Tyson left the box before the close of the last act. She kept her place
for ten minutes after the fall of the curtain, while the crowd streamed
out. She stood long after the house was empty, saying nothing, but
waiting--waiting. Once she looked piteously at Stanistreet. Her fingers
trembled so that she could not fasten her cloak, her gloves. He helped
her. A weird little ghost of a smile fluttered to her lips and vanished.
They hurried out at last along empty passages. Tyson was nowhere to be
seen. They drove quickly home.
At the corner of Francis Street the hansom drew up with a jerk and
waited. A crowd blocked the way. She leaned forward with a little cry.
What was it? An accident? No; a fight. The great swinging lamps over
the door of a public-house threw their yellow light on a ring of brutal
faces, men and women, for the most part drunk, trampling, hustling,
shouldering each other in their haste to break through to the center. A
girl reeled from the public-house and stood on the edge of the pavement
bawling a vile song. A man lurched up against the side of the hansom;
a coarse swollen face flaming with drink was pressed to the glass, close
to her own. As she shrank back in horror, turning her head away from the
evil thing, her face sought Stanistreet, the soft fringe of her hair
brushed against his cheek. She had never been so near to him, never, in
the abstraction of her terror, so far away. To-night everything combined
to make his own meaning clear to him, sharpened his fierce indignant
longing to take her away, out of the hell where these things were
possible, to protect her forever from the brutalities of life.
There was a stir; the crowd swayed forward and began to move. They
followed slowly in its wake, hemmed in by the rabble that streamed
towards Ridgmount Gardens, to lose itself in the black slums of
Bloomsbury. On the pavement the reeling girl was swept on with the crowd,
still singing her hideous song. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was leaning back now,
with her eyes closed, not heeding the ugly pageant. But the scene came
back to her in nightmares afterwards.
As Stanistreet's hansom turned after leaving her at Ridgmount Gardens, he
thought he saw some one remarkably like Tyson standing in the shadow of
the railings opposite her door. He must have seen them; and but for the
delay they would probably have overtaken and so missed him.
And Stanistreet kept on saying to himself: No. Women do not love like
that. And yet the bare idea of it turned Stanistreet, the cool, the
collected, into a trembling maniac. He could not face the possibility of
losing her, of being nothing to her. But for that he might have been
content to go on drifting indefinitely, sure of a sort of visionary
eternity, taking no count of time. He had been happy in his doubt. Once
it had tormented him; he had struggled against it; later, it had become
a source of endless interest, like a man's amusing dialogues with his own
soul; now, it was the one solitary refuge of his hope. He clung to it, he
could not let it go. He staked his all on the folly, the frailty of
Mrs. Nevill Tyson.