Lady Coryston's quarters at Coryston Place were not quite so devoid of all the lighter touches as her London sitting-room. The view from the windows, of the formal garden outside, with its rows of white statues, leading to a winding lake, and parklike slopes beyond it, was certainly cheerful. Coryston particularly disliked it, and had many ribald things to say about the statues, which in his mad undergraduate days he had more than once adorned with caps of liberty, pipes, mustaches, and similar impertinences. But most people were attracted by the hard brightness of the outlook; and of light and sunshine—on sunny days—there was, at any rate, no lack. Marcia had recently chosen a new chintz for the chairs and sofas, and one small group of photographs, on a table beside the fireplace, were allowed to remind the spectator that the owner of the room had once been a young mother, with a maternal pride in a bunch of fine children. Here were Coryston, aged nine, on pony-back, pompously showing off; James, dreamily affable, already a personage at seven; Arthur, fondling a cricket-bat, with a stiff mouth, hastily closed—by order—on its natural grin; and Marcia, frowning and pouting, in fancy dress as "The Strawberry Girl," just emerging, it seemed, from one battle-royal with her nurse, and about to plunge into another.
Lady Coryston had just entered the room. She was alone, and she carried a pile of letters, which she put down on the central writing-table. Then she went to one of the windows, which on this May day was open, and stood, looking out, one long mittened hand resting vaguely on the table that held the photographs. A commanding figure! She was in black, carrying her only ornament, an embossed silver girdle and chatelaine, the gift of her husband in their first year of marriage. As she paused, motionless, in the clear sunshine, her great height and her great thinness and flatness brought out with emphasis the masculine carriage of the shoulders and the strong markings of the face. In this moment of solitude, however, the mistress of Coryston Place and of the great domain on which she looked, allowed herself an expression which was scarcely that of an autocrat—at any rate of an autocrat at ease.
She was thinking of Coryston; and Coryston was giving her a good deal to think about. Of course she had expected annoyance; but scarcely such annoyance as Coryston, it seemed, was now bent on causing her. At bottom, she had always reckoned on her position as mother and woman. Coryston might threaten, but that he should actually carry out such iniquities as he was now engaged on, had been—she owned it—beyond her calculations.
For she had come down to find the whole neighborhood in a ferment, and many pleasant illusions, in the shelter of which she had walked for years, both before and since her husband's death, questioned, at least, and cracking, if not shattered. That the Corystons were model landlords, that they enjoyed a feudal popularity among their tenants and laborers, was for Lady Coryston one of the axioms on which life was based. She despised people who starved their estates, let their repairs go, and squeezed the last farthing out of their tenants. Nor had she any sympathy with people who owned insanitary cottages. It had been her fond belief that she at least possessed none. And now here was Coryston, her eldest son, camped in the very midst of her property, not as her friend and support, but as her enemy and critic; poking his nose into every corner of the estates, taken in by every ridiculous complaint, preaching Socialism at full blast to the laborers, and Land Acts to the farmers, stirring up the Nonconformists to such antics as the Baptists had lately been playing on Sundays at her gates; discovering bad cottages, where none were known to exist; and, in general, holding up his mother to blame and criticism, which, as Lady Coryston most truly, sincerely, indignantly felt, was wholly undeserved.
This then was the "game" that Coryston had warned her of. He was actually playing it; though she had never believed for one moment that he would ever do so. How was she to meet it? With firmness, no doubt, and dignity. As to the firmness she had no fears; it was the dignity she was anxious about.
Lady Coryston was a woman of conscience; although no doubt she had long ago harnessed her will to her conscience, which revolved—sometimes heavily—in the rear. Still there the conscience was, and periodically she had to take account of it. Periodically, it made her uncomfortable on the subject of her eldest son. Periodically, it forced her to ask herself—as in this reverie by the window—"How is it that, bit by bit, and year by year, he and I have drifted to this pass? Who began it? Is it in any sense my fault?"
How was it, in the first place, that neither she nor his father had ever had any real influence over this incorrigible spirit; that even in Corry's childish days, when his parents had him at their mercy, they might punish, and thwart, and distress him, but could never really conquer him? Lady Coryston could recall struggles with her son, whether at home or at school, which turned her sick to think of.
Corry—for instance—at his preparatory school, taking a loathing to his head master, demanding to be withdrawn, and stubbornly refusing to say why; the master's authority upheld by Corry's parents; vindictive punishment; followed by sudden illness on the boy's part in the midst of the commotion, and his return home, white-faced, silent, indomitable. It made her shiver to remember how he had refused to be nursed by her or by any one but the old housekeeper at Coryston; how for weeks he had scarcely spoken to his father or mother. Then had come the lad's justification—a hideous cruelty charge against the head master; and on a quasi-apology from his father, Corry had consented to forgive his parents.
And again—at Cambridge—another recollection clutched at memory; Corry, taking up the case of a youth who had been sent down, according to him, unjustly—furious attacks on the college authorities—rioting in college—ending of course in the summary sending down of Coryston also. She and his father in their annoyance and disappointment had refused to listen to his explanations, to let him defend himself indeed at all. His mother could see still Corry's strange hostile look at her, on his first arrival at home, as much as to say, "Nothing to expect fromyou!" She could still hear the hall door closing behind him as he went off on wanderings abroad and in the East for what proved to be an absence of three years.
Yet there were some things she could remember on the other side, dating also from Corry's Cambridge years. When her old father died, one Easter vacation, and she, who was deeply attached to him, had arrived at Coryston after the funeral, worn out by misery and grief, there, suddenly, were Corry's arms open to her, and his—almost timid—kiss on her cheek. The thought of those few weeks when he had been so tender to her, and she had been too tired and sad for anything except to lie still and accept the kindness of her husband and sons, was embittered to her by the remembrance of all the fierce jars which had come after; but, at the moment, they were halcyon days. As she thought of them now beside the open window, she was suddenly aware of a catch in the throat, which she must instantly restrain. It was really too late for any such melting between herself and Corry!
As to the scene which had taken place in the drawing-room of the St. James's Square house on Coryston's hurried return home after his father's death, and the explanation to him of the terms of his father's will, she had expected it, and had prepared for it. But it had been none the less a terrible experience. The fierceness of Corry's anger had been indeed quietly expressed—he had evidently schooled himself; but the words and phrases used by him had bitten into her mind. His wrath had taken the form of a long summing up of the relations between himself and her since his boyhood, of a final scornful attack on her supposed "principles," and a denunciation of her love of power—unjustified, unwarranted power—as the cause of all the unhappiness in their family life. He had not said it in so many words, but she knew very well that what he meant was "You have refused to be the normal woman, and you have neither mind enough nor knowledge enough to justify you. You have sacrificed everything to politics, and you don't understand a single political problem. You have ruined your own life and ours for a barren intellectualism, and it will leave you in the end a lonely and unhappy woman."
Well, well, she had borne with him—she had not broken with him, after all that. She would have found a dozen ways of improving his position, of giving him back his inheritance, if he had shown the smallest disposition to meet her, to compromise with her. But he had gone from extravagance to extravagance, from outrage to outrage. And finally she had gathered up all her strength and struck, for the family traditions, for the party's, the country's interests. And of course she had been right—she had been abundantly right.
Drawing herself unconsciously erect, she looked out over the wide Coryston domain, the undulations of the great estate as it stretched northward to the hills. Politics! She had been in politics from her childhood; she had been absorbed in them through all her married life; and now, in her later years, she was fairly consumed by the passion of them, by the determination to win and conquer. Not for herself!—so at least her thoughts, judged in her own cause, vehemently insisted; not for any personal motive whatever, but to save the country from the break-up of all that made England great, from the incursions of a venomous rabble, bent on destroying the upper class, the landed system, the aristocracy, the Church, the Crown. Woman as she was, she would fight revolution to the last; they should find her body by the wall, when and if the fortress of the old English life went down.
Glenwilliam!—in that name all her hatreds were summed up.
For there had arisen, during these latter years, a man of the people, to lead what Lady Coryston called the "revolution"—a man who had suffered cruelties, so it was said, at the hands of the capitalist and employing class; who, as a young miner, blacklisted because of the part he had taken in a successful strike, had gone, cap in hand, to mine after mine, begging vainly for work, his wife and child tramping beside him. The first wife and her child had perished, so the legend ran, at any rate, of hardship and sheer lack of food. That insolent conspicuous girl who was now the mistress of his house was the daughter of a second wife, a middle-class woman, married when he was already in Parliament, and possessed of a small competence which had been the foundation of her husband's political position. On that modest sum he had held his ground; and upon it, while England was being stirred from end to end by his demagogue's gift, he had built up a personal independence and a formidable power which had enabled him to bargain almost on equal terms with the two great parties.
"We refused to pay his price," was the way in which Lady Coryston was accustomed to put it, "so the Liberals bought him—dear!"
And he was now exacting from that luckless party the very uttermost farthing! Destruction of the Church; conscription, with a view, no doubt, to turning a workman-led army, in case of need, upon the possessing class; persecution of the landed interests; criminally heavy taxation—these were Apollyon's weapons. And against such things even a weak woman must turn to bay—must fight even her own heart, in the interests of her country.
"Did I choose my post in life for myself?—its duties, its responsibilities? It was as much given to me as a soldier's place in the line of battle! Am I to shirk it because I am a woman? The women have no more right to run away than the men—vote or no vote! Haven't we eyes to see this ruin that's coming, and minds to baffle it with? If I make Corry rich?—and help thereby to throw England to the dogs? Am I to give him what he says he hates—land and money—to use for whatIhate—and what his father hated? Just because he is my son—my flesh and blood? He would scorn the plea himself—he has scorned it all his life. Then let him respect his mother—when she does the same."
But meanwhile the "game," as Coryston was playing it?—what was to be done as to this episode and that?
She sat down to her writing-table, still busily thinking, and reminding herself that her agent Mr. Page was to come and see her at twelve. She had hoped to get some counsel and help out of Arthur, now that the House was up for a fortnight. But Arthur had really been very inconsiderate and tiresome so far. He had arrived so late for dinner on the Saturday that there had been no time for talk, especially as there was a large party in the house. On Sunday he had taken a motor, and had been away all day, paying—he said—some constituency visits. And now this morning with the earliest train he was off to London, though there was really no occasion for him whatever to go up there. He seemed rather unlike himself. His mother wondered if he was ill. And she fell into some indignant reflections on the stuffy atmosphere and bad lighting of the House of Commons. But ever since he knew that he was to have the estates his manner seemed to have changed; not certainly in the direction of triumph or satisfaction. On the contrary, he had once or twice said irritably to his mother that the will was ridiculous and ought not to stand. She had been obliged to make it clear to him that the matter wasnotto be discussed.
Suddenly, as she sat there, distress seized her at the bare thought of any shadow between herself and Arthur—Arthur, her darling, who was upholding his father's principles and hers in Parliament with so much zeal and good feeling; who had never all his life—till these latter weeks—given her so much as a cross word. Yet now that she could no longer chase the thought quite away, she admitted, more and more frankly, that she was anxious. Was he in any money difficulties? She must get James to find out. In love? She smiled. There were very few maidens in England, whatever their pretensions, who would be likely to refuse Arthur Coryston. Let him only throw the handkerchief, and his mother would soon do the rest. And indeed it was high time he set up house for himself. There is a restlessness in a man which means—marriage; and a mother soon becomes aware of it.
Recalling her thoughts to the letters before her, Lady Coryston perceived among them a note from Lady William Newbury asking her and Marcia to spend a week-end at Hoddon Grey. Lady Coryston rather wearily reflected that she must no doubt accept. That young man was clearly in pursuit of Marcia. What Marcia's own views were, her mother had not yet discovered. She seemed sometimes glad to see him; sometimes entirely indifferent; and Lady Coryston thought she had observed that her daughter's vacillations tried Edward Newbury's pride sorely, at times. But it would end in a match—it was pretty certain to end in a match. Marcia was only testing her power over a strong-willed man, who would capture her in the end. That being so, Lady Coryston acknowledged that the necessary tiresome preliminaries must be gone through.
She hastily scrawled a note of acceptance, without any of the fond imaginings that would have accompanied the act in the ordinary mother. Like all imperious women she disliked staying in other people's houses, where she could not arrange her hours. And she had a particularly resentful memory of a visit which she had paid with her husband to Lord and Lady William Newbury when they were renting a house in Surrey, before they had inherited Hoddon Grey, and while Marcia was still in the schoolroom. Never in her life had she been so ordered about. The strict rules of the house had seemed to her intolerable. She was a martinet herself, and inclined to pay all due attention to the observances of religion; but they must be her own observances, or at least approved by her. To be expected to follow other people's observances set her aflame. To make such a fuss, also, about your religion seemed to her indecorous and absurd. She remembered with a satisfaction which was half ashamed, that she—who was always down at home to a half-past-eight breakfast, and was accustomed to walk a mile to church—had insisted on breakfasting in her own room, on Sunday, under the Newburys' roof, and had quite enjoyed Lady William's surprised looks when they met at luncheon.
Well, now the thing had to be done again—for the settling of Marcia. Whether the atmosphere of the family or the house would suit Marcia, her mother did not inquire. In the matters of birth and money, nothing could be more appropriate. Lady Coryston, however, was mostly concerned in getting it through quickly, lest it should stand in the way of things more important. She was fond of Marcia; but her daughter occupied, in truth, only the fringe of her thoughts.
However, she duly put up her letter, and was addressing the envelope, when the door opened to admit the head agent of the estate, Mr. Frederick Page.
Mr. Page was, in Lady Coryston's eyes, a prince of agents. Up till now she had trusted him entirely, and had been more largely governed by his advice than her pride of rule would ever have allowed her to confess. Especially had she found reason to be grateful to him for the large amount of money he had lately been able to provide her with from the savings of the Coryston estates, for political purposes. Lady Coryston was one of the largest subscribers to the party funds in the kingdom; the coming election demanded an exceptional effort, and Page's economies had made it almost easy. She greeted him with a peculiarly gracious smile, remembering perhaps the letter of thanks she had received only the day before from the party headquarters.
The agent was still a young man, not much over forty, ruddy, good-looking, inclined to be plump, and possessed of a manner calculated to win the confidence of any employer. He looked the pink of discretion and capacity, and Lady Coryston had never discovered in him the smallest flaw with regard to any of the orthodoxies she required, political or religious. He was a widower, with two girls, who had often been allowed to play with Marcia.
It was clear to Lady Coryston's eyes at once that Mr. Page was much disturbed and upset. She had expected it, of course. She herself was disturbed and upset. But she had perhaps hoped that he would reassure her—make light of the situation.
He did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, the effects of an encounter he had just had with Lord Coryston himself in the village street, before entering the park, were plainly visible in the agent's bearing. He plunged at once into the subject.
"I fear, Lady Coryston, there is great trouble brewing on this estate!"
"You will stop it," she said, confidently; "you always have stopped it before—you and I together."
He shook his head.
"Ah, but—you see what makes the difference!"
"That Coryston is my son?—and has always been regarded as my heir? Certainly that makes a difference," she admitted, unwillingly. "But his proceedings will soon disgust people—will soon recoil on himself!"
Page looked up to see her pale profile, with its marked hollows in cheek and temple, outlined on the white paneling of the room like some strong, hawkish face of the Renaissance. But, in awe of her as he always was, she seemed to him a foolish woman. Why had she driven matters to this extremity?
He poured out his budget of troubles. All the smoldering discontent which had always existed on the estate had been set alight by Lord Coryston. He was trying to form a union among the laborers, and the farmers were up in arms. He was rousing the dissenters against the Church school of the estate. He was even threatening an inquiry into the state of some of his mother's cottages.
Lady Coryston interrupted. Her voice showed annoyance. "I thought, Mr. Page, there were no insanitary cottages on this property!"
Page hemmed and hawed. He had not the courage to say that if a landowner insists on spending the reserve fund of an estate on politics, the estate suffers. He had found Lady Coryston large sums for the party war-chest; but only a fool could expect him to build new cottages, and keep up a high level of improvements, at the same time.
"I am doing what I can," he said, hurriedly. "There are certain things that must be done. I have given orders."
"My son seems to have caught us napping," said Lady Coryston, rather grimly.
The agent passed the remark by. He inquired whether her ladyship was still determined to refuse land for the Baptist chapel.
"Certainly! The minister they propose is a most mischievous person, I have no intention whatever of extending his influence."
Page acquiesced. He himself would have made the Baptists happy with a half an acre, long since, and so, in his belief, scotched a hornet's nest. But he had never breathed any suggestion of the kind to Lady Coryston.
"I have done my best—believe me—to stop the Sunday disturbances," he said, "but in vain. They are chiefly got up, however, by people from a distance. Purely political!"
"Of course. I am not to be intimidated by them," said Lady Coryston, firmly.
The agent's inner mind let loose a thought to the effect that the increasing influence of women in politics did not seem to be likely to lead to peaceable living. But he merely remarked:
"I much regret that Lord Coryston should have addressed them himself last Sunday. I ventured to tell his lordship so when I met him just now in the village."
Lady Coryston stiffened on her chair.
"He defended himself?"
"Hotly. And I was to tell you that with your leave he will call on you himself this afternoon about the affair."
"My house is always open to my son," said Lady Coryston, quietly. But Page perceived the tremor of battle that ran through her.
"As to his support of that blacksmith from Ling, whom he is actually setting up in business at Knatchett itself—the man is turning out a perfect firebrand!—distributing Socialist leaflets over the whole neighborhood—getting up a quarrel between some of the parents here in this very village and our schoolmaster, about the punishment of a child—perfectly legitimate!—everything in order!—and enrolling more members of Mr. Glenwilliam's new Land League—within a stone's-throw of this house!—than I like to think of. I won't answer for this village, Lady Coryston, at the next election, if Lord Coryston goes on with these proceedings!"
Lady Coryston frowned. She was not accustomed to be addressed in so pessimistic a tone, and the mere mention of her arch-enemy—Glenwilliam—had put defiance into her. With some dryness, she preached energy, watchfulness, and a hopeful mind. The agent grasped the situation with the quickness born of long acquaintance with her, and adroitly shifted his ground. He remarked that at any rate Lord Coryston was making things uncomfortable all round; and he described with gusto the raids upon some of the Radical employers and small cottage-owners of the district, in the name of political liberty and decent housing, by which Coryston had been lately bewildering the Radical mind. Lady Coryston laughed; but was perhaps more annoyed than amused. To be brought down to the same level with Radical millers and grocers—and by her own son—was no consolation to a proud spirit.
"If our cottages can be reasonably attacked, they must be put in order, and at once," she said, with dignity. "You, Mr. Page, are my eyes and ears. I have been accustomed to trust you."
The agent accepted the implied reproach with outward meekness, and an inward resolve to put Lady Coryston on a much stricter financial regime for the future.
A long conversation followed, at the end of which Mr. Page rose, with the remark:
"Your ladyship will be sorry to hear that Mr. Glenwilliam is to speak at Martover next month,—and that it is already rumored Lord Coryston will be in the chair."
He had kept this bombshell to the last, and for various reasons he closely watched its effect.
Lady Coryston paled.
"We will have a Tory meeting here the same night, and my son Arthur shall speak," she said, with vivacity.
Some odd thoughts arose in the mind of Mr. Page as he met the angry fire in the speaker's look.
"By all means. By the way, I did not know Mr. Arthur was acquainted with those strange people the Atherstones?" he said, in a tone of easy interrogation, looking for his hat.
Lady Coryston was a little surprised by the remark.
"I suppose an M.P. must be acquainted with everybody—to some extent," she said, smiling. "I know very well what his opinion of Mr. Atherstone is."
"Naturally," said Page, also smiling. "Well, good-by, Lady Coryston. I hope when you see Lord Coryston this afternoon you will be able to persuade him to give up some of these extravagances."
"I have no power with him," she said, sharply.
"Why did you give up what you had?" thought the agent, as he took his departure. His long experience of Lady Coryston, able as she was, and as he admitted her to be, in many respects, had in the end only increased in him a secret contempt for women, inbred in all but a minority of men. They seemed to him to have so little power of "playing the game"—the old, old game of success that men understand so well; through compromise, cunning, give and take, shrewd and prudent dealing. A kind of heady blundering, when caution and a few lies would have done all that was wanted—it was this he charged them with—Lady Coryston especially.
And as to that nice but rather stupid fellow Arthur, what on earth could he be doing at the Atherstones'? Had he—Page—come by chance on a secret,—dramatic and lamentable!—when, on the preceding Saturday, as he was passing along the skirts of the wood bounding the Atherstones' little property, on his way to one of the Coryston hill-farms, he had perceived in the distance—himself masked by a thin curtain of trees—two persons in the wood-path, in intimate or agitated conversation. They were Arthur Coryston and Miss Glenwilliam. He recognized the lady at once, had several times seen her on the platform when her father spoke at meetings, and the frequent presence of the Glenwilliams at the Atherstones' cottage was well known to the neighborhood.
By George!—if thatdidmean anything!
Meanwhile on this May morning Marcia was reading in the park, not far from a footpath—a right of way—leading from the village to the high road running east and west along the northern boundary of the Coryston property. Round her the slopes were white with hawthorn under a thunderous sky of blue and piled white cloud. The dappled forms of deer glanced through the twisted hawthorn stems, and at her feet a trout-stream, entrancingly clear and clean, slipped by over its chalk bottom—the gray-green weeds swaying under the slight push of the water. There was a mist of blossom, and everywhere the fragrance of a bountiful earth, young once more.
Marcia, it must be confessed, was only pretending to read. She had some reason to think that Edward Newbury might present himself at Coryston for lunch that day. If so, and if he walked from Hoddon Grey—and, unlike most young men of his age, he was a great walker, even when there was no question of grouse or golf—he would naturally take this path. Some strong mingled impulse had placed her there, on his road. The attraction for her of his presence, his smile, his character was irresistibly increasing. There were many days when she was restless and the world was empty till he came. And yet there were other days when she was quite cold to him; when the thought of giving her life into his hands made her cry "impossible"; when it seemed to her, as she had said to Waggin, that she rather feared than loved him.
Edward Newbury indeed belonged to a type not common in our upper class, yet always represented there, and in its main characteristics to be traced back at least to the days of Laud and the Neoplatonists. It is a spiritual, a mystical type, developed under English aristocratic conditions and shaped by them. Newbury had been brought up in a home steeped in high Anglican tradition. His grandfather, old Lord Broadstone, had been one of the first and keenest supporters of the Oxford movement, a friend of Pusey, Keble, and Newman, and later on of Liddon, Church, and Wilberforce. The boy had grown up in a religious hothouse; his father, Lord William, had been accustomed in his youth to make periodical pilgrimages to Christchurch as one of Pusey's "penitents," and his house became in later life a rallying-point for the High Anglican party in all its emergencies. Edward himself, as the result of an intense travail of mind, had abandoned habitual confession as he came to manhood, but he would not for the world have missed the week of "retreat" he spent every year, with other Anglican laymen, under the roof of the most spiritual of Anglican bishops. He was a joyous, confident, devoted son of the English church; a man governed by the most definite and rigid beliefs, held with a pure intensity of feeling, and impervious to any sort of Modernism.
At the same time his handsome person, his ardent and amiable temper, his poetic and musical tastes, made him a very general favorite even in the most miscellaneous society. The enthusiastic Christian was also a popular man of the world; and the esoteric elements in his character, though perfectly well known to all who were in any degree his intimates, were jealously hidden from the multitude, who welcomed him as a good-looking fellow and an agreeable companion. He had been four years in the Guards, and some years in India, as private secretary to his uncle, the Viceroy. He was a good shot, a passionate dancer, a keen musician; and that mysterious note in him of the unbending and the inexorable only made him—in general—the more attractive both to men and women, as it became apparent to them. Men scoffed at him, yet without ever despising him. Perhaps the time was coming when, as character hardened, and the glamour of youth dropped away, many men might hate him. Men like Coryston and Atherstone were beginning indeed to be bitterly hostile. But these were possibilities which were only just emerging.
Marcia was well aware of Newbury's distinction; and secretly very proud of his homage. But rebellion in her was still active. When, however, she asked herself, with that instinct for self-analysis bred in the woman of to-day by the plays she sees, and half the tales she reads—"Why is it he likes me?"—the half-sarcastic reply would still suggest itself—"No doubt just because I am so shapeless and so formless—because I don't know myself what I want or what I mean to be. He thinks he'll form me—he'll save my soul. Shall he?"
A footstep on the path made her look up, annoyed that she could not control a sudden burning of the cheek. But the figure she expected was not there.
"Coryston!" she cried.
Her brother approached her. He seemed to be reciting verse, and she thought she caught some words from a Shelley chorus which she knew, because he had made her learn it when she was a child in the schoolroom. He threw himself down beside her.
"Well?"
Brother and sister had only met twice since Coryston's settlement at Knatchett—once in the village street, and once when Marcia had invaded his bachelor quarters at Knatchett. On that occasion she had discharged upon him all the sarcasm and remonstrance of which she was capable. But she only succeeded in reminding herself of a bullfight of which she had once seen part at San Sebastian. Her shafts stuck glittering in the bull's hide, but the bull barely shook himself. There he stood—good-humored, and pawing.
To-day also Coryston seemed to be in high spirits. Marcia, on the other hand, gave him a look half troubled, half hostile.
"Corry!—I wanted to speak to you. Are you really going to see mother this afternoon?"
"Certainly. I met Page in the village half an hour ago and asked him to announce me."
"I don't want to talk any more about all the dreadful things you've been doing," said Marcia, with sisterly dignity. "I know it wouldn't be any good. But there's one thing I must say. I do beg of you, Corry, not to say a word to mamma about—about Arthur and Enid Glenwilliam. I know you were at the Atherstones on Saturday!"
The anxiety in the girl's face seemed to give a softer shade to its strong beauty. She went on, appealingly:
"Arthur's told me a lot. He's quite mad. I've argued—and argued with him—but it's no good. He doesn't care for anything—Parliament, mamma, the estates, anything—in comparison with that girl. At present she's playing with him, and he's getting desperate. But I'm simply interrorabout mamma!"
Corry whistled.
"My dear, she'll have to know some time. As you say, he's in it, head over ears. No use your trying to pull him back!"
"It'll kill her!" cried Marcia, passionately; "what's left of her, after you've done!"
Coryston lifted his eyebrows and looked long and curiously at his sister. Then he slowly got up from the grass and took a seat beside her.
"Look here, Marcia, do you think—do you honestly think—that I'm the aggressor in this family row?"
"Oh, I don't know—I don't know what to think!"
Marcia covered her face with her hands. "It's all so miserable!—" she went on, in a muffled voice. "And this Glenwilliam thing has come so suddenly! Why, he hardly knew her, when he made that speech in the House six weeks ago! And now he's simply demented! Corry, you must go and argue with him—youmust! Persuade him to give her up!"
She laid her hand on his arm imploringly.
Coryston sat silent, but his eyes laughed a little.
"I don't believe in her," he said at last, abruptly. "If I did, I'd back Arthur up through thick and thin!"
"Corry!—how on earth can Arthur be happy if he marries her—how can he live in that set—the son-in-law ofthat man! He'll have to give up his seat—nobody here would ever vote for him again. His friends would cut him—"
"Oh come, come, my dear, we're not as bad as that!" said Coryston, impatiently.
But Marcia wailed on:
"And it isn't as if he had ideas and theories—like you—"
"Not a principle to his back!—I know," said Coryston, cheerfully. "I tell you again, I'd not dissuade him; on the contrary, I'd shove him into it!—if she were the right sort. But she's not. She's ruined by the luxury she's been living in. I believe—if you ask me—that she'd accept Arthur for his money—but that she doesn't care one brass farthing about him. Why should she?"
"Corry!"
"He's a fool, my dear, though a jolly one—and she's not been accustomed to living with fools. She's got wits as sharp as gimlets. Well, well"—he got up from the seat—"can't talk any more now. Now what is it exactly you want me to do? I repeat—I'm coming to see mother this afternoon."
"Don't let her guess anything. Don't tell her anything. She's a little worried about Arthur already. But we must stop the madness before she knows anything. Promise!"
"Very well. For the present—I'm mum."
"And talk to him!—tell him it'll ruin him!"
"I don't mind—from my own point of view," said Coryston, surveying her with his hands on his sides. Then suddenly his face changed. A cloud overshadowed it. He gave her a queer, cold look.
"Perhaps I have something to ask you," he said, slowly.
"What?" The tone showed her startled.
"Letmecome and talk toyouabout that man whom all the world says you're going to marry!"
She stared at him, struck dumb for the moment by the fierceness of his voice and expression. Then she said, indignantly:
"What do you mean, Corry!"
"You are deceived in him. You can't marry him!" he said, passionately. "At least let me talk to you."
She rose and stood facing him, her hands behind her, her dark face as full of energy and will as his own.
"You are thinking of the story of Mrs. Betts. I know it."
"Not as I should tell it!"
A moving figure in a distant field caught her attention. She made a great effort to master her excitement.
"You may tell me what you like. But I warn you I shall askhimfor his version, too."
Corry's expression changed. The tension relaxed.
"That's only fair," he said, indifferently. Then, perceiving the advancing man: "Ah, I see!—here he is. I'm off. It's a bargain. I say nothing to mother—and do my best to make Arthur hang himself. And I have it out with you—my small sister!—when we next meet."
He paused, looking at her, and in his strangely penetrating eyes there dawned, suddenly, the rare expression that Marcia remembered—as of a grave yet angry tenderness. Then he turned away, walking fast, and was soon invisible among the light shadows of a beech avenue, just in leaf. Marcia was left behind, breathing quick, to watch the approach of Edward Newbury.
As soon as he perceived Marcia under the shade of the hawthorns Newbury quickened his pace, and he had soon thrown himself, out of breath, on the grass beside her.
"What a heavenly spot!—and what a morning! How nice of you to let me find you! I was hoping Lady Coryston would give me lunch."
Radiant, he raised his eyes to her, as he lay propped on his elbows, the spring sun, slipping through the thin blossom-laden branches overhead, dappling his bronzed face.
Marcia flushed a little—an added beauty. As she sat there in a white hat and dress, canopied by the white trees, and lit by a warm reflected light, she stirred in Newbury's senses once more a thrilling delight made all the keener perhaps by the misgiving, the doubts which invariably accompanied it. She could be so gracious; and she could be so dumb and inaccessible. Again and again he had been on the point of declaring himself during the last few weeks, and again and again he had drawn back, afraid lest the decisive word from him should draw the decisive word from her, and it should be a word of denial. Better—better infinitely—these doubts and checks, than a certainty which would divide him from her.
This morning indeed he found her all girlish gentleness and appeal. And it made his own task easier. For he also had matters on his mind. But she anticipated him.
"I want to talk to you about Corry—my brother!" she said, bending toward him.
THIS MORNING HE FOUND HER ALL GIRLISH GENTLENESS AND APPEAL
There was a child in Marcia, and she could evoke it when she pleased. She evoked it now. The young man before her hungered, straightway, to put out his arms to her—gathering her to him caressingly as one does with the child that clings and confides. But instead he merely smiled at her with his bright conscious eyes.
"I, too, want to talk to you about Coryston," he said, nodding.
"We know he's behaving dreadfully—abominably!" laughed Marcia, but with a puckered brow.
"Mr. Lester tells me there was a great attack on Lord and Lady William yesterday in the Martover paper. Mother hasn't seen it yet—and I don't want to read it—"
"Don't!" said Newbury, smiling.
"But mother will be so ashamed, unhappy, when she knows! So am I. But I wanted to explain. We suffer just as much. He's stirring up the whole place against mother. And now that he's begun to attack you, I thought perhaps that if you and I—"
"Took counsel! Excellent!"
"We might perhaps think of some way of stopping it."
"He's much more acutely angry with us at present than with anything your mother does," said Newbury, gravely! "Has he told you?"
"No, but—he means to," said the girl, hesitating.
"It is not unfair I think I should anticipate him. You will have his version afterward. I got an extraordinary letter from him this morning. It is strange that he cannot see we also plead justice and right for what we do—that if we satisfied his conscience we should wound our own."
He rose from the grass as he spoke, and took a seat on a stone a little way from her. And as she looked at him Marcia had a strange, sudden feeling that here was quite another man from the wooer who had just been lying on the grass at her feet.Thiswas the man of whom she had said to Waggin—"he seems the softest, kindest!—and underneath—iron!" A shade of some habitual sternness had crept over the features. A noble sternness, however; and it had begun to stir in her, intermittently, the thrill of an answering humility.
"It is difficult for me—perhaps impossible—to tell you all the story," he said, after a pause, "but I will try and tell it shortly—in its broad outlines."
"I have heard some of it."
"So I supposed. But let me tell it in order—so far as I can. It concerns a man whom a few weeks ago we all regarded—my father and mother—myself—as one of our best friends. You know how keen my father is about experimenting with the land? Well, when we set up our experimental farm here ten years ago we made this man—John Betts—the head of it. He has been my father's right hand—and he has done splendidly—made the farm, indeed, and himself, famous. And he seemed to be one with us in other respects." He paused a moment, looked keenly into her face, and then said, gravely and simply: "We looked upon him as a deeply religious man. My mother could not say enough of his influence on the estate. He took a large men's class on Sundays. He was a regular communicant; he helped our clergyman splendidly. And especially"—here again the speaker hesitated a moment. But he resumed with a gentle seriousness—"he helped us in all our attempts to make the people here live straight—like Christians—not like animals. My mother has very strict rules—she won't allow any one in our cottages who has lost their character. I know it sounds harsh. It isn't so—it's merciful. The villages were in a terrible state when we came—as to morals. I can't of course explain to you—but our priest appealed to us—we had to make changes—and my father and mother bravely faced unpopularity—"
He looked at her steadily, while his face changed, and the sudden red of some quick emotion invaded it.
"You know we are unpopular!"
"Yes," said Marcia, slowly, his perfect sincerity forbidding anything else in her.
"Especially"—there was a touch of scorn in the full voice—"owing to the attacks on my father and mother of that Liberal agitator—that man Atherstone—who lives in that cottage on the hill—your mother knows all about him. He has spread innumerable stories about us ever since we came to live here. He is a free-thinker and a republican—we are church people and Tories. He thinks that every man—or woman—is a law unto themselves. We think—but you know what we think!"
He smiled at her.
"Well—to return to Betts. This is May. Last August he had an attack of influenza, and went off to North Wales, to the sea, to recruit. He was away much longer than any one expected, and after about six weeks he wrote to my father to say that he should return to Hoddon Grey—with a wife. He had found a lady at Colwyn Bay, whom he had known as a girl. She was a widow, had just lost her father, with whom she lived, and was very miserable and forlorn. I need not say we all wrote the most friendly letters. She came, a frail, delicate creature, with one child. My mother did all she could for her, but was much baffled by her reserve and shrinking. Then—bit by bit—through some extraordinary chances and coincidences—I needn't go through it all—the true story came out."
He looked away for a moment over the reaches of the park, evidently considering with himself what he could tell, and how far.
"I can only tell you the bare facts," he said, at last. "Mrs. Betts was divorced by her first husband. She ran away with a man who was in his employment, and lived with him for two years. He never married her, and after two years he deserted her. She has had a wretched life since—with her child. Then Betts came along, whom she had known long ago. She threw herself on his pity. She is very attractive—he lost his head—and married her. Well now, what were we to do?"
"Theyaremarried?" said Marcia.
"Certainly—by the law. But it is a law which matters nothing to us!"
The voice had taken to itself a full challenging note.
Marcia looked up.
"Because—you think—divorce is wrong?"
"Because—'What God has joined together let no man put asunder!'"
"But there are exceptions in the New Testament?"
The peach bloom on Marcia's cheek deepened as she bent over the daisy chain she was idly making.
"Doubtful ones! The dissolution of marriage may itself be an open question. But, for all churchmen, the remarriage of divorced persons—and trebly, when it is asked for by the person whose sin caused the divorce!—is an absolutely closed one!"
Marcia's mind was in a ferment. But her girlish senses were keenly alive to the presence beside her—the clean-cut classical face, the spiritual beauty of the eyes. Yet something in her shivered.
"Suppose she was very unhappy with her first husband?"
"Law cannot be based on hard cases. It is made to help the great multitude of suffering, sinning men and women through their lives." He paused a little, and then said, "Our Lord 'knew what was in man.'"
The low tone in which the last words were spoken affected Marcia deeply, not so much as an appeal to religion, for her own temperament was not religious, as because they revealed the inner mystical life of the man beside her. She was suddenly filled again with a strange pride that he should have singled her out—to love her.
But the rise of feeling was quickly followed by recoil.
She looked up eagerly.
"If I had been very miserable—had made a hideous mistake—and knew it—and somebody came along and offered to make me happy—give me a home—and care for me—I couldn't and I shouldn't resist!"
"You would," he said, simply, "if God gave you strength."
Nothing so intimate had yet been said between them. There was silence. That old, old connection between the passion of religion—which is in truth a great romanticism—and the passion of sex, made itself felt; but in its most poetic form. Marcia was thrillingly conscious of the debate in herself—of the voice which said, "Teach me, govern me, love me—be my adored master and friend!" and the voice which replied, "I should be his slave—I will not!"
At last she said:
"You have dismissed Mr. Betts?"
He sighed.
"He is going in a month. My father offered all we could. If—Mrs. Betts"—the words came out with effort—"would have separated from him we should have amply provided for her and her child. The Cloan Sisters would have watched over her. She could have lived near them, and Betts could have seen her from time to time—"
"They refused?"
"Absolutely. Betts wrote my father the fiercest letters. They were married, he said, married legally and honestly—and that was an end of it. As to Mrs. Betts's former history, no one had the smallest right to pry into it. He defied my father to dismiss him. My father—on his principles—had no choice but to do so. So then—your brother came on the scene!"
"Of course—he was furious?"
"What right has he to be furious?" said Newbury, quietly. "His principles may be what he pleases. But he must allow us ours. This is a free country."
A certain haughtiness behind the gentle manner was very perceptible. Marcia kindled for her brother.
"I suppose Corry would say, if the Church ruled us—as you wish—England wouldn't be free!"
"That's his view. We have ours. No doubt he has the present majority with him. But why attack us personally—call us names—because of what we believe?"
He spoke with vivacity, with wounded feeling. Marcia melted.
"But every one knows," she murmured, "that Corry is mad—quite mad."
And suddenly, impulsively, she put out her hand.
"Don't blame us!"
He took the hand in both his own, bent over and kissed it.
"Don't let him set you against us!"
She smiled and shook her head. Then by way of extricating herself and him from the moment of emotion—by way of preventing its going any further—she sprang to her feet.
"Mother will be waiting lunch for us."
They walked back to the house together, discussing as they went Coryston's whole campaign. Newbury's sympathy with her mother was as balm to Marcia; insensibly she rewarded him, both by an open and charming mood, and also by a docility, a readiness to listen to the Newbury view of life which she had never yet shown. The May day, meanwhile, murmured and gleamed around them. The spring wind like a riotous life leaped and rustled in the new leaf of the oaks and beeches; the sky seemed to be leaning mistily to earth; and there were strange, wild lights on the water and the grass, as though, invisible, the train of Dionysius or Apollo swept through the land. Meanwhile the relation between the young man and the girl ripened apace. Marcia's resistance faltered within her; and to Newbury the walk was enchantment.
Finally they agreed to leave the task of remonstrating with Coryston to Sir Wilfrid Bury, who was expected the following day, and was an old friend of both families.
"Corry likes him," said Marcia. "He says, 'Give me either a firebrand or a cynic!' He has no use for other sorts of people. And perhaps Sir Wilfrid will help us, too—with Arthur." Her look darkened.
"Arthur?" said Newbury, startled. "What's wrong with Arthur?"
Marcia hurriedly told him. He looked amazed and shocked.
"Oh, that can't be allowed. We must protect your mother—and persuade Arthur. Let me do what I can. He and I are old pals."
Marcia was only too glad to be helped. It had begun to seem to her, in spite of the rush of her London gaieties, and the brilliance of her London successes, that she had been very lonely at home for a long time, and here, in this strong man, were warmth and shelter.
Luncheon passed gaily, and Lady Coryston perceived, or thought she perceived, that Marcia's affairs were marching briskly toward their destined end. Newbury took his leave immediately afterward, saying to Lady Coryston, "So we expect you—next Sunday?" The slight emphasis he laid on the words, the pressure on her hand seemed to reveal to her the hope in the young man's mind. Well!—the sooner, the better.
Afterward Lady Coryston paid some calls in the village, and, coming home through a stately series of walled gardens ablaze with spring flowers, she gave some directions for a new herbaceous border. Then she returned to the house to await her son. Marcia meanwhile had gone to the station to meet Sir Wilfrid Bury.
Coryston duly arrived, a more disreputable figure than usual—bedraggled with rain, his shabby trousers tucked into his boots, and his cap festooned with fishing-flies; for the afternoon had turned showery, and Coryston had been pursuing the only sport which appealed to him in the trout-stream of the park. Before he did so he had formally asked leave of the agent, and had been formally granted it.
He and Lady Coryston were closeted together for nearly an hour. Had any one been sitting in the adjoining room they would have heard, save on two occasions when the raised voices clashed together, but little variation in the tones of the combatants. When the conference broke up and Coryston departed Lady Coryston was left alone for a little while. She sat motionless in her chair beside her writing-table. Animation and color faded slowly from her features; and before her trance of thought was broken by the arrival of a servant announcing that Sir Wilfrid Bury had arrived, one who knew her well would have been startled by certain subtle changes in her aspect.
Coryston, meanwhile, made his way to the great library in the north wing, looking for Lester. He found the young librarian at his desk, with a fifteenth-century MS. before him, which he was describing and cataloguing. The beautiful pages sparkling with color and gold were held open by glass weights, and the young man's face, as he bent over his task, showed the happy abstraction of the scholar. All around him rose the latticed walls of the library, holding on one side a collection of MSS., on the other of early printed books, well known to learned Europe. Wandering gleams from the showery sky outside lit up the faded richness of the room, the pale brown and yellows of the books, the sharp black and white of the old engravings hanging among them. The windows were wide open, and occasionally a westerly gust would blow in upon the floor petals from a fruit tree in blossom just outside.
Coryston came in, looking rather flushed and excited, and took a seat on the edge of the table where Lester was working, his hands in his pockets.
"What a blessed place!" he said, glancing round him. Lester looked up and smiled absently.
"Not bad?"
Silence a moment. Then Coryston said, with sudden vehemence:
"Don't you go into politics, Lester!"
"No fear, old man. But what's up, now? You seem to have been ragging a good deal."
"I've been 'following the gleam,'" said Coryston, with a sarcastic mouth. "Or to put it in another way—there's a hot coal in me that makes me do certain things. I dignify it by calling it a sense of justice. What is it? I don't know. I say, Lester, are you a Suffragist?"
"Haven't made up my mind."
"I am—theoretically. But upon my word—politics plays the deuce with women. And sometimes I think that women will play the deuce with politics."
"You mean they're so unmeasured?" said Lester, cautiously.
Coryston shook his head vaguely, staring at the floor, but presently broke out:
"I say, Lester, if we can't find generosity, tenderness, an open mind—among women—where the devil are we going to find them?" He stood up. "And politics kills all that kind of thing."
"'Physician, heal thyself,'" laughed Lester.
"Ah, but it's ourbusiness!'"—Coryston smote the table beside him—"our dusty, d—d business. We've got somehow to push and harry and drive this beastly world into some sort of decency. But the women!—oughtn't they to be in the shrine—tending the mystic fire? What if the fire goes out—if the heart of the nation dies?"
Lester's blue-gray eyes looked up quietly. There was sympathy in them, but he said nothing.
Coryston tramped half-way to the library door, then turned back.
"My mother's quite a good woman," he said, abruptly. "There are no great scandals on this estate—it's better managed than most. But because of this poison of politics, no one can call their souls their own. If she'd let them live their own lives they'd adore her."
"The trade-unions are just the same."
"I believe you!" said Coryston. "Freedom's a lost art in England—from Parliament downward. Well, well—Good-by!"
"Coryston!"
"Yes?" Lord Coryston paused with his hand on the door.
"Don't take the chair for Glenwilliam?"
"By George, I will!" Coryston's eyes flamed. And going out he noisily shut the door.
Lester was left to his work. But his mood had been diverted, and he presently found that he was wasting time. He walked to the window, and stood there gazing at the bright flower-beds in the formal garden, the fountain plashing in its center, the low hills and woods that closed the horizon, the villages with their church-towers, piercing the shelter of the woods. May had drawn over the whole her first veils of green. The English perfection, the English mellowness, was everywhere; the spring breathings in the air came scented with the young leaf of trees that had been planted before Blenheim was fought.
Suddenly across the farther end of the garden passed a girlish figure in white. Lester's pulses ran. It was Marcia. He saw her but seldom, and that generally at a distance. But sometimes she would come, in her pretty, friendly way, to chat to him about his work, and turn over his manuscripts.
"She has the same feeling about me that nice women have about their dogs and cats. They are conscious of them, sorry for them; they don't like them to feel themselves neglected. So she comes to see me every now and then—lest I should think myself forgotten. Her conscience pricks her for people less prosperous than herself. I see it quite plainly. But she would be angry if I were to tell her so!"