"Neuralgia! Why couldn't he give her a stomach-ache for a change?"

Now, when Tyson expressed his opinion of Sir Peter with such delightful

frankness, both he and Mrs. Nevill had overlooked the trifling fact

that Pinker, the footman, while to all outward appearance absorbed in

emptying a coal-scuttle, was listening with all his ears. Pinker was an

intelligent fellow, interested in local politics, still more interested

in the affairs of his master and mistress. The dust upon those

visiting-cards had provided Pinker with much matter for reflection. Now

men will say anything in the passion of elections; but when it was

reported that Mr. Nevill Tyson had in private pronounced Sir Peter to be

a "miserable time-server," and in public (that is to say, in Drayton Town

Hall) declared excitedly--"We will have no time-servers--men who will go

through any gate you open for them--we Leicestershire people want a man

who rides straight across country, and doesn't funk his fences!" And when

Sir Peter remarked that "no doubt Mr. Tyson had taken some nasty ones in

his time," everybody knew that there was something more behind all this

than mere party feeling. Sir Peter was right: that electioneering

business was Tyson's third great mistake. It proved, what nobody would

have been very much aware of, that Nevill Tyson, Esquire, had next to no

standing in the county. As a public man he was worse off than he would

have been as a harmless private individual. He could never have been

found out if he had only stayed quietly at home and devoted himself to

the cultivation of orchids, in the manner of old Tyson, who had managed

to hoodwink himself and his neighbors into the belief that he was a

country gentleman. As it was, for such a clever fellow Tyson had

displayed stupidity that was almost ridiculous. For nobody ever denied

that he was a clever fellow, that he could have been anything that he

liked; in fact, he had been most things already. Anything he

liked--except a country gentleman. The country gentleman, like the

poet, is born, not made; and it was a question if Tyson had ever been

a gentleman at all. He had all the accidents of the thing, but not its

substance, its British stability and reserve. Civilization was rubbing

off him at the edges; he seemed to be struggling against some primeval

tendency. You expected at any moment to see a reversion to some earlier

and uglier type. Across the chastened accents of the journalist there

sounded the wild intemperate tongue of the man of the people. Miss

Batchelor used to declare that Tyson was a self-made man, because he was

constructed on such eccentric principles. His slightest movements showed

that he was uncertain of his ground, and ready to fight you for it, if

it came to that. And now he still met you with the twinkle in his small

blue eyes, but there was a calculating light behind it, as if he were

measuring his forces against yours. And you were sorry for him in spite

of yourself. With the spirit of the soldier of Fortune, Tyson had the

nerves and temper of her spoilt child. He had made an open bid for

popularity and failed, and it was positively painful to see him writhing

under the consciousness of his failure.




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