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

"if that's what you mean." His eyes rested a moment on the striking figure of the Chancellor's daughter. "Certainly--I'll put in a word. But she is a very fascinating young woman, my dear!"

"I know," said Marcia, helplessly, "I know."

There was a pause. Then Sir Wilfrid asked:

"When do you go down to Coryston?"

"Just before Whitsuntide."

He looked round with a smile, saw that Edward Newbury was still in the box, and whispered, mischievously:

"Hoddon Grey, too, I think, will not be empty?"

Marcia kept an indifferent face.

"I dare say. You're coming?" Sir Wilfrid nodded. "Oh, _have_ you heard--?"

She murmured to him behind her fan. Sir Wilfrid knew all their history--had been her father's most intimate friend. She gave him a rapid account of Coryston's disinheriting. The old man rose, his humorous eyes suddenly grave.

"We'll talk of this--at Coryston. Ah, Newbury--I took your chair--I resign. Hullo, Lester--good evening. Heavens, there's the curtain going up. Good night!"

He hurried away. Newbury moved forward, his eager look on Marcia. But she turned, smiling, to the young librarian.

"You haven't seen this ballet, Mr. Lester?--Schumann's 'Carnival'? Oh, you mustn't stand so far back. We can make room, can't we?" She addressed Newbury, and before he knew what had happened, the chairs had been so manipulated that Lester sat between Marcia and Newbury, while Waggin had drawn back into the shadow. The eyes of Marcia's duenna twinkled. It pleased her that this magnificent young man, head, it was said, of the young High Church party, distinguished in many ways, and as good as he was handsome, was not to have too easy a game. Marcia had clearly lost her head a little at the Shrewsbury House ball; and was now trying to recover it.


CHAPTER IV

After one of those baffling fortnights of bitter wind and cold, which so often mark the beginning of an English May, when all that the spring has slowly gained since March seems to be confiscated afresh by returning winter, the weather had repented itself, the skies had cleared, and suddenly, under a flood of sunshine, there were blue-bells in the copses, cowslips in the fields, a tawny leaf breaking on the oaks, a new cheerfulness in the eyes and gait of the countryman.

A plain, pleasant-looking woman sat sewing out-of-doors, in front of a small verandaed cottage, perched high on a hillside which commanded a wide view of central England. The chalk down fell beneath her into a sheath of beech woods; the line of hills, slope behind slope, ran westward to the sunset, while eastward they mounted to a wooded crest beyond which the cottage could not look. Northward, beginning some six hundred feet below the cottage, stretched a wide and varied country, dotted with villages and farms, with houses and woods, till it lost itself in the haze of a dim horizon.

A man of middle age, gray-headed, spare in figure, emerged from one of the French windows of the cottage.

"Marion, when did you say that you expected Enid?"

"Between three and four, papa."

"I don't believe Glenwilliam himself will get here at all. There will be a long Cabinet this afternoon, and another to-morrow probably--Sunday or no Sunday!"

"Well then, he won't come, father," said the daughter, placidly, thrusting her hand into a sock riddled with holes, and looking at it with concern.

"Annoying! I wanted him to meet Coryston--who said he would be here to tea."

Miss Atherstone looked a little startled.

"Will that do, father? You know Enid told me to ask Arthur Coryston, and I wrote yesterday."

"Do? Why not? Because of politics? They must have got used to that in the Coryston family! Or because of the gossip that Arthur is to have the estates? But it's not his fault. I hear the two brothers are on excellent terms. They say that Arthur has warned his mother that he means to make it up to Coryston somehow."

"Enid doesn't like Lord Coryston," said Miss Atherstone, slowly.

"I dare say. He finds out her weak points. She has a good many. And he's not a ladies' man. Between ourselves, my dear, she poses a good deal. I never know quite where to have her, though I dandled her as a baby."

"Oh, Enid's all right," said Marion Atherstone, taking a fresh needleful of brown wool. Miss Atherstone was not clever, though she lived with clever people, and her powers of expressing herself were small. Her father, a retired doctor, on the other hand, was one of the ablest Liberal organizers in the country. From his perch on the Mintern hills he commanded half the midlands, in more senses than one; knew thirty or forty constituencies by heart; was consulted in all difficulties; was better acquainted with "the pulse of the party" than its chief agent, and was never left out of count by any important Minister framing an important bill.

He had first made friends with the man who was now the powerful head of English finance, when Glenwilliam was the young check-weigher of a large Staffordshire colliery; and the friendship--little known except to an inner ring--was now an important factor in English politics. Glenwilliam did nothing without consulting Atherstone, and the cottage on the hill had been the scene of many important meetings, and some decisions which would live in history.

Marion Atherstone, on the other hand, though invaluable to her father, and much appreciated by his friends, took no intellectual part in his life. Brilliant creatures--men and women--came and went, to and from the cottage. Marion took stock of them, provided them with food and lodging, and did not much believe in any of them. Atherstone was a philosopher, a free-thinker, and a vegetarian. Marion read the _Church Family Times_, went diligently to church, and if she had possessed a vote, and cared enough about it to use it, would probably have voted Tory. All the same she and her father were on the best of terms and perfectly understood each other.

Among the brilliant creatures, however, who came and went, there was one who had conquered her. For Enid Glenwilliam, Marion felt the profound affection that often links the plain, scrupulous, conscientious woman to some one or other of the Sirens of her sex. When Enid came to the cottage Marion became her slave and served her hand and foot. But the probability is that she saw through the Siren--what there was to see through--a good deal more sharply than her father did.

Atherstone took a garden chair beside her, and lit his pipe. He had just been engaged in drafting an important Liberal manifesto. His name would probably never appear in connection with it. But that mattered nothing to him. What did vex him was that he probably would not have an opportunity of talking it over with Glenwilliam before it finally left his hands. He was pleased with it, however. The drastic, or scathing phrases of it kept running through his head. He had never felt a more thorough, a more passionate, contempt for his opponents. The Tory party must go! One more big fight, and they would smash the unclean thing. These tyrants of land, and church, and finance!--democratic England when it once got to business--and it was getting to business--would make short work of them.

As he looked out over the plain he saw many things well fitted to stir the democratic pulse. There among the woods, not a mile from the base of the hills, lay the great classic pile of Coryston, where "that woman" held sway. Farther off on its hill rose Hoddon Grey, identified in this hostile mind with Church ascendancy, just as Coryston was identified with landlord ascendancy. If there were anywhere to be found a narrower pair of bigots than Lord and Lady William Newbury, or a more poisonous reactionary than their handsome and plausible son, Atherstone didn't know where to lay hands on them.

One white dot in the plain, however, gave him unmixed satisfaction. He turned, laughing to his daughter.

"Coryston has settled in--with a laborer and his wife to look after him. He has all sorts of ructions on his hands already."

"Poor Lady Coryston!" said Marion, giving a glance at the classical cupolas emerging from the woods.

"My dear--she began it. And he is quite right--he _has_ a public duty to these estates."

"Couldn't he go and stir up people somewhere else? It looks so ugly."

"Oh! women have got to get used to these things, if they play such strong parts as Lady Coryston. The old kid-glove days, as between men and women, are over."

"Even between mothers and sons?" said Marion, dubiously.

"I repeat--she began it! Monstrous, that that man should have made such a will, and that a mother should have taken advantage of it!"

"Suppose she had been a Liberal," said Marion, slyly.

Atherstone shrugged his shoulders--too honest to reply.

He ruminated over his pipe. Presently his eyes flashed.

"I hear Coryston's very servants--his man and wife--were evicted from their cottage for political reasons."

"Yes, by that Radical miller who lives at Martover," said Marion.

Atherstone stared.

"My dear!--"

"The wife told me," said Marion, calmly, rolling up her socks.

"I say, I must look into that," said Atherstone, with discomposure. "It doesn't do to have such stories going round--on our side. I wonder why Coryston chose them."

"I should think--because he hates that kind of thing on both sides." The slightest twinge of red might have been noticed on Miss Atherstone's cheek as she spoke. But her father did not notice it. He lifted his head to listen.

"I think I hear the motor."

"You look tired," said Marion to her guest. The first bout of conversation was over, and Dr. Atherstone had gone back to his letters.

Enid Glenwilliam took off her hat, accepted the cushion which her hostess was pressing upon her, and lay at ease in her cane chair.

"You wouldn't wonder, if you could reckon up my week!" she said, laughing. "Let's see--four dinners, three balls, two operas,--a week-end at Windsor, two bazars, three meetings, two concerts, and tea-parties galore! What do you expect but a rag!"

"Don't say you don't like it!"

"Oh yes, I like it. At least, if people don't ask me to things I'm insulted, and when they do--"

"You're bored?"

"It's you finished the sentence!--not I! And I've scarcely seen father this week except at breakfast. _That's_ bored me horribly."

"What have you _really_ been doing?"

"Inquisitor!--I have been amusing myself."

"With Arthur Coryston?"

Marion turned her large fresh-colored face and small gray eyes upon her companion.

"And others! You don't imagine I confine myself to him?"

"Has Lady Coryston found out yet?"

"That we get on? I am sure she has never imagined that Mr. Arthur could so demean himself."

"But she must find out some day."

"Oh yes, I mean her to," said Miss Glenwilliam, quietly. She reached out a long hand toward Marion's cat and stroked it. Then she turned her large eyes of pale hazel set under beautiful dark brows to her companion. "You see--Lady Coryston has not only snubbed me--she has insulted father."

"How?" exclaimed Marion, startled.

"At Chatton House the other day. She refused to go down to dinner with him. She positively did. The table had to be rearranged, and little Lady Chatton nearly had hysterics."

The girl lay looking at her friend, her large but finely cut mouth faintly smiling. But there was something dangerous