The Coryston Family A Novel by Ward, Humphry, Mrs., 1851-1920

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. Attitude 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 passed, 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."

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