Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

Lady Susan was a somewhat exacting visitor; but it was years since she had seen the inside of a dining-room before luncheon, so Vera's mornings were her own. The half-past twelve o'clock déjeuner even appeared painfully early to Susie, though she contrived to be present at that luxurious meal, where there were often amusing droppers-in, lads from the embassies, soldiers in picturesque uniforms, literary people and artistic people, mostly Americans, people whom Susie could not afford to miss.

Vera's mornings were her own, but she was obliged to do the afternoon drive in the Pincio gardens and along the Corso with Lady Susan, and after the drive she could creep away for an hour to her too-spacious saloon where all the gods and goddesses of Olympus looked down upon her from the tapestry, and sit and dream in the gloaming—or brood over a new novel by Matilda Seraio, her reading-lamp making a speck of light in a world of shadows.

Here, by the red log-fire, where the pine-cones hissed and sputtered, the Irish terrier was her happy companion, laying his head upon her knee, or thrusting his black nose into her hand, now and then, to show her that there was somebody who loved her, and only refraining from leaping on her lap by the good manners inculcated in his puppyhood by an accomplished canine educator.

Sometimes she would throw down her book, snatch up a fur coat from the sofa where it lay, and go out through the glass door that opened into the gardens; and then, with Boroo bounding and leaping round her, letting off volleys of joyful barks, she would run to the lonely garden at the back of the villa, where there was a long terrace on a ridge of high ground shaded with umbrella pines, and with a statue here and there in a niche cut in the wall of century-old ilex.

The solitary walk with her dog in a dark garden always had a quieting effect upon her nerves—like the morning ramble in the outskirts of Rome. To be alone, to be able to think, soothed her. The life without thought was done with. Now to think was to be consoled. Even memories that brought tears had comfort in them.

"What can I do for him but remember him and regret him?" she thought. "It is my only atonement. If what Francis Symeon told me is true and the dead are near us, he knows and understands. He knows, and he forgives."

Sad, sweet thoughts, that came with a rush of tears!

These quiet hours helped her to bear the evening gaieties, the evening splendours. She went everywhere that Claude wanted her to go, gave as many parties as he liked, déjeuners, dinners, suppers after opera or theatre, anything. Her gold was poured out like water. The Newmarket horses were running in the Roman races; the Leicestershire hunters were ridden to death on the Campagna. Claude Rutherford was more talked about, and more admired, than any young man in Rome. He laughed sometimes, remembering the old books, and told them he was like Julius Cæsar in his adolescence, a "harmless trifler." Claude Rutherford was happy; and he thought that his wife was happy also. Certainly she had been happy at Disbrowe less than half a year ago; and there had been nothing since then to distress her. The long rambles of which Susan told him, the evening seclusion, meant nothing. No doubt she was morbid; she had always been morbid. If she had a grief of any kind she loved to brood upon it.

"What grief can she have?" Susan asked. "There never was such a perfect life. She has everything."