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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, in the joy of his heart he thanked whatever G.o.ds 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sages, 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 rehea.r.s.ed that other scene of confession and forgiveness--the tender, sacred words, the promises and vows. Already the New Life was pa.s.sing into the life of memory, while she told herself that it could not pa.s.s. 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 a.s.sent.

"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."