Tyson looked at his watch. "Look there, Stanistreet, it's two
o'clock--there must be some blundering. I'll speak to Baker. What are
those damned doctors thinking of! Why can't they have done with it? Why
can't they put her under chloroform?"
One by one the lamps over the billiard-table died down and went out; the
firelight leapt and started on the wall, making the gloom of the great
room visible; in the half-darkness Tyson became clairvoyant, and his
self-reproach grew dominant and clamorous. "It's all my fault--if she
dies it'll be my fault! But how was I to know? How could I tell that
anything like this would happen? I swear I'd die rather than let her go
through this villainy a second time. It's infamous--I'll kill myself
before it happens again!" He flung himself on the sofa and turned his
face to the wall, muttering invectives, blasphemies--a confused furious
arraignment of the finite and the Infinite.
At three o'clock the doctors sent for him. When he came back he was very
silent. He lay down again quietly, and from time to time his lips moved,
whether in imprecation or prayer it was hard to say; but it struck
Stanistreet that Tyson's mind had veered again to the orthodoxy of
terror.
There was silence overhead too. They were putting her under chloroform.
Another hour and the window-panes glimmered as if a tissue of liquid air
were spread between them and the darkness. There was a break in the night
outside, a livid streak of dawn; the objects in the room took curious
unintelligible shapes, the billiard-table in its white cloth became a
monstrous bed, a bier, a gleaming mausoleum. And with the dawn Tyson on
his sofa had dropped into a doze, and thence into a sleep. The night's
orgy of emotion had left his features in a curious moral disarray; once
or twice a sort of bubbling murmur rose to his lips. "Poor devil!"
thought Stanistreet, "I'd give anything to know how much he really
cared."
Stanistreet still watched. Mrs. Wilcox found him sitting bent forward,
with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands. He was
roused by her touch on his shoulder. He started when he saw her standing
over him, a strange figure in the dull light. She was clad in a long gray
dressing-gown, her hair uncurled, red rims round her eyes and dark
streaks under them, her mouth swollen and trembling. That night had been
a rude shock to her optimism.
Stanistreet never knew how he became possessed of her plump hand, nor
what he did with it. His eyes looked the question he was afraid to speak.
"It's all right--all per--perfectly right," stammered the optimist. "Wake
him up, please, and tell him he has got a son."