The Coryston Family / A Novel

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Marcia laughed.

"And she's very devoted to him, too. She told some one who told me, that he was so much more interesting than any other man she knew, that she hadn't the least wish to marry! I suppose you wouldn't like it if I were to make a friend of her?" The girl's tone had a certain slight defiance in it.

"Do what you like when I'm gone, my dear," said Lady Coryston, quietly.

Marcia flushed, and would have replied, but for the sudden and distant sound of the hall-door bell. Lady Coryston instantly stopped her pacing and took her seat beside a table on which, as Marcia now noticed, certain large envelopes had been laid. The girl threw herself into a low chair behind her mother, conscious of a distress, a fear, she could not analyze. There was a small fire in the grate, for the May evening was chilly, but on the other side of the room a window was open to the twilight, and in a luminous sky cut by the black boughs of a plane tree, and the roofs of a tall building, Marcia saw a bright star shining. The heavy drawing-room, with its gilt furniture and its electric lights, seemed for a moment blotted out. That patch of sky suggested strange, alien, inexorable things; while all the time the sound of mounting footsteps on the stairs grew nearer.

In they came, her three brothers, laughing and talking. Coryston first, then James, then Arthur. Lady Coryston rose to meet them, and they all kissed their mother. Then Coryston, with his hands on his sides, stood in front of her, examining her face with hard, amused eyes, as much as to say, "Now, then, for the scene. Let's get it over!" He was the only one of the three men who was not in evening dress. He wore, indeed, a shabby greenish-gray suit, and a flannel shirt. Marcia noticed it with indignation. "It's not respectful to mother!" she thought, angrily. "It's all very well to be a Socialist and a Bohemian. But there are decencies!"

In spite, however, of the shabby suit and the flannel shirt, in spite also of the fact that he was short and very slight, while his brothers were both of them over six feet and broadly built men, there could be no doubt that, as soon as he entered, Coryston held the stage. He was one of the mercurial men who exist in order to keep the human tide in movement. Their opinions matter principally because without them the opinions of other men would not exist. Their function is to provoke. And from the time he was a babe in the nursery Coryston had fulfilled it to perfection.

He himself would have told you he was simply the reaction from his mother. And indeed, although from the time he had achieved trousers their joint lives had been one scene of combat, they were no sooner in presence of each other than the strange links between them made themselves felt no less than the irreconcilable differences.

Now, indeed, as, after a few bantering remarks to his mother on his recent political escapades—remarks which she took in complete silence—he settled himself in a high chair in front of her to listen to what she had to say, no subtle observer of the scene but must have perceived the likeness—through all contrast—between mother and son. 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. Will—carried to extremes, absorbing and swallowing up the rest of the personality. Lady Coryston had handed on the disease of her own character to her son, and it was in virtue of what she had given him that she had made him her enemy.

Her agitation in his presence, in spite of her proud bearing, was indeed evident, at least to Marcia. Marcia read her; had indeed been compelled to read her mother—the movements of hand and brow, the tricks of expression—from childhood up. And she detected, from various signs of nervousness, that Lady Coryston expected a rough time.

She led the way to it, however, with deliberation. She took no notice of Coryston's, "Well, mother, what's up? Somebody to be tried and executed?" but, waving to him to take a particular chair, she asked the others to sit, and placed herself beside the table which held the sheets of folded foolscap. The ugly electric light from overhead fell full upon the pallid oval of her face, on her lace cap, and shimmering black dress. Only Marcia noticed that the hand which took up the foolscap shook a little. It was an old hand, delicately white, with large finger-joints.