Chapter XXII (1)
The brilliance of the hall at St. Clair dazzled Horatia. Someone took her gently by the arm, and led her up the great staircase into a little room full of books. Not till she got there did she realise even the sex of the person, and found that her conductor was a grey-haired man.
“Madame,” he said, “I am the surgeon, and I must tell you the truth... if you are strong enough to bear it?”
“I am strong enough,” said Horatia.
“Your husband is dying. He was shot by the Philippistes in the forest about six this evening; he was found an hour later unconscious but alive, and brought here as soon as possible. But—I should be doing you a great injury to deceive you—he cannot live till morning.... Will you see him now?”
“Can’t you do anything?” asked Horatia, passionately.
He shook his head. “It is a miracle that he is still alive, Madame—with eight bullet wounds. Madame de Vigerie did not know that you were here; as soon as she heard she sent for you.” He paused at the door, and looking at her with the same stern pity, said, “Remember, Madame, if he talks wildly, that he is still in great pain. I have given him what opiates I dared, but they have little effect, I fear. He will know you now, but later on he may become delirious, so that you should see him at once. There is nothing to do; only do not lift him up. I shall be outside the door, within call.” He preceded her out of the room.
A priest was going down the stairs—the old curé who had given them his blessing. Where was Madame de Vigerie?
She forgot to think of her when she was inside. Was that really Armand? All the shadows in the big, lofty room seemed centred in his face, so sharp and incredibly grey against the white of the bed-linen. He lay on his back in the great sculptured bed; one pillow only out of its many supported him; the rest had been thrown in a heap on the floor. His eyes were closed; he had only a sheet over him, and under it his motionless body had a sinister rigidity. A table with basins, with cloths and lint trailing over it had been pushed, only half out of sight, behind a curtain, and a chair near it bore his blood-soaked clothes, cast there just as they had been cut off him.
She saw all these details, grasped their full meaning, but had thought only for one thing, and going round the foot of the bed, entered the sanctuary of the screen that kept off the candle-light. Armand’s right hand, the fingers twitching a little, lay on the edge of the bed. Horatia fell on her knees beside him.
And Armand opened dark, misty eyes upon her. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then there came about his ashen lips a phantom of the smile that had once charmed her, and he lifted his hand a little way, pointing.
“Your hair... makes a light,” he said faintly. The candles were behind her.
“Armand——” she began, choking.
“Yes,” he said with more strength, “I know. It is... a long business, it seems. They do not shoot very straight, the Orleanists... I should like to see you better... if you would move a candle... Merci.” He relapsed into French. “My dear, you would make a beautiful angel, you who believe in the angels. I shall not see a fairer... Oh, do not be anxious; M. le Curé... has arranged all that.”
She saw now that he was in deadly pain, and the bantering words went past her in a passion of pity and remorse. Her scalding tears fell on his cold hand, and on her own, that clasped it.
“Armand, Armand, forgive me!”
“Ma chère, for what? I thought it was to be... the other way.” A little tortured laugh came from him. “You, to make the... the conventional death-bed scene! Was that why... you came all this distance?”
“I came when I heard that the rising had failed... when I thought... O Armand, cannot something be done!”
“You were really too kind, mon amie. It is such a long way... Did you have a... good journey?”
“Armand, for God’s sake!” cried Horatia, agonised at the tone. But he had closed his eyes again; perhaps he did not even hear her. And lying there helpless, broken, ghastly, he was suddenly once more all that he had ever been to her—the lover, triumphant and adorable, who had kissed her in the field of stubble, the married lover of those days in Brittany... But it was too late now, she saw that; not only too late to save his body, but to make any appeal to the spirit that was leaving it. The time for that was past.
He spoke again, without opening his eyes, very faintly but just as politely. “That glass on the table... if I might trouble you...” When she stooped over him with it she remembered the doctor’s injunction, and, slipping her hand with all possible precaution under his head, raised it only a little way. Even at that movement a contraction passed over his face, and he shut his teeth on a groan. Then he drank, and she lowered his head to the pillow. She longed to touch his hair again, and dared not.
“Thank you,” said Armand, and lay silent for a moment, the sweat gathering on his forehead. Then, with an effort, he began again. “I should like,... while I can... to speak about the boy.... Perhaps... an English school... I believe I put that... in my will the other day... but I cannot remember.... He will be like... you... when he grows up.”
“Oh, I hope not!” was torn, in a whisper, from Horatia.
The expressive eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Mais... you surely... do not wish him... like... me... And you... will marry again, ma chère... you might marry ce bon Tristan...”
Another pause; and his voice had grown almost inaudible when he added, “I would give you my... benediction, the benediction... of a ghost... It is not long ago... you told me I... I did not exist... you had the gift... of prophecy...”
This time the pause was longer still. At the foot of the bed, where his last speech had cast her, Horatia was pressing a handful of the sheet against her mouth, lest she should cry out in her own pain. She did not know whether she was saying anything; only she was aware of the thought that these were perhaps the last words she should ever hear from him...
Suddenly, however, quite changed in tone, the voice said—and she was not sure whether it was addressing her or someone else, “Mais, voyez-vous, I am not at all content to be a ghost... at my age... except that it is the only way... to be rid of these damnable bullets... But if the curé tells you that I was resigned... do not believe him...”
And with these words, in which youth and strength and the soul which had so lightly companioned them, made their last protest against the wrecking of their habitation, Armand de la Roche-Guyon’s head rolled slowly over to one side.
(2)
The next thing that Horatia knew was that, somehow the surgeon was in the room again, bending over the bed. “I expected this,” she heard him mutter. Then he turned to her abruptly.
“He has only fainted,” he said. “He must have tried to move. I shall not revive him, Madame; it is cruel kindness.” He stood a moment looking down at the unconscious face. “Poor boy,” he added to himself, “he will not die easily.... Now, Madame, I think you had better come away. He will not know you again, I think, and I will stay with him.”
“No, no!” exclaimed Horatia, clinging to the pillar of the bed as if she feared to be removed by force. “I will stay—I insist—it is my right! He is quite quiet; I will call you if I need you. Be outside the door! I must stay!”
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.
“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.
The candles were blurred in tears. Emmanuel stooped and kissed the tranquillised dead face.
“Sleep well, my brother,” he whispered, using the words he had uttered, with a different thought, not long ago.
Horatia slipped to her knees, and her head sank forward among the roses.