The Tysons by May Sinclair
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May Sinclair >> The Tysons
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11 THE TYSONS
(Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson)
by
MAY SINCLAIR
Author of _THE DIVINE FIRE_, _THE HELPMATE_, etc.
1906
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. MR. NEVILL TYSON
II. MRS. NEVILL TYSON
III. MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON AT HOME
IV. THE FIRST STONE
V. THE NIGHT WATCH
VI. A SON AND HEIR
VII. SIR PETER'S NEW CLOTHES
VIII. TOWARDS "THE CROSS-ROADS"
IX. AN UNNATURAL MOTHER
X. CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
XI. THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS
XII. A FLAT IN TOWN
XIII. MRS. WILCOX TO THE RESCUE
XIV. THE "CRITERION"
XV. CONFLAGRATION
XVI. THE NEW LIFE
XVII. THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL
XVIII. A MIRACLE
XIX. CONFESSIONAL
XX. A MAN AND A SPHINX
XXI. OUT OF THE NIGHT
XXII. IN THE DESERT
XXIII. _IN MEMORIAM_
CHAPTER I
MR. NEVILL TYSON
There were only two or three houses in Drayton Parva where Mr. and Mrs.
Nevill Tyson were received. A thrill of guilty expectation used to go
through the room when they were announced, and people watched them with
a fearful interest, as if they were the actors in some enthralling but
forbidden drama.
Perhaps, if she had been tried by a jury of her peers--but Mrs. Nevill
Tyson had no peers in Drayton Parva. She was tried by an invisible and
incorruptible jury of ideas in Miss Batchelor's head. Opinion sways all
things in Drayton Parva, and Miss Batchelor swayed opinion.
As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, he had dropped into Leicestershire from heaven
knows where, and was understood to be more or less on his trial. Nobody
knew anything about him, except that he was a nephew of old Tyson of
Thorneytoft, and had come in for the property. Nobody cared much for
old Tyson of Thorneytoft; he was not exactly--well, no matter, he was
very respectable and he was dead, which entitled him to a little
consideration. And as Mr. Nevill Tyson was an unmarried man in those
days he naturally attracted some attention on his own account, as well
as for the sake of the very respectable old man, his uncle.
He was first seen at a dinner at the Morleys. Somebody else happened to
be the guest of the evening, and somebody else took Lady Morley in to
dinner. Tyson took Miss Batchelor, and I don't think he quite liked
it. Miss Batchelor was clever--frightfully clever--but she never showed
up well in public; she had a nervous manner, and a way of looking at you
as if you were some curious animal that she would like to pat if she were
perfectly sure you were not dangerous. And when you were about to take
compassion on her shyness, she startled you with a sudden lapse into
self-possession. I can see her now looking at Tyson over the frills on
her shoulder, with her thin crooked little mouth smiling slightly. She
might well look, for Nevill Tyson's appearance was remarkable. He might
have been any age between twenty-five and forty; as a matter of fact he
was thirty-six. England had made him florid and Anglo-Saxon, but the
tropics had bleached his skin and dried his straw-colored hair till it
looked like hay. His figure was short and rather clumsily built, but
it had a certain strength and determination; so had his face. The
determination was not expressly stated by any single feature--the mouth
was not what you would call firm, and the chin retreated ever so slightly
in a heavy curve--but it was somehow implied by the whole. He gave you
the idea of iron battered in all the arsenals of the world. Miss
Batchelor wondered what he would have to say for himself.
He said very little, and looked at nobody, until some casual remark of
his made somebody look at him. Then he began to talk, laconically at
first, and finally with great fluency. It was all about himself, and
everybody listened. He proved a good talker, as a man ought to be who has
knocked about four continents and seen strange men and stranger women.
You could tell that Miss Batchelor was interested, for she had turned
round in her chair now and was looking him straight in the face. It
seemed that he had worked his way out to Bombay and back again. He had
been reporter to half-a-dozen provincial papers. He had been tutor to
Somebody's son at some place not specified. He had tried his hand at
comic journalism in London and at cattle-driving in Texas, and had been
half-way to glory as a captain of irregulars in the Soudanese war. No,
nobody was more surprised than himself when that mystic old man left him
Thorneytoft. He thought he had chucked civilization for good. For good?
But--after his exciting life--wouldn't he find civilization a
little--dull? (Miss Batchelor had a way of pointing her sentences as if
she were speaking in parables.) Not in the country, there was hardly
enough of it there, and he had never tried being a country gentleman
before; he rather wanted to see what it was like. Wouldn't it be a little
hard, if he had never--? He thought not. The first thing he should do
would be to get some decent hunters.
Hunters were all very well, but had he no hobbies? No, he had not; the
_bona fide_ country gentleman never had hobbies. They were kept by
amateur gentlemen retired from business to the suburbs. Here Sir Peter
observed that talking of hobbies, old Mr. Tyson had a perfect--er--mania
for orchids; he spent the best part of his life in his greenhouse. Mr.
Nevill Tyson thought he would rather spend his in Calcutta at once.
A dark lean man who had arrived with Tyson was seen to smile frequently
during the above dialogue. Miss Batchelor caught him doing it and turned
to Tyson. "Captain Stanistreet seemed rather amused at the notion of your
being a fine old country gentleman."
"Stanistreet? I daresay. But he knows nothing about it, I assure you. He
has the soul of a cabman. He measures everything by its distance from
Charing Cross."
"I see. And you--are all for green fields and idyllic simplicity?"
He bowed, as much as to say, "I am, if you say so."
Miss Batchelor became instantly self-possessed.
"You won't like it. Nothing happens here; nothing ever will happen. You
will be dreadfully bored."
"If I am bored I shall get something to do. I shall dissipate myself in a
bland parochial patriotism. I can feel it coming on already. When I once
get my feet on a platform I shall let myself go."
"Do. You'll astonish our simple Arcadian farmers. Nothing but good old
Tory melodrama goes down here. Are you equal to that?"
"Oh yes. I'm terrific in Tory melodrama. I shall bring down the house."
She turned a curious scrutinizing look on him.
"Yes," said she, "you'll bring down the house--like Samson among the
Philistines."
He returned her look with interest. "I should immensely like to know,"
said he, "what you go in for. I'm sure you go in for something."
She looked at her plate. "Well, I dabble a little in psychology."
"Oh!" There was a moment's silence. "Psychology is a large order," said
Tyson, presently.
"Yes, if you go in deep. I'm not deep. I'm perfectly happy when I've got
hold of the first principles. It sounds dreadfully superficial, but I'm
not interested in anything but principles."
"I'm sorry to hear it, for in that case you won't be interested in me."
She laughed nervously. She was accustomed to be rallied on her
attainments, but never quite after this fashion.
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't any principles."
She bent her brows; but her eyes were smiling under her frown.
"You really mustn't say these things here. We are so dreadfully literal.
We might take you at your word."
Tyson smiled, showing his rather prominent teeth unpleasantly.
"I wish," said she, "I knew what you think a country gentleman's duties
really are."
"Do you? They are three. To hunt hard; to shoot straight; and to go to
church."
"I hope you will perform them--all."
"I shall--all. No--on second thoughts I draw the line at going to church.
It's all very well if you've got a private chapel, or an easy chair in
the chancel, or a family vault you can sit in. But I detest these modern
arrangements; I object to be stuck in a tight position between two
boards, with my feet in somebody else's hat, and somebody else's feet
in mine, and to have people breathing down my collar and hissing and
yelling alternately, in my ear."
Again Miss Batchelor drew her eyebrows together in a friendly frown of
warning. She liked the cosmopolitan Tyson and his reckless speech, and
she had her own reasons for wishing him to make a good impression. But
her hints had roused in him the instinct of antagonism, and he went on
more recklessly than before. "No; you are perfectly wrong. I'm not an
interesting atheist. I have the most beautiful child-like faith in--"
"The God who was clever enough to make Mr. Nevill Tyson?" said Miss
Batchelor, very softly. She had felt the antagonism, and resented it.
At this point Sir Peter came down with one of those tremendous platitudes
that roll conversation out flat. That was his notion of the duty of a
host, to rush in and change the subject just as it was getting exciting.
The old gentleman had destroyed many a promising topic in this way, under
the impression that he was saving a situation.
"You'll be bored to death--I give you six months," were Miss Batchelor's
parting words, murmured aside over her shoulder.
On their way home Stanistreet congratulated Tyson.
"By Jove! you've fallen on your feet, Tyson. They tell me Miss Batchelor
is interested in you."
"I am not interested in Miss Batchelor. Who is she?"
"She is only Miss Batchelor of Meriden Court--the richest land-owner in
Leicestershire."
"Good heavens! Why doesn't somebody marry her?"
"Miss Batchelor, they say, is much too clever for that."
"Is she?" And Tyson laughed, a little brutally.
* * * * *
Of course everybody called on the eccentric newcomer when they saw that
the Morleys had taken him up. But before they had time to ask each other
to meet him, Mr. Nevill Tyson had imported his own society from Putney or
Bohemia, or some of those places.
That was his first mistake.
The next was his marriage. In fact, for a man in Tyson's insecure
position, it was more than a mistake; it was madness. He ought to have
married some powerful woman like Miss Batchelor, a woman with ideas and
money and character, to say nothing of an inviolable social reputation.
But men like Tyson never do what they ought. Miss Batchelor was clever,
and he hated clever women. So he married Molly Wilcox. Molly Wilcox was
nineteen; she had had no education, and, what was infinitely worse, she
had a vulgar mother. And as Mr. Wilcox might be considered a negligible
quantity, the chances were that she would take after her mother.
The mystery was how Tyson ever came to know these people. Mr. Wilcox was
a student and an invalid; moreover, he was excessively morose. He would
not have called, and even Mrs. Wilcox could hardly have called without
him. Scandal-mongers said that Tyson struck up an acquaintance with the
girl and her mother in a railway carriage somewhere between Drayton and
St. Pancras, and had called on the strength of it. It did great credit to
his imagination that he could see the makings of Mrs. Nevill Tyson in
Molly Wilcox, dressed according to her mother's taste, with that hair of
hers all curling into her eyes in front, and rumpled up anyhow behind.
However, though I daresay his introduction was a little informal and
obscure, there was every reason for the intimacy that followed. The
Wilcoxes were unpopular; so, by this time, was Tyson. In cultivating him
Mrs. Wilcox felt that she was doing something particularly esoteric and
rather daring. She had taken a line. She loved everything that was a
little flagrant, a little out of the common, and a little dubious. To a
lady with these tastes Tyson was a godsend; he more than satisfied her
desire for magnificence and mystery. For economical reasons Mrs. Wilcox's
body was compelled to live with Mr. Wilcox in a cottage in Drayton Parva;
but her soul dwelt continually in a side-street in Bayswater, in a region
haunted by the shabby-refined, the shabby-smart, and the innocently
risky. Mrs. Wilcox, I maintain, was as innocent as the babe unborn. She
believed that not only is this world the best of all possible worlds, but
that Bayswater is the best of all possible places in it. So, though she
was quite deaf to many of the chords in Tyson's being, her soul responded
instantly to the note of "town." And when she discovered that Tyson had
met and, what is more, dined with her old friends the Blundell-Thompsons
"of Bombay," her satisfaction knew no bounds.
At any rate, Tyson had not been very long at Thorneytoft before Mrs.
Wilcox found herself arguing with Mr. Wilcox. She herself was impervious
to argument, and owing to her rapt inconsequence it was generally
difficult to tell what she would be at. This time, however, she seemed
to be defending Mr. Nevill Tyson from unkind aspersions.
"Of course, all young men are likely to be wild; but Mr. Tyson is not a
young man."
"Therefore Mr. Tyson is not likely to be wild. Do you know you are guilty
of the fallacy known to logicians as illicit process of the major?"
Mrs. Wilcox looked up in some alarm. The term suggested anything from a
court-martial to some vague impropriety.
"The Major? Major who?" she inquired, deftly recovering her mental
balance. "Where is he?"
"Somewhere about the premises, I fancy," said Mr. Wilcox, dryly. When all
argument failed he had still a chastened delight in mystifying the poor
lady.
Mrs. Wilcox looked out of the window. "Oh, I see; you mean Captain
Stanistreet." She smiled; for where Captain Stanistreet was Mr. Nevill
Tyson was not very far away. Moreover, she was glad that she had on her
nice ultramarine tea-gown with the green _moire_ front. (They were
wearing those colors in town that season.)
At Thorneytoft a few hours later Stanistreet's tongue was running on as
usual, when Tyson pulled him up with a jerk. "Hold hard. Do you know
you're talking about the future Mrs. Nevill Tyson?"
Stanistreet tried to keep calm, for he was poised on his waist across
the edge of the billiard-table. As it was, he lost his balance at the
critical moment, and it ruined his stroke. He looked at the cloth, then
at his cue, with the puzzled air which people generally affect in these
circumstances.
"Great Scott!" said he, "how did I manage that?"
The exclamation may or may not have referred to the stroke.
Tyson looked at his friend with a smile which suggested that he expected
adverse criticism, and was prepared to deal temperately with it.
"Why not?" said he.
Stanistreet, however, said nothing. He was absorbed in chalking the end
of his cue. His silence gave Tyson no chance; it left too much to the
imagination.
"Have you any objection?"
"Well, isn't the lady a little young for a fine old country gentleman
like yourself?"
Tyson's small blue eyes twinkled, for he prided himself on being able
to take a joke at his own expense. Still it was not exactly kind of
Stanistreet to remind him of his mushroom growth.
"Come," said Stanistreet, "you are a gentleman, you know. At any rate,
you're about the only fellow in these parts who can stand a frock-coat
and topper--that's the test. I saw Morley, your big man, going into
church yesterday, and he looked as if he'd just sneaked out of the City
on a 'bus. But you always knew how to dress yourself. The instinct is
hereditary."
Louis had just made a brilliant series of cannons, and was marking fifty
to his score. If he had not been so absorbed in his game, he would have
seen that Tyson was angry; and Tyson when he was angry was not at all
nice to see.
He made himself very stiff as he answered, "Whether I'm a gentleman or
not I can't say. It's an abstruse question. But I've got the girl on my
side, which is a point in my favor; I have the weighty support of my
mamma-in-law elect; and--the prejudices of papa I shall subdue by
degrees."
"By degrees? What degrees?" Again the question was unkind. It referred to
a phase of Tyson's university career which he least liked to look back
upon.
"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 _role_ 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.
"There are a great many beautiful statues in the Vatican," said Sir Peter
in his dream.
"Oh, no end. And, talking of beautiful statues, we were introduced to the
most beautiful woman in Rome, the Countess--Countess--Countess--Nevill,
what _was_ that woman's name? Oh--I forget her name, but she was the
loveliest woman I ever saw in my life. Everybody was in love with
her--down on their knees groveling, you couldn't help it. Fancy, she
was engaged to ten people at once! I suppose she had ten engagement
rings--one for each finger, one for each man. I should never have known
which was which. But oh! I oughtn't to have told you. My husband said I
wasn't to talk about her. I don't see why--everybody was talking about
her!"
There was a chorus of protestation.
"And why shouldn't they talk about her, and why shouldn't she be engaged
to ten gentlemen at once? The more the merrier."
"And you haven't told us the lady's name, so we're none the wiser."
"I forgot it. But it would have been all the same if I hadn't. I never
can remember not to tell things. Oh--Countess--Poli--Polidori! There--you
see. My husband says I'm the soul of indiscretion."
There was a sudden silence. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's last sentence seemed to
detach itself and float about the room, and Miss Batchelor perceived with
a pang of pleasure that if Tyson's wife was not vulgar she was an arrant
fool.
"I suppose you visited all the great cathedrals?" said the Rector.
Perhaps he wished to change the subject; perhaps he felt that by talking
about cathedrals to Mrs. Nevill Tyson he was giving a serious, not to say
sacerdotal, character to a frivolous occupation.
"Well, only St. Peter's and the one at Milan."
"And which did you prefer! I am told that St. Peter's is very like our
own St. Paul's--or I should say St. Paul's--"
"Oh, please don't ask me! I know no more than the man in the moon--I mean
the man in the honeymoon" (that joke was Tyson's), "and a lot _he_ knows
about it. There's the man in the honeymoon," she explained, nodding
merrily in her husband's direction.
Meanwhile Tyson was making himself agreeable to Miss Batchelor. And this
is how he did it.
"I hear, Miss Batchelor, that you are a lady of genius."
There was a rumor that Miss Batchelor was engaged on a work of fiction,
which indeed may have been true, though not exactly in the sense
intended.
"Indeed; who told you that?"
"Scandal. But I never listen to scandal, and I didn't believe it."
"I don't suppose you believe that a woman could be a genius."
"No? I have seen women who were geniuses, before now; but in every
instance it meant--I shall hurt your feelings if I tell you what it
meant."
"Not at all. I have no feelings."
"It meant either devilry or disease." Tyson's eyes twinkled wickedly as
he stroked his blonde mustache. He felt a diabolical delight in teasing
Miss Batchelor. There was a time when Miss Batchelor had admired Tyson.
He was not handsome; but his face had character, and she liked character.
Now she hated him and his face and everything belonging to him, his wife
included. But there was no denying that he was clever, cleverer than any
man she had ever met in her life.
"Even a great intellect"--here Tyson looked hard at Miss Batchelor, and
her faded nervous face seemed to shrink under the look--"is a great
misfortune--to a woman. Look at my wife now. She has about as much
intellect as a guinea-pig, and the consequence is she is not only happy
herself, but a cause of happiness to others. There--see!"
Miss Batchelor saw. She saw Sir Peter Morley contending with the rector
for the honor of handing Mrs. Nevill Tyson her tea. They were joined by
Stanistreet. Yes, Stanistreet. The rector seemed to have drawn the line
nowhere that day. There was no mistaking the tall figure, alert and
vigorous, the lean dark face, a little eager, a little hard. And that
very clever woman Miss Batchelor sat hungry and thirsty--very hungry and
very thirsty--and Tyson stood behind her stroking his mustache. He was
not looking at her now, nor thinking of her. He was contemplating that
adorable piece of folly, his wife.
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