AND SUDDENLY THE LAST

Had anyone told Theophil that in another six months he too would be a memory, and that the future to which he looked, now with a sense of new worlds to be conquered, now with a sense of weariness, was suddenly to close down on him like a dropped curtain, he would have smiled half sadly, and half proudly. No such good fortune for his sad heart! no such miscarriage of his young life!

Young life is so sure of its long lease. All about it lie the broken dreams, the unfinished projects of others; but that its life-work should suddenly suffer the final interruption is not to be thought of! It will die if it please of its own choosing; it will despise life and coquette with death; but to die unconsulted, with not so much as "Will it please your honour to die to-morrow week?" is an indignity inconceivable to youth, however visionary and devoted to the worship of the dead.

Yet for quite simple reasons, as this mysterious world goes, it had been decided that Theophil was for as brief a while as possible, allowing for the leisure of natural causes, to support the life he thought he hated. Even while Jenny lived, fate, mercifully foreseeing, had willed him a brief pilgrimage; for on that night when Jenny had leaned over him with that terrible hunger of damp breath, it had been written that of that kiss Theophil should some day die.

And it was of that kiss that the following May Theophil, all his plans laid aside, engagements cancelled on every hand, eager life suddenly trapped in this choking cul-de-sac, was dying.

Death! It was an outrage! He was young, he was powerful! He would not die!

There was May at the window. He too was full of May. He would get up and go about his work. He knew he could if they would only let him. It was the mere rebellion of unspent energies that craved to be used, like the muscular vivacity of suddenly severed limbs that still toss and twitch with hot life; yet it inspired Theophil one afternoon when he had been a fortnight or so in bed, during a brief absence of his nurse, to rise and dress, and as by a miracle keep an appointment to speak at a neighbouring town, where he had been promised for a great agitation on the Home Rule Question. Surely it was a strange enough contradiction of a year ago, when such meetings had seemed such trivialities in the thought of death. Now, when they said he was dying--had this world grown suddenly so significant that he could rise from his death-bed to make one last appearance in the paltry lists?

He spoke with an overcoat buttoned up to his throat, and a tumbler of port wine at his side; and as the audience looked on his white hollow face, and listened to his terrible eloquence, they realised with a shudder that this was the last tragic effort of a dying man.

Alas! the great world was not to be stamped with his image and superscription, after all; and only a little faithful company of friends would know that Theophilus Londonderry was a great man.

This escapade, though it brought on death with double swiftness, brought too a calm of satisfaction which made it easier to die; and in the revulsion which it set up, life once more shrank into the background, and its little triumphs grew paltry once more. Strange, he half smiled to himself, that the man who was at last really going to Jenny should even momentarily care about doing anything else!

Yes, he was going to Jenny! So soon! Soon he would be on the other side of that wall, soon be travelling that strange highway, on the other side of light and darkness. In a few more weeks he... HE? Would there still be he anywhere in the universe?

Jenny! Perhaps there had been no Jenny all these months. Perhaps Jenny stopped being Jenny forever in that last moment when she had tried to wish him good-bye. And all his daily consciousness of her presence, all the fancies of his faithful heart, had been idle as the words of a man talking in his sleep. Those little offerings he had brought to her altar,--she had never seen them; for perhaps Jenny had been an idol he had made out of air, while he had been her lonely and unheeded worshipper.

Was it really like that? and in a few more weeks would he too be as an eye that had ceased seeing, an ear that had ceased hearing for evermore?

All the wonderful colour and sound of things! Were these waning days to be his last poor opportunities to sit at the great show?

Yes! the world was slipping like water between his hands--and he might not be going to Jenny, after all.

As these thoughts began to possess him, another thought which he had so far resisted grew more importunately pleading--the thought of Isabel. Perhaps he was going to Jenny, but surely he was leaving Isabel. Had he, he could not but ask himself, immolated a warm living heart in a fanatical devotion to a heart long since senseless and cold? Had it not, after all, been a superstitious veneration towards an ideal of faithfulness which had been Jenny's rather than his own? Had he in his heart ever ceased to love Isabel, and had he really believed that to love her too would have been unfaithfulness to Jenny?

Yes, life was nearly over, but it held the possibility still of one supreme blessedness. He might look into Isabel's eyes again.

She had but to stand by his side and his poor remnant of life would grow radiant and rounded as the most complete and blissful destiny. His heart told him that if Isabel could but once enter the room again, and stay with him to the end, however near, he would die singing the song of magnificent life.

Life is tragic, do you say? Life is cruel. Life is a splendid portico--to nothingness. Ah, no! not if in that portico you have stood for a moment, loving and beloved, by the side of Isabel. Life is splendid! life is kind! life is abounding, deep-cupped! and each minute of it is a prodigal eternity.

Thus it was that one May morning Isabel sat very still in her little room with a telegram just opened on her lap. The telegram ran: "Jenny is dead and I am dying. Theophil." And this was the first message Isabel had received from her lover since they had parted at Coalchester station eighteen months ago.

She knew nothing of Theophil's wild visit to her room, for the housemaid had forgotten to mention his call; and the strange and perhaps somewhat cruel silence could, of course, only mean one thing for her,--that Jenny had divined their love, and that for Jenny's happiness Theophil had determined that they must never see each other again.

Yet, even so, it could not have wronged Jenny for him to have sent so much in written words! Had he ceased loving her?... No, that she could never believe. They had met too really for that. And, after all, this silence was no more than their sad marriage-bond. Sad, truly, and a little tired these months had made Isabel, but they had had no power over her love. That belonged to the realities; that could never change.

"Jenny is dead, and I am dying," Isabel kept saying over to herself, divining, with love's intuition, something of Jenny's tragedy, and something of Theophil's conflict during those silent months.

"Jenny is dead, and I am dying,"--a sad, a tragic message, surely! And yet, as from the first shock and consequent turmoil of that message, its real significance slowly evolved, even Isabel was perhaps surprised to find it rather a happy than an unhappy significance. Jenny was dead, and Theophil was dying; and yet, when at last she shook herself out of her reverie, her face was curiously lit with peace.

She presently discovered that there was a train north in two hours; and then she turned to her desk, and with that business-like carefulness with which we often act in a dream, she went over its contents, and methodically transferred its various accumulations to the tiny grate, which was soon blazing with unwonted summer fire. A little handful of letters she saved, and from the diminutive locked cupboard in the centre she took out a small sealed packet, which was to be included among her luggage.

All trains do not separate. There are also glad trains which bring together; and soon Isabel was in one of these, and soon it had taken her to Theophil,--to whose ears at last had come the sound of wonderful wheels in the dead street, wheels that had stopped beneath his window, a rustle of alighting, an opening and shutting of doors, an approaching whisper on the staircase, and then, with reality unutterable--Isabel.

Isabel!

You could hardly have told that Theophil was dying, and the face that Isabel thus found again was marked by none of the dreadful writing of death. His eyes were brighter, his brow more hollow, his cheeks thinner,--that was all; and he was to be of those of whom we have spoken, whose flame of life burns brightly to the end. No heavy mists of Lethe hung about his bed. Till his last heartbeat, he was to be conscious of the nearness of Isabel. For a fortnight he was thus to lie within sight and touch of her. How good life is! Think of it, a whole fortnight! How extravagantly blessed!

Isabel was living in the same house with him day after day. She was no visitor, but went in and out of the room with the step of one who is at home. If he grew weary and dozed a moment, she would still be sitting there when he awoke. She was wearing home things. One morning when she had been busied in the kitchen preparing some little delicacy for him, she had left her task for a moment to see if he needed anything; and as she had bent over him, she had worn a household apron,--a wife's apron. Yes, she was at home, she would never leave him again, never leave him--till he died.

"Oh, Isabel--to die!" he moaned one night as she sat by his side.

"But think, dear," she answered, with her head turned away, "think of Jenny."

"Perhaps there is no Jenny."

No Jenny! Isabel's heart gave a little cry. No Jenny! Then there could be no harm ...

"Theophil," she said, after a silence, "have you forgotten something we said to each other that day,--something we promised?"

For answer he looked at her with awed and suddenly enlightened eyes.

"Do you mean that?" he asked. "You mustn't mean that."

"Do you think I could care any more for life?" she asked. "Would you?"

"No," he answered simply.

"May I, then?"

His eyes could alone answer. He knew her love too well to affect that there would be any loss to her in the life she would thus be leaving.

"But Jenny?"

"If Jenny is there, she will understand now."

I can conceive no happier, completer moment than that which followed for these two, no more unassailable peace. If their lives were to be quite put out, they would be extinguished together; if they were to begin anew elsewhere, they would begin anew together; and meanwhile nothing that could happen could harm them, could rob them of the desire of their hearts. At the worst, they would attain their best; at the very least, they would win their most: they would die together.

To end together. It matters not how few or many years love and the beloved live their days side by side, even though their love be but the morning and the evening of one divine day, so that there be no bereaved and lonely to-morrow. The hour that takes one and not the other takes with it too all the accumulated happiness of all the years. That hour these two were to escape. Yet was there no need of haste. So long as they might, they would sit together in the sun of life. For a little longer they would say, "How wonderful life is!"--for a little longer make sure of each other.

Your eyes, Isabel! Your hair, Isabel! Your dear mouth, Isabel!

A little longer.

"Shall we go to-night?"

"Not yet...perhaps to-morrow, Isabel."

But Theophil was now very near death, and he might forget if he lingered on much more. Not wearily, but with music and singing must they pass through the strange gate of Death.

So at length, one June evening, Isabel made for them one last little feast,--once more wine and great grapes set out upon a little table at Theophil's bedside; and on the table, too, was the little sealed packet Isabel had taken from the cupboard in her desk.

Drawing her chair close up to his pillow, she poured out their wine, and they drank it and ate the grapes together,--no happier people in God's strange world.

As the feast neared its end, Isabel rose, and stirring the little fire into a blaze, turned out the lamps, so that the room was lit only with the light from the fire. Then she refilled their glasses with wine, and breaking the seal of the little white packet, took from it a small bottle of green crystal, the contents of which she mingled with the wine.

Then she and Theophil held up their glasses to each other.

"Let us go deeper into the wood," she said softly.

"How wonderful life has been!" said Theophil; and the two drank, with their eyes firm and sweet upon each other.

Then Isabel sat down again by Theophil's side, and leaning her head against his on the pillow, she took his hand. And the room became a heaven of silence.

Whoso would say of these two lives, "How sad!" let him consider the quality of his own happiness; and whoso would regard the life of Theophilus Londonderry as a failure, let him, too, consider the value of his own success.