The Coryston Family Part 44

"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 pa.s.sed 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:

"Edward, I saw, was ordained last week. And my letter from Marcia this morning tells me she expects to see him in Rome, on his way to India. Poor Lady William will be very much alone!"

"If you make a solitude and call it religion, what can you expect?" said Coryston, sharply. His face had darkened at the Newburys' name. As always, it had evoked the memory of two piteous graves. Then, as he got up from his chair, he said to Arthur:

"I've fixed it up. Marion and I shall get married next month."

The brothers looked a little embarra.s.sed, though not at all surprised.

Corry's attachment to this plain, sensible lady, of moderate opinions, had indeed astonished them enormously when they first became aware of it; but they were now used to it.

"All right, Corry!" said Arthur, slapping his brother on the back. "The best chance of keeping you out of a madhouse! And a very nice woman! You don't expect me to chum with her father?"

"Not unless you wish to learn a thing or two--which was never your strong point," said Coryston, dodging a roll of some Parliamentary paper or other, which Arthur aimed at him. He turned to James. "Well, James, aren't you going to congratulate me?--And why don't you do it yourself?"

"Of course I congratulate you," said James, hastily. "Most sincerely!"

But his expression--half agitated, half smiling--betrayed emotions so far beyond the needs of the situation, that Coryston gave him a puzzled glance.

James indeed opened his mouth as though to speak. Then a bright, pink color overspread his whole countenance from brow to chin; his lips shut and he fell back in his chair. Presently he went away, and could be heard playing Bach on the organ in the central hall. He returned to London the same evening carrying a cargo of philosophical books, from the library, and a number of novels, though as a rule he never read novels.

The next morning, in a letter to Coryston, he announced his engagement to a girl of nineteen, an orphan, and a pupil at the Royal College of Music. She was the daughter of his Cambridge tutor--penniless, pretty, and musical. He had paid her fees it seemed for several years, and the effect on him of her charming mezzo-soprano voice, at a recent concert given by the College, had settled the matter. The philosopher in love, who had been too shy to tell his brothers _viva voce_, was quite free of tongue in writing; and Coryston and Arthur, though they laughed, were glad that "old James" had found the courage to be happy. Coryston remarked to Arthur that it now remained for him to keep up the blue blood of the family.

"Or Marcia," said Arthur, evading the personal reference.

"Marcia?" Coryston threw his brother an amused, significant look, and said nothing for a moment. But presently he dropped out:

"Lester writes that he'll be in Rome next week looking after that Borghese ma.n.u.script. He doesn't expect to get back here till May."

For Lester had now been absent from Coryston some three or four weeks, traveling on matters connected with the library.

Arthur made no comment, but stood awhile by the window in a brown-study, twisting his lip, and frowning slightly. His nondescript features and boyish manner scarcely allowed him at any time to play the magnate with success. But his position as master of Coryston Place, the great family house with its pompous tradition, and the long influence of his mother, had by now a.s.serted, or rea.s.serted themselves; though fighting still with the sore memory of Enid Glenwilliam. Was he going to allow his sister to marry out of her rank--even though the lover were the best fellow in the world?

A man may marry whom he will, and the family is only secondarily affected.

But a woman is absorbed by the family of her husband.

He finally shrugged his shoulders over it.

"Marcia is as stiff-necked as Coryston," he said to himself, "if it comes to that."

April followed. Amid a crowded Rome, alive with flowers and fountains under a life-giving sun, Marcia Coryston became sharply conscious again of the color and beauty interwoven with mere living, for the sane and sound among men. Edward Newbury pa.s.sed through on his way to Brindisi and Southern India; and she saw him for an hour; an interview short and restrained, but not to be forgotten by either of the two persons concerned. When it was over Marcia shed a few secret tears--tears of painful sympathy, of an admiration, which was half pity; and then threw herself once more with--as it were--a gasp of renewed welcome, into the dear, kind, many-hued world on which Edward Newbury had turned his back. Presently Lester arrived. He became her constant companion through the inexhaustible spectacle of Rome; and she could watch him among the students who were his fellows, modest or learned as they, yet marked out from most of them by the signs he bore--signs well known by now to her--of a poetic and eager spirit, always and everywhere in quest of the human--of man himself, laughing or suffering, behind his works. The golden days pa.s.sed by; the blue and white anemones bloomed and died in the Alban woods; the English crowd that comes for Easter arrived and departed; and soon Marcia herself must go home, carrying with her the pa.s.sionate yet expectant feeling of a child, tired out with happy days, and dreaming of more to come.

These were private and personal affairs. But in March a catastrophe happened which shook the mind of England, and profoundly altered the course of politics. An American yacht with Glenwilliam on board was overtaken off the Needles by a sudden and terrific storm, and went down, without a survivor, and with nothing but some floating wreckage to tell the tale. The Chancellor's daughter was left alone and poor. The pa.s.sionate sympathy and admiration which her father's party had felt for himself was in some measure transferred to his daughter. But to the amazement of many persons, she refused with scorn any pecuniary help, living on a small income, and trying her hand, with some prospect of success, at literature. About six weeks after her father's death Arthur Coryston found her out and again asked her to marry him. It is probable there was some struggle in her mind, but in the end she refused. "You are a kind, true fellow!" she said to him, gratefully, "but it wouldn't do--it wouldn't do!" And then with a darkening of her strong face: "There is only one thing I can do for _him_ now--to serve his causes! And you don't care for one of them! No--no!

Good-by!--Good-by!"

At last, in May, Marcia came back again to live--as she supposed--at Coryston with Arthur, and do her duty by her own people. A wonderful spring was abroad in the land. The gorse on the slopes of the hills was a marvel, and when the hawthorns came out beside it, or flung their bloom along the hedgerows and the streams; when far and near the cuckoo's voice made the new world of blossom and growth articulate; when furtive birds slipped joyously to and fro between the nests above and a teeming earth below; when the west winds veering between south and north, and driving the great white clouds before them, made, every day, a new marvel of the sky--Marcia would often hold her breath and know within herself the growth of an answering and a heavenly spring. Lester finished his scholar's errands in Rome and Naples, and returned to Coryston in the middle week of May, in order to complete his work there. He found much more to do than he supposed; he found his friends, Coryston and Arthur, eager to capture and keep him; he found in every field and wood the kindling beauty of the year; he found Marcia!--and a bewildering though still shy message in her dark eyes.

Through what doubts and scruples, through what stages of unfolding confidence and growing joy their minds pa.s.sed, and to what end it all moved on, let those imagine, to whom the purest and deepest of human emotions has ever spoken, or is speaking now.