THE NEW LIFE
"There is now every hope," so wrote that cheerful lady, Mrs. Wilcox, "of
dear Molly's complete recovery."
This, translated from the language of optimism, meant that dear Molly's
beauty was dead, but that Molly would live.
To live, indeed, was not what she had wanted. Mrs. Nevill Tyson had made
up her mind to die; and in the certain hope of death she had borne the
dressing of her burns without a murmur. Lying there, swathed in her
bandages, life came back slowly and unwillingly to her aching nerves and
thirsting veins; and the sense of life woke with a sting, as if her brain
were bound tight, tight, and the pulse of thought beat thickly under the
intolerable ligatures. Then, when they told her she would live, she
screamed and made as though she would tear the bandages from her head
and throat.
"Take them off," she cried, "I won't have them. You said I was going to
die, and I want to die--I want to die--I tell you. Don't let Nevill come
near me. He'll want to come and look at me when I'm dead. Don't let
him come!"
But Nevill was there. The first thing he did, when he heard the doctor's
verdict, was to go straight into his wife's room and cry. He bent over
her bed, sobbing hysterically--"Molly--Molly--my little wife!"
That made her suddenly quiet.
She turned towards him, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than ever
in the section of her face that was not covered with bandages. She held
out her hand, the right hand that had clung with such a grip to his
coat-sleeve and was thus left unhurt. He stroked it and kissed it many
times over, he said what a pretty hand it was; and then, when he
remembered the things he had said and thought of her, he cried again.
"This excitement is very bad for her. Shall I tell him to go away?"
whispered Mrs. Wilcox to the nurse. The nurse shook her head.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson had heard; she gave a queer little fluttering laugh
that was meant to be derisive and ended like a sob. "If you went away,
both of you," said she, "I might feel better."
They went away and left them.
From that moment Mrs. Nevill Tyson was no longer bent upon dying. She had
conceived an immense hope--that old, old hope of the New Life. They would
begin all over again and from the very beginning. Life is an endless
beginning. Had not Nevill's tears assured her that he loved her still, in
spite of what had been done to her? It takes so much to make a man cry.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson may have understood men; it is not so clear that she
knew all about sentimentalists. It seemed as though her beauty being
dead, all that was blind and selfish in her passion for Nevill had died
with it. She was glad to be delivered from the torment of the senses, to
feel that the immortal human soul of her love was free. And as she was
very young and had the heart of a little child, she firmly believed that
her husband's emotions had undergone the same purifying regenerating
process.
As for Tyson, he had not a doubt on the subject. One morning he was
sitting in her room, watching her with a feverish, intermittent devotion.
He noticed her right arm as it hung along the counterpane, and the droop
of the beautiful right hand--the one beautiful thing about her now. He
remembered how he used to tease her about that little white spot on her
wrist, and how she used to laugh and shake down her ruffles or her
bangles to hide it. Even now she had the old trick; she had drawn the
sleeve of her night-gown over it, as she felt his gaze resting on it.
Strange--though she was still sensitive about that tiny blemish, she was
apparently indifferent to the change in her face. He wondered if she
realized how irreparably her beauty was destroyed, and as he wondered he
looked away, lest his eyes should wake that consciousness in her. He had
no idea how long they had been alone together. Time was not measured by
words, for neither had spoken much. He had taken Henley's "Verses" at
haphazard from the bookshelf and was turning over the pages, dipping here
and there, in the fastidious fashion of a man in no mind for any ideas
but his own. Presently he broke out in a voice that throbbed thickly with
emotion--
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul--"
He had found the music that matched his mood. He chanted--
"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul."
Some clumsy movement of his foot shook the bed and jarred her. She drew
in her breath sharply.
"God forgive me!" he cried, "did I hurt you, darling?"
"I don't mind. It's worth it," said she.
At her look his sins rose up to his remembrance. He flung himself on his
knees beside the bed, shaken with his passion of remorse. He muttered a
wild, inarticulate confession.
"Don't, Nevill, don't," she whispered; "it made no difference. It's all
over and done with now."
He looked at her body and thought of the beauty of her soul. He broke
into vows and promises.
"Yes; it's all over. I swear I'll never look at another woman as long as
I live."
The pressure of her weak arms round his neck thrilled him with an
exquisite tenderness, a voluptuous pity. Surely, surely in his heart of
hearts he had never loved any woman as he loved her. She comforted him;
she whispered things too sacred for perfect utterance. It struck him from
time to time that she had no clear notion of the nature of the wrongs she
forgave, just as by some miracle her mind had dwelt apart from everything
that was base in her own marriage. Her ideas of evil were vague and
bodiless. She may have conceived Nevill to have been the victim of some
malign intellectual influence, the thrall, perhaps, of some Miss
Batchelor _sans merci_. There may have been mysteries, gulfs before which
she shuddered, dim regions which she could only just divine. He did not
know that with women like his wife there is all infinity between what
they realize and what they fear. Yet within its range of vision her love
was terribly clearsighted. And now, one by one, Tyson's sins fell from
him in the purifying fire of his wife's fancy.
He staggered to his feet and looked round him with glazed eyes; he was
drunk with his own emotions. She followed his gaze; it was caught by some
object above her bed.
"Hallo," said he, "what's my old sword doing there? My beauty!"
"I brought it in," said she.
"What did you do that for, eh?"
"I don't know. I think I thought that some day you'd walk off with it
somewhere, and that if you did that, you'd never come back again. So you
see I liked to know it was hanging safe up there when I was asleep. You
don't mind, do you?"
He muttered something about "rust" and "an outside wall."
"It's all right. I've cleaned it myself. I used to take it down and look
at it every day."
"When did you do that, Molly?"
"All the time you were away."
"Good God!" He took the sword down from the nail where it hung by a red
cord.
"You won't find a speck of dust on it anywhere," said she.
He had drawn the sword from its scabbard and laid it across his knee. He
felt its edge; he drew his finger down the long groove that ran along the
center of the blade; his gaze rested almost passionately on the floral
arabesque that fringed that bed of the river of blood. Not a spot of rust
from hilt to point; the scabbard, too, was bright and clean.
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.