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Updated: June 1, 2025
When she had gone, the two looked at each other. "She seemed strange," said Isabel. "I think I will go and see her for a moment," said Theophil. So it was that, tapping at Jenny's door, he found her lying across her bed with the gas still down. "Crying, dear!" he exclaimed. "O Theophil dear, don't come," she said; "it's only silly nerves. Go back to Isabel; I shall be better when I've had a sleep.
She was no longer Jenny, but a fearful symbol of mysteries at which the flesh crept. She was going to die. It was a bitterly cold night toward the end of January when Jenny died. She had been curiously alert and restless all the afternoon. Once when Theophil and she had been alone, she beckoned him with a grave, significant gesture to her side.
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.
There was a decanter on the sideboard. The doctor poured some spirit into a glass. "Drink this," he said. Theophil drank it raw, as though it had been water; and presently a certain illusive hope began to stir like an opening rose in his brain, and when the doctor had gone he turned to that decanter again. Perhaps if he drank enough he would find that Jenny was not to die, after all.
In some mystical way eternity had breathed upon this hour and given it immortality. It had been suddenly touched with a wand into an enchanted permanence. Theosophists tell of an astral light, where every moment of time endures in strange paintings upon space. Isabel and Theophil and Jenny were sitting together in the astral light.
Yet such is love's miraculous velocity that it had said all it needed to say, given all, in those four minutes. All it had to say to-night was just two Christian names, said so solemnly, so tenderly, so honestly. Just "Isabel," just "Theophil," and a long quiet clasp of hand and eyes. It was enough. It is written. It was not enough!
She spoke to no one of that look, but it must have been the same look that Theophil saw, a few nights after, as she sat listening to him reading in her usual chair. Suddenly, as he looked up at her, he threw down the book, and with concern, almost terror, in his voice, exclaimed, "Good God, Jenny! are you ill, dear? What is that terrible white look in your face?"
There were hours, particularly those hours of sudden wakefulness in the middle of the night when our minds lose their sense of proportion, in which Theophil agonised beyond endurance, and, as on that afternoon when he had found Jenny's diary, said to himself with merciless reiteration, "She seems to have had a shock" "It was you who killed Jenny."
"Except by death, we must not any way Forget our lady who is gone from us." If women were thus henceforth to influence Theophil, why might not Isabel, the woman whom Jenny had loved, be counted amongst them? Isabel was the one woman in the whole world whom Theophil's faithfulness could not transform into Jenny.
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.
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