And if Molly died?

Molly would not die. Something told him that. But he might break her
heart if he went. Yes; and he would certainly break his promises if he
stayed. Stanistreet was right there.

Her words came back to him: "It's all over and done with now." Was it?
Was it?

Reason said: It was better to risk a possibility than face a certainty.

Reason? Ah, no! It was Nature rather, the inscrutable Sphinx, repeating
her stale old riddle, the answer to which is Man.

A sound of laughter roused him from his communings with Reason.

The lights were going up one by one along the Embankment. In an embrasure
of the parapet a woman was leaning back against the low wall; she was
looking at him, and laughing open-mouthed. She stood near a gas-standard,
on the outer edge of an illuminated disc. Her face, painted and powdered,
flushed faintly in the perishing light. He thought her magnificently
beautiful.

He came forward and was about to speak to her. The woman moved quickly
into the bright center of the disc; she turned her face sideways as she
moved, and he saw in it a sudden likeness to Molly. The likeness was
fugitive, indefinable; something in the coloring, the line of the
forehead, the sweep of the black hair from the cheek; it might have
been a trick of the gaslight or of his own brain. But it was there; he
saw it, an infernal reincarnation of his wife's dead beauty.

And as he swerved out of her path the woman's laughter went after him,
with a ring in it of irony and triumph.




CHAPTER XXI

OUT OF THE NIGHT


That evening as he sat in his wife's bedroom--the perfunctory sitting,
lasting usually about a quarter of an hour--the thought took complete
possession of him. What if he went out to the Soudan? Other fellows
were going; they could never have too many. Men dropped off there faster
than their places could be filled. And if he died, as other fellows died?
Well, death was the supreme Artist's god from the machine, the simplest
solution of all tragic difficulties.

A gentle elegiac mood stole over him. He looked on at his own death; he
saw the grave dug hastily in the hot sand; he heard the roll of the Dead
March, and the rattling of the rifles. In all probability these details
would be omitted, but they helped to glorify the dream. He was a mourner
at his own funeral, indifferent to all around him, yet voluptuously
moved. So violently did the hero and the sentimentalist unite in that
strange composite being that was Nevill Tyson.

He drew his chair a little nearer to her bed. "Molly--supposing I wanted
to go abroad again some of these days, would you very much mind?"

There was a slight quivering of the limbs under the bedclothes, but Mrs.
Nevill Tyson said nothing.

"You see, going back to Thorneytoft is out of the question for you and
me. I think we made the place a bit too hot to hold us. And you hate it,
don't you?"

She murmured some assent.

"And if I stick here doing nothing I shan't be able to stand things much
longer; I feel as if I should go off my head. I oughtn't to be doing
nothing, a great hulking fellow like me."

"No, no; it would never do. But why must you go--abroad? Aren't there
things--"

He felt that his only chance was to throw himself as it were naked on her
sympathy. "I must go--sooner or later. I can't settle--never could.
Traveling is in my blood and in my brain. I'm home-sick, Molly--home-sick
for foreign countries, that's all. I shall come back again. You don't
think I want to leave you, surely?"

He looked into her eyes; there was no reproach there, only melancholy
intelligence. She knew the things that are impossible.

"No. I think you'd rather stay with me--if you could. When shall you go?"

He turned aside. "I don't know. I mayn't go at all. I don't want to talk
about it any more."

It was hopeless to talk about it.

He had found his men, fifty brave fellows in all, ordered his outfit and
booked his passage, before he could make up his mind to break the news to
her, for there was the risk of breaking her heart too.

And now it wanted but two days before his departure.

Coming out of the War Office he met Stanistreet. They walked together as
far as Charing Cross.

"Yes," said Tyson, "the thing's done now. I'm off to the Soudan with
fifty other fellows--glorious devils--and we mean fighting this time.
It's the old field, you see, and the old enemy."

"When do you sail?"

"Wednesday--midnight. See me off?"

"Yes. It's the least I can do."

"Thanks, Stanny." He made a cut at the air with his walking-stick. "Don't
you wish you'd half my luck? You poor devils never get a chance. By Jove!
if I'd only stuck to _mine_!"

They parted. Not a word of his wife.

Stanistreet looked back over his shoulder as Tyson crossed Trafalgar
Square with the bold swinging step of a free man. He was still cutting
the air.

The packing was the worst of it. It had to be done in silence and a
guilty secrecy, for Molly was in bed again, suffering from a sort of
nervous relapse. Up to the last day Tyson was wretched, haunted by the
fear of some unforeseen calamity that might still happen and destroy his
plans. By way of guarding against it he had stuck the Steamship Company's
labels on all his luggage long ago. That seemed to make his decision
irrevocable whatever happened. But he would not be safe till he felt
water under him.

At the last minute Molly took a feverish turn, and was on no account to
be agitated. If he must go it would be better not to say Good-bye. Oh,
much better.

He went into her room. She was drowsy. Her small forehead was furrowed
with much thinking; there was a deep flush on her cheek, and her breath
came and went like sighing. He stooped over her and whispered
"Goodnight," the same as any other night. No, not quite the same, for
Molly started and trembled. He had kissed not her hands only, but her
mouth and her face.

His ship sailed at midnight, and he sailed with it. She had not stood in
his way, the little thing. When, indeed, had she ever hindered him?

Towards midnight Mrs. Wilcox and the servants were startled from
their sleep by hearing Mrs. Nevill Tyson calling "Nevill, Nevill!" They
hurried to her room; her bed was empty; the clothes were all rumpled
back as if flung off suddenly. They looked into the charred, dismantled
drawing-room, she was not there; but the door of communication, always
kept shut at night, was ajar. She must have gone through into the
dining-room. They found her there, stretched across the couch,
unconscious. The cord that had held Nevill's sword to the nail above was
lying on the floor where she had found it. She had divined his destiny.

The next day she was slightly delirious. The doctors and nurses came and
went softly, and Mrs. Wilcox brooded over the sick-room like a vast hope.
They listened now and then. She was talking about the baby, the baby that
died two years ago.

"It's very strange," said Mrs. Wilcox, "she never took much notice of the
little thing when it was alive."

The doctor said nothing to that; but he asked whether her father had
not died of consumption. He certainly had; but nobody had ever been
afraid for Molly; her lungs were always particularly strong. Yes, but the
lungs were not always attacked. Tuberculosis, like other things, follows
the line of least resistance. Her brain could never have been very
strong.--"Her brain was as strong as yours or mine, sir. You don't know;
she has had a miserable life."--Ah, any shock or strong excitement, or
any great drain on the system, was enough to bring on brain fever.

In other words, what could you expect after so much agony, so much
thinking, and the striving of that life within her life, the hope that
would have renewed the world for her--the fruit of three days and three
nights of happiness? It was a grave case, but--oh yes, while there was
life there was hope.

So they talked. But she was far away from them, lost in her dream. And in
her dream the dead child and the unborn child were one.

By night the tumult in her brain was raging like a fire. She had bad
dreams. They were full of noises. First, the hiss of a thin voice singing
from a great distance an insistent, intolerable song; then the roar of
hell, and the hissing of a thousand snakes of flame. And now a crowd of
evil faces pressed on her; they sprang up quick out of the darkness,
and then they left her alone. She was outside in the streets. It was
twilight, a dreadful twilight; and perhaps it was only a dream, for it is
always twilight in dreams. She was all in white, in her night-gown, and
it was open at the neck too. She clutched at it to hide--what was it she
wanted to hide? She had forgotten--forgotten.

But that was nothing, only a dream, and she was awake now. It was light;
it was broad daylight. Then why was she out here, in the street, in her
night-gown? She must hide herself--anywhere--down that dark alley, quick!
No, not there--there was a bundle--a dead baby.

No, no, she knew all about it now; there was a fire, and she had got up
out of her bed to save some one--to save--"Nevill! Nevill!" She must run
or she would be late. Ah, the crowd again, and those faces--all looking
at her and wondering. They were running too, they were hunting her down,
the brutes, driving her before them with pitchforks. The shame of it, the
shame of it! Who was singing that hideous song? It was about her, What
had she done? She had done nothing--nothing. She was bearing the sins of
all women, the sins of the whole world. It was swords now--sharp burning
swords, and they hurt her back--her head--Nevill!

The dream changed. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was wandering about somewhere alone,
always alone; she was walking over sand, hot like the floor of a furnace,
on and on, a terribly long way, towards something black that lay on the
very edge of the world and was now a cloud, and now a cloak, and now a
dead man.

Two people were talking about her now, and there was no sense in what
they said.

"Is there _no_ hope?" said one.

"None," said the other, "none."

There was a sound of some one crying; it seemed to last a long time, but
it was so faint she could scarcely hear it.

"It is just as well. She would have died in child-birth, or lost her
reason."

The crying sounded very far away.

It ceased. The sand drifted and fell from under her feet; she was sinking
into a whirlpool, sucked down by a great spinning darkness and by an icy
wind. She threw up her arms above her head like a dreamer awaking from
sleep. She had done with fevers and with dreams.

The doctor pushed back the soft fringe of down from her forehead. "Look,"
he said, "it is like the forehead of a child."




CHAPTER XXII

IN THE DESERT


It was an hour before dawn, and Tyson was kneeling on the floor of his
tent, doing something to the body of a sick man. He had turned the narrow
place into a temporary ambulance. Dysentery had broken out among his
little troop; and wherever there was a reasonable chance of saving a
man's life, Tyson carried that man from under the long awning, pitched in
the pitiless sunlight where the men swooned and maddened in their
sickness, and brought him into his own tent, where as often as not he
died. This boy was dying. The air was stifling; but it was better than
what they had down there among those close-packed rows, where the poor
devils were dying faster than you could bury them--even in the desert,
where funeral rites are short. And as he stooped to moisten the boy's
lips, Tyson swore with a great oath: there was no water in the tin basin;
the sponge was dry as sand, and caked with blood. His own tongue was like
a hot file laid to the roof of his mouth. The heat by night was the heat
of the great desert, stretched out like a sheet of slowly cooling iron;
and the heat by day was like the fire of the furnace that tried it.

He went out to find water. When they were not interrupted by the enemy,
he might be kept at this sort of work for days; if it was not this boy it
would be another. The care of at least one-half of his sick and wounded
had fallen to Tyson's charge.

Let the Justice that cries out against what men have done for women
remember what they have done for men.

The boy died before dawn. And now, what with sickness and much fighting,
out of the fifty Tyson had brought out with him there were but twenty
sound men.

When he had seen to the burying of his dead, and gone his rounds among
the hopelessly dying, Tyson turned to his own affairs. The mail had come
in, and his letters had been forwarded to him overnight from the nearest
station. There was one from Stanistreet; it lay unopened on a box of
cartridges amongst his other papers. These he began to look over and
arrange.

They were curious documents. One was a letter to his wife, imploring her
forgiveness. "And yet," he had written, "except for one sin (committed
when I was to all intents and purposes insane), and for one mistake, the
grossest man ever made, you have nothing to forgive. I swear that I loved
you even then; and I shall always love you, as I have never loved--never
could love--any other woman. Believe me, I don't say this to justify
myself. There would be far more excuse for me if I had been simply
incapable of the feeling. As it is, I sinned against the highest, the
best part of myself, as much as against you." There was more in the same
strain, only less coherent; hurried sentences jotted down in the night,
whenever he could snatch a minute from his duty. He must have meant
every word of it at the moment of writing; and yet--this is the curious
thing--it was in flat contradiction to certain statements made in the
other paper.

This was a long letter to Stanistreet, begun in the form of an irregular
diary--a rough account of the march, of the fighting, of the struggle
with dysentery, given in the fewest and plainest words possible, with
hardly a trace of the writer's natural egotism. The two last sheets were
a postscript. They had evidently been written at one short sitting, in
sentences that ran into each other, as if the writer had been in
passionate haste to deliver himself of all he had to say. The first
sentence was a brief self-accusation, what followed was the defense--a
sinner's _apologia pro vita sua_. He had behaved like a scoundrel to his
wife. To other women too, if you like, but it had been fair fighting with
them, brute against beast, an even match. While she--she was not a woman;
she was an adorable mixture--two parts child to one part angel. And he,
Tyson, had never been an angel, and it was a long time since he had been
a child. That accounted for everything. Barring his marriage, none of his
crimes had been committed in cold blood; but he had gone into _that_ with
his eyes open, knowing himself to be incapable of the feeling women call
love. (Of course, there was always the other thing.) But that love of his
wife's was something divine--a thing to believe in, not to see. Men were
not made to mate with divinities. He ought to have fallen down and
worshiped the little thing, not married her. But was it his fault!

That particular crime would never have been committed if he had been left
to himself. It was not the will of God; it was that will of the old man
Tyson. The whole thing was a cursed handicap from beginning to end. He
was strong; but the world and life and destiny were a bit stronger--it
was three to one, and two out of the three were women--see? It's always
two to one on them. You can't hit out straight from the shoulder when
you fight with women, Stanny. If you can keep 'em going, it's about all.
He had nothing to say against Destiny, mind. Destiny fights fair enough
(for a woman), and she had fought fair with him. She had picked him up
out of the dirt when the scrimmage was hottest, and pitched him into the
desert to die. It was better to die out here in the desert cleanly, than
to die in the gutter at home. If only he could die fighting!

Now, whatever may be said of this remarkable document, at any rate it
bore on the face of it a passionate veracity. But it gave the lie to
every word of his letter to his wife. Tyson had dashed it off in hot
haste, risen to his work, and then he must have sat down again to
write that letter. Taken singly, the three documents were misleading;
taken altogether, they formed a masterpiece of autobiography. The
self-revelation was lucid and complete; it gave you Tyson the man of no
class, Tyson the bundle of paradoxes, British and Bohemian, cosmopolitan
and barbarian; the brute with the immortal human soul struggling
perpetually to be.

He put the diary into his dispatch-box. It was found there afterwards,
and published with a few other letters. Everybody knows that simple
straightforward record; it shows Tyson at his bravest and his best. If he
had tried to separate the little gold of his life from the dross of it he
could not have succeeded better. He looked over the postscript hurriedly.
When he came to the words, "Knowing myself to be incapable of the feeling
women call love," he compared it with the other letter, "There would have
been far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the
feeling." The two statements did not exactly tally; but what else could
he say? And it was too late to mend it now.

He laid down the sheets and opened Stanistreet's letter. It was short; it
gave the news of Molly's death with a few details, and these words: "In
any case it must have come soon. Your going away made no difference. It
began before you left--the fever was hanging about her; and they say her
brain could never have been very strong."

He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish
crimson against the dawn. The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence
and death. O God! the futility of everything he had ever done! The lie he
had written was futile; it had come too late. His coming out here was
futile; he had come too soon. If he had waited another three weeks he
could have gone without breaking Molly's heart. "Her brain could never
have been very strong." At that he laughed--horribly, aloud.

The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent. He went out. As he
strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed
him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.
There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there
condemnation. He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption.
_Ex oriente lux!_ It was as if illumination had come with that fierce
penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.

Ah--that was a shot! The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him
reloading. A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a
bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of
sand.

And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air. The camp was
surrounded.

Tyson called up his twenty men and ran to his tent for arms. The papers
were still there in the box of cartridges.

He hesitated for a second. He realized with a sudden lucidity that if he
died, and those damning documents were found, there would be a slur on
his memory out of keeping with the end. He could not have it said that
the last words he had written had been an apology and a lie.

He tore the papers across, once, twice--no time for more--and rushed into
the desert, his heart beating with the brutal, jubilant lust of battle.




CHAPTER XXIII

_IN MEMORIAM_


Later on news came of that heroic stand made by Tyson and his men--a mere
handful against hundreds of the enemy. He had led them in their last mad
rush on a line of naked steel; he had fallen first, face downwards,
pierced through the back and breast. He died fighting.

Even in Drayton Parva, where all things are remembered, his sins are
forgotten. Nay, more, they forbear to speak of his wife's sins out of
respect for the memory of a brave man.

In Drayton Parish Church there is a stained glass window with a figure of
St. Michael; he has a drawn sword in his hand and the flames of hell are
about his feet. That window is dedicated

TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE MEMORY OF NEVILL TYSON.

So they remember.

And out there, in the great Soudan, there is a wooden cross that mounts
guard over a long mound. Already it is buried up to its arms in the
shifting sand; by to-morrow the dead and their place will be one with the
eternal desert. And the desert remembers nothing, neither glory nor sin.