In three weeks' time from the date of the fire she was well enough to be
moved into the dining-room. Nevill carried her. They had to go through
the empty drawing-room, and as they passed they stopped and looked round
the desolate place. It struck them both that this was the scene of that
terrible last act of the drama of the old life.
"When we've once gone we will never, never come back again," she said.
"No. We burnt our ships in that blaze, Moll. Do you mind very much?"
"No. I shall never want to see it again. In our new house we won't have
anything to remind us of this."
"No, we'll have everything brand new, won't we?"
"Yes, brand new." She looked round her and smiled. "But it seems a little
sad, don't you think? It was a pretty room, and there were all my
things."
"Never mind. Plenty more where they came from."
They paused in the doorway.
"Ha! This is the way," said he, "that a bride used to be brought into her
husband's house. They lifted her up so!" As he spoke he raised her high
in his strong arms. He was smiling, glorying in his strength.
And that was the way Mrs. Nevill Tyson was carried over the threshold of
the New Life. Or was it not rather her spirit that had lifted his? He
too, unworthy, soiled and shamed with sin, had been suffered to go with
her a little way. For one luminous perfect moment he stood face to face
with her in the mystic marriage-chamber of the soul; he heard--if it were
only for a moment--the unspeakable epithalamium; he saw incomprehensible
things.
It had needed some violent appeal to the senses, the spectacle or idea
of physical agony, to rouse him to that first passion of pity and
tenderness. Something like this he had felt once before, in the night
watch at Thorneytoft, when the wife he had wronged lay in the clutches of
life and death. But now, for the first time in his married life, he loved
her. Surely this was the way of peace.
Surely, surely. She lay down in her gladness and prayed the prayer of her
wedding-night: that God would make her a good wife. She did not pray that
Nevill might be made a good husband; of his sins she had never spoken,
not even to her God.
As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, in the joy of his heart he thanked whatever gods
there might happen to be for his unconquerable soul.