He had found his men, fifty brave fellows in all, ordered his outfit and booked his pa.s.sage, before he could make up his mind to break the news to her, for there was the risk of breaking her heart too.
And now it wanted but two days before his departure.
Coming out of the War Office he met Stanistreet. They walked together as far as Charing Cross.
"Yes," said Tyson, "the thing"s done now. I"m off to the Soudan with fifty other fellows--glorious devils--and we mean fighting this time.
It"s the old field, you see, and the old enemy."
"When do you sail?"
"Wednesday--midnight. See me off?"
"Yes. It"s the least I can do."
"Thanks, Stanny." He made a cut at the air with his walking-stick. "Don"t you wish you"d half my luck? You poor devils never get a chance. By Jove!
if I"d only stuck to _mine_!"
They parted. Not a word of his wife.
Stanistreet looked back over his shoulder as Tyson crossed Trafalgar Square with the bold swinging step of a free man. He was still cutting the air.
The packing was the worst of it. It had to be done in silence and a guilty secrecy, for Molly was in bed again, suffering from a sort of nervous relapse. Up to the last day Tyson was wretched, haunted by the fear of some unforeseen calamity that might still happen and destroy his plans. By way of guarding against it he had stuck the Steamship Company"s labels on all his luggage long ago. That seemed to make his decision irrevocable whatever happened. But he would not be safe till he felt water under him.
At the last minute Molly took a feverish turn, and was on no account to be agitated. If he must go it would be better not to say Good-bye. Oh, much better.
He went into her room. She was drowsy. Her small forehead was furrowed with much thinking; there was a deep flush on her cheek, and her breath came and went like sighing. He stooped over her and whispered "Goodnight," the same as any other night. No, not quite the same, for Molly started and trembled. He had kissed not her hands only, but her mouth and her face.
His ship sailed at midnight, and he sailed with it. She had not stood in his way, the little thing. When, indeed, had she ever hindered him?
Towards midnight Mrs. Wilc.o.x and the servants were startled from their sleep by hearing Mrs. Nevill Tyson calling "Nevill, Nevill!" They hurried to her room; her bed was empty; the clothes were all rumpled back as if flung off suddenly. They looked into the charred, dismantled drawing-room, she was not there; but the door of communication, always kept shut at night, was ajar. She must have gone through into the dining-room. They found her there, stretched across the couch, unconscious. The cord that had held Nevill"s sword to the nail above was lying on the floor where she had found it. She had divined his destiny.
The next day she was slightly delirious. The doctors and nurses came and went softly, and Mrs. Wilc.o.x brooded over the sick-room like a vast hope.
They listened now and then. She was talking about the baby, the baby that died two years ago.
"It"s very strange," said Mrs. Wilc.o.x, "she never took much notice of the little thing when it was alive."
The doctor said nothing to that; but he asked whether her father had not died of consumption. He certainly had; but n.o.body had ever been afraid for Molly; her lungs were always particularly strong. Yes, but the lungs were not always attacked. Tuberculosis, like other things, follows the line of least resistance. Her brain could never have been very strong.--"Her brain was as strong as yours or mine, sir. You don"t know; she has had a miserable life."--Ah, any shock or strong excitement, or any great drain on the system, was enough to bring on brain fever.
In other words, what could you expect after so much agony, so much thinking, and the striving of that life within her life, the hope that would have renewed the world for her--the fruit of three days and three nights of happiness? It was a grave case, but--oh yes, while there was life there was hope.
So they talked. But she was far away from them, lost in her dream. And in her dream the dead child and the unborn child were one.
By night the tumult in her brain was raging like a fire. She had bad dreams. They were full of noises. First, the hiss of a thin voice singing from a great distance an insistent, intolerable song; then the roar of h.e.l.l, and the hissing of a thousand snakes of flame. And now a crowd of evil faces pressed on her; they sprang up quick out of the darkness, and then they left her alone. She was outside in the streets. It was twilight, a dreadful twilight; and perhaps it was only a dream, for it is always twilight in dreams. She was all in white, in her night-gown, and it was open at the neck too. She clutched at it to hide--what was it she wanted to hide? She had forgotten--forgotten.
But that was nothing, only a dream, and she was awake now. It was light; it was broad daylight. Then why was she out here, in the street, in her night-gown? She must hide herself--anywhere--down that dark alley, quick!
No, not there--there was a bundle--a dead baby.
No, no, she knew all about it now; there was a fire, and she had got up out of her bed to save some one--to save--"Nevill! Nevill!" She must run or she would be late. Ah, the crowd again, and those faces--all looking at her and wondering. They were running too, they were hunting her down, the brutes, driving her before them with pitchforks. The shame of it, the shame of it! Who was singing that hideous song? It was about her, What had she done? She had done nothing--nothing. She was bearing the sins of all women, the sins of the whole world. It was swords now--sharp burning swords, and they hurt her back--her head--Nevill!
The dream changed. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was wandering about somewhere alone, always alone; she was walking over sand, hot like the floor of a furnace, on and on, a terribly long way, towards something black that lay on the very edge of the world and was now a cloud, and now a cloak, and now a dead man.
Two people were talking about her now, and there was no sense in what they said.
"Is there _no_ hope?" said one.
"None," said the other, "none."
There was a sound of some one crying; it seemed to last a long time, but it was so faint she could scarcely hear it.
"It is just as well. She would have died in child-birth, or lost her reason."
The crying sounded very far away.
It ceased. The sand drifted and fell from under her feet; she was sinking into a whirlpool, sucked down by a great spinning darkness and by an icy wind. She threw up her arms above her head like a dreamer awaking from sleep. She had done with fevers and with dreams.
The doctor pushed back the soft fringe of down from her forehead. "Look,"
he said, "it is like the forehead of a child."
CHAPTER XXII
IN THE DESERT
It was an hour before dawn, and Tyson was kneeling on the floor of his tent, doing something to the body of a sick man. He had turned the narrow place into a temporary ambulance. Dysentery had broken out among his little troop; and wherever there was a reasonable chance of saving a man"s life, Tyson carried that man from under the long awning, pitched in the pitiless sunlight where the men swooned and maddened in their sickness, and brought him into his own tent, where as often as not he died. This boy was dying. The air was stifling; but it was better than what they had down there among those close-packed rows, where the poor devils were dying faster than you could bury them--even in the desert, where funeral rites are short. And as he stooped to moisten the boy"s lips, Tyson swore with a great oath: there was no water in the tin basin; the sponge was dry as sand, and caked with blood. His own tongue was like a hot file laid to the roof of his mouth. The heat by night was the heat of the great desert, stretched out like a sheet of slowly cooling iron; and the heat by day was like the fire of the furnace that tried it.
He went out to find water. When they were not interrupted by the enemy, he might be kept at this sort of work for days; if it was not this boy it would be another. The care of at least one-half of his sick and wounded had fallen to Tyson"s charge.
Let the Justice that cries out against what men have done for women remember what they have done for men.
The boy died before dawn. And now, what with sickness and much fighting, out of the fifty Tyson had brought out with him there were but twenty sound men.
When he had seen to the burying of his dead, and gone his rounds among the hopelessly dying, Tyson turned to his own affairs. The mail had come in, and his letters had been forwarded to him overnight from the nearest station. There was one from Stanistreet; it lay unopened on a box of cartridges amongst his other papers. These he began to look over and arrange.
They were curious doc.u.ments. One was a letter to his wife, imploring her forgiveness. "And yet," he had written, "except for one sin (committed when I was to all intents and purposes insane), and for one mistake, the grossest man ever made, you have nothing to forgive. I swear that I loved you even then; and I shall always love you, as I have never loved--never could love--any other woman. Believe me, I don"t say this to justify myself. There would be far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the feeling. As it is, I sinned against the highest, the best part of myself, as much as against you." There was more in the same strain, only less coherent; hurried sentences jotted down in the night, whenever he could s.n.a.t.c.h a minute from his duty. He must have meant every word of it at the moment of writing; and yet--this is the curious thing--it was in flat contradiction to certain statements made in the other paper.
This was a long letter to Stanistreet, begun in the form of an irregular diary--a rough account of the march, of the fighting, of the struggle with dysentery, given in the fewest and plainest words possible, with hardly a trace of the writer"s natural egotism. The two last sheets were a postscript. They had evidently been written at one short sitting, in sentences that ran into each other, as if the writer had been in pa.s.sionate haste to deliver himself of all he had to say. The first sentence was a brief self-accusation, what followed was the defense--a sinner"s _apologia pro vita sua_. He had behaved like a scoundrel to his wife. To other women too, if you like, but it had been fair fighting with them, brute against beast, an even match. While she--she was not a woman; she was an adorable mixture--two parts child to one part angel. And he, Tyson, had never been an angel, and it was a long time since he had been a child. That accounted for everything. Barring his marriage, none of his crimes had been committed in cold blood; but he had gone into _that_ with his eyes open, knowing himself to be incapable of the feeling women call love. (Of course, there was always the other thing.) But that love of his wife"s was something divine--a thing to believe in, not to see. Men were not made to mate with divinities. He ought to have fallen down and worshiped the little thing, not married her. But was it his fault!
That particular crime would never have been committed if he had been left to himself. It was not the will of G.o.d; it was that will of the old man Tyson. The whole thing was a cursed handicap from beginning to end. He was strong; but the world and life and destiny were a bit stronger--it was three to one, and two out of the three were women--see? It"s always two to one on them. You can"t hit out straight from the shoulder when you fight with women, Stanny. If you can keep "em going, it"s about all.
He had nothing to say against Destiny, mind. Destiny fights fair enough (for a woman), and she had fought fair with him. She had picked him up out of the dirt when the scrimmage was hottest, and pitched him into the desert to die. It was better to die out here in the desert cleanly, than to die in the gutter at home. If only he could die fighting!
Now, whatever may be said of this remarkable doc.u.ment, at any rate it bore on the face of it a pa.s.sionate veracity. But it gave the lie to every word of his letter to his wife. Tyson had dashed it off in hot haste, risen to his work, and then he must have sat down again to write that letter. Taken singly, the three doc.u.ments were misleading; taken altogether, they formed a masterpiece of autobiography. The self-revelation was lucid and complete; it gave you Tyson the man of no cla.s.s, Tyson the bundle of paradoxes, British and Bohemian, cosmopolitan and barbarian; the brute with the immortal human soul struggling perpetually to be.
He put the diary into his dispatch-box. It was found there afterwards, and published with a few other letters. Everybody knows that simple straightforward record; it shows Tyson at his bravest and his best. If he had tried to separate the little gold of his life from the dross of it he could not have succeeded better. He looked over the postscript hurriedly.
When he came to the words, "Knowing myself to be incapable of the feeling women call love," he compared it with the other letter, "There would have been far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the feeling." The two statements did not exactly tally; but what else could he say? And it was too late to mend it now.
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."