The Coryston Family by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best free e book reader TXT) 📕

in her eyes.

"And one day at lunch she refused to be introduced to me. I saw it happen quite plainly. Oh, she didn't exactly mean to be insolent. But she thinks society is too tolerant--of people like father and me."

"What a foolish woman!" said Marion Atherstone, rather helplessly.

"Not at all! She knows quite well that my whole existence is a fight--so far as London is concerned. She wants to make the fight a little harder--that's all."

"Your 'whole existence a fight,'" repeated Marion, with a touch of scorn, "after that list of parties!"

"It's a good fight at present," said the girl, coolly, "and a successful one. But Lady Coryston gets all she wants without fighting. When father goes out of office I shall be nobody. _She_ will be always at the top of the tree."

"I am no wiser than before as to whether you really like Arthur Coryston or not. You have heard, of course, the gossip about the estates?"

"Heard?" The speaker smiled. "I know not only the gossip--but the facts--by heart! I am drowned--smothered in them. At present Arthur is the darling--the spotless one. But when she knows about me!"--Miss Glenwilliam threw up her hands.

"You think she will change her mind again?"

The girl took up a stalk of grass and nibbled it in laughing meditation.

"Perhaps I oughtn't to risk his chances?" she said, looking sidelong.

"Don't think about 'chances,'" said Marion Atherstone, indignantly--"think about whether you care for each other!"

"What a _bourgeois_ point of view! Well, honestly--I don't know. Arthur Coryston is not at all clever. He has the most absurd opinions. We have only known each other a few months. If he were _very_ rich--By the way, is he coming this afternoon? And may I have a cigarette?"

Marion handed cigarettes. The click of a garden gate in the distance caught her ear.

"Here they are--he and Lord Coryston."

Enid Glenwilliam lit her cigarette, and made no move. Her slender, long-limbed body, as it lay at ease in the deep garden chair, the pale masses of her hair, and the confident quiet face beneath it, made a charming impression of graceful repose. As Arthur Coryston reached her she held out a welcoming hand, and her eyes greeted him--a gay, significant look.

Coryston, having shaken hands with Miss Atherstone, hastily approached her companion.

"I didn't know you smoked," he said, abruptly, standing before her with his hands on his sides.

As always, Coryston made an odd figure. His worn, ill-fitting clothes, with their bulging pockets, the grasshopper slimness of his legs and arms, the peering, glancing look of his eternally restless eyes, were all of them displeasing to Enid Glenwilliam as she surveyed him. But she answered him with a smile.

"Mayn't I?"

He looked down on her, frowning.

"Why should women set up a new want--a new slavery--that costs money?"

The color flew to her cheeks.

"Why shouldn't they? Go and preach to your own sex."

"No good!" He shrugged his shoulders. "But women are supposed to have consciences. And--especially--_Liberal_ women," he added, slowly, as his eyes traveled over her dress.

"And pray why should Liberal women be ascetics any more than any other kind of women?" she asked him, quietly.

"Why?" His voice grew suddenly loud. "Because there are thousands of people in this country perishing for lack of proper food and clothing--and it is the function of Liberals to bring it home to the other thousands."

Arthur Coryston broke out indignantly:

"I say, Cony, do hold your tongue! You do talk such stuff!"

The young man, sitting where the whole careless grace of Miss Glenwilliam's person was delightfully visible to him, showed a countenance red with wrath.

Coryston faced round upon him, transformed. His frown had disappeared in a look of radiant good humor.

"Look here, Arthur, you've got the money-bags--you might leave me the talking. Has he told you what's happened?"

The question was addressed to Miss Glenwilliam, while the speaker shot an indicating thumb in his brother's direction.

The girl looked embarrassed, and Arthur Coryston again came to the rescue.

"We've no right to thrust our family affairs upon other people, Corry," he said, resolutely. "I told you so as we walked up."

"Oh, but they're so interesting," was Coryston's cool reply as he took his seat by Marion Atherstone. "I'm certain everybody here finds them so. And what on earth have I taken Knatchett for, except to blazon abroad what our dear mother has been doing?"

"I wish to heaven you hadn't taken Knatchett," said Arthur, sulkily.

"You regard me as a nuisance? Well, I meant to be. I'm finding out such lots of things," added Coryston, slowly, while his eyes, wandering over the plain, ceased their restlessness for a moment and became fixed and dreamy.

Dr. Atherstone caught the last words as he came out from his study. He approached his guests with an amused look at Coryston. But the necessary courtesies of the situation imposed themselves. So long as Arthur Coryston was present the Tory son of his Tory mother, an Opposition M.P. for a constituency, part of which was visible from the cottage garden, and a comparative stranger to the Atherstones, it was scarcely possible to let Coryston loose. The younger brother was there--Atherstone perfectly understood--simply because Miss Glenwilliam was their guest; not for his own _beaux yeux_ or his daughter's. But having ventured on to hostile ground, for a fair lady's sake, he might look to being kindly treated.

Arthur, on his side, however, played his part badly. He rose indeed to greet Atherstone--whom he barely knew, and was accustomed to regard as a pestilent agitator--with the indifferent good breeding that all young Englishmen of the classes have at command; he was ready to talk of the view and the weather, and to discuss various local topics. But it was increasingly evident that he felt himself on false ground; lured there, moreover, by feelings he could hardly suppose were unsuspected by his hosts. Enid Glenwilliam watched him with secret but sympathetic laughter; and presently came to his aid. She rose from her seat.

"It's a little hot here, Marion. Shall I have time to show Mr. Coryston the view from the wood-path before tea?"

Marion assented. And the two tall figures strolled away across a little field toward a hanging wood on the edge of the hill.

"Will she have him?" said Coryston to Marion Atherstone, looking after the departing figures.

The question was disconcertingly frank. Marion laughed and colored.

"I haven't the slightest idea."

"Because there'll be the deuce to pay if she does," said Coryston, nursing his knees, and bubbling with amusement. "My unfortunate mother will have to make another will. What the lawyers have made out of her already!"

"There would be no reconciling her to the notion of such a marriage?" asked Atherstone, after a moment.

"'If my son takes to him a wife of the daughters of Heth, what good shall my life be unto me?'" quoted Coryston, laughing. "Good gracious, how handy the Bible comes in--for most things! I expect you're an infidel, and don't know." He looked up curiously at Atherstone.

A shade of annoyance crossed Atherstone's finely marked face.

"I was the son of a Presbyterian minister," he said, shortly. "But to return. After all, you know, Radicals and Tories do still intermarry! It hasn't quite come to that!"

"No, but it's coming to that!" cried Coryston, bringing his hand down in a slap on the tea-table. "And women like my mother are determined it shall come to it. They want to see this country divided up into two hostile camps--fighting it out--blood and thunder, and devilries galore. Ay, and"--he brought his face eagerly, triumphantly, close to Atherstone's--"so do you, too--at bottom."

The doctor drew back. "I want politics to be realities, if that's what you mean," he said, coldly. "But the peaceful methods of democracy are enough for me. Well, Lord Coryston, you say you've been finding out a lot of things in these few weeks you've been settled here. What sort?"

Coryston turned an odd, deliberate look at his questioner.

"Yes, I'm after a lot of game--in the Liberal preserves just as much as the Tory. There isn't a pin to choose between you! Now, look here!" He checked the items off on his fingers. "My mother's been refusing land for a Baptist chapel. Half the village Baptist--lots of land handy--she won't let 'em have a yard. Well, we're having meetings every week, we're sending her resolutions every week, which she puts in the waste-paper basket. And on Sundays they rig up a tent on that bit of common ground at the park gates, and sing hymns at her when she goes to church. That's No. 1. No. 2--My mother's been letting Page--her agent--evict a jolly decent fellow called Price, a smith, who's been distributing Liberal leaflets in some of the villages. All sorts of other reasons given, of course--but that's the truth. Well, I sat on Page's doorstep for two or three days--no good. Now I'm knocking up a shop and a furnace, and all the rest of the togs wanted, for Price, in my back yard at Knatchett. And we've made him Liberal agent for the village. I can tell you he's going it! That's No. 2. No. 3--There's a slight difficulty with the hunt I needn't trouble you with. We've given 'em warning we're going to kill foxes wherever we can get 'em. They've been just gorging chickens this last year--nasty beasts! That don't matter much, however. No. 4--Ah-ha!"--he rubbed his hands--"I'm on the track of that old hypocrite, Burton of Martover--"

"Burton! one of the best men in the country!" cried Atherstone, indignantly. "You're quite mistaken, Lord Coryston!"

"Am I!" cried Coryston, with equal indignation--"not a bit of it. Talking Liberalism through his nose at all the meetings round here, and then doing a thing--Look here! He turned that man and his wife--Potifer's his name--who are now looking after me--out of their cottage and their bit of land--why, do you think?--because _the man voted for Arthur_! Why shouldn't he vote for Arthur? Arthur kissed his baby. Of course he voted for Arthur. He thought Arthur was 'a real nice gentleman'--so did his wife. Why shouldn't he vote for Arthur? Nobody wanted to kiss Burton's baby. Hang him! You know this kind of thing must be put a stop to!"

And, getting up, Coryston stamped up and down furiously, his small face aflame. Atherstone watched him in silence. This strange settlement of Lady Coryston's disinherited son--socialist and revolutionist--as a kind of watchman, in the very midst of the Coryston estates, at his mother's very gates, might not after all turn out so well as the democrats of the neighborhood had anticipated. The man was too queer--too flighty.

"Wait a bit! I think some of your judgments may be too hasty, Lord Coryston. There's a deal to learn in this neighborhood--the Hoddon Grey estate, for instance--"

Coryston threw up his hands.

"The Newburys--my word, the Newburys! 'Too bright and good'--aren't they?--'for human nature's daily food.' Such churches--and schools--and villages! All the little boys patterns--and all the little girls saints. Everybody singing in choirs--and belonging to confraternities--and carrying banners. 'By the pricking of my thumbs' when I see a Newbury I feel that a mere fraction divides me from the criminal class. And I tell you, I've heard a story about that estate"--the odd figure paused beside the tea-table and rapped it vigorously for emphasis--"that's worse than any other villainy I've yet come across. You know what I mean.