The Coryston Family | Page 2

behind her. Once or twice her neighbor threw her an angry glance. But it was too dark for her to see it; though if she had seen it she would have paid no attention.
"Lady Coryston!" said a subdued voice. The lady sitting in front of the girl turned and saw an attendant beckoning.
The girl moved toward him, and returned.
"What is it, Marcia?"
"A note from Arthur, mamma."
A slip of paper was handed to Lady Coryston, who read it in the gloom with difficulty. Then she whispered to her daughter:
"He hopes to get his chance about seven; if not then, after dinner."
"I really don't think I can stay so long," said the girl, plaintively. "It's dreadfully tiring."
"Go when you like," said her mother, indifferently. "Send the car back for me."
She resumed her intent listening just as a smart sally from the speaker below sent a tumultuous wave of cheers and counter-cheers through his audience.
"He can be such a buffoon, can't he?" said the stout lady in the corner to her companion, as she yawned again. She had scarcely tried to lower her voice. Her remark was, at any rate, quite audible to her next-door neighbor, who again threw her a swift, stabbing look, of no more avail, however, than its predecessors.
"Who is that lady in the corner--do you mind telling me?"
The query was timidly whispered in the ear of Marcia Coryston by a veiled lady, who on the departure of some other persons had come to stand beside her.
"She is Mrs. Prideaux." said Miss Coryston, stiffly.
"The wife of the Prime Minister!" The voice showed emotion.
Marcia Coryston looked down upon the speaker with an air that said, "A country cousin, I suppose."
But she whispered, civilly enough: "Yes. She always sits in that corner. Weren't you here when he was speaking?"
"No--I've not long come in."
The conversation dropped, just as the voice of the orator standing on the left of the Speaker rose to his peroration.
It was a peroration of considerable eloquence, subtly graduated through a rising series of rhetorical questions, till it finally culminated and broke in the ringing sentences:
"Destroy the ordered hierarchy of English land, and you will sweep away a growth of centuries which would not be where it is if it did not in the main answer to the needs and reflect the character of Englishmen. Reform and develop it if you will; bring in modern knowledge to work upon it; change, expand, without breaking it; appeal to the sense of property, while enormously diffusing property; help the peasant without slaying the landlord; in other words, put aside rash, meddlesome revolution, and set yourselves to build on the ancient foundations of our country what may yet serve the new time! Then you will have an _English_, a national policy. It happens to be the Tory policy. Every principle of it is violated by the monstrous bill you have just brought in. We shall oppose it by every means and every device in our power!"
[Illustration: THE CONVERSATION DROPPED, JUST AS THE VOICE OF THE ORATOR ROSE TO HIS PERORATION]
The speaker sat down amid an ovation from his own side. Three men on the Liberal side jumped up, hat in hand, simultaneously. Two of them subsided at once. The third began to speak.
A sigh of boredom ran through the latticed gallery above, and several persons rose and prepared to vacate their places. The lady in the corner addressed some further remarks on the subject of the speech which had just concluded to an acquaintance who came up to greet her. "Childish!--positively childish!"
Lady Coryston caught the words, and as Mrs. Prideaux rose with alacrity to go into the Speaker's private house for a belated cup of tea, her Tory neighbor beckoned to her daughter Marcia to take the vacant chair.
"Intolerable woman!" she said, drawing a long breath. "And they're in for years! Heaven knows what we shall all have to go through."
"Horrible!" said the girl, fervently. "She always behaves like that. Yet of course she knew perfectly who you were."
"Arthur will probably follow this man," murmured Lady Coryston, returning to her watch.
"Go and have some tea, mother, and come back."
"No. I might miss his getting up."
There was silence a little. The House was thinning rapidly, and half the occupants of the Ladies' Galleries had adjourned to the tearooms on the farther side of the corridor. Marcia could now see her mother's face more distinctly as Lady Coryston sat in a brown study, not listening, evidently, to the very halting gentleman who was in possession of the House, though her eyes still roamed the fast-emptying benches.
It was the face of a woman on the wrong side of fifty. The complexion was extremely fair, with gray shades in it. The eyes, pale in color but singularly imperious and direct, were sunk deep under straight brows. The