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

"So Arthur inherits everything!"

"Hm--does he?" said Sir Wilfrid.

"But I thought--"

"Wait and see, my dear fellow, wait and see. He will only marry Miss Glenwilliam over his mother's body--and if he does marry her he may whistle for the estates."

"Then James will have them?" said Newbury, smiling.

"Why not Marcia? She has as good a chance as anybody."

"I hope not!" Newbury's tone showed a genuine discomfort.

"What is Lady Coryston doing?"

"About the Glenwilliam affair? Ah!--what isn't she doing?" said Sir Wilfrid, significantly. "All the same, she lies low." As he spoke, his eyes fell upon the hillside and on the white cottage of the Atherstones emerging from the wood. He pointed.

"They will be there on Sunday fortnight--after the Martover meeting."

"Who? The Glenwilliams?"

Sir Wilfrid nodded.

"And I am of opinion that something will happen. When two highly inflammable bodies approach each other, something generally does happen."

CHAPTER XII

The weeks that followed offered no particular A event, but were none the less important to this history. Coryston was called off to an election in the north, where he made a series of speeches which perhaps in the end annoyed the Labor candidate he was supporting as much as the Tory he was attacking. For, generally reckoned a Socialist by friends and opponents alike, he preached openly, on this occasion, that Socialism was absurd, and none but fools would upset kings and cabinets, to be governed by committees.

And on one of his spare evenings he wrote a letter to Edward Newbury, loftily accepting him as a brother-in-law--on conditions.

"I see no reason," he wrote, "why you and I should not be good friends--if only I can induce you to take the line of common humanity in this pitiful case, which, as you know, has set our whole neighborhood aflame. Your _opinions_ on divorce don't matter, of course, to me--nor mine to you. But there are cruelties of which all men are judges. And if you must--because of your opinions--commit yourself to one of them--why then, whether you marry Marcia or no, you and I can't be friends. It would be mere hypocrisy to suppose it. And I tell you quite frankly that I shall do my best to influence Marcia. There seem to me to be one or two ways out of the business, that would at any rate relieve you of any active connivance with what you hold to be immorality. I have dealt with them in my letter to your father. But if you stand on your present fiat--"Separate--or go--" well, then you and I'll come to blows--Marcia or no Marcia. And I warn you that Marcia is at bottom a humanist--in the new sense--like me."

To which Newbury promptly replied: