The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Tysons, by May Sinclair
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Title: The Tysons
(Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson)
Author: May Sinclair
Release Date: April 28, 2005 [eBook #15722]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TYSONS***
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THE TYSONS
(Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson)
by
MAY SINCLAIR
Author of _THE DIVINE FIRE_, _THE HELPMATE_, etc.
1906
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. MR. NEVILL TYSON
II. MRS. NEVILL TYSON
III. MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON AT HOME
IV. THE FIRST STONE
V. THE NIGHT WATCH
VI. A SON AND HEIR
VII. SIR PETER'S NEW CLOTHES
VIII. TOWARDS "THE CROSS-ROADS"
IX. AN UNNATURAL MOTHER
X. CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
XI. THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS
XII. A FLAT IN TOWN
XIII. MRS. WILCOX TO THE RESCUE
XIV. THE "CRITERION"
XV. CONFLAGRATION
XVI. THE NEW LIFE
XVII. THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL
XVIII. A MIRACLE
XIX. CONFESSIONAL
XX. A MAN AND A SPHINX
XXI. OUT OF THE NIGHT
XXII. IN THE DESERT
XXIII. _IN MEMORIAM_
CHAPTER I
MR. NEVILL TYSON
There were only two or three houses in Drayton Parva where Mr. and Mrs.
Nevill Tyson were received. A thrill of guilty expectation used to go
through the room when they were announced, and people watched them with
a fearful interest, as if they were the actors in some enthralling but
forbidden drama.
Perhaps, if she had been tried by a jury of her peers--but Mrs. Nevill
Tyson had no peers in Drayton Parva. She was tried by an invisible and
incorruptible jury of ideas in Miss Batchelor's head. Opinion sways all
things in Drayton Parva, and Miss Batchelor swayed opinion.
As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, he had dropped into Leicestershire from heaven
knows where, and was understood to be more or less on his trial. Nobody
knew anything about him, except that he was a nephew of old Tyson of
Thorneytoft, and had come in for the property. Nobody cared much for
old Tyson of Thorneytoft; he was not exactly--well, no matter, he was
very respectable and he was dead, which entitled him to a little
consideration. And as Mr. Nevill Tyson was an unmarried man in those
days he naturally attracted some attention on his own account, as well
as for the sake of the very respectable old man, his uncle.
He was first seen at a dinner at the Morleys. Somebody else happened to
be the guest of the evening, and somebody else took Lady Morley in to
dinner. Tyson took Miss Batchelor, and I don't think he quite liked
it. Miss Batchelor was clever--frightfully clever--but she never showed
up well in public; she had a nervous manner, and a way of looking at you
as if you were some curious animal that she would like to pat if she were
perfectly sure you were not dangerous. And when you were about to take
compassion on her shyness, she startled you with a sudden lapse into
self-possession. I can see her now looking at Tyson over the frills on
her shoulder, with her thin crooked little mouth smiling slightly. She
might well look, for Nevill Tyson's appearance was remarkable. He might
have been any age between twenty-five and forty; as a matter of fact he
was thirty-six. England had made him florid and Anglo-Saxon, but the
tropics had bleached his skin and dried his straw-colored hair till it
looked like hay. His figure was short and rather clumsily built, but
it had a certain strength and determination; so had his face. The
determination was not expressly stated by any single feature--the mouth
was not what you would call firm, and the chin retreated ever so slightly
in a heavy curve--but it was somehow implied by the whole. He gave you
the idea of iron battered in all the arsenals of the world. Miss
Batchelor wondered what he would have to say for himself.
He said very little, and looked at nobody, until some casual remark of
his made somebody look at him. Then he began to talk, laconically at
first, and finally with great fluency. It was all about himself, and
everybody listened. He proved a good talker, as a man ought to be who has
knocked about four continents and seen strange men and stranger women.
You could tell that Miss Batchelor was interested, for she had turned
round in her chair now and was looking him straight in the face. It
seemed that he had worked his way out to Bombay and back again. He had
been reporter to half-a-dozen provincial papers. He had been tutor to
Somebody's son at some place not specified. He had tried his hand at
comic journalism in London and at cattle-driving in Texas, and had been
half-way to glory as a captain of irregulars in the Soudanese war. No,
nobody was more surprised than himself when that mystic old man left him
Thorneytoft. He thought he had chucked civilization for good. For good?
But--after his exciting life--wouldn't he find civilization a
little--dull? (Miss Batchelor had a way of pointing her sentences as if
she were speaking in parables.) Not in the country, there was hardly
enough of it there, and he had never tried being a country gentleman
before; he rather wanted to see what it was like. Wouldn't it be a little
hard, if he had never--? He thought not. The first thing he should do
would be to get some decent hunters.
Hunters were all very well, but had he no hobbies? No, he had not; the
_bona fide_ country gentleman never had hobbies. They were kept by
amateur gentlemen retired from business to the suburbs. Here Sir Peter
observed that talking of hobbies, old Mr. Tyson had a perfect--er--mania
for orchids; he spent the best part of his life in his greenhouse. Mr.
Nevill Tyson thought he would rather spend his in Calcutta at once.
A dark lean man who had arrived with Tyson was seen to smile frequently
during the above dialogue. Miss Batchelor caught him doing it and turned
to Tyson. "Captain Stanistreet seemed rather amused at the notion of your
being a fine old country gentleman."
"Stanistreet? I daresay. But he knows nothing about it, I assure you. He
has the soul of a cabman. He measures everything by its distance from
Charing Cross."
"I see. And you--are all for green fields and idyllic simplicity?"
He bowed, as much as to say, "I am, if you say so."
Miss Batchelor became instantly self-possessed.
"You won't like it. Nothing happens here; nothing ever will happen. You
will be dreadfully bored."
"If I am bored I shall get something to do. I shall dissipate myself in a
bland parochial patriotism. I can feel it coming on already. When I once
get my feet on a platform I shall let myself go."
"Do. You'll astonish our simple Arcadian farmers. Nothing but good old
Tory melodrama goes down here. Are you equal to that?"
"Oh yes. I'm terrific in Tory melodrama. I shall bring down the house."
She turned a curious scrutinizing look on him.
"Yes," said she, "you'll bring down the house--like Samson among the
Philistines."
He returned her look with interest. "I should immensely like to know,"
said he, "what you go in for. I'm sure you go in for something."
She looked at her plate. "Well, I dabble a little in psychology."
"Oh!" There was a moment's silence. "Psychology is a large order," said
Tyson, presently.
"Yes, if you go in deep. I'm not deep. I'm perfectly happy when I've got
hold of the first principles. It sounds dreadfully superficial, but I'm
not interested in anything but principles."
"I'm sorry to hear it, for in that case you won't be interested in me."
She laughed nervously. She was accustomed to be rallied on her
attainments, but never quite after this fashion.
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't any principles."
She bent her brows; but her eyes were smiling under her frown.
"You really mustn't say these things here. We are so dreadfully literal.
We might take you at your word."
Tyson smiled, showing his rather prominent teeth unpleasantly.
"I wish," said she, "I knew what you think a country gentleman's duties
really are."
"Do you? They are three. To hunt hard; to shoot straight; and to go to
church."
"I hope you will perform them--all."
"I shall--all. No--on second thoughts I draw the line at going to church.
It's all very well if you've got a private chapel, or an easy chair in
the chancel, or a family vault you can sit in. But I detest these modern
arrangements; I object to be stuck in a tight position between two
boards, with my feet in somebody else's hat, and somebody else's feet
in mine, and to have people breathing down my collar and hissing and
yelling alternately, in my ear."
Again Miss Batchelor drew her eyebrows together in a friendly frown of
warning. She liked the cosmopolitan Tyson and his reckless speech, and
she had her own reasons for wishing him to make a good impression. But
her hints had roused in him the instinct of antagonism, and he went on
more recklessly than before. "No; you are perfectly wrong. I'm not an
interesting atheist. I have the most beautiful child-like faith in--"
"The God who was clever enough to make Mr. Nevill Tyson?" said Miss
Batchelor, very softly. She had felt the antagonism, and resented it.
At this point Sir Peter came down with one of those tremendous platitudes
that roll conversation out flat. That was his notion of the duty of a
host, to rush in and change the subject just as it was getting exciting.
The old gentleman had destroyed many a promising topic in this way, under
the impression that he was saving a situation.
"You'll be bored to death--I give you six months," were Miss Batchelor's
parting words, murmured aside over her shoulder.
On their way home Stanistreet congratulated Tyson.
"By Jove! you've fallen on your feet, Tyson. They tell me Miss Batchelor
is interested in you."
"I am not interested in Miss Batchelor. Who is she?"
"She is only Miss Batchelor of Meriden Court--the richest land-owner in
Leicestershire."
"Good heavens! Why doesn't somebody marry her?"
"Miss Batchelor, they say, is much too clever for that."
"Is she?" And Tyson laughed, a little brutally.
* * * * *
Of course everybody called on the eccentric newcomer when they saw that
the Morleys had taken him up. But before they had time to ask each other
to meet him, Mr. Nevill Tyson had imported his own society from Putney or
Bohemia, or some of those places.
That was his first mistake.
The next was his marriage. In fact, for a man in Tyson's insecure
position, it was more than a mistake; it was madness. He ought to have
married some powerful woman like Miss Batchelor, a woman with ideas and
money and character, to say nothing of an inviolable social reputation.
But men like Tyson never do what they ought. Miss Batchelor was clever,
and he hated clever women. So he married Molly Wilcox. Molly Wilcox was
nineteen; she had had no education, and, what was infinitely worse, she
had a vulgar mother. And as Mr. Wilcox might be considered a negligible
quantity, the chances were that she would take after her mother.
The mystery was how Tyson ever came to know these people. Mr. Wilcox was
a student and an invalid; moreover, he was excessively morose. He would
not have called, and even Mrs. Wilcox could hardly have called without
him. Scandal-mongers said that Tyson struck up an acquaintance with the
girl and her mother in a railway carriage somewhere between Drayton and
St. Pancras, and had called on the strength of it. It did great credit to
his imagination that he could see the makings of Mrs. Nevill Tyson in
Molly Wilcox, dressed according to her mother's taste, with that hair of
hers all curling into her eyes in front, and rumpled up anyhow behind.
However, though I daresay his introduction was a little informal and
obscure, there was every reason for the intimacy that followed. The
Wilcoxes were unpopular; so, by this time, was Tyson. In cultivating him
Mrs. Wilcox felt that she was doing something particularly esoteric and
rather daring. She had taken a line. She loved everything that was a
little flagrant, a little out of the common, and a little dubious. To a
lady with these tastes Tyson was a godsend; he more than satisfied her
desire for magnificence and mystery. For economical reasons Mrs. Wilcox's
body was compelled to live with Mr. Wilcox in a cottage in Drayton Parva;
but her soul dwelt continually in a side-street in Bayswater, in a region
haunted by the shabby-refined, the shabby-smart, and the innocently
risky. Mrs. Wilcox, I maintain, was as innocent as the babe unborn. She
believed that not only is this world the best of all possible worlds, but
that Bayswater is the best of all possible places in it. So, though she
was quite deaf to many of the chords in Tyson's being, her soul responded
instantly to the note of "town." And when she discovered that Tyson had
met and, what is more, dined with her old friends the Blundell-Thompsons
"of Bombay," her satisfaction knew no bounds.
At any rate, Tyson had not been very long at Thorneytoft before Mrs.
Wilcox found herself arguing with Mr. Wilcox. She herself was impervious
to argument, and owing to her rapt inconsequence it was generally
difficult to tell what she would be at. This time, however, she seemed
to be defending Mr. Nevill Tyson from unkind aspersions.
"Of course, all young men are likely to be wild; but Mr. Tyson is not a
young man."
"Therefore Mr. Tyson is not likely to be wild. Do you know you are guilty
of the fallacy known to logicians as illicit process of the major?"
Mrs. Wilcox looked up in some alarm. The term suggested anything from a
court-martial to some vague impropriety.
"The Major? Major who?" she inquired, deftly recovering her mental
balance. "Where is he?"
"Somewhere about the premises, I fancy," said Mr. Wilcox, dryly. When all
argument failed he had still a chastened delight in mystifying the poor
lady.
Mrs. Wilcox looked out of the window. "Oh, I see; you mean Captain
Stanistreet." She smiled; for where Captain Stanistreet was Mr. Nevill
Tyson was not very far away. Moreover, she was glad that she had on her
nice ultramarine tea-gown with the green _moirê_ front. (They were
wearing those colors in town that season.)
At Thorneytoft a few hours later Stanistreet's tongue was running on as
usual, when Tyson pulled him up with a jerk. "Hold hard. Do you know
you're talking about the future Mrs. Nevill Tyson?"
Stanistreet tried to keep calm, for he was poised on his waist across
the edge of the billiard-table. As it was, he lost his balance at the
critical moment, and it ruined his stroke. He looked at the cloth, then
at his cue, with the puzzled air which people generally affect in these
circumstances.
"Great Scott!" said he, "how did I manage that?"
The exclamation may or may not have referred to the stroke.
Tyson looked at his friend with a smile which suggested that he expected
adverse criticism, and was prepared to deal temperately with it.
"Why not?" said he.
Stanistreet, however, said nothing. He was absorbed in chalking the end
of his cue. His silence gave Tyson no chance; it left too much to the
imagination.
"Have you any objection?"
"Well, isn't the lady a little young for a fine old country gentleman
like yourself?"
Tyson's small blue eyes twinkled, for he prided himself on being able
to take a joke at his own expense. Still it was not exactly kind of
Stanistreet to remind him of his mushroom growth.
"Come," said Stanistreet, "you are a gentleman, you know. At any rate,
you're about the only fellow in these parts who can stand a frock-coat
and topper--that's the test. I saw Morley, your big man, going into
church yesterday, and he looked as if he'd just sneaked out of the City
on a 'bus. But you always knew how to dress yourself. The instinct is
hereditary."
Louis had just made a brilliant series of cannons, and was marking fifty
to his score. If he had not been so absorbed in his game, he would have
seen that Tyson was angry; and Tyson when he was angry was not at all
nice to see.
He made himself very stiff as he answered, "Whether I'm a gentleman or
not I can't say. It's an abstruse question. But I've got the girl on my
side, which is a point in my favor; I have the weighty support of my
mamma-in-law elect; and--the prejudices of papa I shall subdue by
degrees."
"By degrees? What degrees?" Again the question was unkind. It referred to
a phase of Tyson's university career which he least liked to look back
upon.
"And how about Mrs. Hathaway?"
"Damn Mrs. Hathaway," said Tyson.
"Poor lady, isn't she sufficiently damned already?"
The twinkle came back into Tyson's eyes, but there was gloom in the rest
of his face. The twinkle was lost upon Stanistreet. He knew too much; and
the awkward thing was that Tyson never could tell exactly how much he
knew. So he wisely dropped the subject.
Stanistreet certainly knew a great deal; but he was the last man in the
world to make a pedantic display of his knowledge; and Mr. Wilcox's
prejudices remained the only obstacle to Tyson's marriage. It was one
iron will against another, and the battle was long. Mr. Wilcox had the
advantage of position. He simply retreated into his library as into a
fortified camp, intrenching himself behind a barricade of books, and
refusing to skirmish with the enemy in the open. And to every assault
made by his family he replied with a violent fit of coughing. A
well-authenticated lung-disease is a formidable weapon in domestic
warfare.
At last he yielded. Not to time, nor yet to Tyson, nor yet to his wife's
logic, but to the importunities of his lung-disease. Other causes may
have contributed; he was a man of obstinate affections, and he had loved
his daughter.
It was considered right that the faults of the dead (his unreasonable
obstinacy, for instance) should be forgiven and forgotten. Death seemed
to have made Mrs. Wilcox suddenly familiar with her incomprehensible
husband. She was convinced that whatever he had thought of it on earth,
in heaven, purged from all mortal weakness, Mr. Wilcox was taking a very
different view of Molly's engagement.
He died in March, and Tyson married Molly in the following May. The bride
is reported to have summed up the case thus: "Bad? I daresay he is. I'm
not marrying him because he is good; I'm marrying him because he's
delightful. And I'm every bit as bad as he is, if they only knew."
It was Mrs. Nevill Tyson's genius for this sort of remark that helped to
make her reputation later on.
CHAPTER II
MRS. NEVILL TYSON
Tyson took his wife abroad for six months to finish her education (as if
to be Tyson's wife was not education enough for any woman!); and Drayton
Parva forgot about them for a time.
In fact, nobody had fully realized the existence of Molly Wilcox till she
burst on them as Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
It was the first appearance of the bride and bridegroom on their return
from their long honeymoon. The rector was giving an "At Home"
(tentatively) in their honor; and a great many people had accepted,
feeling that a very interesting social experiment was about to be made.
Everybody remembers how Mrs. Nevill Tyson fluttered down into that party
of thirty women to eleven men, in an absurd frock, and with a still more
absurd air of assured welcome. Poor little woman! Her comings and goings
from one Continental watering-place to another had been the progress of a
triumphant divinity; where she found an hotel she left a temple. I
sometimes think, too, that little look of expectant gladness may have
been due to the feeling that the Rectory was in England, and England was
home. She was dressed in the most perfect Parisian fashion, from the
crown of her fur toque to the tips of her little shoes; but she had never
learned to speak three words of French correctly. She informed everybody
of the fact that afternoon, laughing with the keenest enjoyment of her
remarkable stupidity; it seemed that her _rôle_ was to be remarkable in
everything. However that may have been, in less than half an hour seven
out of those eleven men were gathered round her chair in the corner; two
out of the seven were the rector and Sir Peter Morley, and Mrs. Nevill
Tyson was talking to all of them at once.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson--she was an illusion and a distraction from head to
foot; her beauty made a promise to the senses and broke it to the
intellect. Coil upon coil, and curl upon curl of dark hair, the dark eyes
of some ruminant animal, a little frivolous curve in an intelligent nose,
a lower jaw like a boy's, the full white throat of a woman, and the mouth
and cheeks of a child just waked from sleep. Tyson had escaped one
misfortune that had been prophesied for him. His wife was not vulgar. She
sat at her ease (much more at her ease than Miss Batchelor), and
chattered away about her honeymoon, her bad French, the places she had
been to, the people she had seen, and all without any consciousness of
her delightful self. Now it was a continuous stream of minute talk,
growing shallower and shallower as it spread over a larger surface; and
now her mind had hardly settled on its subject before it was off and away
again like a butterfly. There was one advantage in this excessive
lightness of touch, that it left great things as it found them, for great
things lay lightly on her soul. She told everybody she had been to Rome;
but imagination simply, refused to picture Mrs. Nevill Tyson in Rome. Her
presence in the Eternal City seemed something less than her footprint in
its dust or her shadow on its walls. Nothing is more irritating than to
have your dream of a place destroyed by the light-hearted gabble of some
idiot who has seen it; but Mrs. Nevill Tyson spared your dreams. The most
delicate ideal would have been undisturbed by the soft sweep of her
generalities, or the graceful flight of her fancy from the matter in
hand.
"There are a great many beautiful statues in the Vatican," said Sir Peter
in his dream.
"Oh, no end. And, talking of beautiful statues, we were introduced to the
most beautiful woman in Rome, the Countess--Countess--Countess--Nevill,
what _was_ that woman's name? Oh--I forget her name, but she was the
loveliest woman I ever saw in my life. Everybody was in love with
her--down on their knees groveling, you couldn't help it. Fancy, she
was engaged to ten people at once! I suppose she had ten engagement
rings--one for each finger, one for each man. I should never have known
which was which. But oh! I oughtn't to have told you. My husband said I
wasn't to talk about her. I don't see why--everybody was talking about
her!"
There was a chorus of protestation.
"And why shouldn't they talk about her, and why shouldn't she be engaged
to ten gentlemen at once? The more the merrier."
"And you haven't told us the lady's name, so we're none the wiser."
"I forgot it. But it would have been all the same if I hadn't. I never
can remember not to tell things. Oh--Countess--Poli--Polidori! There--you
see. My husband says I'm the soul of indiscretion."
There was a sudden silence. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's last sentence seemed to
detach itself and float about the room, and Miss Batchelor perceived with
a pang of pleasure that if Tyson's wife was not vulgar she was an arrant
fool.
"I suppose you visited all the great cathedrals?" said the Rector.
Perhaps he wished to change the subject; perhaps he felt that by talking
about cathedrals to Mrs. Nevill Tyson he was giving a serious, not to say
sacerdotal, character to a frivolous occupation.
"Well, only St. Peter's and the one at Milan."
"And which did you prefer! I am told that St. Peter's is very like our
own St. Paul's--or I should say St. Paul's--"
"Oh, please don't ask me! I know no more than the man in the moon--I mean
the man in the honeymoon" (that joke was Tyson's), "and a lot _he_ knows
about it. There's the man in the honeymoon," she explained, nodding
merrily in her husband's direction.
Meanwhile Tyson was making himself agreeable to Miss Batchelor. And this
is how he did it.
"I hear, Miss Batchelor, that you are a lady of genius."
There was a rumor that Miss Batchelor was engaged on a work of fiction,
which indeed may have been true, though not exactly in the sense
intended.
"Indeed; who told you that?"
"Scandal. But I never listen to scandal, and I didn't believe it."
"I don't suppose you believe that a woman could be a genius."
"No? I have seen women who were geniuses, before now; but in every
instance it meant--I shall hurt your feelings if I tell you what it
meant."
"Not at all. I have no feelings."
"It meant either devilry or disease." Tyson's eyes twinkled wickedly as
he stroked his blonde mustache. He felt a diabolical delight in teasing
Miss Batchelor. There was a time when Miss Batchelor had admired Tyson.
He was not handsome; but his face had character, and she liked character.
Now she hated him and his face and everything belonging to him, his wife
included. But there was no denying that he was clever, cleverer than any
man she had ever met in her life.
"Even a great intellect"--here Tyson looked hard at Miss Batchelor, and
her faded nervous face seemed to shrink under the look--"is a great
misfortune--to a woman. Look at my wife now. She has about as much
intellect as a guinea-pig, and the consequence is she is not only happy
herself, but a cause of happiness to others. There--see!"
Miss Batchelor saw. She saw Sir Peter Morley contending with the rector
for the honor of handing Mrs. Nevill Tyson her tea. They were joined by
Stanistreet. Yes, Stanistreet. The rector seemed to have drawn the line
nowhere that day. There was no mistaking the tall figure, alert and
vigorous, the lean dark face, a little eager, a little hard. And that
very clever woman Miss Batchelor sat hungry and thirsty--very hungry and
very thirsty--and Tyson stood behind her stroking his mustache. He was
not looking at her now, nor thinking of her. He was contemplating that
adorable piece of folly, his wife.
CHAPTER III
MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON AT HOME
Perhaps it was well that Mrs. Nevill Tyson took things so lightly,
otherwise she might have been somewhat oppressed by her surroundings at
Thorneytoft. That hideous old barrack stared with all the uncompromising
truculence of bare white stone on nature that smiled agreeably round it
in lawn and underwood. Old Tyson had bought the house as it stood from an
impecunious nobleman, supplying its deficiencies according to his own
very respectable fancy. The result was a little startling. Worm-eaten oak
was flanked by mahogany veneer, brocade and tapestry were eked out with
horse-hair and green rep, gules and azure from the stained-glass lozenge
lattices were reflected in a hundred twinkling, dangling lusters; and you
came upon lions rampant in a wilderness of wax-flowers. What with antique
heraldry and utilitarian furniture, you would have said there was no
place there for anything so frivolously pretty as Mrs. Nevill Tyson;
unless, indeed, her figure served to give the finishing touch to the
ridiculous medley.
The sight of Thorneytoft would have taken the heart out of Mrs. Wilcox if
anything could. Mrs. Wilcox herself looked remarkably crisp and fresh and
cheerful in her widow's dress. Tyson rather liked Mrs. Wilcox than
otherwise (perhaps because she was a little afraid of him and showed it);
he noticed with relief that his mother-in-law was beginning to look
almost like a lady, and he attributed this pleasing effect to the fact
that she was now unable to commit any of her former atrocities of color.
He respected her, too, for wearing her weeds with an air of genial
worldliness. There was something about Mrs. Wilcox that evaded the touch
of sorrow; but from certain things--food, clothes, furniture--she seemed
to catch, as it were, the sense of tears, suggestions of the human
tragedy. She was peculiarly sensitive to interiors, and a drawing-room
"without any of the little refinements and luxuries, you know--not so
much as a flower-pot or a basket-table"--weighed heavily on her happy
soul. Needless to say she had never dreamed that Nevill would let the
house remain in its present state; her intellect could never have grasped
so melancholy a possibility, and the fact was somewhat unsettling to her
faith in Nevill Tyson. "Isn't it--for a young bride, you know--just a
little--a little _triste_?" And being more than a little afraid of her
son-in-law, she waved her hands to give an inoffensive vagueness to her
idea. Tyson said he didn't care to spend money on a place like
Thorneytoft; he didn't know how long he would stay in it; he never stayed
anywhere long; he was a pilgrim and a stranger, a sort of cosmopolitan
Cain, and he might go abroad again, or he might take a flat in town for
the season. And at the mention of a flat in town all Mrs. Wilcox's
beautiful beliefs came back to her unimpaired. A flat in town, and a
house in the country that you can afford to look down upon--what more
could you desire?
Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not take the furniture very seriously. For quite
three days after her arrival she was content to sit in that very
respectable drawing-room, waiting for the callers who never came. She
could not have taken the callers very seriously either (what _did_ Mrs.
Nevill Tyson take seriously, I should like to know?), or else, surely she
would have had some little regard for appearances; she would never have
risked being caught at four o'clock in the afternoon sitting on Tyson's
knee, doing all sorts of absurd things to his face. First, she stroked
his hair straight down over his forehead, which had a singularly
brutalizing effect, so that she was obliged to push it back again and
make it all neat with one of the little tortoise-shell combs that kept
her own curls in order. Then she lifted up his mustache till the lip
curled in a dreadful mechanical smile, showing a slightly crooked,
slightly prominent tooth.
"Oh, what an ugly tooth!" said Mrs. Nevill Tyson; and she let the lip
fall again like a curtain. "How could I marry a man with a tooth like
that! Do you know, poor papa used to say you were just like
Phorc--Phorc--something with a fork in it."
"Phorcyas?"
"Yes. How clever you are! Who was Phorc-y-as?" Mrs. Nevill Tyson made a
face over the word.
"It's another name for Mephistopheles." (Tyson knew his Goethe better
than his classics.)
"And Mephistopheles is another name for--the devil! Oh!" She took the
tips of his ears with the tips of her fingers and held his head straight
while she stared into his eyes. "Look me straight in the face now. No
blinking. Are you the devil, I wonder?" She put her head on one side as
if she were considering him judicially from an entirely new point of
view. "I wonder why papa didn't like you?"
"He didn't think me good enough for his little girl, and he was quite
right there."
"He didn't mind so much when I got engaged to Willie Payne. He said we
were admirably suited to each other. That was because Willie was a fool.
Oh--I forgot you didn't know!"
"Ah, I know now. And how many more, Mrs. Molly?"
"No more--only you. And Willie doesn't count. It was ages ago, when I was
at school. Look here." She pushed back the ruffles of her sleeve and
showed him a little livid mark running across the back of her hand. "Did
I ever tell you what that meant? It means that they shoved Willie's
letters into the big fireplace--with the tongs--and that _I_ stuck
my hand between the bars and pulled them out."
"I say--you must have been rather gone on Willie, you know."
"No. I didn't like him much. But I _loved_ his letters." Mrs. Nevill
Tyson looked at the tips of her little shoes, and Mr. Nevill Tyson looked
at her.
"So Willie doesn't count, doesn't he?"
"No. He was a fool. He never did anything. Nevill, what did father think
you'd done?"
"I really cannot say. Nothing to deserve you, I suppose."
"Rubbish! I know all that. But he said there was something, and he
wouldn't tell me what. Anyhow, you didn't do it, did you?"
"Probably not."
"Come, I think you might tell me when I've confessed all my little sins
to you." Mrs. Nevill Tyson was persistent, not because she in the least
wanted to know, but because nobody likes being beaten.
"I don't know what the dear old pater was driving at. I don't suppose he
knew himself. He was a scholar, not a man of the world. He could read any
Greek poet, I daresay, who was dead enough and dull enough; but when a
real live Englishman walked into his study, it seemed to put him out
somehow. He didn't like me, and he showed it. All the same, I think I
could have made him like me if he'd given me a chance. I don't suppose
he does me any injustice now."
"No. He knew an awful lot about those stupid old Greeks and Romans and
people, but I don't think he knew much about you. I expect he made it up
to frighten mother. That reminds me, what _do_ you think Miss Batchelor
says about you? She told mother that it was a pity you hadn't any
profession--every man ought to have a profession--keep you out of
mischief. I wasn't going to have her talking like that about _my_
husband--the impudent thing!--so I just stopped her yesterday in Moxon's
shop and told her you had a profession. I led up to it so neatly, you
can't think. I said you were going to be a barrister or a judge or
something."
"A judge? That's rather a large order. But you know you mustn't tell
stories, you little minx. Miss Batchelor's too clever to take all that
in."
"Well, but it's true. You _are_ going to be a barrister, and everybody
knows that barristers grow into judges, if you feed them properly."
"But I haven't the remotest intention of being a barrister. How did you
get hold of that notion?"
"Oh, I knew it all along. Papa said so."
"You must have been mistaken."
"Not a bit. I'll tell you exactly what he said. I heard him talking about
it to mother in the library. I wasn't listening, you know. I--I heard
your name, and I couldn't help it. He said he expected to see you
figuring in the law courts some of these days--Probate, Divorce, and
Admiralty Division."
Tyson rose, putting her down from his knee as if she had been a baby.
"I hope you didn't tell Miss Batchelor that?"
"Yes, I did though--rather!"
He smiled in spite of himself. "What did she do?"
"Oh, she just stared--over her shoulder; you know her way."
"Look here, Molly, you must _not_ go about saying that sort of thing.
People here don't understand it; they'll only think--"
"What?"
"Never mind what they'll think. The world is chock-full of wickedness, my
child. But if half the people we meet are sinners, the other half are
fools. I never knew any one yet who wasn't one or the other. So don't
think about what they think, but mind what you say. See?"
"I'm sorry." She had come softly up to the window where he stood; and now
she was rubbing his sleeve with one side of her face and smiling with the
other.
He stroked her hair.
"All right. Don't do it again, that's all."
"I won't--if you'll only tell me one thing. Were you ever engaged to
anybody but me?"
"No; I was never engaged to anybody but you."
"Then you were never in love with ten gentlemen at once like the Countess
Pol--"
His answer was cut short by the entrance of Sir Peter Morley, followed by
Captain Stanistreet.
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST STONE
Tyson was much flattered by the rumor that Sir Peter Morley had
pronounced his wife to be "the loveliest woman in Leicestershire";
for Lady Morley herself was a sufficiently splendid type, with her
austere Puritan beauty. As for the rector, it was considered that his
admiration of Mrs. Nevill Tyson somewhat stultified his utterances in
the pulpit.
It is not always well for a woman when the judgment of the other sex
reverses that of her own. It was not well for Mrs. Nevill Tyson to be
told that she had fascinated Sir Peter Morley and spoiled the rector's
sermons; it was not well for her to be worshipped (collectively) by the
riff-raff that swarmed about Thorneytoft at Tyson's invitation; but any
of these things were better than for her to be left, as she frequently
was, to the unmixed society of Captain Stanistreet. He had a reputation.
Tyson thought nothing of going up to town for the week-end and leaving
Louis to entertain his wife in his absence. To do him justice, this
neglect was at first merely a device by which he heightened the luxury
of possession. In his own choice phrase, he "liked to give a mare a loose
rein when he knew her paces." It was all right. He knew Molly, and if he
did not, Stanistreet knew him. But these things were subtleties which
Drayton Parva did not understand, and naturally enough it began to avoid
the Tysons because of them.
Apparently Mrs. Nevill Tyson liked Stanistreet. She liked his humorous
dark face and his courteous manners; above all, she liked that air of
profound interest with which he listened to everything that she had to
say; it made it easy for her to chatter to him as she chattered to nobody
else, except (presumably) her husband. As for Stanistreet, try as he
would (and he tried a great deal), he could not make Mrs. Nevill Tyson
out. Day after day Mrs. Nevill Tyson, in amazing garments, sat and
prattled to him in the dog-cart, while Tyson followed the hounds; yet for
the life of him he could not tell whether she was really very infantile
or only very deep. You see she was Tyson's wife. It must be said she gave
him every opportunity for clearing his ideas on the subject, and if he
did not know, other people might be allowed to make mistakes. And when he
came to stay at Thorneytoft for weeks at a time, familiarity with the
little creature's moods only complicated the problem.
It was about the middle of February, and Stanistreet had been down
for a fortnight's hunting, when, in the morning of his last day, Tyson
announced his intention of going up to town with him to-morrow. He might
be away for three weeks or a month altogether; it depended upon whether
he enjoyed himself sufficiently.
Stanistreet, who was looking at Mrs. Nevill Tyson at the time, saw the
smile and the color die out of her face; her beauty seemed to suffer a
shade, a momentary eclipse. She began to drink tea (they were at
breakfast) with an air of abstraction too precipitate to be quite
convincing.
"Moll," said Tyson, "if you're going to this meet, you'd better run
upstairs and put your things on."
"I don't want to go to any meets."
"Why not?"
"Because--I--I don't like to see other women riding."
"Bless her little heart!" (Tyson was particularly affectionate this
morning) "she's never had a bridle in her ridiculous hands, and she talks
about 'other women riding.'"
"Because I want to ride, and you won't let me, and I'm jealous."
"Well, if you mayn't ride with me, you may drive with Stanistreet."
"_I_ may drive Captain Stanistreet?"
"Certainly not; Captain Stanistreet may drive you."
"We'll see about that," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson as she left the room.
She soon reappeared, enchantingly pretty again in her laces and furs.
It was a glorious morning, the first thin white frost after a long thaw.
The meet was in front of the Cross-Roads Inn, about a mile out of Drayton
Parva. It was neutral ground, where Farmer Ashby could hold his own with
Sir Peter any day, and speech was unfettered. Somebody remarked that Mrs.
Nevill Tyson looked uncommonly happy in the dog-cart; while Tyson spoke
to nobody and nobody spoke to him. Poor devil! he hadn't at all a pretty
look on that queer bleached face of his. And all the time he kept
twisting his horse's head round in a melancholy sort of way, and backing
into things and out of them, fit to make you swear.
She must have noticed something. They were trotting along, Stanistreet
driving, by a road that ran side by side with the fields scoured by the
hunt, and Tyson could always be seen going recklessly and alone. He could
ride, he could ride! His worst enemy never doubted that.
"It's very odd," said she, "but the people here don't seem to like Nevill
one bit. I suppose they've never seen anything quite like him before."
"I very much doubt if they have."
"_I_ think they're afraid of him. Mother is, I know; she blinks when she
talks to him."
"Does she blink when she talks to me?"
"Of course not--you're different."
"I am not her son-in-law, certainly."
"Do you know, though he's so much older than me--I simply shudder when
I think he's thirty-seven--and so awfully clever, and _so_ bad-tempered,
I'm not in the least afraid of him. And he really has a shocking bad
temper."
"I know it of old."
"So many nice people have bad tempers. I think it's the least horrid
fault you can have; because it comes on you when you're not thinking,
and it isn't your fault at all."
"No; it is generally some one else's."
"I don't think much of people's passions myself. He might have something
far worse than that."
"Most undoubtedly. He might have atrocious taste in dress, or a tendency
to drink."
"Don't be silly. Did you know him when he was young? I don't mean to say
he isn't young--thirty-seven's young enough for anybody--I mean when he
was young like me?"
"I can't say. I doubt if he was ever young--like you. But I knew him when
he was a boy."
"So you understand him?"
"Oh, pretty well. Not always, perhaps. He's a difficult subject."
"Anyhow, you like him? Don't you?"
Stanistreet gave a curious hard laugh.
"Oh yes--I like him."
"That's all right. And really, I don't wonder that people can't make him
out. He's the strangest animal _I_ ever met in my life. I haven't made
him out yet. I think I shall give him up."
"Give him up, by all means. Isn't that what people generally do when they
can't understand each other?"
Mrs. Nevill Tyson made no answer. She was trying to think, and thinking
came hard to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"I suppose he's had a past. But of course it doesn't do to go poking and
probing into a man's past--"
Stanistreet lifted his eyebrows and looked at the little woman. She was
sitting bolt upright, staring out over the vague fields; she seemed to
have uttered the words unconsciously, as if at the dictation of some
familiar spirit. "And yet I wish--no, I don't wish I knew. I know he must
have had an awful time of it." She turned her face suddenly on
Stanistreet. "What do you think he told me the other day? He said he had
never known anybody who wasn't either a fool or a sinner. What do you
think of that? Must you be one or the other?"
Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. "You may be both. We are all of us
sinners, and certainly a great many of us are fools."
"I wonder. He isn't a fool."
Stanistreet wondered too. He wondered at the things she allowed herself
to say; he wondered whether she was drawing any inference; and above all,
he wondered at the shrinking introspective look on her careless face.
In another minute Mrs. Nevill Tyson had started from her seat and was
waving her muff wildly in the air. "Look--there he goes! Oh, _did_ you
see him take that fence? What an insane thing to do with the ground
like that."
He looked in the direction indicated by the muff, and saw Tyson riding
far ahead of the hunt, a small scarlet blot on the gray-white landscape.
"By Jove! he rides as if he were charging the enemy's guns at the head of
a line of cavalry."
"Yes." She leaned back; the excitement faded from her face, and she
sighed. The sigh was so light that it scarcely troubled the frosty air,
but it made Stanistreet look at her again. How adorably pretty she was
in all her moods!
Perhaps she was conscious of the look, for she rattled on again more
incoherently than before. "I'm talking a great deal of nonsense; I always
do when I get the chance. You can't talk nonsense to mother; she wouldn't
understand it. She'd think it was sense. And, you see, I'm interested in
my husband. I suppose it's the proper thing to take an interest in your
husband. If you won't take an interest in your husband, what will you
take an interest in? It's natural--not to say primitive. Do you know, he
says I'm the most primitive person he ever came across. Should _you_ say
I was primitive? Don't answer that. I don't think he'd like me to talk
about him quite so much. He thinks I never know where to draw the line.
But I never see any lines to draw, and if I did, I wouldn't know how to
draw them."
Stanistreet smiled grimly. He was wondering whether she _was_
"primitive."
"Just look at Scarum's ears! Don't tease her. She doesn't like it. Dear
thing! She's delicious to kiss--she's got such a soft nose. But she'll
bolt as soon as look at you, and she's awfully hard to hold." Her fingers
were twitching with the desire to hold Scarum.
"I think I can manage her."
"You see, somehow or the other I like talking to you. You may be a
sinner, but I don't think you are a fool; and I've a sort of a notion
that you understand."
He was silent. So many women had thought he understood.
"I wonder--_do_ you understand!"
The eyes that Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on Stanistreet were not
search-lights; they were wells of darkness, unsearchable, unfathomable.
Something in Stanistreet, equally inscrutable, something that was himself
and not himself, answered very low to that vague appeal.
"Yes, I understand."
He had turned towards her, smiling darkly, and all her face flashed back
a happy smile.
Surely, oh surely, Mrs. Nevill Tyson was the soul of indiscretion; for at
that moment Miss Batchelor, trotting past with Lady Morley, looked from
them to her companion and smiled too.
That smile was the first stone.
Miss Batchelor acknowledged them with a curt little nod, and Mrs.
Nevill Tyson's face became instantly overclouded. Louis leaned a little
nearer and said in a husky, uneven voice, "Surely you don't mind that
impertinent woman?"
"Not a bit," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson. "She's got a villainous seat."
"Then what are you thinking about?"
"I'm thinking what horrid hard lines it is that they won't let me hunt.
All the time I might have been flying across country with Nevill, instead
of--"
"Instead of crawling in a dog-cart with me. Thank you, Mrs. Nevill."
"You needn't thank me. I haven't given you anything."
Again Stanistreet wondered whether Mrs. Nevill was very simple or very
profound. And wondering, he gave the mare a cut across the flanks that
made her leap in the shafts.
"That was silly of you. She'll have her heels through before you know
where you are. She's a demon to kick, is Scarum."
Scarum had spared the splash-board this time, but she was going
furiously, and the little dog-cart rocked from side to side. Mrs.
Nevill Tyson rose to her feet.
"Strikes me you can't drive a little bit," said she.
"Please sit down, Mrs. Tyson." But Mrs. Tyson remained imperiously
standing, trying to keep her balance like a small sailor in a
rollicking sea.
"Get up."
Stanistreet muttered wrathfully under his mustache, and she caught the
words "damned foolery."
"Bundle out this minute." She made a grab at the rail in an undignified
manner.
He doubled the reins firmly over his right hand, and with his left arm he
forced her back into her seat. He was holding her there when Farmer Ashby
turned out of a by-lane and followed close behind them. And Farmer Ashby
had a nice tale to tell at "The Cross-Roads" of how he had seen the
Captain driving with his arm round Mrs. Tyson's waist.
That was another stone.
Stanistreet tugged at the reins with both hands and pulled the mare
almost on to her haunches; her hoofs shrieked on the iron road; she stood
still and snorted, her forelegs well out, her hide smoking.
When he had made quite sure that the animal's attitude was that of
temporary exhaustion rather than of passion, Stanistreet changed seats,
and gave the reins to Mrs. Nevill Tyson; and Scarum burst into her
second heat.
"I suppose you have a right to drive your own animal into the ditch,"
said he.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson set her teeth with a determined air, planted her feet
firmly on the floor of the trap to give herself a good purchase; she gave
the reins a little twist as she had seen Stanistreet do, she balanced the
whip like a fishing-rod, with the line dangling over Scarum's ears, and
then she rattled away over the wrinkling roads at a glorious pace; she
reeled over cart-ruts, she went thump over sods and bump over mud-heaps,
she grazed walls and hedges, skimmed over the brink of ditches, careened
round corners, and tore past most things on the wrong side; and
Stanistreet's sense of deadly peril was lost in the pleasure of seeing
her do it. When she was not chattering to him she was encouraging Scarum
with all sorts of endearments, small chirping sounds and delicate
chuckles, smiling that indefinably malicious, lop-sided smile which
Stanistreet had been taught all his life to interpret as a challenge.
Now they were going down a lane of beeches, they bent their heads under
the branches, and a shower of rime fell about her shoulders, powdering
her black hair; he watched it thawing in the warmth there till it
sparkled like a fine dew; and now they were running between low hedges,
and the keen air from the frosted fields smote the blood into her cheeks
and the liquid light into her eyes; it lifted the fringe from her
forehead and crisped it over the fur border of her hat; flying ends of
lace and sable were flung behind her like streamers; she seemed to be
winged with the wind of speed; she was the embodiment of vivid, reckless,
beautiful life.
It came over him with a sort of shock that this woman was Tyson's wife,
irrevocably, until one or other of them died. And Tyson was not the sort
of man to die for anybody's convenience but his own.
At last they swayed into the courtyard at Thorneytoft. "Thank heaven
we're alive!" he said, as he followed her into the house.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on the threshold. "Do you mean to say you didn't
enjoy it!"
"Oh, of course it was delightful; but I don't know that it was
exactly--safe."
"I see--you were afraid. We were safe enough so long as _I_ was driving."
He smiled drearily. He felt that he had been whirled along in a delirious
dream--a madman driven by a fool. As if in answer to his thoughts, she
called back over the banisters--
"I'm not such a fool as I look, you know."
No, for the life of him Stanistreet did not know. His doubt was absurd,
for it implied that Mrs. Nevill Tyson practiced the art of symbolism, and
he could hardly suppose her to be so well acquainted with the resources
of language. On the other hand, he could not conceive how, after living
more than half a year with Tyson, she had preserved her formidable
_naïveté_.
At dinner that evening she still further obscured the question by
boasting that she had saved Captain Stanistreet's life. Stanistreet
protested.
"Nonsense," said she; "you know perfectly well that you'd have upset the
whole show if you'd been left to yourself."
Tyson stared at his wife. "Do you mean to say that he let you drive?"
"Let me? Not he! He couldn't help it." Her white throat shook with
derisive laughter. "I took the reins; or, if you like, I kicked over
the traces. I always told you I'd do it some day."
Tyson pushed his chair back from the table and scowled meditatively. Mrs.
Nevill Tyson was smiling softly to herself as she played with the water
in her finger-glass. Presently she rose and shook the drops from her
fingertips, like one washing her hands of a light matter. Stanistreet got
up and opened the door for her, standing very straight and militant and
grim; and as she passed through she looked back at him and laughed again.
"I can see," said Tyson, as Stanistreet took his seat again, "you've been
letting that wife of mine make more or less of a fool of herself. If you
had no consideration for her neck or your own, you might have thought of
my son and heir."
"Oh," said Stanistreet, a little vaguely, for he was startled, "I kept a
good lookout."
"Not much use in that," said Tyson.
Stanistreet battled with his doubt. Tyson had furnished him with a key to
his wife's moods. Moreover, a simpler explanation had occurred to him.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson was fond of driving; she had been forbidden to drive,
therefore she drove; she had never driven any animal in her life before,
and, notwithstanding her inexperience, she had accomplished the dangerous
feat without injury to anybody. Hence no doubt her laughter and her
triumph.
But this again was symbolism. He determined to sleep on it.
CHAPTER V
THE NIGHT WATCH
Like all delightful things, Mrs. Nevill Tyson's laughter was short-lived.
When Tyson went up to bed that night between twelve and one, he found his
wife sitting by her bedroom fire in the half-darkness. Evidently
contemplation had overtaken her in the act of undressing, for her hair
was still untouched, her silk bodice lay beside her on the floor where
she had let it fall, and she sat robed in her long dressing-gown. He came
up to her, holding his candle so that the light fell full on her face; it
looked strange and pale against the vivid scarlet of her gown. Her eyes,
too, were dim, her mouth had lost its delicate outline, her cheeks seemed
to have grown slightly, ever so slightly, fuller, and the skin looked
glazed as if by the courses of many tears. He had noticed these changes
before; of late they had come many times in the twelve hours; but
to-night it seemed not so much a momentary disfigurement as a sudden
precocious maturity, as if nature had stamped her face with the image of
what it would be ten, fifteen years hence. And as he looked at her a cold
and subtle pang went through him, a curious abominable sensation, mingled
with a sort of spiritual pain. He dared not give a name to the one
feeling, but the other he easily recognized as self-reproach. He had
known it once or twice before.
He stooped over her and kissed her. "Why are you sitting up here and
crying, all by your little self?"
She shook her head.
"What are you crying about? You didn't suppose I was angry with you?"
"No. I wouldn't have cried if you had been angry. I'm not crying now.
I don't know why I cried at all. I'm tired, or cold, or something."
"Why don't you go to bed, then?"
"I'm going." She rose wearily and went to the dressing-table. He watched
her reflection in the looking-glass. As she raised her arms to take the
pins from her hair, her white face grew whiter, it was deadly white. He
went to her help, unpinning the black coils, smoothing them and plaiting
them in a loose braid. He did it in a business-like way, as if he had
been a hairdresser, he whose pulse used to beat faster if he so much as
touched her gown. Then he gave her a cold business-like kiss that left
her sadder than before. The fact was, he had thought she was going to
faint. But Mrs. Nevill Tyson was not of the fainting kind; she was only
tired, tired and sick.
It was arranged that Tyson was to leave by the two o'clock train the next
day. He was packing up his things about noon, when Molly staggered into
his dressing-room with her teeth chattering. Clinging to the rail of the
bedstead for support, she gazed at the preparations for his departure.
"I wish you wouldn't go away, Nevill," she said.
"It's all right, I'll be back in a day or two." He blushed at his own
lie.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson sat down on the bed and began to cry.
"What's the matter, Moll, eh?"
"I don't know, I don't know," she sobbed. "I'm afraid, Nevill--I'm so
terribly afraid."
"Why, what are you afraid of?" He looked up and was touched by the terror
in her face.
"I don't know. But I can bear it--I won't be silly and frightened--I can
bear it if you'll only stay."
She slid on to her knees beside him; and while she implored him to stay,
her hands worked unconsciously, helping him to go--smoothing and folding
his clothes, and laying them in little heaps about the floor, her figure
swaying unsteadily as she knelt.
He put his arm round her; he drew her head against his shoulder; and she
looked up into his face, trying to smile.
"You won't leave me?" she whispered hoarsely.
He laid his hand upon her forehead. It was damp with the first sweat of
her agony.
He carried her to her room and sent for Mrs. Wilcox and the doctor and
the nurse. Then he went back and began turning the things in and out of
his portmanteau in a melancholy, undecided manner. Mrs. Wilcox came and
found him doing it.
"I'm not going," he said in answer to her indignant stare.
"I'm glad to hear it. Because if you _do_ go--"
"I am not going."
But Mrs. Wilcox's maternal instinct had subdued her fear of Nevill Tyson,
and he respected her defiance even more than he had respected her fear.
"If you go you'll put her in a fever, and _I_ won't answer for the
consequences."
He said nothing, for he had a sense of justice, and it was her hour.
Besides, he was no little conscience-stricken.
He went out to look for Stanistreet, and found him in the courtyard,
piling his own luggage on the dog-cart. He put his hand on his shoulder.
"Look here," said he, "I can't go. It's a damned nuisance, but it's out
of the question. Leave those things till to-morrow."
"To-morrow?" Stanistreet stared vaguely at his host.
"Yes; you must see me through this, Stanny. I can't trust myself by
myself. For God's sake let's go and do something, or I'll go off my
head."
They spent the afternoon in the low coverts about the Toft, and the
evening in the billiard-room, sitting forlornly over whiskey-and-soda.
A peculiar throbbing silence and mystery seemed to hang about the house.
Stanistreet was depressed and hardly spoke, while Tyson vainly tried to
hide his nervousness under a fictitious jocularity. He looked eagerly for
the night, by which time he had concluded that all anxiety would be
ended. But when ten o'clock came and he found that nothing more nor less
than a long night-watch was required of him, his nerves revolted.
"I wonder how long this business is going to last? I wish to God I'd
never stayed." He leaned back against the chimney-piece, grinding his
heels on the fender in his irritation. "I was a fool not to get away in
the morning when I had the chance."
He looked up and saw Stanistreet regarding him with a curiously critical
expression. Louis did not look very like sitting up all night; his lean
face was haggard already.
"I say, Stanistreet, it's awfully good of you to stop like this. I'm
confoundedly sorry I asked you to. I don't know how we're going to get
through the night." He cast a glance at the billiard-table. "Pity we
can't knock the balls about a bit--but you see they'd hear us, and she
might think it a little cold-blooded."
"My dear fellow, I'm ready to sit up with you till any time in the
morning, and I never felt less like billiards in my life."
"Then there's nothing for it that I can see but a mighty smoke--it'll
soothe our nerves any way. And a mighty drink--we shall need it, you
bet."
He rang the bell, lit his first cigar, and settled himself for his watch.
His irritation was still sullenly fermenting; for not only was he going
to spend a disagreeable night, but he had been most inconsiderately
balked of a pleasant one.
"It's inconceivable," said he, "the things women expect you to do. If I
could do her the smallest good by stopping I wouldn't complain. But I
can't see her, can't go near her, can't do her the least bit of good in
the world--I would be better out of the way, in fact--and yet I have to
stick here, fretting myself into a fever. If I didn't do it I should be
an unfeeling, heartless, disgusting brute. See? That's the way they
reason."
Presently, under the soothing influence of the cigar, he settled down
into some semblance of his former self. He talked almost as well as
usual, touching on such light local topics as Miss Batchelor and the new
Parish Council; he told Mrs. Nevill's barrister story with variations,
and that landed him in a discussion of his plans. "I very much doubt
whether I shall die a country gentleman after all. It isn't the life for
me. That old man's respectability was ideal--transcendental--it's too
much for me. I don't know why he left it to me. Sheer cussedness, I
suppose. It would have been just like him if he had left me his
immortality, on the condition that I should spend it at Drayton Parva. I
couldn't stand that. I don't even know if I can stand another year of it.
I shall be dragged to the center again some of these days. It must come.
As it is, I'm a rag of a human moth fluttering round the lamps of town."
"Fate," said Stanistreet.
"Not at all. If I go, it'll be chance that takes me--pure chance."
"Don't see much difference myself."
"There's all the difference. Ask any man who's been chivied about to all
the ends of the earth and back again. He can tell you something about,
chance, but I doubt if he swears much by fate. Chance--oh Lord, don't I
know it!--chance takes you up and plays with you, pleases you or teases
you, and drops you when she's tired of you. Like--some ladies of our
acquaintance, and you're none the worse for it, not you! Fate looks
devilish well after you, loves you or hates you, and in either case
sticks to you and ruins you. Like your wife. To complete the little
allegory, you can have as many chances as you like, but only one fate.
Needless to say, though my chances have been many and charming, I
naturally prefer my--fate."
Tyson was a master of the graceful art of symbolism, and Stanistreet had
caught the trick from him. At the present moment he would have given a
great deal to know how much of all this was a mere playing with words.
There was a sound of hurrying feet in the room upstairs, and the two men
held their breath. Tyson was the first to recover.
"Good God, Stanistreet, how white you are! I wish I hadn't let you in for
this. I'm not in the least nervous myself, you know. She's all right.
Thompson says so. I'm awfully sorry for the poor little soul, but if
you come to think of it, it's the most natural and ordinary thing in the
world."
But Stanistreet's thoughts were back in yesterday. He could see nothing,
think of nothing but the little figure going through the doorway, and
laughing as it went.
"Do you mind not talking about it?" said he.
Tyson sat quiet for a while, except when some obscure movement overhead
roused him from his philosophic calm. Towards midnight Mrs. Wilcox came
to the door and spoke to him for a minute. After that he became
thoughtful. "I don't quite like the look of it," said he; "he's sent for
Baker of Drayton--I suppose it means that the idiot has just sense enough
not to trust his own judgment. But I don't like it."
By the time he had struck another attitude, lit another cigar, and gulped
down another tumbler of whiskey-and-soda, philosophic calm gave way to
philosophic doubt. "I don't know who has the management of these things,
but what I want to know is--why do they make women like that? Is it
justice? Is it even common decency? What do you think?"
Stanistreet moved impatiently. "I don't think. I've no opinion on the
subject. And I never interfere between a man and his Maker--it's bad
form. They must settle it between them."
"It's all very well to be so infernally polite. But this sort of thing
wakes you up impolitely, and makes you ask impolite questions. I suppose
I've seen men die by dozens--so have you--seen them die as if they
enjoyed it, and seen them foaming at the mouth, kicking against
death--and I can't say it particularly staggered my belief in my Maker.
But when it comes to the women, somehow it seems more polite not to
believe in him than to believe that he does these damnable things on
purpose."
Stanistreet closed his eyes to shut out the sight of Tyson and his
eternal cigar, and the slow monotonous movement of his lips. His friend's
theological views were not exactly the supreme interest of the moment.
"Down there in the desert" (Tyson seemed to dream as he raised his eyes
to the great map of the Soudan that hung above the chimney-piece), "where
there's no end to the sand and the sky, and man's nothing and woman less
than nothing, this curious belief in the infinite seems the natural
thing; it simply possesses you. You know the feeling? But here it gets
crowded out somehow; it's too big for these little houses we've got to
live in, and work in, and die in. It's beastly business thinking, though.
I fancy old Tennyson got very near the mark--
"'Perplexed in faith, but _pure in deeds_.
At last he beat his music out;
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half--'"
There was a sharp bitter cry, stifled in the instant of its utterance,
and Tyson started to his feet. His mouth worked convulsively. "My God!
I don't care who's responsible for this filthy world. Nobody but a fiend
could take that little thing and torture her so. Think of it, Louis!"
"I'm trying not to think of it. It's damnable as you say, but--other
women have to stand it."
"Other women!" Tyson flung the words out like an execration that throbbed
with his scorn and loathing of the sex. Other women! By an act of his
will he had put his wife on a high pedestal for the moment--made her
shine, for the moment, white and fair above the contemptible herd, her
obscure multitudinous sisterhood. Other women! The phrase had an
undertone of dull passionate self-reproach that was distinctly audible
to Stanistreet's finer ear. Stanistreet knew many things about
Tyson--knew, for instance, the cause that but for this would have taken
him up to town; and Tyson knew that he knew.
If it came to that, Stanistreet too had some grounds for self-reproach.
He took up a book and tried to read; but the words reeled and staggered
and grew dim before him; he found himself listening to the ticking of the
clock, and the pulse of time became a woman's heart beating violently
with pain, a heart indistinguishable from his own. Other women (it was he
who had used the words)--was it simply by her share in their grim lot
that Mrs. Nevill Tyson had contrived to invest herself with this somber
significance? Perhaps. It was the same woman that he had driven with,
laughed with, flirted with a hundred times--the woman that in the natural
course of things (Tyson apart) he would infallibly have made love to; and
yet in one day and one night her prettinesses, her impertinences had
fallen from her like a frivolous garment, leaving only the simple eternal
lines of her womanhood. Henceforth, whatever he might think, he would not
think of her to-morrow as he had thought yesterday; whatever he felt
to-morrow, his feeling would never lose that purifying touch of tragic
pity. Mrs. Nevill Tyson would never be the same woman that he had known
before. And yet--she was a fool, a fool; and he doubted if her sufferings
would make her any wiser.
Tyson looked at his watch. "Look there, Stanistreet, it's two
o'clock--there must be some blundering. I'll speak to Baker. What are
those damned doctors thinking of! Why can't they have done with it? Why
can't they put her under chloroform?"
One by one the lamps over the billiard-table died down and went out; the
firelight leapt and started on the wall, making the gloom of the great
room visible; in the half-darkness Tyson became clairvoyant, and his
self-reproach grew dominant and clamorous. "It's all my fault--if she
dies it'll be my fault! But how was I to know? How could I tell that
anything like this would happen? I swear I'd die rather than let her go
through this villainy a second time. It's infamous--I'll kill myself
before it happens again!" He flung himself on the sofa and turned his
face to the wall, muttering invectives, blasphemies--a confused furious
arraignment of the finite and the Infinite.
At three o'clock the doctors sent for him. When he came back he was very
silent. He lay down again quietly, and from time to time his lips moved,
whether in imprecation or prayer it was hard to say; but it struck
Stanistreet that Tyson's mind had veered again to the orthodoxy of
terror.
There was silence overhead too. They were putting her under chloroform.
Another hour and the window-panes glimmered as if a tissue of liquid air
were spread between them and the darkness. There was a break in the night
outside, a livid streak of dawn; the objects in the room took curious
unintelligible shapes, the billiard-table in its white cloth became a
monstrous bed, a bier, a gleaming mausoleum. And with the dawn Tyson on
his sofa had dropped into a doze, and thence into a sleep. The night's
orgy of emotion had left his features in a curious moral disarray; once
or twice a sort of bubbling murmur rose to his lips. "Poor devil!"
thought Stanistreet, "I'd give anything to know how much he really
cared."
Stanistreet still watched. Mrs. Wilcox found him sitting bent forward,
with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands. He was
roused by her touch on his shoulder. He started when he saw her standing
over him, a strange figure in the dull light. She was clad in a long gray
dressing-gown, her hair uncurled, red rims round her eyes and dark
streaks under them, her mouth swollen and trembling. That night had been
a rude shock to her optimism.
Stanistreet never knew how he became possessed of her plump hand, nor
what he did with it. His eyes looked the question he was afraid to speak.
"It's all right--all per--perfectly right," stammered the optimist. "Wake
him up, please, and tell him he has got a son."
CHAPTER VI
A SON AND HEIR
It seems a simple thing to believe in the divinity of motherhood, when
you have only seen it in the paintings of one or two old masters, or once
in a while perhaps in flesh and blood, transfiguring the face of some
commonplace vulgar woman whom, but for that, nobody would have called
beautiful. But sometimes the divine thing chooses some morsel of humanity
like Mrs. Nevill Tyson, struggles with and overpowers it, rending the
small body, spoiling the delicate beauty; and where you looked for the
illuminating triumphant glory of motherhood, you find, as Tyson found,
a woman with a pitiful plain face and apathetic eyes--apathetic but for
the dull horror of life that wakes in them every morning.
That Tyson had the sentiment of the thing is pretty certain. When he went
up to town (for he went, after all, when the baby was a week old), he
brought back with him a picture (a Madonna of Botticelli's, I think) in a
beautiful frame, as a present for his wife. Poor little soul! I believe
she thought he had gone up on purpose to get it (it was so lovely that
he might well have taken a fortnight to find it); and she had it hung up
over the chimney-piece in her bedroom, so that she could see it whether
she were sitting up or lying down.
Now, whether it was the soothing influence of that belief, or whether
Mrs. Nevill Tyson, the mystic of a moment, found help in the gray eyes
of the mother of God when Nevill had pointed out their beauty, pointed
out, too, the paradox of the divine hands pressing the human breasts for
the milk of life, she revived so far as to take, or seem to take, an
interest in her son. She indulged in no ecstasies of maternal passion;
but as she nursed the little creature, her face began to show a serene
half-ruminant, half-spiritual content.
He was very tiny, tinier than any baby she had ever seen, as well he
might be considering that he had come into the world full seven weeks
before his time; his skin was very red; his eyes were very small, but
even they looked too large for his ridiculous face; his fingers were
fine, like little claws; and his hands--she could hardly feel their
feeble kneading of her breast. He was not at all a pretty baby, but he
was very light to hold.
Tyson had not the least objection to Stanistreet or Sir Peter and the
rest of them, they were welcome to stare at his wife as much as they
pleased; but he was insanely jealous of this minute masculine thing that
claimed so much of her attention. He began to have a positive dislike to
seeing her with the child. There was a strain of morbid sensibility in
his nature, and what was beautiful to him in a Botticelli Madonna,
properly painted and framed, was not beautiful--to him--in Mrs. Nevill
Tyson. He had the sentiment of the thing, as I said, but the thing
itself, the flesh and blood of it, was altogether too much for his
fastidious nerves. And yet once or twice he had seen her turn away from
him, clutching hastily at the open bodice of her gown; once she had
started up and left the room when he came into it; and, curious
contradiction that he was, it had hurt him indescribably. He thought he
recognized in these demonstrations a prouder instinct than feminine
false shame. It was as if she had tried to hide from him some sacred
thing--as if she had risen up in her indignation to guard the portals
of her soul. To be sure he was in no mood just then for entering
sanctuaries; but for all that he did not like to have the door slammed
in his face.
Thank heaven, the worst had not happened. The little creature's volatile
beauty fluttered back to her from time to time; there was a purified
transparent quality in it that had been wanting before. It had still the
trick of fluctuating, vanishing, as if it had caught something of her
soul's caprice; but while it was there Mrs. Nevill Tyson was a more
beautiful woman than she had been before. Some men might have preferred
this divine uncertainty to a more monotonous prettiness. Tyson was not
one of these.
One afternoon, about a fortnight after his return from town, he found her
sitting in the library with "the animal," as he called his son. There had
been a sound of singing, but it ceased as he came in. The child's shawl
was lying on the floor; he picked it up and pitched it to the other end
of the room. Then he came up to her and scanned her face closely.
"What's the matter with you?" he said.
"Nothing. Do I--do I look funny?" She put her hand to her hair, a trick
of Mrs. Nevill Tyson's when she was under criticism. She had been such an
untidy little girl.
"Oh, damned funny. Look here. You've had about enough of that. You must
stop it."
"What! Why?"
"Because it takes up your time, wastes your strength, ruins your
figure--it _has_ ruined your complexion--and it--it makes you a public
nuisance."
"I can't help it."
She got up and stood by the window with her back to Tyson. She still held
the child to her breast, but she was not looking at him; she was looking
away through the window, rocking her body slightly backwards and
forwards, either to soothe the child or to vent her own impatience.
Tyson's angry voice followed her. "Of course you can help it. Other women
can. You must wean the animal."
She turned. "Oh, Nevill, look at him--"
"I don't want to look at him."
"But--he's so ti-i-ny. Whatever _will_ he do?"
"Do? He'll do as other women's children do."
"He won't. He'll die."
"Not he. Catch him dying. He'll only howl more infernally than he's
howled before. That's all he'll do. Do him good too--teach him that he
can't get everything he wants in this vile world. But whatever he does
I'm not going to have you sacrificed to him."
"I'm not sacrificed. I don't mind it."
"Well, then, _I_ mind it. That's enough. I hate the little beast coming
into my room at night."
"He needn't come. I can go to him."
"All right. If you want to make an invalid scarecrow of yourself before
your time, it's not my business. Only don't come to me for sympathy,
that's all."
With one of her passionate movements, she snatched the child from her
breast, carried him upstairs screaming and laid him on her bed. When the
nurse came she found him writhing and wailing, and his mother on her
knees beside the bed, her face hidden in the counterpane.
"Take him away," sobbed Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"Ma'am?" said the nurse.
"Take him away, I tell you. I won't--I can't nurse him. It--it makes me
ill."
And forthwith she went off into a fit of hysterics.
It was at this crisis of the baby's fate that Miss Batchelor, of all
people, took it into her head to call. After all, Tyson was Nevill
Tyson, Esquire, of Thorneytoft, and his wife had been somewhere very near
death's door. People who would have died rather than call for any other
reason, called "to inquire." As did Miss Batchelor, saying to herself
that nothing should induce her to go in.
Now as she was inquiring in her very softest voice, who should come up to
the doorstep but Tyson. He smiled as he greeted her. He was polite; he
was charming; for as a matter of fact he had been rather hard-driven of
late, and a little kindness touched him, especially when it came from an
unexpected quarter.
"This is very good of you, Miss Batchelor," said he. "I hope you'll come
in and see my wife."
Miss Batchelor played nervously with her card-case.
"I--I--Would your wi--would Mrs. Tyson care to see me?"
He smiled again. "I think I can answer for that."
And to her own intense surprise, for the first and last time Miss
Batchelor crossed the threshold of Thorneytoft.
They found the little woman sitting in her drawing-room with her hands
before her, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not smile at Miss Batchelor as she
greeted her. Perhaps with her feminine instinct and antipathy, she felt
that Miss Batchelor had not come to see _her_. So she smiled at her
husband, and the smile was gall and wormwood to the clever woman; it had
the effect, too, of bringing back to her recollection the occasion on
which she had last seen Mrs. Nevill Tyson smiling. She wondered whether
Mrs. Nevill Tyson also recalled the incident. If she did she must find
the situation rather trying.
Apparently Mrs. Nevill Tyson was so happily constituted that to her
trying situations were a stimulant and a resource. She prattled to Miss
Batchelor about her new side-saddle, and her "friend, Captain
Stanistreet"--any subject that came uppermost and dragged another with
it to the surface.
Miss Batchelor was very kind and sympathetic; she took an interest in the
saddle; she assured Mrs. Nevill Tyson that Drayton Parva had been much
concerned on her account; and she asked to see the baby.
The next instant she was sorry she had done so, for Tyson, who had
continued to be charming, went out of the room when the baby came in.
The child was laid in Mrs. Nevill Tyson's lap, and she looked at it with
a gay indifference. "Isn't he a queer thing?" said she. "He isn't pretty
a bit, so you needn't say so. Nevill calls him a boiled shrimp, and a
little rat. He is rather like a little rat--a baby rat, when it's all
pink and squirmy, you know, and its eyes just opened--they've got such
pretty bright eyes. But I'm afraid baby's eyes are more like pig's eyes.
Well, _they're_ pretty too. As he's so ugly I expect he's going to be
clever, like Nevill. They say he's like me. What do you think? Look at
his forehead. Do you think he's going to be clever?"
"It depends," said Miss Batchelor, a little maliciously. (Really, the
woman was impossible, and such a hopeless fool!) Miss Batchelor's
habitually nervous manner made her innuendoes doubly telling when they
came.
"Well--he's very small. Just feel how small he is."
Instinctively Miss Batchelor held out her hands for the child, and in
another moment he was lying across her arms, slobbering dreamily.
He was not quiet long. He stretched himself, he writhed, he made himself
limp, he made himself stiff, he threw himself backwards recklessly; and
still Miss Batchelor held him. And when he cried she held him all the
closer. She let him explore the front of her dress with his little wet
mouth and fingers. He had made a great many futile experiments of the
kind in the last two days. Of those three worlds that were his, the world
of light, the world of sleep, and the world of his mother's breast, they
had taken away the one that he liked best--the warm living world of which
he had been lord and master, that was flesh of his flesh, given to his
hands to hold, and obedient to the pressure of his lips. Since then he
had lived from feeble hope to hope; and now, when he struck upon that
hard and narrow tract of corduroy studded with comfortless buttons, he
began again his melancholy wail.
"Poor little beggar," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, "he can't help it. He's
being weaned. Don't let him slobber over your nice dress."
Certainly he had not improved the corduroy, but Miss Batchelor did not
seem to resent it.
"Can't you nurse him?" she asked.
"No," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"I don't believe it," said Miss Batchelor to herself. "She isn't that
sort. It's the clever, nervous, modern women who can't nurse their
children--it all runs to brains. But these little animals! If ever there
was a woman born to suckle fools, it's Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She's got the
physique, the temperament, everything. And she can give her whole mind to
it."
"What a pity," she said aloud, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson laughed.
"I don't want to nurse him; why should I?" said she. She lay back in
her attitude of indifference, watching her son, and watched by Miss
Batchelor's sharp eyes and heartless brain.
Heartless? Well, I can't say. Not altogether, perhaps. Goodness knows
what went on in the heart of that extraordinary woman, condemned by her
own cleverness to perpetual maidenhood.
"How very odd," said she to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
To herself she said, "I thought so. It's not that she can't. She
_won't_--selfish little thing. And yet--she isn't the kind that
abominates babies, as such. Therefore if she doesn't care for this
small thing, _that_ is because it's her husband's child."
To do Miss Batchelor justice, she was appalled by her own logic. Was it
the logic of the heart or of the brain? She did not stop to think. Having
convinced herself that her argument was a chain of adamant, she caught
herself leaning on it for support, with the surprising result that she
found it easier to be kind to Mrs. Nevill Tyson (a woman who presumably
did not love her husband) when she took her leave.
I am not going to be hard on her. To some women a bitterer thing than not
to be loved is not to be allowed to love. And when two women insist on
loving the same man, the despised one is naturally skeptical as to the
strength and purity and eternity of the other's feelings. "She never
loved him!" is the heart's consolation to the lucid brain reiterating "He
never loved me!" I did not say that Miss Batchelor loved Tyson.
So the baby was weaned. He did not howl under the process so much as his
father expected. He lost his cheerful red hue and grew thin; he was
indifferent to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his
intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a "bad sign
when they took no notice." Gradually, very gradually, his features
settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young.
Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful
and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter. He was Tyson's
son and heir.
And that other baby, Mrs. Nevill Tyson, so violently weaned from the joy
of motherhood, she too grew pale and thin; she too was indifferent to
things around her, and she took very little notice of her son.
By a strange and unfortunate coincidence Captain Stanistreet had not been
seen in Drayton for the space of five months; and coupling this fact with
Mrs. Nevill Tyson's altered looks, the logical mind of Drayton Parva drew
its own conclusions.
CHAPTER VII
SIR PETER'S NEW CLOTHES
Tyson had not married in order to improve his social position; he had
married because he was in love as he had never been in love before. He
would have married a barmaid, if necessary, for the same reason. He was
not long in finding out that he owed his unpopularity in a great measure
to his marriage. To the curious observer this consciousness of his
mistake was conspicuous in his manner. (It was to be hoped that his wife
was not a curious observer.) And Sir Peter made matters no better by
going about declaring that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was the loveliest woman in
Leicestershire, when everybody knew that his wife had flatly refused to
call on her. By this time Tyson was quite aware that his standing in the
county had depended all along on the support which the Morleys were
pleased to give him. They had taken him up in the beginning, and his
position had seemed secure. If at that ripe moment he had chosen to
strengthen it by a marriage with Lady Morley's dearest friend, he might
have been anything he pleased. Miss Batchelor of Meriden would have
proved a still more powerful ally than Sir Peter. She would have been as
ambitious for him as he could have been for himself. By joining the
estates of Thorneytoft and Meriden, Nevill Tyson, Esquire, would have
become one of the largest land-owners in Leicestershire, when in all
probability he would have known the joy of representing his county in
Parliament. He was born for life on a large scale, a life of excitement
and action; and there were times when a political career presented itself
to his maturer fancy as the end and crown of existence. All this might
have been open to him if he had chosen; if, for instance, this clever
man had not cherished a rooted objection to the society of clever women.
As it was, his marriage had made him the best-abused man in those parts.
Since Tyson was not to mold his country's destinies in Parliament, he
turned his attention to local politics as the next best thing, thus
satisfying his appetite for action. He did what he had told Miss
Batchelor he should do; he dissipated himself in parochial patriotism.
He went to and fro, he presided at meetings, sat on committees, made
speeches on platforms. You would hardly have thought that one parish
could have contained so much fiery energy. Moreover, he found a field
for his journalistic talents in a passionate correspondence in the local
papers. Tyson could speak, Tyson could write, where other men maunder and
drivel. His tongue was tipped with fire and his pen with vitriol. Looking
about him for a worthy antagonist, he singled out Smedley, M.D., a local
practitioner given over to two ideals--sanitation and reform. Needless to
say, for sanitation and reform Tyson cared not a hang. It was a stand-up
fight between the man of facts and the man of letters. Smedley was solid
and imperturbable; he stood firm on his facts, and defended himself with
figures. Tyson, a master of literary strategy, was alert and ubiquitous.
Having driven Smedley into a tangled maze of controversy, Tyson pursued
him with genial irony. When Smedley argued, Tyson riddled his arguments
with the lightest of light banter; when Smedley hung back, Tyson lured
him on with some artful feint; when Smedley thrust, Tyson dodged.
Finally, when Smedley, so to speak, drew up all his facts and figures in
the form of a hollow square, Tyson charged with magnificent contempt of
danger. No doubt Tyson's method was extremely amusing and effective, and
his sparkling periods proved the enemy's dullness up to the hilt;
unfortunately, the prosy but responsible representations of Smedley had
more weight with committees.
Only two people really appreciated that correspondence. They were Mrs.
Nevill Tyson and Miss Batchelor. "At this rate," said the lady of
Meriden, smiling to herself, "my friend Samson will very soon bring
down the house."
Tyson, contemptuous of the gallery, had been playing to Sir Peter and Sir
Peter alone, and he flattered himself that this time he had caught the
great man's eye. It was in the first excitement of the elections; Tyson
had come in from Drayton, and was glancing as usual at the visiting cards
on the hall table. On the top of the dusty pile that had accumulated in
the days of his wife's illness there was actually a fresh card. Tyson's
face lost something of its militant expression when he read the name "Sir
Peter Morley," and he smiled up through the banisters at his wife as she
came downstairs to greet him.
"Ha, Molly, I see Morley's looked us up again. He couldn't very well be
off it much longer."
"He called about the elections."
"Oh--I thought you were out?"
"So I was. I met him in the drive and made him come in."
"H'm. Did he say anything about my letters in the _Herald_?"
Mrs. Nevill Tyson hesitated. "N-no. Not much."
"What did he say!"
"Oh--I think--he only said it was rather a pity you'd mixed yourself up
with it."
"Damn his impertinence!"
He flicked the card with a disdainful fingernail and followed his wife
into the drawing-room. She gave him some tea to keep him quiet; he drank
it in passionate gulps. Then he felt better, and lay back in his chair
biting his mustache meditatively.
"By the way, did Morley say whether he'd support Ringwood! The fellow's a
publican, likewise a sinner, but we must rush him in for the District
Council."
"Why?" asked Mrs. Nevill Tyson, trying hard to be interested.
"Why? To keep that radical devil out, of course; a cad that spits on his
Bible, and would do the same for his Queen's face any day--if he got the
chance, I'd like to sound Morley, though." A smile flickered on his lips,
as he anticipated the important interview.
"Oh, he did say something about it. I remember now. I think he's going to
vote for the Smedley man."
Tyson's smile went out suddenly. He was scowling now. Not that he cared a
straw which way the elections went, but he liked to "mix himself up" in
them to give himself local color; and now it seemed that he had taken the
wrong shade. He had spent the better part of six weeks in badgering and
bullying Sir Peter's pet candidate.
"Morley's a miserable time-server," said he savagely. "I suppose the
usual excuses for his wife's not calling?"
"Neuralgia," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, with a grin.
"Neur_al_gia! Why couldn't he give her a stomach-ache for a change?"
Now, when Tyson expressed his opinion of Sir Peter with such delightful
frankness, both he and Mrs. Nevill had overlooked the trifling fact
that Pinker, the footman, while to all outward appearance absorbed in
emptying a coal-scuttle, was listening with all his ears. Pinker was an
intelligent fellow, interested in local politics, still more interested
in the affairs of his master and mistress. The dust upon those
visiting-cards had provided Pinker with much matter for reflection. Now
men will say anything in the passion of elections; but when it was
reported that Mr. Nevill Tyson had in private pronounced Sir Peter to be
a "miserable time-server," and in public (that is to say, in Drayton Town
Hall) declared excitedly--"We will have no time-servers--men who will go
through any gate you open for them--we Leicestershire people want a man
who rides straight across country, and doesn't funk his fences!" And when
Sir Peter remarked that "no doubt Mr. Tyson had taken some nasty ones in
his time," everybody knew that there was something more behind all this
than mere party feeling. Sir Peter was right: that electioneering
business was Tyson's third great mistake. It proved, what nobody would
have been very much aware of, that Nevill Tyson, Esquire, had next to no
standing in the county. As a public man he was worse off than he would
have been as a harmless private individual. He could never have been
found out if he had only stayed quietly at home and devoted himself to
the cultivation of orchids, in the manner of old Tyson, who had managed
to hoodwink himself and his neighbors into the belief that he was a
country gentleman. As it was, for such a clever fellow Tyson had
displayed stupidity that was almost ridiculous. For nobody ever denied
that he was a clever fellow, that he could have been anything that he
liked; in fact, he had been most things already. Anything he
liked--except a country gentleman. The country gentleman, like the
poet, is born, not made; and it was a question if Tyson had ever been
a gentleman at all. He had all the accidents of the thing, but not its
substance, its British stability and reserve. Civilization was rubbing
off him at the edges; he seemed to be struggling against some primeval
tendency. You expected at any moment to see a reversion to some earlier
and uglier type. Across the chastened accents of the journalist there
sounded the wild intemperate tongue of the man of the people. Miss
Batchelor used to declare that Tyson was a self-made man, because he was
constructed on such eccentric principles. His slightest movements showed
that he was uncertain of his ground, and ready to fight you for it, if
it came to that. And now he still met you with the twinkle in his small
blue eyes, but there was a calculating light behind it, as if he were
measuring his forces against yours. And you were sorry for him in spite
of yourself. With the spirit of the soldier of Fortune, Tyson had the
nerves and temper of her spoilt child. He had made an open bid for
popularity and failed, and it was positively painful to see him writhing
under the consciousness of his failure.
And the cause of it all was Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Yet he was proud of her
still; proud even of the notoriety which was a tribute to her beauty. To
tell the truth, her notoriety was his protection. Once the elections were
over, gossip was too busy with the wife to pay much attention to the
husband. He was considered to have extinguished himself for good. Miss
Batchelor no longer regretted that he had no profession. To be the
husband of the loveliest woman in Leicestershire was profession enough
for any man.
By a further social paradox, Mrs. Nevill Tyson owed much of her present
notoriety to her former obscurity. Lady Morley, had her temperament
permitted, might have been as frisky or as risky as she pleased, without
attracting unkind attention, much less censure. But, unless she combined
the virtue of an angel with the manners of a district visitor, and
contrived to walk circumspectly across the quicksands that separated her
from "good society," a daughter of Mrs. Wilcox was condemned already.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson had never walked circumspectly in her life. And Fate,
that follows on the footsteps of the fool, was waiting, if not to catch
Mrs. Nevill Tyson tripping, at any rate to prove that she must trip.
At first Fate merely willed that Sir Peter should take a journey up to
town. Sir Peter's serviceable tweed suit, that had lasted him a good five
years, was beginning to go at the corners. We know Stanistreet's opinion
of Sir Peter's taste in dress; it was only a coarser expression of the
views held by his wife. But for her frank and friendly criticism, Sir
Peter, holding change in abhorrence, would have worn that tweed suit
another five years at the very least.
"It's a capital suit," said he.
"Perfectly disgraceful," said she. "Look at your elbow."
"Ordinary wear and tear."
"Particularly tear." And while she was speaking Sir Peter had rubbed the
worn place into a jagged hole. Sir Peter sighed. He was much attached to
that tweed suit; it knew his ways, and had adapted itself to all the
little eccentricities of his figure. After five years there is a certain
intimacy between a man and his suit. However, there was no blinking the
fact--the suit was doomed. Sir Peter's man seized the occasion for a
general overhauling of his master's wardrobe, with the result that Sir
Peter had to go up by an early train the next morning to consult Mr.
Vance, his tailor.
Sir Peter was being measured up and down and all round him, while Mr.
Vance stood by, note-book in hand, and took minutes of his case.
"A little wider round the waist, Vance, since you made my first coat for
me thirty years ago."
Sir Peter was swaying on his toes, and supporting himself by a finger-tip
laid on the shoulder of Vance's man.
"Not quite so long ago as that, Sir Peter."
"Must be, must be; you've been here more than thirty years."
Sir Peter prided himself on his memory, and was a stickler for the actual
fact.
"I'm afraid not, sir." The voice of Vance was charged with melancholy and
delicate regret. "We were only Binks and Co. in those days."
"Nonsense. Why, you measured me yourself, Vance."
"An impossibility, sir."
Mr. Vance leaned against a pillar of cloth, like one requiring support
in a very painful situation. It was agony for him to contradict Sir
Peter. But truth is great. It prevailed.
"I was in the City then, sir, serving my time at Tyson's."
He dropped his eyes. He had crushed Sir Peter with proof, but he was too
polite to be a witness of his discomfiture.
"Tyson's--Tyson's." Sir Peter's tongue uttered the name mechanically. His
mind no longer followed Vance; it was busy with the loveliest woman in
Leicestershire.
Mr. Vance smiled. "I daresay they know that name pretty well in your
county, sir."
"The name," said Sir Peter, blushing a little at his own thoughts, "the
name is not uncommon."
"It's the same family, though, sir."
"Really--" Sir Peter was a little startled this time--"you don't mean to
say--"
"Yes. It was a small firm, was Tyson's. But they're big people, I fancy,
by now. Old Mr. Tyson left 'em and set up by himself in the wholesale
business in Birmingham. He made a mint o' money. I understand he bought
one of the best properties in your county; is that so, sir?"
If Mr. Vance had not made coats for Sir Peter for thirty years, he had
made them for twenty-five or thereabouts, and he was privileged to
gossip.
"Yes, yes, Thorneytoft. Very good property. And a very good sort too, old
Mr. Tyson."
"A little peculiar, I'm told."
"Well--perhaps. I had not much acquaintance with the old man myself,
but he was very generally respected. I know his nephew, Mr. Nevill
Tyson--slightly."
Sir Peter would have died rather than ask a direct question, but he was
wildly curious as to Mr. Nevill Tyson's antecedents.
An illuminating smile spread over Mr. Vance's face.
"I remember _him_ when he was a youngster. His father chucked the
business, and set up as a Baptist minister--a Particular Baptist."
"Indeed."
"An uncommonly clever fellow, Nevill Tyson; sharp as needles. But they
couldn't bring him up to the business, nor the ministry."
"Hardly good enough for him, I should imagine."
"Well--no. It wasn't a house with any standing in his time. He'd got
ideas in his head, too. Nothing but a 'Varsity education suited his
book."
"Ah, that always tells."
"His father was very much against it. He knew the young rascal. And just
when he was at the top of the tree, as you may say, sure enough he made
off--goodness knows where."
"Lived abroad a great deal, I believe." Sir Peter was anxious to throw a
vaguely charitable light on his neighbor's escapades.
"Got into some scrape about a woman, I fancy. Anyhow he left a pile of
debts behind him, and the old man ruined himself paying them."
Bristling with curiosity, Sir Peter endeavored to look detached. But at
this point Mr. Vance, remembering, perhaps, that Mr. Nevill Tyson was a
great man in his customer's county, and chilled a little by Sir Peter's
manner, checked the flow of his reminiscences. "He was a wild young
scamp--another two inches round the waist, sir--but I daresay he's
settled down steady enough by this time."
"No doubt he has," said Sir Peter, a little loftily. He was disgusted
with Vance.
But though Vance's conduct was disgusting, after all he had told him what
he was dying to know. The antecedents of old Tyson of Thorneytoft had
been wrapped in a dull mystery which nobody had ever taken the trouble to
penetrate. He had been in business--that much was known; and as he was
highly respectable, it was concluded that his business had been highly
respectable too. And then he had retired for ten years before he came to
Thorneytoft. Those ten years might be considered a season of purification
before entering on his solemn career as a country gentleman. Old Tyson
had cut himself adrift from his own origins. And as the years went on he
wrapped himself closer in his impenetrable garment of respectability; he
was only Mr. Tyson, the gentle cultivator of orchids, until, gradually
receding from view, he became a presence, a myth, a name. But when the
amazing Mr. Nevill Tyson dashed into his uncle's place, he drew all eyes
on him by the very unexpectedness of his advent. And now it seemed that
Tyson, the cosmopolitan adventurer, the magnificent social bandit who
trampled, so to speak, on the orchids of respectability, and rode
rough-shod over the sleek traditions of Thorneytoft, was after all
nothing better than a little City tailor's son.
Of course it didn't matter in the very least. A man's a man for all that;
but when the man, in his brilliant oratorical way, has intimated that you
don't ride straight, and that you funk your fences, you may be forgiven
if you smile a sly private smile at his expense.
And Sir Peter did more than smile, he laughed.
"So that was the goose that laid the golden eggs?" (Ha, ha! Sir Peter had
made a joke.)
He went home merrily at the end of the week in his new clothes with his
new idea; and as he sat in the train he kept turning that little bit of
gossip over and over, and tasting it. It lasted him all the way from St.
Pancras to Drayton Parva. Sir Peter did not greatly care for women's
gossip; but he liked his own. And really the provocation had been
intense. It was tit for tat, _quid pro quo_, what was sauce for the
goose--the goose again! Ha! ha! ha! It was a good thing for Sir Peter
that Vance had given him another two inches round the waist.
Now, to do Sir Peter justice, he had meant to keep that little bit of
gossip entirely to himself, for solitary gloating over and nibbling.
But when an old gentleman has spent all his life uttering melancholy
platitudes, and is suddenly delivered of a joke--of two jokes--it is a
little hard to expect him to hide his light under a bushel. He could have
buried scandal in his breast forever, but to put an extinguisher on the
sparks of his playful fancy--no, these things are beyond a man's control.
And as the idea of the goose, with all its subtle humor, sank deeper and
deeper into Sir Peter's mind, he was irresistibly tempted to impart it to
Lady Morley (in strict confidence). Such a joke as that ought not to be
kept to himself to live and die with him; it would hardly be kind to Lady
Morley. She would appreciate it.
She did appreciate it. So did Miss Batchelor, to whom she also told the
story (in strict confidence). So did everybody whom Miss Batchelor may or
may not have confided in. And when the thing became public property, Sir
Peter wished he had restrained his sense of humor.
CHAPTER VIII
TOWARDS "THE CROSS-ROADS"
It was the beginning of the hunting season, and with the hunting season
Louis Stanistreet reappeared on the scene. He stayed at Thorneytoft as
usual. Tyson had just bought a new hunter, a remarkable animal. It fell
away suddenly in the hind-quarters; it had a neck like a giraffe and legs
like a spider; but it could jump, if not very like a horse, very like a
kangaroo. This creature struck wonder and terror into the soul of the
hunt. At the first meet of the season Stanistreet, the Master, and Sir
Peter drew up by one accord to watch the antics of Tyson and his
kangaroo.
"By Jove! where does your friend pick up his hunters?" asked the Master.
"If you ask me," said Stanistreet, "I should say he buys them by the
yard."
Sir Peter smiled. The Master stroked his mustache and meditated. There
was a malignity about Stanistreet's humor conceivable enough--if there
was any truth in history. It struck Stanistreet that his feeble jest
met with an amount of attention out of all proportion to its merits. Sir
Peter was the first to recover himself.
"Your friend may buy his horses by the yard, but he doesn't ride like a
tailor. He rides like a man. Look at him--look at him!"
This was generous of Sir Peter, considering what Tyson had said about
_his_ riding. But for all his love of gossip Sir Peter was a gentleman,
and that goose weighed heavily on his conscience. The reproof he had just
administered to Stanistreet relieved him wonderfully.
Stanistreet was at a loss to understand the old fellow's caustic tone.
Over billiards that night Tyson enlightened him.
Louis had been in a good temper all day; and his high spirits had
infected Mrs. Nevill Tyson, a fact which, you may be sure, was not set
down to her credit by those who noticed it.
"I heard your riding praised this morning, Ty," said he, beaming with
beneficence. They were alone.
"Ha!" said Tyson, "did you?"
"Rather. Binfield was asking where you picked your hunters up--got his
eye on the kangaroo, I fancy. I ventured to suggest, in my agreeable way,
that you bought them by the yard."
Tyson looked furious. Louis went on, unconscious of his doom. "Old Morley
went for me like a lunatic--said you didn't ride like a tailor, you rode
like a _man_. Queer old buffer, Morley--couldn't think what was the
matter with him."
Tyson laid down his cue and held Stanistreet with a leveling gaze.
"Look here, Stanistreet," said he, "I've stood a good deal, but if you
think I'm going to stand that, you're a greater fool than I took you for.
What the hell do you mean by telling everybody about my private affairs?"
"My dear Tyson, a man who rides to hounds regularly on a kangaroo has no
private affairs, he is, _ipso facto_, a public character." He threw back
his head and shouted his laughter. "You've built yourself an everlasting
name."
"Oh, no doubt. If Morley knows it everybody knows it. You might just as
well confide in the town-crier." He sat down and pressed his hands to his
forehead.
"This," he said bitterly, "accounts for everything."
Stanistreet stared at him in hopeless bewilderment. "What _is_ the matter
with you?"
"Nothing. I'm not going to kick you out of the house. I only ask you, so
long as you are in it, to mind your own business."
"I can't. I haven't any business." No one could be more exasperating than
the guileless Louis. Tyson darted another glance at him that was quite
fiendish in its ferocity, and flung himself on the sofa. Sprawling there
with his hands in his pockets, he remarked with freezing politeness, "I
don't say much, Stanistreet, but I think a damned deal."
"My dear Orlando Furioso, surely a harmless jest--"
"So you think it funny, do you, to tell these people that my father was
a tailor? It wouldn't be funny if it was false; but as it happens to be
true, it's simply stupid."
"I never said your father was a tailor."
"Don't trouble yourself to lie about it. He _was_ a tailor. The
minuteness of his business only added to the enormity of his crime. He
was born in an attic on a pile of old breeches. He was a damned
dissenter--called himself a Particular Baptist. He kept a stinking
slopshop in Bishopsgate Street, and a still more stinking schism-shop in
Shoreditch."
("Why the devil shouldn't he?" murmured Louis.)
"Salvation free, gratis, for nothing, and five per cent, discount for
ready money."
Louis was amused, but profoundly uncomfortable. This particular detail of
Tyson's biography was not one of the things he knew; if it had been, he
would naturally have avoided the most distant allusion to it. As it
happened, in his ignorance he seemed to have been perpetually blundering
up against the circumstance. He went on clumsily enough--"If it was, I
didn't know it, and if I had known it, it wouldn't have interested me in
the least. _You_ interest me; you are, and always will be, unique."
"You're an awful fool, Stanistreet. By your own admission Morley is
acquainted with this _charming romance_."
"What if he is?"
"The inference is obvious. You told him."
"Good God! If I did, do you suppose that Morley or any one else would
care? Does anybody care what another fellow's father was? As a matter of
fact I neither knew nor cared. But for your own genius for autobiography
I should never have heard of it."
"That's odd, considering that you've made capital out of it ever since
I knew you. It supplied the point of all your witticisms that weren't
failures. I assure you your delicate humor was not lost on me."
"Considering that I've known you for at least twenty years, those
jokes must have worn a little--er--threadbare. I'm extremely sorry for
these--these breaches of etiquette. I shall do my best to repair them.
That's a specimen of the thing you mean, I imagine?" From sheer
nervousness Louis did what was generally the best thing to do after
any little squabble with Tyson. He laughed.
Unfortunately this time Tyson was in no mood for laughter. The plebeian
was uppermost in him. His wrongs rankled in him like a hereditary taint;
this absurd quarrel with Stanistreet was a skirmish in the blood-feud
of class against class. Tyson was morbidly sensitive on the subject of
his birth, but latterly he had almost forgotten it. It had become an
insignificant episode in the long roll of his epic past. Now for the
first time for years it was recalled to him with a rude shock.
How real it was too! As he thought of it he was back in the stifling
little shop. Faugh! How it reeked of shoddy! Back in the whitewashed
chapel, hot with the fumes of gas and fervent humanity. He heard the
hymn sung to a rollicking tune:--
"I am so glad that my Father in heaven
Tells of His love in the book He has given.
"I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me,
I am so glad that Jesus loves me," etc.
The hateful measure rang in his ears, racking his nerves and brain. He
could feel all the agony of his fierce revolting youth. The very torment
of it had been a spur to his ambition. He swore (young Tyson was always
swearing) that he would raise himself out of all that; he would
distinguish himself at any cost. (As a matter of fact the cost was borne
by the Baptist minister.) The world (represented then by his tutor and a
few undergraduates), the world that he suspected of looking down on him,
or more intolerable still, of patronizing him, should be compelled to
admire him. And the world, being young and generous, did admire him
without any strong compulsion. At Oxford the City tailor's son scribbled,
talked, debated furiously; the excited utterance of the man of the
people, naked and unashamed, passed for the insolence of the aristocrat
of letters. He crowned himself with _kudos_. How the beggars shouted when
he got up to speak! He could hear them now. How they believed in him!
Young Tyson was a splendid fellow; he could do anything he chose--knock
you off a leading article or lead a forlorn hope. In time he began to be
rather proud of his origin; it showed up his pluck, his grit, the stuff
he was made of. He owed everything to himself.
And that last year when he let himself go altogether--there again
his origin told. He had flung himself into dissipation in the spirit
of dissent. His passions were the passions of Demos, violent and
revolutionary. Tyson the Baptist minister had despised the world,
vituperated the flesh, stamped on it and stifled it under his decent
broadcloth. If it had any rights he denied them. Therefore in the person
of his son they reasserted their claim; and young Tyson paid it honorably
and conscientiously to the full. In a year's time he knew enough of the
world and the lust of it to satisfy the corrupt affections of generations
of Baptist ministers, with the result that his university career was
suddenly, mysteriously cut short. He had made too many experiments with
life.
After that his life had been all experiments, most of them failures. But
they served to separate him forever from his place and his people, from
all the hateful humiliating past. He could still say that he owed
everything to himself.
Then his uncle's death gave him the means of realizing his supreme
ambition. By that time he had forgotten that he ever had an uncle. His
family had effaced itself. Backed by an estate and a good income, there
was no reason why its last surviving member should not be a conspicuous
social success. Well, it seemed that he was a conspicuous social failure.
He owed that to Stanistreet, curse him! curse him! His brain still
reeled, and he roused himself with difficulty from his retrospective
dream. When he spoke again it was with the conscious incisiveness of a
drunken man trying hard to control his speech.
"Would you mind telling me who you've told this story to? Lady Morley,
for one. My wife," he raised his voice in his excitement, "my wife, I
suppose, for another?"
Stanistreet had every reason for not wanting to quarrel with Tyson. He
liked a country house that he could run down to when he chose; he liked
a good mount; he liked a faultless billiard-table; and oddly enough, with
all his faults he liked Nevill Tyson. And he had a stronger motive now.
Consciously or unconsciously he felt that his friendship for Tyson was a
safeguard. A safeguard against--he hardly knew what. But the idea of Mrs.
Nevill Tyson was like fire to his dry mood. His brain flared up all in a
moment, though his tongue spoke coolly enough.
"I swear I never did anything of the sort. I haven't seen your wife
for ages--till to-night. We don't correspond. If we did"--he stopped
suddenly--"if I did that sort of thing at all Mrs. Tyson is the very last
person--"
"Oblige me by keeping her name out of it."
Tyson's voice carried far, through the door and across the passage,
penetrating to Pinker in his pantry.
"I didn't introduce it."
"All right. I'm not asking you to lie again. No doubt everybody knows the
facts by this time. I'm going to turn the lights out."
Stanistreet pulled himself together with a shrug. If any other man had
hinted to him, in the most graceful and allegorical manner, that he lied,
it would have been better for that man if he had not spoken. But he
forgave Tyson many things, and for many reasons, one of these, perhaps,
being a certain shamefaced consciousness touching Tyson's wife.
"By the way," said he, "are you going to keep this up very much longer?
It's getting rather monotonous."
Tyson turned and paused with his hand on the door-knob. He snarled,
showing his teeth like an angry cur, irritated beyond endurance.
"If you mean, am I going to take your word for that--frankly, I am not."
He flung the door open and strode out.
Stanistreet followed him.
"I think, Tyson," said he, "if I want to catch that early train
to-morrow, I'd better take my things over to 'The Cross-Roads' to-night."
"Just as you like."
So Stanistreet betook himself to "The Cross-Roads."
CHAPTER IX
AN UNNATURAL MOTHER
Next morning a rumor set out from three distinct centers, Thorneytoft,
Meriden, and "The Cross-Roads," to the effect that Tyson had quarreled
seriously with Stanistreet. His wife, as might be imagined, was the
cause. After a hot dispute, in which her name had been rather freely
bandied about, it seems that Tyson had picked the Captain up by the
scruff of the neck and tumbled him out of the house.
By the evening the scandal was blazing like a fire.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson was undoubtedly a benefactor to her small public. She
had roused the intelligence of Drayton Parva as it had never been roused
before. Conjecture followed furtively on her footsteps, and inference met
her and stared her in the face. No circumstance, not even Sir Peter's
innocent admiration, was too trivial to furnish a link in the chain of
evidence against her. Not that a breath of slander touched Sir Peter. He,
poor old soul, was simply regarded as the victim of diabolical
fascinations.
After the discomfiture of Stanistreet, Mrs. Nevill Tyson's movements were
watched with redoubled interest. Her appearances were now strictly
limited to those large confused occasions which might be considered open
events--Drayton races, church, the hunt ball, and so on. Only the casual
stranger, languishing in magnificent boredom by Miss Batchelor's side,
followed Mrs. Nevill Tyson with a kindly eye.
"Who is that pretty little woman in the pink gown?" he would ask in his
innocence.
"Oh, that is Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She _is_ pretty," would be the answer,
jerked over Miss Batchelor's shoulder. (That habit was growing on her.)
"And who or what is Mrs. Nevill Tyson?"
Whereupon Miss Batchelor would suddenly recover her self-possession and
reply, "Not a person you would care to make an intimate friend of."
And at this the stranger smiled or looked uncomfortable according to his
nature.
Public sympathy was all with Tyson. If ever a clever man ruined his life
by a foolish marriage, that man was Tyson. Opinions differed as to the
precise extent of Mrs. Tyson's indiscretion; but her husband was held to
have saved his honor by his spirited ejection of Captain Stanistreet, and
he was respected accordingly.
Meanwhile the hero of this charming fiction was unconscious of the fine
figure he cut. He was preoccupied with the unheroic fact, the ridiculous
cause of a still more ridiculous quarrel. Looking back on it, he was
chiefly conscious of having made more or less of a fool of himself.
After all, Tyson knew men. On mature reflection it was simply impossible
to regard Stanistreet as a purveyor of puerile gossip, or seriously to
believe that such gossip had been the cause of his disaster. That was
only the last of a long train of undignified circumstances which had made
his position in Drayton Parva insupportable; it lent a little more point
to the innuendo on every tongue, the intelligence in every eye. He was
sick with disgust, and consumed with the desire to get out of it all, to
cut Drayton Parva for good. The accursed place was trying to stare him
out of countenance. Everywhere he turned there was a stare: it was on the
villagers' faces, behind Miss Batchelor's eye-glass, on the bare fields
with their sunken fences, and on that abominable bald-faced house of his.
No doubt this was the secret of the business that took Tyson up to town
so many times that winter. He said nothing to his wife that could account
for his frequent absence, but she believed that he was looking about for
the long-promised flat; and when he remarked casually one morning that he
meant to leave Thorneytoft in the spring she was not surprised. Neither
was Mrs. Wilcox. The flat had appeared rather often in her conversation
of late. Mrs. Wilcox was dimly, fitfully aware of the state of public
opinion; but it did not disturb her in the least. She at once assumed
the smile and the attitude of Hope; she smiled on her son-in-law's
aberrations as she smiled on the ways of the universe at large, and for
the same reason, that the one was about as intelligible as the other. She
went about paying visits, and in the course of conversation gave people
to understand that Mr. Tyson's residence in Drayton had been something of
a concession on his part from the first. So large a land-owner had a
great many tiresome claims and obligations, as well as a position to keep
up in his county; but there could be no doubt that Nevill was quite lost
in the place, and that the true sphere of his activity was town. Mrs.
Wilcox's taste for vague and ample phrases was extremely convenient at
times.
If his wife was the last person to be consulted in Tyson's arrangements,
it may be supposed that no great thought was taken for his son and heir.
Not that the little creature would have been much affected by any change
in his surroundings; he was too profoundly indifferent to the world. It
had taken all the delicious tumult of the spring, all the flaming show of
summer, to move him to a few pitiful smiles. He had none of the healthy
infant's passion and lusty grasp of life; he seemed to touch it as he had
touched his mother's breasts, delicately, tentatively, with some foregone
fastidious sense of its illusion. What little interest he had ever taken
in the thing declined perceptibly with autumn, when he became too deeply
engrossed with the revolutions taking place in his sad little body to
care much for anything that went on outside it.
Hitherto he had not had to suffer from the neglect of servants. He was so
delicate from his birth that his mother had been strongly advised to keep
on the trained nurse till he was a year old. But Mrs. Nevill Tyson knew
better than that. For some reason she had taken a dislike to her trained
nurse; perhaps she was a little bit afraid of the professional severity
which had so often held in check her fits of hysterical passion. Aided by
Mrs. Wilcox and her own intuitions, after rejecting a dozen candidates on
the ground of youth and frivolity, she chose a woman with calm blue eyes
and a manner that inspired confidence. Swinny, engaged at an enormous
salary, had absolute authority in the nursery. And if it had been
possible to entertain a doubt as to this excellent woman's worth, the
fact that she had kept the Tyson baby alive so long was sufficient
testimonial to her capabilities.
But Swinny was in love--in love with Pinker. And to be in love with
Pinker was to live in a perfect delirium of hopes and fears. No sooner
was Swinny delivered over to the ministers of love, who dealt with her
after their will, than Baby too agonized and languished. His food ceased
to nourish him, his body wasted. They bought a cow for his sole use and
benefit, and guarded it like a sacred animal but to no purpose. He drank
of its milk and grew thinner than ever. Strange furrows began to appear
on his tiny face, with shadows and a transparent tinge like the blue of
skim-milk. As the pure air of Drayton did so little for him, Mrs. Nevill
Tyson wondered how he would bear the change to London.
"Shall I take him, Nevill?" she asked.
"Take him if you like," was the reply. "But you might as well poison the
little beast at home while you're about it."
So it was an understood thing that when Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson settled
in town, Baby was to be left behind at Thorneytoft for the good of his
health. It was his father's proposal, and his mother agreed to it in
silence.
Her indifference roused the severest comments in the household. Mrs.
Nevill Tyson was an unnatural mother. From the day she weaned him, no one
had ever seen her caress the child. She handled him with a touch as light
and fleeting as his own; her lips seemed to shrink from contact with his
pure soft skin. There could be no doubt of it, Mrs. Nevill Tyson's
behavior was that of a guilty woman--guilty in will at any rate, if not
in deed.
A shuddering whisper went through the house; it became a murmur, and the
murmur became an articulate, unmistakable voice. The servants were
sitting in judgment on her. Swinny spoke from the height of a lofty
morality; Pinker, being a footman of the world, took a humorous, not to
say cynical view, which pained Swinny. Such a view could never have been
taken by one whose affections were deeply engaged.
The conclusions arrived at in the servants' hall soon received a
remarkable confirmation.
It was on a Monday. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was seen to come down to breakfast
in an unusually cheerful frame of mind. Tyson was away; he had been up in
town for three weeks, and was expected home that evening. She looked for
letters. There were two--one from the master of the house; one also from
Stanistreet, placed undermost by the discreet Pinker. The same thoughtful
observer of character noticed that his mistress blushed and put her
letters aside instead of reading them at once. At ten Swinny came into
the breakfast-room, bearing Baby. This was the custom of the house. By
courtesy the most unnatural mother may be credited with a wish to see her
child once a day.
This morning Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not so much as raise her head. She was
sitting by the fire in her usual drooping guilty attitude. Swinny noticed
that the hearth was strewn with the fragments of torn letters. She put
the baby down on a rug by the window, and left his mother alone with him
to see what she would do.
She did nothing. Baby lay on the floor sucking his little claw-like
fingers, and stirring feebly in the sun. Mrs. Nevill Tyson continued
to gaze abstractedly at nothing. When Swinny came back after a judicious
interval, he was still lying there, and she still sitting as before. She
had not moved an inch. How did Swinny know that? Why, the tail of Mrs.
Tyson's dress was touching the exact spot on the carpet it had touched
before. (Swinny had made a note of the pattern.) And the child might have
cried himself into fits before she'd have stirred hand or foot to comfort
him. Baby found himself caught up in a rapture and strained to his
faithful Swinny's breast. Whereupon he cried. He had been happier lying
in the sun.
Swinny turned round to the motionless figure by the hearth, and held the
child well up in her arms.
"Baby thinks that his mamma would like to see him," said Swinny, in an
insinuating manner.
A hard melancholy voice answered, "I don't want to see him. I don't want
to see him any more."
All the same Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned and looked after him as he was
carried through the doorway. She could just see the downy back of his
innocent head, and his ridiculous frock bulging roundly over the nurse's
arm. But whether she was thinking of him at that moment God only knows.
The household was informed that its master would not return that evening
after all; that no date was fixed for his coming.
Later on Pinker, the guardian of the hearth, finding those fragments of
letters tried to put them together again. Tyson's letter it was
impossible to restore. It had been torn to atoms in a vicious fury of
destruction. But by great good luck Stanistreet's (a mere note) had been
more tenderly dealt with. It was torn in four neat pieces; the text,
though corrupt, was fairly legible, and left little to the ingenuity of
the scholiast. The Captain was staying in the neighborhood. He proposed
to call on Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Would she be at home on Wednesday
afternoon? Now, to Pinker's certain knowledge, Mrs. Nevill Tyson had
taken the letters to the post herself that morning. That meant secrecy,
and secrecy meant mischief.
How was she going to get through the next two days? This was provided
for. Baby was a bad sleeper. That night he cried as he had never cried
before. Not violently; he was too weak for that, but with a sound like
the tongue-tied whimper of some tiny animal. Swinny had slept through
worse noise many a night. Now he cried from midnight to cock-crow; and on
Tuesday morning Swinny was crying too. He had had one of his "little
attacks," after which he began to show signs of rapid wasting.
He had got something which Mrs. Nevill Tyson had never heard
of--"marasmus," the doctor called it. She hoped it was nothing very bad.
Then the truth came out piecemeal, through Swinny's confession and the
witness of her fellow-servants. The wretched woman's movements had been
wholly determined by the movements of Pinker; and she had been in the
habit of leaving the child in the servants' hall, where the cook, being
an affectionate motherly woman, made much of him, and fed him with
strange food. He had had an "attack" the last time she did this, and
Swinny, who valued her place for more reasons than one, had been afraid
to say anything about it. Preoccupied with her great passion, she had
been insensible to the signs of sickness that showed themselves from day
to day. In other words, there had been shameful, pitiful neglect.
Terrified and repentant, Swinny confessed, and became faithful again. She
sat up all night with the child wrapped in blankets in her lap. She left
nothing for his mother to do but to sit and look at him, or go softly to
and fro, warming blankets. (It was odd, but Mrs. Nevill Tyson never
questioned the woman's right to exclusive possession of the child.)
She had written to Nevill by the first post to tell him of his son's
illness. That gave him time to answer the same night.
Wednesday came. There was no answer to her letter; and the baby was
worse. The doctor doubted if he would pull through.
Mrs. Wilcox was asked to break the news to her daughter. She literally
broke it. That is to say, she presented it in such disjointed fragments
that it would have puzzled a wiser head than Mrs. Nevill Tyson's to make
out the truth. Mrs. Wilcox had been much distressed by Molly's strange
indifference to her maternal claims; but when you came to think of it,
it was a very good thing that she had not cared more for the child, if
she was not to keep him. All the same, Mrs. Wilcox knew that she had an
extremely disagreeable task to perform.
They were in the porch at Thorneytoft, the bare white porch that stared
out over the fields, and down the great granite road to London. As Mrs.
Nevill Tyson listened she leaned against the wall, with her hands clasped
in front or her and her head thrown back to stop her tears from falling.
Her throat shook. She was so young--only a child herself! A broad shaft
of sunshine covered her small figure; her red dress glowed in the living
light. Looking at her, a pathetic idea came to Mrs. Wilcox. "You never
had a frock that became you more," she murmured between two sighs. Mrs.
Nevill Tyson heard neither murmur nor sighs. And yet her senses did their
work. For years afterwards she remembered that some one was standing
there in the bright sunshine, dressed in a red gown, some one who
answered when she was spoken to; but that she--she--stood apart in her
misery and was dumb.
"I don't understand," she said at last. "Why can't you say what you mean?
_Is_ there danger?"
Mrs. Wilcox looked uncomfortable. "Yes, there is _some_ danger. But while
there is life there is--hope."
"If there is danger--" she paused, looking away toward the long highroad,
"if there _is_ danger, I shall send for Nevill. He will come."
She telegraphed: "Baby dangerously ill. Come at once."
She waited feverishly for an answer. There was none. To the horror of the
household, she gave orders that when Captain Stanistreet called she would
see him. As she could not tear herself from the baby, there was nothing
for it but to bring Stanistreet to her.
To his intense astonishment Louis was led up into a wide bare room on the
third story: He was in that mood when we are struck with the unconscious
symbolism of things. By the high fire-guard, the walls covered with
cheerful oleographs, the toys piled in the corner, he knew that this was
the abode of innocence, a child's nursery. The place was flooded with
sunshine. A woman sat by the fire with a small yellowish bundle in her
lap. Opposite her sat Mrs. Nevill Tyson, with her eyes fixed on the
bundle. She looked up in Stanistreet's face as he came in, but held out
no hand.
"Louis," she whispered hoarsely when he was near, "where's Nevill?"
"In London."
"Have you seen him?"
"Yes."
"Is he coming?"
"I don't know. I didn't speak to him. I--I was in a hurry."
She had turned her head. Her eyes never wandered from that small
yellowish bundle. Up to the last she had let it lie on the nurse's knee.
She had not dared to take it; perhaps she felt she was unworthy. He
followed her gaze.
"He's very ill," said she. "Look at him."
The nurse moved a fold of blanket from the child's face, and Stanistreet
gazed at Tyson's son. He tried to speak.
"Sh--sh--" whispered Mrs. Nevill Tyson. "He's sleeping."
"Dying, sir," muttered the nurse. The woman drew in her knees, tightening
her hold on the child. Her face was stained with tears. (She had loved
the baby before she loved Pinker. Remorse moved her and righteous
indignation.) Mrs. Nevill Tyson's nostrils twitched; deep black rings
were round her eyes. Passion and hunger were in them, but there were no
tears.
And as Stanistreet looked from one woman to the other, he understood. He
picked up the bundle and removed it to its mother's knee. All her soul
passed into the look wherewith she thanked him. Swinny, tear-stained but
inexorable, stood aloof, like rigid Justice, weighing her mistress in the
balance.
"He's dying, Molly," he said gently.
She shook her head. "No; he's not dying. God isn't cruel. He won't let
him die."
She turned the child's face to her breast, hoping perhaps that his hands
would move in the old delicious way.
He did not stir, and she laid him on his back again and looked at him.
His lips and the hollows under his eyes were blue. The collapse had come.
Louis knelt down and put his hand over the tiny heart.
A spasm passed over the baby's face, simulating a smile. Then Mrs. Nevill
Tyson fell to smiling too.
"See"--she said.
But Stanistreet had seen enough. He rose from his knees and left her.
CHAPTER X
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
Well, if she wouldn't look at him when he was alive, she might show some
feeling now he's dead. (So Justice.)
She showed no feeling. That is to say, none perceptible to the eyes of
Justice.
On Thursday morning she heard from Tyson. A short note: "I am more sorry
than words can say. I wish I could be with you, but I'm kept in this
infernal place till the beginning of next week. I hope the little man
will pull through. Take care of yourself," and the usual formula.
She sat down and wrote a telegram, brutally brief, as telegrams must be.
"Died yesterday. Funeral Friday, two o'clock. Can you come?"
Two hours later the answer came in one word--"Impossible." She flushed
violently and set her face like a flint.
But she showed no feeling. None when they screwed the baby into a box
lined with white satin; none when they lowered him into his grave and
piled flowers and earth upon him; none when, as they drove home from the
funeral, Mrs. Wilcox's pent-up emotions broke loose in a torrent of
words.
Having gone through so much, it occurred to Mrs. Wilcox that the time had
now come to look a little on the bright side of things. "Well," she began
with a faint perfunctory sigh, "I am thankful we've had a fine day. The
sunshine makes one hope. You'll remember, Molly, it was just the same at
your poor father's funeral. We had a sudden gleam of sunlight between the
showers. There were showers, for my new crape was ruined. And in December
we might have had snow or pouring rain--so bad for the clergyman--and
gentlemen, if they take their hats off. Some don't; and very sensible
too. They catch such awful colds at funerals, standing about in their wet
feet, and no one likes to be the first to put up an umbrella. I didn't
see Captain Stanistreet in the church--did you?--nor yet at the grave.
Rather strange of him. I think under the circumstances he might have
come--Nevill's oldest friend. Did you know Miss Batchelor was in church!
She was. Not in the chancel--away at the back. You couldn't see her. I
think it showed very nice feeling in her to come, and to send those
lovely roses too--from her own greenhouse. I must say everybody has been
most kind, and there wasn't a hitch in the arrangements. I often think
you have only to be in real trouble to know who your true friends are.
I'm sure the sympathy--and the flowers--you wouldn't have known he was
lying in his little coffin--and Swinny--that woman has feeling. I saw
her--sobbing as if her heart would break. We misjudged her, Molly, we did
indeed. Really, her devotion at the last--"
At this point Molly turned her back on her mother and looked out of
the window. They were going up the village street now, and a hard
tearless face was presented to a highly emotional group of spectators.
All Drayton Parva was alive to the fact that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was an
unnatural mother. "I'm sure the villagers did everything they could
to show their respect. There was Pinker's father, and Ashby, at the
gate--with their hats off. And for Baby--poor little darling, if he only
knew! Well, it shows what they think of you and Nevill. You've got mud on
your skirt, dear--off the wheel getting into the carriage. Pinker should
have been more careful. How wise you were to get that good serge. It's
everlasting. At any rate it'll last you as long as you want it. Ah-h!
My poor child"--she laid her hand on Mrs. Nevill Tyson's averted
shoulder--"you'll _not_ fret, will you, now? No--you're too brave, I
know. The more I think of it the more I feel that it's all for the best.
Think--if he'd lived to be older you'd have cared more, and it would
have been harder then--when he was running about and playing. You can't
have the same feeling for a little baby. And he was so delicate, too, you
really couldn't have wished it. He had your father's constitution. And if
you'd tried to teach him anything, he'd just have got water on the brain.
Ah-h-h-h! Depend upon it, it'll bring you and Nevill closer together."
A white rosebud, dropped on the back seat, marked the place where the
coffin had rested. Mrs. Nevill Tyson picked it up and crushed it in her
hand.
"Yes. I know you've had your little tiffs lately. Somebody said,
'It's blessings on the falling out that all the more endears.' Who was
it? I don't know how it goes on; I've such a head for poetry. They
kissed--kissed--kissed. Whoever was it now? Oh! It was poor dear Mrs.
Browning. They kissed again--with tears. Ah! Are you cold, love?"
"No--no."
"I thought you shivered."
From Drayton parish church Thorneytoft is a long drive, and from
beginning to end of it Mrs. Wilcox had never ceased talking. At last they
reached home. The blinds were drawn up again in the front of the house;
it was staring with all its windows.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson lingered till she saw her mother half-way upstairs,
then she turned into the library. The room was only used by Tyson; she
would be certain to be alone there.
The silence sank into her brain like an anesthetic after torture. She had
closed the door before she realized that she was not alone.
Somebody was sitting writing at the table in the window. His head was
bent low over his hands, so that she could not see it well; but at the
first sight of his back and shoulders she thought it was Tyson.
It was Stanistreet.
He turned and started when he saw her.
"Forgive me," said he, "I--I'm leaving to-morrow, and I was just writing
a note to you. I was going--I did not expect to see you--they told me-"
His manner was nervous and confused and he broke off suddenly. She sat
down in the chair he had just left, and took off her gloves and her hat.
She leaned her elbow on the table and her head upon her hand. "Don't
go," she said. "I only came in here to get away--to think. I was afraid
of being talked to. But I'd rather you didn't go." She looked away from
him. "Have you heard from Nevill?"
"No."
"Do you think he's ill?"
"He wasn't ill when I saw him on Sunday."
"Then I wonder why he keeps away. You _don't_ know, do you?"
"I do not. And I don't want to talk about him."
"No more do I!" she said fiercely. "I told him--and he doesn't care. He
doesn't care!"
Her lips shook; her breast heaved; she hid her face in her hands.
"Oh, Louis, Louis, he's dead! And I said I didn't want to see him ever
again!"
His hand was on the arm of her chair. "I'm so sorry," he said below his
breath, guarding his tongue.
She had clutched his hand and dragged herself to her feet. She was
clinging to him almost, crying her heart out.
"I know," she said at last, "I know you care."
He trembled violently. In another minute he would have drawn her to him;
he would have said the stupid, unutterable word. The thing had passed
beyond his control. It had not happened by his will. She was Tyson's
wife. Yes; and this was the third time he had been thrust into Tyson's
place. Why was he always to be with or near this woman in these moments,
in the throes of her mortal agony, in the divine passion of her
motherhood, and now--?
Did she know? Did she know? She stopped crying suddenly, like a startled
child. She looked down at the hand she held and frowned at it, as if it
puzzled her.
The door opened. She loosed her hold and went from him, brushing past the
astonished Pinker in her flight.
CHAPTER XI
THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS
Tyson returned by the end of the following week. He found his wife in the
big hall. She was standing by the fireplace, with one foot on the
curbstone of the hearth, the other lifted a little to the blaze. Her arms
lay along the chimney-piece, her head drooped over them. Her back was
towards him as he came in, and she did not turn at the sound of his
footsteps. He went up to her, put his arm round her waist and led her
gently into the library. She had started violently at his touch, but she
made no resistance. He meant to kiss and comfort her.
"Darling," he said, "I was awfully cut up. Tell me about the poor little
beggar."
He held her closer. His breath was like flame against her cheek. When he
spoke he coughed--a short hard cough.
She pushed against his arm and broke from him. Then she turned. "Don't
speak of him! Don't speak of him!"
"I won't, dear, if you'd rather not. Only don't think I didn't care."
"Don't tell me you cared!" She held her arms outstretched, the hands
clenched. Her small body was tense with passion. "Don't tell me. It's
a lie. You never cared. You hated him from the first. You kept me from
him lest I should love him better than you. You would have taken me away
and left him here. You were cruel. And you knew it. You stayed away
because you knew it. You were afraid, and no wonder. I know why you did
it. You thought I didn't love you. Was that the way to make me love you?"
"Molly," he said faintly, "I didn't know. I never thought you'd take it
to heart that way. Come--" He held out his hand.
She too had said "Come." She remembered the answer: "Impossible."
"No," she said. "I won't. I can't. I don't want to have anything to do
with you. What were you doing all those days when he was dying?"
He slunk from her, conscience-stricken. "My dear Molly," he said, "I'm
awfully sorry, but you're a damned little fool. You'd better hold your
tongue before you say something you'll be sorry for."
"I'm going to hold my tongue. If I pleased myself I should never speak to
you again."
Ah, she had said something very like that not long before.
He sighed heavily. Then he drew a chair up to the fire and lowered
himself carefully into it. He was shivering.
"All right," he muttered between chattering teeth. "Get me some brandy,
will you? You can do that without speaking."
"Nevill--what's the matter?"
"Nothing. I've got an infernally bad chill coming here, that's all."
She flew for the brandy.
Yes; there was no mistake about it. It was an infernally bad chill, and
it saved him.
Whether Mrs. Wilcox was right or wrong in her conjecture, the Tyson baby
had shown infinite delicacy in retiring from a world where he had caused
so many complications. He had done mischief enough in his short life, and
I believe to the last Tyson owed the little beggar a grudge. He had
spoiled the complexion of the loveliest woman in Leicestershire. At any
rate Tyson thought he had. Other people perhaps knew better.
If she had been thin and pale before the baby's death, she was thinner
and paler now. She had the look of a woman who carries a secret about
with her. She trembled and blushed when you spoke to her. And when she
had ceased to blush she took to dabbing on paint and powder. It was just
like her folly to let everybody see she was pining. And the more she
pined the more she painted. Ah, she might well hide her face!
Scandal may circulate for years before it comes to the ears of the
persons most concerned in it; still, one could not help wondering how
much Tyson knew. He was going to take her away, which was certainly very
wise of him. Poor man, she had made Leicestershire rather too hot to hold
him.
He was always going up to London now, and people who had met him there
hinted that the country gentleman had become a man about town. Still, you
must not believe the half of what you hear; and supposing there was some
truth in the report, why, what could you expect with a wife like that?
By March it was settled that they were to leave Thorneytoft and make
London their headquarters. Tyson had taken a flat in Ridgmount Gardens.
This, he said, was a good central position and handy for the theatres.
At any rate, he could not afford a better one so long as that infernal
estate swallowed up two-thirds of his income.
It looked as if they meant to make a clean sweep of their past. They
began by making a clean sweep of the servants, from the kitchen-maid
upwards. Here they were forestalled. Before it could come to his turn the
thoughtful Pinker gave notice. His example was followed by Swinny the
virtuous. Swinny, as it happened, was a niece of Farmer Ashby's, the same
who saw Stanistreet driving with his arm round Mrs. Nevill Tyson's waist;
she was first cousin to the landlord of "The Cross-Roads," where the
Captain retired on the night of the quarrel, and she was sister to Miss
Batchelor's maid. The scandal was all in the family. It was this
circumstance, no doubt, that had given such color and consistency to
the floating rumor.
Swinny, having regard to her testimonials, was not openly offensive.
She told Tyson that she was sorry to leave a good master and mistress,
but she never could abide the town. No more could Pinker. And she must
go where there was a baby. Then Swinny, having shaken the dust of
Thorneytoft from her virtuous feet, called on every member of her family,
and told to each the same unvarying tale. She wasn't going to stay in a
place where there were such goings on; it was as much as her character
was worth. The gentlemen were after Mrs. Nevill Tyson from morning till
night, you couldn't keep 'em off--not that lot. She hadn't much to say to
them, but she fair ran after the Captain--it was perfectly disgraceful.
When Mr. Tyson sent him to the right-about, she waited till her husband's
back was turned, then she wrote to him to come. And, as if nothing else
would serve her, she had him up in the nursery when her little baby was
dying. They were actually whispering the two of them, and making eyes
at each other over the child's coffin. Why, Pinker, he caught 'em in the
library the very day of the funeral. Oh, it wasn't the Captain's fault.
She whistled and he came, that was all. So far Swinny.
_Was_ that all?
On every face there was a tremendous query. But upon the whole it was
concluded that Stanistreet at any rate had had regard to his friend's
honor.
It is the last stone that kills; so, you see, there was a certain
hesitation about hurling it. No educated person believes the evidence
of servants. Besides, when it came to the point, one felt too sorry for
Nevill Tyson to make up one's mind to the worst. So far Miss Batchelor.
Ah, well, he took her away. The last that was seen of Mrs. Nevill Tyson
in Leicestershire was a sad little figure, shrinking away in the corner
of a railway carriage, nursing her guilty secret.
CHAPTER XII
A FLAT IN TOWN
Though they had cut them dead lately, it must be confessed that some
people found Drayton Parva a very dull place without Mr. and Mrs. Nevill
Tyson. They heard about them sometimes from Sir Peter, who was now in
Parliament; and from Miss Batchelor, after her flying visits to the
Morleys' house in town. Stanistreet, by the way, had his headquarters
somewhere in London; and in London Mrs. Nevill Tyson revived. She had
begun all over again. She had got new clothes, new servants, and a new
drawing-room. An absurd little drawing-room it was, too--all white paint,
muslin draperies, and frivolous gim-crack furniture. A place, said Miss
Batchelor, that it would have been dangerous to smoke a cigarette in. And
if you would believe it, she had hung up Tyson's sword over the couch in
the dining-room, as a memorial of his deeds in the Soudan. So ridiculous,
when everybody knew that he was nothing but a sort of volunteer (Miss
Batchelor had had a brother in "the Service").
Having furnished her drawing-room, and hung up her husband's sword, Mrs.
Nevill Tyson seems to have done nothing noteworthy, but to have sat down
and waited for events.
She had not long to wait. By the end of the season she was alone in the
flat. _He_ had left her. She had no clue to his whereabouts; but, other
people believed him to be living in another flat--not alone.
Drayton Parva was alive again with the scandal. Miss Batchelor, as became
the intelligence of Drayton Parva, alone kept calm. She went about saying
that she was not at all surprised to hear it. Miss Batchelor never was
surprised at anything. She refused to take a part, to commit herself
to a definite opinion. Human nature is a mixed matter, and in these
cases there are generally faults on both sides. Mrs. Nevill Tyson had
been--certainly--very--indiscreet. It was indiscreet of her to go on
living in that flat all by herself. Did Miss Batchelor think there was
anything in that report about Captain Stanistreet? Well, if there wasn't
something in it you would have thought she would have come back to
Thorneytoft; her staying in town looked bad under the circumstances.
Poor Mrs. Nevill Tyson, every circumstance made a link in a chain of
evidence whose ends were nowhere.
And, indeed, she was not left very long to herself.
But though Stanistreet was always hanging about Ridgmount Gardens, he was
no nearer solving the problem that had perplexed him. And yet his views
of women had undergone a change; he was not the same man who had
discussed Molly Wilcox in the billiard-room at Thorneytoft three years
ago. One thing he noticed which was new. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was not
literary; but whenever he called now he always found her sitting with
some book in her hand, which she instantly hid behind the cushions of her
chair. Stanistreet unearthed three of these volumes one day. They were
"Barrack-Room Ballads," "With Gordon in the Soudan," "India: What it can
Teach Us"--a work, if you please, on Vedic philosophy, annotated in
pencil by Tyson. Now Stanistreet had brought "Barrack-Room Ballads"
into the house; Stanistreet had been with Gordon, in the Soudan;
Stanistreet--no, Stanistreet had not been in India; but he might have
been. He was immensely amused at the idea of Mrs. Nevill Tyson
cultivating her mind. Poor little soul, how bored she must have been!
There could be no possible doubt about the boredom. Mrs. Nevill Tyson
turned from reading to talking with obvious relief. Their conversation
had taken a wider range lately; it was more intimate, and at the same
time less embarrassing. He wondered how often she thought of that scene
in the library at Thorneytoft; she had behaved ever since as if it had
never happened. For one thing Stanistreet was thankful--she had left off
discussing Nevill with him. If she had ever been in ignorance, she now
knew all that it concerned her to know. Not that she avoided the subject;
on the contrary, it seemed to have floated into the vague region of
general interest, where any chance current of thought might drift them to
it. Stanistreet dreaded it; but she was continually brushing up against
it, with a feathery lightness which made him marvel at the volatile
character of her mind. Was it the clumsiness of a butterfly or the
dexterity of a woman? Once or twice he thought he detected a certain
reluctant shyness in approaching the subject directly. It was as if she
regarded her affection for her husband as a youthful folly, and her
marriage as a discreditable episode of which she was now ashamed.
On the other hand, she was always ready to talk about Stanistreet and
his doings. She would listen for hours to his mess-room stories, his
descriptions of the people and the places he had seen, the engagements
he had taken part in. For a whole evening one Sunday they had talked
about nothing but fortification. Now it was impossible that Mrs. Nevill
Tyson could be interested in fortification. As for Vedic philosophy, she
cared for Brahma about as much as Stanistreet did for Brahms.
He was walking with her in Hyde Park; they had turned off into the
path by the flower-beds on the Park Lane side. It was April, between
six and seven in the evening, and, except for a few stragglers, they
had the walk to themselves. Louis had been giving her the history of
his first campaign in the Soudan, and she was listening with a dreamy,
half-suppressed interest, which rose gradually to excitement. He sat down
and drew on the gravel with the point of his walking-stick a rude map of
the country, showing the course of the Nile and the line of march, with
pebbles for stations, and bare patches for battlefields. He then began to
trace out an extremely complicated plan of the campaign. She followed the
movements of the walking-stick with an intelligence which he would
hardly have credited her with. And, indeed, it was no inconsiderable
feat, seeing that for want of a finer instrument Louis's plan was
hopelessly mixed up with his line of march and other matters.
"Was Nevill there?" she asked, casually, at the close of a spirited
account of his last engagement.
"No. He was with the volunteers, farther south." He looked at her and her
eyes dropped.
"Which is north and which is south?"
The walking-stick indicated the points of the compass.
"I see. And you were there in that great splodge in the middle. Go on.
What did you do then?"
The walking-stick staggered in a wavering line eastwards. But before it
could join the Nile, Mrs. Nevill Tyson had rubbed out the map, campaign
and all, with the tips of her shoes.
"There's a park-keeper coming," said she, "he'll wonder why we're making
such a mess of his nice gravel-walk."
The park-keeper came, he looked at the gravel and frowned, he looked at
Mrs. Nevill Tyson, smiled benignly, and passed on. Perhaps he wondered.
They got up and walked as far as the Corner, where they looked at the
Achilles statue. Under the shadow of the pedestal Mrs. Nevill Tyson took
a bunch of violets from her waistband.
"What are you going to do with that?" said Louis.
"I'm going to stick it in Achilles' buttonhole. Oh, I see, Achilles
hasn't got a buttonhole. I must put it in yours then."
She put it in.
Louis's dark face flushed. "Why did you do that?"
"I did that--Because you are a brave man, and I like brave men."
Still under the shadow of the pedestal, he took her by both hands and
looked into her eyes. "What are you going to do now?" said he.
"Nothing. We must go back. We have gone too far," said she.
"Too far?" He dropped her hands.
She smiled in the old ambiguous, maddening way. "Yes; much too far. We
shall be late for dinner."
They turned back by the way they had come. Near the Marble Arch a small
crowd was gathered round a poor street preacher with a raucous voice.
They could hear him as they passed.
"We're all sinners," shouted the preacher. (They stopped and looked at
each other with a faint smile. All sinners--that was what Nevill used to
say, all sinners--or fools.) "We're all sinners, you and me, but Jesus
can save us. 'E loves sinners. 'E bears their sins; your sins an' my
sins, dear brethren; 'e bears the sins of the 'ole world. Why, that's
wot 'e came inter the world for--to save sinners. Ter save 'em from death
an' everlasting 'ell! That's wot Jesus does for sinners."
Oh, Molly, Molly, what has he done for fools?
He took her to Ridgmount Gardens, and left her at the door of the flat.
She was incomprehensible, this little Mrs. Tyson. But up till now his
own state of mind had been plain. He knew where he was drifting; he had
always known. But where she was drifting, or whether she was drifting at
all, he did not know; that is to say, he was not sure. And up till now he
had not tried very hard to make sure. He was a person of infinite tact,
and could boast with some truth that he had never done an abrupt or
clumsy thing. By this time his attitude of doubt had given a sort of
metaphysical character to this interest of the senses; he was almost
content to wait and let the world come round to him. It was to be
supposed that Mrs. Nevill Tyson, being Mrs. Nevill Tyson, would have
fathomed him long ago if he had been of the same clay as her engaging
husband. He was of clay, no doubt, but it was not the same clay; and it
was impossible to say how much she knew or had divined; other women were
no rule for her, or else--No. One thing was certain, he would never have
betrayed Tyson until Tyson had betrayed her. As it was, his relations
with her were sufficiently abnormal to be exciting; it was not passion,
it was a rush of minute sensations, swarming and swirling like a dance of
fire-flies--an endless approach and flight.
After all, he would not have had it otherwise. The charm, he told
himself, was in the levity of the situation. The thread by which she held
him was so fine that it could be broken any day. There would be no pangs
of conscience, no tears, no reproaches; no tyrannies of the heart and
revolutions of the soul. It was to Mrs. Nevill Tyson's eternal credit
that she made no claims. Clearly, when a tie can be broken to-morrow,
there is no urgent necessity for breaking it to-day.
So in the afternoon Stanistreet called again at Ridgmount Gardens.
Whether or no Mrs. Nevill Tyson ignored the possibility of passion, she
had the largest ideas of the scope and significance of friendship. She
made no claims, but she exacted from Louis a multitude of small services
for which he was held to be sufficiently repaid in smiles. Whether she
knew it or not, she had grown dependent on him. She had always shown an
affecting confidence in the integrity of masculine judgment, and she
consulted him about her dividends and the pattern of her gowns with
equally guileless reliance.
To-day he found her in a state of agitated perplexity. She put a letter
into his hands. He was to read it; he might skip the first page, it was
all about calico. There--that was what she meant.
The letter was from Mrs. Wilcox imploring her to go back to Drayton "till
this little cloud blows over."
"I don't want to go to Drayton, to those people. They talk. I know they
talk, and I don't like them. Besides, I want to stay in London. Nobody
knows me here except you."
"Do I know you?"
"Well, if you don't, you ought to--by now. I wonder if mother wants me.
She might come here, though I'd rather she didn't. She talks too, you
know; she doesn't mean to, but she can't help it. What I like about you
is--you never talk."
"You won't let me."
"What ought I to do?" she asked helplessly. "Must I go?"
"No," said Louis emphatically. "Don't."
"Why not?"
He tossed the letter aside, and their eyes met.
"It would look like defeat."
CHAPTER XIII
MRS. WILCOX TO THE RESCUE
So Nevill Tyson had left his wife. This was the most exciting act in the
drama that had entertained Drayton Parva for two years. He had brought
down the house. Presently it seemed that Drayton Parva was not unprepared
for the catastrophe. Miss Batchelor was sadly afraid that something of
this sort had been going on for long enough. But she had not condemned
Nevill Tyson wholesale and without a hearing; in these cases there are
always faults on both sides. A man as much in love with his wife as he
was would never have left her without some grounds. (I cannot think why
Miss Batchelor, being so clever, didn't see through Tyson; but there is
a point at which the cleverness of the cleverest woman ceases.) Anyhow,
if Mrs. Nevill Tyson was as innocent as one was bound to suppose, why did
she not come back to Drayton, to her mother? That was the proper thing
for her to do under the circumstances.
Have you ever sat by the seashore playing with pebbles in an idle mood?
You are not aiming at anything, you are much too lazy to aim; but some
god directs your arm, and, without thinking, you hit something that, ten
to one, you never would have hit if you had thought about it. After that
your peace is gone; you feel that you can never leave the spot till you
have hit that particular object again, with deliberate intent. So Miss
Batchelor, sitting by the shore of the great ocean of Truth, began by
throwing stones aimlessly about; and other people (being without sin)
picked them up and aimed them at Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Sometimes they hit
her, but more often they missed. They were clumsy. Then Miss Batchelor
joined in; and, because she found that she was more skillful than the
rest, she began, first to take a languid interest in the game, then to
play as if her life depended on it. She aimed with mathematical
precision, picking out all the tiny difficult places that other people
missed or grazed. Amongst them they had ended by burying Mrs. Nevill
Tyson up to her neck in a fairly substantial pile of pebbles. It only
needed one more stone to complete the work. Still, as I said before, Mrs.
Nevill Tyson's enemies were not particularly anxious to throw it.
This was reserved for another hand.
It was impossible for Mrs. Wilcox to live, even obscurely, in Drayton
Parva without hearing some garbled version of the current rumor. At first
she was a little shocked at finding her son-in-law under a cloud. But
if there is one truth more indisputable than another, it is that every
cloud has a handsome silver lining to it. (Though, indeed, from Mrs.
Wilcox's account of the matter, it was impossible to tell which was the
lining and which was the cloud.) The more she thought of it the more she
felt that there was nothing in it. There must be some misunderstanding
somewhere. Her optimism, rooted in ignorance, and watered with vanity,
had become a sort of hardy perennial.
Then it came to Mrs. Wilcox's knowledge that certain reflections had been
made on her daughter's conduct. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was said to be making
good use of her liberty. No names had been mentioned in Mrs. Wilcox's
hearing, but she knew perfectly well what had given rise to these
ridiculous reports. It was the conspicuous attention which Sir Peter had
insisted on paying Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Not that there was anything to be
objected to in an old gentleman's frank admiration for a young (and
remarkably pretty) married woman. No doubt Sir Peter had been very
indiscreet in his expression of it. What with calling on her in private
and paying her the most barefaced compliments in public, he had made her
the talk of the county. Mrs. Wilcox went further: she was firmly
convinced that Sir Peter had fallen a hopeless victim to her daughter's
attractions, and she had derived a great deal of gratification from the
flattering thought. But now that Molly was being compromised by the old
fellow's attentions, it was another matter.
That anybody else could have compromised her by his attentions did not
once occur to Mrs. Wilcox. By its magnificent unlikelihood, the idea that
Sir Peter Morley, M.P., was fascinated by her daughter extinguished every
other. So possessed was Mrs. Wilcox by the idea of Sir Peter that she had
never thought of Stanistreet. In any case Stanistreet was the last person
she would have thought of. He came and went without her notice, a
familiar, and therefore insignificant, fact of her daily life.
Of course Molly was a desperate little flirt; but it was absurd that her
flirtations should be made responsible for "this temporary separation."
(That was the mild phrase by which Mrs. Wilcox described Tyson's
desertion of his wife.) As for her encouraging Sir Peter in her husband's
absence, that was all nonsense. Mrs. Wilcox was a woman of the world, and
she would have passed the whole thing off with a laugh, but that, really,
the reports were so scandalous. They actually declared that her daughter
had been seen going about with Sir Peter in the most open and shameless
manner, ever since she had been left to her own devices.
Well, Mrs. Wilcox could disprove _that_ by the irrefragable logic of
facts.
It was high time something should be done. Her plan was to go quietly and
call on Miss Batchelor, and mention the facts in a casual way. She would
not mention Sir Peter.
So with the idea of Sir Peter in her head and a letter from Molly in
her pocket, Mrs. Wilcox called on Miss Batchelor. There was nothing
extraordinary in that, for the ladies were in the habit of exchanging
half-yearly visits, and Mrs. Wilcox was about due.
She stood a little bit in awe of a woman who took up all sorts of
dreadful subjects as easily as you take up an acquaintance, and had such
works as "The Principles of Psychology" lying about as the light
literature of her drawing-room table. But Miss Batchelor was much more
nervous than her visitor, therefore Mrs. Wilcox had the advantage at
once.
She knew perfectly well what she was going to do. She was not going to
make a fuss; that would do more harm than good. She had simply to mention
the facts in a casual way, without mentioning Sir Peter. As for the
separation, that was not to be taken seriously for a moment.
She began carelessly. "I heard from Molly this morning."
"Indeed? Good news, I hope?"
"Very good news. Except that she's disappointed me. She's not coming to
Thorneytoft after all."
"I didn't know she was expected."
"Well, I wanted her to run down and entertain me a little, now that she
can get away."
"It would be rather a sacrifice for her to leave town just at the
beginning of the season."
"That's it. She has such hosts of engagements--always going out
somewhere. She tells me she thinks nothing of five theatres in one week."
Miss Batchelor raised her eyebrows.
"She must be very much stronger than she was at Thorneytoft."
"She's never been so well in her life. Thorneytoft didn't agree with her
at all. She's been a different woman since they left it." (This to guard
against any suspicion of an attraction in the neighborhood.) "Nevill was
never well there either."
"I never thought it would suit Mr. Tyson."
"No; it wasn't the life for him at all. He's got too much go in him to
settle down anywhere in the country. Look how he's roamed about the
world." (Now was her opportunity.) "You know, Miss Batchelor, there's
a great deal of nonsense talked about this separation."
"There's a great deal of nonsense talked about most things in this
place."
"Well--but really, if you think of it, what is there to talk about? He's
just gone away in a huff, and--and he'll come back in another. You'll
see. He has a very peculiar temper, has Nevill; and Molly's too--too
suscept--too emotional. People can't always hit it off together."
"No--"
"No. And I think it's a very good plan to separate for a time. For a
time, of course. It's her own wish."
(Oh, Mrs. Wilcox! But strict accuracy is an abject virtue when pride and
the honor of a family are at stake.)
"That's all very well, my dear Mrs. Wilcox, but in the meanwhile people
will talk."
"_That_ won't break Molly's heart. She'd snap her fingers at them. And
the more they talk, the more she'll go her own way. That's Molly all
over. You can't turn her by talking, but she'd go through fire and
water for any one she loves."
Poor vulgar, silly Mrs. Wilcox! But try her on the subject of her
daughter, and she rang true.
Miss Batchelor smiled. She didn't know about going through fire; but Mrs.
Nevill had certainly been playing with the element, and got her fingers
badly scorched too.
"Well," said she, "of course, so long as Mrs. Nevill Tyson doesn't break
her heart over it."
"Does it look as if she were breaking her heart? Five theatres in one
week."
"No; I can't say I think it does."
"Shockingly dissipated, isn't she?"
"Well--rather more dissipated than we are in Drayton Parva. You must miss
her dreadfully, Mrs. Wilcox?"
"I don't mind that so long as she's happy. You see, it's not as if she
hadn't friends. I know she's well looked after."
Mrs. Wilcox felt that she was making a remarkably good case of it. And
she had not once mentioned Sir Peter.
All was well so long as you did not mention Sir Peter.
"I'm very glad to hear it."
"Of course _I_ want her to get away out of it all. I know that people are
making very strange remarks about her staying--"
"They might make stranger remarks if she came, that's one consolation.
Still--"
"Well, Miss Batchelor, the child is perfectly willing to come if I want
her. But--er--er--a friend"--(Mrs. Wilcox was determined to be discreet,
and leave no loophole for scandal)--"a friend has strongly advised
her to stay."
"Oh, no doubt she is perfectly right. Sir Peter is in town again, I
believe?"
Miss Batchelor said it abruptly, as if she were trying to change the
subject. And at the mention of Sir Peter Mrs. Wilcox lost her head and
fluttered into the trap. There are fallacies in the logic of facts.
"No, no," she said, getting up to go. "It was Captain Stanistreet I
meant."
Again Miss Batchelor smiled.
This was proof positive--the last stone.
CHAPTER XIV
THE "CRITERION"
Mrs. Nevill's account of herself, though somewhat highly colored, was
substantially true. When Stanistreet suggested defeat, it was his first
allusion to her husband's desertion of her; and like most of Louis's
utterances, it was full of tact.
Defeat? She had brooded over the idea, and then apparently she had an
inspiration.
From that day, wherever there was a sufficiently important crowd to see
her, Mrs. Nevill Tyson was to be seen. She was generally with Louis
Stanistreet, who was not a figure to be overlooked; she was always
exquisitely dressed; and sometimes, not often, she was delicately painted
and powdered. Mrs. Nevill Tyson hated what was commonplace and loud; and
she had to make herself conspicuous in a season when women dressed
_fortissimo_, and a fashionable crowd was like a bed of flowers in June.
Somehow she managed to strike some resonant minor chord of color that
went throbbing through that confused orchestra. Everywhere she went
people turned and stared at her as she flashed by; and apparently her one
object was to be stared at. She became as much of a celebrity as any
woman with a character and without a position "in society" can become.
If she were counterfeiting a type, enough of the original Mrs. Nevill
Tyson remained to give her own supernatural _näiveté_ to the character.
Stanistreet was completely puzzled by this new freak; it looked like
recklessness, it looked like vanity, it looked--it looked like an
innocent parody of guilt. He had given in to her whim, as he had given
In to every wish of hers, but he was not quite sure that he liked the
frankness, the publicity of the thing. He wondered how so small a woman
contrived to attract so large a share of attention in a city where pretty
women were as common as paving-stones. Perhaps it was partly owing to the
persistence and punctuality of her movements: she patronized certain
theatres, haunted certain thoroughfares at certain times. She had an
affection for Piccadilly, a sentiment for Oxford Circus, and a passion
for the Strand. Louis could sympathize with these preferences; he, too,
liked to walk up and down the Embankment in the summer twilight--though
why such abrupt stoppages? Why such impetuous speed? He could understand
a human being finding a remote interest in the Houses of Parliament, but
he could not understand why Mrs. Nevill Tyson should love to linger
outside the doors of the War Office.
Her ways were indeed inscrutable; but he had learnt to know them all, not
a gesture escaped him. How well he knew the turn of her head and the
sudden flash of her face as they entered a theatre, and her eyes swept
the house, eager, expectant, dubious; how well he knew the excited touch
on his sleeve, the breath half-drawn, the look that was a confidence and
an enigma; knew, too, the despondent droop of her eyes when the play was
done and it was all over; the tightening of her hand upon his arm, and
the shrinking of the whole tiny figure as they made their way out through
the crowd. She had spirit enough for anything; but her nerves were all on
edge--she was so easily tired, so easily startled.
Day after day, and night after night; it was evident that at this
rate she and Tyson were bound to see each other some time, somewhere.
Stanistreet wondered whether that thought had ever occurred to her. And
if they met--well, he could not tell whether he desired or feared to see
that meeting. In all probability it would put an end to doubt. Was it
possible that he had begun to love doubt for its own sake?
At last they met, as was to be expected, and Stanistreet was there to
see. He had taken her to the "Criterion" one night, and at the close of
the first act Tyson came into the box opposite theirs. He was alone. The
lights went up in the house, and he looked round before he sat down;
evidently he had recognized his wife, and evidently she knew it.
Stanistreet, watching her with painful interest, saw her body slacken
and her face turn white under its paint and powder.
"Either she cares for the beggar still, or else--she's afraid for her
life of him."
A horrible thought flashed across him. What if all the time she had
simply been making use of him as--as a damned stalking-horse for Tyson?
It might account for the enigmatic smiles, the swift transitions, the
whole maddening mystery of her ways. If he had been nothing to her but
the man who knew more about Tyson than anybody else? She had always had a
way of making him talk about Tyson, while he seemed to himself to be most
engagingly egotistic.
And he had once thought that Mrs. Nevill Tyson adored her husband for his
(Stanistreet's) benefit. There was this summer, and that moment in the
library at Thorneytoft--Mrs. Nevill Tyson was beyond him. And he had been
three years trying to understand her. He was a man of the world, and he
ought to have understood.
Ah--perhaps that was the reason of his failure!
He looked at her again. She had shifted her position, turned her back on
the stage; her eyes were lowered, fixed on the programme in her lap, but
they were motionless; she was not reading. One ungloved arm hung by her
side, and under the white skin he could see the pulses leaping and
throbbing in the arteries, the delicate tissues of her bodice trembled
and shook. Was it possible that in that frivolous little body, under
that corsage of lace and satin and whalebone, there beat one of those
rare and tragic passions, all-consuming, all-absorbing, blind and deaf
to everything but itself? In that case--well, he felt something very
like awe before what he called her miraculous stupidity. But no, it was
impossible; to believe it was to believe in miracles, and he had long ago
lost his faith in the supernatural. Women did not love like that
nowadays.
Tyson left the box before the close of the last act. She kept her place
for ten minutes after the fall of the curtain, while the crowd streamed
out. She stood long after the house was empty, saying nothing, but
waiting--waiting. Once she looked piteously at Stanistreet. Her fingers
trembled so that she could not fasten her cloak, her gloves. He helped
her. A weird little ghost of a smile fluttered to her lips and vanished.
They hurried out at last along empty passages. Tyson was nowhere to be
seen. They drove quickly home.
At the corner of Francis Street the hansom drew up with a jerk and
waited. A crowd blocked the way. She leaned forward with a little cry.
What was it? An accident? No; a fight. The great swinging lamps over
the door of a public-house threw their yellow light on a ring of brutal
faces, men and women, for the most part drunk, trampling, hustling,
shouldering each other in their haste to break through to the center. A
girl reeled from the public-house and stood on the edge of the pavement
bawling a vile song. A man lurched up against the side of the hansom;
a coarse swollen face flaming with drink was pressed to the glass, close
to her own. As she shrank back in horror, turning her head away from the
evil thing, her face sought Stanistreet, the soft fringe of her hair
brushed against his cheek. She had never been so near to him, never, in
the abstraction of her terror, so far away. To-night everything combined
to make his own meaning clear to him, sharpened his fierce indignant
longing to take her away, out of the hell where these things were
possible, to protect her forever from the brutalities of life.
There was a stir; the crowd swayed forward and began to move. They
followed slowly in its wake, hemmed in by the rabble that streamed
towards Ridgmount Gardens, to lose itself in the black slums of
Bloomsbury. On the pavement the reeling girl was swept on with the crowd,
still singing her hideous song. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was leaning back now,
with her eyes closed, not heeding the ugly pageant. But the scene came
back to her in nightmares afterwards.
As Stanistreet's hansom turned after leaving her at Ridgmount Gardens, he
thought he saw some one remarkably like Tyson standing in the shadow of
the railings opposite her door. He must have seen them; and but for the
delay they would probably have overtaken and so missed him.
And Stanistreet kept on saying to himself: No. Women do not love like
that. And yet the bare idea of it turned Stanistreet, the cool, the
collected, into a trembling maniac. He could not face the possibility of
losing her, of being nothing to her. But for that he might have been
content to go on drifting indefinitely, sure of a sort of visionary
eternity, taking no count of time. He had been happy in his doubt. Once
it had tormented him; he had struggled against it; later, it had become
a source of endless interest, like a man's amusing dialogues with his own
soul; now, it was the one solitary refuge of his hope. He clung to it, he
could not let it go. He staked his all on the folly, the frailty of
Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
He had yet to prove it.
Of course she was a little fool; that went without saying. He had known
many women who were fools, and he had survived their folly. But it seemed
that he could not live without this particular little fool.
He called the next day at Ridgmount Gardens.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson's manner was a little disconcerting. He found her at
the piano, singing in her pathetic mezzo-soprano a song that used to he
a favorite of Tyson's. The selection was another freak; it was the first
time Louis had heard her sing that song since they left Thorneytoft.
This is what she sang; but Louis only came in for the last two verses.
"Oh feet that would be roving,
I will not bid you stay,
Though my heart should break with loving,
When love is far away.
(_Dim_.) "Oh heart that would be sleeping,
I will not wake you. No,
You shall hear no sound of weeping,
No footsteps come and go.
"Then come not for my calling,
Roam on the livelong day;
Some time when night is falling,
Love will steal home and stay.
"Or sleep, and fe-ear no waking,
Sleep on, the li-ights are low,
Some time when dawn is breaking,
Love will awa-ake--awa-ake,
(_Cresc_.) Love will awa-ake and know."
That was the sort of song Tyson liked; and well, as Mrs. Nevill sang it,
Stanistreet liked it too. And Stanistreet was not in the least musical.
"What--_you_ here again?" said she, swinging round on her music-stool.
"That's a jolly crescendo, isn't it? But they're the silliest words,
don't you think? As if love ever came home to stay if he could help it.
He might put up a few things in a portmanteau, and run down from Saturday
to Monday, perhaps, and--the lady was very accommodating, wasn't she?"
Stanistreet frowned and champed the ends of his mustache. This was not at
all the mood he desired to find her in.
"Don't be cynical," said he; "it's not like you."
"Dear me--what shall I be then? What _is_ like me?" She threw herself
back in a chair, kicked out her little feet, and yawned. It reminded
Louis unpleasantly of the attitude of the woman in the _Marriage à la
Mode_. Then she chattered; and it struck him, as it had struck him more
than once before, that Tyson had found his wife's head empty and
furnished it according to his own taste. She was always quoting Tyson;
and as there was not the least indication of inverted commas, it was hard
to tell which was quotation and which was the original text. This
creature of fitful, unbalanced mind and reckless speech was certainly the
Mrs. Nevill Tyson he had sometimes seen at Thorneytoft; but it was not
the Mrs. Nevill Tyson of last night, nor even of the other day, that
afternoon when her eyes said, as unmistakably as eyes could say anything,
that she would not accept defeat.
Another moment and the expression of her face had changed again; he saw
something there that he had never seen before, something unguarded and
appealing. He was near the end of doubt.
He felt that if he stayed with her another moment he would lose his head,
and he did not want to lose it--yet! He struggled desperately between his
desire to stay and his will to go--if there was any difference between
desire and will.
His struggles were cut short by the entrance of Tyson.
He walked into the room at half-past five, greeted Stanistreet cheerfully
(his eyes twinkling), ordered fresh tea, and began to talk to his wife as
if nothing had happened. If Louis had not known him so well, he would
have said he was immensely improved since the remarkable occasion on
which they had last met. He had quarreled with his best friend; he had
betrayed his wife and then left her; and he could come back with a
twinkle in his eye.
From where Stanistreet sat Mrs. Nevill Tyson's face was a _profil perdu_;
but he could hear her breath fluttering in her throat like a bird.
"Didn't I see you two at the 'Criterion' last night?" said Tyson. "What
did you think of 'Rosemary,' Molly?"
"I--I thought it was very good."
"From a purely literary point of view, eh? As you sat with your back to
the stage your judgment was not biased by such vulgar accessories as
scenery and acting. No doubt that is the way to enjoy a play. What are
your engagements for to-night?"
"Mine? I have none, Nevill."
"Ah--well, then, you might tell them to get my room ready for me. Don't
go, Stanistreet."
He had come home to stay.
CHAPTER XV
CONFLAGRATION
To see his wife casually in a crowd, and to fall desperately in love with
her for the second time, was a unique experience even in Tyson's life.
But it had its danger. He had never been jealous before; now a feeling
very like jealousy had been roused by seeing her with Stanistreet. He had
followed her to the "Criterion"; he had hurried out before the end of the
piece, and hung about Ridgmount Gardens till he had seen her homecoming.
Stanistreet's immediate departure was a relief to a certain anxiety that
he was base enough to feel. And still there remained a vague suspicion
and discomfort. He had to begin all over again with her. In their first
courtship she was a child; in their second she was a woman. Hitherto, the
creature of a day, she had seemed to spring into life afresh every
morning, without a memory of yesterday or a thought of to-morrow; she had
had no past, not even an innocent one. And now he had no notion what
experiences she might not have accumulated during this year in which he
had left her. That was her past; and they had the future before them.
They had been alone together for three days, three days and three nights
of happiness; and on the evening of the fourth day Tyson had found her
reading--yes, actually reading!
He sat down opposite her to watch the curious sight.
Perhaps she had said to herself: "Some day I shall be old, and very
likely I shall be ugly. If I am stupid too, he will be bored, and perhaps
he will leave me. So now--I am going to be his intellectual companion."
He was amused, just as Stanistreet had been. "I say, I can't have that,
you know. What have you got there?"
She held up her book without speaking. "Othello," of all things in the
world!
"Shakespeare? I thought so. When a woman's in a damned bad temper she
always reads Shakespeare, or Locke on the Human Understanding. Come out
of that."
Though Mrs. Nevill Tyson set her little teeth very hard, the corners of
her mouth and eyes curled with mischief. It was delicious to feel that
she could torment Nevill, to know that she had so much power. And while
she pretended to read she played with the pearl necklace she wore. It was
one shade with the white of her beautiful throat.
"Who gave you those pearls?"
She made no answer, but her hand dropped a little consciously. He had
given them to her that afternoon, remarking, with rather questionable
taste, that they were "a wedding-present for the second Mrs. Nevill
Tyson."
He leant over her chair and assailed her with questions to which no
answer came, to which no answer was possible, punctuating his periods
with kisses.
"Are you a conundrum? Or a fiend? Or a metaphysical system? And if so,
why do you wear a pink frock! Are you a young woman who prefers a dead
poet to a living husband? Are you a young woman at all? Or only a dear
little, sweet little, pink little strawberry iceberg?"
He lay down on the sofa as if overcome by unutterable fatigue. "Just as
you like," he murmured faintly. "You'll be sorry for this some day.
Shakespeare is immortal. I, most unfortunately, am not."
He got up and threw the window open. He ramped about the room,
soliloquizing as he went. Never, even in the last days of their
engagement, had she seen him so restless. (But she was not going to speak
yet; not she!) He stopped before the chimney-piece; it was covered with
ridiculous objects, the things that please a child: there were Swiss
cow-bells and stags carved in wood, Chinese idols that wagged their
heads, little images of performing cats, teacups, a whole shelf full of
toys. Not one of them but had some minute fragment of his wife's
personality adhering to it. He remembered the insane impulse that came
upon him last year to smash them, sweep the lot of them on to the floor.
To-night he could have kissed them, cried over them. "T-t-t-tt! What
affecting absurdity!" That was the way he went on. And now he sat down
by her writing-table, and was taking things up and examining them while
he talked. He never, never forgot the expression of a certain brass
porcupine that was somehow a penwiper; it seemed to belong to a world
gone mad, where everything was something else, where porcupines _were_
penwipers, and his wife--
For suddenly his tongue had stopped. He had caught sight of an enormous
bunch of hothouse flowers in a vase on the floor by the writing-table.
Stanistreet's card was in the midst of the bunch, and a note from
Stanistreet lay open on the writing-table.
There was an ominous pause while Tyson read it. It was curt enough; only
an offer of flowers and a ticket for the "Lyceum." Stanistreet's mind
must have been seriously off its balance, otherwise he would never have
done this clumsy thing.
Tyson strode to his wife's chair and tossed the letter into her lap.
"How long has Stanistreet been paying you these little attentions?"
She looked up smiling. I am not sure that she did not think this new tone
of Tyson's was part of the game they were playing together. She had never
taken him seriously.
"Ever since he found out that I liked them, I suppose."
"Did it not occur to you that the things you like are rather expensive
luxuries, some of them?"
"No. Perhaps that's why I hardly ever get them."
"My dear girl, I know the precise amount of Stanistreet's income. Money
can't be any object to him. But perhaps you've a soul above boxes at the
'Criterion,' and champagne suppers afterwards, and the rest of it?"
"I have, unfortunately. But there wasn't any champagne." Her indifferent
voice gave the lie to her beating pulses. Between playing and fighting
there is only a difference of degree.
"Will you kindly tell me why you selected Stanistreet of all people for
this business?"
"I didn't select him--he was always there."
"And if it hadn't been Stanistreet it would have been somebody else? I
see. I hope you appreciate the peculiar advantages of his society?"
"I do. Louis is a gentleman, though he is your friend. He knows how to
talk to women."
"If he doesn't it is not for want of practice. I could swallow all this,
Molly, if you were a little girl just out of the schoolroom; but--I
don't think you've much to learn."
Mrs. Nevill Tyson's eyes flashed. The play had turned to deadly earnest.
"Not much, thanks to you," said she. Her voice sank. "Louis was good to
me."
"Was he? '_Good_' to you--How extremely touching! Pray, were you good to
him?"
"No--no." She shook her head remorsefully. "I wish I had been."
Tyson knitted his brows and looked at her. He had not quite made up his
mind.
"Do you know, I don't altogether believe in your refreshing _näiveté_.
Stanistreet is not 'good' to pretty women for nothing. I know, and you
know, that a woman who has been seen with him as you apparently have
been, is not supposed to have a character to lose."
She rose to her feet and faced him. "How could you? Oh, how could you?"
He shrank from her, without the least attempt to conceal his repulsion.
"If you look in the glass you'll see."
She turned mechanically and saw the reflection of her face, all flushed
as it was and distorted, the eyes fierce with passion. It was like the
sudden leaping forth of her soul; and Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul, after
three days' intercourse with her husband's, was not a thing to trust
implicitly. Without sinning it seemed unconsciously to reflect his sin.
I can not tell you how that was; marriage is a great mystery.
She understood him, though imperfectly; she understood many things
now. Oh, he was right--she looked the part; no wonder that he hated
her. She sat down and covered her face with her hands, as if to shut
out that momentary vision of herself. Herself and not herself. What she
saw was something that had never been. But it was something that might
be--herself, as Tyson alone had power to make her. All this came to her
as an unexplained, confused terror, a trouble of the nerves; there was no
reasoning, no idea; it was all too new.
But if she did not understand her own misery, she understood vaguely what
he had said to her. She got up and went to her writing-table where a
letter lay folded, ready for its envelope. She gave it to him without
a word.
"Do you mean me to read this?" he asked.
"Yes; if you like." She answered without looking at him; apparently she
was absorbed in addressing her envelope.
He opened the letter gingerly, and read in his wife's schoolgirl
handwriting:--
"Dear Louis,--It's awfully good of you but I'm afraid I can't go with you
to the 'Lyceum' to-morrow night so I return the ticket with many thanks,
in case you want to give it to somebody else. Nevill has come home--why
of course you saw him--and I am so happy and I want all my time for him.
"I thought you'd like to know this. I'm sure he will be delighted to see
you whenever you like to call.--Yours sincerely,
"Molly Tyson.
"_P.S._--Thanks awfully for the lovely flowers. You can smell them all
over the flat!"
"Come here, you fool," he said gently.
But Mrs. Nevill Tyson was stamping her envelope with great deliberation
and care. She handed it to him at arm's length and darted away. He heard
her turning the key in her bedroom door with a determined click.
He read her letter over again twice. The ridiculous little phrases
convinced him of the groundlessness of his suspicion. Punctuation
would have argued premeditation, and premeditation guilt. "Nevill has
come home--why of course you saw him." She had actually forgotten that
Stanistreet had been there on the evening of his arrival.
He laughed so loud that Mrs. Nevill Tyson heard him in her bedroom.
An hour later he heard her softly unlocking her door. He smiled. She
might be as innocent as she pleased, but she had made him make a cursed
fool of himself, and he meant that she should suffer for that.
He threw Stanistreet's flowers out of the window, put Molly's note up in
its envelope and sent it to the post. Then he sat down to think.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson's room was opposite the one she had just left. She
stood for a moment before her looking-glass, studying her own reflection.
She took off her pearl necklace and spanned her white throat with her
tiny hands. And as she looked she was glad. When all was said and done
she looked beautiful--beautiful after her small fashion. She turned this
way and that to make perfectly sure of the fact. She had realized long
ago how much her hold on Nevill's affections depended on it. His love had
waxed and waned with her beauty. Well--She opened her door before getting
into bed, and for the next hour she lay listening and wondering. She saw
the line of light at the top of the drawing-room door disappear as the
big lamp went out. It was followed by a fainter streak. Nevill must have
lit the little lamp on the table by the window. (Oh, dear! He was going
to sit up, then.) She heard him go into the dining-room beyond and
stumble against things; then came the spurt of a match, followed by the
clinking of glasses. (He was only going to have a smoke and a drink.)
She waited a little while longer, then she called to him. There was no
answer; he must be dozing on the couch in the dining-room. A light wind
lifted the carpet at the door, and she wondered drowsily whether Nevill
had left the drawing-room window open.
He had done all that she supposed, and more. First of all, he drank a
little more than was good for him; this happened occasionally now. Then
he sat down and wrote what he thought was a very terse and biting letter
to Stanistreet, in which he said: "You needn't call. You will not find
either of us at home at Ridgmount Gardens from May to August, nor at
Thorneytoft from August to May. And if you should happen to meet my
wife anywhere in public, you will oblige me greatly by cutting her."
This letter he left on the table outside for postage in the morning. Then
he went back to the dining-room and drank a great deal more than was good
for him. Of course he left the drawing-room window open and the lamp
burning, and by midnight he was sleeping heavily in the adjoining room.
And the wind got up in the night: it played with the muslin curtains,
flinging them out like streamers into the room; played with the flimsy
parasol lamp-shade until it tilted, and the little lamp was thrown on to
the floor.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson woke with the light crash. She sat up for a moment,
then got out of bed, crossed the passage, and opened the drawing-room
door. A warm wind puffed in her face; the air was full of black flakes
flying through a red rain; a stream of fire ran along the floor, crests
of flames leapt and quivered over the steady blue under-current; and over
there, in the corner, an absurd little arm-chair had caught fire all by
itself; the flames had peeled off its satin covering like a skin, and
were slowly consuming the horse-hair stuffing; the pitiable object sent
out great puffs and clouds of smoke that writhed in agonized spirals. The
tiny room had become a battlefield of dissolute forces. But as yet none
of the solid furniture was touched; it was a superficial conflagration.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson saw nothing but the stream of fire that ran between her
and the room where Nevill lay. She picked up her skirt and waded through
it barefoot. A spark flung from the burning draperies settled on the wide
flapping frills of her night-gown. Nevill was fast asleep with the rug
over him and his mouth open. She shook him with one hand, and with the
other she tried to beat down her flaming capes. Was he never going to
wake?
She was afraid to move; but by dropping forward on her knees she could
just reach some soda-water on the table; she dashed it over his face. The
fire had hurt the soles of her feet; now it had caught her breast, her
throat, her hair; it rose flaming round her head, and she cried aloud in
her terror. Still clutching Nevill's sleeve, she staggered and fell
across him, and he woke.
He woke dazed; but he had sense enough to roll her in the rug and crush
the flames out.
CHAPTER XVI
THE NEW LIFE
"There is now every hope," so wrote that cheerful lady, Mrs. Wilcox, "of
dear Molly's complete recovery."
This, translated from the language of optimism, meant that dear Molly's
beauty was dead, but that Molly would live.
To live, indeed, was not what she had wanted. Mrs. Nevill Tyson had made
up her mind to die; and in the certain hope of death she had borne the
dressing of her burns without a murmur. Lying there, swathed in her
bandages, life came back slowly and unwillingly to her aching nerves and
thirsting veins; and the sense of life woke with a sting, as if her brain
were bound tight, tight, and the pulse of thought beat thickly under the
intolerable ligatures. Then, when they told her she would live, she
screamed and made as though she would tear the bandages from her head
and throat.
"Take them off," she cried, "I won't have them. You said I was going to
die, and I want to die--I want to die--I tell you. Don't let Nevill come
near me. He'll want to come and look at me when I'm dead. Don't let
him come!"
But Nevill was there. The first thing he did, when he heard the doctor's
verdict, was to go straight into his wife's room and cry. He bent over
her bed, sobbing hysterically--"Molly--Molly--my little wife!"
That made her suddenly quiet.
She turned towards him, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than ever
in the section of her face that was not covered with bandages. She held
out her hand, the right hand that had clung with such a grip to his
coat-sleeve and was thus left unhurt. He stroked it and kissed it many
times over, he said what a pretty hand it was; and then, when he
remembered the things he had said and thought of her, he cried again.
"This excitement is very bad for her. Shall I tell him to go away?"
whispered Mrs. Wilcox to the nurse. The nurse shook her head.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson had heard; she gave a queer little fluttering laugh
that was meant to be derisive and ended like a sob. "If you went away,
both of you," said she, "I might feel better."
They went away and left them.
From that moment Mrs. Nevill Tyson was no longer bent upon dying. She had
conceived an immense hope--that old, old hope of the New Life. They would
begin all over again and from the very beginning. Life is an endless
beginning. Had not Nevill's tears assured her that he loved her still, in
spite of what had been done to her? It takes so much to make a man cry.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson may have understood men; it is not so clear that she
knew all about sentimentalists. It seemed as though her beauty being
dead, all that was blind and selfish in her passion for Nevill had died
with it. She was glad to be delivered from the torment of the senses, to
feel that the immortal human soul of her love was free. And as she was
very young and had the heart of a little child, she firmly believed that
her husband's emotions had undergone the same purifying regenerating
process.
As for Tyson, he had not a doubt on the subject. One morning he was
sitting in her room, watching her with a feverish, intermittent devotion.
He noticed her right arm as it hung along the counterpane, and the droop
of the beautiful right hand--the one beautiful thing about her now. He
remembered how he used to tease her about that little white spot on her
wrist, and how she used to laugh and shake down her ruffles or her
bangles to hide it. Even now she had the old trick; she had drawn the
sleeve of her night-gown over it, as she felt his gaze resting on it.
Strange--though she was still sensitive about that tiny blemish, she was
apparently indifferent to the change in her face. He wondered if she
realized how irreparably her beauty was destroyed, and as he wondered he
looked away, lest his eyes should wake that consciousness in her. He had
no idea how long they had been alone together. Time was not measured by
words, for neither had spoken much. He had taken Henley's "Verses" at
haphazard from the bookshelf and was turning over the pages, dipping here
and there, in the fastidious fashion of a man in no mind for any ideas
but his own. Presently he broke out in a voice that throbbed thickly with
emotion--
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul--"
He had found the music that matched his mood. He chanted--
"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul."
Some clumsy movement of his foot shook the bed and jarred her. She drew
in her breath sharply.
"God forgive me!" he cried, "did I hurt you, darling?"
"I don't mind. It's worth it," said she.
At her look his sins rose up to his remembrance. He flung himself on his
knees beside the bed, shaken with his passion of remorse. He muttered a
wild, inarticulate confession.
"Don't, Nevill, don't," she whispered; "it made no difference. It's all
over and done with now."
He looked at her body and thought of the beauty of her soul. He broke
into vows and promises.
"Yes; it's all over. I swear I'll never look at another woman as long as
I live."
The pressure of her weak arms round his neck thrilled him with an
exquisite tenderness, a voluptuous pity. Surely, surely in his heart of
hearts he had never loved any woman as he loved her. She comforted him;
she whispered things too sacred for perfect utterance. It struck him from
time to time that she had no clear notion of the nature of the wrongs she
forgave, just as by some miracle her mind had dwelt apart from everything
that was base in her own marriage. Her ideas of evil were vague and
bodiless. She may have conceived Nevill to have been the victim of some
malign intellectual influence, the thrall, perhaps, of some Miss
Batchelor _sans merci_. There may have been mysteries, gulfs before which
she shuddered, dim regions which she could only just divine. He did not
know that with women like his wife there is all infinity between what
they realize and what they fear. Yet within its range of vision her love
was terribly clearsighted. And now, one by one, Tyson's sins fell from
him in the purifying fire of his wife's fancy.
He staggered to his feet and looked round him with glazed eyes; he was
drunk with his own emotions. She followed his gaze; it was caught by some
object above her bed.
"Hallo," said he, "what's my old sword doing there? My beauty!"
"I brought it in," said she.
"What did you do that for, eh?"
"I don't know. I think I thought that some day you'd walk off with it
somewhere, and that if you did that, you'd never come back again. So you
see I liked to know it was hanging safe up there when I was asleep. You
don't mind, do you?"
He muttered something about "rust" and "an outside wall."
"It's all right. I've cleaned it myself. I used to take it down and look
at it every day."
"When did you do that, Molly?"
"All the time you were away."
"Good God!" He took the sword down from the nail where it hung by a red
cord.
"You won't find a speck of dust on it anywhere," said she.
He had drawn the sword from its scabbard and laid it across his knee. He
felt its edge; he drew his finger down the long groove that ran along the
center of the blade; his gaze rested almost passionately on the floral
arabesque that fringed that bed of the river of blood. Not a spot of rust
from hilt to point; the scabbard, too, was bright and clean.
He held up the sword, still looking at it with the eyes of a lover; a
quick turn of his wrist, and it leapt and flashed in the sun.
He turned to his wife, smiling. "Isn't she a beauty?" said he.
Fear gripped her heart. She may have had shadowy notions of Tyson's
conjugal infidelities, but she had a very clear idea of the power of her
rival, the sword. She did not know that he was merely moved by the spirit
of Henley's verse.
"Take it away," she said; "I don't like the look of it."
"Well, it's not a nice thing to have hanging over your head."
He took it away and hung it in its old place in the dining-room.
And Mrs. Nevill Tyson was content. Though there was not a sign or a hope
that her beauty would be restored to her, she was content. What was more,
she was positively glad that it was gone, regarding the loss of it as the
ransom for Tyson's soul.
She was growing stronger every day now, and they were full of plans for
their future. No attempt had been made to repair the damage done by the
fire. It was settled--so far as anything was settled--that they were to
let the flat, let Thorneytoft too, and go away from London, from England
perhaps, to some Elysium to be agreed on by them both. It was to be a
second honeymoon--or was it a third? There was nothing like beginning all
over again from the very beginning. They talked of the Riviera.
In three weeks' time from the date of the fire she was well enough to be
moved into the dining-room. Nevill carried her. They had to go through
the empty drawing-room, and as they passed they stopped and looked round
the desolate place. It struck them both that this was the scene of that
terrible last act of the drama of the old life.
"When we've once gone we will never, never come back again," she said.
"No. We burnt our ships in that blaze, Moll. Do you mind very much?"
"No. I shall never want to see it again. In our new house we won't have
anything to remind us of this."
"No, we'll have everything brand new, won't we?"
"Yes, brand new." She looked round her and smiled. "But it seems a little
sad, don't you think? It _was_ a pretty room, and there were all my
things."
"Never mind. Plenty more where they came from."
They paused in the doorway.
"Ha! This is the way," said he, "that a bride used to be brought into her
husband's house. They lifted her up so!" As he spoke he raised her high
in his strong arms. He was smiling, glorying in his strength.
And that was the way Mrs. Nevill Tyson was carried over the threshold of
the New Life. Or was it not rather her spirit that had lifted his? He
too, unworthy, soiled and shamed with sin, had been suffered to go with
her a little way. For one luminous perfect moment he stood face to face
with her in the mystic marriage-chamber of the soul; he heard--if it were
only for a moment--the unspeakable epithalamium; he saw incomprehensible
things.
It had needed some violent appeal to the senses, the spectacle or idea
of physical agony, to rouse him to that first passion of pity and
tenderness. Something like this he had felt once before, in the night
watch at Thorneytoft, when the wife he had wronged lay in the clutches of
life and death. But now, for the first time in his married life, he loved
her. Surely this was the way of peace.
Surely, surely. She lay down in her gladness and prayed the prayer of her
wedding-night: that God would make her a good wife. She did not pray that
Nevill might be made a good husband; of _his_ sins she had never spoken,
not even to her God.
As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, in the joy of his heart he thanked whatever gods
there might happen to be for his unconquerable soul.
CHAPTER XVII
THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL
Three weeks and they were still in London. If they could only have risen
up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful
flat forever! But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her
journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal
was hardly to be thought of yet. The doctor was consulted.
"I must examine the heart," said the man of science.
He examined the heart.
"Better wait another week," he said, shortly. Brevity is the soul of
medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.
So they waited a week, three weeks in fact. The delay gave Tyson time to
study the New Life in all its bearings. At first it seemed to him that he
too had attained. He was ready to fall in with all his wife's innocent
schemes. For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with
excitement that was pleasure in itself. He was perfectly prepared for an
open rupture with the past, or, indeed, for any sudden and violent course
of action, the more violent the better. He dreamed of cataclysms and
upheavals, of trunks packed hastily in the night, of flight by express
trains from London, the place of all disaster. His soul would have been
appeased by a telegram.
Instead of telegrams he received doctors' bulletins, contradictory,
ambiguous, elusive. They began to get on his nerves.
Still, there could be no possible doubt that he had attained. At any rate
he had advanced a considerable distance on the way of peace. It looked
like it; he was happy without anything to make him happy, a state which
seemed to be a feature of the New Life.
The New Life was not exhausting. He had an idea that he could keep it up
indefinitely. But at the end of the first fortnight he realized that he
was drifting, not towards peace, but towards a horrible, teeming,
stagnant calm. Before long he would be given over to dullness and
immitigable ennui.
A perfectly sane man would have faced the facts frankly. He would have
pulled himself together, taken himself out of the house, and got
something to do. And under any other circumstances, this is what Tyson
would have done. Unfortunately, he considered it his duty as a repentant
husband to stay at home; and at home he stayed, cultivating his emotions.
Ah, those emotions! If Tyson had been simply and passionately vicious
there might have been some chance for him. But sentimentalism, subtlest
source of moral corruption, worked in him like that hectic disease that
flames in the colors of life, flouting its wretched victim with an
extravagant hope. The deadly taint was spreading, stirred into frightful
activity by the shock of his wife's illness. He stayed indoors, lounging
in easy-chairs, and lying about on sofas; he smoked, drank, yawned; he
hovered in passages, loomed in doorways; he hung about his wife's
bedroom, chattering aimlessly, or sat in silence and deep depression by
her side. In vain she implored him to go out, for goodness' sake, and get
some fresh air. Once or twice, to satisfy her, he went, and yawned
through a miserable evening at some theatre, when, as often as not, he
left before the end of the first act. Hereditary conscience rose up and
thrust him violently from the house; outside, the spirit of the Baptist
minister, of the guileless cultivator of orchids, haled him by the collar
and dragged him home. Or he would spend whole afternoons looking into
shop windows in a dreamy quest of flowers, toys, trinkets, something that
would "suit my wife." Judging from the unconsidered trifles that he
brought home, he must have credited the poor little soul with criminally
extravagant tastes. The tables and shelves about her couch were heaped
with idiotic lumber, on which Mrs. Nevill Tyson looked with thoughtful
eyes.
She was perpetually thinking now; she lay there weaving long chains of
reasoning from the flowers of her innocent fancy, chains so brittle and
insubstantial, they would have offered no support to any creature less
light than she. If Tyson was more than usually sulky, that was the
serious side of him coming out; if he was silent, well, everybody knows
that the deepest feelings are seldom expressed in words; if he was
atrociously irritable, it was no wonder, considering the strain he had
undergone, poor fellow. She reminded herself how he had cried over her
like a child; she rehearsed that other scene of confession and
forgiveness--the tender, sacred words, the promises and vows. Already
the New Life was passing into the life of memory, while she told herself
that it could not pass. It takes so much to make a strong man cry, you
know. When doubts came, she always fell back on the argument from tears.
He was reading to her one evening after she had gone tired to bed
(reading was so much easier than talking), when Mrs. Nevill Tyson, whose
attention wandered dreadfully, interrupted him.
"Nevill--you remember that night when the accident happened? I mean--just
before the fire?"
He moaned out an incoherent assent.
"And you remember what you thought?"
His only answer was a nervous movement of his feet.
"Well, I've often wanted to tell you about that. I know you didn't really
think there was anything between me and Louis, but--"
"Of course I didn't."
"I know--really. Still it might have made a difference. I would have told
you all about it that night, if it hadn't been for that beastly fire. You
know mother said I was awfully silly--I laid myself open to all sorts of
dreadful things. She said I ought to have left London--that time. I
couldn't. I knew when you came back you would come right here--I might
have missed you. Besides, it would have been horrible to go back to
Thorneytoft, where everybody was talking and thinking things. They
_would_ talk, Nevill."
"The fiends! You shouldn't have minded them, darling. They didn't
understand you. How could they? The brutes."
"Me? Oh, I wouldn't have minded _that_."
Tyson was frankly astonished. Apparently she had not a notion that she
had been the subject of any scurrilous reports at Drayton Parva or
elsewhere. From the first she had resented their social ostracism (when
she became aware of it) as an insult to him; and now, evidently she had
found the clue to the mysterious scandal in her knowledge of his conduct.
Before she could do that, in her own mind she must have accused him
gravely. And yet, but for this characteristic little inadvertence, he
would never have known it. How much did she know?
She went on a little incoherently; so many ideas cropped up to be
gathered instantly, and wreathed into the sequence of her thought.
"Mother said people would talk if I didn't take care. She thought Sir
Peter--poor old Sir Peter--do you remember his funny red face, and his
throat--all turkey's wattles?--because he said I was the prettiest woman
in Leicestershire. I don't see much harm in that, you know. Anyhow, he
can't very well do it again--now. _Perhaps_--she thought I oughtn't to
have gone about quite so much with Louis."
"Why did you, Molly? It was a mistake."
"I wonder--Well, it was all my fault."
"No; it was Stanistreet's. He knew what he was about."
"It was _mine_. I liked him."
"What did you see to like in him?" (He really had some curiosity on that
point.)
"I liked him because he was your friend--the best friend you ever had.
I hated the other men that used to come. And when you were away I felt
somehow as if--as if--he was all that was left of you. But that was
afterwards. I think I liked him first of all because he liked you."
"How do you know it was me he liked?"
"Oh, it was; I _know_. Whatever other people thought, he always
understood. Do you see? We used to talk about you, every day I think,
till just the last--and then, he knew what I was thinking. Then he was
sorry when baby died. I can never forget that."
(Inconceivable! Had she never for an instant understood? Ah, well, if
_he_ had been so transfigured in her sight, she might well idealize
Stanistreet.)
She went on impetuously, with inextricable confusion of persons and
events. "Nevill--I wasn't kind to him. They said I didn't care--and
I did--I did! It nearly broke my heart. Only I was afraid you'd think I
loved him better than you, and so--I didn't take any notice of him. I
thought he wouldn't mind--he was so little, you see; and then I thought
some day I could tell him. Oh, Nevill--_do_ you think he minded?"
He bowed his head. He had not a word to say. He was trying to realize
this thing. To keep his worthless love, she had given up everything, even
to the supreme sacrifice of her motherhood.
Her fingers clutched the counterpane, working feverishly. She had had
something else to say. But she was afraid to say it, to speak of that
unspeakable new thing, her hidden hope of motherhood. He covered her
hands with his to keep them still.
"You see it was all right, as it happened."
"Yes--as it happened. But I think it was a little hard on poor old
Stanistreet."
"Sometimes I wonder if it _was_ fair. He used to say things; but I didn't
take them in at the time. I didn't understand; and somehow now, I feel as
if it had never happened. Perhaps it wasn't quite fair--but then I didn't
think. I wonder why he's never been to see me."
"Can't say, Molly."
"He must have seen the fire in the papers--I hope he didn't think what
you did. I mean--think--"
"What?"
"Think that I cared."
"Don't, Molly, for God's sake! I never thought it. I was in an infernal
bad temper, that was all."
"So that hasn't made any difference?"
"Of course it hasn't."
"Nothing can make any difference now then, can it?"
It was too much. He got up and walked up and down the room. Poor Mrs.
Nevill Tyson, she had put his idea into words. She had suggested that
there was a difference, and suggestion is a fatal thing to an unsteady
mind. In that moment of fearful introspection he said to himself that it
was all very well for her to say there was no difference. There was a
difference. She was not exactly lying on a bed of roses; but in the
nature of things her lot was easier than his. There was no comparison
between the man's case and the woman's. He had not sunk into that
serene apathy which is nine-tenths of a woman's virtue. He was not an
invalid--neither was he a saint. It is not necessary to be a saint in
order to be a martyr; poor devils have their martyrdom. Why could not
women realize these simple facts? Why would they persist in believing
the impossible?
His face was very red when he turned round and answered. "I can't talk
about it, Molly. God knows what I feel."
This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of
deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.
He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the
reading. He sat and watched her.
Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman.
Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated
its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it;
as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and
insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it
start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid
dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the
nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life.
He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal
triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead--that was the horrible thing. Beneath
that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would
be young when he was long past middle age.
He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage
that had saved his life--for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate
actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine
ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have
left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable
"accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved
him all the better for it.
Odd. But some women are made so. Marion Hathaway was that sort--she stuck
like a leech.
And now--the frivolous, feather-headed little wife, whom he had held so
cheap and wronged so lightly, urging her folly as almost a justification
of the wrong, she too--She appalled him with the terrific eternity of her
love. Was it possible that this feeling, which he had despised as the
blind craving and clinging of the feminine animal, could take a place
among the supreme realities, the things more living than flesh and blood,
which in his way he still contrived to believe in? The idea made him
extremely uncomfortable, and he put it from him. He had drifted into that
stagnant backwater of the soul where the scum of thought rises to the
surface. Molly was better than most women; but, poor little thing, there
was nothing transcendent about her virtues. She loved him after the
manner of her kind.
No--no--no. She loved him as no other woman had ever loved him before.
She loved him because she believed in him against the evidence of her
senses. If she only knew! A diabolical impulse seized him to awaken her
then and there and force her to listen to a full confession of his
iniquities, without reticence and without apology. Surely no woman's love
could stand before that appalling revelation? But no; what other women
would do he would not undertake to say; _she_ would only look at him with
her innocent eyes, reiterating "It makes no difference."
Would he have cared more if she had cared less? On the whole--no. And
what if she had been a woman of a higher, austerer type? That woman would
have repelled him, thrown him back upon himself. She had drawn him by her
very foolishness. He had been brought back to her, again and again, by
the certainty of her unreasoning affection. By its purity also. That had
saved him from falling lower than a certain dimly defined level. If there
was a spark of good in him he owed it to her. He had never sunk so low as
in that intolerable moment when he had doubted her. For the behavior of
the brute is low enough in all conscience; but below that is the behavior
of the cad. Tyson had his own curious code of morals.
Yes; and in the raw enthusiasm of remorse he had made all manner of vows
and promises, and he felt bound in honor to keep them. He had talked of
a rupture with the past. A rupture with the past! You might as well talk
of breaking with your own shadow. The shadow of your past. Imbecile
expression! The past was in his blood and nerves; it was bone of his bone
and flesh of his flesh. It was he. Or rather it was this body of his that
seemed to live with a hideous independent life of its own. And yet, even
yet, there were moments when he caught a glimpse of his better self
struggling as if under the slough of dissolution; the soul that had never
seen the sun was writhing to leap into the light. He would have given the
whole world to be able to love Molly. There was no death and no
corruption like the death of love; and the spirit of his passion had
been too feeble to survive its divorce from the flesh.
He could not look away. He rose and lifted the lamp-shade, throwing the
pitiless light on the thing that fascinated him. She stirred in her
sleep, turning a little from the light. He bent over her pillow and
peered into her face. She woke suddenly, as if his gaze had drawn her
from sleep; and from the look in her eyes he judged a little of the
horror his own must have betrayed.
He shrank back guiltily, replaced the shade, and sat down in the chair
at the foot of the bed. She looked at him. His whole frame trembled; his
eyes were blurred with tears; the parted lips drooped with weakness,
bitterness, and unappeased desire. Did she know that in that moment the
hunger and thirst after righteousness raged more fiercely than any
earthly appetite? It seemed to him that in her look he read pity and
perfect comprehension. He hid his face in his hands.
After that night he began to have a nervous dread of going into her
room. He was always afraid that she would "say something." By this time
his senses, too, were morbidly acute. The sight and smell of drugs,
dressings, and disinfectants afflicted him with an agony of sensation.
There was no escaping these things in the little flat, and he could not
help associating his wife with them: it seemed as if a crowd of trivial
and sordid images was blotting out the delicate moral impressions he had
once had. Tyson was paying the penalty of having lived the life of the
senses; his brain had become their servant, and he was horrified to find
that he could not command its finest faculties at pleasure.
There was no disguising the detestable truth. He could attain no further.
From those heights of beautiful emotion where he had disported himself
lately there could be no gradual lapse into indifference. It was a
furious break-neck descent to the abominable end--repulsion and infinite
dislike, tempered at first by a little remnant of pity. Every day her
presence was becoming more intolerable to him. But, for the few moments
that he perforce spent with her, he was more elaborately attentive than
ever. As his tenderness declined his manner became more scrupulously
respectful, (She would have given anything to have heard him say "You
little fool," as in the careless days of the old life.) He had no
illusions left. Not even to himself could he continue that pleasant
fiction of the strong man with feelings too deep for utterance. Still,
there were certain delicacies: if his love was dead he must do his best
to bury it decently--anyhow, anywhere, out of his sight and hers.
He noticed now that, as he carried her from one room to the other, she
turned her face from his, as she had turned it from the light.
And she was growing stronger.
One afternoon she heard the doctor talking to Nevill in the passage. He
uttered the word "change."
"Shall I send her to Bournemouth?" said Nevill.
"Yes, yes. Good-morning. Or, better still, take her yourself to the
Riviera," sang out the doctor.
The door closed behind the eminent man, and Tyson went out immediately
afterwards.
He came home late that night, and she did not see him till the afternoon
of the following day, when he turned into the dining-room on his way out
of the house. He was nervously polite, and apologized for having an
appointment. She noticed that he looked tired and ill; but there was
another look in his face that robbed it of the pathos of illness, and she
saw that too.
"Nevill," said she, "I wish you'd go away for a bit."
"Where do you want me to go to?"
"Oh, anywhere." She considered a moment. "You'll be ill if you stop here.
You ought to go ever so far away. A sea-voyage would be the very thing."
"It wouldn't do me much good to go sea-voyaging by myself."
For a second her face brightened. "No--but--I shall be quite strong in
another fortnight--and then--I could go out to you wherever you were, and
we could come back together, couldn't we?"
There was no answer.
"You might go--to please me."
He laughed shortly. "I might go to please myself. But what's the good of
talking about it when you know I can't."
"Well, if you'd rather wait, there's the Riviera"--he colored
violently--"would that do for you?"
"Yes; I think it _would_ 'do' for me--just about."
"Well--anywhere then. If I'm well enough to go to the Riviera, I'm--"
"You're not well enough to go to the Riviera."
"What makes you think that?" she asked gravely.
He looked away and muttered something about "Thompson," and "the
journey." Again that look of agonized comprehension!
She said nothing. She knew that he had lied. Ah, to what pitiful shifts
she had driven him!
He hurried off to his appointment, and she lay on her couch by the window
with clenched hands and closed eyelids. She had no sensations to speak
of; but thought came to her--confused, overwhelming thought--an agony
of ideas. She loved him. Ah, the shame of it! And that hidden hope of
hers became a terror. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul was struggling with its
immortality. The hot flare of summer was in the streets and in the
room; the old life was surging everywhere around her; above the brutal
roar and gust of it, blown from airy squares, flung back from throbbing
thoroughfares, she caught responsive voices, rhythmic, inarticulate
murmurs, ripples of the resonant joy of the world. Down there, in their
dim greenery, the very plane-trees were whispering together under the
shadow of the great flats.
What were these things to Mrs. Nevill Tyson? She had entered the New
Life, as you enter heaven, alone.
CHAPTER XVIII
A MIRACLE
In the afternoon of the following day Tyson was sitting with Molly in the
dining-room when he was told that Captain Stanistreet had called and had
asked to see him. "Was he--?" Yes, the Captain was in the drawing-room.
Tyson was a little surprised at the announcement; for though the shock of
the fire had somewhat obscured his recollection of the events that
preceded it, Molly had unfortunately recalled them to his memory. But he
had clean forgotten some of the details. Consequently he was more than a
little surprised when Stanistreet, without any greeting or formality
whatsoever, took two letters from his pocket and flung one of them on the
window-seat.
"That's your letter," he said. "And here's the answer."
He laid Molly's little note down beside it.
Tyson stared at the letters rather stupidly. That correspondence was one
of the details he had forgotten. He also stared at Stanistreet, who
looked horribly ill. Then he took up Molly's note and examined it without
reading a word. It was crumpled, dirty, almost illegible, as if Louis had
thrust it violently into his pocket, and carried it about with him for
weeks.
"If you really don't know what it means," said Stanistreet, "I'll tell
you. It means that your wife had only one idea in her head. She didn't
understand it in the least, but she stuck to it. She thought of it from
morning till night, when other women would have been amusing themselves;
thought of it ever since you married her and left her. Unfortunately,
it kept her from thinking much of anything else. There were many things
she might have thought of--she might have thought of _me_. But she
didn't."
"Thanks. I know that as well as you. Did it ever occur to you to think of
her?"
"I shouldn't be here if I hadn't thought of her."
"Oh--" Tyson stepped over to the empty fireplace. It was the only thing
in the room that was left intact.
His attitude suggested that he was lord of the hearth, and that his
position was indestructible.
"Since you considered your testimony to my wife's character so
indispensable, may I ask why you waited five weeks to give it?"
Tyson could play with words like a man of letters; he fought with them
like the City tailor's son.
"You post your letters rather late. I left town an hour after I got
hers."
"It was the least you could do."
"Then I got ill. That also was the least I could do. But I did my best to
die too, for decency's sake. Needless to say, I did not succeed."
"I see. You thought of yourself first, and of her afterwards. What I want
to know is, would you have thought of me, supposing--only supposing--you
could have taken advantage of the situation?"
"No. In that case I would not have thought of you. I would have thought
of her."
"In other words, you would have behaved like a scoundrel if you'd got
the chance." The twinkle in Tyson's eyes intimated that he was enjoying
himself immensely. He had never had the whip-hand of Stanistreet before.
"I would have behaved like a damned scoundrel, if you like. But I
wouldn't have left her. Not even to marry and live morally ever after.
I can be faithful--to another man's wife."
The twinkle went out like a spark, and Tyson looked at his hearth. It was
dangerous to irritate Stanistreet, for there was no end to the things he
knew. So he only said, "Do you mind not shouting quite so loud. She's in
there--she may hear you."
She had heard him; she was calling to Nevill. He went to her, leaving the
door of communication unlatched.
"Is that Louis?" she asked. Tyson muttered something which Stanistreet
could not hear, and Molly answered with an intense pleading note that
carried far. "But I _must_ see him."
He started forward at the sound of her voice. I believe up to the very
last he clung to the doubt that was his hope. But Tyson had heard the
movement and he shut the door.
The pleading and muttering went on again on the other side. Heaven only
knew what incriminating things the little fool was saying in there! As
Stanistreet waited, walking up and down the empty room, he noticed for
the first time that it _was_ empty. Only the other day it had been
crammed with things that were symbols or monuments of the foolishness
of Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Now ceiling and walls were foul with smoke, the gay
white paint was branded and blistered, and the floor he walked on was
cleared as if for a dance of devils. But it was nothing to Stanistreet.
It would have been nothing to him if he had found Mrs. Nevill Tyson's
drawing-room utterly consumed. There was no reality for him but his own
lust, and anger, and bitterness, and his idea of Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
Presently Tyson came back.
"You can go in," he said, "but keep quiet, for God's sake!"
Stanistreet went in.
Tyson looked back; he saw him stop half-way from the threshold.
It was only for a second, but to Stanistreet it seemed eternity. From all
eternity Mrs. Nevill Tyson had been lying there on that couch, against
those scarlet cushions, with the blinds up and the sun shining full on
her small, scarred face, and on her shrunken, tortured throat.
She held out her hand and said, "I thought it was you. I wanted to see
you. Can you find a chair?"
He murmured something absolutely trivial and sat down by her couch,
playing with the fringe of the shawl that covered her.
"Did I hear you say you had been ill?" she asked.
He leant forward, bending his head low over the fringe; she could not see
his face. "I had inflammation of something or other, and I went partially
off my head--got out of bed and walked about in an east wind with a
temperature of a hundred and two, decimal point nine."
"Oh, Louis, how wicked of you! You might have died!"
"No such luck."
"For shame! I've been ill too; did you know? Of course you didn't, or
else you'd have come to ask how I was, wouldn't you? No, you wouldn't.
How could you come when you were ill?"
"I would have come. I didn't know."
"Didn't you? Oh, well--we had a fire here, and I was burnt; that's all.
How funny you not knowing, though. It was in all the papers--'Heroic
conduct of a lady.' Aren't they silly, those people that write papers.
I wasn't heroic a bit."
"I--I never saw it. I was in Paris."
"In Paris? Ah, I love Paris! That's where I went for my honeymoon. Was
that where you were ill?"
"Yes."
"Poor Louis! And I was so happy there."
Poor Louis!--she had loved Nevill in him and he was still a part of
Nevill. And for the rest, she who understood so much, who was she to
judge him?
He looked at her. By this time his sensations had lost the sting of
pity and horror. He could look without flinching. The fire had only burnt
the lower frame-work of the face, leaving the features untouched; the
eyes still glowed under their scorched brows with a look half-tender,
half-triumphant.
It was as if they said, "See what it was you loved so much."
The little fool, tortured into wisdom, was that what she meant? It was
always hard to fathom her meanings. Could it be that?
Yes, it must be. She had sent for him, not because she wanted to see
him, but because she wanted him to see her. She had sent for him to save
him. The sight of her face had killed her husband's love; she had
supposed that it would do the same kind office for his. Would any other
woman have thought of it? It was preposterous, of course; but it would
not have been Mrs. Nevill Tyson's idea without some touch of divine
absurdity.
But--could any other woman have done it? "See what it was you loved so
much." Poor little fool!
And he saw. This was not Mrs. Nevill Tyson, but it was the woman that he
had loved. Her being Mrs. Nevill Tyson was an accident; it had nothing to
do with _her_. Her beauty too? It was gone. So was something that had
obscured his judgment of her. He had doubted her over and over again,
unwillingly at first, willfully at the end; but he knew now that if for
one instant she had justified his skepticism he would have ceased to love
her. It was the paradox of her purity, dimly discerned under all his
doubt, that had tormented and fascinated him; and she held him by it
still.
His fingers worked nervously, plaiting and unplaiting the fringe.
"You were burnt. Where was Nevill then?"
"He was here."
"Was _he_ burnt?"
"No; but he might have been. He--he helped to put the fire out. Oh,
Louis, it's horribly hard on him!"
Stanistreet clenched his teeth lest he should blaspheme.
"How long have you known Nevill?" she asked, as if she had read his
thoughts.
"I don't know. A long time--"
"How many years? Think."
"Fifteen perhaps. We were at Marlborough together in seventy-eight."
"You've known him twenty years then. And you have known me--three?"
"Four, Molly--four next September."
"Well, four then. It isn't a long time. And you see it wasn't enough, to
know me in, was it?"
He said nothing; but the fringe dropped from his fingers.
"You were Nevill's best friend too, weren't you?"
"Yes. His best friend, and his worst, God help me!"
"I suppose that means you've quarreled with him? I thought I heard you.
But, of course, you didn't know."
"Forgive me, I did not." He had misunderstood her--again!
"Well, you know now. I wasn't worth quarreling about, was I?"
He got up and leaned out of the window, looking into the dull street that
roared seventy feet below. Then he sighed; and whether it was a sigh of
relief or pain he could not tell.
Neither did Mrs. Nevill Tyson in her great wisdom know.
CHAPTER XIX
CONFESSIONAL
After all, Tyson was the first to make up the quarrel. If a sense of
justice was wanting in him it was supplied by a sense of humor, and he
was very soon conscious of something ridiculous in his attitude towards
Stanistreet. He had law and nature on his side for once, but in the eyes
of the humorist, or of impartial justice, there was not very much to
choose between them. In fact the advantage was on Stanistreet's side. He,
Tyson, had thrown his wife and Stanistreet together from the first, he
had exposed her to what, in his view, would have been sharp temptation to
nine women out of ten, and she had not wronged him by a single thought.
As for Stanistreet, he had not taken, or even attempted to take, the
chance he gave him.
His tolerance showed how far he had separated himself from her. A month
ago he would not have thought so lightly of the matter.
One evening, not long after their stormy interview, he turned up at
Stanistreet's rooms in Chelsea, much as he had turned up at Ridgmount
Gardens after his year's absence.
Stanistreet was lying back in a low chair, smoking and thinking. The
change in Louis's appearance was still more striking than when they had
last met. His clothes hung loosely, on him; his whole figure had a
drooping, disjointed look. But the restless light had gone from his eyes;
the muscles of his lean face were set in a curious repose, as if the
man's nature were appeased, as if his will had somehow resisted the
physical collapse. He rose reluctantly as Tyson came in, and stood,
manifestly ill at ease, while Tyson, ignoring the interrogation of his
air, took possession of a seat which was not offered to him.
"Look here, Stanistreet," said he, "I can't stand this any longer. You
and I can't afford to quarrel--about a woman. It's not worth it."
"That is precisely what your wife said. But it's not the way I should put
it myself. We did quarrel; and you at least had every provocation."
"Oh, damn the provocation. You don't suppose I came here to make you
apologize?"
"I'm not going to apologize. When I say you had provocation enough
to justify your putting a bullet into me, I'm merely stating the
conventional view."
"Well--yes. If I hit you hard, it was all above the belt."
"There are some vulnerable parts above the belt, though you mightn't
think it."
"If it comes to that, Stanny, I must say you got your revenge. Trust an
old friend for knowing where to hit. That fist of yours caught me in some
very nasty places. Suppose we shake hands."
They shook hands. Stanistreet's hand was cold as ice. He lowered himself
into his chair, and lit a pipe in token of reconciliation.
He was magnanimous. It was he who had done the wrong, and it was he who
had pardoned. He had always been sorry for that poor devil, Tyson.
Tyson was aware of this feeling, and he generally resented it; but at
times like the present it gave him a curious sense of moral support.
The two men sat and smoked in a silence which Tyson, as usual, was the
first to break.
"I wouldn't like to swear," said he, "that I don't go abroad again before
long. It's my only chance. I'm knocked out of the game here. It's too
quick, too hard, and the rules are too cursedly complicated."
"All the same, I'd wait a bit before I flung it up, if I were you."
"Wait? Wait? I've done nothing but wait ever since I came to this
detestable country, and my chance never turned up. It never will turn
up--here."
"Why not?"
"My own fault, I suppose. I've spent my life in going round and round the
earth passionately in a circle. I don't say that perpetual rotation is a
natural function of the ordinary human being; but it's my function--I'm
good for nothing else. And they expect a man with the world in his brain
and the devil in his blood to live decently in this damnable city of fog
and filth! And when the world-madness comes on him nobody knows anything
about this particular form of mania--the poor wretch must get into a
stiff shirt or a strait waistcoat and converse sanely with that innocent
woman, his wife. If he doesn't there's a scandal, and the devil to pay--"
Stanistreet looked grave. Whither was all this tending? To a final
abandonment of Mrs. Nevill Tyson?
"Of course, the mistake was to try. There might have been a chance for me
if I'd had a tithe of your sense. But being what I am, I must needs go
and marry. It was the deed of a lunatic."
"Isn't it rather late to go back on that now? What's the good?"
"None, you fool, none. And if there's anything that stamps a man as a cur
and a cad, it's this vile habit of slanging the women for his own sins.
All the same--I'm not blaming anybody but myself, mind--all the same, I
being what I am, there's no doubt I married the wrong sort of woman. I
don't mind making that confession to you. I believe you know more about
me than anybody, barring my Maker."
Stanistreet looked straight in front of him, terribly detached and stern.
"She was not the wrong sort," he said slowly; "but she may have been the
wrong woman for you."
"Men like you and me, Stanistreet, contrive to get hold of the wrong
woman; I don't know why."
"You must know that your marriage did nothing for you that was not very
well done before."
"Yes. It seems to me that there was a time when I had an immortal
soul. That was before the Framley episode. You remember? An edifying
experience."
Stanistreet assented. He knew the horrible story, of a mad boy and a bad
woman. Perhaps it accounted for the ugliest facts in Tyson's character.
He was warped from his youth, the bitter, premature manhood, so soon
corrupt.
"That woman was possessed of seven distinct devils, and amongst them they
didn't leave much of my immortal soul. And you hear men talk of their
'first love.' Good God!"
Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. He had not met these men. But there
could be no doubt that if any of Tyson's loves could be called his first,
he would have talked freely enough about it. No subject was too sacred
or too vile for his unbridled tongue. He continued to talk.
"After all, at my worst, I never did as much harm to any woman as that
Framley fiend did to me. I suppose I had my revenge; but that was
Nature's justice, not mine. Right or wrong, I obeyed the law of the
cosmos. And for the life of me I don't see why I should bother about it."
If it had not been for Mrs. Nevill Tyson, Stanistreet might have been
faintly amused at the idea of this little cockney cosmopolitan persuading
himself that his contemptible vices were part of the pageant of the
world. As it was he was disgusted. He, too, was a sinner in all
conscience; but his sins and his repentance had been alike simple and
sincere. He had none of the pendantry of vice.
"If you ask me," he said, "what did for you was that low trick of the
old man Tyson when he left you his respectability. A property you really
could not be expected to manage. _That_ was your ruin, if you like."
Tyson looked up. His drowning conscience snatched at straws. "It was.
I've thought as much myself. But that doesn't square my account. I lied
when I said my marriage was a mistake. It was not a mistake. It was
a crime committed against the dearest, sweetest woman that ever lived."
"You mean--?" It was hard to tell what Tyson meant when he went off into
reminiscences. And for the moment Stanistreet's vision was obscured by a
painful memory. Three years ago a woman had come to his rooms and asked
for Tyson. She sat in that chair opposite--where Tyson was sitting now.
She said unspeakable things that were by no means pleasant for
Stanistreet to hear. It had required all his tact to break the news
of Tyson's marriage and take her home in a cab. He could see her now,
in her pitiful finery, sitting back, trying to hide her white face with
gloves that were anything but white.
But Tyson was not thinking of Mrs. Hathaway.
"I mean that baby--Molly--my wife. That was the wickedest, cruellest
thing I ever did in the whole course of my abominable life. I might have
known how it would end."
Stanistreet looked thoughtfully at his friend. He was used to these
outbursts of self-reproach, but they had never moved him greatly until
now.
"They told me I ought to have married a clever woman. _She_ wasn't
clever, thank God! Yet somehow she had a sort of originality--I don't
know what it was." (Tyson had lately fallen into the habit of talking
about his wife in the past tense, as if she were dead.) "It was something
that no clever woman ever has. _I_ know them! Upon my soul I do believe
I loved her." He paused, pondering. "I wonder how it would have answered
though if I'd married a thing with more brains?"
"Brains? They're damnation. Are you thinking of Miss Batchelor?"
"N-no. There _is_ a medium. A woman needn't be a fool or a philosopher,
nor yet a saint or a devil. It exists somewhere, that golden mean."
"Oh, no doubt."
"It's odd how that notion of the perfect woman sticks to you. How the
devil did I get hold of it, I wonder?"
Stanistreet made no answer. It was sufficiently evident that Tyson had
got it from his wife. The odd thing was that Tyson was unaware of this.
He seemed to have no doubt whatever that his marriage with the perfect
woman had been arranged for in heaven, though somehow it had failed to
come off on earth. A delusion not uncommon with men of Tyson's stamp.
"I believe," said Tyson, "it's a what d'ye call 'em--category--innate
idea--_a priori_ form of the masculine intelligence. I've never seen a
man yet who hadn't it somewhere about him. And I've seen most sorts.
Terrific bounders, too, some of them."
A year ago Stanistreet would have laughed at this, now he smiled.
Tyson lay back in his chair and fell into a waking dream. He spoke
slowly, in the curious muffled voice of the dreamer. "The perfect
woman--the eternal, incomprehensible divinity, all-wise, all-good,
all-loving, the guardian of the soul--I believe in it, I adore it; but,
unfortunately, I have never met it."
"My dear Tyson, I doubt if you and I would know it if we did meet it."
Tyson said nothing. He had closed his eyelids. He was following his
dream.
Presently he spoke.
"I say, Stanistreet, do you believe in miracles?"
Stanistreet looked down. Only the other day he had seen a miracle and
believed. And he himself was a greater miracle than the one he saw. But
the experience was not one that he cared to talk about.
"They don't happen here, where people are so damned clever. But I know
that they happen--sometimes--over there--in the East--_ex oriente lux_."
He rose. "Some day I shall go there or thereabouts, and see."
"And leave your wife here?"
"That's it. Do you think I ought to go?"
"I think it doesn't matter in the very least."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that whether you go or stay you'll kill her. But go, for God's
sake! It's the kindest way."
CHAPTER XX
A MAN AND A SPHINX
The idea of leaving England had occurred to Tyson more than once before.
In Stanistreet's rooms it took its first vague shape. But Louis's parting
words had a sting in them; they were at once a shock to his feelings and
a challenge to his will.
Stanistreet had read him thoroughly. In plain language he had entertained
serious thoughts of deserting Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Desertion? It was an
ugly word. He dismissed his idea. He would dree his weird. He wasn't
going to funk the thing--not he! The New Life had been found impossible.
No matter. _Certum quia impossibile_. Nothing like a big thumping paradox
when you were about it. Impossibility had the smile and lure of haunting
deity, the glamor of the arcana. That night he dedicated himself with
more promises and vows.
He was in that state of mind when men look out for miracles to save them.
There was no reason why miracles should not happen, here and now. Those
fellows must have been in a bad way who had to go out into deserts and
places to find God and their unconquerable souls. No doubt queer things
have happened in Africa, in Asia, things which the Western mind--Pending
the miracle, his Western mind would seek peace in an office. He would try
anything, from a Government appointment to a clerkship in the Bank. After
all they do not manage things so very differently in the East. If you
come to think of it, there is not much to choose between bending yourself
double over a desk and sitting with your head in the pit of your stomach,
meditating on Brahma. The effect on the liver must be pretty much the
same.
He went to bed thinking of Upanishads, with the result that he dreamed of
tiger-shooting in the jungle.
Ah, yes, in the cold light of intellect, between doing and not doing a
thing there is but the difference of a word. That colorless negative does
nothing to alter the salient image of the thing. The fervency of his
resolve not to leave England called up as in a calenture the lands that
he was not to travel, the freedom that was not to be his.
The idea he had dismissed came back to him. He flew and it followed; he
veered and it waylaid him at every turn. An intolerable restlessness took
possession of him. He spent his days and a great part of his nights in
furious walking about the streets. The idea hounded him on; it stared at
him now from newspaper placards, it was whispered and murmured and
shrieked into his ears.
There was war in the Soudan.
He saw his idea illuminated, transfigured. It was Glory, a stern wingless
Victory, beckoning him across a continent. It no longer pursued him. It
had changed its tactics. It was coming to meet him; there was no
escaping.
He met it face to face on the Embankment somewhere between Charing Cross
and the Temple. A light fog had set in from the river, blurring the
outlines of things. He had been walking up and down for about an hour,
walking for walking's sake, with his eyes fixed on the pavement. Suddenly
he found himself standing still, staring at one of the sphinxes that
guard Cleopatra's Needle. The monster rose up out of the fog as out
of a sea; its body glistened with an oily sooty moisture, a big drop
had gathered in one of its huge eyelids like a tear.
Obelisk and sphinx--what were they doing by this gray river, under this
gray sky? They were exiles here, they belonged to the Desert. So did he.
To leave London to its mob of journalists and stock-brokers, and to the
demons of the pavement; to go there where there are none of these things,
where miracles are sometimes allowed to happen; where God and Nature are
more, not less, than man, and where courage, even in these days, counts
as a virtue. If, indeed, as sometimes he feared, the brute in him was
supreme and indestructible, London was not the place for him.
London! Every stone of its pavement marked the grave of a human soul.
But he would still be good for something out there. There were things
there that wanted doing; things that he could do; things that men died in
doing.
Reason said: Why not go and do them? And if he died! Well, what can a man
do more than die for his country?
And if Molly died?
Molly would not die. Something told him that. But he might break her
heart if he went. Yes; and he would certainly break his promises if he
stayed. Stanistreet was right there.
Her words came back to him: "It's all over and done with now." Was it?
Was it?
Reason said: It was better to risk a possibility than face a certainty.
Reason? Ah, no! It was Nature rather, the inscrutable Sphinx, repeating
her stale old riddle, the answer to which is Man.
A sound of laughter roused him from his communings with Reason.
The lights were going up one by one along the Embankment. In an embrasure
of the parapet a woman was leaning back against the low wall; she was
looking at him, and laughing open-mouthed. She stood near a gas-standard,
on the outer edge of an illuminated disc. Her face, painted and powdered,
flushed faintly in the perishing light. He thought her magnificently
beautiful.
He came forward and was about to speak to her. The woman moved quickly
into the bright center of the disc; she turned her face sideways as she
moved, and he saw in it a sudden likeness to Molly. The likeness was
fugitive, indefinable; something in the coloring, the line of the
forehead, the sweep of the black hair from the cheek; it might have
been a trick of the gaslight or of his own brain. But it was there; he
saw it, an infernal reincarnation of his wife's dead beauty.
And as he swerved out of her path the woman's laughter went after him,
with a ring in it of irony and triumph.
CHAPTER XXI
OUT OF THE NIGHT
That evening as he sat in his wife's bedroom--the perfunctory sitting,
lasting usually about a quarter of an hour--the thought took complete
possession of him. What if he went out to the Soudan? Other fellows
were going; they could never have too many. Men dropped off there faster
than their places could be filled. And if he died, as other fellows died?
Well, death was the supreme Artist's god from the machine, the simplest
solution of all tragic difficulties.
A gentle elegiac mood stole over him. He looked on at his own death; he
saw the grave dug hastily in the hot sand; he heard the roll of the Dead
March, and the rattling of the rifles. In all probability these details
would be omitted, but they helped to glorify the dream. He was a mourner
at his own funeral, indifferent to all around him, yet voluptuously
moved. So violently did the hero and the sentimentalist unite in that
strange composite being that was Nevill Tyson.
He drew his chair a little nearer to her bed. "Molly--supposing I wanted
to go abroad again some of these days, would you very much mind?"
There was a slight quivering of the limbs under the bedclothes, but Mrs.
Nevill Tyson said nothing.
"You see, going back to Thorneytoft is out of the question for you and
me. I think we made the place a bit too hot to hold us. And you hate it,
don't you?"
She murmured some assent.
"And if I stick here doing nothing I shan't be able to stand things much
longer; I feel as if I should go off my head. I oughtn't to be doing
nothing, a great hulking fellow like me."
"No, no; it would never do. But why must you go--abroad? Aren't there
things--"
He felt that his only chance was to throw himself as it were naked on her
sympathy. "I must go--sooner or later. I can't settle--never could.
Traveling is in my blood and in my brain. I'm home-sick, Molly--home-sick
for foreign countries, that's all. I shall come back again. You don't
think I want to leave you, surely?"
He looked into her eyes; there was no reproach there, only melancholy
intelligence. She knew the things that are impossible.
"No. I think you'd rather stay with me--if you could. When shall you go?"
He turned aside. "I don't know. I mayn't go at all. I don't want to talk
about it any more."
It was hopeless to talk about it.
He had found his men, fifty brave fellows in all, ordered his outfit and
booked his passage, before he could make up his mind to break the news to
her, for there was the risk of breaking her heart too.
And now it wanted but two days before his departure.
Coming out of the War Office he met Stanistreet. They walked together as
far as Charing Cross.
"Yes," said Tyson, "the thing's done now. I'm off to the Soudan with
fifty other fellows--glorious devils--and we mean fighting this time.
It's the old field, you see, and the old enemy."
"When do you sail?"
"Wednesday--midnight. See me off?"
"Yes. It's the least I can do."
"Thanks, Stanny." He made a cut at the air with his walking-stick. "Don't
you wish you'd half my luck? You poor devils never get a chance. By Jove!
if I'd only stuck to _mine_!"
They parted. Not a word of his wife.
Stanistreet looked back over his shoulder as Tyson crossed Trafalgar
Square with the bold swinging step of a free man. He was still cutting
the air.
The packing was the worst of it. It had to be done in silence and a
guilty secrecy, for Molly was in bed again, suffering from a sort of
nervous relapse. Up to the last day Tyson was wretched, haunted by the
fear of some unforeseen calamity that might still happen and destroy his
plans. By way of guarding against it he had stuck the Steamship Company's
labels on all his luggage long ago. That seemed to make his decision
irrevocable whatever happened. But he would not be safe till he felt
water under him.
At the last minute Molly took a feverish turn, and was on no account to
be agitated. If he must go it would be better not to say Good-bye. Oh,
much better.
He went into her room. She was drowsy. Her small forehead was furrowed
with much thinking; there was a deep flush on her cheek, and her breath
came and went like sighing. He stooped over her and whispered
"Goodnight," the same as any other night. No, not quite the same, for
Molly started and trembled. He had kissed not her hands only, but her
mouth and her face.
His ship sailed at midnight, and he sailed with it. She had not stood in
his way, the little thing. When, indeed, had she ever hindered him?
Towards midnight Mrs. Wilcox and the servants were startled from
their sleep by hearing Mrs. Nevill Tyson calling "Nevill, Nevill!" They
hurried to her room; her bed was empty; the clothes were all rumpled
back as if flung off suddenly. They looked into the charred, dismantled
drawing-room, she was not there; but the door of communication, always
kept shut at night, was ajar. She must have gone through into the
dining-room. They found her there, stretched across the couch,
unconscious. The cord that had held Nevill's sword to the nail above was
lying on the floor where she had found it. She had divined his destiny.
The next day she was slightly delirious. The doctors and nurses came and
went softly, and Mrs. Wilcox brooded over the sick-room like a vast hope.
They listened now and then. She was talking about the baby, the baby that
died two years ago.
"It's very strange," said Mrs. Wilcox, "she never took much notice of the
little thing when it was alive."
The doctor said nothing to that; but he asked whether her father had
not died of consumption. He certainly had; but nobody had ever been
afraid for Molly; her lungs were always particularly strong. Yes, but the
lungs were not always attacked. Tuberculosis, like other things, follows
the line of least resistance. Her brain could never have been very
strong.--"Her brain was as strong as yours or mine, sir. You don't know;
she has had a miserable life."--Ah, any shock or strong excitement, or
any great drain on the system, was enough to bring on brain fever.
In other words, what could you expect after so much agony, so much
thinking, and the striving of that life within her life, the hope that
would have renewed the world for her--the fruit of three days and three
nights of happiness? It was a grave case, but--oh yes, while there was
life there was hope.
So they talked. But she was far away from them, lost in her dream. And in
her dream the dead child and the unborn child were one.
By night the tumult in her brain was raging like a fire. She had bad
dreams. They were full of noises. First, the hiss of a thin voice singing
from a great distance an insistent, intolerable song; then the roar of
hell, and the hissing of a thousand snakes of flame. And now a crowd of
evil faces pressed on her; they sprang up quick out of the darkness,
and then they left her alone. She was outside in the streets. It was
twilight, a dreadful twilight; and perhaps it was only a dream, for it is
always twilight in dreams. She was all in white, in her night-gown, and
it was open at the neck too. She clutched at it to hide--what was it she
wanted to hide? She had forgotten--forgotten.
But that was nothing, only a dream, and she was awake now. It was light;
it was broad daylight. Then why was she out here, in the street, in her
night-gown? She must hide herself--anywhere--down that dark alley, quick!
No, not there--there was a bundle--a dead baby.
No, no, she knew all about it now; there was a fire, and she had got up
out of her bed to save some one--to save--"Nevill! Nevill!" She must run
or she would be late. Ah, the crowd again, and those faces--all looking
at her and wondering. They were running too, they were hunting her down,
the brutes, driving her before them with pitchforks. The shame of it, the
shame of it! Who was singing that hideous song? It was about her, What
had she done? She had done nothing--nothing. She was bearing the sins of
all women, the sins of the whole world. It was swords now--sharp burning
swords, and they hurt her back--her head--Nevill!
The dream changed. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was wandering about somewhere alone,
always alone; she was walking over sand, hot like the floor of a furnace,
on and on, a terribly long way, towards something black that lay on the
very edge of the world and was now a cloud, and now a cloak, and now a
dead man.
Two people were talking about her now, and there was no sense in what
they said.
"Is there _no_ hope?" said one.
"None," said the other, "none."
There was a sound of some one crying; it seemed to last a long time, but
it was so faint she could scarcely hear it.
"It is just as well. She would have died in child-birth, or lost her
reason."
The crying sounded very far away.
It ceased. The sand drifted and fell from under her feet; she was sinking
into a whirlpool, sucked down by a great spinning darkness and by an icy
wind. She threw up her arms above her head like a dreamer awaking from
sleep. She had done with fevers and with dreams.
The doctor pushed back the soft fringe of down from her forehead. "Look,"
he said, "it is like the forehead of a child."
CHAPTER XXII
IN THE DESERT
It was an hour before dawn, and Tyson was kneeling on the floor of his
tent, doing something to the body of a sick man. He had turned the narrow
place into a temporary ambulance. Dysentery had broken out among his
little troop; and wherever there was a reasonable chance of saving a
man's life, Tyson carried that man from under the long awning, pitched in
the pitiless sunlight where the men swooned and maddened in their
sickness, and brought him into his own tent, where as often as not he
died. This boy was dying. The air was stifling; but it was better than
what they had down there among those close-packed rows, where the poor
devils were dying faster than you could bury them--even in the desert,
where funeral rites are short. And as he stooped to moisten the boy's
lips, Tyson swore with a great oath: there was no water in the tin basin;
the sponge was dry as sand, and caked with blood. His own tongue was like
a hot file laid to the roof of his mouth. The heat by night was the heat
of the great desert, stretched out like a sheet of slowly cooling iron;
and the heat by day was like the fire of the furnace that tried it.
He went out to find water. When they were not interrupted by the enemy,
he might be kept at this sort of work for days; if it was not this boy it
would be another. The care of at least one-half of his sick and wounded
had fallen to Tyson's charge.
Let the Justice that cries out against what men have done for women
remember what they have done for men.
The boy died before dawn. And now, what with sickness and much fighting,
out of the fifty Tyson had brought out with him there were but twenty
sound men.
When he had seen to the burying of his dead, and gone his rounds among
the hopelessly dying, Tyson turned to his own affairs. The mail had come
in, and his letters had been forwarded to him overnight from the nearest
station. There was one from Stanistreet; it lay unopened on a box of
cartridges amongst his other papers. These he began to look over and
arrange.
They were curious documents. One was a letter to his wife, imploring her
forgiveness. "And yet," he had written, "except for one sin (committed
when I was to all intents and purposes insane), and for one mistake, the
grossest man ever made, you have nothing to forgive. I swear that I loved
you even then; and I shall always love you, as I have never loved--never
could love--any other woman. Believe me, I don't say this to justify
myself. There would be far more excuse for me if I had been simply
incapable of the feeling. As it is, I sinned against the highest, the
best part of myself, as much as against you." There was more in the same
strain, only less coherent; hurried sentences jotted down in the night,
whenever he could snatch a minute from his duty. He must have meant
every word of it at the moment of writing; and yet--this is the curious
thing--it was in flat contradiction to certain statements made in the
other paper.
This was a long letter to Stanistreet, begun in the form of an irregular
diary--a rough account of the march, of the fighting, of the struggle
with dysentery, given in the fewest and plainest words possible, with
hardly a trace of the writer's natural egotism. The two last sheets were
a postscript. They had evidently been written at one short sitting, in
sentences that ran into each other, as if the writer had been in
passionate haste to deliver himself of all he had to say. The first
sentence was a brief self-accusation, what followed was the defense--a
sinner's _apologia pro vita sua_. He had behaved like a scoundrel to his
wife. To other women too, if you like, but it had been fair fighting with
them, brute against beast, an even match. While she--she was not a woman;
she was an adorable mixture--two parts child to one part angel. And he,
Tyson, had never been an angel, and it was a long time since he had been
a child. That accounted for everything. Barring his marriage, none of his
crimes had been committed in cold blood; but he had gone into _that_ with
his eyes open, knowing himself to be incapable of the feeling women call
love. (Of course, there was always the other thing.) But that love of his
wife's was something divine--a thing to believe in, not to see. Men were
not made to mate with divinities. He ought to have fallen down and
worshiped the little thing, not married her. But was it his fault!
That particular crime would never have been committed if he had been left
to himself. It was not the will of God; it was that will of the old man
Tyson. The whole thing was a cursed handicap from beginning to end. He
was strong; but the world and life and destiny were a bit stronger--it
was three to one, and two out of the three were women--see? It's always
two to one on them. You can't hit out straight from the shoulder when
you fight with women, Stanny. If you can keep 'em going, it's about all.
He had nothing to say against Destiny, mind. Destiny fights fair enough
(for a woman), and she had fought fair with him. She had picked him up
out of the dirt when the scrimmage was hottest, and pitched him into the
desert to die. It was better to die out here in the desert cleanly, than
to die in the gutter at home. If only he could die fighting!
Now, whatever may be said of this remarkable document, at any rate it
bore on the face of it a passionate veracity. But it gave the lie to
every word of his letter to his wife. Tyson had dashed it off in hot
haste, risen to his work, and then he must have sat down again to
write that letter. Taken singly, the three documents were misleading;
taken altogether, they formed a masterpiece of autobiography. The
self-revelation was lucid and complete; it gave you Tyson the man of no
class, Tyson the bundle of paradoxes, British and Bohemian, cosmopolitan
and barbarian; the brute with the immortal human soul struggling
perpetually to be.
He put the diary into his dispatch-box. It was found there afterwards,
and published with a few other letters. Everybody knows that simple
straightforward record; it shows Tyson at his bravest and his best. If he
had tried to separate the little gold of his life from the dross of it he
could not have succeeded better. He looked over the postscript hurriedly.
When he came to the words, "Knowing myself to be incapable of the feeling
women call love," he compared it with the other letter, "There would have
been far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the
feeling." The two statements did not exactly tally; but what else could
he say? And it was too late to mend it now.
He laid down the sheets and opened Stanistreet's letter. It was short; it
gave the news of Molly's death with a few details, and these words: "In
any case it must have come soon. Your going away made no difference. It
began before you left--the fever was hanging about her; and they say her
brain could never have been very strong."
He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish
crimson against the dawn. The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence
and death. O God! the futility of everything he had ever done! The lie he
had written was futile; it had come too late. His coming out here was
futile; he had come too soon. If he had waited another three weeks he
could have gone without breaking Molly's heart. "Her brain could never
have been very strong." At that he laughed--horribly, aloud.
The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent. He went out. As he
strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed
him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.
There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there
condemnation. He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption.
_Ex oriente lux!_ It was as if illumination had come with that fierce
penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.
Ah--that was a shot! The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him
reloading. A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a
bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of
sand.
And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air. The camp was
surrounded.
Tyson called up his twenty men and ran to his tent for arms. The papers
were still there in the box of cartridges.
He hesitated for a second. He realized with a sudden lucidity that if he
died, and those damning documents were found, there would be a slur on
his memory out of keeping with the end. He could not have it said that
the last words he had written had been an apology and a lie.
He tore the papers across, once, twice--no time for more--and rushed into
the desert, his heart beating with the brutal, jubilant lust of battle.
CHAPTER XXIII
_IN MEMORIAM_
Later on news came of that heroic stand made by Tyson and his men--a mere
handful against hundreds of the enemy. He had led them in their last mad
rush on a line of naked steel; he had fallen first, face downwards,
pierced through the back and breast. He died fighting.
Even in Drayton Parva, where all things are remembered, his sins are
forgotten. Nay, more, they forbear to speak of his wife's sins out of
respect for the memory of a brave man.
In Drayton Parish Church there is a stained glass window with a figure of
St. Michael; he has a drawn sword in his hand and the flames of hell are
about his feet. That window is dedicated
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE MEMORY OF NEVILL TYSON.
So they remember.
And out there, in the great Soudan, there is a wooden cross that mounts
guard over a long mound. Already it is buried up to its arms in the
shifting sand; by to-morrow the dead and their place will be one with the
eternal desert. And the desert remembers nothing, neither glory nor sin.
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