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In the passage outside the Gallery he overtook and recognized the man whose entrance into the House Lady Coryston and her daughter had noticed about an hour earlier. "Well, what did you think of it, Lester?" The other smiled good-humoredly. "Capital! Everybody must make a beginning. He's taken a lot of pains." "It's a beastly audience!" said Sir Wilfrid Bury, in reply. "Don't I know it!
The agent accepted the implied reproach with outward meekness, and an inward resolve to put Lady Coryston on a much stricter financial regime for the future. A long conversation followed, at the end of which Mr. Glenwilliam is to speak at Martover next month, and that it is already rumored Lord Coryston will be in the chair."
Lady Coryston was tall, large-boned, thin to emaciation, imposing a Lady Macbeth of the drawing-room. Coryston was small, delicately finished, a whimsical snippet of a man on wires never at ease the piled fair hair overbalancing the face and the small, sarcastic chin. And yet the essential note of both physiognomies, of both aspects, was the same.
They think his behavior to his mother unseemly; and if they were he, they would use all his advantages without winking. At the same time, there is a younger generation growing up in the village and on the farms not so much there, however! which is going to give Lady Coryston trouble. Coryston puzzles and excites them.
Was it really she, Marcia Coryston, who had been drawn into that atmosphere of happy and impassioned religion? drawn with a hand so gentle yet so irresistible? She had been most tenderly treated by them all, even by that pious martinet, Lord William.
She was able during an interval of comparative betterment about Christmas-time, to make an alteration in her will, and the alteration was no mere surrender to what one sees to have been, at bottom, her invincible affection for Coryston.
"Everybody seems extremely pleased," he said, walking at her side, and not indeed knowing what to say. "Except Coryston," replied Marcia, calmly. "I shall have a bad time with him." "Stand up to him!" he laughed. "His bark is worse than his bite Ah! A sudden sound of vehement voices overhead Lady Coryston's voice and Arthur's clashing startled them both.
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."
But Newbury dismounted with only a footman to receive him, and Marcia did not appear till the gong had rung for luncheon. Sir Wilfrid's social powers were severely taxed to keep that meal going. Lady Coryston sat almost entirely silent and ate nothing. Marcia too ate little and talked less.
The agent's inner mind let loose a thought to the effect that the increasing influence of women in politics did not seem to be likely to lead to peaceable living. But he merely remarked: "I much regret that Lord Coryston should have addressed them himself last Sunday. I ventured to tell his lordship so when I met him just now in the village." Lady Coryston stiffened on her chair.
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