Coryston walked back to Knatchett at a furious pace, jumped on his bicycle,
and went off to find Marion Atherstone--the only person with whom he could
trust himself at the moment. He more than suspected that Marcia in a fit
of sentimental folly would relent toward Newbury in distress--and even his
rashness shrank from the possibility of a quarrel which might separate him
from his sister for good. But liberate his soul he must; and he thirsted
for a listener with whom to curse bigots up and down. In Marion's mild
company, strangely enough, the most vigorous cursing, whether of men or
institutions, had always in the end calming results. To Marion, however,
led by a sure instinct, he went.
Meanwhile the motor which passed Newbury and Coryston in the park had sped
to its goal. It had already carried Arthur Coryston over half the county.
That morning he had been told at the Atherstones' cottage, on his
breathless arrival there, just before luncheon, that while the Chancellor
had returned to town, Miss Glenwilliam had motored to a friend's house,
some twenty miles north, and was not going back to London till the evening.
Arthur Coryston at once pursued her. Sorely against her will, he had forced
the lady to an interview, and in the blind rage of his utter defeat and
discomfiture, he left her again in hot quest of that explanation with his
mother which Enid Glenwilliam had honestly--and vainly--tried to prevent.
Lady Coryston meanwhile was bewildered by his absence. During the lonely
hours when Marcia, from a distance, had once caught sight of her crossing
an open window in her sitting-room, she had not been able to settle to any
occupation, still less to rest. She tried to write out the Agenda of an
important Primrose League meeting over which she was to preside; to put
together some notes of her speech. In vain. A strange heaviness weighed
upon her. The only stimulus that worked--and that only for a time--was a
fierce attack on Glenwilliam in one of the morning papers. She read it
hungrily; but it brought on acute headache, which reduced her to idleness
and closed eyes.
After a while she roused herself to pull down a blind against a teasing
invasion of sun, and in doing so she perceived a slim, white figure
hurrying away from the house, through the bright-colored mazes of the
Italian garden. Marcia! She remembered vaguely that Marcia had come to her
that morning in trouble about what? She could not remember. It had seemed
to her of importance.
At last, about half an hour after she had seen Marcia disappear in the
shrubbery paths leading to the East Wood, Lady Coryston, startled by a
sound from the fore-court, sat suddenly erect on her sofa. A motor?
She rose, and going to a little mirror on the wall, she straightened the
lace coiffure she habitually wore. In doing so she was struck--dismayed
even--by her own aspect.
"When this is all over, Marcia and I perhaps might go abroad for a week or
two," she thought.
A swift step approaching--a peremptory knock at the door.
"Come in!"
Arthur entered, and with his back against the door stood surveying
his mother. She waited for him to speak, expecting violence. For some
moments--in vain. Except in so far as his quick-breathing silence, his look
of dry, hollow-eyed exasperation spoke--more piercingly than words.
"Well, Arthur," she said, at last, "I have been expecting you for some
time."
"I have been trying to put the mischief you have done me straight," he
said, between his teeth.
"I have done you no mischief that I know of. Won't you come and sit down
quietly--and talk the whole matter over? You can't imagine that I desire
anything but your good!"
His laugh seemed to give her physical pain.
"Couldn't you take to desiring something else, mother, than my 'good' as
you call it? Because, I tell you plainly, it don't suit my book. You have
been meddling in my affairs!--just as you have always meddled in them, for
matter of that! But this time you've done it with a vengeance--you've done
it _damnably_!" He struck his hand upon a table near. "What right had
you"--he approached her threateningly--"what earthly right had you to go
and see Enid Glenwilliam yesterday, just simply that you might spoil my
chances with her! Who gave you leave?"
He flung the questions at her.
"I had every right," said Lady Coryston, calmly. "I am your mother--I
have done everything for you--you owe your whole position to me. You
were ruining yourself by a mad fancy. I was bound to take care that
Miss Glenwilliam should not accept you without knowing all the facts.
But--actually--as it happens--she had made up her mind--before we met."
"So she says!--and I don't believe a word of it--_not--one--word_! She
wanted to make me less mad with you. She's like you, mother, she thinks
she can manage everybody. So she tried to cram me--that it was Glenwilliam
persuaded her against me. Rot! If you hadn't gone and meddled, if you
hadn't treated her like dirt--if you hadn't threatened to spoil my
prospects, and told her you'd never receive her--if you hadn't put her
back up in a hundred ways--she'd have married me. It's
you--you--_you_--that have done it!"
He threw himself on a chair in front of her, his hands on his knees,
staring at her. His aspect as of a man disorganized and undone by baffled
passion, repelled and disgusted her. Was this her Arthur?--her perfect
gentleman--her gay, courteous, well-behaved darling--whose mingled docility
and good breeding had, so far, suited both her affection and her love of
rule so well? The deep under-sense of disaster which had held her all day,
returned upon her in ten-fold strength. But she fronted him bravely.
"You are, as it happens, entirely wrong, Arthur. It's not I who have done
it--but Miss Glenwilliam's own good sense--or her father's. Of course I
confess frankly that I should have done my best--that I did, if you like,
do my best, to prevent your marriage with Miss Glenwilliam. And as for
right, who else had a right, if not I? Was it not most unkind, most
undutiful on your part!"--her tone was a tone of battle--"was it not an
outrage on your father's memory--that you should even entertain the
notion of such a connection? To bring the daughter of that man into this
family!--after all we have done--and suffered--for our principles--it's
you, who ought to ask _my_ pardon, Arthur, and not I yours! Times
without number, you have agreed with me in despising people who have
behaved as if politics were a mere game--a trifle that didn't matter. You
have told me often, that things were getting too hot; you couldn't be
friends in private, with people you hated in public; people you looked
upon as robbers and cheats. And then--_then_--you go and let this
infatuation run away with you--you forget all your principles--you forget
your mother, and all you owe her--and you go and ask this girl to marry
you--whose father is our personal and political enemy--a political
adventurer who is trying to pull down and destroy everything that you and I
hold sacred--or ought to hold sacred!"
"For goodness' sake, mother, don't make a political speech!" He turned upon
her with angry contempt. "That kind of thing does all very well to spout
at an election--but it won't do between you and me. I _don't_ hate
Glenwilliam--_there_! The estates--and the property--and all we hold
sacred, as you call it--will last my time--and his. And I jolly well don't
care what happens afterward. _He's_ not going to do us much harm.
England's a deal tougher proposition than he thinks. It's you women who get
up such a hullabaloo--I declare you make politics a perfect devilry! But
then"--he shrugged his shoulders fiercely--"I'm not going to waste time in
arguing. I just came to tell you _what I intend to do_; and then I'm
going up to town. I've ordered the motor for seven o'clock."
Lady Coryston had risen, and stood, with one hand on the mantelpiece,
looking down upon her son.
"I shall be glad indeed to hear what you intend to do, Arthur. I see you
have missed two or three important divisions lately."
He burst out:
"And they won't be the last either, by a good way. I'm going to chuck it,
mother! And if you don't like it--you can blame yourself!"
"What do you mean?"
He hesitated a moment--then spoke deliberately.
"I intend to leave Parliament after this session. I do! I'm sick of it. A
friend of mine has got a ranch forty miles from Buenos Ayres. He wants me
to go in with him--and I think I'll try it. I want something to distract my
mind from these troubles."
Lady Coryston's eyes blazed in her gray-white face, which not even her
strong will could keep from trembling.
"So this, Arthur, is the reward you propose for all that has been done for
you!--for the time, the thought, the money that has been showered upon
you--"
He looked at her from under his eyebrows, unmoved.
"I should have remembered all that, mother, if you--Look here! Have you
ever let me, in anything--for one day, one hour--call my soul my own--since
I went into Parliament? It's true I deceived you about Enid. I was
literally _afraid_ to tell you--there! You've brought me to that!
And when a man's afraid of a woman--it somehow makes a jelly of
him--altogether. It was partly what made me run after Enid--at first--that
I was doing something independent of you--something you would hate, if you
knew. Beastly of me, I know!--but there it was. And then you arranged that
meeting here, without so much as giving me a word's notice!--you told Page
_before you told me_. And when I kicked--and told you about Enid--did
you ever come afterward and talk to me nicely about her?--did you ever,
even, consider for one moment what I told you?--that I was in love with
her?--dead gone on her? Even if I was rude to you that day when you dragged
it out of me, most mothers, I think, would have been sorry for a fellow--"
His voice suddenly broke; but he instantly recovered himself.
"Instead of that, mother--you only thought of how you could thwart and
checkmate me--how you could get _your_ way--and force me to give up
mine. It was _abominable_ of you to go and see Enid, without a word to
me!--it was _abominable_ to plot and plan behind my back, and then to
force yourself on her and insult her to her face! Do you think a girl of
any spirit whatever would put herself in your clutches after that? No!--she
didn't want to come it too hard on you--that's her way!--so she made up
some tale about Glenwilliam. But it's as plain as the nose in your face!
You've ruined me!--you've ruined me!"
He began to walk furiously up and down, beside himself again with rage and
pain.
Lady Coryston dropped into a chair. Her large, blanched face expressed a
passion that even at this supreme moment, and under the sense of doom that
was closing on her, she could not restrain.
"It is not I who have ruined you, Arthur--as you put it--though of course
you're not ruined at all!--but your own wanton self-will. Are you really so
lost to all decency--all affection--that you can speak to your mother like
this?"
He turned and paused--to throw her an ugly look.
"Well--I don't know that I'm more of a brute than other men--but it's no
good talking about affection to me--after this. Yes, I suppose you've been
fond of me, mother, in your way--and I suppose I've been fond of you. But
the fact is, as I told you before, I've stood in _fear_ of you!--all
my life--and lots of things you thought I did because I was fond of you, I
did because I was a coward--a disgusting coward!--who ought to have been
kicked. And that's the truth! Why, ever since I was a small kid--"
And standing before her, with his hands on his sides, all his pleasant face
disfigured by anger and the desire to wound, he poured out upon her a flood
of recollections of his childhood and youth. Beneath the bitterness and the
shock of it, even Lady Coryston presently flinched. This kind of language,
though never in such brutal terms, she had heard from Corry once or twice.
But, Arthur!--She put up a trembling hand.
"That's enough, Arthur! We had better stop this conversation. I have done
the best I could for you--always."
"Why didn't you _love_ us!" he cried, striking a chair beside him for
emphasis. "Why didn't you _love_ us! It was always politics--politics!
Somebody to be attacked--somebody to be scored off--somebody to be squared.
And a lot of stupid talk that bored us all! My poor father was as sick of
it often as we were. He had enough of it out of doors. Damn politics for
women, I say--damn them!"
Lady Coryston raised her hand.
"_Go_, Arthur! This is enough."
He drew a long breath.
"Upon my soul, I think it is. We'd better not excite each other any more.
I'll speak to Sir Wilfrid, mother, before I go, and ask him to report
various things to you, which I have to say. And I shall go and see the
Whips to-night. Of course I don't want to do the party any harm. If there
is a general election in the autumn, all that need happen is that I sha'n't
stand again. And as to the estates"--he hesitated--"as to the estates,
mother, do as you like. Upon my word I think you'd better give them back to
Coryston! A certain amount of money is all I shall want."
"Go!" said Lady Coryston again, still pointing.
He stood a moment, fiddling with some ornaments on a table near him, then
caught up his hat with a laugh--and still eying her askance, he walked to
the door, opened it, and disappeared; though he closed it so uncertainly
that Lady Coryston, until, after what seemed an interval, she heard his
footsteps receding, could not be sure that he was really gone.
But he was gone; and all the plans and hopes of her later life lay in ashes
about her. She sat motionless. After half an hour she heard the sound of a
motor being driven away from the front of the house. Through the evening
air, too, she caught distant voices--which soon ceased.
She rang presently for her maid, and said she would dine in her room,
because of a bad headache. Marcia came, but was not admitted. Sir Wilfrid
Bury asked if he might see her, just for a few minutes. A message referred
him to the next morning.
Dinner came and went down untouched. Whenever she was ill, Lady Coryston's
ways were solitary and ungracious. She hated being "fussed over." So that
no one dared force themselves upon her. Only, between ten and eleven,
Marcia again came to the door, knocked gently, and was told to go away. Her
mother would be all right in the morning. The girl reluctantly obeyed.
The state of terrible tension in which Lady Coryston passed that night had
no witness. It could only be guessed at, by Marcia, in particular, to
whom it fell afterward to take charge of her mother's papers and personal
affairs. Lady Coryston had apparently gathered all Arthur's, letters to her
together, from the very first to the very latest, tied them up neatly, and
laid them in the drawer which held those of her dead husband. She had begun
to write a letter to Coryston, but when found, it was incoherent, and could
not be understood. She had removed the early photographs of Arthur from her
table, and a larger, recent one of the young M.P., taken in London for the
constituency, which was on her mantelpiece, and had placed them both face
downward in the same drawer with the letters. And then, when she had found
it impossible to write what she wished to write, she seemed to have gone
back to her arm-chair, taking with her two or three of Arthur's Eton
reports--by what instinct had she chosen them out from the piles of
letters!--and a psalter she often used. But by a mere accident, a sinister
trick of fate, when she was found, the book lay open under her hand at one
of those imprecatory psalms at which Christendom has at last learned to
shudder. Only a few days before, Sir Wilfrid Bury had laughed at her--as
only he might--for her "Old Testament tone" toward her enemies, and had
quoted this very psalm. Her helpless fingers touched it.
But the night was a night of vigil for others also. Coryston, who could not
sleep, spent the greater part of it first in writing to Marion Atherstone,
and then in composing a slashing attack upon the High Church party for its
attitude toward the divorce laws of the country, and the proposals recently
made for their reform. "How much longer are we going to allow these
black-coated gentlemen to despise and trample on the laws under which
the rest of us are content to live!--or to use the rights and powers
of property for the bare purpose of pressing their tyrannies and their
superstitions on other people?"
Meanwhile, in the beautiful chapel of Hoddon Grey, Edward Newbury, worn out
with the intolerable distress of the preceding forty-eight hours, and yet
incapable of sleep, sat or knelt through long stretches of the night. The
chapel was dark but for one light. Over the altar there burnt a lamp, and
behind it could be seen, from the chair, where he knelt, the silk veil of
the tabernacle. Reservation had been permitted for years in the Hoddon Grey
chapel, and the fact had interwoven itself with the deepest life of
the household, eclipsing and dulling the other religious practices
of Anglicanism, just as the strong plant in a hedgerow drives out or
sterilizes the rest. There, in Newbury's passionate belief, the Master of
the House kept watch, or slept, above the altar, as once above the Galilean
waves. For him, the "advanced" Anglican, as for any Catholic of the Roman
faith, the doctrine of the Mass was the central doctrine of all religion,
and that intimate and personal adoration to which it leads, was the
governing power of life. The self-torturing anguish which he had suffered
ever since the news of the two suicides had reached him could only endure
itself in this sacred presence; and it was there he had taken refuge under
the earlier blow of the breach with Marcia.
The night was very still--a night of soft showers, broken by intervals of
starlight. Gradually as the darkness thinned toward dawn, the figures,
stoled and winged and crowned, of the painted windows, came dimly forth,
and long rays of pale light crept over the marble steps and floor, upon the
flowers on the altar and the crucifix above it. The dawn flowed in silently
and coldly; the birds stirred faintly; and the white mists on the lawn and
fields outside made their way through the open windows, and dimmed the glow
of color on the walls and in the apse.
In those melancholy and yet ardent hours Edward Newbury reached the utmost
heights of religious affirmation, and the extreme of personal renunciation.
It became clear to a mind attuned for such thoughts, that, by severing him
from Marcia, and, at the same time, and by the same stroke, imposing upon
him at least some fraction of responsibility--a fraction which his honesty
could not deny--for the deaths of John and Alice Betts, God had called him,
Edward Newbury, in a way not to be mistaken and not to be refused. His life
was henceforth forfeit--forfeit to his Lord. Henceforth, let him make of
it a willing sacrifice, an expiatory oblation, perpetually renewed, and
offered in perpetual union with the Divine Victim, for their souls and his
own.
The ideas of the Conventual house in which he had so lately spent hours of
intense religious happiness closed upon him and possessed him. He was
not to marry. He was reserved for the higher counsels, the Counsels of
Perfection. The face and talk of his friend Brierly, who was so soon going
to his dangerous and solitary post in Southern India, haunted his mind, and
at last seemed to show him a way out of his darkness. His poor father and
mother! But he never doubted for one moment that they would give him up,
that they would let him follow his conscience.
By the time the sun was fairly up, the storm of religious feeling had died
down in Newbury. He had taken his resolve, but he was incapable of any
further emotion concerning it. On the other hand, his heart was alive to
the thought of Marcia, and of that letter she had sent him. Dear, generous
Marcia! Once more he would write to her--once more!
"DEAREST MARCIA,--I may call you so, I think, for the last time, and at
this turning-point of both our lives. I may never see you again; or if we
do meet, you will have become so strange to me that you will wonder in what
other and distant life it was that we loved each other. I think you did
love me for a little while, and I do bless and thank you that you let
me know you--and love you. And I bless you above all for the thought of
consolation and pity you had toward me, even yesterday, in those terrible
hours--when you offered to come back to me and help me, as though our bond
had never been broken.
"No, dear Marcia!--I saw the truth in your face yesterday. I could not make
you happy. I should set jarring a discord in your life for which it was
never meant. You did right, absolutely right, to separate yourself from one
whose inmost and irrevocable convictions repelled and shocked you. I may be
narrow and cold; but I am not narrow enough--or cold enough!--to let you
give yourself back to one you cannot truly love--or trust. But that you
offered it, because you were sorry for me, and that you would have carried
it out, firmly, your dear hand clenched, as it were, on the compact--that
warms my heart--that I shall have, as a precious memory, to carry into the
far-off life that I foresee.
"I cannot write much about the terrible thing at Redcross Farm. Your great
pity for me implies that you think me--and my father--in some way and in
some degree, responsible. Perhaps we are--I do not wish to shirk the truth.
If so, it is as soldiers under orders are responsible for the hurt and
damage they may cause, in their King's war--as much, and as little. At
least, so far as the main matter is concerned. That I might have been--that
I ought to have been--infinitely more loving, wiser, stronger to help
them--that I know--that I shall feel as long as I live. And it is a feeling
which will determine all my future life.
"You remember what I told you of Father Brierly and the Community of the
Ascension? As soon as I can leave my father and mother--they are at present
in deep distress--I shall probably go to the Community House in Lancashire
for a time. My present intention is to take orders, and perhaps to join
Brierly eventually in mission work. My father and mother are splendid! They
and I shall be separated perhaps in this world, but in that mysterious
other world which lies all about us even now, and which is revealed to us
in the Sacraments, we shall meet at last, and forever--if we are faithful.
"Good-by--God be with you--God give you every good thing in this
present time--love, children, friends--and, 'in the world to come, life
everlasting.'"
* * * * *
About the hour when the letter was finished, when the July sun was already
high over the dewy new-shorn fields, Coryston, after an hour's sleep in his
chair, and a bath, left Knatchett to walk to Coryston. He was oppressed by
some vague dread which would not let him rest. In the strong excitements
and animosities of the preceding day he had forgotten his mother. But the
memory of her face on the sofa during that Sunday reading had come back
upon him with unpleasant force. It had been always so with him in life. She
no sooner relapsed into the woman than he became a son. Only the experience
had been rare!
He crossed the Hoddon Grey park, and then walked through _a_ mile
of the Coryston demesne, till he reached the lake and saw beyond it the
Italian garden, with its statues glittering in the early sun--and the long
marble front of the house, with its rococo ornament, and its fine pillared
loggia. "What the deuce are _we_ going to do with these places!" he
asked himself in petulant despair. "And to think that Arthur won't be
allowed to sell it, or turn it to any useful purpose whatever!"
He skirted the lake, and began to mount the steps, and flagged paths of the
formal garden. Suddenly as he approached the garden front he saw that two
windows of his mother's sitting-room were open, and that some one--a figure
in black--was sitting in a high-backed arm-chair beside one of them. His
mother!--up?--at seven o'clock in the morning? Yet was it his mother? He
came nearer. The figure was motionless--the head thrown back, the eyes
invisible from where he stood. Something in the form, the attitude--its
stillness and strangeness in the morning light--struck him with horror. He
rushed to the garden door, found it open, dashed up the stairs, and into
his mother's room.
"Mother!"
Lady Coryston neither moved nor spoke. But as he came up to her, he saw
that she was alive--that her eyes opened and perceived him. Nothing else in
her lived or moved. And as he knelt down by her, and took her tenderly in
his arms, she relapsed into the unconscious state from which his entrance
had momentarily roused her.
* * * * *
What else there is to tell had best be told quickly. Lady Coryston lived
for some eight months after this seizure. She partially recovered from the
first stroke, and all the organization of the great house, and all the
thought of her children circled round the tragic death-in-life into which
she had fallen.
Arthur had come rushing back to Coryston after the catastrophe, restored
by it, like a stream which has wandered in flood, to the older and natural
channels of life. Bitter remorse for his conduct to his mother, and a sharp
resentment of Enid Glenwilliam's conduct toward himself, acted wholesomely.
He took up his normal occupations again, in Parliament and on the estates,
and talked no more of Buenos Ayres. But whether his mother's darkened mind
ever forgave him it would be difficult to say. She rarely noticed him,
and when she spoke it was generally for Coryston. Her dependence upon her
eldest son became a touching and poignant thing, deepening the souls of
both. Coryston came to live at Coryston, and between his love for Marion
Atherstone, and his nursing of his mother, was more truly happy for a time
than his character had ever yet allowed him to be. The din of battle,
political and religious, penetrated no more within a house where death came
closer day by day, and where weakness and suffering had at last united
these differing men and women in a common interest of profoundest pity.
Lady Coryston became strangely dear to her children before she left them
forever, and the last faint words she spoke, on that winter morning when
she died, were for Coryston, who had her hand in his. "Corry--Corry
darling"--and as he came closer--"Corry, who was my firstborn!"
On the night of Lady Coryston's death Reginald Lester wrote:
"Coryston has just taken me in to see his mother. She lies in a frowning
rest which does not--as death so often does--make any break with our
memories of her when alive. Attitude and expression are characteristic. She
is the strong woman still, conscious of immense power; and, if that shut
mouth could speak, and if health were given back to her, ready no doubt
still to use it tyrannously. There is no weakening and no repentance in the
face; and I like it better so. Nor did she ever really reverse, though she
modified, the exclusion of Coryston from the inheritance. She was able
during an interval of comparative betterment about Christmas-time, to make
an alteration in her will, and the alteration was no mere surrender to what
one sees to have been, at bottom, her invincible affection for Coryston.
She has still left Arthur the estates for life, but with remainder to
Coryston's son, should he have one, and she has made Coryston a trustee
together with Sir Wilfrid Bury. This will mean practically a division
between the brothers--to which Arthur has already pledged himself, so he
tells me--but with no power to Coryston to make such radical changes as
would destroy the family tradition, at least without Arthur's consent and
Sir Wilfrid's. But Coryston will have plenty of money and plenty of land
wherewith to experiment, and no doubt we shall see some strange things.
"Thus she kept her flag flying to the end, so far as the enfeebled brain
allowed. Yet the fact was that her state of dependence on her children
during her illness, and their goodness to her, did in truth evoke another
woman with new perceptions, superposed, as it were, upon the old. And
there, I think, came in her touch of greatness--which one could not have
expected. She was capable at any rate of _this_ surrender; not going
back upon the old--but just accepting the new. Her life might have petered
out in bitterness and irritation, leaving an odious memory. It became a
source of infinite sweetness, just because her children found out--to their
immense surprise--that she _could_ let herself be loved; and they
threw themselves with eagerness on the chance she gave them.
"She dies in time--one of the last of a generation which will soon have
passed, leaving only a procession of ghosts on a vanishing road. She had no
doubts about her place and prerogative in the world, no qualms about her
rights to use them as she pleased. Coryston also has no doubts--or few.
As to individuals he is perpetually disillusioned; as to causes he is as
obstinate as his mother. And independently of the Glenwilliam affair, that
is why, I think, in the end she preferred Coryston to Arthur, who will
'muddle through,' not knowing whither, like the majority of his kind.
"Marcia!--in her black dress, beside her mother, looking down upon
her--with that yearning look!--But--not a word! There are things too sacred
for these pages."
* * * * *
During the months of Lady Coryston's illness, indeed, Reginald Lester
entered, through stages scarcely perceived by himself and them, upon a new
relation toward the Coryston family. He became the increasingly intimate
friend and counselor of the Coryston brothers, and of Marcia, no less--but
in a fresh and profounder sense. He shared much of the estate business with
Mr. Page; he reconciled as best he could the jarring views of Coryston and
Arthur; he started on the reorganization of the great Library, in which, so
far, he had only dealt with a fraction of its possessions. And every day he
was Marcia's companion, in things intimate and moving, no less than in
the practical or commonplace affairs of ordinary life. It was he who read
poetry with her, or played accompaniments to her songs, in the hours of
relief from her nursing; it was he who watched and understood her; who
guided and yet adored her. His love for her was never betrayed; but it
gradually became, without her knowing it, the condition of her life. And
when Lady Coryston died, in the February following her stroke, and Marcia,
who was worn out, went abroad with Waggin for a few weeks' rest, the
correspondence which passed between her and Lester during the earlier days
of her absence, by the more complete and deliberate utterance which it
permitted between them, did at last reveal to the girl the depths of her
own heart.
During her travels various things happened.
One chilly afternoon, late in March, when a light powdering of snow lay on
the northern slopes of the hills, Coryston went up to the cottage in
the hopes of finding Marion Atherstone alone. There had been a quiet
understanding between them all the winter, more or less known to the
Coryston family, but all talk of marriage had been silenced by the
condition of Lady Coryston, who indeed never knew such schemes were in the
air.
About six weeks, however, after his mother's death, Coryston's natural
_fougue_ suggested to him that he was being trifled with. He burst
into the little sitting-room where Marion was just making tea, and sat
down, scowling, on the further side of the hearth.
"What is the matter?" Marion asked, mildly. During the winter a beautifying
change seemed to have passed upon Atherstone's daughter. She was younger,
better looking, better dressed; yet keeping always the touch of homeliness,
of smiling common-sense, which had first attracted a man in secret
rebellion against his own rhetoric and other people's.
"You are treating me abominably!" said Coryston, with vehemence.
"How? My conscience is as sound as a bell!" Wherewith, laughing, she handed
him his cup of tea.
"All bells aren't sound. Some are flawed," was the prompt reply. "I have
asked you twice this week to tell me when you will be good enough to marry
me, and you haven't said a single word in reply."
Marion was silent a little; then she looked up, as Andromache looked at
Hector--with a laugh, yet with something else fluttering behind.
"Let's ask ourselves once more, Herbert--is it really a wise thing to do?"
Nobody else since his father died had ever called Coryston by his Christian
name; which was perhaps why Marion Atherstone took a peculiar pleasure in
using it. Coryston had mostly forgotten that he possessed such a name, but
from her he liked it.
"What on earth do you mean by that?"
"In the first place, Herbert, I was never intended by nature to be a
peeress."
He sprang up furiously.
"I never heard a more snobbish remark! All that you are asked is to be my
wife."
She shook her head.
"We can't make a world for ourselves only. Then there's--father."
"Well, what about him?"
"You don't get on very well," she said, with a sigh.
Coryston controlled himself with difficulty.
"For your father, the Liberal party is mostly Jahve--the hope of the
children of light. For me the Liberal party is mostly Dagon--either made a
god of by Philistines, or groveling before a stronger God--Mammon. But that
don't matter. I can behave myself."
Marion bent over her work.
"Can't I behave myself?" he repeated, threateningly, as he moved nearer
her.
She looked up at last.
"Suppose you get bored with me--as you have with the Liberal party?"
"But never with liberty," he said, ardently.
"Suppose you come to see the seamy side of me--as you do of everybody?"
"I don't invent seamy sides--where none exist," he said, looking
peremptorily into her eyes.
"I'm not clever, Herbert--and I think I'm a Tory."
"Heavens, what do I care? You're the woman I happen to love."
"And I intend to go to church."
"Edward Newbury's kind of church?" he asked her, uneasily.
She shook her head.
"No. I'm an Evangelical."
"Thank the Lord! So am I," he said, fervently.
She laughed.
"It's true," he insisted. "Peace on earth--goodwill to men--that I can
understand. So that's settled. Now then--a fortnight next Wednesday?"
"No, no!" she said, in alarm, "certainly not. Wait a minute, Herbert! Where
are you going to live, and what are you going to do?"
"I'm taking over the Dorset estates. Lots to do on them, and not much
money. Arthur washes his hands of them. There's an old farm where we can
live. In six months I shall have quarreled with all the neighbors, and life
will be worth living again."
She lifted her eyebrows.
"A charming prospect for your wife!"
"Certainly. You'll have the life you were born for. You'll go round
after me--whitewashing the scandals I cause--or if you like to put it
sentimentally--binding up the wounds I make. But if I'm anything I'm a
sociologist, and my business is to make experiments. They will no doubt be
as futile as those I have been making here."
"And where shall I come in?"
"You'll be training up the boy--who'll profit by the experiments."
"The boy?"
"The boy--our boy--who's to have the estates," said Coryston, without a
moment's hesitation.
Marion flushed, and pulled her work to her again. Coryston dropped on his
knees beside her, and asked her pardon with eyes whereof the male audacity
had passed into a steady and shining tenderness.
When Coryston returned that night to the big house, he found his brothers
Arthur and James arrived for the week-end. Arthur was full of Parliamentary
gossip--"battles of kites and crows," of which Coryston was generally
intolerant. But on this occasion he took it silently, and Arthur rambled
on. James sat mildly beaming, with finger-tips joined, and the look of
one on the verge of a confidence. But he talked, after all--when Arthur
paused--only of music and the opera, and as his brothers were not musical,
he soon came to an end, and Arthur held the stage. They were gathered in
the smoking-room on the ground or garden floor, a room hung with pictures
of race-horses, and saddened by various family busts that had not been
thought good enough for the library. Outside, the March wind rattled
through trees as yet untouched by the spring, and lashed a shivering water
round the fountain nymphs.
"Whoever could have dreamed they would have held on till now!" said Arthur,
in reply to a perfunctory remark from James. Coryston looked up from a
reverie.
"Who? The Government? Lord!--what does it matter? Look here, you chaps--I
heard some news in Martover just now. Lord William Newbury died last
night--heart failure--expected for the last fortnight."
Arthur received the news with the lively professional interest that one
landowner feels in another, and tied a knot in his handkerchief to remind
himself to ask Page when the funeral was to be, as the Member for the
division must of course attend it. James said, thoughtfully:
"Edward, I saw, was ordained last week. And my letter from Marcia this
morning tells me she expects to see him in Rome, on his way to India. Poor
Lady William will be very much alone!"
"If you make a solitude and call it religion, what can you expect?" said
Coryston, sharply. His face had darkened at the Newburys' name. As always,
it had evoked the memory of two piteous graves. Then, as he got up from his
chair, he said to Arthur:
"I've fixed it up. Marion and I shall get married next month."
The brothers looked a little embarrassed, though not at all surprised.
Corry's attachment to this plain, sensible lady, of moderate opinions, had
indeed astonished them enormously when they first became aware of it; but
they were now used to it.
"All right, Corry!" said Arthur, slapping his brother on the back. "The
best chance of keeping you out of a madhouse! And a very nice woman! You
don't expect me to chum with her father?"
"Not unless you wish to learn a thing or two--which was never your strong
point," said Coryston, dodging a roll of some Parliamentary paper or other,
which Arthur aimed at him. He turned to James. "Well, James, aren't you
going to congratulate me?--And why don't you do it yourself?"
"Of course I congratulate you," said James, hastily. "Most sincerely!"
But his expression--half agitated, half smiling--betrayed emotions so far
beyond the needs of the situation, that Coryston gave him a puzzled glance.
James indeed opened his mouth as though to speak. Then a bright, pink color
overspread his whole countenance from brow to chin; his lips shut and he
fell back in his chair. Presently he went away, and could be heard playing
Bach on the organ in the central hall. He returned to London the same
evening carrying a cargo of philosophical books, from the library, and a
number of novels, though as a rule he never read novels.
The next morning, in a letter to Coryston, he announced his engagement to a
girl of nineteen, an orphan, and a pupil at the Royal College of Music. She
was the daughter of his Cambridge tutor--penniless, pretty, and musical. He
had paid her fees it seemed for several years, and the effect on him of her
charming mezzo-soprano voice, at a recent concert given by the College, had
settled the matter. The philosopher in love, who had been too shy to tell
his brothers _viva voce_, was quite free of tongue in writing; and
Coryston and Arthur, though they laughed, were glad that "old James" had
found the courage to be happy. Coryston remarked to Arthur that it now
remained for him to keep up the blue blood of the family.
"Or Marcia," said Arthur, evading the personal reference.
"Marcia?" Coryston threw his brother an amused, significant look, and said
nothing for a moment. But presently he dropped out:
"Lester writes that he'll be in Rome next week looking after that Borghese
manuscript. He doesn't expect to get back here till May."
For Lester had now been absent from Coryston some three or four weeks,
traveling on matters connected with the library.
Arthur made no comment, but stood awhile by the window in a brown-study,
twisting his lip, and frowning slightly. His nondescript features and
boyish manner scarcely allowed him at any time to play the magnate with
success. But his position as master of Coryston Place, the great family
house with its pompous tradition, and the long influence of his mother, had
by now asserted, or reasserted themselves; though fighting still with the
sore memory of Enid Glenwilliam. Was he going to allow his sister to marry
out of her rank--even though the lover were the best fellow in the world?
A man may marry whom he will, and the family is only secondarily affected.
But a woman is absorbed by the family of her husband.
He finally shrugged his shoulders over it.
"Marcia is as stiff-necked as Coryston," he said to himself, "if it comes
to that."
* * * * *
April followed. Amid a crowded Rome, alive with flowers and fountains under
a life-giving sun, Marcia Coryston became sharply conscious again of the
color and beauty interwoven with mere living, for the sane and sound among
men. Edward Newbury passed through on his way to Brindisi and Southern
India; and she saw him for an hour; an interview short and restrained, but
not to be forgotten by either of the two persons concerned. When it was
over Marcia shed a few secret tears--tears of painful sympathy, of an
admiration, which was half pity; and then threw herself once more with--as
it were--a gasp of renewed welcome, into the dear, kind, many-hued world
on which Edward Newbury had turned his back. Presently Lester arrived. He
became her constant companion through the inexhaustible spectacle of Rome;
and she could watch him among the students who were his fellows, modest
or learned as they, yet marked out from most of them by the signs he
bore--signs well known by now to her--of a poetic and eager spirit,
always and everywhere in quest of the human--of man himself, laughing or
suffering, behind his works. The golden days passed by; the blue and white
anemones bloomed and died in the Alban woods; the English crowd that comes
for Easter arrived and departed; and soon Marcia herself must go home,
carrying with her the passionate yet expectant feeling of a child, tired
out with happy days, and dreaming of more to come.
These were private and personal affairs. But in March a catastrophe
happened which shook the mind of England, and profoundly altered the course
of politics. An American yacht with Glenwilliam on board was overtaken
off the Needles by a sudden and terrific storm, and went down, without a
survivor, and with nothing but some floating wreckage to tell the tale. The
Chancellor's daughter was left alone and poor. The passionate sympathy
and admiration which her father's party had felt for himself was in some
measure transferred to his daughter. But to the amazement of many persons,
she refused with scorn any pecuniary help, living on a small income, and
trying her hand, with some prospect of success, at literature. About six
weeks after her father's death Arthur Coryston found her out and again
asked her to marry him. It is probable there was some struggle in her mind,
but in the end she refused. "You are a kind, true fellow!" she said to him,
gratefully, "but it wouldn't do--it wouldn't do!" And then with a darkening
of her strong face: "There is only one thing I can do for _him_
now--to serve his causes! And you don't care for one of them! No--no!
Good-by!--Good-by!"
At last, in May, Marcia came back again to live--as she supposed--at
Coryston with Arthur, and do her duty by her own people. A wonderful spring
was abroad in the land. The gorse on the slopes of the hills was a marvel,
and when the hawthorns came out beside it, or flung their bloom along the
hedgerows and the streams; when far and near the cuckoo's voice made the
new world of blossom and growth articulate; when furtive birds slipped
joyously to and fro between the nests above and a teeming earth below; when
the west winds veering between south and north, and driving the great white
clouds before them, made, every day, a new marvel of the sky--Marcia would
often hold her breath and know within herself the growth of an answering
and a heavenly spring. Lester finished his scholar's errands in Rome and
Naples, and returned to Coryston in the middle week of May, in order to
complete his work there. He found much more to do than he supposed; he
found his friends, Coryston and Arthur, eager to capture and keep him; he
found in every field and wood the kindling beauty of the year; he found
Marcia!--and a bewildering though still shy message in her dark eyes.
Through what doubts and scruples, through what stages of unfolding
confidence and growing joy their minds passed, and to what end it all moved
on, let those imagine, to whom the purest and deepest of human emotions has
ever spoken, or is speaking now.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Coryston Family, by Mrs. Humphry Ward