It was the old housekeeper at Coryston, one Mrs. Drew, who had been the presiding spirit of the house in all its domestic aspects for some thirty years, who came at the summons of Marcia's frightened maid, and helped the girl to revive her mistress, without alarming Lady Coryston. And before the news could reach her mother in other ways, Marcia herself went in to tell her what she must know.
Lady Coryston had had a bad night, and was sitting up in bed gazing straight before her, her gaunt hands lying listlessly on a pile of letters she had not yet opened. When Marcia came in, a white ghost, still shivering under nervous shock, her mother looked at her in sudden dismay. She sprang forward in bed.
"What!—Marcia!—have you seen Arthur?"
Marcia shook her head.
"It's not Arthur, mother!"
And standing rigid beside her mother's bed, she told her news, so far as those piteous deaths at Redcross Farm were concerned. Of her own position, and of the scene which had passed between herself and Newbury the preceding day, she said not a word.
On the facts presented to her, Lady Coryston was first bewildered, then irritated. Why on earth should Marcia take this morbid and extravagant interest in the affairs of such people? They were not even tenants of the Coryston estates! It was monstrous that she should have taken them up at all, and most audacious and unbecoming that she should have tried to intercede for them with the Newburys, as she understood, from her daughter's hardly coherent story, had been the case. And now, she supposed, as Marcia had actually been so foolish, so headstrong, as to go herself—without permission either from her mother or her betrothed—to see these two people at the farm, the very day before this horrible thing happened, she might have to appear at the inquest. Most improper and annoying!
However, she scarcely expressed her disapproval aloud with her usual trenchancy. In the first place, Marcia's tremulous state made it difficult. In the next, she was herself so far from normal that she could not, after the first few minutes, keep her attention fixed upon the matter at all. She began abruptly to question Marcia as to whether she had seen Arthur the night before—or that morning?
"I had gone up-stairs before he arrived last night—and this morning he's not yet down," said the girl, perfunctorily, as though she only answered the question with her lips, without attaching any real meaning to it. Then her mother's aspect, which on her entrance she had scarcely noticed, struck her with a sudden and added distress.
"You don't look well, mother. Don't come down to-day."
"I shall certainly come down by luncheon-time," said Lady Coryston, sharply. "Tell Arthur that I wish to have some conversation with him before he goes back to London. And as for you, Marcia, the best thing you can do is to go and rest for a time, and then to explain all you have been doing to Edward. I must say I think you will have a great deal to explain. And I shall scold Bellows and Mrs. Drew for letting you hear such a horrible thing at all—without coming to me first."
"Mother!" cried Marcia, in a kind of despair. "Aren't you—aren't you sorry for those two people?—and don't you understand that I—I hoped I might have helped them?"
At last she began to weep. The tears ran down her cheeks. Lady Coryston frowned.
"Certainly, I'm sorry. But—the fact is, Marcia—I can't stand any extra strain this morning. We'll talk about it again when you're more composed. Now go and lie down."
She closed her eyes, looking so gray and old that Marcia, seized with a new compunction, could only obey her at once. But on the threshold she was called back.
"If any messenger arrives with a letter for Arthur—tell them down-stairs to let me know."
"Yes, mother."
As soon, however, as she had closed the door Marcia's tired mind immediately dismissed the subject of Arthur, even of her mother. The tumult of anguish returned upon her in which she had stood ever since she had come back from her faint to the bitter consciousness of a world—an awful world—where people can die of misery for lack of pity, for lack of help, and yet within a stone's-throw of those who yearned to give them both.
She went back to her room, finished her dressing mechanically, wrote a short letter, blotting it with tears, and then went tottering down-stairs. In the central hall, a vast pillared space, crowded with statuary and flowers, where the men of the house were accustomed to smoke and read the newspapers after breakfast, she perceived Reginald Lester sitting alone.
He sprang up at sight of her, came to her, took her hands, looked into her face, and then stooped and kissed her fingers, respectfully, ardently; with such an action as a brother might have used to a much younger sister.
She showed no surprise. She simply lifted her eyes to him, like a miserable child—saying under her breath:
"You know—I saw them—the night before last?"
"I know. It has been a fearful shock. Is there anything I can do for you?" For he saw she had a letter in her hand.
"Please tell them to send this letter. And then—come back. I'll go to the library."
She went blindly along the passages to the library, hearing and flying from the voices of Sir Wilfrid and Arthur in the dining-room as she passed. When Lester returned, he saw her standing by his desk, lost in an abstraction of grief. But she roused herself at sight of him, and asked for any further news there might be. Lester, who had been suffering from a sprained wrist, had that morning seen the same doctor who had been called in on the discovery of the tragedy.
"It must all have happened within an hour. His sister, who had come to stay with them, says that John Betts had seemed rather brighter in the evening, and his wife rather less in terror. She spoke very warmly to her sister-in-law of your having come to see her, and said she had promised you to wait a little before she took any step. Then he went out to the laboratory, and there, it is supposed, he was overcome by a fit of acute depression—the revolver was in his drawer—he scrawled the two words that were found—and you know the rest. Two people on the farm heard the shot—but it was taken as fired by the night watcher in a field beyond, which was full of young pheasants. About midnight Mrs. Betts went out to bring him in—her sister-in-law having gone up to bed. She never came back again—no one heard a sound—and they were not discovered till the morning. How long she was alone with him before she killed herself cannot even be guessed."
Marcia's trembling fingers fumbled at the bosom of her dress. She drew out a crumpled paper, and pushed it toward him. He read:
"Good-by, dear Miss Coryston. He sits so still—not much injured. I have often seen him look so. My John—my John—I can't stay behind. Will you please do something for my boy? John—John—if only we hadn't met again—"
It ended incoherently in blots and smudges.
"You poor child!" said Lester, involuntarily, as he looked up from the letter. It was a word of sudden compassion wrested from him by the sight of Marcia's intolerable pain. He brought forward one of the deep library chairs, and made her sit in it, and as he bent over her his sympathy drew from her piteous little cries and stifled moans which he met with answering words of comfort. All consciousness of sex dropped away; the sharp-chinned face, the blue, black-fringed eyes, behind their spectacles, the noble brow under its pile of strong grizzled hair:—she saw them all as an embodied tenderness—courage and help made visible—a courage and help on which she gradually laid hold. She could not stop to ask herself how it was that, in this moment of shock and misery, she fell so naturally into this attitude of trust toward one with whom she had never yet set up any relation but that of a passing friendship. She only knew that there was comfort in his voice, his look, in his understanding of her suffering, in the reticence with which he handled it. She had lived beside him in the same house for months without ever really knowing him. Now suddenly—here was a friend—on whom to lean.
But she could not speak to him of Newbury, though it was the thought of Newbury that was burning her heart. She did mention Coryston, only to say with energy: "I don't want to see him yet—notyet!" Lester could only guess at her meaning, and would not have probed her for the world.
But after a little she braced herself, gave him a grateful, shrinking look, and, rising, she went in search of Sir Wilfrid and Arthur.
Only Sir Wilfrid was in the hall when she reentered it. He had just dismissed a local reporter who had got wind of Miss Coryston's visit to the farm, and had rushed over to Coryston, in the hope of seeing her.
"My dear child!" He hurried to meet her. "You look a perfect wreck! Howabominablethat you should be mixed up with this thing!"
"I couldn't help it," she said, vaguely, turning away at once from the discussion of it. "Where is Arthur? Mother wanted me to give him a message."
NOW SUDDENLY—HERE WAS A FRIEND—ON WHOM TO LEAN
Sir Wilfrid looked uneasy.
"He was here till just now. But he is in a curious state of mind. He thinks of nothing but one thing—and one person. He arrived late last night, and it is my belief that he hardly went to bed. And he is just hanging on the arrival of a letter—"
"From Enid Glenwilliam?"
"Evidently. I tried to get him to realize this horrible affair—the part the Newburys had played in it—the effect on you—since that poor creature appealed to you. But no—not a bit of it! He seems to have neither eyes nor ears—But here he is!"
Sir Wilfrid and Marcia stepped apart. Arthur came into the hall from the library entrance. Marcia saw that he was much flushed, and that his face wore a hard, determined look, curiously at variance with its young features and receding chin.
"Hullo, Marcia! Beastly business, this you've been getting into. Think, my dear, you'd have done much better to keep out of it—especially as you and Newbury didn't agree. I've just seen Coryston in the park—he confessed he'd set you on—and that you and Newbury had quarreled over it.He'sperfectly mad about it, of course. That you might expect. I say—mother is late!"
He looked round the hall imperiously.
Marcia, supporting herself on a chair, met his eyes, and made no reply. Yet she dimly remembered that her mother had asked her to give him some message.
"Arthur, remember that your sister's had a great shock!" said Sir Wilfrid, sternly.
"I know that! Sorry for you, Marcia—awfully—but I expect you'll have to appear at the inquest—don't see how you can get out of it. You should have thought twice about going there—when Newbury didn't want you to. And what's this they say about a letter?"
His tone had the peremptory ring natural to many young men of his stamp, in dealing with their inferiors, or—until love has tamed them—with women; but it came strangely from the good-tempered and easy-going Arthur.
Marcia's hand closed instinctively on the bosom of her dress, where the letter was.
"Mrs. Betts wrote me a letter," she said, slowly.
"You'd better let me see it. Sir Wilfrid and I can advise you."
He held out an authoritative hand. Marcia made no movement, and the hand dropped.
"Oh, well, if you're going to take no one's advice but your own, I suppose you must gang your own gait!" said her brother, impatiently. "But if you're a sensible girl you'll make it up with Newbury and let him keep you out of it as much as possible. Betts was always a cranky fellow. I'm sorry for the little woman, though."
And walking away to a distant window at the far end of the hall, whence all the front approaches to the house could be seen, he stood drumming on the glass and fixedly looking out. Sir Wilfrid, with an angry ejaculation, approached Marcia.
"My dear, your brother isn't himself!—else he could never have spoken so unkindly. Will you show me that letter? It will, of course, have to go to the police."
She held it out to him obediently.
Sir Wilfrid read it. He blew his nose, and walked away for a minute. When he returned, it was to say, with lips that twitched a little in his smooth-shaven actor's face:
"Most touching! If one could only have known! But dear Marcia, I hope it's not true—I hope to God, it's not true!—that you've quarreled with Newbury?"
Marcia was standing with her head thrown back against the high marble mantelpiece. The lids drooped over her eyes.
"I don't know," she said, in a faint voice. "I don't know. Oh no, notquarreled—"
Sir Wilfrid looked at her with a fatherly concern; took her limp hand and pressed it.
"Stand by him, dear, stand by him! He'll suffer enough from this—without losing you."
Marcia did not answer. Lester had returned to the hall, and he and Bury then got from her, as gently as possible, a full account of her two interviews with Mrs. Betts. Lester wrote it down, and Marcia signed it. The object of the two men was to make the police authorities acquainted with such testimony as Marcia had to give, while sparing her if possible an appearance at the inquest. While Lester was writing, Sir Wilfrid threw occasional scathing glances toward the distant Arthur, who seemed to be alternately pacing up and down and reading the newspapers. But the young man showed no signs whatever of doing or suggesting anything further to help his sister.
Sir Wilfrid perceived at once how Marcia's narrative might be turned against the Newburys, round whom the hostile feeling of a whole neighborhood was probably at that moment rising into fury. Was there ever a more odious, a more untoward situation!
But he could not be certain that Marcia understood it so. He failed, indeed, altogether, to decipher her mind toward Newbury; or to get at the truth of what had happened between them. She sat, very pale, and piteously composed; answering the questions they put to her, and sometimes, though rarely, unable to control a sob, which seemed to force its way unconsciously. At the end of their cross-examination, when Sir Wilfrid was ready to start for Martover, the police headquarters for the district, she rose, and said she would go back to her room.
"Do, do, dear child!" Bury threw a fatherly arm round her, and went with her to the foot of the stairs. "Go and rest—sleep if you can."
As Marcia moved away there was a sudden sound at the end of the hall. Arthur had run hurriedly toward the door leading to the outer vestibule. He opened it and disappeared. Through the high-arched windows to the left, a boy on a bicycle could be seen descending the long central avenue leading to the fore-court.
It was just noon. The great clock set in the center of the eastern façade had chimed the hour, and as its strokes died away on the midsummer air Marcia was conscious, as her mother had been the preceding afternoon, of an abnormal stillness round her. She was in her sitting-room, trying to write a letter to Mrs. Betts's sister about the boy mentioned in his mother's last words. He was not at the farm, thank God!—that she knew. His stepfather had sent him at Easter to a good preparatory school.
It seemed to help her to be doing this last poor service to the dead woman. And yet in truth she scarcely knew what she was writing. Her mind was torn between two contending imaginations—the thought of Mrs. Betts, sitting beside her dead husband, and waiting for the moment of her own death; and the thought of Newbury. Alternately she saw the laboratory at night—the shelves of labeled bottles and jars—the tables and chemical apparatus—the electric light burning—and in the chair the dead man, with the bowed figure against his knee:—and then—Newbury—in his sitting-room, amid the books and portraits of his college years—the crucifix over the mantelpiece—the beautiful drawings of Einsiedeln—of Assisi.
Her heart cried out to him. It had cried out to him in her letter. The thought of the agony he must be suffering tortured her. Did he blame himself? Did he remember how she had implored him to "take care"? Or was it all still plain to him that he had done right? She found herself praying with all her strength that he might still feel he could have done no other, and that what had happened, because of his action, had been God's will, and not merely man's mistake. She longed—sometimes—to throw her arms round him, and comfort him. Yet there was no passion in her longing. All that young rising of the blood seemed to have been killed in her. But she would never draw back from what she had offered him—never. She would go to him, and stand by him—as Sir Wilfrid had said—if he wanted her.
The gong rang for luncheon. Marcia rose unwillingly; but she was still more unwilling to make her feelings the talk of the household. As she neared the dining-room she saw her mother approaching from the opposite side of the house. Lady Coryston walked feebly, and her appearance shocked her daughter.
"Mother!—do let me send for Bryan!" she pleaded, as they met—blaming herself sharply the while for her own absorption and inaction during the morning hours. "You don't look a bit fit to be up."
Lady Coryston replied in a tone which forbade discussion that she was quite well, and had no need whatever of Dr. Bryan's attendance. Then she turned to the butler, and inquired if Mr. Arthur was in the house.
"His motor came round, my lady, about twelve o'clock. I have not seen him since."
The lunch passed almost in complete silence between the two ladies. Lady Coryston was informed that Sir Wilfrid and Lester had gone to Martover in connection with Marcia's share in the events at Redcross Farm. "They hope I needn't appear," said Marcia, dully.
"I should rather think not!"
Lady Coryston's indignant tone seemed to assume that English legal institutions were made merely to suit the convenience of the Coryston family. Marcia had enough of Coryston in her to perceive it. But she said nothing.
As they entered the drawing-room after luncheon she remembered—with a start.
"Mother—I forgot!—I'm so sorry—I dare say it was nothing. But I think a letter came for Arthur just before twelve—a letter he was expecting. At least I saw a messenger-boy come down the avenue. Arthur ran out to meet him. Then I went up-stairs, and I haven't seen him since."
Lady Coryston had turned whiter than before. She groped for a chair near and seated herself, before she recovered sufficient self-possession to question her daughter as to the precise moment of the messenger's appearance, the direction from which he arrived, and so forth.
But Marcia knew no more, and could tell no more. Nor could she summon up any curiosity about her brother, possessed and absorbed as her mind was by other thoughts and images. But in a vague, anxious way she felt for her mother; and if Lady Coryston had spoken Marcia would have responded.
And Lady Coryston would have liked to speak, first of all to scold Marcia for forgetting her message, and then to confide in her—insignificant as the daughter's part in the mother's real life and thoughts had always been. But she felt physically incapable of bearing the emotion which might spring out upon her from such a conversation. It was as though she possessed—and knew she possessed—a certain measured strength; just enough—and no more—to enable her to go through a conversation whichmustbe faced. She had better not waste it beforehand. Sometimes it occurred to her that her feeling toward this coming interview was wholly morbid and unnatural. How many worse things had she faced in her time!
But reasoning on it did not help her—only silence and endurance. After resting a little in the drawing-room she went up to her sitting-room again, refusing Marcia's company.
"Won't you let me come and make you comfortable?—if you're going to rest, you'll want a shawl and some pillows," said the girl, as she stood at the foot of the staircase, wistfully looking after her.
But Lady Coryston shook her head.
"Thank you—I don't want anything."
So—for Marcia—there was nothing to be done with these weary hours—but wait and think and weep! She went back to her own sitting-room, and lingeringly put Newbury's letters together, in a packet, which she sealed; in case—well, in case—nothing came of her letter of the morning. They had been engaged not quite a month. Although they had met almost every day, yet there were many letters from him; letters of which she felt anew the power and beauty as she reread them. Yet from that power and beauty, the natural expression of his character, she stood further off now than when she had first known him. The mystery indeed in which her nascent love had wrapped him had dropped away. She knew him better, she respected him infinitely; and all the time—strangely, inexplicably—love had been, not growing, but withering.
Meanwhile, into all her thoughts about herself and Newbury there rushed at recurrent intervals the memory, the overwhelming memory, of her last sight of John and Alice Betts. That gray face in the summer dusk, beyond the window, haunted her; and the memory of those arms which had clung about her waist.
Was there a beyond?—where were they?—those poor ghosts! All the riddles of the eternal Sphinx leaped upon Marcia—riddles at last made real. Twenty-four hours ago, two brains, two hearts, alive, furiously alive, with human sorrow and human revolt. And now? Had that infinitely pitiful Christ in whom Newbury believed, received the two tormented souls?—were they comforted—purged—absolved? Had they simply ceased to be—to feel—to suffer? Or did some stern doom await them—still—after all the suffering here? A shudder ran through the girl, evoking by reaction the memory of immortal words—"Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much." She fed herself on the divine saying; repressing with all her strength the skeptical, pessimistic impulses that were perhaps natural to her temperament, forcing herself, as it were, for their sakes, to hope and to believe.
Again, as the afternoon wore away, she was weighed down by the surrounding silence. No one in the main pile of building but her mother and herself. Not a sound, but the striking of the great gilt clock outside. From her own room she could see the side windows of her mother's sitting-room; and once she thought she perceived the stately figure passing across them. But otherwise Lady Coryston made no sign; and her daughter dared not go to her without permission.
Why did no letter come for her, no reply? She sat at her open windows for a time, watching the front approaches, and looking out into a drizzling rain which veiled the afternoon. When it ceased she went out—restlessly—to the East Wood—the wood where they had broken it off. She lay down with her face against the log—a prone white figure, among the fern. The buried ring—almost within reach of her hand—seemed to call to her like a living thing. No!—let it rest.
If it was God's will that she should go back to Edward, she would make him a good wife. But her fear, her shrinking, was all there still. She prayed; but she did not know for what.
Meanwhile at Redcross Farm, the Coroner was holding his inquiry. The facts were simple, the public sympathy and horror profound. Newbury and Lord William had given their evidence amid a deep and, in many quarters, hostile silence. The old man, parchment-pale, but of an unshaken dignity, gave a full account of the efforts—many and vain—that had been made both by himself and his son to find Betts congenial work in another sphere and to persuade him to accept it.
"We had nothing to do with his conscience, or with his private affairs—in themselves. All we asked was that we should not be called on to recognize a marriage which in our eyes was not a marriage. Everything that we could have done consistently with that position, my son and I may honestly say we have done."
Sir Wilfrid Bury was called, to verify Marcia's written statement, and Mrs. Betts's letter was handed to the Coroner, who broke down in reading it. Coryston, who was sitting on the opposite side of the room, watched the countenances of the two Newburys while it was being read, with a frowning attention.
When the evidence was over, and the jury had retired, Edward Newbury took his father to the carriage which was waiting. The old man, so thin and straight, from his small head and narrow shoulders to his childishly small feet, leaned upon his son's arm, and apparently saw nothing around him. A mostly silent throng lined the lane leading to the farm. Half-way stood the man who had come down to lecture on "Rational Marriage," surrounded by a group of Martover Socialists. From them rose a few hisses and groans as the Newburys passed. But other groups represented the Church Confraternities and clubs of the Newbury estate. Among them heads were quietly bared as the old man went by, or hands were silently held out. Even a stranger would have realized that the scene represented the meeting of two opposing currents of thought and life.
Newbury placed his father in the carriage, which drove off. He then went back himself to wait for the verdict.
As he approached the door of the laboratory in which the inquiry had been held, Coryston emerged.
Newbury flushed and stopped him. Coryston received it as though it had been the challenge of an enemy. He stepped back, straightening himself fiercely. Newbury began:
"Will you take a message from me to your sister?"
A man opened the door in front a little way.
"Mr. Edward, the jury are coming back."
The two men went in; Coryston listened with a sarcastic mouth to the conventional verdict of "unsound mind" which drapes impartially so many forms of human ill. And again he found himself in the lane with Newbury beside him.
"One more lie," he said, violently, "to a jury's credit!"
Newbury looked up. It was astonishing what a mask he could make of his face, normally so charged—over-charged—with expression.
"What else could it have been? But this is no time or place for us to discuss our differences, Coryston—"
"Why not!" cried Coryston, who had turned a dead white. "'Our differences,' as you call them, have led tothat!" He turned and flung out a thin arm toward the annex to the laboratory, where the bodies were lying. "It is time, I think, that reasonable men should come to some understanding about 'differences' that can slay and madden a pair of poor hunted souls, as these have been slain!"
"'Hunted?' What do you mean?" said Newbury, sternly, while his dark eyes took fire.
"Hunted by the Christian conscience!—that it might lie comfortable o' nights," was the scornful reply.
Newbury said nothing for a few moments. They emerged on the main road, crossed it, and entered the Hoddon Grey park. Here they were alone, out of sight of the crowd returning from the inquest to the neighboring village. As they stepped into one of the green rides of the park they perceived a motorcar descending the private road which crossed it a hundred yards away. A man was driving it at a furious pace, and Coryston clearly recognized his brother Arthur. He was driving toward Coryston. Up to the moment when the news of the farm tragedy had reached him that morning, Coryston's mind had been very full of what seemed to him the impending storm between his mother and Arthur. Since then he had never thought of it, and the sight of his brother rushing past, making for Coryston, no doubt, from some unknown point, excited but a moment's recollection, lost at once in 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 whatyouthought 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 heavenshaveopened—a Godhaswalked 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.
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 itdamnably!" 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 askmypardon, 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. Idon'thate 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'snot 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 youwhat 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 literallyafraidto 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 Pagebefore 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 getyourway—and force me to give up mine. It wasabominableof you to go and see Enid, without a word to me!—it wasabominableto 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 infearof 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 youloveus!" he cried, striking a chair beside him for emphasis. "Why didn't youloveus! 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 throughamile 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 arewegoing 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 ofthissurrender; 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 shecouldlet 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 naturalfouguesuggested 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: