"You must come at once!" cried Horatia. "He is dying!"
Madame de Vigerie rose stiffly, as if she were cramped; her face was absolutely colourless and almost without expression.
"Go back," she said dully. "It is your place. I have no right there."
Horatia fell on her knees, sobbing out, "For God's sake, come! You do not understand—I implore you, I, his wife ... I think a wound has opened ... blood..."
A noisy darkness came down on her; she sank sideways to the floor.
* * * * *
Did it really happen, or was it a vision? She seemed to be back in the room where Armand had taken his farewell of life. It was very quiet now. The oasis of candle-light at the far side of the bed was beginning to be flooded out by the cold waves of dawn; the first birds were already chirping. Armand was where he had craved to be, for Madame de Vigerie had him in her arms. She had lifted him away from the pillow, and his head was lying back on her shoulder. Laurence de Vigerie's own head was bent; she did not move either, but there was that in her attitude which was piercingly maternal—the mother, not the lover, with her dead. For that Armand was gone Horatia was instinctively sure. Billows of mist broke over her, and she seemed to fall...
(3)
Long, long afterwards—and yet she knew that it was only next morning—Horatia stood by Emmanuel's side and looked down at what had been Armand. She had shrunk a little from going in, remembering the gloomy catafalque at St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and fearing the sable French palls besprinkled with tears and skulls. It was hard to associate things like that with Armand. She need not have been afraid. The windows were closely curtained, and there were great candles burning at the foot of the bed, and between them a prie-dieu, but nothing of gloom. Even the conventional white flowers were not there; for Horatia slowly realised, with an under-current of wonder, that the spotless drapery of the bed was splashed with trails and mounds of crimson roses.
And Armand lay in the midst of them indifferent and serene, all the traces of his difficult dying smoothed away, the shadow of a smile round his mouth—but as far removed from the lover and husband she had known as from the tortured stranger of last night. The fingers of his uninjured right hand, which alone lay on his breast, held, not the usual crucifix, but a tiny sprig of laurel. Only she who had put it there, and she who now gazed at it, knew why.