The Coryston Family Part 41

"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 to _that_!" 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 pa.s.sionate 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 d.a.m.ned traditions! I appeal to those two dead people! They did what _you_ thought wrong, and your conscience judged and sentenced them. But who made you a judge and divider over them? Who asked you to be the dispenser for them of blessing and cursing?"

Newbury stood still.

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

"Including the deaths of John Betts and his wife!" said Coryston, with bitter contempt. "A G.o.d suffers and bleeds, for that! No!--for us, if there is a G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion had died from his face, which in its pale sorrow was more beautiful than Coryston had ever seen it.

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

It tells me where to go--and I obey."

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVI

Coryston walked back to Knatchett at a furious pace, jumped on his bicycle, and went off to find Marion Atherstone--the only person with whom he could trust himself at the moment. He more than suspected that Marcia in a fit of sentimental folly would relent toward Newbury in distress--and even his rashness shrank from the possibility of a quarrel which might separate him from his sister for good. But liberate his soul he must; and he thirsted for a listener with whom to curse bigots up and down. In Marion's mild company, strangely enough, the most vigorous cursing, whether of men or inst.i.tutions, had always in the end calming results. To Marion, however, led by a sure instinct, he went.

Meanwhile the motor which pa.s.sed 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."