As he lay down to rest that night, his eyes fell with a sudden sense of freshness upon the familiar Botticelli’s “Mother and Child,” which hung over his fireplace; and a need that could never be fulfilled awoke in his soul.  If only Jenny could have left him a little child,—­a little girl!  He had not seemed so lonely then.

It was so he thought; yet perhaps Jenny’s child would but have deepened his loneliness, like a bird singing in a garden where our love walked long ago.  Yet the cry was from his heart, and the longing brought with it his first tears.  “O Jenny,” he sobbed, “if only you had left me a little child!”

CHAPTER XXIV

THE BEGINNING OF THE PILGRIMAGE—­MESSAGE FROM JENNY

If every inclination of his heart had not desired it too, Theophil would have gone on living at 3 Zion Place, for old Mrs. Talbot’s sake; for now he was literally all she had left in the world, and what greater joy remained for either than just to sit close by the fire and talk of Jenny?

3 Zion Place was now a little chapel of memory, where a bowed ancient woman and a sad-faced young man kept up perpetual services to the holy dead.  A woman of her own years, also acquainted with grief, came to companion the old woman, a sort of lay sister in this little monastery of grief.  It was so piety began, and thus piety is purest and tenderest in the worship of the dead.  Everything in that house which had taken the impress of Jenny’s fingers, been Jenny’s to use or handle, remained exactly as and where Jenny had placed it.  They were as yet as fragrant of Jenny as a fresh-gathered flower of its own perfume.  In a very real sense indeed Jenny had not died, or she was coming to life again as she had never lived before; and it was no merely idealised Jenny who was henceforward to fill up all her lover’s thoughts and speak to him in every sight and sound, but just the human Jenny, with her faults and all.

On these—­such little faults!—­Theophil ever loved to dwell.  They saved Jenny from becoming an abstraction, a saint.  Even those bitter little quarrels which all lovers must suffer,—­how sweet they seemed now!

The old mother’s method was no doubt again different from her son-in-law’s.  She would never have admitted that Jenny had a fault.  Such is the difference in reality between the new idealism and the old.

In such small matters as the minutiae of mourning that difference was again illustrated.  Theophil could permit himself no outward insignia of sorrow which he could not wear for ever.  Already his profession had clothed him in black, and it was only for him that his black seemed now to gain a deeper distinction; but such ugly symbols of beautiful memory as that note-paper whose diminishing edge of blackness is rather a cynical witness of a graduated forgetfulness, were not for a real grief like his.  As if sorrow, while it may and will change, can ever end!  Why, in the world of faithful hearts, men and women have not yet dried their tears for Romeo and Juliet!