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Page 38
She had not long to wait. By the end of the season she was alone in the
flat. _He_ had left her. She had no clue to his whereabouts; but, other
people believed him to be living in another flat--not alone.
Drayton Parva was alive again with the scandal. Miss Batchelor, as became
the intelligence of Drayton Parva, alone kept calm. She went about saying
that she was not at all surprised to hear it. Miss Batchelor never was
surprised at anything. She refused to take a part, to commit herself
to a definite opinion. Human nature is a mixed matter, and in these
cases there are generally faults on both sides. Mrs. Nevill Tyson had
been--certainly--very--indiscreet. It was indiscreet of her to go on
living in that flat all by herself. Did Miss Batchelor think there was
anything in that report about Captain Stanistreet? Well, if there wasn't
something in it you would have thought she would have come back to
Thorneytoft; her staying in town looked bad under the circumstances.
Poor Mrs. Nevill Tyson, every circumstance made a link in a chain of
evidence whose ends were nowhere.
And, indeed, she was not left very long to herself.
But though Stanistreet was always hanging about Ridgmount Gardens, he was
no nearer solving the problem that had perplexed him. And yet his views
of women had undergone a change; he was not the same man who had
discussed Molly Wilcox in the billiard-room at Thorneytoft three years
ago. One thing he noticed which was new. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was not
literary; but whenever he called now he always found her sitting with
some book in her hand, which she instantly hid behind the cushions of her
chair. Stanistreet unearthed three of these volumes one day. They were
"Barrack-Room Ballads," "With Gordon in the Soudan," "India: What it can
Teach Us"--a work, if you please, on Vedic philosophy, annotated in
pencil by Tyson. Now Stanistreet had brought "Barrack-Room Ballads"
into the house; Stanistreet had been with Gordon, in the Soudan;
Stanistreet--no, Stanistreet had not been in India; but he might have
been. He was immensely amused at the idea of Mrs. Nevill Tyson
cultivating her mind. Poor little soul, how bored she must have been!
There could be no possible doubt about the boredom. Mrs. Nevill Tyson
turned from reading to talking with obvious relief. Their conversation
had taken a wider range lately; it was more intimate, and at the same
time less embarrassing. He wondered how often she thought of that scene
in the library at Thorneytoft; she had behaved ever since as if it had
never happened. For one thing Stanistreet was thankful--she had left off
discussing Nevill with him. If she had ever been in ignorance, she now
knew all that it concerned her to know. Not that she avoided the subject;
on the contrary, it seemed to have floated into the vague region of
general interest, where any chance current of thought might drift them to
it. Stanistreet dreaded it; but she was continually brushing up against
it, with a feathery lightness which made him marvel at the volatile
character of her mind. Was it the clumsiness of a butterfly or the
dexterity of a woman? Once or twice he thought he detected a certain
reluctant shyness in approaching the subject directly. It was as if she
regarded her affection for her husband as a youthful folly, and her
marriage as a discreditable episode of which she was now ashamed.
On the other hand, she was always ready to talk about Stanistreet and
his doings. She would listen for hours to his mess-room stories, his
descriptions of the people and the places he had seen, the engagements
he had taken part in. For a whole evening one Sunday they had talked
about nothing but fortification. Now it was impossible that Mrs. Nevill
Tyson could be interested in fortification. As for Vedic philosophy, she
cared for Brahma about as much as Stanistreet did for Brahms.
He was walking with her in Hyde Park; they had turned off into the
path by the flower-beds on the Park Lane side. It was April, between
six and seven in the evening, and, except for a few stragglers, they
had the walk to themselves. Louis had been giving her the history of
his first campaign in the Soudan, and she was listening with a dreamy,
half-suppressed interest, which rose gradually to excitement. He sat down
and drew on the gravel with the point of his walking-stick a rude map of
the country, showing the course of the Nile and the line of march, with
pebbles for stations, and bare patches for battlefields. He then began to
trace out an extremely complicated plan of the campaign. She followed the
movements of the walking-stick with an intelligence which he would
hardly have credited her with. And, indeed, it was no inconsiderable
feat, seeing that for want of a finer instrument Louis's plan was
hopelessly mixed up with his line of march and other matters.
"Was Nevill there?" she asked, casually, at the close of a spirited
account of his last engagement.
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