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. Wilc.o.x, "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. Wilc.o.x 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.ds 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.

"G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d!" 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 pa.s.sionately 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.