Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

It was a massive, oblong tomb without device or symbol, and only an artist would have been conscious of the delicate workmanship with which every member of the unobtrusive mouldings had been executed. There was no elaborate ornament, only a Doric simplicity, and the perfection of finely finished work.

The same simplicity marked the brief inscription on the level slab.

"Giulia, the only child of Mario Provana." This—with the date of birth and death—-was all. No record of parental love, nothing for the world to know, except that a father's one ewe lamb had lived and died.

A yew hedge, breast high, made a quadrangular enclosure which isolated Giulia's resting-place—a cemetery within a cemetery—and, at the end facing Genoa and the morning sun, there was a broad marble bench, and here Vera sat for nearly an hour, reading her father's poem, the work of his last year, written after the hand of death had touched him.

It was an hour of pensive thought, and as she pondered over pages where every line was familiar, it seemed to her that Giulia's spirit could not be remote from the friend whose sudden tears fell on the page, where some deeper melancholy in the verse brought last year's sorrow back with the force of a new grief.

The sun was low when she left the cemetery, and the shiver that comes with sundown chilled her as she hurried back to the hotel, more than five minutes late for Grannie's tea. But the following afternoon, and the day after that, she went back to the Roman bench, and sat there till sunset, with the green cloth volume that had grown shabby with much use, and her memory of Giulia, for her only companions. After this she went there every afternoon, sometimes with "Afterwards," sometimes with a volume of Byron or Shelley. The sense of dullness and monotony that had depressed her in her walk up and down the parade under the palm trees seldom came upon her in this silent enclosure, where the yew hedge—that only wealth could have attained in so brief a time—screened her from observation. She sometimes heard the voices of tourists admiring the monuments, or reading the epitaphs, in the cemetery; but it was rarely that anyone looked in at the opening in the green quadrangle where she sat.

It was more than a fortnight after her first visit to this mournful solitude when for the first time Vera was startled by the sound of approaching footsteps, and looking up she saw the tall form of Mario Provana, standing in the golden sunset. She rose as he came towards her, and gave him her hand, a hand so slender that it seemed to disappear in the broad palm and strong fingers that clasped it.

"I was told that you were in San Marco," he said; "but I never thought I should find you here. Then you have not forgotten?"

"I shall never forget. I come here every afternoon with my father's book—the poem he wrote when he knew that he was dying."

"May I sit by your side for a few minutes? I should like to see your father's book. I have not forgotten that he was a poet. Since you told me that, it has seemed as if I ought to have known beforehand. You look like a poet's child. I suppose everybody who saw Miranda for the first time, without having seen Prospero, ought to have known that her father was a magician."