By the time the sun was fairly up, the storm of religious feeling had died down in Newbury. He had taken his resolve, but he was incapable of any further emotion concerning it. On the other hand, his heart was alive to the thought of Marcia, and of that letter she had sent him. Dear, generous Marcia! Once more he would write to her--once more!

"DEAREST MARCIA,--I may call you so, I think, for the last time, and at this turning-point of both our lives. I may never see you again; or if we do meet, you will have become so strange to me that you will wonder in what other and distant life it was that we loved each other. I think you did love me for a little while, and I do bless and thank you that you let me know you--and love you. And I bless you above all for the thought of consolation and pity you had toward me, even yesterday, in those terrible hours--when you offered to come back to me and help me, as though our bond had never been broken.

"No, dear Marcia!--I saw the truth in your face yesterday. I could not make you happy. I should set jarring a discord in your life for which it was never meant. You did right, absolutely right, to separate yourself from one whose inmost and irrevocable convictions repelled and shocked you. I may be narrow and cold; but I am not narrow enough--or cold enough!--to let you give yourself back to one you cannot truly love--or trust. But that you offered it, because you were sorry for me, and that you would have carried it out, firmly, your dear hand clenched, as it were, on the compact--that warms my heart--that I shall have, as a precious memory, to carry into the far-off life that I foresee.

"I cannot write much about the terrible thing at Redcross Farm. Your great pity for me implies that you think me--and my father--in some way and in some degree, responsible. Perhaps we are--I do not wish to shirk the truth.

If so, it is as soldiers under orders are responsible for the hurt and damage they may cause, in their King's war--as much, and as little. At least, so far as the main matter is concerned. That I might have been--that I ought to have been--infinitely more loving, wiser, stronger to help them--that I know--that I shall feel as long as I live. And it is a feeling which will determine all my future life.

"You remember what I told you of Father Brierly and the Community of the Ascension? As soon as I can leave my father and mother--they are at present in deep distress--I shall probably go to the Community House in Lancashire for a time. My present intention is to take orders, and perhaps to join Brierly eventually in mission work. My father and mother are splendid! They and I shall be separated perhaps in this world, but in that mysterious other world which lies all about us even now, and which is revealed to us in the Sacraments, we shall meet at last, and forever--if we are faithful.

"Good-by--G.o.d be with you--G.o.d give you every good thing in this present time--love, children, friends--and, 'in the world to come, life everlasting.'"

About the hour when the letter was finished, when the July sun was already high over the dewy new-shorn fields, Coryston, after an hour's sleep in his chair, and a bath, left Knatchett to walk to Coryston. He was oppressed by some vague dread which would not let him rest. In the strong excitements and animosities of the preceding day he had forgotten his mother. But the memory of her face on the sofa during that Sunday reading had come back upon him with unpleasant force. It had been always so with him in life. She no sooner relapsed into the woman than he became a son. Only the experience had been rare!

He crossed the Hoddon Grey park, and then walked through _a_ mile of the Coryston demesne, till he reached the lake and saw beyond it the Italian garden, with its statues glittering in the early sun--and the long marble front of the house, with its rococo ornament, and its fine pillared loggia. "What the deuce are _we_ going to do with these places!" he asked himself in petulant despair. "And to think that Arthur won't be allowed to sell it, or turn it to any useful purpose whatever!"

He skirted the lake, and began to mount the steps, and flagged paths of the formal garden. Suddenly as he approached the garden front he saw that two windows of his mother's sitting-room were open, and that some one--a figure in black--was sitting in a high-backed arm-chair beside one of them. His mother!--up?--at seven o'clock in the morning? Yet was it his mother? He came nearer. The figure was motionless--the head thrown back, the eyes invisible from where he stood. Something in the form, the att.i.tude--its stillness and strangeness in the morning light--struck him with horror. He rushed to the garden door, found it open, dashed up the stairs, and into his mother's room.

"Mother!"

Lady Coryston neither moved nor spoke. But as he came up to her, he saw that she was alive--that her eyes opened and perceived him. Nothing else in her lived or moved. And as he knelt down by her, and took her tenderly in his arms, she relapsed into the unconscious state from which his entrance had momentarily roused her.

What else there is to tell had best be told quickly. Lady Coryston lived for some eight months after this seizure. She partially recovered from the first stroke, and all the organization of the great house, and all the thought of her children circled round the tragic death-in-life into which she had fallen.

Arthur had come rushing back to Coryston after the catastrophe, restored by it, like a stream which has wandered in flood, to the older and natural channels of life. Bitter remorse for his conduct to his mother, and a sharp resentment of Enid Glenwilliam's conduct toward himself, acted wholesomely.

He took up his normal occupations again, in Parliament and on the estates, and talked no more of Buenos Ayres. But whether his mother's darkened mind ever forgave him it would be difficult to say. She rarely noticed him, and when she spoke it was generally for Coryston. Her dependence upon her eldest son became a touching and poignant thing, deepening the souls of both. Coryston came to live at Coryston, and between his love for Marion Atherstone, and his nursing of his mother, was more truly happy for a time than his character had ever yet allowed him to be. The din of battle, political and religious, penetrated no more within a house where death came closer day by day, and where weakness and suffering had at last united these differing men and women in a common interest of profoundest pity.

Lady Coryston became strangely dear to her children before she left them forever, and the last faint words she spoke, on that winter morning when she died, were for Coryston, who had her hand in his. "Corry--Corry darling"--and as he came closer--"Corry, who was my firstborn!"

On the night of Lady Coryston's death Reginald Lester wrote:

"Coryston has just taken me in to see his mother. She lies in a frowning rest which does not--as death so often does--make any break with our memories of her when alive. Att.i.tude and expression are characteristic. She is the strong woman still, conscious of immense power; and, if that shut mouth could speak, and if health were given back to her, ready no doubt still to use it tyrannously. There is no weakening and no repentance in the face; and I like it better so. Nor did she ever really reverse, though she modified, the exclusion of Coryston from the inheritance. 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.

She has still left Arthur the estates for life, but with remainder to Coryston's son, should he have one, and she has made Coryston a trustee together with Sir Wilfrid Bury. This will mean practically a division between the brothers--to which Arthur has already pledged himself, so he tells me--but with no power to Coryston to make such radical changes as would destroy the family tradition, at least without Arthur's consent and Sir Wilfrid's. But Coryston will have plenty of money and plenty of land wherewith to experiment, and no doubt we shall see some strange things.

"Thus she kept her flag flying to the end, so far as the enfeebled brain allowed. Yet the fact was that her state of dependence on her children during her illness, and their goodness to her, did in truth evoke another woman with new perceptions, superposed, as it were, upon the old. And there, I think, came in her touch of greatness--which one could not have expected. She was capable at any rate of _this_ surrender; not going back upon the old--but just accepting the new. Her life might have petered out in bitterness and irritation, leaving an odious memory. It became a source of infinite sweetness, just because her children found out--to their immense surprise--that she _could_ let herself be loved; and they threw themselves with eagerness on the chance she gave them.

"She dies in time--one of the last of a generation which will soon have pa.s.sed, leaving only a procession of ghosts on a vanishing road. She had no doubts about her place and prerogative in the world, no qualms about her rights to use them as she pleased. Coryston also has no doubts--or few.

As to individuals he is perpetually disillusioned; as to causes he is as obstinate as his mother. And independently of the Glenwilliam affair, that is why, I think, in the end she preferred Coryston to Arthur, who will 'muddle through,' not knowing whither, like the majority of his kind.

"Marcia!--in her black dress, beside her mother, looking down upon her--with that yearning look!--But--not a word! There are things too sacred for these pages."

During the months of Lady Coryston's illness, indeed, Reginald Lester entered, through stages scarcely perceived by himself and them, upon a new relation toward the Coryston family. He became the increasingly intimate friend and counselor of the Coryston brothers, and of Marcia, no less--but in a fresh and profounder sense. He shared much of the estate business with Mr. Page; he reconciled as best he could the jarring views of Coryston and Arthur; he started on the reorganization of the great Library, in which, so far, he had only dealt with a fraction of its possessions. And every day he was Marcia's companion, in things intimate and moving, no less than in the practical or commonplace affairs of ordinary life. It was he who read poetry with her, or played accompaniments to her songs, in the hours of relief from her nursing; it was he who watched and understood her; who guided and yet adored her. His love for her was never betrayed; but it gradually became, without her knowing it, the condition of her life. And when Lady Coryston died, in the February following her stroke, and Marcia, who was worn out, went abroad with Waggin for a few weeks' rest, the correspondence which pa.s.sed between her and Lester during the earlier days of her absence, by the more complete and deliberate utterance which it permitted between them, did at last reveal to the girl the depths of her own heart.

During her travels various things happened.

One chilly afternoon, late in March, when a light powdering of snow lay on the northern slopes of the hills, Coryston went up to the cottage in the hopes of finding Marion Atherstone alone. There had been a quiet understanding between them all the winter, more or less known to the Coryston family, but all talk of marriage had been silenced by the condition of Lady Coryston, who indeed never knew such schemes were in the air.

About six weeks, however, after his mother's death, Coryston's natural _fougue_ suggested to him that he was being trifled with. He burst into the little sitting-room where Marion was just making tea, and sat down, scowling, on the further side of the hearth.

"What is the matter?" Marion asked, mildly. During the winter a beautifying change seemed to have pa.s.sed upon Atherstone's daughter. She was younger, better looking, better dressed; yet keeping always the touch of homeliness, of smiling common-sense, which had first attracted a man in secret rebellion against his own rhetoric and other people's.

"You are treating me abominably!" said Coryston, with vehemence.

"How? My conscience is as sound as a bell!" Wherewith, laughing, she handed him his cup of tea.

"All bells aren't sound. Some are flawed," was the prompt reply. "I have asked you twice this week to tell me when you will be good enough to marry me, and you haven't said a single word in reply."

Marion was silent a little; then she looked up, as Andromache looked at Hector--with a laugh, yet with something else fluttering behind.

"Let's ask ourselves once more, Herbert--is it really a wise thing to do?"

n.o.body else since his father died had ever called Coryston by his Christian name; which was perhaps why Marion Atherstone took a peculiar pleasure in using it. Coryston had mostly forgotten that he possessed such a name, but from her he liked it.

"What on earth do you mean by that?"

"In the first place, Herbert, I was never intended by nature to be a peeress."

He sprang up furiously.

"I never heard a more sn.o.bbish remark! All that you are asked is to be my wife."

She shook her head.

"We can't make a world for ourselves only. Then there's--father."

"Well, what about him?"

"You don't get on very well," she said, with a sigh.

Coryston controlled himself with difficulty.

"For your father, the Liberal party is mostly Jahve--the hope of the children of light. For me the Liberal party is mostly Dagon--either made a G.o.d of by Philistines, or groveling before a stronger G.o.d--Mammon. But that don't matter. I can behave myself."

Marion bent over her work.

"Can't I behave myself?" he repeated, threateningly, as he moved nearer her.

She looked up at last.

"Suppose you get bored with me--as you have with the Liberal party?"

"But never with liberty," he said, ardently.