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Page 5
"And how about Mrs. Hathaway?"
"Damn Mrs. Hathaway," said Tyson.
"Poor lady, isn't she sufficiently damned already?"
The twinkle came back into Tyson's eyes, but there was gloom in the rest
of his face. The twinkle was lost upon Stanistreet. He knew too much; and
the awkward thing was that Tyson never could tell exactly how much he
knew. So he wisely dropped the subject.
Stanistreet certainly knew a great deal; but he was the last man in the
world to make a pedantic display of his knowledge; and Mr. Wilcox's
prejudices remained the only obstacle to Tyson's marriage. It was one
iron will against another, and the battle was long. Mr. Wilcox had the
advantage of position. He simply retreated into his library as into a
fortified camp, intrenching himself behind a barricade of books, and
refusing to skirmish with the enemy in the open. And to every assault
made by his family he replied with a violent fit of coughing. A
well-authenticated lung-disease is a formidable weapon in domestic
warfare.
At last he yielded. Not to time, nor yet to Tyson, nor yet to his wife's
logic, but to the importunities of his lung-disease. Other causes may
have contributed; he was a man of obstinate affections, and he had loved
his daughter.
It was considered right that the faults of the dead (his unreasonable
obstinacy, for instance) should be forgiven and forgotten. Death seemed
to have made Mrs. Wilcox suddenly familiar with her incomprehensible
husband. She was convinced that whatever he had thought of it on earth,
in heaven, purged from all mortal weakness, Mr. Wilcox was taking a very
different view of Molly's engagement.
He died in March, and Tyson married Molly in the following May. The bride
is reported to have summed up the case thus: "Bad? I daresay he is. I'm
not marrying him because he is good; I'm marrying him because he's
delightful. And I'm every bit as bad as he is, if they only knew."
It was Mrs. Nevill Tyson's genius for this sort of remark that helped to
make her reputation later on.
CHAPTER II
MRS. NEVILL TYSON
Tyson took his wife abroad for six months to finish her education (as if
to be Tyson's wife was not education enough for any woman!); and Drayton
Parva forgot about them for a time.
In fact, nobody had fully realized the existence of Molly Wilcox till she
burst on them as Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
It was the first appearance of the bride and bridegroom on their return
from their long honeymoon. The rector was giving an "At Home"
(tentatively) in their honor; and a great many people had accepted,
feeling that a very interesting social experiment was about to be made.
Everybody remembers how Mrs. Nevill Tyson fluttered down into that party
of thirty women to eleven men, in an absurd frock, and with a still more
absurd air of assured welcome. Poor little woman! Her comings and goings
from one Continental watering-place to another had been the progress of a
triumphant divinity; where she found an hotel she left a temple. I
sometimes think, too, that little look of expectant gladness may have
been due to the feeling that the Rectory was in England, and England was
home. She was dressed in the most perfect Parisian fashion, from the
crown of her fur toque to the tips of her little shoes; but she had never
learned to speak three words of French correctly. She informed everybody
of the fact that afternoon, laughing with the keenest enjoyment of her
remarkable stupidity; it seemed that her _r�le_ was to be remarkable in
everything. However that may have been, in less than half an hour seven
out of those eleven men were gathered round her chair in the corner; two
out of the seven were the rector and Sir Peter Morley, and Mrs. Nevill
Tyson was talking to all of them at once.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson--she was an illusion and a distraction from head to
foot; her beauty made a promise to the senses and broke it to the
intellect. Coil upon coil, and curl upon curl of dark hair, the dark eyes
of some ruminant animal, a little frivolous curve in an intelligent nose,
a lower jaw like a boy's, the full white throat of a woman, and the mouth
and cheeks of a child just waked from sleep. Tyson had escaped one
misfortune that had been prophesied for him. His wife was not vulgar. She
sat at her ease (much more at her ease than Miss Batchelor), and
chattered away about her honeymoon, her bad French, the places she had
been to, the people she had seen, and all without any consciousness of
her delightful self. Now it was a continuous stream of minute talk,
growing shallower and shallower as it spread over a larger surface; and
now her mind had hardly settled on its subject before it was off and away
again like a butterfly. There was one advantage in this excessive
lightness of touch, that it left great things as it found them, for great
things lay lightly on her soul. She told everybody she had been to Rome;
but imagination simply, refused to picture Mrs. Nevill Tyson in Rome. Her
presence in the Eternal City seemed something less than her footprint in
its dust or her shadow on its walls. Nothing is more irritating than to
have your dream of a place destroyed by the light-hearted gabble of some
idiot who has seen it; but Mrs. Nevill Tyson spared your dreams. The most
delicate ideal would have been undisturbed by the soft sweep of her
generalities, or the graceful flight of her fancy from the matter in
hand.
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