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

farm, of her conversation with Mrs. Betts, of that gray, grief-stricken face at the window.

"He's fifty-two. How can he start again? He's just torn between his work--and her. And if she goes away and hides from him, it'll be the last straw. He believes he saved her from a bad life--and now he'll think that he's only made things worse. And he's ill--his brain's had a shake. Edward--dear Edward!--let them stay!--for my sake, let them stay!"

All her soul was in her eyes. She had never been more winning--more lovely. She placed her hands on his shoulders as he sat beside her, and leaned her soft cheek against his.

"Do you mean--let them stay on at the Farm?" he asked, after a pause, putting his arms round her.

"Couldn't they? They could live so quietly. She would hardly ever leave the house--and so long as he does his work--his scientific work--need anything else trouble you? Need you have any other relations with them at all? Wouldn't everybody understand--wouldn't everybody know you'd done it for pity?"

Again a pause. Then he said, with evident difficulty: "Dear Marcia--do you ever think of my father in this?"

"Oh, mayn't I go!--and _beg_ Lord William--"

"Ah, but wait a minute. I was going to say--My father's an old man. This has hit him hard. It's aged him a good deal. He trusted Betts implicitly, as he would himself. And now--in addition--you want him to do something that he feels to be wrong."

"But Edward, they _are_ married! Isn't it a tyranny"--she brought the word out bravely--"when it causes so much suffering!--to insist on more than the law does?"

"For us there is but one law--the law of Christ!" And then, as a flash of something like anger passed through his face, he added, with an accent of stern conviction: "For us they are _not_ married--and we should be conniving at an offense and a scandal, if we accepted them as married persons. Oh, dear Marcia, why do you make me say these things? I _can't_ discuss them with you!" he repeated, in a most real distress.

She raised herself, and moved a little further from him. A passionate hopelessness--not without resentment--was rising in her.

"Then you won't try to persuade your father--even for my sake, Edward?"

He made no reply. She saw his lip tremble, but she knew it was only because he could not bear to put into words the refusal behind.

The silence continued. Marcia, raising her head, looked away into the green vistas of the wood, while the tears gathered slowly in her eyes. He watched her, in a trouble no less deep. At last she said--in a low, lingering voice:

"And I--I couldn't marry--and be happy--with the thought always--of what had happened to them--and how--you couldn't give me--what I asked. I have been thinking it out for hours and hours. I'm afraid, Edward--we--we've made a great mistake!"

She drew her hand away, and looked at him, very pale and trembling, yet with something new--and resolute--in her aspect.

"Marcia!" It was a sound of dismay.

"Oh! it was my fault!"--and she clasped her hands in a gesture at once childish and piteous--"I somehow knew from the beginning that you thought me different from what I am. It was quite natural. You're much older than I, and of course--of course--you thought that if--if I loved you--I'd be guided by you--and think as you wish. But Edward, you see I've had to live by myself--and think for myself--more than other girls--because mother was always busy with other things--that didn't concern me--that I didn't care about--and I was left alone--and had to puzzle out a lot of things that I never talked about. I'm obstinate--I'm proud. I must believe for myself--and not because some one else does. I don't know where I shall come out. And that's the strange thing! Before we were engaged, I didn't know I had a mind!" She smiled at him pitifully through her tears. "And ever since we've been engaged--this few weeks--I've been doing nothing but think and think--and all the time it's been carrying me away from you. And now this trouble. I _couldn't_"--she clenched her hand with a passionate gesture--"I _couldn't_ do what you're doing. It would kill me. You seem to be obeying something outside--which you're quite sure of. But if _I_ drove those two people to despair, because I thought something was wrong that they thought right, I should never have any happiness in my heart--my _own heart_--again. Love seems to me everything!--being kind--not giving pain. And for you there's something greater--what the Church says--what the Bible says. And I could never see that. I could never agree. I could never submit. And we should be miserable. You'd think I was wicked--and I--well!"--she panted a little, trying for her words--"there are ugly--violent--feelings in me sometimes. I couldn't hate _you_--but--Edward--just now--I felt I could hate--what you believe!"

The sudden change in his look smote her to the heart. She held out her hands, imploring.

"Forgive me! Oh, do forgive me!"

During her outburst he had risen, and was now leaning against a young tree beside her, looking down upon her--white and motionless. He had made no effort to take her hands, and they dropped upon her knee.

"This is terrible!" he said, as though to himself, and half-consciously--"terrible!"

"But indeed--indeed--it's best." Her voice, which was little more than a whisper, was broken by a sob. She buried her face in the hands he had left untaken.

The minutes seemed endless till he spoke again; and then it was with a composure which seemed to her like the momentary quiet that may come--the sudden furling of the winds--in the very midst of tempest. She divined the tempest, in this man of profound and concentrated feeling; but she had not dared to watch it.

"Marcia--is it really true? Couldn't I make you happy? Couldn't I lead you to look at things as I do? As you say, I am older, I have had more time to think and learn. If you love me, wouldn't it be right, that--I should influence you?"

"It might be," she said, sadly. "But it wouldn't happen. I know more of myself--now. This has made me know myself--as I never did. I should wound and distress you. And to struggle with you would make me hard--and bad."

Another silence. But for both it was one of those silences when the mind, as it were, reaps at one stroke a whole harvest of ideas and images which, all unconsciously to itself, were standing ready to be reaped; the silences, more active far than speech, which determine life.

At the end of it, he came to sit beside her.

"Then we must give it up--we must give it up. I bless you for the happiness you gave me--this little while. I pray God to bless you--now and forever."

Sobbing, she lifted her face to him, and he kissed her for the last time. She slipped off her engagement ring and gave it to him. He looked at it with a sad smile, pressed his lips to it, and then stooping down, he took a stick lying by the log, and scooped out a deep hole in the mossy, fibrous earth. Into it he dropped the ring, covering it again with all the leafy "rubble and wreck" of the wood. He covered his eyes for a moment, and rose.

"Let me take you home. I will write to Lady Coryston to-night."

They walked silently through the wood, and to the house. Never, in her whole life, had Marcia felt so unhappy. And yet, already, she recognized what she had done as both inevitable and past recall.

They parted, just with a lingering look into each other's eyes, and a piteous murmur from her: "I'm sorry!--oh, I'm _sorry_!"

At the moment when Marcia and Newbury were crossing the formal garden on the west front of the house, one of two persons in Lady Coryston's sitting-room observed them.

These persons were--strange to say--Lady Coryston and her eldest son. Lady Coryston, after luncheon, had felt so seriously unwell that she had retired to her sitting-room, with strict injunctions that she must be left alone. Sir Wilfrid and Lester started on a Sunday walk; Marcia and Newbury had disappeared.

The house, through all its innumerable rooms and corridors, sank into deep silence. Lady Coryston was lying on her sofa, with closed eyes. All the incidents of her conversation with Enid Glenwilliam were running perpetually through her mind--the girl's gestures and tones--above all the words of her final warning.

After all it was not she--his mother--who had done it. Without her it would have happened all the same. She found herself constantly putting up this plea, as though in recurrent gusts of fear. Fear of whom?--of Arthur? What absurdity! Her proud spirit rebelled.

And yet she knew that she was listening--listening in dread--for a footstep in the house. That again was absurd. Arthur was staying with friends on the further side of the country, and was to leave them after dinner by motor. He could not be home till close on midnight; and there would be no chance of her seeing him--unless she sent for him--till the following morning, after the arrival of the letter. _Then_--she must face him.

But still the footstep haunted her imagination, and the remembrance of him as he had stood, light and buoyant, on the floor of the House of Commons, making his maiden speech. In April--and this was July. Had that infatuation begun even then, which had robbed her of her dearest--her Benjamin?

She fell into a restless sleep after a while, and woke suddenly, in alarm. There was somebody approaching her room--evidently on tiptoe. Some one knocking--very gently. She sat up, trembling. "Come in!"

The door opened--and there was Coryston.

She fell back on her cushions, astonished and annoyed.

"I said I was not to be disturbed, Coryston."

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