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.”

CHAPTER VI

A SON AND HEIR

It seems a simple thing to believe in the divinity of motherhood, when you have only seen it in the paintings of one or two old masters, or once in a while perhaps in flesh and blood, transfiguring the face of some commonplace vulgar woman whom, but for that, nobody would have called beautiful.  But sometimes the divine thing chooses some morsel of humanity like Mrs. Nevill Tyson, struggles with and overpowers it, rending the small body, spoiling the delicate beauty; and where you looked for the illuminating triumphant glory of motherhood, you find, as Tyson found, a woman with a pitiful plain face and apathetic eyes—­apathetic but for the dull horror of life that wakes in them every morning.

That Tyson had the sentiment of the thing is pretty certain.  When he went up to town (for he went, after all, when the baby was a week old), he brought back with him a picture (a Madonna of Botticelli’s, I think) in a beautiful frame, as a present for his wife.  Poor little soul!  I believe she thought he had gone up on purpose to get it (it was so lovely that he might well have taken a fortnight to find it); and she had it hung up over the chimney-piece in her bedroom, so that she could see it whether she were sitting up or lying down.