The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.]

by Richard Le Gallienne

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!

Like sudden snow on a summer meadow, a white silence fell from his imagination across that fiddling, jigging, gleaming atmosphere, and everywhere the dead sat around him, watching in a trance strange antics of the grimacing dead. Curiously, in these moods, he never thought of himself as dead. Alas! life was too cruel to release him so soon to death and Jenny.

Suddenly the theatre sprang back to life again with the entrance of the prima donna. Yes, the resemblance was even greater than in the photograph. She was a little taller and more heavily built than Jenny, and it was not Jenny's voice; but for the rest, she was Jenny. The fascination of watching her was terrible. It seemed impossible that one form could so mockingly resemble another, and yet be so hopelessly someone else. Theophil could hardly bring himself to believe that the woman yonder with Jenny's eyes and mouth and hair had never even heard of Jenny's name. Surely, if he were to come and look into her face, she would recognise him at once, and the old common interests would rise to her lips as of old.

Theophil went again to the theatre the next night, and again the next, which was the last of the company's stay in the town; and the spell of the false Florimel grew so strong upon him that at the close of the final performance he sent up his card to the actress, and presently, as in a dream, found himself stumbling among scenery and dipping under beams on his way to the actress's room. If she were only as like Jenny close to, he felt he must follow her to the end of the world; and indeed the illusion still held as he entered the little mirrored room, smelling of powder and littered with laces and silks,--fancy little Jenny here among the grease-paints and the bouquets! It was only with the lack of recognition in the polite welcome the actress gave him that the illusion began to waver, or was it only that Jenny had forgotten him?

So possessed had he been with the hallucination, that he had not thought what excuse he would have to make to the actress for his visit, and it was with an embarrassing shock that the necessity of speech came to him, when he had stumbled through some mechanical words of salutation. She looked at him with a little air of bewilderment, and motioned to her attendant to leave them alone. As the door closed, Theophil had determined to tell her the simple truth.

"I have to ask your pardon," he began, "for a very strange intrusion. The reason of it is simply this. You are so like someone I love who is dead that I felt I could not rest till I had spoken to you. I trust you will excuse me, and try to understand. Yes! you are terribly like her!"

The story appealed to the actress's instinct for romance, and she entered into its spirit. Besides, the young clergyman was very interesting to look at, and the charm of sorrow was on his face.

"An actress can hardly complain," she answered, "of being taken for someone else, and though I don't know you, I feel that you have done me an honour. Am I indeed so like her? How strange it must seem to you!"