The Coryston Family Part 17

CHAPTER VII

It was a breezy June afternoon, with the young summer at its freshest and l.u.s.tiest.

Lord and Lady William Newbury were strolling in the garden at Hoddon Grey.

The long low line of the house rose behind them--an attractive house and an old one, but with no architectural features to speak of, except a high-pitched mossy roof, a picturesque series of dormer-windows, and a high gable and small lantern cupola at the farther end which marked the private chapel. The house was evidently roomy, but built for comfort, not display; the garden with its spreading slopes and knolls was simple and old-fas.h.i.+oned, in keeping thereby with the general aspect of the two people who were walking up and down the front lawn together.

Lord William Newbury was a man of sixty-five, tall and slenderly built. His pale hazel eyes, dreamily kind, were the prominent feature of his face; he had very thin flat cheeks, and his white hair--he was walking bareheaded--was blown back from a brow which, like the delicate mouth, was still young, almost boyish. Sweetness and a rather weak refinement--a stranger would probably have summed up his first impressions of Lord William, drawn from his bodily presence, in some such words. But the stranger who did so would have been singularly wide of the mark. His wife beside him looked even frailer and slighter than he. A small and mouse-like woman, dressed in gray clothes of the simplest and plainest make, and wearing a shady garden hat; her keen black eyes in her shriveled face gave that clear promise of strong character in which her husband's aspect, at first sight, was lacking. But Lady William knew her place. She was the most submissive and the most docile of wives; and on no other terms would life have been either possible or happy in her husband's company.

They were discussing, with some eagerness, the approaching arrival of their week-end guests--Lady Coryston and Marcia, the new dean of a neighboring cathedral, an ex-Cabinet Minister and an Oxford professor. But the talk, however it circled, had a way of returning to Marcia. It was evident that she held the field.

"It is so strange that I have scarcely seen her!" Lady William was saying in a tone which was not without its note of complaint. "I hope dear Edward has not been too hasty in his choice. As for you, William, I don't believe you would know her again, if you were to see her without her mother."

"Oh yes, I should. Her mother introduced her to me at the Archbishop's party, and I talked to her a little. A very handsome young woman. I remember thinking her talk rather too theatrical."

"About theaters, you mean," sighed Lady William. "Well, that's the way with all the young people. The fuss people make about actors and actresses is perfectly ridiculous."

"I remember she talked to me enthusiastically about Madame Froment," said Lord William, in a tone of reminiscence. "I asked her whether she knew that Madame Froment had a scandalous story, and was not fit acquaintance for a young girl. And she opened her eyes at me, as though I had propounded something absurd. 'One doesn't inquire about that!' she said--quite indignantly, I a.s.sure you! 'but only whether she can _act_.' It was curious--and rather disquieting--to see so much decision--self-a.s.sertion--in so young a woman."

"Oh, well, Edward will change all that." Lady William's voice was gently confident. "He a.s.sures me that she has excellent principles--a fine character really, though quite undeveloped. He thinks she will be readily guided by one she loves."

"I hope so, for Edward's sake--for he is very much in love. I trust he is not letting inclination run away with him. So much--to all of us--depends on his marriage!"

Lord William, frowning a little, paused a moment in his walk and turned his eyes to the house. Hoddon Grey had only become his personal property some three years before this date; but ever since his boyhood it had been a.s.sociated for him with hallowed images and recollections. It had been the dower-house of his widowed mother, and after her death his brother, a widower with one crippled son, had owned it for nearly a quarter of a century. Both father and son had belonged to the straitest sect of Anglo-Catholicism; their tender devotion to each other had touched with beauty the austerity and seclusion of their lives. Yet at times Hoddon Grey had sheltered large gatherings--gatherings of the high Puseyite party in the English Church, both lay and clerical. Pusey himself had preached in the chapel; Liddon with the Italianate profile--orator and ascetic--might have been seen strolling under the trees where Lord and Lady William were strolling now; Manning, hatchet-faced, jealous and self-conscious, had made fugitive appearances there; even the great Newman himself, in his extreme old age, had once rested there on a journey, and given his Cardinal's blessing to the sons of one of his former comrades in the Oxford movement.

Every stone in the house, every alley in the garden, was sacred in Lord William's eyes. To most men the house they love represents either the dignity and pride of family, or else successful money-making, and the pleasure of indulged tastes. But to Lord William Newbury the house of Hoddon Grey stood as the symbol of a spiritual campaign in which his forebears, himself, and his son were all equally enrolled--the endless, unrelenting campaign of the Church against the world, the Christian against the unbeliever.

... His wife broke in upon his reverie.

"Are you going to say anything about Lord Coryston's letter, William?"

Lord William started.

"Say anything to his mother? Certainly not, Albinia!" He straightened his shoulders. "It is my intention to take no notice of it whatever."

"You have not even acknowledged it?" she asked, timidly.

"A line--in the third person."

"Edward thinks Lady Coryston most unwise--"

"So she is--most unwise!" cried Lord William, warmly. "Coryston has every right to complain of her."

"You think she has done wrong?"

"Certainly. A woman has no right to do such things--whatever her son may be. For a woman to take upon herself the sole direction and disposal of such properties as the Coryston properties is to step outside the bounds of her s.e.x; it is to claim something which a woman ought not to claim--something altogether monstrous and unnatural!"

Lord William's thin features had flushed under a sudden rush of feeling.

His wife could not help the sudden thought, "But if we had had an infidel or agnostic son?"

Aloud she said, "You don't think his being such a Radical, so dreadfully extreme and revolutionary, justifies her?"

"Not at all! That was G.o.d's will--the cross she had to bear. She interferes with the course of Providence--presumptuously interferes with it--doing evil that what she conceives to be good may come. A woman must persuade men by gentleness--not govern them by force. If she attempts that she is usurping what does not--what never can--belong to her."

The churchman had momentarily disappeared in the indignant stickler for male prerogative and the time-honored laws of English inheritance. Lady William acquiesced in silence. She, too, strongly disapproved of Lady Coryston's action toward her eldest son, abominable as Coryston's opinions were. Women, like minorities, must suffer; and she was glad to have her husband's word for it that it is not their business to correct or coerce their eldest sons, on the ground of political opinions, however grievous those opinions may be.

"I trust that Lady Coryston will not open on this subject to me," said Lord William, after a pause. "I am never good at concealing my opinions for politeness' sake. And of course I hold that Coryston is just as much in the wrong as she. And mad to boot! No sane man could have written the letter I received last week?"

"Do you think he will do what he threatens?"

"What--get up a subscription for Mr. and Mrs. Betts, and settle them somewhere here? I dare say! We can't help it. We can only follow our consciences."

Lord William held himself erect. At that moment no one could have thought of "sweetness" in connection with the old man's delicately white features.

Every word fell from him with a quiet and steely deliberation.

His wife walked beside him a little longer. Then she left him and went into the house to see that all the last preparations for the guests were made; gathering on her way a bunch of early roses from a bed near the house.

She walked slowly through the guestrooms on the garden front, looking at everything with a critical eye. The furniture of the rooms was shabby and plain. It had been scarcely changed at all since 1832, when Lord William's widowed mother had come to live at Hoddon Grey. But everything smelt of lavender and much cleaning. The windows were open to the June air, and the house seemed pervaded by the cooing of doves from the lime walk outside; a sound which did but emphasize the quiet of the house and garden. At the end of the garden front Lady William entered a room which had a newer and fresher appearance than the rest. The walls were white; a little rosebud chintz curtained the windows and the bed. White rugs made the hearth and the dressing-table gay, and there was a muslin bedspread lined with pink and tied with knots of pink ribbon.

Lady William stood and looked at it with an intense and secret pleasure.

She had been allowed to "do it up" the preceding summer, out of her own money, on which, in all her life, she had never signed a check; and she had given orders that Miss Coryston was to be put into it. Going to the dressing-table, she took from the vase there the formal three sprigs of azalea which the housemaid had arranged, and replaced them by the roses.

Her small, wrinkled hands lingered upon them. She was putting them there for the girl Edward loved--who was probably to be his wife. A great tenderness filled her heart.

When she left the room, she rapidly descended a staircase just beyond it, and found herself in the vestibule of the chapel. Pus.h.i.+ng the chapel doors open, she made her way in. The rich glooms and scents of the beautiful still place closed upon her. Kneeling before the altar, still laden with Whitsun flowers, and under the large crucifix that hung above it, she prayed for her son, that he might worthily uphold the heritage of his father, that he might be happy in his wife, and blessed with children....

An hour later the drawing-room and the lawns of Hoddon Grey were alive with tea and talk. Lady Coryston, superbly tall, in trailing black, was strolling with Lord William. Sir Wilfrid, the ex-Minister Sir Louis Ford, the Dean, and the Chaplain of the house were chatting and smoking round the deserted tea-table, while Lady William and the Oxford Professor poked among the flower-beds, exchanging confidences on phloxes and delphiniums.

In the distance, under the lime avenue, now in its first pale leaf, two young figures paced to and fro. They were Newbury and Marcia.

Sir Wilfrid had just thrown himself back in his chair, looking round him with a sigh of satisfaction.

"Hoddon Grey makes me feel good! Not a common effect of country-houses!"

"Enjoy them while you may!" laughed Sir Louis Ford. "Glenwilliam is after them."

"Glenwilliam!" exclaimed the Dean. "I saw him at the station, with his handsome but rather strange-looking daughter. What's he doing here?"

"Hatching mischief with a political friend of his--a 'fidus Achates'--who lives near here," said the Chaplain, Mr. Perry, in a deep and rather melancholy tone.

"From the bills I saw posted up in Martover as we came through"--Sir Louis Ford lowered his voice--"I gathered the amazing fact that Coryston--_Coryston_!--is going to take the chair at a meeting where Glenwilliam speaks some way on in next month."

Sir Wilfrid shrugged his shoulders, with a warning glance at the stately form of Coryston's mother in the distance.

"Too bad to discuss!" he said, shortly.

A slight smile played round the Dean's flexible mouth. He was a new-comer, and much more of an Erastian than Lord William approved. He had been invited, not for pleasure, but for tactics; that the Newburys might find out what line he was going to take in the politics of the diocese.