The Coryston Family Part 38

He paused on the threshold.

"Am I disturbing you? Wouldn't you like me to read to you--or something?"

His tone was so gentle that she was disarmed--though still annoyed.

"Come in. I may perhaps point out that it's a long time since you've come to see me like this, Coryston."

"Yes. Never mind. What shall I read?"

She pointed to a number of the _Quarterly_ that was lying open, and to an article on "The later years of Disraeli."

Coryston winced. He knew the man who had written it, and detested him. But he sat down beside her, and began immediately to read. To both of them his reading was a defense against conversation, and yet to both of them, after a little while, it was pleasant.

Presently indeed he saw that it had soothed her and that in spite of her efforts to keep awake she had fallen fitfully asleep again. He let the book drop, and sat still, studying his mother's strong, lined face in its setting of gray hair. There was something in her temporary quiescence and helplessness that touched him; and it was clear to him that in these last few months she had aged considerably. As he watched, a melancholy softness--as of one who sees deeper than usual into the human spectacle--invaded and transformed his whole expression; his thin body relaxed; his hands dropped at his side. The dead quiet of the house also oppressed him--like a voice--an omen.

He knew that she had seen Enid Glenwilliam that morning. A little note from Marion Atherstone that afternoon spoke anxiety and sympathy. "Enid confesses she was violent. I am afraid it was a painful scene." And now there was Arthur to be faced--who would never believe, of course, but that his mother had done it.

A movement in the garden outside diverted his attention. He looked up and saw two figures--Marcia and Newbury. A sight which roused in him afresh--on the instant--all his fiercest animosities. That fellow!--and his creed!

That old hide-bound inquisitor, his father!

Well!--he peered at them--has she got anything whatever out of young Tartuffe? Not she! He knew the breed. He rose discreetly, so as not to wake Lady Coryston, and standing by the window, he watched them across the garden, and saw their parting. Something in their demeanor struck him. "Not demonstrative anyway," he said to himself, with a queer satisfaction.

He sat down again, and tossing the _Quarterly_ away, he took up a volume of Browning. But he scarcely read a line. His mind was really possessed by the Betts' story, and by the measures that might be taken--Marcia or no Marcia!--to rouse the country-side against the Newburys, and force them to bow to public opinion in the matter of this tragedy. He himself had seen the two people concerned, again, that morning--a miserable sight! Neither of them had said anything further to him of their plans. Only Mrs. Betts had talked incoherently of "waiting to hear from Miss Coryston." Poor soul!--she might wait.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HE SAT STILL, STUDYING HIS MOTHER'S STRONG, LINED FACE]

Twenty minutes pa.s.sed, and then he too heard a footfall in the pa.s.sage outside, and the swish of a dress. Marcia!

He opened the door.

"Don't come in. Mother's asleep."

Marcia stared at him in amazement. Then she stepped past him, and stood on the threshold surveying her mother. Her pathetic look conveyed the instinctive appeal of the young girl turning in the crisis of her life to her natural friend, her natural comforter. And it remained unanswered. She turned and beckoned to Coryston.

"Come with me--a moment." They went noiselessly down the staircase leading from Lady Coryston's wing, into a room which had been their schoolroom as children, on the ground floor. Marcia laid a hand on her brother's arm.

"Coryston--I was coming to speak to mother. I have broken off my engagement."

"Thank the Lord!" cried Coryston, taken wholly aback. "Thank the Lord!"

He would have kissed her in his relief and enthusiasm. But Marcia stepped back from him. Her pale face showed a pa.s.sionate resentment.

"Don't speak about him, Corry! Don't say another word about him. You never understood him, and I'm not going to discuss him with you. I couldn't bear it. What's wrong with mother?"

"She's knocked over--by that girl, Enid Glenwilliam. She saw her this morning."

He described the situation. Marcia showed but a languid interest.

"Poor mother!" she said, absently. "Then I won't bother her with my affairs--till to-morrow. Don't tell her anything, Corry. Good-by."

"I say, Marcia--old woman--don't be so fierce with me. You took me by surprise--" he muttered, uncomfortably.

"Oh, it doesn't matter. n.o.body in this world--seems to be able to understand anybody else--or make allowances for anybody else. Good-by."

Coryston had long since departed. Lady Coryston had gone to bed, seeing no one, and pleading headache. Marcia, too, had deserted Sir Wilfrid and Lester after dinner, leaving Sir Wilfrid to the liveliest and dismalest misgivings as to what might have been happening further to the Coryston family on this most inexplicable and embarra.s.sing day.

Marcia was sitting in her room by the open window. She had been writing a long letter to Newbury, pouring out her soul to him. All that she had been too young and immature to say to him face to face, she had tried to say to him in these closely written and blotted pages. To write them had brought relief, but also exhaustion of mind and body.

The summer night was sultry and very still. Above a bank of purple cloud, she looked into depths of fathomless azure, star-sprinkled, with a light in the southeast prophesying moonrise. Dark shapes of woods--the distant sound of the little trout-stream, where it ran over a weir--a few notes of birds--were the only sounds; otherwise the soul was alone with itself. Once indeed she heard a sudden burst of voices far overhead, and a girl's merry laugh. One of the young servants no doubt--on the top floor. How remote!--and yet how near.

And far away over those trees was Newbury, smarting under the blow she had given him--suffering--suffering. That poor woman, too, weeping out her last night, perhaps, beside her husband. What could she do for her--how could she help her? Marcia sat there hour after hour, now lost in her own grief, now in that of others; realizing through pain, through agonized sympathy, the energy of a fuller life.

She went to bed, and to sleep--for a few hours--toward morning. She was roused by her maid, who came in with a white face of horror.

"Oh, miss!"

"What is the matter?"

Marcia sat up in bed. Was her mother ill?--dead?

The girl stammered out her ghastly news. Briggs the head gardener had just brought it. The head foreman at Redcross Farm going his rounds in the early hours, had perceived a light burning in the laboratory. The door was locked, but on forcing his way in, he had come suddenly on a spectacle of horror. John Betts was sitting--dead--in his chair, with a bullet wound in the temple; Mrs. Betts was on a stool beside him, leaning against his knee.

She must have found him dead, have taken up the revolver, as it had dropped from his hand, and after an interval, long or short, have deliberately unfastened her dress--The bullet had pa.s.sed through her heart, and death had been a matter of seconds. On the table was lying a sc.r.a.p of paper on which were the words in John Betts's handwriting: "Mad--forgive." And beside it a little twisted note, addressed to "Miss Marcia Coryston." The foreman had given it to Briggs. Her maid placed it in Marcia's hands.

She tried to read it, but failed. The girl beside her saw her slip back, fainting, on her pillows.

CHAPTER XV

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 pa.s.sed 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.