The Coryston Family Part 20

"If we could but revive the duel!" said Lady Coryston, looking up with eyes aflame.

"Gracious! For what and whom? Do you want to shoot your future son-in-law for taking her from you?"

"Who--Marcia? Nonsense!" said Lady Coryston, impatiently. "I was talking of this last speech of Glenwilliam's, attacking us landlords. If the duel still existed he would either never have made it or he would have been shot within twenty-four hours!"

"Hang Glenwilliam!" Sir Wilfrid's tone was brusque. "I want to talk about Marcia!"

Lady Coryston turned slowly round upon him.

"What's wrong with Marcia? I see nothing to talk about."

"Wrong! You unnatural woman! I want to know what you feel about it. Do you really like the young man? Do you think he's good enough for her?"

"Certainly I like him. A very well disposed fellow. I hope he'll manage her properly. But if you want to know what I think of his family"--she dropped her voice--"I can only say that although their virtues no doubt are legion, the atmosphere of this house is to me positively stifling. You feel it as you cross the threshold. It is an atmosphere of sheer tyranny! What on earth do they mean by bundling us into chapel like that?"

"Tyranny! _You_ call it tyranny!" Sir Wilfrid's eyes danced.

"Certainly," said Lady Coryston, stiffly. "What else should I call it?

One's soul is not one's own."

Sir Wilfrid settled down on the sofa beside her, and devoted himself to drawing her out. Satan rebuking sin was a spectacle of which he never tired, and the situation was the more amusing because he happened to have spent the morning in remonstrating with her--to no purpose whatever--on the manner in which she was treating her eldest son.

CHAPTER VIII

While these events were happening at Hoddon Grey, Reginald Lester was pa.s.sing a solitary Sunday at Coryston, until the afternoon, at least, when visitors appeared. To be left to himself, the solitary inhabitant, save for the servants, of the great cla.s.sical pile; to be able to wander about it as he liked, free to speculate on its pictures and engravings; to rummage the immense collection of china in the bas.e.m.e.nt rooms which no one but himself ever looked at; to examine some new corner of the muniment-room, and to ponder the strange and gruesome collection of death-masks, made by Coryston's grandfather, and now ranged in one of the annexes of the library--gave him endless entertainment. He was a born student, in whom the antiquarian instincts would perhaps ultimately overpower the poetic and literary tastes which were now so strong in him; and on Sunday, when he put aside his catalogue, the miscellaneous possessions of an historic house represented for him a happy hunting-ground through which he was never tired of raiding.

But on Sunday, also, he generally gave some time to writing the journal of the preceding week. He had begun it in the hopes of attaining thereby a more flexible and literary style than the methods of his daily research allowed, and with various Stevensonian ambitions dinning in his head. Why should he not make himself a _writer_, like other people?

But the criticisms of books, the records of political or literary conversation, with which the parchment-bound volume had been filled for some time, had been gradually giving place to something quite different, and it had become more necessary than ever that the book should be carefully locked when done with, and put away in his most private drawer.

For instance:

"What is happening, or what has probably already happened, yesterday or to-day, at Hoddon Grey? It is very easy to guess. N. has been gaining ground steadily ever since he has been able to see her away from the distracting influences of London. What is impressive and unusual in his character has room to show itself; and there are no rival forces. And yet--I doubt very much whether it would answer his purpose that she should see much of his home. She will never endure any home of her own run on the same lines; for at bottom she is a pagan, with the splendid pagan virtues, of honor, fairness, loyalty, pity, but incapable by temperament of those particular emotions on which the life of Hoddon Grey is based. Humility, to her, is a word and a quality for which she has no use; and I am sure that she has never been sorry for her 'sins,' in the religious sense, though often, it seems to me, her dear life just swings hour by hour between the two poles of impulse and remorse. She pa.s.sionately wants something and must get it; and then she is consumed with fear lest in the getting it she should have injured or trampled on some one else.

"Of late she has come in here--to the library--much more frequently. I am sure she feels that I care deeply what happens to her; and I sometimes am presumptuous enough to think that she wishes me to understand and approve her.

"It has grown up inevitably--this affair; but N. little realizes how dangerous his position is. Up to a certain point the ascetic element in him and his philosophy will attract her--will draw the moth to the candle. All strong-willed characters among women are attracted by the austere, the ascetic powers in men. The history of all religious movements is there to prove it. But there are tremendous currents in our modern life making against such men as Newbury--their ideals and traditions. And to one or other of those currents it always seems to me that she is committed. She does not know it--does not dream, perhaps, whither she is being carried; but all the same there are 'murmurs and scents' from 'the infinite sea' of free knowledge and experiment which play upon her, and will never play upon Newbury.

"Coryston will make a great effort to upset the engagement--if it is an engagement; that I can see. He thinks himself justified, on the ground that she will be committing herself to an inhuman and antisocial view of life; and he will work upon her through this painful Betts case. I wonder if he will succeed. Is he really any more tolerant than his mother? And can toleration in the active-spirited be ever anything more than approximate?

'When I speak of toleration I mean not tolerated Popery,' said Milton. Lady Coryston can't tolerate her son, and Coryston can't tolerate Newbury. Yet all three must somehow live together and make a world. Doesn't that throw some light on the ideal function of women? Not voting--not direct party-fighting--but the creation of a spiritual atmosphere in which the nation may do its best, and may be insensibly urged to do its best, in fresh, spontaneous ways, like a plant flowering in a happy climate--isn't that what women might do for us?--instead of taking up with all the old-fashioned, disappointing, political machinery, that men have found out?

Meanwhile Lady Coryston of course wants all the women of her sort to vote, but doesn't see how it is to be done without letting in the women of all and any sort--to vote against her.

"I have about half done my cataloguing, and have been writing some letters to Germany this morning with a view to settling on some university work there for the winter. A big book on the rise and fall of Burgundy suggests itself to me; and already I hug the thought of it. Lady Coryston has paid me well for this job, and I shall be able to do what I like for a year, and give mother and Janie some of the jam and frills of life. And who knows if I sha'n't after all be able to make my living out of what I like best? If I only could _write_! The world seems to be waiting for the historian that can write.

"But meanwhile I shall always be glad of this year with the Corystons. How much longer will this rich, leisurely, aristocratic cla.s.s with all its still surviving power and privileges exist among us? It is something that obviously is in process of trans.m.u.tation and decay; though in a country like England the process will be a very slow one. Personally I greatly prefer this landlord stratum to the top stratum of the trading and manufacturing world. There are buried seeds in it, often of rare and splendid kinds, which any crisis brings to life--as in the Boer war; and the mere cult of family and inheritance implies, after all, something valuable in a world that has lately grown so poor in all cults.

"Mother and daughter here show what is going on. Lady Coryston is just the full-blown _tyrannus_. She has no doubt whatever about her right to rule, and she rules for all she's worth. At the same time she knows that Demos has the last word, and she spends her time in the old see-saw between threats and cajolery. The old vicar here has told me astonishing tales of her--how she turned her own sister out-of-doors and never spoke to her afterward because she married a man who ratted to the Liberals, and the wife went with him; how her own husband dreaded her if he ever happened to differ from her politically, and a sort of armed neutrality between her and Coryston was all that could be hoped for at the best of times.

"The poor people here--or most of them--are used to her, and in a way respect her. They take her as inevitable--like the rent or the east wind; and when she sends them coal and blankets, and builds village halls for them, they think they might be worse off. On the other hand, I don't see that Coryston makes much way among them. They think his behavior to his mother unseemly; and if they were he, they would use all his advantages without winking. At the same time, there is a younger generation growing up in the village and on the farms--not so much there, however!--which is going to give Lady Coryston trouble. Coryston puzzles and excites them. But they, too, often look askance; they wonder what he, personally, is going to get out of his campaign.

"And then--Marcia? For in this book, this locked book, may I not call her by her name? Well, she is certainly no prophetess among these countryfolk.

She takes up no regular duties among the poor, as the women of her family have probably always done. She is not at her ease with them; nor they with her. When she tries to make friends with them she is like a ship teased with veering winds, and glad to shrink back into harbor. And yet when something does really touch her--when something makes her _feel_--that curious indecision in her nature hardens into something irresistible.

There was a half-witted girl in the village, ill-treated and enslaved by a miserly old aunt. Miss Coryston happened to hear of it from her maid, who was a relation of the girl. She went and bearded the aunt, and took the girl away bodily in her pony-cart. The scene in the cottage garden--Marcia with her arm round the poor beaten and starved creature, very pale, but keeping her head, and the old virago shrieking at her heels--must have been worth seeing. And there is an old man--a decrepit old road-mender, whose sight was injured in a shooting accident. She likes his racy talk, and she never forgets his Christmas present or his birthday, and often drops in to tea with him and his old wife. But that's because it amuses her. She goes to see them for precisely the same reasons that she would pay a call in Mayfair; and it's inspiriting to see how they guess, and how they like it.

You perceive that she is shrinking all the time from the a.s.sumptions on which her mother's life is based, refusing to make them her own, and yet she doesn't know what to put in their place. Does Coryston, either?

"But the tragic figure--the tragic possibility--in all this family _galere_ at the present moment, of course, is Arthur. I know, because of our old Cambridge friendship--quite against my will--a good deal about the adventure into which he has somehow slipped; and one can only feel that any day may bring the storm. His letter to me yesterday shows that he is persecuting the lady with entreaties, that she is holding him off, and that what Lady Coryston may do when she knows will greatly affect what the young lady will do. I don't believe for one moment that she will marry a penniless A. She has endless opportunities, and, I am told, many proposals--"

The journal at this point was abruptly closed and locked away. For the writer of it, who was sitting at an open window of the library, became aware of the entrance of a motor into the forecourt of the house. Arthur Coryston was sitting in it. When he perceived Lester at the window he waved to the librarian, and jumping from the car as it drew up at the front door, he came across the court to a side door, which gave access to the library staircase.

As he entered the room Lester was disagreeably struck by his aspect. It was that of a man who has slept ill and drunk unwisely. His dress was careless, his eyes haggard, and all the weaknesses of the face seemed to have leaped to view, amid the general relaxation of _tenue_ and dignity. He came up to the chair at which Lester was writing, and flung himself frowning into a chair beside it.

"I hear mother and Marcia are away?"

"They have gone to Hoddon Grey for the Sunday. Didn't you know?"

"Oh yes, I knew. I suppose I knew. Mother wrote something," said the young man, impatiently. "But I have had other things to think about."

Lester glanced at him, but without speaking. Arthur rose from his seat, thrust his hands into his pockets, and began to pace the polished floor of the library. The florid, Georgian decoration of ceiling and walls, and the busts of placid gentlemen with curling wigs which stood at intervals among the gla.s.s cases, wore an air of trivial or fatuous repose beside the hunted young fellow walking up and down. Lester resolutely forbore to cross-examine him. But at last the walk came to an abrupt stop.

"Here's the last straw, Lester! Have you heard what mother wants me to do?

There's to be a big Tory meeting here in a month--mother's arranged it all--not a word to me with your leave, or by your leave!--and I'm to speak at it and blackguard Glenwilliam! I have her letter this morning. I'm not allowed a look in, I tell you! I'm not consulted in the least. I'll bet mother's had the bills printed already!"

"A reply, of course, to the Martover meeting?"

"I dare say. D--n the Martover meeting! But what _taste_!--two brothers slanging at each other--almost in the same parish. I declare women have no taste!--not a ha'porth. But I won't do it--and mother, just for once, will have to give in."

He sat down again and took the cigarette which Lester handed him--no doubt with soothing intentions. And indeed his state of excitement and agitation appeared nothing less than pitiable to the friend who remembered the self-complacent young orator, the budding legislator of early April.

"You are afraid of being misunderstood?"

"If I attack her father, as mother wishes me to attack him," said the young man, with emphasis, looking up, "Enid Glenwilliam will never speak to me again. She makes that quite plain."

"She ought to be too clever!" said Lester, with vivacity. "Can't she discriminate between the politician and the private friend?"

Arthur shook his head.

"Other people may. She doesn't. If I get up in public and call Glenwilliam a thief and a robber--and what else can I call him, with mother looking on?--there'll be an end of my chances for good and all. She's _fanatical_ about her father! She's pulled me up once or twice already about him. I tell you--it's rather fine, Lester!--upon my soul, it is!"

And with a countenance suddenly softening and eyes shining, Arthur turned his still boyish looks upon his friend.

"I can quite believe it. They're a very interesting pair.... But--I confess I'm thinking of Lady Coryston. What explanation can you possibly give? Are you prepared to take her into your confidence?"

"I don't know whether I'm prepared or not. Whatever happens I'm between the devil and the deep sea. If I tell her, she'll break with me; and if I don't tell her, it won't be long before she guesses for herself!"

There was a pause, broken at last by Lester, whose blue eyes had shown him meanwhile deep in reflection. He bent forward.