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Page 52
He held up the sword, still looking at it with the eyes of a lover; a
quick turn of his wrist, and it leapt and flashed in the sun.
He turned to his wife, smiling. "Isn't she a beauty?" said he.
Fear gripped her heart. She may have had shadowy notions of Tyson's
conjugal infidelities, but she had a very clear idea of the power of her
rival, the sword. She did not know that he was merely moved by the spirit
of Henley's verse.
"Take it away," she said; "I don't like the look of it."
"Well, it's not a nice thing to have hanging over your head."
He took it away and hung it in its old place in the dining-room.
And Mrs. Nevill Tyson was content. Though there was not a sign or a hope
that her beauty would be restored to her, she was content. What was more,
she was positively glad that it was gone, regarding the loss of it as the
ransom for Tyson's soul.
She was growing stronger every day now, and they were full of plans for
their future. No attempt had been made to repair the damage done by the
fire. It was settled--so far as anything was settled--that they were to
let the flat, let Thorneytoft too, and go away from London, from England
perhaps, to some Elysium to be agreed on by them both. It was to be a
second honeymoon--or was it a third? There was nothing like beginning all
over again from the very beginning. They talked of the Riviera.
In three weeks' time from the date of the fire she was well enough to be
moved into the dining-room. Nevill carried her. They had to go through
the empty drawing-room, and as they passed they stopped and looked round
the desolate place. It struck them both that this was the scene of that
terrible last act of the drama of the old life.
"When we've once gone we will never, never come back again," she said.
"No. We burnt our ships in that blaze, Moll. Do you mind very much?"
"No. I shall never want to see it again. In our new house we won't have
anything to remind us of this."
"No, we'll have everything brand new, won't we?"
"Yes, brand new." She looked round her and smiled. "But it seems a little
sad, don't you think? It _was_ a pretty room, and there were all my
things."
"Never mind. Plenty more where they came from."
They paused in the doorway.
"Ha! This is the way," said he, "that a bride used to be brought into her
husband's house. They lifted her up so!" As he spoke he raised her high
in his strong arms. He was smiling, glorying in his strength.
And that was the way Mrs. Nevill Tyson was carried over the threshold of
the New Life. Or was it not rather her spirit that had lifted his? He
too, unworthy, soiled and shamed with sin, had been suffered to go with
her a little way. For one luminous perfect moment he stood face to face
with her in the mystic marriage-chamber of the soul; he heard--if it were
only for a moment--the unspeakable epithalamium; he saw incomprehensible
things.
It had needed some violent appeal to the senses, the spectacle or idea
of physical agony, to rouse him to that first passion of pity and
tenderness. Something like this he had felt once before, in the night
watch at Thorneytoft, when the wife he had wronged lay in the clutches of
life and death. But now, for the first time in his married life, he loved
her. Surely this was the way of peace.
Surely, surely. She lay down in her gladness and prayed the prayer of her
wedding-night: that God would make her a good wife. She did not pray that
Nevill might be made a good husband; of _his_ sins she had never spoken,
not even to her God.
As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, in the joy of his heart he thanked whatever gods
there might happen to be for his unconquerable soul.
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