Flames. Robert Hichens
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Robert Hichens
Flames
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664586230
Table of Contents
BOOK III—THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS
CHAPTER I
THE TRANCE
Gaining no reply to his call, Julian grew alarmed. He sprang up from the table and turned on the electric light. Valentine was leaning back nervelessly in his chair. His face was quite pale and cold. His lips were slightly parted. His eyes were wide open and stared before him without expression. His head hung far back over the edge of his chair. He looked exactly like a man who had just died, and died in a convulsion. For though the lips were parted, the teeth set tightly together grinned through them, and the hands were intensely contracted into fists. Julian seized Valentine in his arms, lifted the drooping body from the chair and laid it out at length on the divan. He put a pillow under the head, which fell on it grotesquely and lay sideways, still smiling horribly at nothing. Then he poured out a glass of brandy and strove to force some of it between Valentine's teeth, dashed water in the glaring eyes, beat the air with a fan which he tore from the mantelpiece. All was in vain. There came no sign of returning life. Then Julian caught Valentine's hands in his and sought to unclench the rigid, cold fingers. He laid his hand on the heart of his friend. No pulsation beat beneath his anxious touch. Then a great horror overtook him. Suddenly he felt a conviction that Valentine had died beside him in the dark, had died sitting up in his chair by the table. The cry he had heard, so thin, so strange and piercing, the attenuated flame that he had seen, were the voice and the vision of the flying soul which he had loved, seeking its final freedom, en route to the distant spheres believers dream of and sceptics deny.
"Valentine! Valentine!" he cried again, with the desperate insistence of the hopeless. But the cold, staring creature upon the green divan did not reply. With a brusque and fearful movement Julian shut the eyelids. Would they ever open again? He knelt upon the floor, leaning passionately over his friend, or that which had been his friend. He bent his head down on the silent breast, listening. Surely if Valentine were alive he would show it by some sign, the least stir, breath, shiver, pulse. There was none. Julian might have been clasping stone or iron. If he could only know for certain whether Valentine were really