Three weeks and they were still in London. If they could only have risen

up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful

flat forever! But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her

journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal

was hardly to be thought of yet. The doctor was consulted.

"I must examine the heart," said the man of science.

He examined the heart.

"Better wait another week," he said, shortly. Brevity is the soul of

medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.

So they waited a week, three weeks in fact. The delay gave Tyson time to

study the New Life in all its bearings. At first it seemed to him that he

too had attained. He was ready to fall in with all his wife's innocent

schemes. For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with

excitement that was pleasure in itself. He was perfectly prepared for an

open rupture with the past, or, indeed, for any sudden and violent course

of action, the more violent the better. He dreamed of cataclysms and

upheavals, of trunks packed hastily in the night, of flight by express

trains from London, the place of all disaster. His soul would have been

appeased by a telegram.

Instead of telegrams he received doctors' bulletins, contradictory,

ambiguous, elusive. They began to get on his nerves.

Still, there could be no possible doubt that he had attained. At any rate

he had advanced a considerable distance on the way of peace. It looked

like it; he was happy without anything to make him happy, a state which

seemed to be a feature of the New Life.

The New Life was not exhausting. He had an idea that he could keep it up

indefinitely. But at the end of the first fortnight he realized that he

was drifting, not towards peace, but towards a horrible, teeming,

stagnant calm. Before long he would be given over to dullness and

immitigable ennui.

A perfectly sane man would have faced the facts frankly. He would have

pulled himself together, taken himself out of the house, and got

something to do. And under any other circumstances, this is what Tyson

would have done. Unfortunately, he considered it his duty as a repentant

husband to stay at home; and at home he stayed, cultivating his emotions.

Ah, those emotions! If Tyson had been simply and passionately vicious

there might have been some chance for him. But sentimentalism, subtlest

source of moral corruption, worked in him like that hectic disease that

flames in the colors of life, flouting its wretched victim with an

extravagant hope. The deadly taint was spreading, stirred into frightful

activity by the shock of his wife's illness. He stayed indoors, lounging

in easy-chairs, and lying about on sofas; he smoked, drank, yawned; he

hovered in passages, loomed in doorways; he hung about his wife's

bedroom, chattering aimlessly, or sat in silence and deep depression by

her side. In vain she implored him to go out, for goodness' sake, and get

some fresh air. Once or twice, to satisfy her, he went, and yawned

through a miserable evening at some theatre, when, as often as not, he

left before the end of the first act. Hereditary conscience rose up and

thrust him violently from the house; outside, the spirit of the Baptist

minister, of the guileless cultivator of orchids, haled him by the collar

and dragged him home. Or he would spend whole afternoons looking into

shop windows in a dreamy quest of flowers, toys, trinkets, something that

would "suit my wife." Judging from the unconsidered trifles that he

brought home, he must have credited the poor little soul with criminally

extravagant tastes. The tables and shelves about her couch were heaped

with idiotic lumber, on which Mrs. Nevill Tyson looked with thoughtful

eyes.




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