UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME.
THE FILIBUSTERS CUTCLIFFE HYNE
THE ROYAL END HENRY HARLAND
MOLLIE'S PRINCE ROSA N. CAREY
BY RIGHT OF SWORD A. W. MARCHMONT
THE MAYORESS'S WOOING MRS. BAILLIE SAUNDERS
THE THIEF OF VIRTUE EDEN PHILLPOTTS
A LONELY LITTLE LADY DOLF WYLLARDE
THE STUMBLING BLOCK JUSTUS MILES FORMAN
TWO IMPOSTORS AND TINKER DOROTHEA CONYERS
PARK LANE PERCY WHITE
HUTCHINSON & CO.'S
7d. COPYRIGHT NOVELS.
[Illustration: "I could hear her stifled sobs as she lay on the
floor."--_p. 318._]
BEYOND
THESE VOICES
By
M. E. BRADDON
London
HUTCHINSON & CO.
Paternoster Row
"BEYOND THESE VOICES"
CHAPTER I
Lady Felicia Disbrowe was supposed to condescend when she married
Captain Cunningham of the first Life--since, although his people lived
on their own land, and were handsomely recorded in Burke, there was
no record of them before the Conquest, nor even on the muster-roll of
those who fought and died for the Angevin Kings. Captain Cunningham
was handsome and fashionable, but not rich; and when he had the bad
luck to get himself killed in an Egyptian campaign, he left his widow
with an only daughter seven years old, her pension, and a settlement
that brought her about six hundred a year, half of which came from the
Disbrowes, while the other half was the rental of three or four small
farms in Somersetshire. It will be seen therefore that for a person who
considered herself essentially _grande dame_, and to whom all degrading
economies must be impossible, Lady Felicia's position was not enviable.
As the seven-year-old orphan grew in grace and beauty to sweet
seventeen, Lady Felicia began to consider her daughter her chief
asset. So lovely a creature must command the admiration of the richest
bachelors in the marriage-market. She would have her choice of opulent
lovers. There would be no cruel necessity for forcing a marriage with
vulgar wealth or drivelling age. She would have her adorers among the
best, the fortunate, the well-bred, the young and handsome. Nor was
Lady Felicia mistaken in her forecast. When Cara came out under the
auspices of her aunt, Lady Okehampton, she made a success that realised
her mother's fondest dreams. Youth, rank, and wealth were at her feet.
There was no question of riches raked out of the gutter. She had but
to say the sweet little monosyllable "yes," and one of the best born
and best-looking men in London, and town and country houses, yacht and
opera box, would be hers; and her mother would cease to be "poor Lady
Felicia."
Unhappily, before Lord Walford had time to offer her all these
advantages, Cara had fallen in love with somebody else, and that
somebody was no other than Lancelot Davis, the poet, just then the
petted darling of dowagers, and of young married women whose daughters
were in the nursery, and who had therefore no fear of his fascinating
personality. Unfortunately for Lady Felicia, her head was too high
in the air for her to take note of the literary stars who shone at
luncheon parties, and even when her daughter praised the young poet,
and tried to interest her mother in his latest book, Lady Felicia took
no alarm. It was only in the beginning of their acquaintance that Cara
talked of the poet to her unresponsive mother. By the time she had
known him twenty days of that heavenly June, he was far too sacred
to be talked about to an unsympathetic listener. It was only to her
dearest and only bosom friend, who was also in love with the adorable
Lancelot, that Cara liked to talk of him, and to her she discoursed
romantic nonsense that would have covered reams of foolscap, had it
been written.
"Lancelot!" she said in low, thrilling tones. "Even his name is a poem."
Everything about him was a poem for Cara. His boots, his tie, his cane,
and especially his hair, which he took a poet's privilege of wearing
longer than fashion justified.
Though educated at the Stationers' School, and unacquainted with either
'Varsity, nobody ever said of Mr. Davis that he was "not a gentleman."
That scathing, irrevocable sentence, with the cruel emphasis upon the
negative, had not been pronounced upon the man who wrote "The New
Ariadne," a work of genius which scared the lowly-minded country vicar,
his father, and set his pious mother praying, with trembling and tears,
that the eyes of her beloved son might be opened, and that he might
repent of using the talents God had given him in the service of Satan.
Lancelot Davis had made up for the lack of 'Varsity training by
strenuous self-culture. He was passionate, exalted, transcendental,
more Swinburne than Swinburne, steeped in Dante and Victor Hugo,
stuffed almost to choking with Musset, Baudelaire, and Verlaine; he was
young, handsome, or rather beautiful, too beautiful for a man--Paris,
Leander, the Sun God--anything you like; and, at the time of his
wooing, his pockets were full of the proceeds of a book that had made a
sensation--and he was the rage.
Were not these things enough to fire the imagination and win the heart
of a girl of eighteen, half-educated, undisciplined, the daughter of a
shallow-brained mother, who had never taken the trouble to understand
her, or taken account of the romantic yearnings in the mind of
eighteen? If Lady Felicia had cultivated her daughter's mind half as
strenuously as she had cultivated her person, the girl would have not
been so ready to fall in love with her poet. But the girl's home life
had been an arid waste, and the mother's conversation had been one long
repining against the Fate that had made her "poor Lady Felicia," and
had deprived her of all the things that are needed to make life worth
living.
Lancelot Davis opened the gates of an enchanted land in which money
counted for nothing, where there was no animosity against the ultra
rich, no perpetual talk of debts and difficulties, no moaning over
the hardship of doing without things that luckier people could enjoy
in abundance. He let her into that lovely world where the imagination
rules supreme. He introduced her to other poets, the gods of that
enchanted land--Browning, Tennyson, Shelley, Byron. She bowed down
before these mighty spirits, but thought Lancelot Davis greater than
the greatest of them.
There was nothing mean or underhand about her poet's conduct. He lost
no time in offering himself to Lady Felicia. He was not a pauper; he
was not ill born; and he was thought to have a brilliant future before
him. His suit was supported by some of "poor Felicia's" oldest and
best friends; but Lady Felicia received his addresses with coldness
and scarcely concealed contempt; and she told her daughter that while
she had committed an unpardonable sin when she refused Lord Walford,
were she to insist upon marrying Mr. Davis, it would be a heart-broken
mother's duty to cast her off for ever.
"I never could forgive you, Cara," she said, and she never did.
Cara walked out of the Weymouth Street lodgings early one morning,
before Lady Felicia had rung for her meagre breakfast of chocolate
and toast. She carried her dressing-bag to the corner of the street,
where Davis was waiting in a hansom. Her trunk, with all that was
most needful of her wardrobe, had been despatched to the station over
night, labelled for the Continental Express. There was plenty of time
to be married before the registrar, and to be at Victoria, ready for
the train that was to carry them on the first stage of that wonderful
journey which begins in the smoke and grime of South London and ends
under the Italian sky.
* * * * *
They went from the registrar's office straight to the Lake of Como, and
lived between Bellagio and Venice for four years, years of ineffable
bliss, at the end of which sweet summer-time of love and life--for it
seemed never winter--the girl-wife died, leaving her young husband
heart-broken, with an only child, a daughter three years old, an
incarnation of romantic love and romantic beauty.
When he carried off Lady Felicia's daughter, the poet was at the top of
his vogue, and his vogue lasted for just those four years of supreme
happiness.
Nothing that he wrote after his wife's death had the old passion
or the old music. His genius died with his wife. Heart-broken and
disappointed, he became a consumptive, and died of an open-air cure,
leaving piteous letters to Lady Felicia and his wife's other relations,
imploring them to take care of his daughter. She would have the
copyright of his five volumes of verse, and two successful tragedies,
for her portion; so she was not altogether without means.
Lady Felicia's heart was not all stone; there was a vulnerable spot
upon which the serpent's tooth had fastened. Obstinate, proud, and
selfish, she had never faltered in her unforgiving attitude towards the
runaway daughter; but when there came the sudden news of Cara's death,
a blow for which the Spartan mother was utterly unprepared, an agony
of remorse disturbed the self-satisfied calm of a mind which thought
itself justified in resenting injury.
Perhaps she had pictured to herself a day upon which Cara would have
come back to her and sued for pardon, and she would have softened,
and taken the prodigal daughter to her heart. One of the girl's
worst crimes had been that she had not knelt and wept and entreated
to be forgiven, before she took that desperate, immodest, and even
vulgar, step of a marriage before the registrar. She had shown herself
heartless as a daughter, and how could she expect softness in her
mother? But she was dead. She had passed beyond the possibility of
pardon or love. That vague dream of reconciliation could never be
realised. If there had been anything wrong in Lady Felicia's behaviour
as a parent, that wrong could never be righted. Never more would she
see the lovely face that was to have brought prosperity and happiness
for them both; never more would she hear the sweet voice which the
fashionable Italian master had trained to such perfection. The French
ballads, and Jensen's setting of Heine, came out of the caverns of
memory as Lady Felicia sat, poor and lonely, in a lodging-house
drawing-room, on the borderland of West-End London, the last "possible"
street, before W. became N.W.
"_Ninon, que fait tu de la vie?_" Memory brought back every tone of the
fresh young voice. Lady Felicia could hardly believe that there was
no one singing, that the room was empty of human life, except her own
fatigued existence.
That last year of remorseful memories softened her, and she accepted
the charge that Lancelot Davis left her. He lived just long enough
in his bleak hospital on a Gloucestershire hill-top to read his
mother-in-law's letter:
"Send the little girl to me. I will be kinder to her than I was to her
mother."
Society, and especially Cara's other relations, said that poor Felicia
had been quite admirable in taking the sole charge of the orphan.
There was no attempt to foist the little girl upon aunts and cousins;
and, considering poor Felicia's state of genteel pauperism, always in
lodgings, her behaviour was worthy of all praise.
The grandchild brought back the memory of the daughter's childhood,
and Lady Felicia almost felt as if she was again a young widow, full
of care for her only child. So far as her narrow means permitted she
made the little girl happy, and she found her own dreary existence
brightened by that young life.
That calm and monotonous existence with Grannie was not the kind of
life that childhood yearns for, and there were long stretches of
time in which little Veronica had only her picture-books and fancy
needlework to amuse her--after the cheap morning governess had
departed, and the day's tasks were done. At least Grannie did not
torture the orphan with over-education. A little French, a little
easy music, a little English history, occupied the morning hours,
and then Vera was free to read what books she liked to choose out of
Grannie's blameless and meagre library. Lady Felicia's nomadic life
had not allowed the accumulation of literature, but the few books she
carried about with her were of the best, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens,
Byron. Her trunks had room only for the Immortals, and as soon as Vera
could read them, and long before she could understand them, those dear
books were familiar to her. The pictures helped her to understand, and
she was never tired of looking at them. Sometimes Grannie would read
Shakespeare to her, the ghostly scenes in _Hamlet_, which thrilled
her, or passages and scenes from the _Tempest_, or _Midsummer Night's
Dream_, which Vera thought divine. She had no playfellows, and hardly
knew how to play; but in her lonely life imagination filled the space
that the frolics and gambols of exuberant spirits occupy in the life
of the normal child. Those few great novels which she read over and
over again peopled her world, a world of beautiful images that she
had all to herself, and of which her fancy never wearied--Amy Robsart
and Leicester, the Scottish Knight, the generous Saracen, the heroic
dog, Paul Dombey and his devoted sister, David Copperfield and his
child-wife. These were the companions of the long silent afternoons,
when Grannie was taking her siesta in seclusion upstairs, and when
Vera had the drawing-room to herself. No visitors intruded on those
long afternoons; for Lady Felicia's card gave the world to know that
the first and fifteenth of May, June, and July, were the only days on
which she was accessible to the friends and acquaintances who had not
utterly forgotten "poor Felicia's" existence.
It was a life of monotony against which an older girl would have
revolted; but childhood is submissive, and accepts its environment
as something inevitable, so Vera made no protest against Fate. But
there was one golden season in her young life, one heavenly summer
holiday in the West Country, when her aunt, Lady Okehampton, happening
to call upon Lady Felicia, was moved to compassion at sight of the
little girl, pale and languid, as she sat in the corner of the unlovely
drawing-room, with an open book on her lap.
"This hot weather makes London odious," said Lady Okehampton. "We are
all leaving much earlier than usual. I suppose you and the little girl
are soon going into the country?"
"No, I shan't move till the end of October, when we go to Brighton,
as usual. I have had invitations to nice places, the Helstons, the
Heronmoors; but I can't take that child, and I can't leave her."
"Poor little girl. Does she never see gardens and meadows? Brighton is
only London with a little less smoke, and a strip of grey water that
one takes on trust for the sea. Wouldn't you like a country holiday,
Veronica? What a name!"
"She is always called Vera. Her father was a poet----"
"Lancelot Davis, yes, I remember him!"
"And he gave her that absurd name because the Italian hills were purple
and white with the flower when she was born."
"Rather a nice idea. Well, Vera, if Grannie likes, you shall come to
Disbrowe with your cousins, and you shall have a real country holiday,
and come back to Grannie in September with rosy cheeks and bright eyes."
Oh, never-to-be-forgotten golden days, in which the child of eleven
found herself among a flock of young cousins in a rural paradise where
she first knew the rapture of loving birds and beasts. She adored them
all, from the gold and silver pheasants in the aviary to the great,
slow wagon horses on the home farm, and the shooting dogs.
Among the children of the house, and more masterful in his behaviour
than any of them, there was an Eton boy of sixteen, who was not a
Disbrowe, although he claimed cousinship in a minor degree. He was a
Disbrowe on the Distaff side, he told Vera, a distinction which he had
to explain to her. He was Claude Rutherford, and he belonged to the
Yorkshire Rutherfords, who had been Roman Catholic from the beginning
of history, with which they claimed to be coeval. He was in the upper
sixth at Eton, and was going to Oxford in a year or two, and from
Oxford into the Army. He was a clever boy, old for his years, quoted
Omar Khayyam in season and out of season, and was already tired of many
things that boys are fond of.
But, superior as this young person might be, he behaved with something
more than cousinly kindness to the little girl from London, whose
pitiful story Lady Okehampton had expounded to him. He was familiar
with the poetry of Lancelot Davis, whose lyrics had a flavour of Omar;
and he was pleased to patronise the departed poet's daughter.
He took Vera about the home farm, and the stables, and introduced
her to the assemblage of living creatures that made Disbrowe Park so
enchanting. He taught her to ride the barb that had been his favourite
mount four years earlier. He seemed ages older than Vera; and he
condescended to her and protected her, and would not allow his cousins
to tease her, although their vastly superior education tempted them to
make fun of the little girl who had only two hours a day from a Miss
Walker, and to whom the whole world of science was dark. What a change
was that large life at Disbrowe, the picnics and excursions, the little
dances after dinner, the run with the otter-hounds on dewy mornings,
the rustic races and sports, the thrilling jaunts with Cousin Claude in
his dinghy, over those blue-green West Country waves, a life so full
of variety and delight that the pleasures of the day ran over into the
dreams of night, and sleep was a round of adventure and excitement!
What a change from the slow walk in Regent's Park, or along the
sea-front at Brighton, beside Grannie's Bath chair, or the afternoon
drive between Hove and Kemp Town, in a hired landau!
She thought of poor Grannie, who was not invited to Disbrowe, and was
sorry to think of her lingering in the dull London lodging, when all
her friends had gone off to their cures in Germany and Austria, and
while it was still too early to migrate to the brighter rooms on the
Marine Parade.
These happy days at Disbrowe were the first and last of their kind,
for though Lady Okehampton promised to invite her the following year,
there were hindrances to the keeping of that promise, and she saw
Disbrowe Park no more. Life in London and Brighton continued with
what the average girl would have called a ghastly monotony, till Vera
was sixteen, when Lady Felicia, after a bronchial attack of unusual
severity, was told that Brighton was no longer good enough for her
winters, and if she wished to see any more Decembers, she must migrate
to sunnier regions in the autumn. Cannes or Mentone were suggested.
Grannie smiled a bitter smile at the mention of Cannes. She had stayed
there with her husband at the beginning of their wedded life, when she
was young and beautiful, and when Captain Cunningham was handsome and
reckless. They had been among the gayest, and the best received, and
had tasted all that Cannes could give of pleasure; but they had spent a
year's income in five weeks, and had felt themselves paupers among the
millionaire shipbuilders and exotic Hebrews.
Lady Felicia decided on San Marco, a picturesque little spot on the
Italian Riviera, which had been only a fishing village till within the
last ten years, when an English doctor had "discovered" it, and two or
three hotels had been built to accommodate the patients he sent there.
The sea-front was sheltered from every pernicious wind, and the sea was
unpolluted by the drainage of a town. Peasant proprietors grew their
carnations all along the shore, close to the sandy beach, and the olive
woods that clothed the sheltering hill were carpeted with violets and
narcissus.
Lady Felicia described San Marco as a paradise; but her friends told
her that there was absolutely no society, and that she would be bored
to death.
"You will meet nobody but invalids, dreadful people in Bath chairs!"
one of her rich friends told her, a purse-proud matron who owned a
villa at Cannes, and considered no other place "possible" from Spezzia
to Marseilles.
"I shall be in a Bath chair myself," replied Lady Felicia. "I want
quiet and economy, and not society. At Vera's age it is best that there
should be no talk of dances and high jinks."
Mrs. Montagu Watson smiled, and shrugged her shoulders. "Girls have
their own opinions about life nowadays," she said. "I don't think
Theodora or Margaret would put up with San Marco, although they are
still in the school-room. They want fine clothes and smart carriages to
look at, when they trudge with their governess."
"Vera is more unsophisticated than your girls. She will be quite happy
reading Scott or Dickens in a garden by the sea. I mean to keep her as
fresh as I can till I hand her over to one of her aunts to be brought
out."
"She is a sweet, dreamy child," said Mrs. Watson, who became
deferential at the mere mention of countesses, "and I dare say she is
going to be pretty."
"I have no doubt about that," said Lady Felicia.
* * * * *
They went to San Marco early in November, and found the hotel and the
sea-front the abode of desolation, so far as people went. The habitual
invalids had not yet arrived, and the weather was at its worst. The
four cosmopolitan shops that spread their trivial wares to tempt the
English visitor, and which gave a touch of colour and gaiety to the
poor little street, were not to open till December. There were only the
shabby little butcher, baker, and grocer, who supplied the wants of the
natives.
Vera delighted in the scenery, but she found a sense of dulness
creeping over her, in the midst of all that loveliness of mountain and
shore.
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.
Vera had no yearning for the gaieties of the hotel drawing-room, or the
conjuror's entertainment; but she had a feeling of hopeless loneliness,
which even her favourite books could not overcome. If she had been free
to roam about the olive woods, to climb the hills, and get nearer the
blue sky, she might have been almost happy; but Grannie was exacting,
and Vera had never more than an hour's freedom at a time. The hills,
and the rustic shrines that shone dazzling white against the soft blue
heaven, were impossible for her. Exploration or adventure was out of
the question. She might sit in the garden where the pepper trees and
palms were dust-laden and shabby; or she might pace the promenade,
where Grannie and Martha Lidcott, Grannie's maid, could see her from
the _salon_ windows on the second floor.
On the promenade she was safe and needed no chaperon. The hardiest
and most audacious of prowling cads would not have dared to follow or
address her under the glare of all those hotel windows, and within
sound of shrill female voices and flying tennis balls. On the promenade
she had all the hotel for her chaperon. Grannie asked her the same
questions every evening when she came in to dress for the seven o'clock
dinner. Had she enjoyed her walk? and was it not a delicious evening?
And then Grannie would tell her what a privilege it was to be young,
and able to walk, instead of being a helpless invalid in a Bath chair.
Vera wondered sometimes whether the privilege of youth, with the long
blank vista of years lying in front of it, were an unmixed blessing.