Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

Mario Provana's wife was the fashion. The prestige for which some women strive and labour for years, spending themselves and their husband's fortunes in the strenuous endeavour, and having to confess themselves failures at last, had been won by Vera without an effort. Her husband's wealth had done much; her youth, and the something rare and exceptional in her beauty, had done more; but the Disbrowes had done the most of all. With such material—a triple millionaire's wife in the first bloom of her loveliness—the work had been easy; but no one could deny that the Disbrowes had worked, and might fairly congratulate themselves, as well as their fair young cousin, (first, second, or third, as the case might be) upon the result of their tactful efforts. All Disbrowes were supposed to have tact, just as they had arched insteps, and long, lean hands. It was as much a mark of their race.

From the day of Vera's return from her long Italian honeymoon she found herself walled round and protected by her mother's kindred. They came from all the points of the compass. Lord Okehampton from his park in North Devon, Lady Balgowrie from her castle in Aberdeenshire, Lady Helstone from the Land's End. They came unbidden, and overflowing with affection, but much too tactful to be vulgarly demonstrative.

"Poor Lady Felicia's foolish pride kept us all at a distance," they told Vera; "but now that you are emancipated, and your own mistress, I hope you will let us be useful."

From countesses down to hard-up spinsters, they all said the same thing, and no one could accuse them of "gush." They all announced themselves as worldlings, pure and simple, and they made no professions.

"You have made a great match, my dear," said Lady Helstone, "and you have a great career before you, if you are careful in the choice of your friends. That is the essential point. One black sheep among your flock might spoil all your chances. There are men about town that my husband calls 'oilers'—they were called tigers when my mother was young—and one of those in a new woman's visiting list can wreck her. The creatures are intolerably pushing, and don't rest till they can pose as cavaliere servente or at least as l'ami de la maison."

Vera welcomed this army of blood relations with amiability, but without enthusiasm. She was ready to love that one kind lady who had given her the only happy holiday of her childhood, under whose hospitable roof she had known Claude Rutherford; but the countesses who had been unaware of her existence while she was a dependant upon "poor Lady Felicia," could have no claim upon her affection. Yet they and their belongings were all pleasant people; and in that large and splendid house which was to be her home in London, she found that people were wanted.

The emptiness of those spacious rooms, during the long hours when her husband was at his offices in the City, soon became appalling; and she was glad of the lively aunts and cousins, and their following, who transformed her drawing-rooms into a parrot house, both for noise and brilliant colour, to say nothing of the aquiline beaks that prevailed among the dowagers and elderly bachelors. Once established as her relations—the distance of some of the cousinship being ignored—they came as often as Vera cared to ask them, and they brought all the people whom Vera ought to know, the poets, and novelists, and playwrights, who were all dying to know the daughter of Lancelot Davis, that delightful poet whom everybody loved and nobody envied. His fame had increased since he had gone into the ground; and his shade was now crowned with that belated fame which is the aureole of the dead. They brought the newest painting people, and the fashionable actors and actresses, English or American, as well as that useful following of "nice boys," who are as necessary in every drawing-room as occasional chairs, or tables to hold tea-cups.

Instigated by the Disbrowes, and with Mario Provana's approval, Vera soon began that grand business of entertaining, to which a triple millionaire's wife should indubitably devote the greater part of her time, talent, and energy. Countesses and countess-dowagers gave their mornings to her, advising whom she should invite, and how she should entertain. They instructed her in the table of precedence as solemnly as if it had been the Church Catechism, showed her how, in some rare concatenation, a rule might be broken, as a past master of harmony might, on occasion, allow himself the use of consecutive fifths.

They were never tired of extending Madame Provana's knowledge of life as it is lived in the London that is bounded on the south by Queen Anne's Gate and by Portland Place on the north. They called it opening her mind—and praised her for the intelligence with which she mastered the social problems.

Her husband was pleased to see her admired and cherished, above all to see her happy; yet he could not but feel some touch of disappointment when he looked back upon those quiet afternoons in the olive woods at San Marco, and the tea-parties of three in Lady Felicia's sitting-room, and remembered how he had thought he was marrying a friendless and unappreciated girl, who would be all the world to him, and for whom he must be all the world, in a long future of wedded love.