The Coryston Family | Page 5

be, of course, the guillotine at Hyde Park Corner. Coryston
wants our heads! There's nothing else to be said. I took the speeches for

young men's nonsense--just midsummer madness, but I find people
very angry. Your son! one of _us_!"
"I thought the speeches very clever," said Lady Coryston.
"I'm rejoiced you take it so philosophically, my dear Emilia!"--the tone
was a little snappish--"I confess I thought you would have been much
distressed."
"What's the good of being distressed? I have known Coryston's
opinions for a long time. One has to _act_--of course," the speaker
added, with deliberation.
"Act? I don't understand."
Lady Coryston 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;