Beyond These Voices

by M. E. Braddon

It was weary work, but she persevered, and enlisted all the Disbrowes in her cause, unconscious that they were being made use of. She accepted every invitation, lent herself to everybody's fads, philanthropic or otherwise; listened to the same fiddlers and singers day after day, in drawing-rooms and among people that she knew by heart; or stood with aching head under a ten-guinea hat, selling programmes at amateur theatricals.

She contracted a closer alliance with Lady Susan Amphlett, and planned excursions: a day at Windsor, a day at Dorking, at Guildford, to rummage in furniture shops, at Greenwich to see the Nelson relics, to Richmond and Hampton, even to Kew Gardens. Lady Susan was almost worn out by these simple pleasures; but as she professed, and sincerely, an absolute culte for Vera Provana, she held out bravely.

These excursions were fairly successful, and as Vera took care that no one should know where she and her friend were going—not even Susan herself till they were on the road—it was not possible for Claude to follow her. It was otherwise in the houses of her friends, where she was always meeting him, and where it was essential that she should not seem to avoid him, least of all to let him see that she was so doing.

She greeted him always with the old friendliness—a little more cousinly than it had been of late; and she showed a matronly interest in his health and occupations, as if she had been an aunt rather than a cousin.

"It is quite delightful to meet you here this afternoon," he told her, in a ducal house where guinea tickets for a charity concert seemed cheap to the outside public. "You are to be met anywhere and everywhere except in your own house. I have called so often that I have taken a disgust for your knockers. When I am dead I believe those lions' heads will be found engraven on my heart, like Queen Mary's Calais."

It was only natural that, with the awakening of conscience, there should come the thought of those two first years of her married life, when her husband's love had made an atmosphere of happiness around her, when she had cared for no other companion, needed no other friend; those blessed years before Claude Rutherford's pale, clear-cut face, and low, seductive voice had become a part of her life, essential to her peace. The change of feeling, the growing regard for this man, had come about so gradually, with a growth so slow and imperceptible, that she tried in vain to analyse her feelings in those four years of careless intimacy, and to trace the process by which an innocent friendship had changed to a guilty love. When had the fatal change begun? She could not tell. It was only when she felt the misery of one long day of parting that she knew her sin. The husband had become a stranger, the friend had become the other half of her soul. He had called her by that sweet name sometimes, but with so playful a tone that the impassioned phrase had not scared her. It was one of many lightly spoken phrases that she had heard as carelessly as they were uttered.

And now, looking back at the last two years, she told herself that it was her husband's fault that she had leant on Claude for sympathy, her husband's fault that they had been too much together. For some reason that she had never fathomed, Mario Provana had held himself aloof from the old domestic intimacy. It was not only that his business engagements necessitated his absence from home several times in the course of the year, and on occasion for a considerable period. He had business in Russia, and in Austria, and he had crossed the Atlantic twice in the last year, the affairs of his New York house calling for special attention in a disturbed state of American finance. These frequent absences alone were sufficient to weaken the marriage bond; but in the last year he had given his wife very little of his society when they were under the same roof.

"You have hosts of friends," he said one day when she reproached him for keeping aloof, "people who share your tastes and can be amused by the things that amuse you. I bring back a tired brain after my continental journeys, and am still more tired after New York. I should make a wretched companion for a young wife, a beautiful butterfly who was born to shine among all the other butterflies."

"I am nearly as tired as you are after your business journeys, Mario," she said. "I shall be very glad when we can go back to Rome."

"But you will have other butterflies there, and a good many of the same that flutter about you here," he answered.