Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

"That's rather lovely!" exclaimed Miss Flippant. "I would give worlds to see him."

"We'll excuse you the worlds, even if you owned them," said Claude in his lazy voice. "You may see him within the next ten minutes, unless he is a promise-breaker. I had not forgotten your commands, Vera. I spent half a day in hunting Symeon, and did not leave him till he promised to come to tea with you. I believe tea is the most material refreshment he takes."

"You are ever so much better than I thought you," said Vera, with one look up at Rutherford, before she turned to gaze at the distant door, heedless of the talk that went on round her, until after some minutes a servant announced "Mr. Symeon."

Claude Rutherford left his station by the mantelpiece and went to meet the visitor.

The spacious rooms were mostly in shadow by this time, all the lamps being so tempered by artistic shades in sea-green silk that they gave faint patches of colour rather than light, and some people started at the sound of Mr. Symeon's name, almost as if they had seen a ghost.

It was a name that all cultured people knew, even when they did not know the man. Francis Symeon was a leader in the spiritual world, and there were no depths in the mysteries of occultism, from ancient Egypt to modern India, that he had not sounded. He was the editor and proprietor of The Unseen, a quarterly magazine, to which only the most advanced thinkers were allowed to contribute—a magazine which the subscriber opened with a thrill of anticipation, wondering what new revelation of the "life beyond" he was to find in those shining, hot-pressed pages, where the matter was often more dazzling than the gloss on the paper.

Vera watched with eager interest and a faint flush of pleasure as Rutherford and Symeon came through the shadows towards her.

"You see I have kept my promise, and here is Mr. Symeon, to answer some of those far-reaching questions with which you often bewilder my poor brain."

Vera left her table, where there had come a sudden lull in the soprano voices as Mr. Symeon drew near—a pause in the discussion of frocks and hats in the new comedy at the St. James's. She stood up to talk to Mr. Symeon, telling him how she had been reading the last number of The Unseen, and more especially his own contribution, an essay on the other life, as understood by Tennyson and Browning.

In that half-light which makes all beautiful things more beautiful, she had a spirit look, and might have seemed the materialisation of Mr. Symeon's thought, as she stood before him, fragile and slender, with glimmering lamplight on her cloud of brown hair, and on the simple white gown, of some transparent fabric, loosely draped over satin that flashed through its fleecy whiteness. Her only ornament was a necklace of aqua marina in a Tiffany setting.