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?