A SON AND HEIR
It seems a simple thing to believe in the divinity of motherhood, when
you have only seen it in the paintings of one or two old masters, or once
in a while perhaps in flesh and blood, transfiguring the face of some
commonplace vulgar woman whom, but for that, nobody would have called
beautiful. But sometimes the divine thing chooses some morsel of humanity
like Mrs. Nevill Tyson, struggles with and overpowers it, rending the
small body, spoiling the delicate beauty; and where you looked for the
illuminating triumphant glory of motherhood, you find, as Tyson found,
a woman with a pitiful plain face and apathetic eyes--apathetic but for
the dull horror of life that wakes in them every morning.
That Tyson had the sentiment of the thing is pretty certain. When he went
up to town (for he went, after all, when the baby was a week old), he
brought back with him a picture (a Madonna of Botticelli's, I think) in a
beautiful frame, as a present for his wife. Poor little soul! I believe
she thought he had gone up on purpose to get it (it was so lovely that
he might well have taken a fortnight to find it); and she had it hung up
over the chimney-piece in her bedroom, so that she could see it whether
she were sitting up or lying down.
Now, whether it was the soothing influence of that belief, or whether
Mrs. Nevill Tyson, the mystic of a moment, found help in the gray eyes
of the mother of God when Nevill had pointed out their beauty, pointed
out, too, the paradox of the divine hands pressing the human breasts for
the milk of life, she revived so far as to take, or seem to take, an
interest in her son. She indulged in no ecstasies of maternal passion;
but as she nursed the little creature, her face began to show a serene
half-ruminant, half-spiritual content.
He was very tiny, tinier than any baby she had ever seen, as well he
might be considering that he had come into the world full seven weeks
before his time; his skin was very red; his eyes were very small, but
even they looked too large for his ridiculous face; his fingers were
fine, like little claws; and his hands--she could hardly feel their
feeble kneading of her breast. He was not at all a pretty baby, but he
was very light to hold.
Tyson had not the least objection to Stanistreet or Sir Peter and the
rest of them, they were welcome to stare at his wife as much as they
pleased; but he was insanely jealous of this minute masculine thing that
claimed so much of her attention. He began to have a positive dislike to
seeing her with the child. There was a strain of morbid sensibility in
his nature, and what was beautiful to him in a Botticelli Madonna,
properly painted and framed, was not beautiful--to him--in Mrs. Nevill
Tyson. He had the sentiment of the thing, as I said, but the thing
itself, the flesh and blood of it, was altogether too much for his
fastidious nerves. And yet once or twice he had seen her turn away from
him, clutching hastily at the open bodice of her gown; once she had
started up and left the room when he came into it; and, curious
contradiction that he was, it had hurt him indescribably. He thought he
recognized in these demonstrations a prouder instinct than feminine
false shame. It was as if she had tried to hide from him some sacred
thing--as if she had risen up in her indignation to guard the portals
of her soul. To be sure he was in no mood just then for entering
sanctuaries; but for all that he did not like to have the door slammed
in his face.
Thank heaven, the worst had not happened. The little creature's volatile
beauty fluttered back to her from time to time; there was a purified
transparent quality in it that had been wanting before. It had still the
trick of fluctuating, vanishing, as if it had caught something of her
soul's caprice; but while it was there Mrs. Nevill Tyson was a more
beautiful woman than she had been before. Some men might have preferred
this divine uncertainty to a more monotonous prettiness. Tyson was not
one of these.
One afternoon, about a fortnight after his return from town, he found her
sitting in the library with "the animal," as he called his son. There had
been a sound of singing, but it ceased as he came in. The child's shawl
was lying on the floor; he picked it up and pitched it to the other end
of the room. Then he came up to her and scanned her face closely.
"What's the matter with you?" he said.
"Nothing. Do I--do I look funny?" She put her hand to her hair, a trick
of Mrs. Nevill Tyson's when she was under criticism. She had been such an
untidy little girl.
"Oh, damned funny. Look here. You've had about enough of that. You must
stop it."
"What! Why?"
"Because it takes up your time, wastes your strength, ruins your
figure--it _has_ ruined your complexion--and it--it makes you a public
nuisance."
"I can't help it."
She got up and stood by the window with her back to Tyson. She still held
the child to her breast, but she was not looking at him; she was looking
away through the window, rocking her body slightly backwards and
forwards, either to soothe the child or to vent her own impatience.
Tyson's angry voice followed her. "Of course you can help it. Other women
can. You must wean the animal."
She turned. "Oh, Nevill, look at him--"
"I don't want to look at him."
"But--he's so ti-i-ny. Whatever _will_ he do?"
"Do? He'll do as other women's children do."
"He won't. He'll die."
"Not he. Catch him dying. He'll only howl more infernally than he's
howled before. That's all he'll do. Do him good too--teach him that he
can't get everything he wants in this vile world. But whatever he does
I'm not going to have you sacrificed to him."
"I'm not sacrificed. I don't mind it."
"Well, then, _I_ mind it. That's enough. I hate the little beast coming
into my room at night."
"He needn't come. I can go to him."
"All right. If you want to make an invalid scarecrow of yourself before
your time, it's not my business. Only don't come to me for sympathy,
that's all."
With one of her passionate movements, she snatched the child from her
breast, carried him upstairs screaming and laid him on her bed. When the
nurse came she found him writhing and wailing, and his mother on her
knees beside the bed, her face hidden in the counterpane.
"Take him away," sobbed Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"Ma'am?" said the nurse.
"Take him away, I tell you. I won't--I can't nurse him. It--it makes me
ill."
And forthwith she went off into a fit of hysterics.
It was at this crisis of the baby's fate that Miss Batchelor, of all
people, took it into her head to call. After all, Tyson was Nevill
Tyson, Esquire, of Thorneytoft, and his wife had been somewhere very near
death's door. People who would have died rather than call for any other
reason, called "to inquire." As did Miss Batchelor, saying to herself
that nothing should induce her to go in.
Now as she was inquiring in her very softest voice, who should come up to
the doorstep but Tyson. He smiled as he greeted her. He was polite; he
was charming; for as a matter of fact he had been rather hard-driven of
late, and a little kindness touched him, especially when it came from an
unexpected quarter.
"This is very good of you, Miss Batchelor," said he. "I hope you'll come
in and see my wife."
Miss Batchelor played nervously with her card-case.
"I--I--Would your wi--would Mrs. Tyson care to see me?"
He smiled again. "I think I can answer for that."
And to her own intense surprise, for the first and last time Miss
Batchelor crossed the threshold of Thorneytoft.
They found the little woman sitting in her drawing-room with her hands
before her, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not smile at Miss Batchelor as she
greeted her. Perhaps with her feminine instinct and antipathy, she felt
that Miss Batchelor had not come to see _her_. So she smiled at her
husband, and the smile was gall and wormwood to the clever woman; it had
the effect, too, of bringing back to her recollection the occasion on
which she had last seen Mrs. Nevill Tyson smiling. She wondered whether
Mrs. Nevill Tyson also recalled the incident. If she did she must find
the situation rather trying.
Apparently Mrs. Nevill Tyson was so happily constituted that to her
trying situations were a stimulant and a resource. She prattled to Miss
Batchelor about her new side-saddle, and her "friend, Captain
Stanistreet"--any subject that came uppermost and dragged another with
it to the surface.
Miss Batchelor was very kind and sympathetic; she took an interest in the
saddle; she assured Mrs. Nevill Tyson that Drayton Parva had been much
concerned on her account; and she asked to see the baby.
The next instant she was sorry she had done so, for Tyson, who had
continued to be charming, went out of the room when the baby came in.
The child was laid in Mrs. Nevill Tyson's lap, and she looked at it with
a gay indifference. "Isn't he a queer thing?" said she. "He isn't pretty
a bit, so you needn't say so. Nevill calls him a boiled shrimp, and a
little rat. He is rather like a little rat--a baby rat, when it's all
pink and squirmy, you know, and its eyes just opened--they've got such
pretty bright eyes. But I'm afraid baby's eyes are more like pig's eyes.
Well, _they're_ pretty too. As he's so ugly I expect he's going to be
clever, like Nevill. They say he's like me. What do you think? Look at
his forehead. Do you think he's going to be clever?"
"It depends," said Miss Batchelor, a little maliciously. (Really, the
woman was impossible, and such a hopeless fool!) Miss Batchelor's
habitually nervous manner made her innuendoes doubly telling when they
came.
"Well--he's very small. Just feel how small he is."
Instinctively Miss Batchelor held out her hands for the child, and in
another moment he was lying across her arms, slobbering dreamily.
He was not quiet long. He stretched himself, he writhed, he made himself
limp, he made himself stiff, he threw himself backwards recklessly; and
still Miss Batchelor held him. And when he cried she held him all the
closer. She let him explore the front of her dress with his little wet
mouth and fingers. He had made a great many futile experiments of the
kind in the last two days. Of those three worlds that were his, the world
of light, the world of sleep, and the world of his mother's breast, they
had taken away the one that he liked best--the warm living world of which
he had been lord and master, that was flesh of his flesh, given to his
hands to hold, and obedient to the pressure of his lips. Since then he
had lived from feeble hope to hope; and now, when he struck upon that
hard and narrow tract of corduroy studded with comfortless buttons, he
began again his melancholy wail.
"Poor little beggar," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, "he can't help it. He's
being weaned. Don't let him slobber over your nice dress."
Certainly he had not improved the corduroy, but Miss Batchelor did not
seem to resent it.
"Can't you nurse him?" she asked.
"No," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"I don't believe it," said Miss Batchelor to herself. "She isn't that
sort. It's the clever, nervous, modern women who can't nurse their
children--it all runs to brains. But these little animals! If ever there
was a woman born to suckle fools, it's Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She's got the
physique, the temperament, everything. And she can give her whole mind to
it."
"What a pity," she said aloud, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson laughed.
"I don't want to nurse him; why should I?" said she. She lay back in
her attitude of indifference, watching her son, and watched by Miss
Batchelor's sharp eyes and heartless brain.
Heartless? Well, I can't say. Not altogether, perhaps. Goodness knows
what went on in the heart of that extraordinary woman, condemned by her
own cleverness to perpetual maidenhood.
"How very odd," said she to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
To herself she said, "I thought so. It's not that she can't. She
_won't_--selfish little thing. And yet--she isn't the kind that
abominates babies, as such. Therefore if she doesn't care for this
small thing, _that_ is because it's her husband's child."
To do Miss Batchelor justice, she was appalled by her own logic. Was it
the logic of the heart or of the brain? She did not stop to think. Having
convinced herself that her argument was a chain of adamant, she caught
herself leaning on it for support, with the surprising result that she
found it easier to be kind to Mrs. Nevill Tyson (a woman who presumably
did not love her husband) when she took her leave.
I am not going to be hard on her. To some women a bitterer thing than not
to be loved is not to be allowed to love. And when two women insist on
loving the same man, the despised one is naturally skeptical as to the
strength and purity and eternity of the other's feelings. "She never
loved him!" is the heart's consolation to the lucid brain reiterating "He
never loved me!" I did not say that Miss Batchelor loved Tyson.
So the baby was weaned. He did not howl under the process so much as his
father expected. He lost his cheerful red hue and grew thin; he was
indifferent to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his
intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a "bad sign
when they took no notice." Gradually, very gradually, his features
settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young.
Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful
and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter. He was Tyson's
son and heir.
And that other baby, Mrs. Nevill Tyson, so violently weaned from the joy
of motherhood, she too grew pale and thin; she too was indifferent to
things around her, and she took very little notice of her son.
By a strange and unfortunate coincidence Captain Stanistreet had not been
seen in Drayton for the space of five months; and coupling this fact with
Mrs. Nevill Tyson's altered looks, the logical mind of Drayton Parva drew
its own conclusions.