His struggles were cut short by the entrance of Tyson.

He walked into the room at half-past five, greeted Stanistreet cheerfully (his eyes twinkling), ordered fresh tea, and began to talk to his wife as if nothing had happened. If Louis had not known him so well, he would have said he was immensely improved since the remarkable occasion on which they had last met. He had quarreled with his best friend; he had betrayed his wife and then left her; and he could come back with a twinkle in his eye.

From where Stanistreet sat Mrs. Nevill Tyson's face was a profil perdu; but he could hear her breath fluttering in her throat like a bird.

"Didn't I see you two at the 'Criterion' last night?" said Tyson. "What did you think of 'Rosemary,' Molly?"

"I—I thought it was very good."

"From a purely literary point of view, eh? As you sat with your back to the stage your judgment was not biased by such vulgar accessories as scenery and acting. No doubt that is the way to enjoy a play. What are your engagements for to-night?"

"Mine? I have none, Nevill."

"Ah—well, then, you might tell them to get my room ready for me. Don't go, Stanistreet."

He had come home to stay.



CHAPTER XV

CONFLAGRATION

To see his wife casually in a crowd, and to fall desperately in love with her for the second time, was a unique experience even in Tyson's life. But it had its danger. He had never been jealous before; now a feeling very like jealousy had been roused by seeing her with Stanistreet. He had followed her to the "Criterion"; he had hurried out before the end of the piece, and hung about Ridgmount Gardens till he had seen her homecoming. Stanistreet's immediate departure was a relief to a certain anxiety that he was base enough to feel. And still there remained a vague suspicion and discomfort. He had to begin all over again with her. In their first courtship she was a child; in their second she was a woman. Hitherto, the creature of a day, she had seemed to spring into life afresh every morning, without a memory of yesterday or a thought of to-morrow; she had had no past, not even an innocent one. And now he had no notion what experiences she might not have accumulated during this year in which he had left her. That was her past; and they had the future before them.

They had been alone together for three days, three days and three nights of happiness; and on the evening of the fourth day Tyson had found her reading—yes, actually reading!

He sat down opposite her to watch the curious sight.

Perhaps she had said to herself: "Some day I shall be old, and very likely I shall be ugly. If I am stupid too, he will be bored, and perhaps he will leave me. So now—I am going to be his intellectual companion."

He was amused, just as Stanistreet had been. "I say, I can't have that, you know. What have you got there?"

She held up her book without speaking. "Othello," of all things in the world!

"Shakespeare? I thought so. When a woman's in a damned bad temper she always reads Shakespeare, or Locke on the Human Understanding. Come out of that."

Though Mrs. Nevill Tyson set her little teeth very hard, the corners of her mouth and eyes curled with mischief. It was delicious to feel that she could torment Nevill, to know that she had so much power. And while she pretended to read she played with the pearl necklace she wore. It was one shade with the white of her beautiful throat.

"Who gave you those pearls?"

She made no answer, but her hand dropped a little consciously. He had given them to her that afternoon, remarking, with rather questionable taste, that they were "a wedding-present for the second Mrs. Nevill Tyson."

He leant over her chair and assailed her with questions to which no answer came, to which no answer was possible, punctuating his periods with kisses.

"Are you a conundrum? Or a fiend? Or a metaphysical system? And if so, why do you wear a pink frock! Are you a young woman who prefers a dead poet to a living husband? Are you a young woman at all? Or only a dear little, sweet little, pink little strawberry iceberg?"

He lay down on the sofa as if overcome by unutterable fatigue. "Just as you like," he murmured faintly. "You'll be sorry for this some day. Shakespeare is immortal. I, most unfortunately, am not."

He got up and threw the window open. He ramped about the room, soliloquizing as he went. Never, even in the last days of their engagement, had she seen him so restless. (But she was not going to speak yet; not she!) He stopped before the chimney-piece; it was covered with ridiculous objects, the things that please a child: there were Swiss cow-bells and stags carved in wood, Chinese idols that wagged their heads, little images of performing cats, teacups, a whole shelf full of toys. Not one of them but had some minute fragment of his wife's personality adhering to it. He remembered the insane impulse that came upon him last year to smash them, sweep the lot of them on to the floor. To-night he could have kissed them, cried over them. "T-t-t-tt! What affecting absurdity!" That was the way he went on. And now he sat down by her writing-table, and was taking things up and examining them while he talked. He never, never forgot the expression of a certain brass porcupine that was somehow a penwiper; it seemed to belong to a world gone mad, where everything was something else, where porcupines were penwipers, and his wife—

For suddenly his tongue had stopped. He had caught sight of an enormous bunch of hothouse flowers in a vase on the floor by the writing-table. Stanistreet's card was in the midst of the bunch, and a note from Stanistreet lay open on the writing-table.

There was an ominous pause while Tyson read it. It was curt enough; only an offer of flowers and a ticket for the "Lyceum." Stanistreet's mind must have been seriously off its balance, otherwise he would never have done this clumsy thing.

Tyson strode to his wife's chair and tossed the letter into her lap.

"How long has Stanistreet been paying you these little attentions?"

She looked up smiling. I am not sure that she did not think this new tone of Tyson's was part of the game they were playing together. She had never taken him seriously.

"Ever since he found out that I liked them, I suppose."

"Did it not occur to you that the things you like are rather expensive luxuries, some of them?"

"No. Perhaps that's why I hardly ever get them."

"My dear girl, I know the precise amount of Stanistreet's income. Money can't be any object to him. But perhaps you've a soul above boxes at the 'Criterion,' and champagne suppers afterwards, and the rest of it?"

"I have, unfortunately. But there wasn't any champagne." Her indifferent voice gave the lie to her beating pulses. Between playing and fighting there is only a difference of degree.

"Will you kindly tell me why you selected Stanistreet of all people for this business?"

"I didn't select him—he was always there."

"And if it hadn't been Stanistreet it would have been somebody else? I see. I hope you appreciate the peculiar advantages of his society?"

"I do. Louis is a gentleman, though he is your friend. He knows how to talk to women."

"If he doesn't it is not for want of practice. I could swallow all this, Molly, if you were a little girl just out of the schoolroom; but—I don't think you've much to learn."

Mrs. Nevill Tyson's eyes flashed. The play had turned to deadly earnest. "Not much, thanks to you," said she. Her voice sank. "Louis was good to me."

"Was he? 'Good' to you—How extremely touching! Pray, were you good to him?"

"No—no." She shook her head remorsefully. "I wish I had been."

Tyson knitted his brows and looked at her. He had not quite made up his mind.

"Do you know, I don't altogether believe in your refreshing naeivete. Stanistreet is not 'good' to pretty women for nothing. I know, and you know, that a woman who has been seen with him as you apparently have been, is not supposed to have a character to lose."

She rose to her feet and faced him. "How could you? Oh, how could you?"

He shrank from her, without the least attempt to conceal his repulsion. "If you look in the glass you'll see."

She turned mechanically and saw the reflection of her face, all flushed as it was and distorted, the eyes fierce with passion. It was like the sudden leaping forth of her soul; and Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul, after three days' intercourse with her husband's, was not a thing to trust implicitly. Without sinning it seemed unconsciously to reflect his sin. I can not tell you how that was; marriage is a great mystery.

She understood him, though imperfectly; she understood many things now. Oh, he was right—she looked the part; no wonder that he hated her. She sat down and covered her face with her hands, as if to shut out that momentary vision of herself. Herself and not herself. What she saw was something that had never been. But it was something that might be—herself, as Tyson alone had power to make her. All this came to her as an unexplained, confused terror, a trouble of the nerves; there was no reasoning, no idea; it was all too new.

But if she did not understand her own misery, she understood vaguely what he had said to her. She got up and went to her writing-table where a letter lay folded, ready for its envelope. She gave it to him without a word.

"Do you mean me to read this?" he asked.

"Yes; if you like." She answered without looking at him; apparently she was absorbed in addressing her envelope.

He opened the letter gingerly, and read in his wife's schoolgirl handwriting:—

"Dear Louis,—It's awfully good of you but I'm afraid I can't go with you to the 'Lyceum' to-morrow night so I return the ticket with many thanks, in case you want to give it to somebody else. Nevill has come home—why of course you saw him—and I am so happy and I want all my time for him.

"I thought you'd like to know this. I'm sure he will be delighted to see you whenever you like to call.—Yours sincerely,

"Molly Tyson.

"P.S.—Thanks awfully for the lovely flowers. You can smell them all over the flat!"

"Come here, you fool," he said gently.

But Mrs. Nevill Tyson was stamping her envelope with great deliberation and care. She handed it to him at arm's length and darted away. He heard her turning the key in her bedroom door with a determined click.

He read her letter over again twice. The ridiculous little phrases convinced him of the groundlessness of his suspicion. Punctuation would have argued premeditation, and premeditation guilt. "Nevill has come home—why of course you saw him." She had actually forgotten that Stanistreet had been there on the evening of his arrival.

He laughed so loud that Mrs. Nevill Tyson heard him in her bedroom.

An hour later he heard her softly unlocking her door. He smiled. She might be as innocent as she pleased, but she had made him make a cursed fool of himself, and he meant that she should suffer for that.

He threw Stanistreet's flowers out of the window, put Molly's note up in its envelope and sent it to the post. Then he sat down to think.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson's room was opposite the one she had just left. She stood for a moment before her looking-glass, studying her own reflection. She took off her pearl necklace and spanned her white throat with her tiny hands. And as she looked she was glad. When all was said and done she looked beautiful—beautiful after her small fashion. She turned this way and that to make perfectly sure of the fact. She had realized long ago how much her hold on Nevill's affections depended on it. His love had waxed and waned with her beauty. Well—She opened her door before getting into bed, and for the next hour she lay listening and wondering. She saw the line of light at the top of the drawing-room door disappear as the big lamp went out. It was followed by a fainter streak. Nevill must have lit the little lamp on the table by the window. (Oh, dear! He was going to sit up, then.) She heard him go into the dining-room beyond and stumble against things; then came the spurt of a match, followed by the clinking of glasses. (He was only going to have a smoke and a drink.) She waited a little while longer, then she called to him. There was no answer; he must be dozing on the couch in the dining-room. A light wind lifted the carpet at the door, and she wondered drowsily whether Nevill had left the drawing-room window open.

He had done all that she supposed, and more. First of all, he drank a little more than was good for him; this happened occasionally now. Then he sat down and wrote what he thought was a very terse and biting letter to Stanistreet, in which he said: "You needn't call. You will not find either of us at home at Ridgmount Gardens from May to August, nor at Thorneytoft from August to May. And if you should happen to meet my wife anywhere in public, you will oblige me greatly by cutting her."

This letter he left on the table outside for postage in the morning. Then he went back to the dining-room and drank a great deal more than was good for him. Of course he left the drawing-room window open and the lamp burning, and by midnight he was sleeping heavily in the adjoining room. And the wind got up in the night: it played with the muslin curtains, flinging them out like streamers into the room; played with the flimsy parasol lamp-shade until it tilted, and the little lamp was thrown on to the floor.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson woke with the light crash. She sat up for a moment, then got out of bed, crossed the passage, and opened the drawing-room door. A warm wind puffed in her face; the air was full of black flakes flying through a red rain; a stream of fire ran along the floor, crests of flames leapt and quivered over the steady blue under-current; and over there, in the corner, an absurd little arm-chair had caught fire all by itself; the flames had peeled off its satin covering like a skin, and were slowly consuming the horse-hair stuffing; the pitiable object sent out great puffs and clouds of smoke that writhed in agonized spirals. The tiny room had become a battlefield of dissolute forces. But as yet none of the solid furniture was touched; it was a superficial conflagration.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson saw nothing but the stream of fire that ran between her and the room where Nevill lay. She picked up her skirt and waded through it barefoot. A spark flung from the burning draperies settled on the wide flapping frills of her night-gown. Nevill was fast asleep with the rug over him and his mouth open. She shook him with one hand, and with the other she tried to beat down her flaming capes. Was he never going to wake?

She was afraid to move; but by dropping forward on her knees she could just reach some soda-water on the table; she dashed it over his face. The fire had hurt the soles of her feet; now it had caught her breast, her throat, her hair; it rose flaming round her head, and she cried aloud in her terror. Still clutching Nevill's sleeve, she staggered and fell across him, and he woke.

He woke dazed; but he had sense enough to roll her in the rug and crush the flames out.



CHAPTER XVI

THE NEW LIFE

"There is now every hope," so wrote that cheerful lady, Mrs. Wilcox, "of dear Molly's complete recovery."

This, translated from the language of optimism, meant that dear Molly's beauty was dead, but that Molly would live.

To live, indeed, was not what she had wanted. Mrs. Nevill Tyson had made up her mind to die; and in the certain hope of death she had borne the dressing of her burns without a murmur. Lying there, swathed in her bandages, life came back slowly and unwillingly to her aching nerves and thirsting veins; and the sense of life woke with a sting, as if her brain were bound tight, tight, and the pulse of thought beat thickly under the intolerable ligatures. Then, when they told her she would live, she screamed and made as though she would tear the bandages from her head and throat.

"Take them off," she cried, "I won't have them. You said I was going to die, and I want to die—I want to die—I tell you. Don't let Nevill come near me. He'll want to come and look at me when I'm dead. Don't let him come!"

But Nevill was there. The first thing he did, when he heard the doctor's verdict, was to go straight into his wife's room and cry. He bent over her bed, sobbing hysterically—"Molly—Molly—my little wife!"

That made her suddenly quiet.

She turned towards him, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than ever in the section of her face that was not covered with bandages. She held out her hand, the right hand that had clung with such a grip to his coat-sleeve and was thus left unhurt. He stroked it and kissed it many times over, he said what a pretty hand it was; and then, when he remembered the things he had said and thought of her, he cried again.

"This excitement is very bad for her. Shall I tell him to go away?" whispered Mrs. Wilcox to the nurse. The nurse shook her head.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson had heard; she gave a queer little fluttering laugh that was meant to be derisive and ended like a sob. "If you went away, both of you," said she, "I might feel better."

They went away and left them.

From that moment Mrs. Nevill Tyson was no longer bent upon dying. She had conceived an immense hope—that old, old hope of the New Life. They would begin all over again and from the very beginning. Life is an endless beginning. Had not Nevill's tears assured her that he loved her still, in spite of what had been done to her? It takes so much to make a man cry.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson may have understood men; it is not so clear that she knew all about sentimentalists. It seemed as though her beauty being dead, all that was blind and selfish in her passion for Nevill had died with it. She was glad to be delivered from the torment of the senses, to feel that the immortal human soul of her love was free. And as she was very young and had the heart of a little child, she firmly believed that her husband's emotions had undergone the same purifying regenerating process.

As for Tyson, he had not a doubt on the subject. One morning he was sitting in her room, watching her with a feverish, intermittent devotion. He noticed her right arm as it hung along the counterpane, and the droop of the beautiful right hand—the one beautiful thing about her now. He remembered how he used to tease her about that little white spot on her wrist, and how she used to laugh and shake down her ruffles or her bangles to hide it. Even now she had the old trick; she had drawn the sleeve of her night-gown over it, as she felt his gaze resting on it. Strange—though she was still sensitive about that tiny blemish, she was apparently indifferent to the change in her face. He wondered if she realized how irreparably her beauty was destroyed, and as he wondered he looked away, lest his eyes should wake that consciousness in her. He had no idea how long they had been alone together. Time was not measured by words, for neither had spoken much. He had taken Henley's "Verses" at haphazard from the bookshelf and was turning over the pages, dipping here and there, in the fastidious fashion of a man in no mind for any ideas but his own. Presently he broke out in a voice that throbbed thickly with emotion—

"Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul—"

He had found the music that matched his mood. He chanted—

"It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul."

Some clumsy movement of his foot shook the bed and jarred her. She drew in her breath sharply.

"God forgive me!" he cried, "did I hurt you, darling?"

"I don't mind. It's worth it," said she.

At her look his sins rose up to his remembrance. He flung himself on his knees beside the bed, shaken with his passion of remorse. He muttered a wild, inarticulate confession.

"Don't, Nevill, don't," she whispered; "it made no difference. It's all over and done with now."

He looked at her body and thought of the beauty of her soul. He broke into vows and promises.

"Yes; it's all over. I swear I'll never look at another woman as long as I live."

The pressure of her weak arms round his neck thrilled him with an exquisite tenderness, a voluptuous pity. Surely, surely in his heart of hearts he had never loved any woman as he loved her. She comforted him; she whispered things too sacred for perfect utterance. It struck him from time to time that she had no clear notion of the nature of the wrongs she forgave, just as by some miracle her mind had dwelt apart from everything that was base in her own marriage. Her ideas of evil were vague and bodiless. She may have conceived Nevill to have been the victim of some malign intellectual influence, the thrall, perhaps, of some Miss Batchelor sans merci. There may have been mysteries, gulfs before which she shuddered, dim regions which she could only just divine. He did not know that with women like his wife there is all infinity between what they realize and what they fear. Yet within its range of vision her love was terribly clearsighted. And now, one by one, Tyson's sins fell from him in the purifying fire of his wife's fancy.

He staggered to his feet and looked round him with glazed eyes; he was drunk with his own emotions. She followed his gaze; it was caught by some object above her bed.

"Hallo," said he, "what's my old sword doing there? My beauty!"

"I brought it in," said she.

"What did you do that for, eh?"

"I don't know. I think I thought that some day you'd walk off with it somewhere, and that if you did that, you'd never come back again. So you see I liked to know it was hanging safe up there when I was asleep. You don't mind, do you?"

He muttered something about "rust" and "an outside wall."

"It's all right. I've cleaned it myself. I used to take it down and look at it every day."

"When did you do that, Molly?"

"All the time you were away."

"Good God!" He took the sword down from the nail where it hung by a red cord.

"You won't find a speck of dust on it anywhere," said she.

He had drawn the sword from its scabbard and laid it across his knee. He felt its edge; he drew his finger down the long groove that ran along the center of the blade; his gaze rested almost passionately on the floral arabesque that fringed that bed of the river of blood. Not a spot of rust from hilt to point; the scabbard, too, was bright and clean.

He held up the sword, still looking at it with the eyes of a lover; a quick turn of his wrist, and it leapt and flashed in the sun.

He turned to his wife, smiling. "Isn't she a beauty?" said he.

Fear gripped her heart. She may have had shadowy notions of Tyson's conjugal infidelities, but she had a very clear idea of the power of her rival, the sword. She did not know that he was merely moved by the spirit of Henley's verse.

"Take it away," she said; "I don't like the look of it."

"Well, it's not a nice thing to have hanging over your head."

He took it away and hung it in its old place in the dining-room.

And Mrs. Nevill Tyson was content. Though there was not a sign or a hope that her beauty would be restored to her, she was content. What was more, she was positively glad that it was gone, regarding the loss of it as the ransom for Tyson's soul.

She was growing stronger every day now, and they were full of plans for their future. No attempt had been made to repair the damage done by the fire. It was settled—so far as anything was settled—that they were to let the flat, let Thorneytoft too, and go away from London, from England perhaps, to some Elysium to be agreed on by them both. It was to be a second honeymoon—or was it a third? There was nothing like beginning all over again from the very beginning. They talked of the Riviera.

In three weeks' time from the date of the fire she was well enough to be moved into the dining-room. Nevill carried her. They had to go through the empty drawing-room, and as they passed they stopped and looked round the desolate place. It struck them both that this was the scene of that terrible last act of the drama of the old life.

"When we've once gone we will never, never come back again," she said.

"No. We burnt our ships in that blaze, Moll. Do you mind very much?"

"No. I shall never want to see it again. In our new house we won't have anything to remind us of this."

"No, we'll have everything brand new, won't we?"

"Yes, brand new." She looked round her and smiled. "But it seems a little sad, don't you think? It was a pretty room, and there were all my things."

"Never mind. Plenty more where they came from."

They paused in the doorway.

"Ha! This is the way," said he, "that a bride used to be brought into her husband's house. They lifted her up so!" As he spoke he raised her high in his strong arms. He was smiling, glorying in his strength.

And that was the way Mrs. Nevill Tyson was carried over the threshold of the New Life. Or was it not rather her spirit that had lifted his? He too, unworthy, soiled and shamed with sin, had been suffered to go with her a little way. For one luminous perfect moment he stood face to face with her in the mystic marriage-chamber of the soul; he heard—if it were only for a moment—the unspeakable epithalamium; he saw incomprehensible things.

It had needed some violent appeal to the senses, the spectacle or idea of physical agony, to rouse him to that first passion of pity and tenderness. Something like this he had felt once before, in the night watch at Thorneytoft, when the wife he had wronged lay in the clutches of life and death. But now, for the first time in his married life, he loved her. Surely this was the way of peace.

Surely, surely. She lay down in her gladness and prayed the prayer of her wedding-night: that God would make her a good wife. She did not pray that Nevill might be made a good husband; of his sins she had never spoken, not even to her God.

As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, in the joy of his heart he thanked whatever gods there might happen to be for his unconquerable soul.



CHAPTER XVII

THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL

Three weeks and they were still in London. If they could only have risen up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful flat forever! But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal was hardly to be thought of yet. The doctor was consulted.

"I must examine the heart," said the man of science.

He examined the heart.

"Better wait another week," he said, shortly. Brevity is the soul of medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.

So they waited a week, three weeks in fact. The delay gave Tyson time to study the New Life in all its bearings. At first it seemed to him that he too had attained. He was ready to fall in with all his wife's innocent schemes. For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with excitement that was pleasure in itself. He was perfectly prepared for an open rupture with the past, or, indeed, for any sudden and violent course of action, the more violent the better. He dreamed of cataclysms and upheavals, of trunks packed hastily in the night, of flight by express trains from London, the place of all disaster. His soul would have been appeased by a telegram.

Instead of telegrams he received doctors' bulletins, contradictory, ambiguous, elusive. They began to get on his nerves.

Still, there could be no possible doubt that he had attained. At any rate he had advanced a considerable distance on the way of peace. It looked like it; he was happy without anything to make him happy, a state which seemed to be a feature of the New Life.

The New Life was not exhausting. He had an idea that he could keep it up indefinitely. But at the end of the first fortnight he realized that he was drifting, not towards peace, but towards a horrible, teeming, stagnant calm. Before long he would be given over to dullness and immitigable ennui.

A perfectly sane man would have faced the facts frankly. He would have pulled himself together, taken himself out of the house, and got something to do. And under any other circumstances, this is what Tyson would have done. Unfortunately, he considered it his duty as a repentant husband to stay at home; and at home he stayed, cultivating his emotions. Ah, those emotions! If Tyson had been simply and passionately vicious there might have been some chance for him. But sentimentalism, subtlest source of moral corruption, worked in him like that hectic disease that flames in the colors of life, flouting its wretched victim with an extravagant hope. The deadly taint was spreading, stirred into frightful activity by the shock of his wife's illness. He stayed indoors, lounging in easy-chairs, and lying about on sofas; he smoked, drank, yawned; he hovered in passages, loomed in doorways; he hung about his wife's bedroom, chattering aimlessly, or sat in silence and deep depression by her side. In vain she implored him to go out, for goodness' sake, and get some fresh air. Once or twice, to satisfy her, he went, and yawned through a miserable evening at some theatre, when, as often as not, he left before the end of the first act. Hereditary conscience rose up and thrust him violently from the house; outside, the spirit of the Baptist minister, of the guileless cultivator of orchids, haled him by the collar and dragged him home. Or he would spend whole afternoons looking into shop windows in a dreamy quest of flowers, toys, trinkets, something that would "suit my wife." Judging from the unconsidered trifles that he brought home, he must have credited the poor little soul with criminally extravagant tastes. The tables and shelves about her couch were heaped with idiotic lumber, on which Mrs. Nevill Tyson looked with thoughtful eyes.

She was perpetually thinking now; she lay there weaving long chains of reasoning from the flowers of her innocent fancy, chains so brittle and insubstantial, they would have offered no support to any creature less light than she. If Tyson was more than usually sulky, that was the serious side of him coming out; if he was silent, well, everybody knows that the deepest feelings are seldom expressed in words; if he was atrociously irritable, it was no wonder, considering the strain he had undergone, poor fellow. She reminded herself how he had cried over her like a child; she rehearsed that other scene of confession and forgiveness—the tender, sacred words, the promises and vows. Already the New Life was passing into the life of memory, while she told herself that it could not pass. It takes so much to make a strong man cry, you know. When doubts came, she always fell back on the argument from tears.

He was reading to her one evening after she had gone tired to bed (reading was so much easier than talking), when Mrs. Nevill Tyson, whose attention wandered dreadfully, interrupted him.

"Nevill—you remember that night when the accident happened? I mean—just before the fire?"

He moaned out an incoherent assent.

"And you remember what you thought?"

His only answer was a nervous movement of his feet.

"Well, I've often wanted to tell you about that. I know you didn't really think there was anything between me and Louis, but—"

"Of course I didn't."

"I know—really. Still it might have made a difference. I would have told you all about it that night, if it hadn't been for that beastly fire. You know mother said I was awfully silly—I laid myself open to all sorts of dreadful things. She said I ought to have left London—that time. I couldn't. I knew when you came back you would come right here—I might have missed you. Besides, it would have been horrible to go back to Thorneytoft, where everybody was talking and thinking things. They would talk, Nevill."

"The fiends! You shouldn't have minded them, darling. They didn't understand you. How could they? The brutes."

"Me? Oh, I wouldn't have minded that."

Tyson was frankly astonished. Apparently she had not a notion that she had been the subject of any scurrilous reports at Drayton Parva or elsewhere. From the first she had resented their social ostracism (when she became aware of it) as an insult to him; and now, evidently she had found the clue to the mysterious scandal in her knowledge of his conduct. Before she could do that, in her own mind she must have accused him gravely. And yet, but for this characteristic little inadvertence, he would never have known it. How much did she know?

She went on a little incoherently; so many ideas cropped up to be gathered instantly, and wreathed into the sequence of her thought. "Mother said people would talk if I didn't take care. She thought Sir Peter—poor old Sir Peter—do you remember his funny red face, and his throat—all turkey's wattles?—because he said I was the prettiest woman in Leicestershire. I don't see much harm in that, you know. Anyhow, he can't very well do it again—now. Perhaps—she thought I oughtn't to have gone about quite so much with Louis."

"Why did you, Molly? It was a mistake."

"I wonder—Well, it was all my fault."

"No; it was Stanistreet's. He knew what he was about."

"It was mine. I liked him."

"What did you see to like in him?" (He really had some curiosity on that point.)

"I liked him because he was your friend—the best friend you ever had. I hated the other men that used to come. And when you were away I felt somehow as if—as if—he was all that was left of you. But that was afterwards. I think I liked him first of all because he liked you."

"How do you know it was me he liked?"

"Oh, it was; I know. Whatever other people thought, he always understood. Do you see? We used to talk about you, every day I think, till just the last—and then, he knew what I was thinking. Then he was sorry when baby died. I can never forget that."

(Inconceivable! Had she never for an instant understood? Ah, well, if he had been so transfigured in her sight, she might well idealize Stanistreet.)

She went on impetuously, with inextricable confusion of persons and events. "Nevill—I wasn't kind to him. They said I didn't care—and I did—I did! It nearly broke my heart. Only I was afraid you'd think I loved him better than you, and so—I didn't take any notice of him. I thought he wouldn't mind—he was so little, you see; and then I thought some day I could tell him. Oh, Nevill—do you think he minded?"

He bowed his head. He had not a word to say. He was trying to realize this thing. To keep his worthless love, she had given up everything, even to the supreme sacrifice of her motherhood.

Her fingers clutched the counterpane, working feverishly. She had had something else to say. But she was afraid to say it, to speak of that unspeakable new thing, her hidden hope of motherhood. He covered her hands with his to keep them still.

"You see it was all right, as it happened."

"Yes—as it happened. But I think it was a little hard on poor old Stanistreet."

"Sometimes I wonder if it was fair. He used to say things; but I didn't take them in at the time. I didn't understand; and somehow now, I feel as if it had never happened. Perhaps it wasn't quite fair—but then I didn't think. I wonder why he's never been to see me."

"Can't say, Molly."

"He must have seen the fire in the papers—I hope he didn't think what you did. I mean—think—"

"What?"

"Think that I cared."

"Don't, Molly, for God's sake! I never thought it. I was in an infernal bad temper, that was all."

"So that hasn't made any difference?"

"Of course it hasn't."

"Nothing can make any difference now then, can it?"

It was too much. He got up and walked up and down the room. Poor Mrs. Nevill Tyson, she had put his idea into words. She had suggested that there was a difference, and suggestion is a fatal thing to an unsteady mind. In that moment of fearful introspection he said to himself that it was all very well for her to say there was no difference. There was a difference. She was not exactly lying on a bed of roses; but in the nature of things her lot was easier than his. There was no comparison between the man's case and the woman's. He had not sunk into that serene apathy which is nine-tenths of a woman's virtue. He was not an invalid—neither was he a saint. It is not necessary to be a saint in order to be a martyr; poor devils have their martyrdom. Why could not women realize these simple facts? Why would they persist in believing the impossible?

His face was very red when he turned round and answered. "I can't talk about it, Molly. God knows what I feel."

This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.

He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the reading. He sat and watched her.

Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman. Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it; as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life. He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead—that was the horrible thing. Beneath that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would be young when he was long past middle age.

He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage that had saved his life—for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable "accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved him all the better for it.

Odd. But some women are made so. Marion Hathaway was that sort—she stuck like a leech.

And now—the frivolous, feather-headed little wife, whom he had held so cheap and wronged so lightly, urging her folly as almost a justification of the wrong, she too—She appalled him with the terrific eternity of her love. Was it possible that this feeling, which he had despised as the blind craving and clinging of the feminine animal, could take a place among the supreme realities, the things more living than flesh and blood, which in his way he still contrived to believe in? The idea made him extremely uncomfortable, and he put it from him. He had drifted into that stagnant backwater of the soul where the scum of thought rises to the surface. Molly was better than most women; but, poor little thing, there was nothing transcendent about her virtues. She loved him after the manner of her kind.

No—no—no. She loved him as no other woman had ever loved him before. She loved him because she believed in him against the evidence of her senses. If she only knew! A diabolical impulse seized him to awaken her then and there and force her to listen to a full confession of his iniquities, without reticence and without apology. Surely no woman's love could stand before that appalling revelation? But no; what other women would do he would not undertake to say; she would only look at him with her innocent eyes, reiterating "It makes no difference."

Would he have cared more if she had cared less? On the whole—no. And what if she had been a woman of a higher, austerer type? That woman would have repelled him, thrown him back upon himself. She had drawn him by her very foolishness. He had been brought back to her, again and again, by the certainty of her unreasoning affection. By its purity also. That had saved him from falling lower than a certain dimly defined level. If there was a spark of good in him he owed it to her. He had never sunk so low as in that intolerable moment when he had doubted her. For the behavior of the brute is low enough in all conscience; but below that is the behavior of the cad. Tyson had his own curious code of morals.

Yes; and in the raw enthusiasm of remorse he had made all manner of vows and promises, and he felt bound in honor to keep them. He had talked of a rupture with the past. A rupture with the past! You might as well talk of breaking with your own shadow. The shadow of your past. Imbecile expression! The past was in his blood and nerves; it was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. It was he. Or rather it was this body of his that seemed to live with a hideous independent life of its own. And yet, even yet, there were moments when he caught a glimpse of his better self struggling as if under the slough of dissolution; the soul that had never seen the sun was writhing to leap into the light. He would have given the whole world to be able to love Molly. There was no death and no corruption like the death of love; and the spirit of his passion had been too feeble to survive its divorce from the flesh.

He could not look away. He rose and lifted the lamp-shade, throwing the pitiless light on the thing that fascinated him. She stirred in her sleep, turning a little from the light. He bent over her pillow and peered into her face. She woke suddenly, as if his gaze had drawn her from sleep; and from the look in her eyes he judged a little of the horror his own must have betrayed.

He shrank back guiltily, replaced the shade, and sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed. She looked at him. His whole frame trembled; his eyes were blurred with tears; the parted lips drooped with weakness, bitterness, and unappeased desire. Did she know that in that moment the hunger and thirst after righteousness raged more fiercely than any earthly appetite? It seemed to him that in her look he read pity and perfect comprehension. He hid his face in his hands.

After that night he began to have a nervous dread of going into her room. He was always afraid that she would "say something." By this time his senses, too, were morbidly acute. The sight and smell of drugs, dressings, and disinfectants afflicted him with an agony of sensation. There was no escaping these things in the little flat, and he could not help associating his wife with them: it seemed as if a crowd of trivial and sordid images was blotting out the delicate moral impressions he had once had. Tyson was paying the penalty of having lived the life of the senses; his brain had become their servant, and he was horrified to find that he could not command its finest faculties at pleasure.

There was no disguising the detestable truth. He could attain no further. From those heights of beautiful emotion where he had disported himself lately there could be no gradual lapse into indifference. It was a furious break-neck descent to the abominable end—repulsion and infinite dislike, tempered at first by a little remnant of pity. Every day her presence was becoming more intolerable to him. But, for the few moments that he perforce spent with her, he was more elaborately attentive than ever. As his tenderness declined his manner became more scrupulously respectful, (She would have given anything to have heard him say "You little fool," as in the careless days of the old life.) He had no illusions left. Not even to himself could he continue that pleasant fiction of the strong man with feelings too deep for utterance. Still, there were certain delicacies: if his love was dead he must do his best to bury it decently—anyhow, anywhere, out of his sight and hers.

He noticed now that, as he carried her from one room to the other, she turned her face from his, as she had turned it from the light.

And she was growing stronger.

One afternoon she heard the doctor talking to Nevill in the passage. He uttered the word "change."

"Shall I send her to Bournemouth?" said Nevill.

"Yes, yes. Good-morning. Or, better still, take her yourself to the Riviera," sang out the doctor.

The door closed behind the eminent man, and Tyson went out immediately afterwards.

He came home late that night, and she did not see him till the afternoon of the following day, when he turned into the dining-room on his way out of the house. He was nervously polite, and apologized for having an appointment. She noticed that he looked tired and ill; but there was another look in his face that robbed it of the pathos of illness, and she saw that too.

"Nevill," said she, "I wish you'd go away for a bit."

"Where do you want me to go to?"

"Oh, anywhere." She considered a moment. "You'll be ill if you stop here. You ought to go ever so far away. A sea-voyage would be the very thing."

"It wouldn't do me much good to go sea-voyaging by myself."

For a second her face brightened. "No—but—I shall be quite strong in another fortnight—and then—I could go out to you wherever you were, and we could come back together, couldn't we?"

There was no answer.

"You might go—to please me."

He laughed shortly. "I might go to please myself. But what's the good of talking about it when you know I can't."

"Well, if you'd rather wait, there's the Riviera"—he colored violently—"would that do for you?"

"Yes; I think it would 'do' for me—just about."

"Well—anywhere then. If I'm well enough to go to the Riviera, I'm—"

"You're not well enough to go to the Riviera."

"What makes you think that?" she asked gravely.

He looked away and muttered something about "Thompson," and "the journey." Again that look of agonized comprehension!

She said nothing. She knew that he had lied. Ah, to what pitiful shifts she had driven him!

He hurried off to his appointment, and she lay on her couch by the window with clenched hands and closed eyelids. She had no sensations to speak of; but thought came to her—confused, overwhelming thought—an agony of ideas. She loved him. Ah, the shame of it! And that hidden hope of hers became a terror. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul was struggling with its immortality. The hot flare of summer was in the streets and in the room; the old life was surging everywhere around her; above the brutal roar and gust of it, blown from airy squares, flung back from throbbing thoroughfares, she caught responsive voices, rhythmic, inarticulate murmurs, ripples of the resonant joy of the world. Down there, in their dim greenery, the very plane-trees were whispering together under the shadow of the great flats.

What were these things to Mrs. Nevill Tyson? She had entered the New Life, as you enter heaven, alone.



CHAPTER XVIII

A MIRACLE

In the afternoon of the following day Tyson was sitting with Molly in the dining-room when he was told that Captain Stanistreet had called and had asked to see him. "Was he—?" Yes, the Captain was in the drawing-room. Tyson was a little surprised at the announcement; for though the shock of the fire had somewhat obscured his recollection of the events that preceded it, Molly had unfortunately recalled them to his memory. But he had clean forgotten some of the details. Consequently he was more than a little surprised when Stanistreet, without any greeting or formality whatsoever, took two letters from his pocket and flung one of them on the window-seat.

"That's your letter," he said. "And here's the answer."

He laid Molly's little note down beside it.

Tyson stared at the letters rather stupidly. That correspondence was one of the details he had forgotten. He also stared at Stanistreet, who looked horribly ill. Then he took up Molly's note and examined it without reading a word. It was crumpled, dirty, almost illegible, as if Louis had thrust it violently into his pocket, and carried it about with him for weeks.

"If you really don't know what it means," said Stanistreet, "I'll tell you. It means that your wife had only one idea in her head. She didn't understand it in the least, but she stuck to it. She thought of it from morning till night, when other women would have been amusing themselves; thought of it ever since you married her and left her. Unfortunately, it kept her from thinking much of anything else. There were many things she might have thought of—she might have thought of me. But she didn't."

"Thanks. I know that as well as you. Did it ever occur to you to think of her?"

"I shouldn't be here if I hadn't thought of her."

"Oh—" Tyson stepped over to the empty fireplace. It was the only thing in the room that was left intact.

His attitude suggested that he was lord of the hearth, and that his position was indestructible.

"Since you considered your testimony to my wife's character so indispensable, may I ask why you waited five weeks to give it?"

Tyson could play with words like a man of letters; he fought with them like the City tailor's son.

"You post your letters rather late. I left town an hour after I got hers."

"It was the least you could do."

"Then I got ill. That also was the least I could do. But I did my best to die too, for decency's sake. Needless to say, I did not succeed."

"I see. You thought of yourself first, and of her afterwards. What I want to know is, would you have thought of me, supposing—only supposing—you could have taken advantage of the situation?"

"No. In that case I would not have thought of you. I would have thought of her."

"In other words, you would have behaved like a scoundrel if you'd got the chance." The twinkle in Tyson's eyes intimated that he was enjoying himself immensely. He had never had the whip-hand of Stanistreet before.

"I would have behaved like a damned scoundrel, if you like. But I wouldn't have left her. Not even to marry and live morally ever after. I can be faithful—to another man's wife."

The twinkle went out like a spark, and Tyson looked at his hearth. It was dangerous to irritate Stanistreet, for there was no end to the things he knew. So he only said, "Do you mind not shouting quite so loud. She's in there—she may hear you."

She had heard him; she was calling to Nevill. He went to her, leaving the door of communication unlatched.

"Is that Louis?" she asked. Tyson muttered something which Stanistreet could not hear, and Molly answered with an intense pleading note that carried far. "But I must see him."

He started forward at the sound of her voice. I believe up to the very last he clung to the doubt that was his hope. But Tyson had heard the movement and he shut the door.

The pleading and muttering went on again on the other side. Heaven only knew what incriminating things the little fool was saying in there! As Stanistreet waited, walking up and down the empty room, he noticed for the first time that it was empty. Only the other day it had been crammed with things that were symbols or monuments of the foolishness of Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Now ceiling and walls were foul with smoke, the gay white paint was branded and blistered, and the floor he walked on was cleared as if for a dance of devils. But it was nothing to Stanistreet. It would have been nothing to him if he had found Mrs. Nevill Tyson's drawing-room utterly consumed. There was no reality for him but his own lust, and anger, and bitterness, and his idea of Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

Presently Tyson came back.

"You can go in," he said, "but keep quiet, for God's sake!"

Stanistreet went in.

Tyson looked back; he saw him stop half-way from the threshold.

It was only for a second, but to Stanistreet it seemed eternity. From all eternity Mrs. Nevill Tyson had been lying there on that couch, against those scarlet cushions, with the blinds up and the sun shining full on her small, scarred face, and on her shrunken, tortured throat.

She held out her hand and said, "I thought it was you. I wanted to see you. Can you find a chair?"

He murmured something absolutely trivial and sat down by her couch, playing with the fringe of the shawl that covered her.

"Did I hear you say you had been ill?" she asked.

He leant forward, bending his head low over the fringe; she could not see his face. "I had inflammation of something or other, and I went partially off my head—got out of bed and walked about in an east wind with a temperature of a hundred and two, decimal point nine."

"Oh, Louis, how wicked of you! You might have died!"

"No such luck."

"For shame! I've been ill too; did you know? Of course you didn't, or else you'd have come to ask how I was, wouldn't you? No, you wouldn't. How could you come when you were ill?"

"I would have come. I didn't know."

"Didn't you? Oh, well—we had a fire here, and I was burnt; that's all. How funny you not knowing, though. It was in all the papers—'Heroic conduct of a lady.' Aren't they silly, those people that write papers. I wasn't heroic a bit."

"I—I never saw it. I was in Paris."

"In Paris? Ah, I love Paris! That's where I went for my honeymoon. Was that where you were ill?"

"Yes."

"Poor Louis! And I was so happy there."

Poor Louis!—she had loved Nevill in him and he was still a part of Nevill. And for the rest, she who understood so much, who was she to judge him?

He looked at her. By this time his sensations had lost the sting of pity and horror. He could look without flinching. The fire had only burnt the lower frame-work of the face, leaving the features untouched; the eyes still glowed under their scorched brows with a look half-tender, half-triumphant.

It was as if they said, "See what it was you loved so much."

The little fool, tortured into wisdom, was that what she meant? It was always hard to fathom her meanings. Could it be that?

Yes, it must be. She had sent for him, not because she wanted to see him, but because she wanted him to see her. She had sent for him to save him. The sight of her face had killed her husband's love; she had supposed that it would do the same kind office for his. Would any other woman have thought of it? It was preposterous, of course; but it would not have been Mrs. Nevill Tyson's idea without some touch of divine absurdity.

But—could any other woman have done it? "See what it was you loved so much." Poor little fool!

And he saw. This was not Mrs. Nevill Tyson, but it was the woman that he had loved. Her being Mrs. Nevill Tyson was an accident; it had nothing to do with her. Her beauty too? It was gone. So was something that had obscured his judgment of her. He had doubted her over and over again, unwillingly at first, willfully at the end; but he knew now that if for one instant she had justified his skepticism he would have ceased to love her. It was the paradox of her purity, dimly discerned under all his doubt, that had tormented and fascinated him; and she held him by it still.

His fingers worked nervously, plaiting and unplaiting the fringe.

"You were burnt. Where was Nevill then?"

"He was here."

"Was he burnt?"

"No; but he might have been. He—he helped to put the fire out. Oh, Louis, it's horribly hard on him!"

Stanistreet clenched his teeth lest he should blaspheme.

"How long have you known Nevill?" she asked, as if she had read his thoughts.

"I don't know. A long time—"

"How many years? Think."

"Fifteen perhaps. We were at Marlborough together in seventy-eight."

"You've known him twenty years then. And you have known me—three?"

"Four, Molly—four next September."

"Well, four then. It isn't a long time. And you see it wasn't enough, to know me in, was it?"

He said nothing; but the fringe dropped from his fingers.

"You were Nevill's best friend too, weren't you?"

"Yes. His best friend, and his worst, God help me!"

"I suppose that means you've quarreled with him? I thought I heard you. But, of course, you didn't know."

"Forgive me, I did not." He had misunderstood her—again!

"Well, you know now. I wasn't worth quarreling about, was I?"

He got up and leaned out of the window, looking into the dull street that roared seventy feet below. Then he sighed; and whether it was a sigh of relief or pain he could not tell.

Neither did Mrs. Nevill Tyson in her great wisdom know.



CHAPTER XIX

CONFESSIONAL

After all, Tyson was the first to make up the quarrel. If a sense of justice was wanting in him it was supplied by a sense of humor, and he was very soon conscious of something ridiculous in his attitude towards Stanistreet. He had law and nature on his side for once, but in the eyes of the humorist, or of impartial justice, there was not very much to choose between them. In fact the advantage was on Stanistreet's side. He, Tyson, had thrown his wife and Stanistreet together from the first, he had exposed her to what, in his view, would have been sharp temptation to nine women out of ten, and she had not wronged him by a single thought. As for Stanistreet, he had not taken, or even attempted to take, the chance he gave him.

His tolerance showed how far he had separated himself from her. A month ago he would not have thought so lightly of the matter.

One evening, not long after their stormy interview, he turned up at Stanistreet's rooms in Chelsea, much as he had turned up at Ridgmount Gardens after his year's absence.

Stanistreet was lying back in a low chair, smoking and thinking. The change in Louis's appearance was still more striking than when they had last met. His clothes hung loosely, on him; his whole figure had a drooping, disjointed look. But the restless light had gone from his eyes; the muscles of his lean face were set in a curious repose, as if the man's nature were appeased, as if his will had somehow resisted the physical collapse. He rose reluctantly as Tyson came in, and stood, manifestly ill at ease, while Tyson, ignoring the interrogation of his air, took possession of a seat which was not offered to him.

"Look here, Stanistreet," said he, "I can't stand this any longer. You and I can't afford to quarrel—about a woman. It's not worth it."

"That is precisely what your wife said. But it's not the way I should put it myself. We did quarrel; and you at least had every provocation."

"Oh, damn the provocation. You don't suppose I came here to make you apologize?"

"I'm not going to apologize. When I say you had provocation enough to justify your putting a bullet into me, I'm merely stating the conventional view."

"Well—yes. If I hit you hard, it was all above the belt."

"There are some vulnerable parts above the belt, though you mightn't think it."

"If it comes to that, Stanny, I must say you got your revenge. Trust an old friend for knowing where to hit. That fist of yours caught me in some very nasty places. Suppose we shake hands."

They shook hands. Stanistreet's hand was cold as ice. He lowered himself into his chair, and lit a pipe in token of reconciliation.

He was magnanimous. It was he who had done the wrong, and it was he who had pardoned. He had always been sorry for that poor devil, Tyson.

Tyson was aware of this feeling, and he generally resented it; but at times like the present it gave him a curious sense of moral support.

The two men sat and smoked in a silence which Tyson, as usual, was the first to break.

"I wouldn't like to swear," said he, "that I don't go abroad again before long. It's my only chance. I'm knocked out of the game here. It's too quick, too hard, and the rules are too cursedly complicated."

"All the same, I'd wait a bit before I flung it up, if I were you."

"Wait? Wait? I've done nothing but wait ever since I came to this detestable country, and my chance never turned up. It never will turn up—here."

"Why not?"

"My own fault, I suppose. I've spent my life in going round and round the earth passionately in a circle. I don't say that perpetual rotation is a natural function of the ordinary human being; but it's my function—I'm good for nothing else. And they expect a man with the world in his brain and the devil in his blood to live decently in this damnable city of fog and filth! And when the world-madness comes on him nobody knows anything about this particular form of mania—the poor wretch must get into a stiff shirt or a strait waistcoat and converse sanely with that innocent woman, his wife. If he doesn't there's a scandal, and the devil to pay—"

Stanistreet looked grave. Whither was all this tending? To a final abandonment of Mrs. Nevill Tyson?

"Of course, the mistake was to try. There might have been a chance for me if I'd had a tithe of your sense. But being what I am, I must needs go and marry. It was the deed of a lunatic."

"Isn't it rather late to go back on that now? What's the good?"

"None, you fool, none. And if there's anything that stamps a man as a cur and a cad, it's this vile habit of slanging the women for his own sins. All the same—I'm not blaming anybody but myself, mind—all the same, I being what I am, there's no doubt I married the wrong sort of woman. I don't mind making that confession to you. I believe you know more about me than anybody, barring my Maker."

Stanistreet looked straight in front of him, terribly detached and stern.

"She was not the wrong sort," he said slowly; "but she may have been the wrong woman for you."

"Men like you and me, Stanistreet, contrive to get hold of the wrong woman; I don't know why."

"You must know that your marriage did nothing for you that was not very well done before."

"Yes. It seems to me that there was a time when I had an immortal soul. That was before the Framley episode. You remember? An edifying experience."

Stanistreet assented. He knew the horrible story, of a mad boy and a bad woman. Perhaps it accounted for the ugliest facts in Tyson's character. He was warped from his youth, the bitter, premature manhood, so soon corrupt.

"That woman was possessed of seven distinct devils, and amongst them they didn't leave much of my immortal soul. And you hear men talk of their 'first love.' Good God!"

Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. He had not met these men. But there could be no doubt that if any of Tyson's loves could be called his first, he would have talked freely enough about it. No subject was too sacred or too vile for his unbridled tongue. He continued to talk.

"After all, at my worst, I never did as much harm to any woman as that Framley fiend did to me. I suppose I had my revenge; but that was Nature's justice, not mine. Right or wrong, I obeyed the law of the cosmos. And for the life of me I don't see why I should bother about it."

If it had not been for Mrs. Nevill Tyson, Stanistreet might have been faintly amused at the idea of this little cockney cosmopolitan persuading himself that his contemptible vices were part of the pageant of the world. As it was he was disgusted. He, too, was a sinner in all conscience; but his sins and his repentance had been alike simple and sincere. He had none of the pendantry of vice.

"If you ask me," he said, "what did for you was that low trick of the old man Tyson when he left you his respectability. A property you really could not be expected to manage. That was your ruin, if you like."

Tyson looked up. His drowning conscience snatched at straws. "It was. I've thought as much myself. But that doesn't square my account. I lied when I said my marriage was a mistake. It was not a mistake. It was a crime committed against the dearest, sweetest woman that ever lived."

"You mean—?" It was hard to tell what Tyson meant when he went off into reminiscences. And for the moment Stanistreet's vision was obscured by a painful memory. Three years ago a woman had come to his rooms and asked for Tyson. She sat in that chair opposite—where Tyson was sitting now. She said unspeakable things that were by no means pleasant for Stanistreet to hear. It had required all his tact to break the news of Tyson's marriage and take her home in a cab. He could see her now, in her pitiful finery, sitting back, trying to hide her white face with gloves that were anything but white.

But Tyson was not thinking of Mrs. Hathaway.

"I mean that baby—Molly—my wife. That was the wickedest, cruellest thing I ever did in the whole course of my abominable life. I might have known how it would end."

Stanistreet looked thoughtfully at his friend. He was used to these outbursts of self-reproach, but they had never moved him greatly until now.

"They told me I ought to have married a clever woman. She wasn't clever, thank God! Yet somehow she had a sort of originality—I don't know what it was." (Tyson had lately fallen into the habit of talking about his wife in the past tense, as if she were dead.) "It was something that no clever woman ever has. I know them! Upon my soul I do believe I loved her." He paused, pondering. "I wonder how it would have answered though if I'd married a thing with more brains?"

"Brains? They're damnation. Are you thinking of Miss Batchelor?"

"N-no. There is a medium. A woman needn't be a fool or a philosopher, nor yet a saint or a devil. It exists somewhere, that golden mean."

"Oh, no doubt."

"It's odd how that notion of the perfect woman sticks to you. How the devil did I get hold of it, I wonder?"

Stanistreet made no answer. It was sufficiently evident that Tyson had got it from his wife. The odd thing was that Tyson was unaware of this. He seemed to have no doubt whatever that his marriage with the perfect woman had been arranged for in heaven, though somehow it had failed to come off on earth. A delusion not uncommon with men of Tyson's stamp.

"I believe," said Tyson, "it's a what d'ye call 'em—category—innate idea—a priori form of the masculine intelligence. I've never seen a man yet who hadn't it somewhere about him. And I've seen most sorts. Terrific bounders, too, some of them."

A year ago Stanistreet would have laughed at this, now he smiled.

Tyson lay back in his chair and fell into a waking dream. He spoke slowly, in the curious muffled voice of the dreamer. "The perfect woman—the eternal, incomprehensible divinity, all-wise, all-good, all-loving, the guardian of the soul—I believe in it, I adore it; but, unfortunately, I have never met it."

"My dear Tyson, I doubt if you and I would know it if we did meet it."

Tyson said nothing. He had closed his eyelids. He was following his dream.

Presently he spoke.

"I say, Stanistreet, do you believe in miracles?"

Stanistreet looked down. Only the other day he had seen a miracle and believed. And he himself was a greater miracle than the one he saw. But the experience was not one that he cared to talk about.

"They don't happen here, where people are so damned clever. But I know that they happen—sometimes—over there—in the East—ex oriente lux."

He rose. "Some day I shall go there or thereabouts, and see."

"And leave your wife here?"

"That's it. Do you think I ought to go?"

"I think it doesn't matter in the very least."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that whether you go or stay you'll kill her. But go, for God's sake! It's the kindest way."



CHAPTER XX

A MAN AND A SPHINX

The idea of leaving England had occurred to Tyson more than once before. In Stanistreet's rooms it took its first vague shape. But Louis's parting words had a sting in them; they were at once a shock to his feelings and a challenge to his will.

Stanistreet had read him thoroughly. In plain language he had entertained serious thoughts of deserting Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Desertion? It was an ugly word. He dismissed his idea. He would dree his weird. He wasn't going to funk the thing—not he! The New Life had been found impossible. No matter. Certum quia impossibile. Nothing like a big thumping paradox when you were about it. Impossibility had the smile and lure of haunting deity, the glamor of the arcana. That night he dedicated himself with more promises and vows.

He was in that state of mind when men look out for miracles to save them. There was no reason why miracles should not happen, here and now. Those fellows must have been in a bad way who had to go out into deserts and places to find God and their unconquerable souls. No doubt queer things have happened in Africa, in Asia, things which the Western mind—Pending the miracle, his Western mind would seek peace in an office. He would try anything, from a Government appointment to a clerkship in the Bank. After all they do not manage things so very differently in the East. If you come to think of it, there is not much to choose between bending yourself double over a desk and sitting with your head in the pit of your stomach, meditating on Brahma. The effect on the liver must be pretty much the same.

He went to bed thinking of Upanishads, with the result that he dreamed of tiger-shooting in the jungle.

Ah, yes, in the cold light of intellect, between doing and not doing a thing there is but the difference of a word. That colorless negative does nothing to alter the salient image of the thing. The fervency of his resolve not to leave England called up as in a calenture the lands that he was not to travel, the freedom that was not to be his.

The idea he had dismissed came back to him. He flew and it followed; he veered and it waylaid him at every turn. An intolerable restlessness took possession of him. He spent his days and a great part of his nights in furious walking about the streets. The idea hounded him on; it stared at him now from newspaper placards, it was whispered and murmured and shrieked into his ears.

There was war in the Soudan.

He saw his idea illuminated, transfigured. It was Glory, a stern wingless Victory, beckoning him across a continent. It no longer pursued him. It had changed its tactics. It was coming to meet him; there was no escaping.

He met it face to face on the Embankment somewhere between Charing Cross and the Temple. A light fog had set in from the river, blurring the outlines of things. He had been walking up and down for about an hour, walking for walking's sake, with his eyes fixed on the pavement. Suddenly he found himself standing still, staring at one of the sphinxes that guard Cleopatra's Needle. The monster rose up out of the fog as out of a sea; its body glistened with an oily sooty moisture, a big drop had gathered in one of its huge eyelids like a tear.

Obelisk and sphinx—what were they doing by this gray river, under this gray sky? They were exiles here, they belonged to the Desert. So did he.

To leave London to its mob of journalists and stock-brokers, and to the demons of the pavement; to go there where there are none of these things, where miracles are sometimes allowed to happen; where God and Nature are more, not less, than man, and where courage, even in these days, counts as a virtue. If, indeed, as sometimes he feared, the brute in him was supreme and indestructible, London was not the place for him.

London! Every stone of its pavement marked the grave of a human soul.

But he would still be good for something out there. There were things there that wanted doing; things that he could do; things that men died in doing.

Reason said: Why not go and do them? And if he died! Well, what can a man do more than die for his country?

And if Molly died?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XXI

OUT OF THE NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

She murmured some assent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was hopeless to talk about it.

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

And now it wanted but two days before his departure.

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

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

"When do you sail?"

"Wednesday—midnight. See me off?"

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

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

They parted. Not a word of his wife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is there no hope?" said one.

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

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

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

The crying sounded very far away.

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

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



CHAPTER XXII

IN THE DESERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XXIII

IN MEMORIAM

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

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

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

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

So they remember.

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

THE END