The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.]Le Gallienne, Richard
General
The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.]
Le Gallienne, Richard
Clergy -- England -- Fiction; English fiction -- 19th century; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction
Experience indeed was now divided for Theophil into what Jenny had not
seen or known and into what she had seen and known; and it was one of
the tricks of his grief, as time went on, to confuse the two. Sometimes
he would think that Jenny had been with him at a certain place, or
perhaps had read a certain book which, on taking thought, he knew she
could never have seen.
Allied perhaps to this confusion was the fancy that possessed him on
certain days that he caught glimpses of Jenny in little flitting figures
of women about the streets. A sudden poise of the head, the way of doing
the hair, a trick of walk,--just a flash and gone again; though
sometimes he was haunted with more persistent resemblances, which
brought him a curious mixture of joy and pain. And this perhaps is the
place to record what only those acquainted with grief will understand,
and not all of those,--for grief has many contradictory fashions.
Till he had loved Jenny, women had played little or no part in
Theophil's life; but with Jenny's death he found, to his surprise, that
the idea of woman was strangely sweet to him. His eyes were drawn after
women in the street, and he found himself longing sometimes for some
woman on whose shoulder he might lean his head and weep out his grief
for Jenny! He loved death because Jenny had died; was he to love women
because Jenny had been a woman? Perhaps his feet had wandered in
dangerous paths at this time, had it not been for the restrictions which
his calling laid upon him.
These, however, did not deny him the theatre, which it had been part of
his programme at New Zion to advocate, though there was seldom anything
worth seeing at Coalchester Theatre Royal. Yet sometimes a good London
company would call there on its provincial progress, and it chanced one
day, looking into a shop window, that Theophil caught sight of a
photograph of a woman that startled him with its remarkable resemblance
to Jenny. It was the prima donna of a Gaiety burlesque. Such was the
strange shape Jenny had for the moment taken!
For the first time after her death Theophil was at the theatre that
evening. The bright lights and the music pierced him as with swords.
Once more he saw that apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun. Yet
his fancy found grim spells to lay the insolent ghost of life, and death
ever at his side whispered that all this light and music and dancing was
for but a little while; that those gay rouged faces, so confident in
laughing beauty, and all those nimble shapes, were to the eye that had
looked beyond life already stark in their coffins, with chin-cloths
about their nerveless jaws. Surely the lover would trip in the shroud
that was plainly to be seen from his feet to his lips!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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