THE TRYST LETHEAN

Jenny had gone into the darkness, and she had gone alone. Theophil had not gone with her.

That he had remained behind meant certainly no selfish clinging to life, and indeed there was a sense, as was presently to appear, in which very really he had kept young love's old promise and died with Jenny. That he had not literally fulfilled it was due to those physical conditions of dying of which in the hour of that promise young love is happily ignorant; for the promise is usually made in moments of keenly conscious physical life. Dying together is then figured, perhaps, as climbing hand in hand the radiant topmost peak of life, with a last splendid leap together into some immortal morning; and such a marriage in death, a last union of two lives in some fiery consummation of dying, has been the lot of some lovers supremely blest.

Some indeed there are whose last earthly moment is a vivid reassertion of the glory and loveliness of life. They drink the great cup to its last golden drain, and by their death-beds we seem to be standing at the laughing founts of being. They are radiant, victorious, even witty, to the last, when at one swoop of blackness they are extinguished like a light plunged into a stream.

But for others the cold mists that hang low by Lethe's banks have already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first step into the dark water. To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but with a sad unrecognising meeting. To lie together in oblivion, with sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless hands,--that was not love's meaning.

And not only are the dying thus drugged out of knowledge before they die, but those who stand near them grow drowsed, too, by the fumes of the poppies of death. The dying have forgotten; the living are numb and foolish and in a dream. All they love on earth is passing away beneath their very eyes, and they cannot understand,--cannot realise that this, this is death.

Except in moments of piercing agony, days and weeks afterwards, moments that were similarly soothed away again by that mysterious narcotic property which pain at its highest brings with it (pain at its highest being its own anaesthetic), Theophil never realised that Jenny had died, and least of all at the moment when she was dying. Long after he remembered how he had said to himself: "There is Jenny dying, dying. A few more seconds and she will be beyond the sound of your voice for ever. Call to her; she can still, perhaps, hear you. O my Jenny, my Jenny! Louder, louder,--hold her tighter, tighter,--she is slipping away. O God, she is slipping away. No love can hold her back. My Jenny, my Jenny!"

And all the time he had been curiously calm, almost unfeeling,--as one standing stupefied in the presence of fate. The air seemed full of boding sounds, echoes of low thunder, as from a distant world in the throes of portentous change; and he told himself mechanically that he should know the meaning of those sounds some day. He should wake up soon from this unnatural torpor of pain to an empty house of life, through the cold halls of which he would seek in vain for Jenny for evermore.

Meanwhile, he suddenly found himself standing with his back to the fire in the lighted study, talking to Mr. Moggridge, who, late as was the hour, had called for news, and had stayed on from a perception that the young minister had best have some one to talk to as far into the morning as he would go on talking. They were talking in a business-like way of Zion; and Theophil was smoking cigarette after cigarette. He was terribly clear-headed and bright-witted, and Mr. Moggridge looked at him sometimes with a sort of fear.

It was about three in the morning when the door was softly opened by Mrs. Talbot.

"Will you come now, and see our little girl?" she said, with a voice that could say no more.

Theophil followed her, and, still in a dream, he stood in Jenny's room, grown strangely solemn and sweet since he was last there,--was it a thousand years ago? And there was Jenny lying asleep with a wonderful smile on her face. She had a little gold chain round her neck and a white crysanthemum in the bosom of her night-gown, and you thought of some princess lying in enchanted sleep in an Arabian night. It seemed so light a sleep and yet somehow so eternal. You stept softly, you spoke low, lest you should awaken her--not carelessly shall one disturb that imperious slumber.

Yes, the distinction of death sat like an invisible crown upon Jenny's brow. She was no longer little Jenny, but a mysterious princess upon whose sleep it was permitted thus to gaze. The pain which had filled these weeks with bitter human anguish had been the process of some mysterious ennoblement. She had been found "worthy to die." In the peerage of God's creatures, she had now outsoared those whom she loved. The nature of it was a mystery, but no one could look on her face and doubt that a great honour had come to little Jenny.

But, O Jenny, may it be your gain indeed, for the loss to us is greater than we can bear--greater than we can bear. Not Theophil only--not young love, that, for all his smitten heart, has somewhere hidden away the potencies of his unspent life, and will still have his dream, though sorrow itself should become that dream--but this poor old mother, all the force of her days spent, the sap of her spirit dried up. Hers is the terrible sorrow of age, with not a hope left betwixt her and death.

Pity her, Jenny--speak one word to her. Hearken to her sobs as she kneels by your side, and can you not hear the hard crying of his heart that knows no tears?

Are you become as the gods, Jenny, that you still smile on at the sound of mortal tears? Will you not stretch out one of those folded hands to each and lead them away with you? They are praying to follow you, only to be with you, wherever you are.

And it did seem as though in some strange way the soul of the mother had still some sure communication with the soul of her dead child. Motherhood had given her a nearness in the hour which no love of a lover could gain. She alone spoke to the dead girl as though she were still really alive, as one speaking to the deaf whom only one voice can reach.

But Theophil was conscious in his wildest, most heartbroken, words that Jenny could not hear them. He talked to her as though she were a picture of herself, and as one would implore a picture to answer us, he symbolised the cry of his soul in cries that he knew were vain.

Yet though Jenny were sculpture now, Theophil could not forget that this icy marble had once been the flesh he had loved. O God! that little tender body, whose every part was sweetly joined together like the words of a song, it was marble now.

"Ah! Jenny, are you smiling to think of what you and I know, you and I, and no one else in the world? Jenny, we shall never forget, never forget, shall we? And you will not breathe our secrets even in heaven. Do you really hear me, after all, but are forbidden to say? Are you glad somewhere to see how I love you, and are you at this moment looking into my face wildly for a sign, as I into yours? Is it I who seem dead, Jenny? and are you beating wildly at the gates of life to win back to me, as I am beating at the gates of death? But, Jenny, we shall find each other, must find each other some day. I shall be so true, Jenny,--will you be true to me in heaven?"

Then would sweep across his soul a pitiless vista of the long cold years that lay between him and Jenny. He was not twenty-five; through what a weary pilgrimage of useless years must he journey on, before there was Jenny's face shining at the end. How he envied the old woman whose sorrow was in this alone less cruel than his, that she was already fifty years farther on the road to Jenny. Perhaps another year or two and she would meet her. To meet so soon--was hardly to have parted at all.

But, why live those years? Have you forgotten that old promise? Is it too late to follow? Surely little Jenny will not speed so swiftly from the earth she loved but that you shall overtake her. Who knows but she is fluttering still at the gate of death, putting off the heavenward journey hour after hour, in hope that the face she waits for will at last light up the dark portal--

"I'll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light;
As unto a stream we will step down,
And bathe there in God's sight."

But was this the way to find Jenny? The universe was so full of dark traps for lovers' feet. To lie down cold as Jenny by Jenny's side, was that the way to find her? When death's gate opened for Jenny, had Theophil at that very instant, hand in her hand, eyes fixed upon her eyes, slipped through too, then surely they had been together. But the door had closed, and whither on the other side Jenny had already wandered, who could tell? Perhaps that was the very way to miss her.

When two have lost each other in a crowd, it is best that one should stand still and await the other. Perhaps it were best for him to stand still here in life. Jenny would know where to seek him then--and maybe the dead had mysterious ways of bringing news to the living. He could wait a little while and see. For a little he could live--and listen.