D. Broster - The Vision Splendid (D. K. Broster) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

"Dieu! a-t-il des poumons!" exclaimed the young man despairingly to himself. He made a gesture and rose; at the same instant heard Horatia's step and, turning round, snatched off his hat. His mien implored the succour which she would have rendered in any case.

"Is the child really hurt, Sir?" she asked. As well pretend that she took him for an Englishman, since he spoke the tongue so readily!

"Mademoiselle," said the young man dramatically, "I swear to you that my horse never passed within a foot of him. But he runs across the road in front of me, and falls down; I dismount and pick him up – what else could I do? – and since that time he ceases not to yell comme un démon!"

His brilliant, speaking dark-blue eyes rested on her with a mixture of humour, appeal, and (it was impossible not to recognise it) of admiration. His black silk cravat was so high that his chin creased it; his chamois-coloured cashmere waistcoat was fastened with buttons of chased gold, and the cut of his greenish-bronze coat testified to an ultra-fashionable tailor. Horatia looked at Tommy Wilson, now rolling on the grass in a perfect luxury of woe. Bending over him she seized him firmly by the arm.

"Tommy," she commanded, "get up!" More successful than the Frenchman, she restored him to some measure of equilibrium. "Now you are coming with me to the doctor to show him where you are hurt. Come along!"

Her voice, which he knew, had the effect of reducing the youth's lamentations, but at her suggestion a fresh tide of alarm swept over his round, smeared face. He resisted, ejaculating hoarsely: "No, Miss! No, Miss 'Ratia! No, I 'ont!"

"Very well then, I shall bring the doctor to you here," said Miss Grenville firmly. "Now mind, Tommy, that you stay where you are without moving till I come back with him. Do you hear?" She loosed her hold and stood back, holding up a warning finger.

A success almost startling rewarded her manoeuvre. For five seconds, perhaps, Thomas Wilson stood blinking at her through his tears, his mouth working woefully at the corners; then, with an expression of forlorn determination, he turned, ran past the horse, and set off to trot home at a pace which dispelled the least suspicion of injury.

(1)

Both Horatia and the stranger whom she had befriended looked after the small vanishing figure with an amused relief; then the young man turned, and, clasping his hat to his breast (for he was still bareheaded), made her a graceful, formal bow.

"Mademoiselle, I am your debtor to my dying day! Conceive how I am alarmed by that so evil boy! Ma foi, I began to see myself in an English prison for attempted murder."

"Mr. Hungerford would soon have effected your release, Monsieur," said Horatia, laughing. "May I ask, indeed, why he has left you to these adventures?" For she would no longer pretend ignorance of his identity.

The young man showed a marked surprise. "Is it possible that I have the good fortune to be known to you?" he exclaimed. "But yes; I am the guest of Mr. Hungerford, and, to make a clean breast of my sins, Mademoiselle, I have lost him. He was taking me to pay a call upon M. le Recteur of Compton Regis, and his daughter – cousins of Mr. Hungerford, I believe – we parted half an hour ago, and I was to meet him at some place whose name I have forgotten; then I have the contretemps with the infant and have lost the way also. I am in despair, because I have it in my mind that the cousine of Mr. Hungerford is une très belle personne, and her father very instructed; and who knows now whether I shall ever see them?"

His air of regret and helplessness was rather attractive; but the suspicion that he really had more than half an inkling who she was restored to Miss Grenville's voice and manner something of the decorum proper to the chance meeting of a young lady with a strange gentleman on the road – a decorum already a good deal impaired by the feeling of complicity in the business of Tommy Wilson.

"I have no doubt," she said, "that you will find Mr. Hungerford already at the Rectory, and I will direct you the shortest way thither. I am myself Miss Grenville."

M. le Comte de la Roche-Guyon smote himself lightly on the breast. "I might have guessed it!" he said in an aside to Tristram's horse. "Mademoiselle, I am more than ever your devoted servant ... Permit me!" He kissed her gloved hand with a singular mixture of reverence and fervour. "But ... if we are going the same way ... might I not have the great honour of accompanying you, or would it not be considered convenable, in England?"

His tone, his innocent, pleading glance suggested that in his own less conventional native land such a proceeding would be perfectly proper; whereas Horatia knew the exact contrary to be the case. However, she always thought that she despised convention; there was the chance that he might get lost again, and meanwhile poor Tristram would be waiting about Heaven knew where. So she said, with sufficient dignity, that she should be very pleased, and they started homewards, conversing with great propriety on such banal subjects as the weather, and with Tristram's horse pacing beside them for chaperon. Yet the shade of Tommy Wilson, hovering cherub-like above them, linked them in a half-guilty alliance.

And thus they came round by Five-Acres into Compton Regis, and at the cross-roads by the farm found Tristram Hungerford, on his old horse, looking for his missing guest.

"My dear La Roche-Guyon, where have you been?" he demanded, as he dismounted and saluted Horatia.

"In Paradise," responded the young man audaciously. "Eh quoi, you were anxious about me, mon ami? I found a guardian angel in the person of Miss Grenville herself."

"So I see," answered his host a trifle drily. "I rode back to Risley to look for you."

The Comte protested that he was desolated, at the same time managing to convey to the girl beside him, without either speech or look, that, for obvious reasons, he was nothing of the sort. But Miss Grenville, with a heightened colour, walked on in silence between them. She had no taste for exaggerated compliments; that foolish utterance about Paradise would not have been at all in good taste for an Englishman. But, of course, M. de la Roche-Guyon was a foreigner.

She had yet to learn that M. de la Roche-Guyon, born and partially educated as he had been in England, had a much less incomplete knowledge of English usage than he found convenient, at times, to publish abroad.

(2)

Armand-Maurice de la Roche-Guyon achieved, in the Rectory drawing-room, the impression which he never failed to make in any society. Man or woman, you wanted instinctively to be friends with him; he had so engaging an air of expecting it. And Horatia noticed afresh how intensely he was alive, and how little he tried to conceal the fact. She thought of the wooden, controlled visages of some of her male acquaintances, and contrasted them with his changing, vivid face, in which every feature, from the clear eyebrows to the rather mocking mouth, could express any shade of feeling from derision to adoration. Such foreign accent as he retained lent a charm to his fluent English, which, though apt to desert him at moments of crisis, carried him gallantly in ordinary conversation, and only required occasional help from a gesture or a French word. But, as he explained, he had been born in England, and therefore the English "th," the shibboleth of his countrymen, troubled him but little.

"M. l'Abbé Dubayet, who taught my daughter, never learnt our language properly, though he had been in England for a quarter of a century," remarked the Rector, commenting on his visitor's proficiency.

"So much the better for Mademoiselle, who speaks, I will wager, like a Tourangelle," responded the young Frenchman, with a little bow in Horatia's direction.