Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

All show of brightness had vanished from the stretch of thin grass and the ragged pepper trees—no pretty chairs or bright Italian draperies, no gaudy-plumaged cockatoo, or be-ribboned Blenheims. All was desolate, and tears clouded Vera's eyes, as she paused to look at the place where she had been happy.

"How could I ever forget that she was going to die?" she wondered.

"It was she herself who made me forget. She was so full of joy—so much alive—that I never really believed she was dying. I could not believe; I never did believe, till she was lying speechless, with death in her face."

She was going to the cemetery, to her friend's grave. It was almost as if she were going to Giulia. She could not believe the bright spirit was quenched, although the lovely form had passed into everlasting darkness. Somewhere between earth and heaven that happy soul was conscious of the beauty of the world she had loved, and of the love that had been given to her—somewhere, not utterly beyond the reach of those who loved her, that sweet spirit was floating—not dead, but emancipated.

Miss Thompson had told her of the heroic fortitude behind that light-hearted gaiety which had been Giulia's special charm. Although she was sustained by the unconsciousness of her doom, which goes so often with pulmonary disease, she had not been exempt from suffering. The sleepless night, the wearying cough, breathlessness, pain, exhaustion, fever, had all been borne with a sublime patience; and her only thought when the tardy morning stole at last upon the seeming endless night—had been of her father. He was never to be told she had slept badly—or had not slept at all—and it was her own cheerful voice that answered his inquiry as he stood at the half-open door: "Pretty well, Padre mio, si, si; not a bad night—a pretty good night—very good, upon the whole." No hint of the weariness, the suffering, of those long hours—and the nurse, though unwilling, had to indulge her, and allow the anxious father to be deceived. After all, as Miss Thompson said, a detail like that could not matter. He knew.

Remembering this, it seemed to Vera that Giulia's death meant emancipation—a blessed escape from the mortal frame that was fraught with suffering, to the freedom of the immortal spirit, winged for its flight to higher horizons, a being with new capacities, new joys—yet not unremembering those beloved on earth, nay, with a higher power to love the clay-bound creatures it had loved when it was clay.

In Vera's reverence for her father's genius, there had been much of the child's unquestioning faith in something it has been told to admire, for a considerable part of Lancelet Davis's poetry, and that which his review book showed to have been most appreciated by his critics, soared far beyond the limits of Vera's understanding. There were verses which she recited to herself again and again, with a delight in their music—verses where the words followed each other with an entrancing melodiousness—but for whose meaning she sought in vain. A Runic rhyme would have been as clear. She had repeated them dumbly in the dead hours of the night. Mellifluous lines that had a soothing charm. Lines that rose and fell like the waves of the sea; and lines drawn out in a slow monotony like the long, level stretch of wind-swept marshes—visions of white temples and strange goddesses; but they were shapeless as dreams to Vera—a confusion of lovely images without one distinct idea.

There were others of his poems that she understood and loved; the poems that the critics had mourned over as a disappointment, a falling away from the promise of a splendid career. There was his story of his courtship and wedded life, which Vera thought better than "Maud," written during his three happy years; and there was a poem called "Afterwards," written after her mother's death, which she thought better than "In Memoriam," a poem in which, after descending to the darkness of the grave, the poet soared to the gate of heaven, and told how where there is great love there is no such thing as death. The bond of love is also the bond of the dead and the living. Those who love with intensity cannot be parted. The spirit returns from behind the veil, and soul meets soul. Not in the crowded city—not within the sound of foolish voices, not amidst people or things that are of the earth earthy—but in the quiet graveyard, in the shadowy gloom of the forest, in lonely places by the starlit sea, or in the silence of sleepless nights, that other half of the soul is near, and, though there is neither voice nor touch, the beloved presence is felt, and the message of consolation is heard.

It was with her father's poem in her hand that Vera went to the white-walled enclosure under the hill, where the silver-grey of the olive woods shivered in the faint wind that could not stir a fibre of the cypress.

She had no trouble in finding Giulia's resting-place, for the picture of the spring morning when she had stood beside the open grave was in her mind, as if the funeral had been yesterday. It was at the farther end of the cemetery, in a little solitude guarded by a triangle of cypresses that marked the end of the enclosure, a spot where the ground rose considerably above the level of the larger space. Upon this higher level the massive marble tomb—so severely simple, so dazzling in its whiteness—dominated the lower plane, where memorial devices of every shape and form, Gothic cross, and broken column, winged angel, inverted torch, and Grecian urn, seemed poor and trivial by comparison.