Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

And for the murdered man himself, no details were omitted. Interviews were invented, in which, during the last year, Signor Provana had expounded his opinions and views of that sphere of life in which he exercised so vast an influence—his ideas political, his tastes in art and literature, music, and the drama. Minute descriptions of his person were given in the same glowing style. The picturesque reporter made the dead man alive again for the million readers who were panting for details that would help them to strengthen their own pet theory or to crush an opponent.

Thousands of sensation-hunters went to Portland Place to look at the house that held that dreadful mystery of a life untimely cut short by the hand of a murderer. Loafers stood on the pavement and gazed and gazed, as if their hungry eyes would have pierced dead walls and darkened windows. The loafers knew that the house was in charge of the police, and that a vigilant watch was being kept there. They wondered whether the lovely young wife was in the house. They pictured her weeping alone in one of those darkened rooms; yet were inclined to think that her friends would have insisted on her leaving that house of gloom, and would have carried her off to some less terrible place for rest and comfort.

The first idea was the correct one. Vera was lying in that spacious bed-chamber behind three windows on the second floor, where ivy-leaved geraniums were falling in showers of pale pink blossom from the flower-boxes. She was lying on the vast Italian bed, lying like a stone figure, while Susan Amphlett sat by the bed, and wept and sighed, with intervals of vague, consoling speech, till, finding that speech elicited no reply, and indeed seemed unheard, she had at last, in sheer vacuity of mind, to take refuge in the first book within reach of her hand.

It was one among many small volumes on a table by the bed—Omar Kháyyam.

"Oh, what a dreary book," thought Susie, who was beginning to feel her office of consoler something of a burden.

She had hated entering that dreadful house, as she always called it in her thoughts, since she had heard of the murder; and now to be sitting there in that deadly silence, in that grey light from shrouded windows, to be sitting there with the knowledge that only a little way off, in another darkened room at the back of the dreadful house, there lay death in its most appalling form, was a kind of martyrdom for which Susie was unprepared, and which she was not constituted to suffer calmly or lightly. As she had hated old age, so, with a deeper hate, she hated death. To hear of it, to be forced to think of it, was agonising; and to visualise the horror lying so near her, a murdered man in his bloodstained shroud, made her start up from her easy chair and begin to roam about the room in restlessness and fear.

She lifted the edge of a blind and peered into the street.

The sight of the people staring up at the house was comforting. They were alive. There were people standing in the road, looking up with widened eyes, so absorbed in what they saw, or wanted to see, that they ran a risk of sudden annihilation from a motor-car, and skipped off to the opposite pavement, there to content themselves with a more distant view.

"There never was such a murder," Susie said to herself. "I think every soul in town must have come to look at this horrid house since eleven o'clock this morning."

It was now past three, in a dull, sultry afternoon. Susie spent all the intervening hours in the silent room in the dreadful house. She was sorry for her friend; but she was still more sorry for herself. All those hours of silent horror, without any luncheon, and no good done! What was the use of sitting by the bed where a woman lay dumb and motionless, unconsoled by affectionate murmurs from a bosom friend, apparently unconscious that the friend was there.