This morning Mrs. Nevill Tyson did not so much as raise her head. She was

sitting by the fire in her usual drooping guilty attitude. Swinny noticed

that the hearth was strewn with the fragments of torn letters. She put

the baby down on a rug by the window, and left his mother alone with him

to see what she would do.

She did nothing. Baby lay on the floor sucking his little claw-like

fingers, and stirring feebly in the sun. Mrs. Nevill Tyson continued

to gaze abstractedly at nothing. When Swinny came back after a judicious

interval, he was still lying there, and she still sitting as before. She

had not moved an inch. How did Swinny know that? Why, the tail of Mrs.

Tyson's dress was touching the exact spot on the carpet it had touched

before. (Swinny had made a note of the pattern.) And the child might have

cried himself into fits before she'd have stirred hand or foot to comfort

him. Baby found himself caught up in a rapture and strained to his

faithful Swinny's breast. Whereupon he cried. He had been happier lying

in the sun.

Swinny turned round to the motionless figure by the hearth, and held the

child well up in her arms.

"Baby thinks that his mamma would like to see him," said Swinny, in an

insinuating manner.

A hard melancholy voice answered, "I don't want to see him. I don't want

to see him any more."

All the same Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned and looked after him as he was

carried through the doorway. She could just see the downy back of his

innocent head, and his ridiculous frock bulging roundly over the nurse's

arm. But whether she was thinking of him at that moment God only knows.

The household was informed that its master would not return that evening

after all; that no date was fixed for his coming.

Later on Pinker, the guardian of the hearth, finding those fragments of

letters tried to put them together again. Tyson's letter it was

impossible to restore. It had been torn to atoms in a vicious fury of

destruction. But by great good luck Stanistreet's (a mere note) had been

more tenderly dealt with. It was torn in four neat pieces; the text,

though corrupt, was fairly legible, and left little to the ingenuity of

the scholiast. The Captain was staying in the neighborhood. He proposed

to call on Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Would she be at home on Wednesday

afternoon? Now, to Pinker's certain knowledge, Mrs. Nevill Tyson had

taken the letters to the post herself that morning. That meant secrecy,

and secrecy meant mischief.

How was she going to get through the next two days? This was provided

for. Baby was a bad sleeper. That night he cried as he had never cried

before. Not violently; he was too weak for that, but with a sound like

the tongue-tied whimper of some tiny animal. Swinny had slept through

worse noise many a night. Now he cried from midnight to cock-crow; and on

Tuesday morning Swinny was crying too. He had had one of his "little

attacks," after which he began to show signs of rapid wasting.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024