Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

Everything seemed deadly still, a calm that weighed upon the spirits. Her grandmother had caught cold on the journey, and the English doctor had to be summoned in the morning after their arrival.

He was their first acquaintance in San Marco, and was the most popular inhabitant in that quiet settlement. Old ladies talked of him as "chatty" and "so obliging"; but objected to him on the ground of too frequent visits, which made it perilous to call him in for any small ailment, whereby he was sometimes called in too late for an illness which was graver than the patient suspected.

Dr. Wilmot was essentially a snob, but the amiable kind of snob, fussy, obliging, benevolent, and with a childlike worship of rank for its own sake. He was delighted to find a Lady Felicia at the Hôtel des Anglais—where even a courtesy title was rare, and where for the most part a City Knight's widow took the pas of all the other inmates.

Dr. Wilmot told Lady Felicia that she had chosen the very best spot on the Riviera for her bronchial trouble, and that the longer she stayed at San Marco the better she would like the place.

The bronchial trouble was mitigated, but not conquered; and from this time Lady Felicia claimed all the indulgences of a confirmed invalid; while Vera's position became that of an assistant nurse, subordinate always to Grannie's devoted maid, a sturdy North Country woman of eight-and-forty, who had been in Lady Felicia's service from her eighteenth year, and who could talk to Vera of her mother, as she remembered her, in those long-ago days before the runaway marriage which was supposed to have broken Grannie's heart. Vera had no idea of shirking the duties imposed upon her. She walked to the market to buy flowers for Lady Felicia's sitting-room, and she cut and snipped them and petted them to keep them alive for a week; she dusted the books and photographs, and the priceless morsels of Chelsea and Dresden china, which Grannie carried about with her, and which gave a cachet to the shabby second-floor salon. She went on all Grannie's errands; she walked beside her Bath chair, and read her to sleep in the drowsy, windless afternoons, when the casements were wide open, and the sea looked like a stagnant pond. It was a dismal life for a girl on the edge of womanhood—a girl who had little to look back upon and nothing to look forward to. It seemed to Vera sometimes as if she had never lived, and as if she were never going to live.

Grannie talked of the same things day after day; indeed, her conversation suggested a talking-machine, for one always knew what was coming. The talk was for the most part a long lament over all the things that had gone amiss in Grannie's life. The follies and mistakes of other people: father, uncles and aunts, husband, daughter; the wrong-headedness and self-will of others that had meant shipwreck for Grannie. Vera listened meekly, and could not say much in excuse for the sins of these dead people, of whose lives and characters she knew only what Grannie had told her. For her mother she did plead, at the risk of offending Grannie. She knew the history of the girl's love for her poet-lover; for she had it all in her father's exquisite verse; a story poem in which every phase of that romantic love lived in colour and light. Vera could feel the young hearts beating, as she hung over pages that were to her as sacred as Holy Writ.

Grannie's bronchitis and Grannie's memories of past wrongs did not make for cheerfulness; and even the loveliness of that Italian shore in the celestial light of an Italian spring was not enough for the joy of life. There is a profound melancholy that comes down upon the soul in the monotony of a beautiful scene—where there is nothing besides that scenic beauty—a monotony that weighs heavier than ugliness. A dull street in Bloomsbury would have been hardly more oppressive than the afternoon stillness of San Marco, when Grannie had fallen asleep in her nest of silken cushions, and Vera had her one little walk alone—up and down, up and down the poor scrap of promenade with its scanty row of palms, tall and straggling, crowned with a spare tuft of leaves, and a bunch of dates that never came to maturity.

Companionless and hopeless, Vera paced the promenade, and looked over the tideless sea.

The only changes in the days were the alternations of Grannie's health, the days when she was better, and the days when she was worse, and when Dr. Wilmot came twice—dreary days, on which Vera had to go down to the table d'hôte alone, and to run the gauntlet of all the other visitors, who surrounded her in the hall, obtrusively sympathetic, and wanting to know the fullest particulars of Lady Felicia's bronchial trouble, and what Dr. Wilmot thought of it. They told her it must be very dull for her to be always with an invalid, and they tried to lure her into the public drawing-room, where she might join in a round game, or even make a fourth at bridge; or, if there were a conjuror that evening, the elderly widows and spinsters almost insisted upon her stopping to see the performance.

"No, thank you, I mustn't stay. Grannie wants me," she would answer quietly; and after she had run upstairs, there would be a chorus of disapproval of Lady Felicia's want of consideration in depriving the sweet child of every little pleasure within her reach.