Towards evening she began to take strange fancies, which had to be humoured.  She complained of intruding faces in the room, she called with dreadful peevishness to unseen people who would not leave her bedside, and even sat at its foot.  Then she forgot them, and imagined she was picking daisies on the counterpane.  Then she begged Theophil to go downstairs and see Isabel.  It was a shame to keep her waiting all that time by herself in the study.  And when Theophil tried to persuade her that Isabel was not there, she shook her head and said:  “You must not mind me, Theophil, dear.  I’m not unhappy about her now.  I’m not a silly little girl any more.  I’m a woman now.  ‘Look in my face and see.’”

Then towards midnight a sudden accession of strength came to her, and she said she would get up.  They tried to dissuade her; she grew angry, and struggled so hard to rise, that it seemed best to humour her once more.  So, wrapt round with blankets, Theophil lifted her from the bed into a great chair by the fire.  Then she asked to be taken to look into her bottom drawer.  So they lifted her across to it, and opened it.  She dabbled with her hands aimlessly among its piteous treasures, laughing low to herself.

Suddenly a fit of coughing took her, and a great choking was in her throat.  She was seen to be battling for her breath.  For an instant she drew herself up, and lifted her hand as though she would wave farewell, smiled a faint little smile at Theophil, making, too, as if she would speak.  Then she fell back, her whole body relaxed, she had ceased coughing, and a wonderful sweetness was stealing over her face.  She had gone all alone into the darkness, and Theophil was alone in the world.

CHAPTER XXII

THE TRYST LETHEAN

Jenny had gone into the darkness, and she had gone alone.  Theophil had not gone with her.

That he had remained behind meant certainly no selfish clinging to life, and indeed there was a sense, as was presently to appear, in which very really he had kept young love’s old promise and died with Jenny.  That he had not literally fulfilled it was due to those physical conditions of dying of which in the hour of that promise young love is happily ignorant; for the promise is usually made in moments of keenly conscious physical life.  Dying together is then figured, perhaps, as climbing hand in hand the radiant topmost peak of life, with a last splendid leap together into some immortal morning; and such a marriage in death, a last union of two lives in some fiery consummation of dying, has been the lot of some lovers supremely blest.

Some indeed there are whose last earthly moment is a vivid reassertion of the glory and loveliness of life.  They drink the great cup to its last golden drain, and by their death-beds we seem to be standing at the laughing founts of being.  They are radiant, victorious, even witty, to the last, when at one swoop of blackness they are extinguished like a light plunged into a stream.