Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

She was alone, but she told herself that solitude did not matter. It was not solitude that weighed upon her spirits as she roamed from room to room in the emptiness and silence. It was the sense of not being alone that weighed upon her. It was the consciousness of a silent presence—the invisible third who had come between her and her husband of late—who had come back into her life. In the noontide of her love, while passion reigned supreme, and the man she loved filled her world, the shadow had been lifted from her path. She had seen all old things dimly—dazzled by the glory of her life's sun. She had remembered nothing, except her childish bliss with the boy who was to be her fate. Her life began and ended in her husband; as it had begun and ended in Claude Rutherford when he was only her friend and companion, the light-hearted companion, whose presence meant happiness.

In the first two years of her second marriage she had been completely absorbed in that transcendent love, and in the ceaseless round of pleasures and excitements that her husband contrived for her, filling her days and nights with emotional moments, with little social triumphs and trivial ambitions.

Satiety came in an hour—or it may be that it came so slowly and so gradually that there was an hour when Vera awoke to the consciousness that she was tired of everything, that the earth with all its changing loveliness, its surprises of mountain and lake, wood and river, was but a sterile promontory, and the blue vault above Como only a pestilent congregation of vapours. The suddenness of the revelation was startling; but the not uncommon malady that afflicted the Prince of Denmark had been eating her heart for a long time before she was aware of its hold upon her. And with the coming of satiety, the distaste for amusement, the distrust of love, came the shadow. Memory that had been lulled asleep by the magic philtre of passion, awakened and was alive again. She roamed the great, silent house, haunting with a morbid preference those rooms that were particularly associated with the dead man, that range of spacious rooms on the ground floor where nothing had been altered since Mario Provana lived in them: his library, and the severe, official-looking sitting-room adjoining, where he was often closeted with his partners and allies, his head clerks and managers, his business visitors from Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, New York.

When the drawing-rooms had been transformed by a gayer style of decoration, more in harmony with Vera's frivolous entertainments, Claude had been urgent that these ground-floor rooms should be refurnished, and every trace of their severe, business-like aspect done away with and even certain priceless old masters that Provana had been proud of despatched with ruthless haste to Christie's sale room; but to his astonishment Vera had told him that nothing was to be changed in the rooms her husband had occupied—that all things touched or valued by him were to be sacred.

For this reason, while approving Claude's plan of colour for the walls and draperies and carpets in the drawing-rooms, she had insisted upon retaining the Italian cabinets of ebony and ivory, and the Florentine mosaic tables, the things that had been collected all over Italy a century ago, in the beginning of the Provana riches.

And now, solitary and dejected, she moved restlessly from room to room. Sometimes standing before one of the bookcases in the library, looking along the titles of books that she had learnt to love, in those far-off days before she had been launched by the Disbrowes—a frail cockle-shell, spinning round and round in the Society whirlpool—while she and her husband were still unfashionable enough to sit together in the autumn twilight, or to spend tête-à-tête evenings in this solemn-looking room. His mind was with her there to-day, in the July sunshine, as it had been in those evenings of the past, while he was a living man. His remembered speech was in her ears to-day, grave and earnest, telling her the things she loved to hear, widening her view of life, opening the gate to new knowledge, the knowledge of authors she had never heard of, the story of heroes and statesmen, philosophers and poets, whose names had been only names till he made them living people, people to be admired and loved. He had taught her to comprehend and love Dante to appreciate the verse of Carducci, the prose of Manzoni. He had taught her to revere Cavour, to adore St. Francis of Assisi, to weep for Savonarola and Giordano Bruno. He had made Italy a land of genius and valour, a land alive from the Alps to the Adriatic with heroic memories. He had made her know and love the history of his country, almost as he himself loved it.

And now his spirit filled the room in which the man had lived. His shadow had come into the house that had been his, and had taken possession of the place and of the atmosphere. Whatever might still remain of the undisciplined love, the passion of unreasoning youth, that she had given to her second husband, she could never again release herself from that first marriage tie. It was the bond of death.

She went into the dining-room when luncheon was announced, carrying a volume of Browning, and made some pretence of eating, with the book open by the side of her plate, a proceeding upon which the butler expatiated somewhat severely that afternoon as he lingered over tea in the housekeeper's comfortable parlour.

"I don't know what's come over the Missus," he said, as he took an unwelcome "stranger" out of his second cup, and parenthetically, "This tea isn't what it was, Mrs. Manby. She don't eat enough for a tomtit, let alone a sparrow—and she's falling back into that dreamy way she was in when Provana was in America, and for a long time before that, as you may remember; that time when it was always not at home to Mr. Rutherford."

"She was trying to break with him," said Mrs. Manby. "I give her credit for that."