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.