Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

Claude Rutherford had become a part of her life, and life was meaningless without him: a fatal stage in the downhill path, but it was a long time before her awakened conscience gave the first note of warning.

Then—waking in the first faint flush of a summer dawn, after a night of troubled sleep and feverish dreams—a night succeeding one of those dismal days that she had been obliged to endure without the sight of the familiar face, the glad, gay call of the familiar voice, the sound of the light footstep on the stairs—she told herself for the first time, with unutterable horror, that this man was dearer to her than he ought to be—dearer than her husband, dearer than her peace of mind, dearer than all this world held for her and all the next world promised. Oh, the wickedness of it! the shame, the horror! To be false to him—the man who had put his strong arms round her and lifted her out of the dismal swamp of shabby gentility and taken her to his generous heart; the man who trusted her with unquestioning faith, who had never by word or look betrayed the faintest doubt of her truth and purity.

No lovers' word had been spoken, no lovers' lips had met; yet as she rose from that uneasy bed, and paced the spacious room in fever and agitation, a ghostly figure, with bare feet and streaming hair, and long white draperies, she felt as if she were steeped to the lips in dishonour—a monster of ingratitude and treachery.

And then she began the struggle that most women make—even the weaker souls—when they feel the downward path sloping under their feet, and know that the pit of shame lies at the bottom of it, though they cannot see it yet—the impotent struggle in which all the odds are against them, their environment, every circumstance of their lives, their friends, the nearest and dearest even, to whom they cannot cry aloud and say: "Don't you see that I am fighting the tempter, don't you see that I am half way down the hill and am trying to make a stand, that I am over the edge of the cliff, and am hanging to the bushes with bleeding, lacerated hands in the desperate endeavour to keep myself from falling? Have you neither eyes nor understanding that you don't try to help me?" Rarely is any friendly hand stretched out to help the woman who sees her danger and tries to escape her doom. Acquaintances look on and smile. These open secrets are accepted as a part of the scheme of the universe, a particular phase of existence that doesn't matter as long as the chief actors are happy. The wife, her familiar friend, her complaisant or indifferent husband, are smiled upon by a society of men and women who know their world and take it for what it is worth. Only when the actors begin to play their parts badly, and when the open secret becomes an open scandal, does Society cease to be kind.

Vera did not think of Society in that tragic hour of an awakened conscience. That which would have been the first thought with most women had no place in her mind. It was of her sin that she thought—the sin of inconstancy, of ingratitude, of faithlessness. Had she crossed the border line, and qualified herself for the Divorce Court, she could not have thought of herself with deeper contrition.

To love this other man better than she loved her husband; to long for his coming; to be happy when he was with her, and miserable when he was away; there was the sin.

But no word of love had been spoken. There was time for repentance. He did not know that she loved him. Although, looking back, and recalling words and tones of his, she could not doubt that he loved her, she could hope that no word of hers had revealed the passion whose development had been gradual and imperceptible as the growth of the leaf buds in early spring, which no eye marks till they flash into life in the first warmth of April.

Her friendship with this man, who was of her kindred, the companion of the only happy days of her childhood, had seemed as natural as it would have been to attach herself to a brother from whom she had long been separated. She had welcomed him with a childish eagerness, she had trusted him with a childish belief in the perfection of the creature who is kind. She had admired him—comparing him with all the other young men she knew, and finding him infinitely above them. His very weakness had appealed to her. All that was wanting in his character made him more likable, since compassion and regret mingled with her liking. To be so clever, so gifted by nature, and to have done nothing with nature's gifts—to be doomed to go down to death leaving his name written in water—to die, having finished nothing but his beaux jours: people who liked him best talked of him as a young man with a beau passé. Shoulders were shrugged, and smiles were sad, when his painter friends discussed him.

"We thought he was going to do great things in art, and he has done nothing."

Soldiers who remembered him before he left the Army lamented the loss of a man who was made for a soldier.