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Page 69
He laid down the sheets and opened Stanistreet's letter. It was short; it
gave the news of Molly's death with a few details, and these words: "In
any case it must have come soon. Your going away made no difference. It
began before you left--the fever was hanging about her; and they say her
brain could never have been very strong."
He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish
crimson against the dawn. The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence
and death. O God! the futility of everything he had ever done! The lie he
had written was futile; it had come too late. His coming out here was
futile; he had come too soon. If he had waited another three weeks he
could have gone without breaking Molly's heart. "Her brain could never
have been very strong." At that he laughed--horribly, aloud.
The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent. He went out. As he
strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed
him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.
There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there
condemnation. He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption.
_Ex oriente lux!_ It was as if illumination had come with that fierce
penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.
Ah--that was a shot! The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him
reloading. A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a
bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of
sand.
And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air. The camp was
surrounded.
Tyson called up his twenty men and ran to his tent for arms. The papers
were still there in the box of cartridges.
He hesitated for a second. He realized with a sudden lucidity that if he
died, and those damning documents were found, there would be a slur on
his memory out of keeping with the end. He could not have it said that
the last words he had written had been an apology and a lie.
He tore the papers across, once, twice--no time for more--and rushed into
the desert, his heart beating with the brutal, jubilant lust of battle.
CHAPTER XXIII
_IN MEMORIAM_
Later on news came of that heroic stand made by Tyson and his men--a mere
handful against hundreds of the enemy. He had led them in their last mad
rush on a line of naked steel; he had fallen first, face downwards,
pierced through the back and breast. He died fighting.
Even in Drayton Parva, where all things are remembered, his sins are
forgotten. Nay, more, they forbear to speak of his wife's sins out of
respect for the memory of a brave man.
In Drayton Parish Church there is a stained glass window with a figure of
St. Michael; he has a drawn sword in his hand and the flames of hell are
about his feet. That window is dedicated
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE MEMORY OF NEVILL TYSON.
So they remember.
And out there, in the great Soudan, there is a wooden cross that mounts
guard over a long mound. Already it is buried up to its arms in the
shifting sand; by to-morrow the dead and their place will be one with the
eternal desert. And the desert remembers nothing, neither glory nor sin.
***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TYSONS***
******* This file should be named 15722-8.txt or 15722-8.zip *******
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/7/2/15722
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