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Page 30
"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.
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