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Page 50
CHAPTER XVI
THE NEW LIFE
"There is now every hope," so wrote that cheerful lady, Mrs. Wilcox, "of
dear Molly's complete recovery."
This, translated from the language of optimism, meant that dear Molly's
beauty was dead, but that Molly would live.
To live, indeed, was not what she had wanted. Mrs. Nevill Tyson had made
up her mind to die; and in the certain hope of death she had borne the
dressing of her burns without a murmur. Lying there, swathed in her
bandages, life came back slowly and unwillingly to her aching nerves and
thirsting veins; and the sense of life woke with a sting, as if her brain
were bound tight, tight, and the pulse of thought beat thickly under the
intolerable ligatures. Then, when they told her she would live, she
screamed and made as though she would tear the bandages from her head
and throat.
"Take them off," she cried, "I won't have them. You said I was going to
die, and I want to die--I want to die--I tell you. Don't let Nevill come
near me. He'll want to come and look at me when I'm dead. Don't let
him come!"
But Nevill was there. The first thing he did, when he heard the doctor's
verdict, was to go straight into his wife's room and cry. He bent over
her bed, sobbing hysterically--"Molly--Molly--my little wife!"
That made her suddenly quiet.
She turned towards him, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than ever
in the section of her face that was not covered with bandages. She held
out her hand, the right hand that had clung with such a grip to his
coat-sleeve and was thus left unhurt. He stroked it and kissed it many
times over, he said what a pretty hand it was; and then, when he
remembered the things he had said and thought of her, he cried again.
"This excitement is very bad for her. Shall I tell him to go away?"
whispered Mrs. Wilcox to the nurse. The nurse shook her head.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson had heard; she gave a queer little fluttering laugh
that was meant to be derisive and ended like a sob. "If you went away,
both of you," said she, "I might feel better."
They went away and left them.
From that moment Mrs. Nevill Tyson was no longer bent upon dying. She had
conceived an immense hope--that old, old hope of the New Life. They would
begin all over again and from the very beginning. Life is an endless
beginning. Had not Nevill's tears assured her that he loved her still, in
spite of what had been done to her? It takes so much to make a man cry.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson may have understood men; it is not so clear that she
knew all about sentimentalists. It seemed as though her beauty being
dead, all that was blind and selfish in her passion for Nevill had died
with it. She was glad to be delivered from the torment of the senses, to
feel that the immortal human soul of her love was free. And as she was
very young and had the heart of a little child, she firmly believed that
her husband's emotions had undergone the same purifying regenerating
process.
As for Tyson, he had not a doubt on the subject. One morning he was
sitting in her room, watching her with a feverish, intermittent devotion.
He noticed her right arm as it hung along the counterpane, and the droop
of the beautiful right hand--the one beautiful thing about her now. He
remembered how he used to tease her about that little white spot on her
wrist, and how she used to laugh and shake down her ruffles or her
bangles to hide it. Even now she had the old trick; she had drawn the
sleeve of her night-gown over it, as she felt his gaze resting on it.
Strange--though she was still sensitive about that tiny blemish, she was
apparently indifferent to the change in her face. He wondered if she
realized how irreparably her beauty was destroyed, and as he wondered he
looked away, lest his eyes should wake that consciousness in her. He had
no idea how long they had been alone together. Time was not measured by
words, for neither had spoken much. He had taken Henley's "Verses" at
haphazard from the bookshelf and was turning over the pages, dipping here
and there, in the fastidious fashion of a man in no mind for any ideas
but his own. Presently he broke out in a voice that throbbed thickly with
emotion--
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