The Coryston Family Part 42

"I have been trying to put the mischief you have done me straight," he said, between his teeth.

"I have done you no mischief that I know of. Won't you come and sit down quietly--and talk the whole matter over? You can't imagine that I desire anything but your good!"

His laugh seemed to give her physical pain.

"Couldn't you take to desiring something else, mother, than my 'good' as you call it? Because, I tell you plainly, it don't suit my book. You have been meddling in my affairs!--just as you have always meddled in them, for matter of that! But this time you've done it with a vengeance--you've done it _d.a.m.nably_!" He struck his hand upon a table near. "What right had you"--he approached her threateningly--"what earthly right had you to go and see Enid Glenwilliam yesterday, just simply that you might spoil my chances with her! Who gave you leave?"

He flung the questions at her.

"I had every right," said Lady Coryston, calmly. "I am your mother--I have done everything for you--you owe your whole position to me. You were ruining yourself by a mad fancy. I was bound to take care that Miss Glenwilliam should not accept you without knowing all the facts.

But--actually--as it happens--she had made up her mind--before we met."

"So she says!--and I don't believe a word of it--_not--one--word_! She wanted to make me less mad with you. She's like you, mother, she thinks she can manage everybody. So she tried to cram me--that it was Glenwilliam persuaded her against me. Rot! If you hadn't gone and meddled, if you hadn't treated her like dirt--if you hadn't threatened to spoil my prospects, and told her you'd never receive her--if you hadn't put her back up in a hundred ways--she'd have married me. It's you--you--_you_--that have done it!"

He threw himself on a chair in front of her, his hands on his knees, staring at her. His aspect as of a man disorganized and undone by baffled pa.s.sion, repelled and disgusted her. Was this her Arthur?--her perfect gentleman--her gay, courteous, well-behaved darling--whose mingled docility and good breeding had, so far, suited both her affection and her love of rule so well? The deep under-sense of disaster which had held her all day, returned upon her in ten-fold strength. But she fronted him bravely.

"You are, as it happens, entirely wrong, Arthur. It's not I who have done it--but Miss Glenwilliam's own good sense--or her father's. Of course I confess frankly that I should have done my best--that I did, if you like, do my best, to prevent your marriage with Miss Glenwilliam. And as for right, who else had a right, if not I? Was it not most unkind, most undutiful on your part!"--her tone was a tone of battle--"was it not an outrage on your father's memory--that you should even entertain the notion of such a connection? To bring the daughter of that man into this family!--after all we have done--and suffered--for our principles--it's you, who ought to ask _my_ pardon, Arthur, and not I yours! Times without number, you have agreed with me in despising people who have behaved as if politics were a mere game--a trifle that didn't matter. You have told me often, that things were getting too hot; you couldn't be friends in private, with people you hated in public; people you looked upon as robbers and cheats. And then--_then_--you go and let this infatuation run away with you--you forget all your principles--you forget your mother, and all you owe her--and you go and ask this girl to marry you--whose father is our personal and political enemy--a political adventurer who is trying to pull down and destroy everything that you and I hold sacred--or ought to hold sacred!"

"For goodness' sake, mother, don't make a political speech!" He turned upon her with angry contempt. "That kind of thing does all very well to spout at an election--but it won't do between you and me. I _don't_ hate Glenwilliam--_there_! The estates--and the property--and all we hold sacred, as you call it--will last my time--and his. And I jolly well don't care what happens afterward. _He's_ not going to do us much harm.

England's a deal tougher proposition than he thinks. It's you women who get up such a hullabaloo--I declare you make politics a perfect devilry! But then"--he shrugged his shoulders fiercely--"I'm not going to waste time in arguing. I just came to tell you _what I intend to do_; and then I'm going up to town. I've ordered the motor for seven o'clock."

Lady Coryston had risen, and stood, with one hand on the mantelpiece, looking down upon her son.

"I shall be glad indeed to hear what you intend to do, Arthur. I see you have missed two or three important divisions lately."

He burst out:

"And they won't be the last either, by a good way. I'm going to chuck it, mother! And if you don't like it--you can blame yourself!"

"What do you mean?"

He hesitated a moment--then spoke deliberately.

"I intend to leave Parliament after this session. I do! I'm sick of it. A friend of mine has got a ranch forty miles from Buenos Ayres. He wants me to go in with him--and I think I'll try it. I want something to distract my mind from these troubles."

Lady Coryston's eyes blazed in her gray-white face, which not even her strong will could keep from trembling.

"So this, Arthur, is the reward you propose for all that has been done for you!--for the time, the thought, the money that has been showered upon you--"

He looked at her from under his eyebrows, unmoved.

"I should have remembered all that, mother, if you--Look here! Have you ever let me, in anything--for one day, one hour--call my soul my own--since I went into Parliament? It's true I deceived you about Enid. I was literally _afraid_ to tell you--there! You've brought me to that!

And when a man's afraid of a woman--it somehow makes a jelly of him--altogether. It was partly what made me run after Enid--at first--that I was doing something independent of you--something you would hate, if you knew. Beastly of me, I know!--but there it was. And then you arranged that meeting here, without so much as giving me a word's notice!--you told Page _before you told me_. And when I kicked--and told you about Enid--did you ever come afterward and talk to me nicely about her?--did you ever, even, consider for one moment what I told you?--that I was in love with her?--dead gone on her? Even if I was rude to you that day when you dragged it out of me, most mothers, I think, would have been sorry for a fellow--"

His voice suddenly broke; but he instantly recovered himself.

"Instead of that, mother--you only thought of how you could thwart and checkmate me--how you could get _your_ way--and force me to give up mine. It was _abominable_ of you to go and see Enid, without a word to me!--it was _abominable_ to plot and plan behind my back, and then to force yourself on her and insult her to her face! Do you think a girl of any spirit whatever would put herself in your clutches after that? No!--she didn't want to come it too hard on you--that's her way!--so she made up some tale about Glenwilliam. But it's as plain as the nose in your face!

You've ruined me!--you've ruined me!"

He began to walk furiously up and down, beside himself again with rage and pain.

Lady Coryston dropped into a chair. Her large, blanched face expressed a pa.s.sion that even at this supreme moment, and under the sense of doom that was closing on her, she could not restrain.

"It is not I who have ruined you, Arthur--as you put it--though of course you're not ruined at all!--but your own wanton self-will. Are you really so lost to all decency--all affection--that you can speak to your mother like this?"

He turned and paused--to throw her an ugly look.

"Well--I don't know that I'm more of a brute than other men--but it's no good talking about affection to me--after this. Yes, I suppose you've been fond of me, mother, in your way--and I suppose I've been fond of you. But the fact is, as I told you before, I've stood in _fear_ of you!--all my life--and lots of things you thought I did because I was fond of you, I did because I was a coward--a disgusting coward!--who ought to have been kicked. And that's the truth! Why, ever since I was a small kid--"

And standing before her, with his hands on his sides, all his pleasant face disfigured by anger and the desire to wound, he poured out upon her a flood of recollections of his childhood and youth. Beneath the bitterness and the shock of it, even Lady Coryston presently flinched. This kind of language, though never in such brutal terms, she had heard from Corry once or twice.

But, Arthur!--She put up a trembling hand.

"That's enough, Arthur! We had better stop this conversation. I have done the best I could for you--always."

"Why didn't you _love_ us!" he cried, striking a chair beside him for emphasis. "Why didn't you _love_ us! It was always politics--politics!

Somebody to be attacked--somebody to be scored off--somebody to be squared.

And a lot of stupid talk that bored us all! My poor father was as sick of it often as we were. He had enough of it out of doors. d.a.m.n politics for women, I say--d.a.m.n them!"

Lady Coryston raised her hand.

"_Go_, Arthur! This is enough."

He drew a long breath.

"Upon my soul, I think it is. We'd better not excite each other any more.

I'll speak to Sir Wilfrid, mother, before I go, and ask him to report various things to you, which I have to say. And I shall go and see the Whips to-night. Of course I don't want to do the party any harm. If there is a general election in the autumn, all that need happen is that I sha'n't stand again. And as to the estates"--he hesitated--"as to the estates, mother, do as you like. Upon my word I think you'd better give them back to Coryston! A certain amount of money is all I shall want."

"Go!" said Lady Coryston again, still pointing.

He stood a moment, fiddling with some ornaments on a table near him, then caught up his hat with a laugh--and still eying her askance, he walked to the door, opened it, and disappeared; though he closed it so uncertainly that Lady Coryston, until, after what seemed an interval, she heard his footsteps receding, could not be sure that he was really gone.

But he was gone; and all the plans and hopes of her later life lay in ashes about her. She sat motionless. After half an hour she heard the sound of a motor being driven away from the front of the house. Through the evening air, too, she caught distant voices--which soon ceased.

She rang presently for her maid, and said she would dine in her room, because of a bad headache. Marcia came, but was not admitted. Sir Wilfrid Bury asked if he might see her, just for a few minutes. A message referred him to the next morning.

Dinner came and went down untouched. Whenever she was ill, Lady Coryston's ways were solitary and ungracious. She hated being "fussed over." So that no one dared force themselves upon her. Only, between ten and eleven, Marcia again came to the door, knocked gently, and was told to go away. Her mother would be all right in the morning. The girl reluctantly obeyed.

The state of terrible tension in which Lady Coryston pa.s.sed that night had no witness. It could only be guessed at, by Marcia, in particular, to whom it fell afterward to take charge of her mother's papers and personal affairs. Lady Coryston had apparently gathered all Arthur's, letters to her together, from the very first to the very latest, tied them up neatly, and laid them in the drawer which held those of her dead husband. She had begun to write a letter to Coryston, but when found, it was incoherent, and could not be understood. She had removed the early photographs of Arthur from her table, and a larger, recent one of the young M.P., taken in London for the const.i.tuency, which was on her mantelpiece, and had placed them both face downward in the same drawer with the letters. And then, when she had found it impossible to write what she wished to write, she seemed to have gone back to her arm-chair, taking with her two or three of Arthur's Eton reports--by what instinct had she chosen them out from the piles of letters!--and a psalter she often used. But by a mere accident, a sinister trick of fate, when she was found, the book lay open under her hand at one of those imprecatory psalms at which Christendom has at last learned to shudder. Only a few days before, Sir Wilfrid Bury had laughed at her--as only he might--for her "Old Testament tone" toward her enemies, and had quoted this very psalm. Her helpless fingers touched it.

But the night was a night of vigil for others also. Coryston, who could not sleep, spent the greater part of it first in writing to Marion Atherstone, and then in composing a slas.h.i.+ng attack upon the High Church party for its att.i.tude toward the divorce laws of the country, and the proposals recently made for their reform. "How much longer are we going to allow these black-coated gentlemen to despise and trample on the laws under which the rest of us are content to live!--or to use the rights and powers of property for the bare purpose of pressing their tyrannies and their superst.i.tions on other people?"

Meanwhile, in the beautiful chapel of Hoddon Grey, Edward Newbury, worn out with the intolerable distress of the preceding forty-eight hours, and yet incapable of sleep, sat or knelt through long stretches of the night. The chapel was dark but for one light. Over the altar there burnt a lamp, and behind it could be seen, from the chair, where he knelt, the silk veil of the tabernacle. Reservation had been permitted for years in the Hoddon Grey chapel, and the fact had interwoven itself with the deepest life of the household, eclipsing and dulling the other religious practices of Anglicanism, just as the strong plant in a hedgerow drives out or sterilizes the rest. There, in Newbury's pa.s.sionate belief, the Master of the House kept watch, or slept, above the altar, as once above the Galilean waves. For him, the "advanced" Anglican, as for any Catholic of the Roman faith, the doctrine of the Ma.s.s was the central doctrine of all religion, and that intimate and personal adoration to which it leads, was the governing power of life. The self-torturing anguish which he had suffered ever since the news of the two suicides had reached him could only endure itself in this sacred presence; and it was there he had taken refuge under the earlier blow of the breach with Marcia.

The night was very still--a night of soft showers, broken by intervals of starlight. Gradually as the darkness thinned toward dawn, the figures, stoled and winged and crowned, of the painted windows, came dimly forth, and long rays of pale light crept over the marble steps and floor, upon the flowers on the altar and the crucifix above it. The dawn flowed in silently and coldly; the birds stirred faintly; and the white mists on the lawn and fields outside made their way through the open windows, and dimmed the glow of color on the walls and in the apse.

In those melancholy and yet ardent hours Edward Newbury reached the utmost heights of religious affirmation, and the extreme of personal renunciation.

It became clear to a mind attuned for such thoughts, that, by severing him from Marcia, and, at the same time, and by the same stroke, imposing upon him at least some fraction of responsibility--a fraction which his honesty could not deny--for the deaths of John and Alice Betts, G.o.d had called him, Edward Newbury, in a way not to be mistaken and not to be refused. His life was henceforth forfeit--forfeit to his Lord. Henceforth, let him make of it a willing sacrifice, an expiatory oblation, perpetually renewed, and offered in perpetual union with the Divine Victim, for their souls and his own.

The ideas of the Conventual house in which he had so lately spent hours of intense religious happiness closed upon him and possessed him. He was not to marry. He was reserved for the higher counsels, the Counsels of Perfection. The face and talk of his friend Brierly, who was so soon going to his dangerous and solitary post in Southern India, haunted his mind, and at last seemed to show him a way out of his darkness. His poor father and mother! But he never doubted for one moment that they would give him up, that they would let him follow his conscience.