THE FIRST STONE
Tyson was much flattered by the rumor that Sir Peter Morley had
pronounced his wife to be "the loveliest woman in Leicestershire";
for Lady Morley herself was a sufficiently splendid type, with her
austere Puritan beauty. As for the rector, it was considered that his
admiration of Mrs. Nevill Tyson somewhat stultified his utterances in
the pulpit.
It is not always well for a woman when the judgment of the other sex
reverses that of her own. It was not well for Mrs. Nevill Tyson to be
told that she had fascinated Sir Peter Morley and spoiled the rector's
sermons; it was not well for her to be worshipped (collectively) by the
riff-raff that swarmed about Thorneytoft at Tyson's invitation; but any
of these things were better than for her to be left, as she frequently
was, to the unmixed society of Captain Stanistreet. He had a reputation.
Tyson thought nothing of going up to town for the week-end and leaving
Louis to entertain his wife in his absence. To do him justice, this
neglect was at first merely a device by which he heightened the luxury
of possession. In his own choice phrase, he "liked to give a mare a loose
rein when he knew her paces." It was all right. He knew Molly, and if he
did not, Stanistreet knew him. But these things were subtleties which
Drayton Parva did not understand, and naturally enough it began to avoid
the Tysons because of them.
Apparently Mrs. Nevill Tyson liked Stanistreet. She liked his humorous
dark face and his courteous manners; above all, she liked that air of
profound interest with which he listened to everything that she had to
say; it made it easy for her to chatter to him as she chattered to nobody
else, except (presumably) her husband. As for Stanistreet, try as he
would (and he tried a great deal), he could not make Mrs. Nevill Tyson
out. Day after day Mrs. Nevill Tyson, in amazing garments, sat and
prattled to him in the dog-cart, while Tyson followed the hounds; yet for
the life of him he could not tell whether she was really very infantile
or only very deep. You see she was Tyson's wife. It must be said she gave
him every opportunity for clearing his ideas on the subject, and if he
did not know, other people might be allowed to make mistakes. And when he
came to stay at Thorneytoft for weeks at a time, familiarity with the
little creature's moods only complicated the problem.
It was about the middle of February, and Stanistreet had been down
for a fortnight's hunting, when, in the morning of his last day, Tyson
announced his intention of going up to town with him to-morrow. He might
be away for three weeks or a month altogether; it depended upon whether
he enjoyed himself sufficiently.
Stanistreet, who was looking at Mrs. Nevill Tyson at the time, saw the
smile and the color die out of her face; her beauty seemed to suffer a
shade, a momentary eclipse. She began to drink tea (they were at
breakfast) with an air of abstraction too precipitate to be quite
convincing.
"Moll," said Tyson, "if you're going to this meet, you'd better run
upstairs and put your things on."
"I don't want to go to any meets."
"Why not?"
"Because--I--I don't like to see other women riding."
"Bless her little heart!" (Tyson was particularly affectionate this
morning) "she's never had a bridle in her ridiculous hands, and she talks
about 'other women riding.'"
"Because I want to ride, and you won't let me, and I'm jealous."
"Well, if you mayn't ride with me, you may drive with Stanistreet."
"_I_ may drive Captain Stanistreet?"
"Certainly not; Captain Stanistreet may drive you."
"We'll see about that," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson as she left the room.
She soon reappeared, enchantingly pretty again in her laces and furs.
It was a glorious morning, the first thin white frost after a long thaw.
The meet was in front of the Cross-Roads Inn, about a mile out of Drayton
Parva. It was neutral ground, where Farmer Ashby could hold his own with
Sir Peter any day, and speech was unfettered. Somebody remarked that Mrs.
Nevill Tyson looked uncommonly happy in the dog-cart; while Tyson spoke
to nobody and nobody spoke to him. Poor devil! he hadn't at all a pretty
look on that queer bleached face of his. And all the time he kept
twisting his horse's head round in a melancholy sort of way, and backing
into things and out of them, fit to make you swear.
She must have noticed something. They were trotting along, Stanistreet
driving, by a road that ran side by side with the fields scoured by the
hunt, and Tyson could always be seen going recklessly and alone. He could
ride, he could ride! His worst enemy never doubted that.
"It's very odd," said she, "but the people here don't seem to like Nevill
one bit. I suppose they've never seen anything quite like him before."
"I very much doubt if they have."
"_I_ think they're afraid of him. Mother is, I know; she blinks when she
talks to him."
"Does she blink when she talks to me?"
"Of course not--you're different."
"I am not her son-in-law, certainly."
"Do you know, though he's so much older than me--I simply shudder when
I think he's thirty-seven--and so awfully clever, and _so_ bad-tempered,
I'm not in the least afraid of him. And he really has a shocking bad
temper."
"I know it of old."
"So many nice people have bad tempers. I think it's the least horrid
fault you can have; because it comes on you when you're not thinking,
and it isn't your fault at all."
"No; it is generally some one else's."
"I don't think much of people's passions myself. He might have something
far worse than that."
"Most undoubtedly. He might have atrocious taste in dress, or a tendency
to drink."
"Don't be silly. Did you know him when he was young? I don't mean to say
he isn't young--thirty-seven's young enough for anybody--I mean when he
was young like me?"
"I can't say. I doubt if he was ever young--like you. But I knew him when
he was a boy."
"So you understand him?"
"Oh, pretty well. Not always, perhaps. He's a difficult subject."
"Anyhow, you like him? Don't you?"
Stanistreet gave a curious hard laugh.
"Oh yes--I like him."
"That's all right. And really, I don't wonder that people can't make him
out. He's the strangest animal _I_ ever met in my life. I haven't made
him out yet. I think I shall give him up."
"Give him up, by all means. Isn't that what people generally do when they
can't understand each other?"
Mrs. Nevill Tyson made no answer. She was trying to think, and thinking
came hard to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"I suppose he's had a past. But of course it doesn't do to go poking and
probing into a man's past--"
Stanistreet lifted his eyebrows and looked at the little woman. She was
sitting bolt upright, staring out over the vague fields; she seemed to
have uttered the words unconsciously, as if at the dictation of some
familiar spirit. "And yet I wish--no, I don't wish I knew. I know he must
have had an awful time of it." She turned her face suddenly on
Stanistreet. "What do you think he told me the other day? He said he had
never known anybody who wasn't either a fool or a sinner. What do you
think of that? Must you be one or the other?"
Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. "You may be both. We are all of us
sinners, and certainly a great many of us are fools."
"I wonder. He isn't a fool."
Stanistreet wondered too. He wondered at the things she allowed herself
to say; he wondered whether she was drawing any inference; and above all,
he wondered at the shrinking introspective look on her careless face.
In another minute Mrs. Nevill Tyson had started from her seat and was
waving her muff wildly in the air. "Look--there he goes! Oh, _did_ you
see him take that fence? What an insane thing to do with the ground
like that."
He looked in the direction indicated by the muff, and saw Tyson riding
far ahead of the hunt, a small scarlet blot on the gray-white landscape.
"By Jove! he rides as if he were charging the enemy's guns at the head of
a line of cavalry."
"Yes." She leaned back; the excitement faded from her face, and she
sighed. The sigh was so light that it scarcely troubled the frosty air,
but it made Stanistreet look at her again. How adorably pretty she was
in all her moods!
Perhaps she was conscious of the look, for she rattled on again more
incoherently than before. "I'm talking a great deal of nonsense; I always
do when I get the chance. You can't talk nonsense to mother; she wouldn't
understand it. She'd think it was sense. And, you see, I'm interested in
my husband. I suppose it's the proper thing to take an interest in your
husband. If you won't take an interest in your husband, what will you
take an interest in? It's natural--not to say primitive. Do you know, he
says I'm the most primitive person he ever came across. Should _you_ say
I was primitive? Don't answer that. I don't think he'd like me to talk
about him quite so much. He thinks I never know where to draw the line.
But I never see any lines to draw, and if I did, I wouldn't know how to
draw them."
Stanistreet smiled grimly. He was wondering whether she _was_
"primitive."
"Just look at Scarum's ears! Don't tease her. She doesn't like it. Dear
thing! She's delicious to kiss--she's got such a soft nose. But she'll
bolt as soon as look at you, and she's awfully hard to hold." Her fingers
were twitching with the desire to hold Scarum.
"I think I can manage her."
"You see, somehow or the other I like talking to you. You may be a
sinner, but I don't think you are a fool; and I've a sort of a notion
that you understand."
He was silent. So many women had thought he understood.
"I wonder--_do_ you understand!"
The eyes that Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on Stanistreet were not
search-lights; they were wells of darkness, unsearchable, unfathomable.
Something in Stanistreet, equally inscrutable, something that was himself
and not himself, answered very low to that vague appeal.
"Yes, I understand."
He had turned towards her, smiling darkly, and all her face flashed back
a happy smile.
Surely, oh surely, Mrs. Nevill Tyson was the soul of indiscretion; for at
that moment Miss Batchelor, trotting past with Lady Morley, looked from
them to her companion and smiled too.
That smile was the first stone.
Miss Batchelor acknowledged them with a curt little nod, and Mrs.
Nevill Tyson's face became instantly overclouded. Louis leaned a little
nearer and said in a husky, uneven voice, "Surely you don't mind that
impertinent woman?"
"Not a bit," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson. "She's got a villainous seat."
"Then what are you thinking about?"
"I'm thinking what horrid hard lines it is that they won't let me hunt.
All the time I might have been flying across country with Nevill, instead
of--"
"Instead of crawling in a dog-cart with me. Thank you, Mrs. Nevill."
"You needn't thank me. I haven't given you anything."
Again Stanistreet wondered whether Mrs. Nevill was very simple or very
profound. And wondering, he gave the mare a cut across the flanks that
made her leap in the shafts.
"That was silly of you. She'll have her heels through before you know
where you are. She's a demon to kick, is Scarum."
Scarum had spared the splash-board this time, but she was going
furiously, and the little dog-cart rocked from side to side. Mrs.
Nevill Tyson rose to her feet.
"Strikes me you can't drive a little bit," said she.
"Please sit down, Mrs. Tyson." But Mrs. Tyson remained imperiously
standing, trying to keep her balance like a small sailor in a
rollicking sea.
"Get up."
Stanistreet muttered wrathfully under his mustache, and she caught the
words "damned foolery."
"Bundle out this minute." She made a grab at the rail in an undignified
manner.
He doubled the reins firmly over his right hand, and with his left arm he
forced her back into her seat. He was holding her there when Farmer Ashby
turned out of a by-lane and followed close behind them. And Farmer Ashby
had a nice tale to tell at "The Cross-Roads" of how he had seen the
Captain driving with his arm round Mrs. Tyson's waist.
That was another stone.
Stanistreet tugged at the reins with both hands and pulled the mare
almost on to her haunches; her hoofs shrieked on the iron road; she stood
still and snorted, her forelegs well out, her hide smoking.
When he had made quite sure that the animal's attitude was that of
temporary exhaustion rather than of passion, Stanistreet changed seats,
and gave the reins to Mrs. Nevill Tyson; and Scarum burst into her
second heat.
"I suppose you have a right to drive your own animal into the ditch,"
said he.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson set her teeth with a determined air, planted her feet
firmly on the floor of the trap to give herself a good purchase; she gave
the reins a little twist as she had seen Stanistreet do, she balanced the
whip like a fishing-rod, with the line dangling over Scarum's ears, and
then she rattled away over the wrinkling roads at a glorious pace; she
reeled over cart-ruts, she went thump over sods and bump over mud-heaps,
she grazed walls and hedges, skimmed over the brink of ditches, careened
round corners, and tore past most things on the wrong side; and
Stanistreet's sense of deadly peril was lost in the pleasure of seeing
her do it. When she was not chattering to him she was encouraging Scarum
with all sorts of endearments, small chirping sounds and delicate
chuckles, smiling that indefinably malicious, lop-sided smile which
Stanistreet had been taught all his life to interpret as a challenge.
Now they were going down a lane of beeches, they bent their heads under
the branches, and a shower of rime fell about her shoulders, powdering
her black hair; he watched it thawing in the warmth there till it
sparkled like a fine dew; and now they were running between low hedges,
and the keen air from the frosted fields smote the blood into her cheeks
and the liquid light into her eyes; it lifted the fringe from her
forehead and crisped it over the fur border of her hat; flying ends of
lace and sable were flung behind her like streamers; she seemed to be
winged with the wind of speed; she was the embodiment of vivid, reckless,
beautiful life.
It came over him with a sort of shock that this woman was Tyson's wife,
irrevocably, until one or other of them died. And Tyson was not the sort
of man to die for anybody's convenience but his own.
At last they swayed into the courtyard at Thorneytoft. "Thank heaven
we're alive!" he said, as he followed her into the house.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on the threshold. "Do you mean to say you didn't
enjoy it!"
"Oh, of course it was delightful; but I don't know that it was
exactly--safe."
"I see--you were afraid. We were safe enough so long as _I_ was driving."
He smiled drearily. He felt that he had been whirled along in a delirious
dream--a madman driven by a fool. As if in answer to his thoughts, she
called back over the banisters--
"I'm not such a fool as I look, you know."
No, for the life of him Stanistreet did not know. His doubt was absurd,
for it implied that Mrs. Nevill Tyson practiced the art of symbolism, and
he could hardly suppose her to be so well acquainted with the resources
of language. On the other hand, he could not conceive how, after living
more than half a year with Tyson, she had preserved her formidable
_naïveté_.
At dinner that evening she still further obscured the question by
boasting that she had saved Captain Stanistreet's life. Stanistreet
protested.
"Nonsense," said she; "you know perfectly well that you'd have upset the
whole show if you'd been left to yourself."
Tyson stared at his wife. "Do you mean to say that he let you drive?"
"Let me? Not he! He couldn't help it." Her white throat shook with
derisive laughter. "I took the reins; or, if you like, I kicked over
the traces. I always told you I'd do it some day."
Tyson pushed his chair back from the table and scowled meditatively. Mrs.
Nevill Tyson was smiling softly to herself as she played with the water
in her finger-glass. Presently she rose and shook the drops from her
fingertips, like one washing her hands of a light matter. Stanistreet got
up and opened the door for her, standing very straight and militant and
grim; and as she passed through she looked back at him and laughed again.
"I can see," said Tyson, as Stanistreet took his seat again, "you've been
letting that wife of mine make more or less of a fool of herself. If you
had no consideration for her neck or your own, you might have thought of
my son and heir."
"Oh," said Stanistreet, a little vaguely, for he was startled, "I kept a
good lookout."
"Not much use in that," said Tyson.
Stanistreet battled with his doubt. Tyson had furnished him with a key to
his wife's moods. Moreover, a simpler explanation had occurred to him.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson was fond of driving; she had been forbidden to drive,
therefore she drove; she had never driven any animal in her life before,
and, notwithstanding her inexperience, she had accomplished the dangerous
feat without injury to anybody. Hence no doubt her laughter and her
triumph.
But this again was symbolism. He determined to sleep on it.