Then Jenny got very wet one day on her way from school, and she began to cough. She had to stay at home, and bed was perhaps the best place for her. So Jenny went to bed, and looked very pretty there, and was quite merry of an evening when Theophil, bringing her flowers,--he was already bringing her flowers,--would draw up the arm-chair by her side, and read to her. Those were very sweet hours, perhaps the sweetest their love had ever known, so cosy and homelike, and yet without fear.
But one evening, when Jenny had been coughing, there was blood on the bosom of her nightdress, and as Theophil saw it, his heart stood still with terror. Jenny grew very white, too, as she saw it, though the awful thought which was behind the still look they gave each other was not quite new to her. Sometimes she might have been heard softly saying over to herself,--
"I am lost, I am changed, I must go farther, where
The change shall take me worse, and no one dare
Look in my face and see."
Yet although Death's voice calling us from afar may seem all sweetness, his voice coming nearer has a note of dread in it that appals the most death-desirous heart. And in that silence those poor lovers both heard him singing, it seemed not many streets away.
"I must be very ill, dear," said Jenny. "O my love, O my love...!"
Theophil strove with himself to say words with a real ring of the future in them, when this cloud should have passed away; and for his sake Jenny pretended to believe them. Yes, this very week he would take her away to bright skies and healing air,--though Jenny felt a little tired at the thought of rising any more from the bed to which she was growing curiously accustomed.
Then there came a new doctor to see Jenny. He was a very clever specialist from a distant town; but for him the business of death had not yet obscured its tragedy,--though words like "tragedy" were not often on his tongue. Consumption was a strong enough word for him.
His heart went out to that little household; and when he saw Jenny, it ached for that young man downstairs. It was more than a professional contempt for the "general practitioner" that made him silently curse what he called the "death-doctor," as he looked at Jenny, "Jack of all diseases, and master of none."
"Two months ago, a month," he thought, as he listened and listened for a sound of hope that might come to his ear through Jenny's wasted side,--"even a month, and I could have saved her." And yet as he talked to her he was not so sure, after all. He missed something in her voice. It was the will to live.
"Have you had a shock at any time?" he said.