Beyond These Voices. M. E. Braddon
in the afternoon."
"She shall enjoy your hospitality now and then, Signorina, and I will do without my afternoon novel. But you would soon tire of her if she were with you often."
"Tire of her! Impossible! Why, I don't even tire of Miss Thompson!" Giulia said naïvely.
"Please let Miss Davis come with us whenever you can spare her," Provana said, when he took leave of Lady Felicia at the foot of the stairs leading to her upper floor. "You see how charmed my daughter is at having found an English friend; and I think you must understand how anxious I am to make her happy."
Lady Felicia was all sympathy, and placed her granddaughter at the Signorina's disposal. If this man was of plebeian origin, he had a certain personal dignity that impressed her; nor was she unaffected by his importance in that mysterious world of which she knew so little, the world of boundless wealth.
When she arrived, somewhat breathless, in the shabby second-floor salon, she sank into her chair with an impatient movement, and breathed a fretful sigh.
"Think of this great coarse man, with his balcony of flowers, and four horses to his landau," she exclaimed disdainfully. "These Provanas absolutely exude gold!"
"Oh, Grannie, he is not the least bit purse-proud or vulgar," Vera protested. "You must see that he has only one desire in life, to make his daughter happy, and to prolong her life. I hope God will be good to that poor father, and spare that sweet girl."
"The girl is nice enough, and they will make this place pleasant for you. Extra horses for the hills! And I have not been able to afford a one-horse fly!"
"It is hard for you, Grannie dear; but we have been quite comfortable, and you have been better than you were at Brighton last year."
"Yes, I have been better, but it is the same story everywhere—the same pinching and watching lest the end of the quarter should find me penniless."
Lady Felicia resented narrow means, as a personal affront from Providence.
Signor Provana lost no time in returning Grannie's visit. He appeared at three o'clock on the following day, bringing his daughter, and a basket of flowers that had arrived that morning from Genoa, the resources of San Marco not going beyond carnations, roses and anemones.
"I fear you must have found the stairs rather tiring," Lady Felicia said, when she had welcomed Giulia.
"Not a bit. I rather like stairs. You see I came in my carriage," and it was explained that Giulia had an invalid chair on which her father and the footman carried her up and down stairs.
"Of course I could walk up and down just like other people," Giulia said lightly; "but this foolish father of mine won't let me. I feel as if I were the Princess Badroulbadore, coming from the bath in her palanquin; only there is no Aladdin to fall in love with me."
"Aladdin will come in good time," said Lady Felicia.
"I don't want him. I want no one but Papa. When I was three years old I used to think I should marry Papa as soon as I grew up; and now I know I can't, it makes no difference—I don't want anybody else."
An engagement was made for the next day. They were to start at eleven o'clock for the Roman Amphitheatre near Ventimiglia, looking at the old churches and palm groves of Bordighera on their way. It would be a long drive, but there were no alarming hills. Lady Felicia was invited, but was far too much an invalid to accept. There was no making a secret of Grannie's bad health. Her bronchial trouble was the staple of her conversation.
And now a new life began for Vera, a life that would have been all joy but for the shadow that went with them everywhere, like a cloud that follows the traveller through a smiling sky—that shadow of doom which the victim saw not, but which those who loved her could not forget. The shadow made a bond of sympathy between Mario Provana and Vera. The consciousness of that sad secret never left them, and many confidential words and looks drew them closer together in the course of those long days in lovely places—where Giulia was always the gayest of the little party, and eager in her enjoyment of everything that was beautiful or interesting, from a group of peasant children with whom she stopped to talk, to the remains of a Roman citadel that took her fancy back to the Cæsars. The chief care of father, governess, and friend, was to prevent her doing too much. Nothing in her own consciousness warned her how soon languor and fatigue followed on exertion and excitement.
Miss Thompson was always ready with a supporting arm, always tactful in cutting short any little bit of exploration that might tire her charge. She was one of those admirable women who seem born to teach and cherish fragile girlhood. People almost thought she must have been born middle-aged. It was unthinkable that she herself had been young, and had required to be taught and cared for. She was highly accomplished, and the things she knew were known so thoroughly, that one might suppose all those dates and dry historical details had been born with her, ready pigeon-holed in her brain.
Signor Provana treated her with unvarying respect, and always referred any doubtful question in history or science to Miss Thompson.
But her most valuable gift was a disposition of unvarying placidity. Nobody had ever seen Lucy Thompson out of temper. The most irritating of pupils had never been able to put her in a passion. She stood on one side, as it were, while a minx misbehaved herself. Her aloofness was her only reproof, and one that was almost always efficacious.
With Giulia Provana that placid temper had never been put to the proof. Giulia had a sweet nature, was quick to learn, and had a yearning for knowledge that was pathetic when one thought how brief must be her use for earthly wisdom; and, what was better, she loved her governess. Miss Thompson had a pleasant time in Signor Provana's household; moving from one lovely scene to another, or in Rome sharing all the pleasures that the most enchanting of cities could afford. Plays, operas, concerts, races, afternoon parties in noble houses.
From the day his daughter's health began to fail, and the appearance of lung trouble made the future full of fear, Signor Provana made up his mind that her life should never be the common lot of invalids. However few the years she had to live, however inevitable that she was to die in early youth—the years that were hers should not be treated as a long illness. The horrible monotony of sick rooms should never be hers. It should be the business of everybody about her to keep the dark secret of decay. Her trained nurses were not to be called nurses, but maids, and were to wear no hospital uniform. Everything about her was to be gay and fair to look upon—a luxury of colour and light. And she was to enjoy every amusement that was possible for her without actual risk. Into that brief life all the best things that earth can give were to be crowded. She was to know the cleverest and most agreeable people. She was to read the best books, to hear the most exquisite music, to see the finest pictures, the most gifted actors. Nothing famous or beautiful was to be kept from her. From the first note of warning this had been Giulia's education; and Miss Thompson's chief duty had been to read the best books of the best writers to an intelligent and sympathetic pupil. There had been no dull lessons, no long exercises in the grammar of various tongues—Giulia's education after her fifteenth birthday had been literature, in the best sense of that sometimes ill-used word. Signor Provana's system had been so far successful that his daughter had lived much longer than the specialists had expected, and her girlhood had been utterly happy. But the shadow was always in the background of their lives, and wherever he went with his idolised child there was always the fear that he might leave her among the flowers and the palm groves that filled her with joyous surprise on their arrival, and go back to his workaday life lonely and desolate.
Vera was astonished at the things Giulia knew, and was sorely ashamed of her own ignorance. For the first time in her life she had come into close association with cultivated minds—with people whose conversation, though without pedantry, was full of allusions to books that she had never read, and knowledge that she had never heard of. To know Giulia and her governess was a liberal education; and Vera showed a quickness in absorbing knowledge that interested her new friends, and made them eager to help her.
The world of poetry lay open and untrodden before this daughter of a poet.
The idea of her friend's parentage fascinated Giulia.
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