The Tysons (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson)

A SON AND HEIR

It seems a simple thing to believe in the divinity of motherhood, when you have only seen it in the paintings of one or two old masters, or once in a while perhaps in flesh and blood, transfiguring the face of some commonplace vulgar woman whom, but for that, nobody would have called beautiful. But sometimes the divine thing chooses some morsel of humanity like Mrs. Nevill Tyson, struggles with and overpowers it, rending the small body, spoiling the delicate beauty; and where you looked for the illuminating triumphant glory of motherhood, you find, as Tyson found, a woman with a pitiful plain face and apathetic eyes—apathetic but for the dull horror of life that wakes in them every morning.

That Tyson had the sentiment of the thing is pretty certain. When he went up to town (for he went, after all, when the baby was a week old), he brought back with him a picture (a Madonna of Botticelli's, I think) in a beautiful frame, as a present for his wife. Poor little soul! I believe she thought he had gone up on purpose to get it (it was so lovely that he might well have taken a fortnight to find it); and she had it hung up over the chimney-piece in her bedroom, so that she could see it whether she were sitting up or lying down.

Now, whether it was the soothing influence of that belief, or whether Mrs. Nevill Tyson, the mystic of a moment, found help in the gray eyes of the mother of God when Nevill had pointed out their beauty, pointed out, too, the paradox of the divine hands pressing the human breasts for the milk of life, she revived so far as to take, or seem to take, an interest in her son. She indulged in no ecstasies of maternal passion; but as she nursed the little creature, her face began to show a serene half-ruminant, half-spiritual content.

He was very tiny, tinier than any baby she had ever seen, as well he might be considering that he had come into the world full seven weeks before his time; his skin was very red; his eyes were very small, but even they looked too large for his ridiculous face; his fingers were fine, like little claws; and his hands—she could hardly feel their feeble kneading of her breast. He was not at all a pretty baby, but he was very light to hold.

Tyson had not the least objection to Stanistreet or Sir Peter and the rest of them, they were welcome to stare at his wife as much as they pleased; but he was insanely jealous of this minute masculine thing that claimed so much of her attention. He began to have a positive dislike to seeing her with the child. There was a strain of morbid sensibility in his nature, and what was beautiful to him in a Botticelli Madonna, properly painted and framed, was not beautiful—to him—in Mrs. Nevill Tyson. He had the sentiment of the thing, as I said, but the thing itself, the flesh and blood of it, was altogether too much for his fastidious nerves. And yet once or twice he had seen her turn away from him, clutching hastily at the open bodice of her gown; once she had started up and left the room when he came into it; and, curious contradiction that he was, it had hurt him indescribably. He thought he recognized in these demonstrations a prouder instinct than feminine false shame. It was as if she had tried to hide from him some sacred thing—as if she had risen up in her indignation to guard the portals of her soul. To be sure he was in no mood just then for entering sanctuaries; but for all that he did not like to have the door slammed in his face.

Thank heaven, the worst had not happened. The little creature's volatile beauty fluttered back to her from time to time; there was a purified transparent quality in it that had been wanting before. It had still the trick of fluctuating, vanishing, as if it had caught something of her soul's caprice; but while it was there Mrs. Nevill Tyson was a more beautiful woman than she had been before. Some men might have preferred this divine uncertainty to a more monotonous prettiness. Tyson was not one of these.

One afternoon, about a fortnight after his return from town, he found her sitting in the library with "the animal," as he called his son. There had been a sound of singing, but it ceased as he came in. The child's shawl was lying on the floor; he picked it up and pitched it to the other end of the room. Then he came up to her and scanned her face closely.

"What's the matter with you?" he said.

"Nothing. Do I—do I look funny?" She put her hand to her hair, a trick of Mrs. Nevill Tyson's when she was under criticism. She had been such an untidy little girl.

"Oh, damned funny. Look here. You've had about enough of that. You must stop it."

"What! Why?"

"Because it takes up your time, wastes your strength, ruins your figure—it has ruined your complexion—and it—it makes you a public nuisance."

"I can't help it."

She got up and stood by the window with her back to Tyson. She still held the child to her breast, but she was not looking at him; she was looking away through the window, rocking her body slightly backwards and forwards, either to soothe the child or to vent her own impatience.

Tyson's angry voice followed her. "Of course you can help it. Other women can. You must wean the animal."

She turned. "Oh, Nevill, look at him—"

"I don't want to look at him."

"But—he's so ti-i-ny. Whatever will he do?"

"Do? He'll do as other women's children do."

"He won't. He'll die."

"Not he. Catch him dying. He'll only howl more infernally than he's howled before. That's all he'll do. Do him good too—teach him that he can't get everything he wants in this vile world. But whatever he does I'm not going to have you sacrificed to him."

"I'm not sacrificed. I don't mind it."

"Well, then, I mind it. That's enough. I hate the little beast coming into my room at night."

"He needn't come. I can go to him."

"All right. If you want to make an invalid scarecrow of yourself before your time, it's not my business. Only don't come to me for sympathy, that's all."

With one of her passionate movements, she snatched the child from her breast, carried him upstairs screaming and laid him on her bed. When the nurse came she found him writhing and wailing, and his mother on her knees beside the bed, her face hidden in the counterpane.

"Take him away," sobbed Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

"Ma'am?" said the nurse.

"Take him away, I tell you. I won't—I can't nurse him. It—it makes me ill."

And forthwith she went off into a fit of hysterics.

It was at this crisis of the baby's fate that Miss Batchelor, of all people, took it into her head to call. After all, Tyson was Nevill Tyson, Esquire, of Thorneytoft, and his wife had been somewhere very near death's door. People who would have died rather than call for any other reason, called "to inquire." As did Miss Batchelor, saying to herself that nothing should induce her to go in.

Now as she was inquiring in her very softest voice, who should come up to the doorstep but Tyson. He smiled as he greeted her. He was polite; he was charming; for as a matter of fact he had been rather hard-driven of late, and a little kindness touched him, especially when it came from an unexpected quarter.

"This is very good of you, Miss Batchelor," said he. "I hope you'll come in and see my wife."

Miss Batchelor played nervously with her card-case.

"I—I—Would your wi—would Mrs. Tyson care to see me?"

He smiled again. "I think I can answer for that."

And to her own intense surprise, for the first and last time Miss Batchelor crossed the threshold of Thorneytoft.

They found the little woman sitting in her drawing-room with her hands before her, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not smile at Miss Batchelor as she greeted her. Perhaps with her feminine instinct and antipathy, she felt that Miss Batchelor had not come to see her. So she smiled at her husband, and the smile was gall and wormwood to the clever woman; it had the effect, too, of bringing back to her recollection the occasion on which she had last seen Mrs. Nevill Tyson smiling. She wondered whether Mrs. Nevill Tyson also recalled the incident. If she did she must find the situation rather trying.

Apparently Mrs. Nevill Tyson was so happily constituted that to her trying situations were a stimulant and a resource. She prattled to Miss Batchelor about her new side-saddle, and her "friend, Captain Stanistreet"—any subject that came uppermost and dragged another with it to the surface.

Miss Batchelor was very kind and sympathetic; she took an interest in the saddle; she assured Mrs. Nevill Tyson that Drayton Parva had been much concerned on her account; and she asked to see the baby.

The next instant she was sorry she had done so, for Tyson, who had continued to be charming, went out of the room when the baby came in.

The child was laid in Mrs. Nevill Tyson's lap, and she looked at it with a gay indifference. "Isn't he a queer thing?" said she. "He isn't pretty a bit, so you needn't say so. Nevill calls him a boiled shrimp, and a little rat. He is rather like a little rat—a baby rat, when it's all pink and squirmy, you know, and its eyes just opened—they've got such pretty bright eyes. But I'm afraid baby's eyes are more like pig's eyes. Well, they're pretty too. As he's so ugly I expect he's going to be clever, like Nevill. They say he's like me. What do you think? Look at his forehead. Do you think he's going to be clever?"

"It depends," said Miss Batchelor, a little maliciously. (Really, the woman was impossible, and such a hopeless fool!) Miss Batchelor's habitually nervous manner made her innuendoes doubly telling when they came.

"Well—he's very small. Just feel how small he is."

Instinctively Miss Batchelor held out her hands for the child, and in another moment he was lying across her arms, slobbering dreamily.

He was not quiet long. He stretched himself, he writhed, he made himself limp, he made himself stiff, he threw himself backwards recklessly; and still Miss Batchelor held him. And when he cried she held him all the closer. She let him explore the front of her dress with his little wet mouth and fingers. He had made a great many futile experiments of the kind in the last two days. Of those three worlds that were his, the world of light, the world of sleep, and the world of his mother's breast, they had taken away the one that he liked best—the warm living world of which he had been lord and master, that was flesh of his flesh, given to his hands to hold, and obedient to the pressure of his lips. Since then he had lived from feeble hope to hope; and now, when he struck upon that hard and narrow tract of corduroy studded with comfortless buttons, he began again his melancholy wail.

"Poor little beggar," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, "he can't help it. He's being weaned. Don't let him slobber over your nice dress."

Certainly he had not improved the corduroy, but Miss Batchelor did not seem to resent it.

"Can't you nurse him?" she asked.

"No," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

"I don't believe it," said Miss Batchelor to herself. "She isn't that sort. It's the clever, nervous, modern women who can't nurse their children—it all runs to brains. But these little animals! If ever there was a woman born to suckle fools, it's Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She's got the physique, the temperament, everything. And she can give her whole mind to it."

"What a pity," she said aloud, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson laughed.

"I don't want to nurse him; why should I?" said she. She lay back in her attitude of indifference, watching her son, and watched by Miss Batchelor's sharp eyes and heartless brain.

Heartless? Well, I can't say. Not altogether, perhaps. Goodness knows what went on in the heart of that extraordinary woman, condemned by her own cleverness to perpetual maidenhood.

"How very odd," said she to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

To herself she said, "I thought so. It's not that she can't. She won't—selfish little thing. And yet—she isn't the kind that abominates babies, as such. Therefore if she doesn't care for this small thing, that is because it's her husband's child."

To do Miss Batchelor justice, she was appalled by her own logic. Was it the logic of the heart or of the brain? She did not stop to think. Having convinced herself that her argument was a chain of adamant, she caught herself leaning on it for support, with the surprising result that she found it easier to be kind to Mrs. Nevill Tyson (a woman who presumably did not love her husband) when she took her leave.

I am not going to be hard on her. To some women a bitterer thing than not to be loved is not to be allowed to love. And when two women insist on loving the same man, the despised one is naturally skeptical as to the strength and purity and eternity of the other's feelings. "She never loved him!" is the heart's consolation to the lucid brain reiterating "He never loved me!" I did not say that Miss Batchelor loved Tyson.

So the baby was weaned. He did not howl under the process so much as his father expected. He lost his cheerful red hue and grew thin; he was indifferent to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a "bad sign when they took no notice." Gradually, very gradually, his features settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young. Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter. He was Tyson's son and heir.

And that other baby, Mrs. Nevill Tyson, so violently weaned from the joy of motherhood, she too grew pale and thin; she too was indifferent to things around her, and she took very little notice of her son.

By a strange and unfortunate coincidence Captain Stanistreet had not been seen in Drayton for the space of five months; and coupling this fact with Mrs. Nevill Tyson's altered looks, the logical mind of Drayton Parva drew its own conclusions.

SIR PETER'S NEW CLOTHES

Tyson had not married in order to improve his social position; he had married because he was in love as he had never been in love before. He would have married a barmaid, if necessary, for the same reason. He was not long in finding out that he owed his unpopularity in a great measure to his marriage. To the curious observer this consciousness of his mistake was conspicuous in his manner. (It was to be hoped that his wife was not a curious observer.) And Sir Peter made matters no better by going about declaring that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was the loveliest woman in Leicestershire, when everybody knew that his wife had flatly refused to call on her. By this time Tyson was quite aware that his standing in the county had depended all along on the support which the Morleys were pleased to give him. They had taken him up in the beginning, and his position had seemed secure. If at that ripe moment he had chosen to strengthen it by a marriage with Lady Morley's dearest friend, he might have been anything he pleased. Miss Batchelor of Meriden would have proved a still more powerful ally than Sir Peter. She would have been as ambitious for him as he could have been for himself. By joining the estates of Thorneytoft and Meriden, Nevill Tyson, Esquire, would have become one of the largest land-owners in Leicestershire, when in all probability he would have known the joy of representing his county in Parliament. He was born for life on a large scale, a life of excitement and action; and there were times when a political career presented itself to his maturer fancy as the end and crown of existence. All this might have been open to him if he had chosen; if, for instance, this clever man had not cherished a rooted objection to the society of clever women. As it was, his marriage had made him the best-abused man in those parts.

Since Tyson was not to mold his country's destinies in Parliament, he turned his attention to local politics as the next best thing, thus satisfying his appetite for action. He did what he had told Miss Batchelor he should do; he dissipated himself in parochial patriotism. He went to and fro, he presided at meetings, sat on committees, made speeches on platforms. You would hardly have thought that one parish could have contained so much fiery energy. Moreover, he found a field for his journalistic talents in a passionate correspondence in the local papers. Tyson could speak, Tyson could write, where other men maunder and drivel. His tongue was tipped with fire and his pen with vitriol. Looking about him for a worthy antagonist, he singled out Smedley, M.D., a local practitioner given over to two ideals—sanitation and reform. Needless to say, for sanitation and reform Tyson cared not a hang. It was a stand-up fight between the man of facts and the man of letters. Smedley was solid and imperturbable; he stood firm on his facts, and defended himself with figures. Tyson, a master of literary strategy, was alert and ubiquitous. Having driven Smedley into a tangled maze of controversy, Tyson pursued him with genial irony. When Smedley argued, Tyson riddled his arguments with the lightest of light banter; when Smedley hung back, Tyson lured him on with some artful feint; when Smedley thrust, Tyson dodged. Finally, when Smedley, so to speak, drew up all his facts and figures in the form of a hollow square, Tyson charged with magnificent contempt of danger. No doubt Tyson's method was extremely amusing and effective, and his sparkling periods proved the enemy's dullness up to the hilt; unfortunately, the prosy but responsible representations of Smedley had more weight with committees.

Only two people really appreciated that correspondence. They were Mrs. Nevill Tyson and Miss Batchelor. "At this rate," said the lady of Meriden, smiling to herself, "my friend Samson will very soon bring down the house."

Tyson, contemptuous of the gallery, had been playing to Sir Peter and Sir Peter alone, and he flattered himself that this time he had caught the great man's eye. It was in the first excitement of the elections; Tyson had come in from Drayton, and was glancing as usual at the visiting cards on the hall table. On the top of the dusty pile that had accumulated in the days of his wife's illness there was actually a fresh card. Tyson's face lost something of its militant expression when he read the name "Sir Peter Morley," and he smiled up through the banisters at his wife as she came downstairs to greet him.

"Ha, Molly, I see Morley's looked us up again. He couldn't very well be off it much longer."

"He called about the elections."

"Oh—I thought you were out?"

"So I was. I met him in the drive and made him come in."

"H'm. Did he say anything about my letters in the Herald?"

Mrs. Nevill Tyson hesitated. "N-no. Not much."

"What did he say!"

"Oh—I think—he only said it was rather a pity you'd mixed yourself up with it."

"Damn his impertinence!"

He flicked the card with a disdainful fingernail and followed his wife into the drawing-room. She gave him some tea to keep him quiet; he drank it in passionate gulps. Then he felt better, and lay back in his chair biting his mustache meditatively.

"By the way, did Morley say whether he'd support Ringwood! The fellow's a publican, likewise a sinner, but we must rush him in for the District Council."

"Why?" asked Mrs. Nevill Tyson, trying hard to be interested.

"Why? To keep that radical devil out, of course; a cad that spits on his Bible, and would do the same for his Queen's face any day—if he got the chance, I'd like to sound Morley, though." A smile flickered on his lips, as he anticipated the important interview.

"Oh, he did say something about it. I remember now. I think he's going to vote for the Smedley man."

Tyson's smile went out suddenly. He was scowling now. Not that he cared a straw which way the elections went, but he liked to "mix himself up" in them to give himself local color; and now it seemed that he had taken the wrong shade. He had spent the better part of six weeks in badgering and bullying Sir Peter's pet candidate.

"Morley's a miserable time-server," said he savagely. "I suppose the usual excuses for his wife's not calling?"

"Neuralgia," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, with a grin.

"Neuralgia! Why couldn't he give her a stomach-ache for a change?"

Now, when Tyson expressed his opinion of Sir Peter with such delightful frankness, both he and Mrs. Nevill had overlooked the trifling fact that Pinker, the footman, while to all outward appearance absorbed in emptying a coal-scuttle, was listening with all his ears. Pinker was an intelligent fellow, interested in local politics, still more interested in the affairs of his master and mistress. The dust upon those visiting-cards had provided Pinker with much matter for reflection. Now men will say anything in the passion of elections; but when it was reported that Mr. Nevill Tyson had in private pronounced Sir Peter to be a "miserable time-server," and in public (that is to say, in Drayton Town Hall) declared excitedly—"We will have no time-servers—men who will go through any gate you open for them—we Leicestershire people want a man who rides straight across country, and doesn't funk his fences!" And when Sir Peter remarked that "no doubt Mr. Tyson had taken some nasty ones in his time," everybody knew that there was something more behind all this than mere party feeling. Sir Peter was right: that electioneering business was Tyson's third great mistake. It proved, what nobody would have been very much aware of, that Nevill Tyson, Esquire, had next to no standing in the county. As a public man he was worse off than he would have been as a harmless private individual. He could never have been found out if he had only stayed quietly at home and devoted himself to the cultivation of orchids, in the manner of old Tyson, who had managed to hoodwink himself and his neighbors into the belief that he was a country gentleman. As it was, for such a clever fellow Tyson had displayed stupidity that was almost ridiculous. For nobody ever denied that he was a clever fellow, that he could have been anything that he liked; in fact, he had been most things already. Anything he liked—except a country gentleman. The country gentleman, like the poet, is born, not made; and it was a question if Tyson had ever been a gentleman at all. He had all the accidents of the thing, but not its substance, its British stability and reserve. Civilization was rubbing off him at the edges; he seemed to be struggling against some primeval tendency. You expected at any moment to see a reversion to some earlier and uglier type. Across the chastened accents of the journalist there sounded the wild intemperate tongue of the man of the people. Miss Batchelor used to declare that Tyson was a self-made man, because he was constructed on such eccentric principles. His slightest movements showed that he was uncertain of his ground, and ready to fight you for it, if it came to that. And now he still met you with the twinkle in his small blue eyes, but there was a calculating light behind it, as if he were measuring his forces against yours. And you were sorry for him in spite of yourself. With the spirit of the soldier of Fortune, Tyson had the nerves and temper of her spoilt child. He had made an open bid for popularity and failed, and it was positively painful to see him writhing under the consciousness of his failure.

And the cause of it all was Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Yet he was proud of her still; proud even of the notoriety which was a tribute to her beauty. To tell the truth, her notoriety was his protection. Once the elections were over, gossip was too busy with the wife to pay much attention to the husband. He was considered to have extinguished himself for good. Miss Batchelor no longer regretted that he had no profession. To be the husband of the loveliest woman in Leicestershire was profession enough for any man.

By a further social paradox, Mrs. Nevill Tyson owed much of her present notoriety to her former obscurity. Lady Morley, had her temperament permitted, might have been as frisky or as risky as she pleased, without attracting unkind attention, much less censure. But, unless she combined the virtue of an angel with the manners of a district visitor, and contrived to walk circumspectly across the quicksands that separated her from "good society," a daughter of Mrs. Wilcox was condemned already. Mrs. Nevill Tyson had never walked circumspectly in her life. And Fate, that follows on the footsteps of the fool, was waiting, if not to catch Mrs. Nevill Tyson tripping, at any rate to prove that she must trip.

At first Fate merely willed that Sir Peter should take a journey up to town. Sir Peter's serviceable tweed suit, that had lasted him a good five years, was beginning to go at the corners. We know Stanistreet's opinion of Sir Peter's taste in dress; it was only a coarser expression of the views held by his wife. But for her frank and friendly criticism, Sir Peter, holding change in abhorrence, would have worn that tweed suit another five years at the very least.

"It's a capital suit," said he.

"Perfectly disgraceful," said she. "Look at your elbow."

"Ordinary wear and tear."

"Particularly tear." And while she was speaking Sir Peter had rubbed the worn place into a jagged hole. Sir Peter sighed. He was much attached to that tweed suit; it knew his ways, and had adapted itself to all the little eccentricities of his figure. After five years there is a certain intimacy between a man and his suit. However, there was no blinking the fact—the suit was doomed. Sir Peter's man seized the occasion for a general overhauling of his master's wardrobe, with the result that Sir Peter had to go up by an early train the next morning to consult Mr. Vance, his tailor.

Sir Peter was being measured up and down and all round him, while Mr. Vance stood by, note-book in hand, and took minutes of his case.

"A little wider round the waist, Vance, since you made my first coat for me thirty years ago."

Sir Peter was swaying on his toes, and supporting himself by a finger-tip laid on the shoulder of Vance's man.

"Not quite so long ago as that, Sir Peter."

"Must be, must be; you've been here more than thirty years."

Sir Peter prided himself on his memory, and was a stickler for the actual fact.

"I'm afraid not, sir." The voice of Vance was charged with melancholy and delicate regret. "We were only Binks and Co. in those days."

"Nonsense. Why, you measured me yourself, Vance."

"An impossibility, sir."

Mr. Vance leaned against a pillar of cloth, like one requiring support in a very painful situation. It was agony for him to contradict Sir Peter. But truth is great. It prevailed.

"I was in the City then, sir, serving my time at Tyson's."

He dropped his eyes. He had crushed Sir Peter with proof, but he was too polite to be a witness of his discomfiture.

"Tyson's—Tyson's." Sir Peter's tongue uttered the name mechanically. His mind no longer followed Vance; it was busy with the loveliest woman in Leicestershire.

Mr. Vance smiled. "I daresay they know that name pretty well in your county, sir."

"The name," said Sir Peter, blushing a little at his own thoughts, "the name is not uncommon."

"It's the same family, though, sir."

"Really—" Sir Peter was a little startled this time—"you don't mean to say—"

"Yes. It was a small firm, was Tyson's. But they're big people, I fancy, by now. Old Mr. Tyson left 'em and set up by himself in the wholesale business in Birmingham. He made a mint o' money. I understand he bought one of the best properties in your county; is that so, sir?"

If Mr. Vance had not made coats for Sir Peter for thirty years, he had made them for twenty-five or thereabouts, and he was privileged to gossip.

"Yes, yes, Thorneytoft. Very good property. And a very good sort too, old Mr. Tyson."

"A little peculiar, I'm told."

"Well—perhaps. I had not much acquaintance with the old man myself, but he was very generally respected. I know his nephew, Mr. Nevill Tyson—slightly."

Sir Peter would have died rather than ask a direct question, but he was wildly curious as to Mr. Nevill Tyson's antecedents.

An illuminating smile spread over Mr. Vance's face.

"I remember him when he was a youngster. His father chucked the business, and set up as a Baptist minister—a Particular Baptist."

"Indeed."

"An uncommonly clever fellow, Nevill Tyson; sharp as needles. But they couldn't bring him up to the business, nor the ministry."

"Hardly good enough for him, I should imagine."

"Well—no. It wasn't a house with any standing in his time. He'd got ideas in his head, too. Nothing but a 'Varsity education suited his book."

"Ah, that always tells."

"His father was very much against it. He knew the young rascal. And just when he was at the top of the tree, as you may say, sure enough he made off—goodness knows where."

"Lived abroad a great deal, I believe." Sir Peter was anxious to throw a vaguely charitable light on his neighbor's escapades.

"Got into some scrape about a woman, I fancy. Anyhow he left a pile of debts behind him, and the old man ruined himself paying them."

Bristling with curiosity, Sir Peter endeavored to look detached. But at this point Mr. Vance, remembering, perhaps, that Mr. Nevill Tyson was a great man in his customer's county, and chilled a little by Sir Peter's manner, checked the flow of his reminiscences. "He was a wild young scamp—another two inches round the waist, sir—but I daresay he's settled down steady enough by this time."

"No doubt he has," said Sir Peter, a little loftily. He was disgusted with Vance.

But though Vance's conduct was disgusting, after all he had told him what he was dying to know. The antecedents of old Tyson of Thorneytoft had been wrapped in a dull mystery which nobody had ever taken the trouble to penetrate. He had been in business—that much was known; and as he was highly respectable, it was concluded that his business had been highly respectable too. And then he had retired for ten years before he came to Thorneytoft. Those ten years might be considered a season of purification before entering on his solemn career as a country gentleman. Old Tyson had cut himself adrift from his own origins. And as the years went on he wrapped himself closer in his impenetrable garment of respectability; he was only Mr. Tyson, the gentle cultivator of orchids, until, gradually receding from view, he became a presence, a myth, a name. But when the amazing Mr. Nevill Tyson dashed into his uncle's place, he drew all eyes on him by the very unexpectedness of his advent. And now it seemed that Tyson, the cosmopolitan adventurer, the magnificent social bandit who trampled, so to speak, on the orchids of respectability, and rode rough-shod over the sleek traditions of Thorneytoft, was after all nothing better than a little City tailor's son.

Of course it didn't matter in the very least. A man's a man for all that; but when the man, in his brilliant oratorical way, has intimated that you don't ride straight, and that you funk your fences, you may be forgiven if you smile a sly private smile at his expense.

And Sir Peter did more than smile, he laughed.

"So that was the goose that laid the golden eggs?" (Ha, ha! Sir Peter had made a joke.)

He went home merrily at the end of the week in his new clothes with his new idea; and as he sat in the train he kept turning that little bit of gossip over and over, and tasting it. It lasted him all the way from St. Pancras to Drayton Parva. Sir Peter did not greatly care for women's gossip; but he liked his own. And really the provocation had been intense. It was tit for tat, quid pro quo, what was sauce for the goose—the goose again! Ha! ha! ha! It was a good thing for Sir Peter that Vance had given him another two inches round the waist.

Now, to do Sir Peter justice, he had meant to keep that little bit of gossip entirely to himself, for solitary gloating over and nibbling. But when an old gentleman has spent all his life uttering melancholy platitudes, and is suddenly delivered of a joke—of two jokes—it is a little hard to expect him to hide his light under a bushel. He could have buried scandal in his breast forever, but to put an extinguisher on the sparks of his playful fancy—no, these things are beyond a man's control. And as the idea of the goose, with all its subtle humor, sank deeper and deeper into Sir Peter's mind, he was irresistibly tempted to impart it to Lady Morley (in strict confidence). Such a joke as that ought not to be kept to himself to live and die with him; it would hardly be kind to Lady Morley. She would appreciate it.

She did appreciate it. So did Miss Batchelor, to whom she also told the story (in strict confidence). So did everybody whom Miss Batchelor may or may not have confided in. And when the thing became public property, Sir Peter wished he had restrained his sense of humor.

TOWARDS "THE CROSS-ROADS"

It was the beginning of the hunting season, and with the hunting season Louis Stanistreet reappeared on the scene. He stayed at Thorneytoft as usual. Tyson had just bought a new hunter, a remarkable animal. It fell away suddenly in the hind-quarters; it had a neck like a giraffe and legs like a spider; but it could jump, if not very like a horse, very like a kangaroo. This creature struck wonder and terror into the soul of the hunt. At the first meet of the season Stanistreet, the Master, and Sir Peter drew up by one accord to watch the antics of Tyson and his kangaroo.

"By Jove! where does your friend pick up his hunters?" asked the Master.

"If you ask me," said Stanistreet, "I should say he buys them by the yard."

Sir Peter smiled. The Master stroked his mustache and meditated. There was a malignity about Stanistreet's humor conceivable enough—if there was any truth in history. It struck Stanistreet that his feeble jest met with an amount of attention out of all proportion to its merits. Sir Peter was the first to recover himself.

"Your friend may buy his horses by the yard, but he doesn't ride like a tailor. He rides like a man. Look at him—look at him!"

This was generous of Sir Peter, considering what Tyson had said about his riding. But for all his love of gossip Sir Peter was a gentleman, and that goose weighed heavily on his conscience. The reproof he had just administered to Stanistreet relieved him wonderfully.

Stanistreet was at a loss to understand the old fellow's caustic tone. Over billiards that night Tyson enlightened him.

Louis had been in a good temper all day; and his high spirits had infected Mrs. Nevill Tyson, a fact which, you may be sure, was not set down to her credit by those who noticed it.

"I heard your riding praised this morning, Ty," said he, beaming with beneficence. They were alone.

"Ha!" said Tyson, "did you?"

"Rather. Binfield was asking where you picked your hunters up—got his eye on the kangaroo, I fancy. I ventured to suggest, in my agreeable way, that you bought them by the yard."

Tyson looked furious. Louis went on, unconscious of his doom. "Old Morley went for me like a lunatic—said you didn't ride like a tailor, you rode like a man. Queer old buffer, Morley—couldn't think what was the matter with him."

Tyson laid down his cue and held Stanistreet with a leveling gaze.

"Look here, Stanistreet," said he, "I've stood a good deal, but if you think I'm going to stand that, you're a greater fool than I took you for. What the hell do you mean by telling everybody about my private affairs?"

"My dear Tyson, a man who rides to hounds regularly on a kangaroo has no private affairs, he is, ipso facto, a public character." He threw back his head and shouted his laughter. "You've built yourself an everlasting name."

"Oh, no doubt. If Morley knows it everybody knows it. You might just as well confide in the town-crier." He sat down and pressed his hands to his forehead.

"This," he said bitterly, "accounts for everything."

Stanistreet stared at him in hopeless bewilderment. "What is the matter with you?"

"Nothing. I'm not going to kick you out of the house. I only ask you, so long as you are in it, to mind your own business."

"I can't. I haven't any business." No one could be more exasperating than the guileless Louis. Tyson darted another glance at him that was quite fiendish in its ferocity, and flung himself on the sofa. Sprawling there with his hands in his pockets, he remarked with freezing politeness, "I don't say much, Stanistreet, but I think a damned deal."

"My dear Orlando Furioso, surely a harmless jest—"

"So you think it funny, do you, to tell these people that my father was a tailor? It wouldn't be funny if it was false; but as it happens to be true, it's simply stupid."

"I never said your father was a tailor."

"Don't trouble yourself to lie about it. He was a tailor. The minuteness of his business only added to the enormity of his crime. He was born in an attic on a pile of old breeches. He was a damned dissenter—called himself a Particular Baptist. He kept a stinking slopshop in Bishopsgate Street, and a still more stinking schism-shop in Shoreditch."

("Why the devil shouldn't he?" murmured Louis.)

"Salvation free, gratis, for nothing, and five per cent, discount for ready money."

Louis was amused, but profoundly uncomfortable. This particular detail of Tyson's biography was not one of the things he knew; if it had been, he would naturally have avoided the most distant allusion to it. As it happened, in his ignorance he seemed to have been perpetually blundering up against the circumstance. He went on clumsily enough—"If it was, I didn't know it, and if I had known it, it wouldn't have interested me in the least. You interest me; you are, and always will be, unique."

"You're an awful fool, Stanistreet. By your own admission Morley is acquainted with this charming romance."

"What if he is?"

"The inference is obvious. You told him."

"Good God! If I did, do you suppose that Morley or any one else would care? Does anybody care what another fellow's father was? As a matter of fact I neither knew nor cared. But for your own genius for autobiography I should never have heard of it."

"That's odd, considering that you've made capital out of it ever since I knew you. It supplied the point of all your witticisms that weren't failures. I assure you your delicate humor was not lost on me."

"Considering that I've known you for at least twenty years, those jokes must have worn a little—er—threadbare. I'm extremely sorry for these—these breaches of etiquette. I shall do my best to repair them. That's a specimen of the thing you mean, I imagine?" From sheer nervousness Louis did what was generally the best thing to do after any little squabble with Tyson. He laughed.

Unfortunately this time Tyson was in no mood for laughter. The plebeian was uppermost in him. His wrongs rankled in him like a hereditary taint; this absurd quarrel with Stanistreet was a skirmish in the blood-feud of class against class. Tyson was morbidly sensitive on the subject of his birth, but latterly he had almost forgotten it. It had become an insignificant episode in the long roll of his epic past. Now for the first time for years it was recalled to him with a rude shock.

How real it was too! As he thought of it he was back in the stifling little shop. Faugh! How it reeked of shoddy! Back in the whitewashed chapel, hot with the fumes of gas and fervent humanity. He heard the hymn sung to a rollicking tune:—

"I am so glad that my Father in heaven
Tells of His love in the book He has given.

"I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me,
I am so glad that Jesus loves me," etc.

The hateful measure rang in his ears, racking his nerves and brain. He could feel all the agony of his fierce revolting youth. The very torment of it had been a spur to his ambition. He swore (young Tyson was always swearing) that he would raise himself out of all that; he would distinguish himself at any cost. (As a matter of fact the cost was borne by the Baptist minister.) The world (represented then by his tutor and a few undergraduates), the world that he suspected of looking down on him, or more intolerable still, of patronizing him, should be compelled to admire him. And the world, being young and generous, did admire him without any strong compulsion. At Oxford the City tailor's son scribbled, talked, debated furiously; the excited utterance of the man of the people, naked and unashamed, passed for the insolence of the aristocrat of letters. He crowned himself with kudos. How the beggars shouted when he got up to speak! He could hear them now. How they believed in him! Young Tyson was a splendid fellow; he could do anything he chose—knock you off a leading article or lead a forlorn hope. In time he began to be rather proud of his origin; it showed up his pluck, his grit, the stuff he was made of. He owed everything to himself.

And that last year when he let himself go altogether—there again his origin told. He had flung himself into dissipation in the spirit of dissent. His passions were the passions of Demos, violent and revolutionary. Tyson the Baptist minister had despised the world, vituperated the flesh, stamped on it and stifled it under his decent broadcloth. If it had any rights he denied them. Therefore in the person of his son they reasserted their claim; and young Tyson paid it honorably and conscientiously to the full. In a year's time he knew enough of the world and the lust of it to satisfy the corrupt affections of generations of Baptist ministers, with the result that his university career was suddenly, mysteriously cut short. He had made too many experiments with life.

After that his life had been all experiments, most of them failures. But they served to separate him forever from his place and his people, from all the hateful humiliating past. He could still say that he owed everything to himself.

Then his uncle's death gave him the means of realizing his supreme ambition. By that time he had forgotten that he ever had an uncle. His family had effaced itself. Backed by an estate and a good income, there was no reason why its last surviving member should not be a conspicuous social success. Well, it seemed that he was a conspicuous social failure.

He owed that to Stanistreet, curse him! curse him! His brain still reeled, and he roused himself with difficulty from his retrospective dream. When he spoke again it was with the conscious incisiveness of a drunken man trying hard to control his speech.

"Would you mind telling me who you've told this story to? Lady Morley, for one. My wife," he raised his voice in his excitement, "my wife, I suppose, for another?"

Stanistreet had every reason for not wanting to quarrel with Tyson. He liked a country house that he could run down to when he chose; he liked a good mount; he liked a faultless billiard-table; and oddly enough, with all his faults he liked Nevill Tyson. And he had a stronger motive now. Consciously or unconsciously he felt that his friendship for Tyson was a safeguard. A safeguard against—he hardly knew what. But the idea of Mrs. Nevill Tyson was like fire to his dry mood. His brain flared up all in a moment, though his tongue spoke coolly enough.

"I swear I never did anything of the sort. I haven't seen your wife for ages—till to-night. We don't correspond. If we did"—he stopped suddenly—"if I did that sort of thing at all Mrs. Tyson is the very last person—"

"Oblige me by keeping her name out of it."

Tyson's voice carried far, through the door and across the passage, penetrating to Pinker in his pantry.

"I didn't introduce it."

"All right. I'm not asking you to lie again. No doubt everybody knows the facts by this time. I'm going to turn the lights out."

Stanistreet pulled himself together with a shrug. If any other man had hinted to him, in the most graceful and allegorical manner, that he lied, it would have been better for that man if he had not spoken. But he forgave Tyson many things, and for many reasons, one of these, perhaps, being a certain shamefaced consciousness touching Tyson's wife.

"By the way," said he, "are you going to keep this up very much longer? It's getting rather monotonous."

Tyson turned and paused with his hand on the door-knob. He snarled, showing his teeth like an angry cur, irritated beyond endurance.

"If you mean, am I going to take your word for that—frankly, I am not."

He flung the door open and strode out.

Stanistreet followed him.

"I think, Tyson," said he, "if I want to catch that early train to-morrow, I'd better take my things over to 'The Cross-Roads' to-night."

"Just as you like."

So Stanistreet betook himself to "The Cross-Roads."

AN UNNATURAL MOTHER

Next morning a rumor set out from three distinct centers, Thorneytoft, Meriden, and "The Cross-Roads," to the effect that Tyson had quarreled seriously with Stanistreet. His wife, as might be imagined, was the cause. After a hot dispute, in which her name had been rather freely bandied about, it seems that Tyson had picked the Captain up by the scruff of the neck and tumbled him out of the house.

By the evening the scandal was blazing like a fire.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson was undoubtedly a benefactor to her small public. She had roused the intelligence of Drayton Parva as it had never been roused before. Conjecture followed furtively on her footsteps, and inference met her and stared her in the face. No circumstance, not even Sir Peter's innocent admiration, was too trivial to furnish a link in the chain of evidence against her. Not that a breath of slander touched Sir Peter. He, poor old soul, was simply regarded as the victim of diabolical fascinations.

After the discomfiture of Stanistreet, Mrs. Nevill Tyson's movements were watched with redoubled interest. Her appearances were now strictly limited to those large confused occasions which might be considered open events—Drayton races, church, the hunt ball, and so on. Only the casual stranger, languishing in magnificent boredom by Miss Batchelor's side, followed Mrs. Nevill Tyson with a kindly eye.

"Who is that pretty little woman in the pink gown?" he would ask in his innocence.

"Oh, that is Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She is pretty," would be the answer, jerked over Miss Batchelor's shoulder. (That habit was growing on her.)

"And who or what is Mrs. Nevill Tyson?"

Whereupon Miss Batchelor would suddenly recover her self-possession and reply, "Not a person you would care to make an intimate friend of."

And at this the stranger smiled or looked uncomfortable according to his nature.

Public sympathy was all with Tyson. If ever a clever man ruined his life by a foolish marriage, that man was Tyson. Opinions differed as to the precise extent of Mrs. Tyson's indiscretion; but her husband was held to have saved his honor by his spirited ejection of Captain Stanistreet, and he was respected accordingly.

Meanwhile the hero of this charming fiction was unconscious of the fine figure he cut. He was preoccupied with the unheroic fact, the ridiculous cause of a still more ridiculous quarrel. Looking back on it, he was chiefly conscious of having made more or less of a fool of himself.

After all, Tyson knew men. On mature reflection it was simply impossible to regard Stanistreet as a purveyor of puerile gossip, or seriously to believe that such gossip had been the cause of his disaster. That was only the last of a long train of undignified circumstances which had made his position in Drayton Parva insupportable; it lent a little more point to the innuendo on every tongue, the intelligence in every eye. He was sick with disgust, and consumed with the desire to get out of it all, to cut Drayton Parva for good. The accursed place was trying to stare him out of countenance. Everywhere he turned there was a stare: it was on the villagers' faces, behind Miss Batchelor's eye-glass, on the bare fields with their sunken fences, and on that abominable bald-faced house of his.

No doubt this was the secret of the business that took Tyson up to town so many times that winter. He said nothing to his wife that could account for his frequent absence, but she believed that he was looking about for the long-promised flat; and when he remarked casually one morning that he meant to leave Thorneytoft in the spring she was not surprised. Neither was Mrs. Wilcox. The flat had appeared rather often in her conversation of late. Mrs. Wilcox was dimly, fitfully aware of the state of public opinion; but it did not disturb her in the least. She at once assumed the smile and the attitude of Hope; she smiled on her son-in-law's aberrations as she smiled on the ways of the universe at large, and for the same reason, that the one was about as intelligible as the other. She went about paying visits, and in the course of conversation gave people to understand that Mr. Tyson's residence in Drayton had been something of a concession on his part from the first. So large a land-owner had a great many tiresome claims and obligations, as well as a position to keep up in his county; but there could be no doubt that Nevill was quite lost in the place, and that the true sphere of his activity was town. Mrs. Wilcox's taste for vague and ample phrases was extremely convenient at times.

If his wife was the last person to be consulted in Tyson's arrangements, it may be supposed that no great thought was taken for his son and heir. Not that the little creature would have been much affected by any change in his surroundings; he was too profoundly indifferent to the world. It had taken all the delicious tumult of the spring, all the flaming show of summer, to move him to a few pitiful smiles. He had none of the healthy infant's passion and lusty grasp of life; he seemed to touch it as he had touched his mother's breasts, delicately, tentatively, with some foregone fastidious sense of its illusion. What little interest he had ever taken in the thing declined perceptibly with autumn, when he became too deeply engrossed with the revolutions taking place in his sad little body to care much for anything that went on outside it.

Hitherto he had not had to suffer from the neglect of servants. He was so delicate from his birth that his mother had been strongly advised to keep on the trained nurse till he was a year old. But Mrs. Nevill Tyson knew better than that. For some reason she had taken a dislike to her trained nurse; perhaps she was a little bit afraid of the professional severity which had so often held in check her fits of hysterical passion. Aided by Mrs. Wilcox and her own intuitions, after rejecting a dozen candidates on the ground of youth and frivolity, she chose a woman with calm blue eyes and a manner that inspired confidence. Swinny, engaged at an enormous salary, had absolute authority in the nursery. And if it had been possible to entertain a doubt as to this excellent woman's worth, the fact that she had kept the Tyson baby alive so long was sufficient testimonial to her capabilities.

But Swinny was in love—in love with Pinker. And to be in love with Pinker was to live in a perfect delirium of hopes and fears. No sooner was Swinny delivered over to the ministers of love, who dealt with her after their will, than Baby too agonized and languished. His food ceased to nourish him, his body wasted. They bought a cow for his sole use and benefit, and guarded it like a sacred animal but to no purpose. He drank of its milk and grew thinner than ever. Strange furrows began to appear on his tiny face, with shadows and a transparent tinge like the blue of skim-milk. As the pure air of Drayton did so little for him, Mrs. Nevill Tyson wondered how he would bear the change to London.

"Shall I take him, Nevill?" she asked.

"Take him if you like," was the reply. "But you might as well poison the little beast at home while you're about it."

So it was an understood thing that when Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson settled in town, Baby was to be left behind at Thorneytoft for the good of his health. It was his father's proposal, and his mother agreed to it in silence.

Her indifference roused the severest comments in the household. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was an unnatural mother. From the day she weaned him, no one had ever seen her caress the child. She handled him with a touch as light and fleeting as his own; her lips seemed to shrink from contact with his pure soft skin. There could be no doubt of it, Mrs. Nevill Tyson's behavior was that of a guilty woman—guilty in will at any rate, if not in deed.

A shuddering whisper went through the house; it became a murmur, and the murmur became an articulate, unmistakable voice. The servants were sitting in judgment on her. Swinny spoke from the height of a lofty morality; Pinker, being a footman of the world, took a humorous, not to say cynical view, which pained Swinny. Such a view could never have been taken by one whose affections were deeply engaged.

The conclusions arrived at in the servants' hall soon received a remarkable confirmation.

It was on a Monday. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was seen to come down to breakfast in an unusually cheerful frame of mind. Tyson was away; he had been up in town for three weeks, and was expected home that evening. She looked for letters. There were two—one from the master of the house; one also from Stanistreet, placed undermost by the discreet Pinker. The same thoughtful observer of character noticed that his mistress blushed and put her letters aside instead of reading them at once. At ten Swinny came into the breakfast-room, bearing Baby. This was the custom of the house. By courtesy the most unnatural mother may be credited with a wish to see her child once a day.

This morning Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not so much as raise her head. She was sitting by the fire in her usual drooping guilty attitude. Swinny noticed that the hearth was strewn with the fragments of torn letters. She put the baby down on a rug by the window, and left his mother alone with him to see what she would do.

She did nothing. Baby lay on the floor sucking his little claw-like fingers, and stirring feebly in the sun. Mrs. Nevill Tyson continued to gaze abstractedly at nothing. When Swinny came back after a judicious interval, he was still lying there, and she still sitting as before. She had not moved an inch. How did Swinny know that? Why, the tail of Mrs. Tyson's dress was touching the exact spot on the carpet it had touched before. (Swinny had made a note of the pattern.) And the child might have cried himself into fits before she'd have stirred hand or foot to comfort him. Baby found himself caught up in a rapture and strained to his faithful Swinny's breast. Whereupon he cried. He had been happier lying in the sun.

Swinny turned round to the motionless figure by the hearth, and held the child well up in her arms.

"Baby thinks that his mamma would like to see him," said Swinny, in an insinuating manner.

A hard melancholy voice answered, "I don't want to see him. I don't want to see him any more."

All the same Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned and looked after him as he was carried through the doorway. She could just see the downy back of his innocent head, and his ridiculous frock bulging roundly over the nurse's arm. But whether she was thinking of him at that moment God only knows.

The household was informed that its master would not return that evening after all; that no date was fixed for his coming.

Later on Pinker, the guardian of the hearth, finding those fragments of letters tried to put them together again. Tyson's letter it was impossible to restore. It had been torn to atoms in a vicious fury of destruction. But by great good luck Stanistreet's (a mere note) had been more tenderly dealt with. It was torn in four neat pieces; the text, though corrupt, was fairly legible, and left little to the ingenuity of the scholiast. The Captain was staying in the neighborhood. He proposed to call on Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Would she be at home on Wednesday afternoon? Now, to Pinker's certain knowledge, Mrs. Nevill Tyson had taken the letters to the post herself that morning. That meant secrecy, and secrecy meant mischief.

How was she going to get through the next two days? This was provided for. Baby was a bad sleeper. That night he cried as he had never cried before. Not violently; he was too weak for that, but with a sound like the tongue-tied whimper of some tiny animal. Swinny had slept through worse noise many a night. Now he cried from midnight to cock-crow; and on Tuesday morning Swinny was crying too. He had had one of his "little attacks," after which he began to show signs of rapid wasting.

He had got something which Mrs. Nevill Tyson had never heard of—"marasmus," the doctor called it. She hoped it was nothing very bad.

Then the truth came out piecemeal, through Swinny's confession and the witness of her fellow-servants. The wretched woman's movements had been wholly determined by the movements of Pinker; and she had been in the habit of leaving the child in the servants' hall, where the cook, being an affectionate motherly woman, made much of him, and fed him with strange food. He had had an "attack" the last time she did this, and Swinny, who valued her place for more reasons than one, had been afraid to say anything about it. Preoccupied with her great passion, she had been insensible to the signs of sickness that showed themselves from day to day. In other words, there had been shameful, pitiful neglect.

Terrified and repentant, Swinny confessed, and became faithful again. She sat up all night with the child wrapped in blankets in her lap. She left nothing for his mother to do but to sit and look at him, or go softly to and fro, warming blankets. (It was odd, but Mrs. Nevill Tyson never questioned the woman's right to exclusive possession of the child.) She had written to Nevill by the first post to tell him of his son's illness. That gave him time to answer the same night.

Wednesday came. There was no answer to her letter; and the baby was worse. The doctor doubted if he would pull through.

Mrs. Wilcox was asked to break the news to her daughter. She literally broke it. That is to say, she presented it in such disjointed fragments that it would have puzzled a wiser head than Mrs. Nevill Tyson's to make out the truth. Mrs. Wilcox had been much distressed by Molly's strange indifference to her maternal claims; but when you came to think of it, it was a very good thing that she had not cared more for the child, if she was not to keep him. All the same, Mrs. Wilcox knew that she had an extremely disagreeable task to perform.

They were in the porch at Thorneytoft, the bare white porch that stared out over the fields, and down the great granite road to London. As Mrs. Nevill Tyson listened she leaned against the wall, with her hands clasped in front or her and her head thrown back to stop her tears from falling. Her throat shook. She was so young—only a child herself! A broad shaft of sunshine covered her small figure; her red dress glowed in the living light. Looking at her, a pathetic idea came to Mrs. Wilcox. "You never had a frock that became you more," she murmured between two sighs. Mrs. Nevill Tyson heard neither murmur nor sighs. And yet her senses did their work. For years afterwards she remembered that some one was standing there in the bright sunshine, dressed in a red gown, some one who answered when she was spoken to; but that she—she—stood apart in her misery and was dumb.

"I don't understand," she said at last. "Why can't you say what you mean? Is there danger?"

Mrs. Wilcox looked uncomfortable. "Yes, there is some danger. But while there is life there is—hope."

"If there is danger—" she paused, looking away toward the long highroad, "if there is danger, I shall send for Nevill. He will come."

She telegraphed: "Baby dangerously ill. Come at once."

She waited feverishly for an answer. There was none. To the horror of the household, she gave orders that when Captain Stanistreet called she would see him. As she could not tear herself from the baby, there was nothing for it but to bring Stanistreet to her.

To his intense astonishment Louis was led up into a wide bare room on the third story: He was in that mood when we are struck with the unconscious symbolism of things. By the high fire-guard, the walls covered with cheerful oleographs, the toys piled in the corner, he knew that this was the abode of innocence, a child's nursery. The place was flooded with sunshine. A woman sat by the fire with a small yellowish bundle in her lap. Opposite her sat Mrs. Nevill Tyson, with her eyes fixed on the bundle. She looked up in Stanistreet's face as he came in, but held out no hand.

"Louis," she whispered hoarsely when he was near, "where's Nevill?"

"In London."

"Have you seen him?"

"Yes."

"Is he coming?"

"I don't know. I didn't speak to him. I—I was in a hurry."

She had turned her head. Her eyes never wandered from that small yellowish bundle. Up to the last she had let it lie on the nurse's knee. She had not dared to take it; perhaps she felt she was unworthy. He followed her gaze.

"He's very ill," said she. "Look at him."

The nurse moved a fold of blanket from the child's face, and Stanistreet gazed at Tyson's son. He tried to speak.

"Sh—sh—" whispered Mrs. Nevill Tyson. "He's sleeping."

"Dying, sir," muttered the nurse. The woman drew in her knees, tightening her hold on the child. Her face was stained with tears. (She had loved the baby before she loved Pinker. Remorse moved her and righteous indignation.) Mrs. Nevill Tyson's nostrils twitched; deep black rings were round her eyes. Passion and hunger were in them, but there were no tears.

And as Stanistreet looked from one woman to the other, he understood. He picked up the bundle and removed it to its mother's knee. All her soul passed into the look wherewith she thanked him. Swinny, tear-stained but inexorable, stood aloof, like rigid Justice, weighing her mistress in the balance.

"He's dying, Molly," he said gently.

She shook her head. "No; he's not dying. God isn't cruel. He won't let him die."

She turned the child's face to her breast, hoping perhaps that his hands would move in the old delicious way.

He did not stir, and she laid him on his back again and looked at him. His lips and the hollows under his eyes were blue. The collapse had come. Louis knelt down and put his hand over the tiny heart.

A spasm passed over the baby's face, simulating a smile. Then Mrs. Nevill Tyson fell to smiling too.