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

the open windows. The sight of Arthur suddenly sobered her, and diverted her thoughts. For if Newbury now held the chief place in her mind, her mother still reigned there. She--Marcia--must be on the spot to protect her mother!--in case protection were wanted, and Coryston and Sir Wilfrid had not succeeded yet in bringing that mad fellow to his senses. Ah! but they had all a new helper and counselor now--in Edward. Let Coryston abuse him to her, if he dared! She would know how to defend him.

She hurried on.

Simultaneously, from the garden door of the library a figure emerged, a man with some books under his arm. She recognized Lester, and a rush of something which was partly shyness and partly a delicious pride came over her, to delay her steps.

They met under the wide open colonnade which carried the first story of the house. Lester came toward her smiling and flushed.

"I've just heard," he said. "I do congratulate you. It's splendid!"

She gave him her hand; and he thought as he looked at her how happiness had beautified and transformed her. All that was imperfect in the face seemed to have fallen into harmony; and her dark bloom had never been so lovely.

"Yes, I'm very happy. He'll keep me in order! At least he'll try." Her eyes danced.

"Everybody seems extremely pleased," he said, walking at her side, and not indeed knowing what to say.

"Except Coryston," replied Marcia, calmly. "I shall have a bad time with him."

"Stand up to him!" he laughed. "His bark is worse than his bite--Ah!--"

A sudden sound of vehement voices overhead--Lady Coryston's voice and Arthur's clashing--startled them both.

"Oh, I must go!" cried Marcia, frowning and paling. "Thank you--thank you so much. Good-by."

And she ran into the house. Lester remained rooted in the shadows of the colonnade for a minute or two, looking after her, with a set, abstracted face. Then the sound of the altercation overhead smote him too with alarm. He moved quickly away lest through the open windows he might catch what was said.


CHAPTER X

Marcia entered her mother's sitting-room in the midst of what seemed a babel of voices. James Coryston, indeed, who was sitting in a corner of the room while Coryston and Sir Wilfrid Bury argued across him, was not contributing to it. He was watching his mother, and she on the other side of the room was talking rapidly to her son Arthur, who could evidently hardly control himself sufficiently to listen to her.

As Marcia came in she heard Arthur say in a loud voice:

"Your attitude, mother, is perfectly unreasonable, and I will not submit to be dictated to like this!"

Marcia, staying her foot half-way across the room, looked at her youngest brother in amazement.

Was this rough-mannered, rough-voiced man, Arthur?--the tame house-brother, and docile son of their normal life? What was happening to them all?

Lady Coryston broke out:

"I repeat--you propose to me, Arthur, a bargain which is no bargain!--"

"A quid without a quo?" interrupted Coryston, who had suddenly dropped his argument with Sir Wilfrid, and had thrown himself on a sofa near his mother and Arthur.

Lady Coryston took no notice of him. She continued to address her youngest-born.

"What Coryston may do--now--after all that has passed is to me a matter of merely secondary importance. When I first saw the notice of the Martover meeting it was a shock to me--I admit it. But since then he has done so many other things--he has struck at me in so many other ways--he has so publicly and scandalously outraged family feeling, and political decency--"

"I really haven't," said Coryston, mildly. "I haven't--if this was a free country."

Lady Coryston flashed a sudden superb look at him and resumed:

"--that I really don't care what Coryston does. He has done his worst. I can't suffer any greater insult than he has already put upon me--"

Coryston shook his head, mutely protesting. He seized a pen from a table near, and began to bite and strip it with an absent face.

"But _you_, Arthur!" his mother went on with angry emphasis, "have still a character to lose or gain. As I have said, it doesn't now matter vitally to me whether Coryston is in the chair or not--I regard him as merely Glenwilliam's cat's-paw--but if _you_ let this meeting at Martover pass, you will have weakened your position in this constituency, you will have disheartened your supporters, you will have played the coward--and you will have left your mother disgracefully in the lurch--though that latter point I can see doesn't move you at all!"

James and Sir Wilfrid Bury came anxiously to join the group. Sir Wilfrid approached the still standing and distressed Marcia. Drawing her hand within his arm, he patted it kindly.

"We can't persuade your mother, my dear. Suppose you try."

"Mother, you can't insist on Arthur's going through with the meeting if he doesn't wish to!" said Marcia, with animation. "Do let him give it up! It would be so easy to postpone it."

Lady Coryston turned upon her.

"Everything is easy in your eyes, no doubt, Marcia, except that he should do his duty, and spare my feelings! As a matter of fact you know perfectly well that Arthur has always allowed me to arrange these things for him."

"I don't mean, mother, to do so in future!" said Arthur, resolutely turning upon her. "You _must_ leave me to manage my own life and my own affairs."

Lady Coryston's features quivered in her long bony face. As she sat near the window, on a high chair, fully illumined, in a black velvet dress, long-waisted, and with a kind of stand-up ruffle at the throat, she was amazingly Queen Bess. James, who was always conscious of the likeness, could almost have expected her to rise and say in the famous words of the Queen to Cecil--"Little man, little man, your father durst not have said 'must' to me!"

But instead she threw her son a look of furious contempt, with the words:

"You have been glad enough of my help, Arthur, in the past; you have never been able indeed to do without it. I am under no illusions as to your Parliamentary abilities--unaided."

"Mother!--" cried Marcia and James simultaneously.

Coryston shrugged his shoulders. Arthur, breaking from Sir Wilfrid's restraining hand, approached his mother. His face was inflamed with anger, his eyes bloodshot.

"You like to say these cruel things, mother. We have all put up with them long enough. My father put up with them long enough. I intend to think for myself in future. I don't think of Glenwilliam as you do. I know him--and I know his daughter."

The last words were spoken with a special emphasis. A movement of alarm--in Marcia's case, of terror--ran through all the spectators. Sir Wilfrid caught the speaker by the arm, but was impatiently shaken off.

Lady Coryston met her son's eyes with equal passion.

"An intriguer--an unscrupulous intriguer--like himself!" said Lady Coryston, with cutting emphasis.

Arthur's flush turned to pallor. Coryston, springing up, raised a warning hand. "Take care, old fellow!" Marcia and James came forward. But Arthur thrust them aside.

"Mother and I have got to settle this!" He came to lean over her, looking into her face. "I advise you to be careful, mother, of what you say!" There was a dreadful pause. Then he lifted himself and said, with folded arms, slowly, still looking hard at Lady Coryston: "I am--in love--with the lady to whom you refer in that unjustifiable manner. I wish to marry her--and I am doing my best to persuade her to marry me. _Now_ you understand perhaps why I didn't wish to attack her father at this particular juncture."

"Arthur!"

Marcia threw herself upon her brother, to lead him away. Coryston, meanwhile, with lifted brows and the prominent greenish eyes beneath them starting out of his head, never ceased to observe his mother. There was trouble--and a sudden softness--in his look.

Silence reigned, for a few painful moments. The eyes of the two combatants were on each other. The change in Lady Coryston's aspect was something quite different from what is ordinarily described as "turning pale." It represented rather the instinctive and immediate rally of the whole human personality in the presence of danger more deadly than any it has yet encountered. It was the gray rally of strength, not the pallor of fear. She laughed--as she passed her handkerchief over her lips--so Marcia thought afterward--to hide their trembling.

"I thank you for your frankness, Arthur. You will hardly expect me to wish you success in such a love affair, or to further your suit. But your confession--your astonishing confession--does at least supply some reason for your extraordinary behavior. For the present--_for the present_"--she spoke slowly--"I cease to press you to speak at this meeting which has been announced. It can at any rate be postponed. As to the other and graver matter, we will discuss it later--and in private. I must take time to think it over."

She rose. James came forward.

"May I come with you, mother?"

She frowned a little.

"Not now, James, not now. I must write some letters immediately, with regard to the meeting."

And without another look at any of her children, she walked proudly through the room. Sir Wilfrid threw the door open for her, and murmured something in her ear--no doubt an offer of consultation. But she only shook her head; and he closed the door.

Then while Arthur, his hands on his hips, walked restlessly up and down, and Coryston, lying back on the sofa, stared at the ceiling, Marcia, James, and Sir Wilfrid looked at each other in a common dismay.

Sir Wilfrid spoke first:

"Are we really, Arthur, to take the statement you have just made seriously?"

Arthur turned impatiently.

"Do I look like joking?"

"I wish you did," said Sir Wilfrid, dryly. "It would be a comfort to us."

"Luckily mother doesn't believe a word of it!"

The voice was Coryston's, directed apparently at the Adam decoration of the ceiling.

Arthur stood still.

"What do you mean?"

"No offense. I dare say she believed _you_. But the notion strikes her as too grotesque to be bothered about."

"She may be right there," said Arthur, gloomily, resuming his walk.

"Whether she is or not, she'll take good care, my boy, that nothing comes of it," was Coryston's murmured comment. But the words were lost in his mustache. He turned to look at James, who was standing at the open window gazing into the garden. Something in his brother's meditative back seemed to annoy him. He aimed at it with a crumpled envelope he held in his hand, and hit it. James turned with a start.

"Look here, James--this isn't Hegel--and it isn't Lotze--and it isn't Bergson--it's life. Haven't you got a remark to contribute?"

James's blue eyes showed no resentment.

"I'm very sorry for you all," he said, quietly, "especially for mother."

"Why?"

"Because she's the oldest. We've got the future. She hasn't."

The color rushed to Marcia's face. She looked gratefully at her brother. Sir Wilfrid's gray head nodded agreement.

"Hm!" said Coryston, "I don't see that. At least, of course it has a certain truth. But it doesn't present itself to me as a ground for sparing the older generation. In fact"--he sprang to his feet--"present company--present family excepted--we're being ruined--stick