The Coryston Family | Page 5

did not enlighten her. Indeed, she did not hear her. She was bending forward eagerly. The fair-haired youth on the back benches, who had been so long waiting his turn, was up at last.
It was a maiden speech, and a good one, as such things go. There was enough nervousness and not too much; enough assurance and not too much. The facts and figures in it had been well arranged. A modest jest or two tripped pleasantly out; and the general remarks at the end had been well chosen from the current stock, and were not unduly prolonged. Altogether a creditable effort, much assisted by the young man's presence and manner. He had no particular good looks, indeed; his nose ascended, his chin satisfied no one; but he had been a well-known bat in the Oxford eleven of his day, and was now a Yeomanry officer; he held himself with soldierly erectness, and his slender body, cased in a becoming pale waistcoat under his tail coat, carried a well-shaped head covered with thick and tumbling hair.
The House filled up a little to hear him. His father had been a member of Parliament for twenty years, and a popular member. There was some curiosity to know what his son would make of his first speech. And springing from the good feeling which always animates the House of Commons on such occasions, there was a fair amount of friendly applause from both sides when he sat down.
"Features the father, and takes after the mother!" said a white-haired listener in the Strangers' Gallery to himself, as the young man ceased speaking. "She's drilled him! Well, now I suppose I must go and congratulate her." He rose from his seat and began to make his way out. In the passage outside the Gallery he overtook and recognized the man whose entrance into the House Lady Coryston and her daughter had noticed about an hour earlier.
"Well, what did you think of it, Lester?"
The other smiled good-humoredly.
"Capital! Everybody must make a beginning. He's taken a lot of pains."
"It's a beastly audience!" said Sir Wilfrid Bury, in reply. "Don't I know it! Well, I'm off to congratulate. How does the catalogue get on?"
"Oh, very well. I sha'n't finish till the summer. There's a good deal still to do at Coryston. Some of the things are really too precious to move about."
"How do you get on with her ladyship?" asked the old man, gaily, lowering his voice.
The young man smiled discreetly.
"Oh, very well. I don't see very much of her."
"I suppose she's pressed you into the service--makes you help Arthur?"
"I looked out a few things for his speech to-day. But he has his own secretary."
"You're not staying for the rest of the debate?"
"No, I'm going back to St. James's Square. I have a heap of arrears to get through."
"Do they put you up there? I know it's a huge house."
"Yes. I have a bedroom and sitting-room there when I want them, and my own arrangements."
"Ta-ta."
Sir Wilfrid nodded pleasantly, and vanished into a side passage leading to the Ladies' Gallery. The young man, Reginald Lester, to whom he had been chatting, was in some sort a protégé of his own. It was Sir Wilfrid, indeed, who had introduced him, immediately after he had won an Oxford historical fellowship, to Lady Coryston, as librarian, for the highly paid work of cataloguing a superb collection of MSS. belonging to the Corystons. A generation earlier, Lester's father had been a brother officer of Sir Wilfrid's, in days when the Lester family was still rich, and before the crashing failure of the great banking-house of the name.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the House of Commons, Lady Coryston had been sitting pleasantly absorbed, watching her son, who lay now like a man relieved, lolling on the half-empty bench, chatting to a friend beside him. His voice was still in her ears: mingled with the memory of other voices from old, buried times. For more than twenty years how familiar had she been with this political scene!--these galleries and benches, crowded or listless; these opposing Cabinets--the Ins and Outs--on either side of the historic table; the glitter of the Mace at its farther end; the books, the old morocco boxes, the tops of the official wigs, the ugly light which bathed it all; the exhausted air, the dreariness, the boredom! all worth while, these last, just for the moments, the crises, the play of personalities, the conflict of giants, of which they were the inevitable conditions. There, on the second bench above the gangway on the Tory side, her husband, before he succeeded to the title, had sat through four Parliaments. And from the same point of vantage above she had watched him year after year, coming in and out, speaking occasionally, never eloquent