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Page 1
XIV. THE "CRITERION"
XV. CONFLAGRATION
XVI. THE NEW LIFE
XVII. THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL
XVIII. A MIRACLE
XIX. CONFESSIONAL
XX. A MAN AND A SPHINX
XXI. OUT OF THE NIGHT
XXII. IN THE DESERT
XXIII. _IN MEMORIAM_
CHAPTER I
MR. NEVILL TYSON
There were only two or three houses in Drayton Parva where Mr. and Mrs.
Nevill Tyson were received. A thrill of guilty expectation used to go
through the room when they were announced, and people watched them with
a fearful interest, as if they were the actors in some enthralling but
forbidden drama.
Perhaps, if she had been tried by a jury of her peers--but Mrs. Nevill
Tyson had no peers in Drayton Parva. She was tried by an invisible and
incorruptible jury of ideas in Miss Batchelor's head. Opinion sways all
things in Drayton Parva, and Miss Batchelor swayed opinion.
As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, he had dropped into Leicestershire from heaven
knows where, and was understood to be more or less on his trial. Nobody
knew anything about him, except that he was a nephew of old Tyson of
Thorneytoft, and had come in for the property. Nobody cared much for
old Tyson of Thorneytoft; he was not exactly--well, no matter, he was
very respectable and he was dead, which entitled him to a little
consideration. And as Mr. Nevill Tyson was an unmarried man in those
days he naturally attracted some attention on his own account, as well
as for the sake of the very respectable old man, his uncle.
He was first seen at a dinner at the Morleys. Somebody else happened to
be the guest of the evening, and somebody else took Lady Morley in to
dinner. Tyson took Miss Batchelor, and I don't think he quite liked
it. Miss Batchelor was clever--frightfully clever--but she never showed
up well in public; she had a nervous manner, and a way of looking at you
as if you were some curious animal that she would like to pat if she were
perfectly sure you were not dangerous. And when you were about to take
compassion on her shyness, she startled you with a sudden lapse into
self-possession. I can see her now looking at Tyson over the frills on
her shoulder, with her thin crooked little mouth smiling slightly. She
might well look, for Nevill Tyson's appearance was remarkable. He might
have been any age between twenty-five and forty; as a matter of fact he
was thirty-six. England had made him florid and Anglo-Saxon, but the
tropics had bleached his skin and dried his straw-colored hair till it
looked like hay. His figure was short and rather clumsily built, but
it had a certain strength and determination; so had his face. The
determination was not expressly stated by any single feature--the mouth
was not what you would call firm, and the chin retreated ever so slightly
in a heavy curve--but it was somehow implied by the whole. He gave you
the idea of iron battered in all the arsenals of the world. Miss
Batchelor wondered what he would have to say for himself.
He said very little, and looked at nobody, until some casual remark of
his made somebody look at him. Then he began to talk, laconically at
first, and finally with great fluency. It was all about himself, and
everybody listened. He proved a good talker, as a man ought to be who has
knocked about four continents and seen strange men and stranger women.
You could tell that Miss Batchelor was interested, for she had turned
round in her chair now and was looking him straight in the face. It
seemed that he had worked his way out to Bombay and back again. He had
been reporter to half-a-dozen provincial papers. He had been tutor to
Somebody's son at some place not specified. He had tried his hand at
comic journalism in London and at cattle-driving in Texas, and had been
half-way to glory as a captain of irregulars in the Soudanese war. No,
nobody was more surprised than himself when that mystic old man left him
Thorneytoft. He thought he had chucked civilization for good. For good?
But--after his exciting life--wouldn't he find civilization a
little--dull? (Miss Batchelor had a way of pointing her sentences as if
she were speaking in parables.) Not in the country, there was hardly
enough of it there, and he had never tried being a country gentleman
before; he rather wanted to see what it was like. Wouldn't it be a little
hard, if he had never--? He thought not. The first thing he should do
would be to get some decent hunters.
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