The Coryston Family | Page 2

and occupying what
seemed to be a privileged and habitual seat, was a woman of uncouth
figure and strange headgear. Since the Opposition leader had risen, her
attention had wholly wandered. She yawned perpetually, and talked a
great deal to a lady 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