ALL IS VANITY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXII, Issue II, 14 January 1899, Page 62

ALL IS VANITY.

(By Beatrice Heron-Maxwell.)

‘Flame-coloured hair, big grey eyes and a dead-white face, no manner at all. and doesn’t look as if she could sing a bit.’ Marilla Chesney could distinctly hear this unflattering report of herself through the folding doors of the draw-ing-room in which she w-aited for Madame Martin’s verdict. Madame Martin, first instructress of half the professionals on the concert platform, was neither easy of approach nor accessible to any demand save that of real talent.

She literally could not spare the time to teach anyone whose success was not assured to her quick instinctive judgment with the first few notes they uttered. Therefore the advent of Mrs. Chesney with Marilla had resulted so far only in the appearance of Madame Martin’s secretary, Miss Dent, who had taken stock of the visitors and retired gracefully, and whose clear, incisive voice ‘carried’ further than she intended.

Tn those few moments of waiting Marilla, the despised, the oppressed, whose unobtrusive existence was the bane of her step-mother, and of all her half-brothers and sisters, felt a curious sensation of the inevitable stealing over her. She was plain, no doubt; she was defective in manner, but the knowledge of power that comes with all great gifts was latent in her and sprang to life at this moment. The past, which had seemed so unbearable, so impossible to escape from had suddenly ceased to be her present or her future, and she knew that she need trouble herself no further over it. It was gone. Suda!

When the chance remark of a friend who overheard Marilla carolling to the birds in the orchard set Mrs Chesney wondering, w-ith a flash of relief, whether there might not be a way of getting rid of her step-daughter, and settling her in life, Marilla herself felt no elation or excitement, She knew she could sing, and whether it would be pleasant to sing for her living or not she was quite willing to do it in preference to playing second fiddle for the rest of her life to a band of usurpers who grudged her her birth-right.

It did not matter to her what Madame Martin’s secretary thought of her personally. She intended to sing to Madame Martin that day. and of the result she felt certain. Yet, she was only sixteen. She had never been to a concert, and no one except this casual friend of the family had criticised her voice. When Miss Dent returned, she said with a deprecating smile, ‘Madame Martin is very sorry, but she is busy just now. and her list of pupils is quite filled up. She is afraid—’ But Marilla had moved swiftly though awkwardly, to the piano. ‘I will sing a song.’ she said, ‘and I dare say Madame Martin will hear me just as well as if she were in the room.’ Mrs Chesney looked at her wit* horrified amazement. The girl would damage her own chances. She was quite untrained: she had never sung out of the schoolroom. ‘Marilla,’ she began in a tone o T authority. But it was too late. And before the first verse ended Madame Martin was in the room. ‘Who has been teaching you?’ she asked, ns Marilla’s voice died away soft!'- in a long sweet cadence of sound. ‘No one.’ Madame Martin turned to Mrs Chesney.

‘The production is perfect,’ she said, ‘and is quite natural, which is unusual. The voice needs nothing but maturity. I shall be pleased to bring Miss Chesney out.’ Yet, even then, and with the evidence of her own ears, Mrs Chesney hardly realised that the girl she had snubbed and ignored was an embryo prima donna —the ugly duckling a rara avis, whose wings were already spread for flight.

li was twenty years later am! Marilla lay dying.

For weeks her reason had trembled in the balance, unhinged by the violence of the shock that had begun her illness.

Singing to an enormous and idolising audience, radiant in the extraordinary beauty and charm that developed themselves with the power and pathos of her voice between the ages of sixteen and twenty, she had suddenly been hurled from this pinnacle of fame and hapm’ness into an abyss of indescribable darkness and despair. ‘An unparalleled case,’ the doctors said, with professional interest, ‘paralysis of the vocal chords without any apparent cause or symptom. She wiU never sing again, and if she regain her speaking voice it will be husky and dissonant.’

Through the cloud obscuring her brain, and which outwardly resembled unconsciousness, Marilla listened to this brief summary of her case, as years before she had listened in Madeira Martin’s drawing room. And again the sense af the inevil able came upon her. Her life, with all its glory and its glamour, was past and .lone wiih. She was as widely sever-I from it as long ago she had been divided from her unhappy girlhood on that memorable day. And something else was past, too—the bitterness of Death. In that, moment of agony, when without a moment’s warning, the note which was her supreme effort, which had always been the crown of her success, trembled, broke and died into silence that was to be eternal, she had vanquished the power of pain she had learned the secret of all Time. Now. as she lay with the sands of life running low, the pain was stilled, and her thoughts, vagrant and peaceful, dwelt only on little incidents of her early life in which her great talent had no part.

There had been someone who was very dear to her once. She had given him up because it seemed best for both their careers. She thought chiefly of him.

It did not seem strange to her when she found him kneeling at her side. ‘Marilla, my darling, you will get well for my sake? Never mind what else is lost to you. lam still left, and I know you eared for me once. The barrier between us is gone, and I am free to come to you. Don’t try to speak, but put your hand in mine and let my lips touch yours.’ She was fully conscious now, and she turned towards him. The beautiful grey eyes were still the same, and they told him that the suffering he had been dreading so for her was vanquished. They were serene and tranquil. For a moment they gazed into his and then the love reflected in them changed into the absorbed expression of one who looks into the hereafter, for whom everything is past, and the beyond has become the immediate and everlasting present.