Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

It was the dead season of the year. The late lingering roses on the walls had a sodden look, the pepper trees drooped disconsolately, and a curtain of grey mist hung over the parade, where Vera had walked, alone and dejected, before the coming of Giulia and her father. The hills where they had driven looked farther away in the shadowy atmosphere. There was no gleaming whiteness on the distant mountains. All was grey and melancholy—and in unison with her thoughts of the dead. She had come there to look upon her husband's grave. She had been prostrate and helpless at the time of his burial, and had only just been capable of arousing herself from a state of apathy, to insist that he should be carried back to the country of his birth, and should lie beside his daughter in the shadow of the cypresses, between the sea and the olive woods.

Even in that agonising time the picture of that familiar spot had been in her mind as she gave her instructions; and she had seen the marble tomb in its green enclosure, and the tall trees standing deeply black against the pale gold of the sky, as on that evening when Mario Provana had found her sitting by his daughter's tomb. He must lie there, she told his partner, nowhere else; no, not even in Rome, where his family had their stately sepulchre. It was under the marble tomb he had made for his idolised child that he must rest.

And now, in the dull grey November, she stood once more beside the marble and read the lines that had been graven under Giulia's brief epitaph. "Also in memory of Mario Provana, her father, who died in London, on July the thirteenth, 19—, in the fifty-seventh year of his age." And below this one word—"Re-united."

She stayed long in the green enclosure, her dog coming back to her after much exploration of the wood above, where he had startled and scattered any animal life that he could find there, and the seashore below, where he stirred the tideless waves by the vehemence of his plunges; and then she went for a long ramble in the familiar paths where she had walked with Provana in those sunny afternoons, before the ride to the chocolate mills. She stayed nearly a week at San Marco, repeating the same process every day; first a lingering visit to the grave, and then a long, lonely walk in the paths she had trodden with the man whom she had thought of only as her friend's father, until by an imperceptible progress he had made himself the one close friend of her life. She took pains to find the very paths they had trodden together, the humble shrines or chapels they had looked at, the rocks where they had sat down to rest.

When she had first spoken of revisiting San Marco Claude had done his uttermost to dissuade her. "Don't be morbid," he had said more than once. "Your mind has a fatal leaning that way. You ought to fight against it."

Yes, she knew that she was morbid, that she had taken to brooding upon melancholy memories, that she was cultivating sadness. Alone in the olive wood, watching the evening light change and fade, and the shadows steal slowly from the valley and the sea, while memory recalled words that had been spoken in that narrow pathway, among those grey old trees in the light and shade of evenings that seemed ages ago, she had a feeling that was almost happiness. It was a memory of happiness so vivid that it seemed the thing itself.

She had been very happy in those tranquil evenings. She knew now that she had begun to love Mario Provana many days before his impassioned avowal had taken her by storm. His eloquence, his power of thought and feeling, had made life and the world new. She "saw Othello's visage in his mind." His rugged features and his eight-and-forty years were forgotten in the charm of his conversation and the rare music of his voice. The world of the scholar, of the thinker, and the poet, had been an unknown world to the girl of eighteen, whose poor little bit of flimsy education had been limited to the morning hours of a Miss Greenhow at a guinea a week. He opened the gate of that divine world and led her in, and they walked there together; he charmed by her freshness and naïveté, she dazzled by his wealth of knowledge and his power of imagination. Not even her poet father could have had a wider knowledge of books, or a greater power of thought, she told herself; which was a concession to friendship, as she had hitherto put her father in the front rank of those who know.

She looked back at those innocent hours, when he who was so soon to be her husband was only thought of as her first friend.

She looked back to hours that seemed to her to have been the happiest in all her life. Yes, the happiest; for happiness is sunshine and calm weather, not fever and storm. There were other hours more romantic and more thrilling, but agonising to remember—sensual, devilish. Those hours in the woods had been serene and pure, and she had walked there with the heart of a child.

How kind he had been, how kind! It was the kindness in the low, grave voice that had made its music: only the kindness of a friend of mature years interested in her youth and ignorance, only a grave and thoughtful friend, liking her because she had been loved by his dead daughter. That is what she had thought of him for the greater part of those quiet hours. Yet now and then she had been startled by a sudden suggestion. She did not know, but she felt that he was her lover.