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.