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

the emotion which held him.

Newbury struck in, however, before he could express it further; in the same dry and carefully governed voice as before.

"You are Marcia's brother, Coryston. Yesterday morning she and I were still engaged to be married. Yesterday afternoon we broke it off--although--since then--I have received two letters from her--"

He paused a moment, but soon resumed, with fresh composure.

"Those letters I shall answer to-night. By that time--perhaps--I shall know better--what my future life will be."

"Perhaps!" Coryston repeated, roughly. "But I have no claim to know, nor do I want to know!"

Newbury gave him a look of wonder.

"I thought you were out for justice--and freedom of conscience?" he said, slowly. "Is the Christian conscience--alone--excepted? Freedom for every one else--but none for us?"

"Precisely! Because your freedom means other men's slavery!" Coryston panted out the words. "You can't have your freedom! It's too costly in human life. Everywhere Europe has found that out. The freedom you Catholics--Anglican or Roman--want, is anti-social. We sha'n't give it you!"

"You will have to give it us," said Newbury, calmly, "because in putting us down--which of course you could do with ease--you would destroy all that you yourselves value in civilization. It would be the same with us, if we had the upper hand, as you have now. Neither of us can destroy the other. We stand face to face--we shall stand face to face--while the world lasts."

Coryston broke into passionate contradiction. Society, he was confident, would, in the long run, put down Catholicism, of all sorts, by law.

"Life is hard enough, the devil knows! We can't afford--we simply can't afford--to let you make it harder by these damned traditions! I appeal to those two dead people! They did what _you_ thought wrong, and your conscience judged and sentenced them. But who made you a judge and divider over them? Who asked you to be the dispenser for them of blessing and cursing?"

Newbury stood still.

"No good, Coryston, your raving like this! There is one question that cuts the knot--that decides where you stand--and where I stand. You don't believe there has ever been any living word from God to man--any lifting of the eternal veil. We do! We say the heavens _have_ opened--a God _has_ walked this earth! Everything else follows from that."

"Including the deaths of John Betts and his wife!" said Coryston, with bitter contempt. "A God suffers and bleeds, for that! No!--for us, if there is a God, He speaks in love--in love only--in love supremely--such love as those two poor things had for each other!"

After which they walked along in silence for some time. Each had said the last word of his own creed.

Presently they reached a footpath from which the house at Hoddon Grey could be reached. Newbury paused.

"Here, Coryston, we part--and we may never meet again."

He raised his heavy eyes to his companion. All passion had died from his face, which in its pale sorrow was more beautiful than Coryston had ever seen it.

"Do you think," he said, with deliberate gentleness, "that I feel nothing--that life can ever be the same for me again--after this? It has been to me a sign-post in the dark--written in letters of flame--and blood. It tells me where to go--and I obey."

He paused, looking, as it seemed, through Coryston, at things beyond. And Coryston was aware of a strange and sudden awe in himself which silenced him.

But Newbury recalled his thoughts. He spoke next in his ordinary tone.

"Please, tell--Marcia--that all arrangements have been made for Mr. Betts's boy, with the relatives' consent. She need have no anxiety about him. And all I have to say to her for her letter--her blessed letter--I will say to-night."

He walked away, and was soon lost to sight among the trees.


CHAPTER XVI

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