Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

They turned their horses, and trotted quietly home, Vera pale and somewhat shaken by the excitement of the long gallop. They were near the end of their country holiday, and they were to part at the end of the week, Claude to spend a fortnight at Newmarket, Vera to start alone for Italy, stopping here and there for a few days, on her way to her Roman villa, where Claude was to join her, bringing his hunters with him, not these light thoroughbreds, but horses of coarser quality and more experience, fitter for the rough work of the Campagna.

It had been Vera's own fancy to revisit familiar places in Italy. Claude had been urgent with her to abandon the idea, but she would not listen to him.

"I want to see San Marco, where I lived so long with Grannie; when we were poor and shabby—such a humdrum life. I sometimes wonder how I could bear it?"

"Poor child! It was hard lines for you. But why conjure up the memory of things that were sad? Looking back is always a mistake. Looking back at the old worn-out things, going back to long-trodden paths! Nobody can afford to do that. Plus ultra is my motto. In Rome there will be plenty for us to do. We must make our third winter more astounding than either of the other two. I know lots of people who are to be there, all sorts of big pots, pretty women, scribblers, painters, soldiers. You will have to invent new features for your evenings, new combinations of all kinds, and you must cultivate the new lights. When the season is over people must go about saying that Mrs. Rutherford has made Rome."

Vera looked at her husband curiously. How shallow he was, after all, how trivial! There were moments when her heart felt frozen, dreadful moments of disenchantment in which the man she had loved seemed to change and become a stranger; moments when she asked herself with a sudden wonder why she had ever loved him.

These were but flashes of disillusion. A touch of tenderness, a thought of all they had been to each other, and her bitter need of his love, made her again his slave. From the hour when he surrendered his chance of redemption, and came to her in her Roman garden, came to claim her with passionate words of love, he had been something more than her lover and her husband. He had been her master, ruling her life even in its trivialities, with a mind so shallow that it could find delight in details, leading and directing her in an existence where there was to be no room for thought.

He had planned their days at Disbrowe so that there should be no margin for ennui. When they were not riding they were on the yacht racing round the coast to Boscastle or Padstow: or they were playing tennis or croquet with the house-party, creating an atmosphere of excitement.

They parted at Disbrowe, Claude leaving for Newmarket; and they were not to meet till November, when he was to find Vera established in the Roman villa. All gaiety and excitement seemed to have left her with him, and Aunt Mildred remarked the change.

"You ought to have gone to Newmarket with your husband," she said, "though I have always thought it a horrid place for women, a place where they think of nothing but horses, and talk nothing but racing slang, and are as full of their bets as professional book-makers. I hate horsey women; but you and Claude are such a romantic couple, that it seems a pity you should ever be separated."

"Romance cannot last for ever, my dear aunt. We have been married nearly three years. It is time we became like other people. I have just your feeling about Newmarket. I was keen about the stud for the first year or two, petting the horses, and watching their gallops in the early mornings; and then it began to seem childish to care so much about them; and whether they won or lost it was the same thing over and over again. The trainer and his boys said just the same things about every success and every defeat. The crack jockeys were all the same, and I hardly knew one from another. I still love the horses for their own sake; and I am miserable if any of them are sold into bondage. But I am sick to death of the whole business."