This escapade, though it brought on death with double swiftness, brought too a calm of satisfaction which made it easier to die; and in the revulsion which it set up, life once more shrank into the background, and its little triumphs grew paltry once more. Strange, he half smiled to himself, that the man who was at last really going to Jenny should even momentarily care about doing anything else!
Yes, he was going to Jenny! So soon! Soon he would be on the other side of that wall, soon be travelling that strange highway, on the other side of light and darkness. In a few more weeks he... HE? Would there still be he anywhere in the universe?
Jenny! Perhaps there had been no Jenny all these months. Perhaps Jenny stopped being Jenny forever in that last moment when she had tried to wish him good-bye. And all his daily consciousness of her presence, all the fancies of his faithful heart, had been idle as the words of a man talking in his sleep. Those little offerings he had brought to her altar,--she had never seen them; for perhaps Jenny had been an idol he had made out of air, while he had been her lonely and unheeded worshipper.
Was it really like that? and in a few more weeks would he too be as an eye that had ceased seeing, an ear that had ceased hearing for evermore?
All the wonderful colour and sound of things! Were these waning days to be his last poor opportunities to sit at the great show?
Yes! the world was slipping like water between his hands--and he might not be going to Jenny, after all.
As these thoughts began to possess him, another thought which he had so far resisted grew more importunately pleading--the thought of Isabel. Perhaps he was going to Jenny, but surely he was leaving Isabel. Had he, he could not but ask himself, immolated a warm living heart in a fanatical devotion to a heart long since senseless and cold? Had it not, after all, been a superstitious veneration towards an ideal of faithfulness which had been Jenny's rather than his own? Had he in his heart ever ceased to love Isabel, and had he really believed that to love her too would have been unfaithfulness to Jenny?
Yes, life was nearly over, but it held the possibility still of one supreme blessedness. He might look into Isabel's eyes again.
She had but to stand by his side and his poor remnant of life would grow radiant and rounded as the most complete and blissful destiny. His heart told him that if Isabel could but once enter the room again, and stay with him to the end, however near, he would die singing the song of magnificent life.
Life is tragic, do you say? Life is cruel. Life is a splendid portico--to nothingness. Ah, no! not if in that portico you have stood for a moment, loving and beloved, by the side of Isabel. Life is splendid! life is kind! life is abounding, deep-cupped! and each minute of it is a prodigal eternity.