being
well again, and books and country walks, when she had so plainly done
with all these things? How bear it, when she, with a half-sad,
half-amused smile, showed her thin wrists? How say that they would soon
be strong and round again? Ugh! she was already beginning to be
different from us, already putting off our body-sweet mortality, and
putting on the fearful garments of death, changing from ruddy familiar
humanity into a being of another element,--an element we dread as the
fish dreads the air. Soon we should not be able to talk to her. Soon she
would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth. She was no longer
Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the flesh crept. She
was going to die.
It was a bitterly cold night toward the end of January when Jenny died.
She had been curiously alert and restless all the afternoon. Once when
Theophil and she had been alone, she beckoned him with a grave,
significant gesture to her side. She was lying down, and she made as if
she would sit up. Humouring her, Theophil raised her and packed up the
pillows at her back. Then, with indescribable solemnity, she took his
face in her hands and kissed him. "Do you love me, Theophil?" she said.
"Will you ever forget me?"
"I will love you for ever. I will never forget you."
He took her gently in his arms, and with terrible tenderness she held
him close to her for a moment, and then sank back with a sigh. For a
moment he thought she was dead; but presently she revived, though that
was the last flicker of Jenny's conscious life.
Towards evening she began to take strange fancies, which had to be
humoured. She complained of intruding faces in the room, she called with
dreadful peevishness to unseen people who would not leave her bedside,
and even sat at its foot. Then she forgot them, and imagined she was
picking daisies on the counterpane. Then she begged Theophil to go
downstairs and see Isabel. It was a shame to keep her waiting all that
time by herself in the study. And when Theophil tried to persuade her
that Isabel was not there, she shook her head and said: "You must not
mind me, Theophil, dear. I'm not unhappy about her now. I'm not a silly
little girl any more. I'm a woman now. 'Look in my face and see.'"
Then towards midnight a sudden accession of strength came to her, and
she said she would get up. They tried to dissuade her; she grew angry,
and struggled so hard to rise, that it seemed best to humour her once
more. So, wrapt round with blankets, Theophil lifted her from the bed
into a great chair by the fire. Then she asked to be taken to look into
her bottom drawer. So they lifted her across to it, and opened it. She
dabbled with her hands aimlessly among its piteous treasures, laughing
low to herself.
Suddenly a fit of coughing took her, and a great choking was in her
throat. She was seen to be battling for her breath. For an instant she
drew herself up, and lifted her hand as though she would wave farewell,
smiled a faint little smile at Theophil, making, too, as if she would
speak. Then she fell back, her whole body relaxed, she had ceased
coughing, and a wonderful sweetness was stealing over her face. She had
gone all alone into the darkness, and Theophil was alone in the world.