Next morning a rumor set out from three distinct centers, Thorneytoft,
Meriden, and "The Cross-Roads," to the effect that Tyson had quarreled
seriously with Stanistreet. His wife, as might be imagined, was the
cause. After a hot dispute, in which her name had been rather freely
bandied about, it seems that Tyson had picked the Captain up by the
scruff of the neck and tumbled him out of the house.
By the evening the scandal was blazing like a fire.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson was undoubtedly a benefactor to her small public. She
had roused the intelligence of Drayton Parva as it had never been roused
before. Conjecture followed furtively on her footsteps, and inference met
her and stared her in the face. No circumstance, not even Sir Peter's
innocent admiration, was too trivial to furnish a link in the chain of
evidence against her. Not that a breath of slander touched Sir Peter. He,
poor old soul, was simply regarded as the victim of diabolical
fascinations.
After the discomfiture of Stanistreet, Mrs. Nevill Tyson's movements were
watched with redoubled interest. Her appearances were now strictly
limited to those large confused occasions which might be considered open
events--Drayton races, church, the hunt ball, and so on. Only the casual
stranger, languishing in magnificent boredom by Miss Batchelor's side,
followed Mrs. Nevill Tyson with a kindly eye.
"Who is that pretty little woman in the pink gown?" he would ask in his
innocence.
"Oh, that is Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She is pretty," would be the answer,
jerked over Miss Batchelor's shoulder. (That habit was growing on her.) "And who or what is Mrs. Nevill Tyson?"
Whereupon Miss Batchelor would suddenly recover her self-possession and
reply, "Not a person you would care to make an intimate friend of."
And at this the stranger smiled or looked uncomfortable according to his
nature.
Public sympathy was all with Tyson. If ever a clever man ruined his life
by a foolish marriage, that man was Tyson. Opinions differed as to the
precise extent of Mrs. Tyson's indiscretion; but her husband was held to
have saved his honor by his spirited ejection of Captain Stanistreet, and
he was respected accordingly.
Meanwhile the hero of this charming fiction was unconscious of the fine
figure he cut. He was preoccupied with the unheroic fact, the ridiculous
cause of a still more ridiculous quarrel. Looking back on it, he was
chiefly conscious of having made more or less of a fool of himself.
After all, Tyson knew men. On mature reflection it was simply impossible
to regard Stanistreet as a purveyor of puerile gossip, or seriously to
believe that such gossip had been the cause of his disaster. That was
only the last of a long train of undignified circumstances which had made
his position in Drayton Parva insupportable; it lent a little more point
to the innuendo on every tongue, the intelligence in every eye. He was
sick with disgust, and consumed with the desire to get out of it all, to
cut Drayton Parva for good. The accursed place was trying to stare him
out of countenance. Everywhere he turned there was a stare: it was on the
villagers' faces, behind Miss Batchelor's eye-glass, on the bare fields
with their sunken fences, and on that abominable bald-faced house of his.