_ CHAPTER XXIII. JENNY'S LYING IN STATE
But there were others besides those who stood so near who mourned Jenny, passers-by on the road of friendship, who would miss her sunshine in the streets, and carry with them one bright thought the less for that bright face that death had thus blown out. There were especially some little people to whom death was as yet hardly even mysterious, but was merely perplexing, like many other grown-up things in which their parents were interested. These were the little scholars of Jenny's Sunday-school class, to whom simple Jenny had been a personage, quite a great lady, full of gentleness. To these Jenny was "Teacher," a name of gentle awe; and to these Teacher was as deeply dear as anyone can be to very young hearts.
Jenny had felt like a little mother to these little ones, and when she lay ill her thoughts would often go to them, while from them would come tiny presents to show how sorry they were that Teacher was ill.
Several times before she grew too ill, Jenny had had her favourites up in her room on Sunday evenings, to read Bible stories with her, and had sent them away happy with magnificent text-cards, that had hitherto been the arduously won rewards of "attention" and the practice of such school-time virtues over many weeks.
Now, when they heard that Teacher was dead, they felt a vague sorrow. They knew that people who died were never seen at school any more, and that people always burst out crying when anyone died; so they cried bitterly, these little girls, and the hearts of one or two of them perhaps really ached for a little while. One of them asked the new teacher, if they would meet their old teacher in heaven, and was told "Yes, if they were good girls,"--which was something to be good for.
Among the wreaths that already filled Jenny's room with that piercing smell of lilies which still clung there--unless it were Theophil's fancy--for many months afterwards, was one sent in loving memory "by her Sunday-school class"; and it was a part of that informal lying-in-state, which is an involuntary recognition of the divine honours due to death, that these little awestruck scholars should be taken in threes and fours to look at Teacher for the last time.
This was the third day, and Jenny was already in her coffin. The first bloom of death, that light that lingers awhile in the face like a sunset tranquil and blessed, a smile of immortal promise in the very moment of mortality, had faded. Jenny's face by this was really dead, a mask of drawn and sunken wax. She seemed now some fantastic doll, some ghastly waxwork image of death such as we see carried on the stage in tragic plays. The reality of death had gone with the coming of its funereal trappings. But the little girls, who had to be lifted up one by one to gaze with curious, scared faces into that harsh box, deeper and deeper into which, as through beds of flowers and veils of gauze, Teacher was sinking, knew nothing of these thoughts. They looked and wondered in hushed bewilderment, and went their ways. It was evidently an occasion when children were to keep more than usually quiet--and was it really Teacher in that strange deep box? It was rather meaningless, but it was certainly very strange and solemn, and you were allowed to cry.
Of the others who came to see Jenny, I shall not speak,--the vulgar sight-seers, the creepy old women, connoisseurs in beautiful death, for whom a neighbour's funeral was like an invitation to the grand opera, but on whom perhaps one should not be too severe, for even such coarse sensitiveness to a mystery is the crude beginning of the poetic.
The night before Jenny was given back to the elements Theophil dreamed a dream, and afterwards he liked to think that he had dreamed it while Jenny's body was still in the house with him, for then it might be interpreted that her spirit was still there too, waiting for its final release from the clay which God had sent her to animate for a while, as an artist imprisons a lovely thought in a vase of alabaster.
Theophil dreamed that he and some friends were gay together in a room, just before setting out for a theatre; and as they laughed and talked there came a little tapping on the wall, so that they grew silent and listened. Then through the wall was heard a faint but glad little voice speaking. It was Jenny's voice.
"I can hear you all," she said; "you are off to the theatre. I wish I were going with you. Never mind, we are not so far away from each other as you think. I am only on the other side of a wall."
And Theophil awoke on a bright wintry morning, with those words still, it seemed, in the room.
"I am only on the other side of a wall!" Was it but the metaphor-making of dreams, which will so often take our forgotten speculations and dramatise them for us into reality, or was it indeed a message? An instinct which was unamenable to reason, and which was perhaps only a desire, told him it was a message; and it was no less a message though it were merely a pictorial symbol of a sense, which was already his in the daytime, of a new and very real nearness to Jenny.
He had slept right through that night out of sheer bodily weariness. Weeks of watching and anguish had worn him out, and he never knew that the poor old mother had laid a benediction on his sleep, looking in upon him as he slept, the only waking being in that house of sleep.
"He will wake soon enough, poor boy!" she had said, as she went once more to watch till daylight by the side of the other sleeper.
"O Jenny, Jenny, why did you leave me? You were the apple of my eye, my Jenny. What will your old mother do now that you are gone?"
So she sat and wailed hour after hour, and sometimes she would raise the dead girl from her coffin and press her to her bosom; for, though even Jenny's lover feared her now, that cold unresponsive clay had no fear for Jenny's mother. It was Jenny still, and though the old woman's creed told her that Jenny was already an angel in heaven, her heart belied her faith, and her love made her a Sadducee.
And yet it was her belief in a literal resurrection of the body that was sorely troubling her old soul during these last hours of watching. For while Jenny was still conscious of the coming of death, she had been much tortured by hideous churchyard fancies, imaginations of the darkness and noisomeness of the grave, and she had wrung from her mother the promise that she should first be cremated and her ashes be afterward buried in the family tomb. This was the promise which was lying heavy on the old woman's heart to-night; and, though her reason told her that the way of the flames and the way of the flowers alike led to dust, yet the disintegration by fire seemed to give her a sense of entire destruction such as the more desultory operations of the earth did not give.
If Jenny must indeed pass right away, the dainty architecture of her body, so lovingly builded, be laid in ruin; not by the fierce fingers of fire should she be torn asunder, but beneath the kind breath of the sun, and the gentle tears of the rain, might she change and change, and on the wings of soft winds might she be carried to and fro in fragrance about the world.
And perhaps in the old Christian's mind there was an imagination of a mysterious recreation in the earth, which when the dust has quite returned to dust, should begin anew the building of an incorruptible Jenny, lying prepared there like a new garment, against the hour when the soul should seek anew its earthly vesture for the last great day. Thus strangely will imagination build its dreams in defiance of imagination.
And in what different ways will love argue with itself! This way of the flames, that brought such a terror to the poor mother, was one of the great consolations of the lover; and when at length on the morrow Jenny was no longer to be sought in her room, and the darkened house was once more filled with an empty light that was crueller than darkness, it brought a sense of warmth to think that Jenny was not lying stark and lonely out in that bitter churchyard, where the graves were covered with sheets of snow and hung with hoods of ice, but that through the cleansing gates of flame she had passed into the eternal elements, and was already about the business of the dreaming spring.
And in other ways this proved a consolation that never failed him. It saved his love from those cruel foulnesses of the grave which had haunted Jenny. That cleansing fire cleansed his fancies too. However morbid his fancies might become, _desiderium_ could never take any but beautiful forms. Jenny could never come to him in any fearful images of corruption, nor could he picture her in any mouldering shape of catacomb or charnel.
She had come like a sylph out of the air, and she had returned again whence she came. She had moved awhile about certain ever sacred rooms, and as she moved she had hummed a little song, which was her life; she had touched certain objects, she had written her name in some books, she had made little everlasting memories with her hands,--that was her history; and now suddenly she had gone. She had come like a dream, and she had gone like a dream. The invisible winds had for a while rocked a flower, and now the flower was gone. Only its perfume remained. No one as long as the world lasted could take up some crumbling relic, and, giving the lie to love's divine answer to the dust, say "This was Jenny!"
No! but sometimes when a bird sings in the stillness, when the moon rises above the trees, when a breath of secret violets crosses one's path one knows not whence; sometimes when the rain is sobbing at the window, or the wind plaining about the doors; sometimes when an unknown happiness fills the heart, when a great deed has been done, when a lovely word has been spoken, in seasons of music and in all high moments, then can one say, "There, listen! _that_ was Jenny."
Jenny was already a legend. She was with the great lovers. Theophil remained behind only to write her name across the high stars. Then he, too, would pass through the gates of fire to her side.
As he lay down to rest that night, his eyes fell with a sudden sense of freshness upon the familiar Botticelli's "Mother and Child," which hung over his fireplace; and a need that could never be fulfilled awoke in his soul. If only Jenny could have left him a little child,--a little girl! He had not seemed so lonely then.
It was so he thought; yet perhaps Jenny's child would but have deepened his loneliness, like a bird singing in a garden where our love walked long ago. Yet the cry was from his heart, and the longing brought with it his first tears. "O Jenny," he sobbed, "if only you had left me a little child!" _