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Arrived there, Theophil, to the possible scandalising of Coalchester, accepted her invitation to a further chat over supper; and when at last he was back at Zion Place, his heart was aware of a new comfort and a new pain. He had leaned his head on a woman's kind shoulder, and she had let him talk and talk about Jenny; but her shoulder had been warm, and it had been sweet to be near her ...
That spring James Whalley persuaded Theophil to walk with him for a week of country lanes far beyond Coalchester, letting him talk of Jenny all the time. Jenny had never been here! If only Jenny could have seen that view! Jenny had never known that flower! Did he remember those verses from James Thomson:
The High Street! what are High Streets to the soul of Theophilus Londonderry? What is Coalchester itself? though that shall soon be humming and whizzing too. This is but the whirling centre of the ever-spreading wheel of force that has begun to turn at New Zion.
And this was the first message Isabel had received from her lover since they had parted at Coalchester station eighteen months ago.
The Time-Spirit had given its angels charge concerning these young people, and, remote as they were from all the fiery centres of thought and the dreaming schools of art, Zion Place, no less than the Rue de Rivoli, took its thought of the newest and its beauty of the best. I have said that Coalchester was a very ignorant old town. I did not mean to imply that there were no M.A.'s there.
New Zion had long since moved and hummed, and whizzed, the neighbouring towns had in a measure begun to dance to his piping, but it must be a long while yet ere his name was to London and to the world what it was already to Coalchester, that mere microcosm of his fame. And till London knew him as well as Coalchester, there was no real monument to Jenny.
Littlejohn could make nothing of it, nor indeed could the artists' colourman, who had been used to pictures all his life. No wonder, for it was the first Rossetti that had ever been seen in Coalchester. And it was the same at the little paperhanger's shop where Theophilus had ordered some pieces of Morris wall-paper for his room.
Meanwhile, as New Zion moved and hummed and whizzed, and as "The Dawn" went on dawning week by week, you couldn't expect the dawn oftener than once a week in Coalchester, the love of Jenny and Theophil grew more and more perfect. There was a long while to wait yet before Jenny was to bear what seemed to her the finest of all names, for old Mrs.
And the best part of the joke was that the assumption was literally true. Coalchester was too much taken by surprise by "The Dawn" to pretend to ignore it, and its first recognition was appropriately made in a ludicrously abusive article in "The Argus," "the one-eyed Argus," as it was mockingly nicknamed in the next week's issue of the new paper.
There was likewise a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little library, poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above the age of twenty-five.
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