The Vision Splendid

by D. K. Broster; G. Winifred Taylor

So he went, and, sitting there, Horatia began her vigil. It was very still. Breaths of the scented June night, poignant of jasmine, came now and then through the open windows, and stirred the candle-flames. For a long time Armand lay without moving; she could only hear his difficult breathing. The screen by the bed was worked with landscapes in silk, autumn scenes of bright brown, amber and gold, like the trees under which they had first met ... But between that first meeting and this—— How could it be that life was so shorn across? She had pictured long years of estrangement, or, perhaps, years when after forgiving him she had tried with a heavy heart to do her duty—and there was this instead. O, if God would only give her those imagined years! And forgiveness—what had that word to do here....

And suddenly in the garden a nightingale began to sing, and that magic voice, with all its thrilling burden of pain and passion, the voice which can never be heard without a stirring of the heart, pierced her like a sword. Crouching down in the chair, her arms across her face to stifle the sound, she wept.

She did not weep for long. As if the bird, or her sobs, had roused him, Armand was drifting back to consciousness; she heard him moan. She sprang up. She would have given everything in the world to speak to him again, but she did not want him to come back to bodily anguish. "Armand, do not wake!" she whispered, the tears streaming down her face. "Sleep, my darling, sleep; do not wake again!" With all her will she strove to push him back; and since he was hers more certainly in unconsciousness, since he could not look at her now with eyes that held mockery and too much remembrance, she bent and kissed him many times, and her tears fell on his hair.

It was vain, for another phantom was flitting before him in the mists of death, drawing him from peace. In a little she knew it. "Laurence, why do you not come?" he began restlessly, and went on begging her at one moment to disregard her scruples, at another not to leave him to die alone, since he had give his life for her. And Horatia, kneeling, frozen, by the bed, learnt from the broken, pregnant sentences all the truth. Whatever his desires, he had never been Laurence's lover. She had to believe him now. Her own name was mingled in the stream. "Horatia does not believe me," said the failing voice. "Leave your scruples, Laurence; she does not believe me." And again, "Why do you send for Horatia? She would not care ... I am nothing to her now ... she told me so."

But chiefly, and with a growing and dangerous agitation, he implored Laurence to come to him, seeming to imagine that he was lying in the wood, that it was dark, and that she would not come. Hardly knowing what she said, stunned by the revelations which at the moment she was not able fully to grasp, Horatia tried to soothe him, calling upon him by all the names of their brief happiness; but to all her efforts he merely responded by crying more insistently for Laurence, Laurence, Laurence, till the name seemed to eat into her brain in letters of fire. At last, at the end of endurance, she got up from the bedside and went dizzily towards a window, towards the air. That Madame de Vigerie's presence might really have power to quiet him never occurred to her; she was too agonised for thought.

Until that moment Armand had not betrayed the slightest consciousness of her, looking always with haunted eyes beyond her for the figure which was not there. But directly she moved away a change came over him, and he seemed suddenly enveloped by a cloud from the past thicker than those in which he wandered. He began to struggle.

"Let me go to her—she is dying ... they have shut the door and will not let me in. Let me go, Emmanuel! I tell you she is dying ... and she was wearing my flowers..."

He tried, ineffectually, to raise himself in the bed, and as Horatia hurried towards him there sprang out on the white sheet, just over his breast, a little crimson patch. For the second or two that she stared at it, terrified, it grew larger, bright and menacing. Gasping, she ran to the door and flung it open, expecting to find the surgeon outside. There was no one there.

To get help, from any quarter, was the sole clamorous idea in Horatia's brain. Opposite her was a door; light streamed from beneath it. In an instant she was across the landing, and had opened it. Only then did she realise whose room she had entered.

Madame de Vigerie was sitting motionless, relaxed, in a chair by the elaborate bed. She had the air of having sat thus for hours. She was still in her riding-habit, stiff, in one place, with Armand's blood; her head was thrown back against the rose-coloured satin of the hangings.