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Page 44
Day after day, and night after night; it was evident that at this
rate she and Tyson were bound to see each other some time, somewhere.
Stanistreet wondered whether that thought had ever occurred to her. And
if they met--well, he could not tell whether he desired or feared to see
that meeting. In all probability it would put an end to doubt. Was it
possible that he had begun to love doubt for its own sake?
At last they met, as was to be expected, and Stanistreet was there to
see. He had taken her to the "Criterion" one night, and at the close of
the first act Tyson came into the box opposite theirs. He was alone. The
lights went up in the house, and he looked round before he sat down;
evidently he had recognized his wife, and evidently she knew it.
Stanistreet, watching her with painful interest, saw her body slacken
and her face turn white under its paint and powder.
"Either she cares for the beggar still, or else--she's afraid for her
life of him."
A horrible thought flashed across him. What if all the time she had
simply been making use of him as--as a damned stalking-horse for Tyson?
It might account for the enigmatic smiles, the swift transitions, the
whole maddening mystery of her ways. If he had been nothing to her but
the man who knew more about Tyson than anybody else? She had always had a
way of making him talk about Tyson, while he seemed to himself to be most
engagingly egotistic.
And he had once thought that Mrs. Nevill Tyson adored her husband for his
(Stanistreet's) benefit. There was this summer, and that moment in the
library at Thorneytoft--Mrs. Nevill Tyson was beyond him. And he had been
three years trying to understand her. He was a man of the world, and he
ought to have understood.
Ah--perhaps that was the reason of his failure!
He looked at her again. She had shifted her position, turned her back on
the stage; her eyes were lowered, fixed on the programme in her lap, but
they were motionless; she was not reading. One ungloved arm hung by her
side, and under the white skin he could see the pulses leaping and
throbbing in the arteries, the delicate tissues of her bodice trembled
and shook. Was it possible that in that frivolous little body, under
that corsage of lace and satin and whalebone, there beat one of those
rare and tragic passions, all-consuming, all-absorbing, blind and deaf
to everything but itself? In that case--well, he felt something very
like awe before what he called her miraculous stupidity. But no, it was
impossible; to believe it was to believe in miracles, and he had long ago
lost his faith in the supernatural. Women did not love like that
nowadays.
Tyson left the box before the close of the last act. She kept her place
for ten minutes after the fall of the curtain, while the crowd streamed
out. She stood long after the house was empty, saying nothing, but
waiting--waiting. Once she looked piteously at Stanistreet. Her fingers
trembled so that she could not fasten her cloak, her gloves. He helped
her. A weird little ghost of a smile fluttered to her lips and vanished.
They hurried out at last along empty passages. Tyson was nowhere to be
seen. They drove quickly home.
At the corner of Francis Street the hansom drew up with a jerk and
waited. A crowd blocked the way. She leaned forward with a little cry.
What was it? An accident? No; a fight. The great swinging lamps over
the door of a public-house threw their yellow light on a ring of brutal
faces, men and women, for the most part drunk, trampling, hustling,
shouldering each other in their haste to break through to the center. A
girl reeled from the public-house and stood on the edge of the pavement
bawling a vile song. A man lurched up against the side of the hansom;
a coarse swollen face flaming with drink was pressed to the glass, close
to her own. As she shrank back in horror, turning her head away from the
evil thing, her face sought Stanistreet, the soft fringe of her hair
brushed against his cheek. She had never been so near to him, never, in
the abstraction of her terror, so far away. To-night everything combined
to make his own meaning clear to him, sharpened his fierce indignant
longing to take her away, out of the hell where these things were
possible, to protect her forever from the brutalities of life.
There was a stir; the crowd swayed forward and began to move. They
followed slowly in its wake, hemmed in by the rabble that streamed
towards Ridgmount Gardens, to lose itself in the black slums of
Bloomsbury. On the pavement the reeling girl was swept on with the crowd,
still singing her hideous song. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was leaning back now,
with her eyes closed, not heeding the ugly pageant. But the scene came
back to her in nightmares afterwards.
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