The Vision Splendid

by D. K. Broster; G. Winifred Taylor

"Want!" observed the Comte de la Roche-Guyon, stretching out a fat hand from his wheeled bassinette towards the huge red poppy nodding in the flowerbed beside him. "Want, want, want!" he repeated beating with the same member upon the satin coverlet.

Grimes the gardener, clipping the hedge near by, looked round. "And so you shall, my pretty!" quoth he. Turning, he broke off the object of Maurice's desires, and presented it to him, and Maurice, after tearing off the flaming petals, inserted the fascinating remainder into his mouth.

He had not time, however, to try his newest teeth upon the green dainty before it was torn from him and flung whirling into the bed as Martha—who had but left her charge for a moment—emptied the vials of her wrath upon the luckless donor. "And you a married man not to know better than that! You might have poisoned the precious child under his mother's very eyes! Come away, my beautiful ... now don't cry after the nasty thing!"

As the hand of indignation wheeled Maurice away from the vicinity of the unworthy Grimes it removed him also out of Horatia's field of vision, where she sat under the acacia tree on the lawn, a book on her lap and a workbasket by her side. Horatia flew something of her old colour in her cheeks. Her father, after her outburst in the spring, had told her to say her prayers and to do her duty. To do her duty, or what she knew that her father would conceive to be her duty, was easy—anything was easy that served to take her mind off herself. She did all she could for Maurice, and was unaware that Martha generally did it all over again. She paid visits and went to local shows, proceedings that before her marriage had been very distasteful to her. The Rector thought her so brave, and wonderfully softened, for now she seemed to suffer fools gladly. She did, for any company was better than her own.

But to say her prayers was a different matter, for though she repeated a form of words she could not pray, and she hated being in church, for there her mind invariably became clear, and all that she had shut away in a box marked "Paris" would emerge, and be, not a dream of the past, but a present reality. At any moment this box was not over-securely fastened. Inside were remorse and hatred. Every letter from France shook the lid—though such letters were not very frequent—one or two melancholy epistles from the Duc, a few kind notes from Emmanuel, some, not so benevolent, from the Dowager, and one malicious communication from the Marquise de Beaulieu, informing her that Madame de Vigerie had not been seen in society this year, and that every one was wondering why.... How she hated the Vicomtesse! It was she who had cast the first poisoned fruit into their Eden, it was she who had deceived her with a show of friendship, she who had caused her to condemn Armand innocent, she who had lured him on—lured him on to his death. Merely to think of her was to revive, in its fadeless colours, that picture or dream of him, lying dead in her arms....

Better than saying her prayers or doing her duty were Tristram's visits.

She did not take them as a matter of course, but looked forward to them almost eagerly, comparing them with the many times he had come in old days. She was changed, she knew, but so was he. The fact of his becoming a clergyman might have been expected to make him more sedate, but it had had the opposite effect. At times he was quite lighthearted and full of hope, and seemed to find no little enjoyment in the prospect of a fight to come. The hope and the joy of battle were for the Church, for the Church was in danger, and yet Horatia no longer wanted to laugh at him or to tease him. He would tell her that he and his friends at Oriel were conspirators, and that one day the conspiracy would break out, that Oxford was going to lead another hope, and not a forlorn one. In July he had said that they only waited for Newman to come back from Italy, that Froude was full of fire, and that if Keble could only be got to move he would be more potent than anyone.

Horatia had watched eagerly to see what the Reformed Parliament would do, and, when the bill for the suppression of the Irish bishoprics was introduced, she was pleasurably thrilled at the thought then presented to her that perhaps an era of persecution had really begun. She was full of elation when Mr. Keble preached his stirring Assize sermon in July and of regret that she herself had not heard it. In August she felt the futility of the meeting at Hadleigh, and she was as convinced as Tristram could have wished that no great movement was ever successfully conducted by an association; she was sure that it must be the work of individuals. And now she was waiting for the appearance of the first-fruits of that idea—the projected series of Tracts.

It was like an exciting game, for Horatia's interest was, after all, purely intellectual. And her instinct told her that even if Mr. Froude could speak jestingly of a conspiracy, and the friends could use, out of reverence for holy things, a "little language" which to the outsider appeared merely flippant, there was within them a spirit which made her shrink. She knew that they had a profound belief in Providence, that they believed they had a work to do, and were but tools for its execution. This alone was a disturbing thought. And she perceived in them a moral force, a severity and a relentlessness which she had never met before. If, as people said, they wished to copy the Roman Catholics, she was at a loss to know where in that body, as she knew it, they had found their exemplar, for not even in Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, reputed and sincerely believed by her to be a saint, had she seen any trace of this spirit. But it was to be found, no doubt, in the religious orders. It also occurred to Horatia that this reformation of the Church for which Tristram's friends were so eager would mean a change in the lives of the clergy. It would mean the disappearance of the hunting parson, of the prosperous rector of the "three-bottle school," even, she supposed, of the fashionable Evangelical preacher. But it might mean, too, a change in the people who were taught by the clergy.... She much preferred not to hear about this sort of thing from Tristram, and yet he was so eager, when once set on to talk, that she often started him for the mere pleasure of watching him. She could laugh at its absurdity, yet she felt a lurking sympathy with Lord Melbourne's plaint, that things were coming to a pretty pass if religion was to invade the affairs of daily life, for thought hovering round this connection was apt to become personal in its application, and that which served generally as a diversion would end by making her conscience still more uneasy.

Tristram might come any day now in his round of distributing these new Tracts. As Maurice was wheeled away Horatia took up the August number of the "British Magazine" on her knee to look at the "Lyra Apostolica" for that month, which she had not yet read. It would be interesting to see whether she could guess the authorship of each of these unsigned poems, and to tell Tristram her surmise. She suspected Mr. Newman, who edited them, of writing most of them himself.