Part 5 (1/2)

Well, we can talk of Theophil again. Meanwhile Jenny was as much in love with her herself, and he held Jenny's hand and loved her, O yes, so dearly--and was quite safe. Fear not, little Jenny; it was only death, you remember, that was to separate Jenny and Theophil.

Mrs. Talbot--if she won't bore you--had made an interesting remark. She had not escaped Isabel's charm, but there was ”something,” something a little alarming about her,--a little like that wicked wall-paper.

Jenny divulged this criticism over supper when her mother was out of ear-shot.

”How very clever of her!” exclaimed Isabel.

”She said the same of Dvorak's music,” said Jenny.

”Good again,” said Isabel. ”How clever of her! Don't you feel how right she is? We are all like that wall-paper, and everything we care about is like it. The New Spirit--that is, the devil--is in that wall-paper. A psychometrist could detect Wagner and Keats, and Schopenhauer, and Rossetti and Swinburne, and all the rest of them in that wall-paper, just as surely as he could have detected Tupper and Eliza Cook in the wall-papers of 1851. Am I not right?”

”If we could only paper New Zion like this!” exclaimed Theophil, a curious new feeling of joy and pain shooting through him to hear a woman thus expressing herself as an independent brain.

”Yes! New Zion! I'd quite forgotten all about New Zion. It seems impossible to think of you together.”

”And a little absurd, I suppose,” said Theophil.

”It is uncouth material, I admit,” he continued, ”and yet somehow it amuses us to mould it all the more; and then you mustn't forget that we had been given no other--but I don't suppose you can understand?”

(Theophil often used ”we” in this imperatorial sense, meaning himself, as of course he had every right to mean.)

”O yes, but I can,” Isabel hastened to correct. ”I understand power.”

”Beauty always does,” was the young minister's reply.

”Besides,” he presently resumed, ”we are glad to have been Nonconformists--once. A Puritan training is a good thing--to look back upon. You are all the more thorough in your pleasures, the truer humanist, for something of it still lurking in your blood.”

”Yes, of course you're right. I don't like the word 'pagan'; but for want of a better, we might say that the best pagans have come of Puritan stock. Besides, it is half the romance of life to have something to escape from, isn't it?”

”And someone to escape with the other half,” responded Theophil, nimble as a real town wit.

O it was a wonderful night. Let us build five tabernacles!

”Good-night, dear Jenny.”

”Good-night, dear wonderful Isabel.”

So at last the two girls bade each other good-night at the door of Jenny's bedroom, where Isabel was to sleep.

Masterful youth! So wild to take, so eager to surrender, the Christian name. Strange, what pa.s.sion sometimes can be put into a _Christian_ name!

When the door was shut on Isabel, she made no haste to undress. Indeed, she sat down on the side of the bed as though she had been waiting to sit down for ever so long, sat very still as in a dream, and an hour went by and she was still sitting and gazing in front of her.

And downstairs in the study, where the lamps were still burning, Theophil was sitting by the fire in just the same curiously wrought and withdrawn way, with just the same eyes.

Isabel's room was over his. Presently she heard him moving about; then she heard him coming upstairs. For a moment the air seemed to grow warm, as she heard him softly pa.s.s her room; then she heard him close his door.

She shook her reverie from her, as though it had been a black veil full of stars, and began to undress. Presently her eyes fell on a little pile of handkerchiefs, with needle and cotton, and little letters printed on dainty tapes, beside it. Jenny had forgotten to put away her sewing.