116 MYSTERIES:
SCENE IV.
The next morning. Esméin bed asleep.
Enter Vaughan.
VAUGHAN.
OOR child, poor child, how are you? You have
not slept, I know. Why, she is still asleep!
Hush! How calmly and regularly she breathes! How
fresh she looks! How she smiles! It is wonderful! It
is impossible! Esmé! Esmé! it is a pity you cannot
always sleep so, and never wake up to the cruel
sorrow of yesterday. Ah me! When we all thought
to be so happy. And in a month he would have
married her: in a day he would have finished the
poem. What a wonderful poem it was! One could
hear, above the angels that sang, the voice of God in
that awful music that made his lines quiver and
shimmer like live coals. And the end was to have
been so perfect: there was on the last passage of his
work a hush, a silence almost as if the world—his
world—awaited the voice of some great one. And
now the silence is not broken. Perhaps men were
not ready for those final chords. Perhaps to hear
them would be to pass where he has passed! But
oh! the pity! To leave his greatest task undone!
To be stricken down in the last charge, a good soldier
to the end! Would God he could come back only