The Coryston Family - Mrs. Humphry Ward (best biographies to read TXT) 📗

/> Mrs. Betts rose, and with her hands on her sides and the tears on her cheeks she bent over Marcia, gasping, in a kind of frenzy. There was no acting now.

The girl of twenty-two was deeply, painfully moved. She put out her hands gently, and drew Mrs. Betts down again to the sofa beside her.

"I'm dreadfully sorry for you! I do wish I could help you. But you know what Lord and Lady William think, what Mr. Newbury thinks about divorced people marrying again. You know--how they've set a standard all their lives--for their people here. How can they go against all they've ever preached? You must see their point of view, too. You must think of their feelings. They hate--I'm sure they hate--making any one unhappy. But if one of the chief people on the estate does this, and they think it wicked, how--"

"Ah!" cried Mrs. Betts, eagerly interrupting. "But now please, _please_, Miss Coryston, listen! This is what I want, what I beg you to say to Mr. Newbury! I can't give John up--and he'll never give me up. But I'll go away--I'll go to a little cottage John has--it was his mother's, in Charnwood Forest--far away from everybody. Nobody here will ever know! And John will come to see me, whenever he can, whenever his work will let him. He will come over in the motor--he's always running about the country--nobody would ever notice. It might be said we'd separated--so we should have separated--as far as spending our lives together goes. But I should sometimes--sometimes--have my John!--for my own--my very own--and he would sometimes have me!"

Sobs came tearing through, and, bowing her face upon the sofa, Mrs. Betts shook from head to foot.

Marcia sat silent, but strangely conscious of new horizons of feeling--of a deepening life. This was the first time she had ever come across such an experience, touched so nearly on passions and sins which had hitherto been to her as stage phantoms moving in a far distance. The girl of to-day, whatever class she belongs to, is no longer, indeed, reared in the conventional innocence of the mid-Victorian moment--a moment differing wholly from that immediately before it, no less than from those which have come after it. The manners, the plays, the talk of our generation attack such an innocence at every turn. But in place of an indirect and hearsay knowledge, here, in this humble, shabby instance, was, for the first time, the real stuff--the real, miserable thing, in flesh and blood. That was new to her.

And, in a flash of memory and association, there passed through her mind the vision of the Opera House blazing with lights--Iphigenia on the stage, wailing at her father's knees in an agony of terror and despair, and Newbury's voice:

"_This_ is the death she shrinks from--"

And again, as the beautiful form, erect and calm once more, swept stately to its doom:

"And this--is the death she _accepts_!"

Newbury's face, as he spoke, was before her, quietly smiling, its handsome features alive with an exaltation which had both chilled and fascinated the girl looking at him. As she remembered it the thought arose--"_he_ would accept any martyrdom for himself, in defense of what he believes and loves--and _therefore_ he will inflict it inexorably on others. But that's the point! For oneself, yes--but for others who suffer and don't believe!--suffer horribly!"

A look of resolution came into the young face. She tried to rouse Mrs. Betts.

"Please don't cry so!" she said, in distress. "I see what you mean. I'll try and put it to Mr. Newbury. Nobody here, you think, need know anything about you? They'd suppose you'd separated? Mr. Betts would live here, and you would live somewhere else. That's what you mean, isn't it? That's all anybody need know?"

Mrs. Betts raised herself.

"That's it. Of course, you see, we might have pretended to accept Lord William's conditions, and then have deceived him. But my husband wouldn't do that. He simply doesn't admit that anybody else here has any right to interfere with our private affairs. But he won't tell lies to Lord William and Mr. Edward. If they won't, they won't!"

She sat up, drearily controlling herself, and began to smooth back her hair and put her hat straight. But in the middle of it she caught Marcia's hand:

"Miss Coryston! you're going to marry Mr. Newbury--because you love him. If I lose John who will ever give me a kind word--a kind look again? I thought at last--I'd found--a little love. Even bad people"--her voice broke--"may rejoice in that, mayn't they? Christ didn't forbid them that."

Her piteous look hung on her companion. The tears sprang to Marcia's eyes. Yet her temperament did not tend to easy weeping; and at the root of her mind in this very moment were feelings of repulsion and of doubt, mingled with impressions of pity. But the hours at Hoddon Grey had been hours of deep and transforming emotion; they had left her a more sensitive and responsive human being.

"I'll do what I can," she said, with slow emphasis. "I promise you that I'll speak to Mr. Newbury."

Mrs. Betts gave her effusive thanks which somehow jarred on Marcia; she was glad when they were over and Mrs. Betts rose to go. That her tearful and disheveled aspect might escape the servants Marcia took her down a side staircase of the vast house, and piloted her through some garden paths. Then the girl herself, returning, opened a gate into a wood, where an undergrowth of wild roses was just breaking into flower, and was soon pacing a mossy path out of sight and sound of the house.

She found herself in a strange confusion of mind. She still saw the small tear-stained face, the dingy finery, the tormented hair; the story she had just heard was still sounding in her ears. But what really held her was the question: "Can I move Edward? What will he say to me?"

And in the stillness of the wood all the incidents of their Sunday together came back upon her, and she stood breathless and amazed at the change which had passed over her life. Was it really she, Marcia Coryston, who had been drawn into that atmosphere of happy and impassioned religion?--drawn with a hand so gentle yet so irresistible? She had been most tenderly treated by them all, even by that pious martinet, Lord William. And yet, how was it that the general impression was that for the first time in her life she had been "dealt with," disciplined, molded, by those who had a much clearer idea than she herself had of what she was to do and where she was to go? Out of her mother's company she had been hitherto accustomed to be the center of her own young world; to find her wishes, opinions, prejudices eagerly asked for, and deferentially received. And she knew herself naturally wilful, conceited, keen to have her own way.

But at Hoddon Grey, even in the most intimate and beautiful moments of the first love scenes between herself and Newbury, she had seemed to be entering upon--moving--in a world where almost nothing was left free for her to judge; where what she thought mattered very little, because it was taken for granted that she would ultimately think as Hoddon Grey thought; would be cherished, indeed, as the latest and dearest captive of the Hoddon Grey system and the Hoddon Grey beliefs.

And she had begun already to know the exquisite, the intoxicating joys of self-surrender. Every hour had revealed to her something more of Newbury's lofty and singular character. The books and occupations amid which his home life was passed, the letters of his Oxford friends to him, and his to them; one letter in particular, from his chiefest and dearest friend, congratulating him on his engagement, which had arrived that morning--these things had been for Marcia so many steps in a new land, under new stars. The mixture in the man she was to marry, of gaiety, of an overflowing enjoyment of life, expressing itself often in an endless childish joking--with mystical sternness; the eager pursuit of beauty in art and literature, coupled with an unbending insistence on authority, on the Church's law, whether in doctrine or conduct, together with an absolute refusal to make any kind of terms with any sort of "Modernisms," so far at least as they affected the high Anglican ideal of faith and practice--in relation to these facts of Newbury's temperament and life she was still standing bewildered, half yielding and half combative. That she was loved, she knew--knew it through every vein and pulse. Newbury's delight in her, his tender worship of her, seemed to enwrap and encompass her. Now as she sat hidden amid the June trees, trembling under the stress of recollection, she felt herself enskied, exalted by such love. What could he see in her?--what was there in her--to deserve it?

And yet--and yet! Some penetrating instinct to which in this moment of solitude, of unwilling reflection, she could not help but listen, told her that the very soul of him was not hers; that the deepest foundation of his life was no human affection, but the rapture, the compelling vision of a mystical faith. And that rapture she could never share; she knew herself; it was not in her. One moment she could have cried out in despair over her own limitations and disabilities. The next she was jealous; on fire.

Jealous!--that was the real, sadly human truth; jealous, as women have always been, of the faith, or the art, or the friendship, which threatens their hold upon the lover. And there stole upon her as she sat musing, the old, old temptation--the temptation of Psyche--to test and try this man, who was to bring her into bondage, before the bonds were yet quite set. She was honestly touched by Mrs. Betts's story. To her, in her first softness of love, it seemed intolerably hard and odious that two people who clung to each other should be forcibly torn apart; two people whom no law, but only an ecclesiastical scruple condemned. Surely Edward would accept, and persuade his father to accept, the compromise which the husband and wife suggested. If Mrs. Betts withdrew from the scene, from the estate, would not this satisfy everybody? What further scandal could there be? She went on arguing it with herself, but all the time the real, deepest motive at work was not so much sympathy, as a kind of excited restlessness --curiosity. She saw herself pleading with Edward, breaking down his resistance, winning her cause, and then, instead of triumphing, flinging herself into his arms, to ask pardon for daring to fight him.

The happy tears blinded her, and fell unheeded until a mocking reaction dried them.

"Oh, what a fool!--what a fool!"

And running through the wood she came out into the sunshine at its farther end--a blaze of sun upon the lake, its swans, its stone-rimmed islands, and statuary, on the gray-white front of the pillared and porticoed house, stretching interminably. The flowers shone in the stiff beds; a rain of blossom drifted through the air. Everything glittered and sparkled. It was Corinthian, pretentious, artificial; but as Marcia hurried up the broad middle walk between the queer gods and goddesses, whom some pupil of Bernini's had manufactured in Rome for a Coryston of the eighteenth century, she was in love with the scene, which in general she disliked; in love with the summer, in love above all with the quick life of her own mind and body....

There were persons talking in her mother's sitting-room--Sir Wilfrid, Arthur, and Coryston--she perceived them through