So Nevill Tyson had left his wife. This was the most exciting act in the
drama that had entertained Drayton Parva for two years. He had brought
down the house. Presently it seemed that Drayton Parva was not unprepared
for the catastrophe. Miss Batchelor was sadly afraid that something of
this sort had been going on for long enough. But she had not condemned
Nevill Tyson wholesale and without a hearing; in these cases there are
always faults on both sides. A man as much in love with his wife as he
was would never have left her without some grounds. (I cannot think why
Miss Batchelor, being so clever, didn't see through Tyson; but there is
a point at which the cleverness of the cleverest woman ceases.) Anyhow,
if Mrs. Nevill Tyson was as innocent as one was bound to suppose, why did
she not come back to Drayton, to her mother? That was the proper thing
for her to do under the circumstances.
Have you ever sat by the seashore playing with pebbles in an idle mood?
You are not aiming at anything, you are much too lazy to aim; but some
god directs your arm, and, without thinking, you hit something that, ten
to one, you never would have hit if you had thought about it. After that
your peace is gone; you feel that you can never leave the spot till you
have hit that particular object again, with deliberate intent. So Miss
Batchelor, sitting by the shore of the great ocean of Truth, began by
throwing stones aimlessly about; and other people (being without sin)
picked them up and aimed them at Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Sometimes they hit
her, but more often they missed. They were clumsy. Then Miss Batchelor
joined in; and, because she found that she was more skillful than the
rest, she began, first to take a languid interest in the game, then to
play as if her life depended on it. She aimed with mathematical
precision, picking out all the tiny difficult places that other people
missed or grazed. Amongst them they had ended by burying Mrs. Nevill
Tyson up to her neck in a fairly substantial pile of pebbles. It only
needed one more stone to complete the work. Still, as I said before, Mrs.
Nevill Tyson's enemies were not particularly anxious to throw it.
This was reserved for another hand.
It was impossible for Mrs. Wilcox to live, even obscurely, in Drayton
Parva without hearing some garbled version of the current rumor. At first
she was a little shocked at finding her son-in-law under a cloud. But
if there is one truth more indisputable than another, it is that every
cloud has a handsome silver lining to it. (Though, indeed, from Mrs.
Wilcox's account of the matter, it was impossible to tell which was the
lining and which was the cloud.) The more she thought of it the more she
felt that there was nothing in it. There must be some misunderstanding
somewhere. Her optimism, rooted in ignorance, and watered with vanity,
had become a sort of hardy perennial.