JENNY'S POSTE RESTANTE
After Jenny's death two letters had come for her from Isabel, who had no
knowledge of what had been happening to her friends of New Zion.
There is something peculiarly sad about the letters that for a little
time go on coming for the dead. Perhaps nothing more simply brings home
the fact that they are no longer with us. Even little bills, circulars
offering new spring goods at sale prices, come charged with pathos, and
Theophil smiled at his own folly as he kept them all. Sad little _poste
restante_! Will the letters ever be called for?
Theophil did not open the letters, but as days went by and no more came,
he sometimes found himself taking them from their drawer and looking at
them. Isabel's handwriting, though his soul would not confess it to
himself, still held the power of a rune over his heart.
Had no traitor thought ever whispered deep down in the darkness of his
consciousness that the way was now open to Isabel? Such thoughts indeed
had come to him, but unwelcomed, involuntarily, as those foul thoughts
which will sometimes torture the pure, or those base thoughts which may
appal the noble.
The mind, like the body, has its foul humours, which can only be
accepted with patience as a part of the inscrutable mechanism of human
organisms. In moments of anger this filth and poison of the mind
sometimes comes to the surface to wrong us--for it is not us, it is in
truth just all that we are not.
Thus at times in Theophil's mind, that was one prayer of faithful love
for Jenny, the thought of Isabel would steal, like--so his stern
faithfulness pictured it--a fair devil in a church. Yet, if he opened
one of those letters he knew there would ascend from it a cloud of
subtle incense, which would ... well, which he must never again breathe.
So he would replace them in their drawer, and again, some other day,
take them out once more.
Perhaps, after all, it might be his duty, the mere duty of a friend, to
open them. What if Isabel should be ill, should be needing him ...
should be dying!
But still the fanaticism of his sorrow conquered, and still week after
week they remained unread.
Meanwhile, Isabel was living her life as she had lived it before she had
heard of New Zion, with the difference of an internal sense of
completion which her love had brought. Need one say that she had her
hours of loneliness and longing, when she would have exchanged a
thousand years of love in heaven for a touch of Theophil's hand upon
earth; but these she knew how to conquer, and for most days that union
of two separated hearts remained to her as real as when it had been
vowed in those silent woods.
At the very moment when Jenny was dying, and Theophil had thrust Isabel
away into the furthest, highest, starlight of memory, she was thinking
how real their union was, how near he seemed!