Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

She remembered how those tranquil afternoons had become impossible, by reason of her perpetual engagements; and how quietly Mario Provana had submitted to the change in her way of life, the succession of futile pleasures, the hurry and excitement.

"I want you to be happy," he told her, when she made a feeble apology for not having an afternoon at his service.

"You are young, and you must enjoy your youth. Things that seem trivial and joyless to me are new and sweet to you. Be happy, love. I have plenty of use for my time."

That was in the beginning of their drifting apart. Looking back to-night she could but wonder as she remembered how gradually, how imperceptibly that drifting apart had gone on; until she awoke one day to find that she and her husband were estranged. He was kind, had only an indulgent smile for the folly of her life, but the happy union of their first wedded years was over and done with. In Lady Susan's brief phrase, "They had become like other people."

And now she and Claude Rutherford had drifted apart, and were like other people. The reunion of a few weeks at Disbrowe was but a flash of summer across the gathering gloom of their lives.

"He can be happy," she thought, brooding in the night silence. "He cares for so many things. I care for nothing but the things that are gone."

And then, while the clock of All Souls struck that solemn single stroke which has even a more awful note than the twelve strokes of midnight, she thought of her dead—all her dead. Her poets, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne—men who had lived while she was living, and one by one had vanished—of the great tragic actor whose genius had thrilled her childish heart—of all that company of the great who had died long before she was born—and it seemed to her in her dejection as if the earth were an empty desert, in which nothing great or beautiful was left. They had all gone through the dark gates of death—across the wild that no man knows. Her poet father, her lovely young mother, phantoms of beauty, distant and dim, evanescent shadows in the memory of a child. Yet, if Francis Symeon's creed were true, they were not gone for ever. They had not gone across the wild to dark distances beyond the reach of human thought. They were only emancipated. The worm had cast its earthly husk, and the spirit had spread its wings. Released from the laws of space and time, the all-understanding mind of the dead could be in sympathy with the elect among the living.

With Us, the elect, who have renounced the joys of sense, and lived only to cultivate the pleasures of the mind: for us the poets we worship still live, the minds that have been the light and leading of our minds are our companions and friends. We need no salaried medium's abracadabra to summon them, no weary waiting round a table in a darkened room, disturbed by suspicions of trickery. They come to us uncalled, as we sit alone in the gloaming, or wander alone over the desolate down, or by the long sea-shore. The poem we read is suddenly illuminated with the soul of the poet: the printed page becomes a message from the immortal mind.

To-night, in that silent hour, it was only of the dead Vera thought, as she wandered from room to room in the house of fear, shrinking from the prospect of the long, sleepless hours, weary yet restless. Restlessness made her wander into regions that were almost strange.

She drew aside a heavy curtain, and pushed open a crimson cloth door that led from the hall of ceremony to those inferior regions common to servants and tradesmen—the long stone passage, with doors right and left, the passage that ended at the door into the stable-yard, the door by which Mario Provana had entered on the night of his death.