The Coryston Family by Mrs. Humphry Ward (10 best books of all time .txt) 📖

saw her standing by his desk, lost in an abstraction of grief. But she roused herself at sight of him, and asked for any further news there might be. Lester, who had been suffering from a sprained wrist, had that morning seen the same doctor who had been called in on the discovery of the tragedy.

"It must all have happened within an hour. His sister, who had come to stay with them, says that John Betts had seemed rather brighter in the evening, and his wife rather less in terror. She spoke very warmly to her sister-in-law of your having come to see her, and said she had promised you to wait a little before she took any step. Then he went out to the laboratory, and there, it is supposed, he was overcome by a fit of acute depression--the revolver was in his drawer--he scrawled the two words that were found--and you know the rest. Two people on the farm heard the shot--but it was taken as fired by the night watcher in a field beyond, which was full of young pheasants. About midnight Mrs. Betts went out to bring him in--her sister-in-law having gone up to bed. She never came back again--no one heard a sound--and they were not discovered till the morning. How long she was alone with him before she killed herself cannot even be guessed."

Marcia's trembling fingers fumbled at the bosom of her dress. She drew out a crumpled paper, and pushed it toward him. He read:

"Good-by, dear Miss Coryston. He sits so still--not much injured. I have often seen him look so. My John--my John--I can't stay behind. Will you please do something for my boy? John--John--if only we hadn't met again--"

It ended incoherently in blots and smudges.

"You poor child!" said Lester, involuntarily, as he looked up from the letter. It was a word of sudden compassion wrested from him by the sight of Marcia's intolerable pain. He brought forward one of the deep library chairs, and made her sit in it, and as he bent over her his sympathy drew from her piteous little cries and stifled moans which he met with answering words of comfort. All consciousness of sex dropped away; the sharp-chinned face, the blue, black-fringed eyes, behind their spectacles, the noble brow under its pile of strong grizzled hair:--she saw them all as an embodied tenderness--courage and help made visible--a courage and help on which she gradually laid hold. She could not stop to ask herself how it was that, in this moment of shock and misery, she fell so naturally into this attitude of trust toward one with whom she had never yet set up any relation but that of a passing friendship. She only knew that there was comfort in his voice, his look, in his understanding of her suffering, in the reticence with which he handled it. She had lived beside him in the same house for months without ever really knowing him. Now suddenly--here was a friend--on whom to lean.

But she could not speak to him of Newbury, though it was the thought of Newbury that was burning her heart. She did mention Coryston, only to say with energy: "I don't want to see him yet--not _yet_!" Lester could only guess at her meaning, and would not have probed her for the world.

But after a little she braced herself, gave him a grateful, shrinking look, and, rising, she went in search of Sir Wilfrid and Arthur.

Only Sir Wilfrid was in the hall when she reentered it. He had just dismissed a local reporter who had got wind of Miss Coryston's visit to the farm, and had rushed over to Coryston, in the hope of seeing her.

"My dear child!" He hurried to meet her. "You look a perfect wreck! How _abominable_ that you should be mixed up with this thing!"

"I couldn't help it," she said, vaguely, turning away at once from the discussion of it. "Where is Arthur? Mother wanted me to give him a message."

Sir Wilfrid looked uneasy.

"He was here till just now. But he is in a curious state of mind. He thinks of nothing but one thing--and one person. He arrived late last night, and it is my belief that he hardly went to bed. And he is just hanging on the arrival of a letter--"

"From Enid Glenwilliam?"

"Evidently. I tried to get him to realize this horrible affair--the part the Newburys had played in it--the effect on you--since that poor creature appealed to you. But no--not a bit of it! He seems to have neither eyes nor ears--But here he is!"

Sir Wilfrid and Marcia stepped apart. Arthur came into the hall from the library entrance. Marcia saw that he was much flushed, and that his face wore a hard, determined look, curiously at variance with its young features and receding chin.

"Hullo, Marcia! Beastly business, this you've been getting into. Think, my dear, you'd have done much better to keep out of it--especially as you and Newbury didn't agree. I've just seen Coryston in the park--he confessed he'd set you on--and that you and Newbury had quarreled over it. _He's_ perfectly mad about it, of course. That you might expect. I say--mother is late!"

He looked round the hall imperiously.

Marcia, supporting herself on a chair, met his eyes, and made no reply. Yet she dimly remembered that her mother had asked her to give him some message.

"Arthur, remember that your sister's had a great shock!" said Sir Wilfrid, sternly.

"I know that! Sorry for you, Marcia--awfully--but I expect you'll have to appear at the inquest--don't see how you can get out of it. You should have thought twice about going there--when Newbury didn't want you to. And what's this they say about a letter?"

His tone had the peremptory ring natural to many young men of his stamp, in dealing with their inferiors, or--until love has tamed them--with women; but it came strangely from the good-tempered and easy-going Arthur.

Marcia's hand closed instinctively on the bosom of her dress, where the letter was.

"Mrs. Betts wrote me a letter," she said, slowly.

"You'd better let me see it. Sir Wilfrid and I can advise you."

He held out an authoritative hand. Marcia made no movement, and the hand dropped.

"Oh, well, if you're going to take no one's advice but your own, I suppose you must gang your own gait!" said her brother, impatiently. "But if you're a sensible girl you'll make it up with Newbury and let him keep you out of it as much as possible. Betts was always a cranky fellow. I'm sorry for the little woman, though."

And walking away to a distant window at the far end of the hall, whence all the front approaches to the house could be seen, he stood drumming on the glass and fixedly looking out. Sir Wilfrid, with an angry ejaculation, approached Marcia.

"My dear, your brother isn't himself!--else he could never have spoken so unkindly. Will you show me that letter? It will, of course, have to go to the police."

She held it out to him obediently.

Sir Wilfrid read it. He blew his nose, and walked away for a minute. When he returned, it was to say, with lips that twitched a little in his smooth-shaven actor's face:

"Most touching! If one could only have known! But dear Marcia, I hope it's not true--I hope to God, it's not true!--that you've quarreled with Newbury?"

Marcia was standing with her head thrown back against the high marble mantelpiece. The lids drooped over her eyes.

"I don't know," she said, in a faint voice. "I don't know. Oh no, not _quarreled_--"

Sir Wilfrid looked at her with a fatherly concern; took her limp hand and pressed it.

"Stand by him, dear, stand by him! He'll suffer enough from this--without losing you."

Marcia did not answer. Lester had returned to the hall, and he and Bury then got from her, as gently as possible, a full account of her two interviews with Mrs. Betts. Lester wrote it down, and Marcia signed it. The object of the two men was to make the police authorities acquainted with such testimony as Marcia had to give, while sparing her if possible an appearance at the inquest. While Lester was writing, Sir Wilfrid threw occasional scathing glances toward the distant Arthur, who seemed to be alternately pacing up and down and reading the newspapers. But the young man showed no signs whatever of doing or suggesting anything further to help his sister.

Sir Wilfrid perceived at once how Marcia's narrative might be turned against the Newburys, round whom the hostile feeling of a whole neighborhood was probably at that moment rising into fury. Was there ever a more odious, a more untoward situation!

But he could not be certain that Marcia understood it so. He failed, indeed, altogether, to decipher her mind toward Newbury; or to get at the truth of what had happened between them. She sat, very pale, and piteously composed; answering the questions they put to her, and sometimes, though rarely, unable to control a sob, which seemed to force its way unconsciously. At the end of their cross-examination, when Sir Wilfrid was ready to start for Martover, the police headquarters for the district, she rose, and said she would go back to her room.

"Do, do, dear child!" Bury threw a fatherly arm round her, and went with her to the foot of the stairs. "Go and rest--sleep if you can."

As Marcia moved away there was a sudden sound at the end of the hall. Arthur had run hurriedly toward the door leading to the outer vestibule. He opened it and disappeared. Through the high-arched windows to the left, a boy on a bicycle could be seen descending the long central avenue leading to the fore-court.

It was just noon. The great clock set in the center of the eastern facade had chimed the hour, and as its strokes died away on the midsummer air Marcia was conscious, as her mother had been the preceding afternoon, of an abnormal stillness round her. She was in her sitting-room, trying to write a letter to Mrs. Betts's sister about the boy mentioned in his mother's last words. He was not at the farm, thank God!--that she knew. His stepfather had sent him at Easter to a good preparatory school.

It seemed to help her to be doing this last poor service to the dead woman. And yet in truth she scarcely knew what she was writing. Her mind was torn between two contending imaginations--the thought of Mrs. Betts, sitting beside her dead husband, and waiting for the moment of her own death; and the thought of Newbury. Alternately she saw the laboratory at night--the shelves of labeled bottles and jars--the tables and chemical apparatus--the electric light burning--and in the chair the dead man, with the bowed figure against his knee:--and then--Newbury--in his sitting-room, amid the books and portraits of his college years--the crucifix over the mantelpiece--the beautiful drawings of Einsiedeln--of Assisi.

Her heart cried out to him. It had cried out to him in her letter. The thought of the agony he must be suffering tortured her. Did he blame himself? Did he remember how she had implored him to "take care"? Or was it all still plain to him that he had done right? She found herself praying with all her strength that he might still feel he could have done no other, and that what had happened, because of his action, had been God's will, and not merely man's mistake. She longed--sometimes--to