Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

The physician was more frank with the husband than he had been with the aunt, though even yet he said nothing to extinguish hope. He told Mr. Rutherford that it would have been better for his wife to winter in the South, or by way of experiment to try a short winter in the Engadine, coming down to Ragaz before the snow melted; but as the dear lady seemed strangely bent upon staying in her own house, it would be safer to indulge her fancy. Lungs and heart were only a question of weakness. The mind was of serious consequence; and everything must be done to check the tendency to melancholia.

"If we can make her happy, we shall be able to deal with the lung trouble," said the physician. "Open air and good spirits might work a miracle."

Dr. Tower naturally inquired as to parental history, and was somewhat disheartened on hearing that the dear lady's father and mother had died young, the former of galloping consumption, during an open-air cure; yet even this did not induce him to pronounce sentence of death. Nor did he allow Mrs. Rutherford to suppose herself a desperate case, though he insisted on having a trained nurse, and of the best, in attendance upon his patient, as well as the maid Louison.

The French girl might be all that Mrs. Rutherford could require, he admitted, when Vera told him she wanted no one else.

"But you must allow me what I want," pleaded Dr. Tower with his most ingratiating air. "My treatment is of the mildest—nothing heroic or troublesome about it—but I must be sure that it is followed. I must have someone about you who is responsible to me. My nurse shall not be allowed to bore you. If she is intrusive or disagreeable to you, you can telephone to me; and she shall be superseded within the hour."

Vera submitted. Her indifference to most things, even to those that concerned herself, was one of her symptoms which made Dr. Tower uneasy.

"This woman will never help to cure herself," he thought, as he drove away, with that far-off look in Vera's face impressed upon his mind. "She does not want to get well. She is not absolutely unhappy—only indifferent. Something must have gone wrong in her life. Yet her husband does not seem a bad sort."

She was not unhappy. She had been allowed to take her own way, and to live as she wished to live—in the silence and peace of the spacious house, where the business of entertaining seemed to be at an end for ever. Whatever had been amiss in the life that was ebbing away seemed hardly to matter, now that she was drawing near the other life. Her husband came and went, and spend a good deal of his time in her room, talking with her, or reading to her, when she was too tired to talk. There had been nothing said of his offence against her; no utterance of that other woman's name. They were friends again, and could talk of the things that they loved—literature, music, art; of Henry Irving's Hamlet; of Millais and Browning, both of whom she had seen at Aunt Mildred's house in her childhood, and whose faces she remembered; of books new and old. They were as friendly and sympathetic as they had been in Mario Provana's lifetime, before the dawn of love. It was as if they were still at the same platonic stage. All that had come after was like a lurid dream from which they had awakened. Tristram was again the true knight. Iseult was sinless.

All that was best in Claude Rutherford was in the ascendant during these long, slow weeks of silent sorrow, in which he knew that the man with the scythe was at the door, that nothing money could buy or love devise could save the woman he loved. He had broken finally with that other woman: finally, for the fiery cup had lost its intoxicating power, and the end had been a vulgar quarrel about money. Whatever was to happen to him, he was safe from that siren's spells.

All his natural sweetness, his sympathy and charm, were for Vera, in those quiet weeks of September and October, when there was nobody in London, and the chariot wheels rolled no more in the broad roadway. He was at his best in his wife's white morning-room, where the faces of the immortals looked down upon him, and where he was kind even to the dog she loved—the Irish terrier, brought home after his half-year's quarantine—who stretched his strong limbs and rough, red-brown body against her satin slippers, as she lay on her sofa, a fragile figure, shadowy in her loose white gown.