CHAPTER I

COLIN

E. F. BENSON

_By_ E. F. BENSON

COLIN

MISS MAPP

PETER

LOVERS AND FRIENDS

DODO WONDERS--

“QUEEN LUCIA”

ROBIN LINNET

ACROSS THE STREAM

UP AND DOWN

AN AUTUMN SOWING

THE TORTOISE

DAVID BLAIZE

DAVID BLAIZE AND THE BLUE DOOR

MICHAEL

THE OAKLEYITES

ARUNDEL

OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS

_New York: George H. Doran Company_

COLIN

BY

E. F. BENSON

NEW [Illustration: colophon] YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1923,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

[Illustration]

COLIN. II

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

COLIN

_Colin_ comprises the first part only of this romance; it will be

completed in a second volume which will tell of the final fading of the

Legend with which the story opens.

E. F. B.

COLIN

_Book One_

CHAPTER I

Neither superstition nor spiritual aspiration signified anything

particular to the Staniers, and for many generations now they had been

accustomed to regard their rather sinister family legend with cynical

complacency. Age had stolen the strength from it, as from some

long-cellared wine, and in the Victorian era they would, to take their

collective voice, have denied that, either drunk or sober, they believed

it. But it was vaguely pleasant to have so antique a guarantee that they

would be so sumptuously looked after in this world, while as for the

next....

The legend dated from the time of Elizabeth, and was closely connected

with the rise of the family into the pre-eminent splendour which it had

enjoyed ever since. The Queen, in one of her regal journeys through her

realm (during which she slept in so incredible a number of beds),

visited the affiliated Cinque Port of Rye, and, after taking dinner with

the mayor, was riding down one of the steep, cobbled ways when her horse

stumbled and came down on its knees.

She would certainly have had a cruel fall if a young man had not sprung

forward from the crowd and caught her before her Grace’s head was dashed

against the stones. He set her on her feet, swiftly releasing the

virgin’s bosom from his rough embrace, and, kneeling, kissed the hem of

her skirt.

The Queen bade him rise, and, as she looked at him, made some

Elizabethan ejaculation of appreciative amazement--a “zounds,” or a

“gadzooks,” or something.

There stood Colin Stanier in the full blossom of his twenty summers,

ruddy as David and blue-eyed as the sea. His cap had fallen off, and he

must needs toss back his head to free his face from the tumble of his

yellow hair. His athletic effort to save her Grace had given him a

moment’s quickened breath, and his parted lips showed the double circle

of his white teeth.

But, most of all, did his eyes capture the fancy of his Sovereign; they

looked at her, so she thought, with the due appreciation of her majesty,

but in their humility there was mingled something both gay and bold, and

she loved that any man, young or old, high or humble, should look at her

thus.

She spoke a word of thanks, and bade him wait on her next day at the

Manor of Brede, where she was to lie that night. Then, motioning her

courtiers aside with a testy gesture, she asked him a question or two

while a fresh horse was being caparisoned and brought for her, and

allowed none other but Colin to help her to mount....

It was thought to be significant that at supper that night the virgin

sighed, and made her famous remark to my Lord of Essex that she wished

sometimes that she was a milk-maid.

Colin Stanier’s father was a man of some small substance, owning a

little juicy land that was fine grazing for cattle, and the boy worked

on the farm. He had some strange, magical power over the beasts; a

savage dog would slaver and fawn on him, a vicious horse sheathed its

violence at his touch, and, in especial at this season of lambing-time,

he wrought wonders of midwifery on the ewes and of nursing on the lambs.

This authoritative deftness sprang from no kindly love of animals;

cleverness and contempt, with a dash of pity, was all he worked with,

and this evening, after the Queen had passed on, it was reluctantly

enough that he went down to the low-lying fields where his father’s

sheep were in pregnancy. The old man himself, as Colin ascertained, had

taken the excuse of her Grace’s visit to get more than usually

intoxicated, and the boy guessed that he himself would be alone half the

night with his lantern and his ministries among the ewes.

So, indeed, it proved, and the moon had sunk an hour after midnight,

when he entered the shed in the lambing-field to take his bite of supper

and get a few hours’ sleep. He crunched his crusty bread and bacon in

his strong teeth, he had a draught of beer, and, wrapping himself in his

cloak, lay down. He believed (on the evidence of his memoirs) that he

then went to sleep.

Up to this point the story is likely enough; a pedant might unsniffingly

accept it. But then there occurred (or is said to have occurred) the

event which forms the basis of the Stanier legend, and it will certainly

be rejected, in spite of a certain scrap of parchment still extant and

of the three centuries of sequel, by all sensible and twentieth-century

minds.

For, according to the legend, Colin woke and found himself no longer

alone in the shed; there was standing by him a finely-dressed fellow who

smiled on him. It was still as dark as the pit outside--no faintest ray

of approaching dawn yet streaked the eastern sky, yet for all that Colin

could see his inexplicable visitor quite plainly.

The stranger briefly introduced himself as his Satanic majesty, and,

according to his usual pleasant custom, offered the boy all that he

could wish for in life--health and beauty (and, indeed, these were his

already) and wealth, honour, and affluence, which at present were sadly

lacking--on the sole condition that at his death his soul was to belong

to his benefactor. The bargain--this was the unusual feature in the

Stanier legend--was to hold good for all his direct descendants who,

unless they definitely renounced the contract on their own behalf, would

be partakers in these benefits and debtors in the other small matter.

For his part, Colin had no sort of hesitation in accepting so tempting

an offer, and Satan thereupon produced for his perusal (he was able to

read) a slip of parchment on which the conditions were firmly and

plainly stated. A scratch with his knife on the forearm supplied the ink

for the signature, and Satan provided him with a pen. He was bidden to

keep the document as a guarantee of the good faith of his bargainer; the

red cloak flashed for a moment in front of his eyes, dazzling him, and

he staggered and fell back on the heap of straw from which he had just

risen.

The darkness was thick and impenetrable round him, but at the moment a

distant flash of lightning blinked in through the open door, showing him

that the shed was empty again. Outside, save for the drowsy answer of

the thunder, all was quiet, but in his hand certainly was a slip of

parchment.

The same, so runs the legend, is reproduced in the magnificent Holbein

of the young man which hangs now above the mantelpiece in the hall of

Stanier. Colin Stanier, first Earl of Yardley, looking hardly older than

he did on this momentous night, stands there in Garter robes with this

little document in his hand. The original parchment, so the loquacious

housekeeper points out to the visitors who to-day go over the house on

the afternoons when it is open to the public, is let into the frame of

the same portrait.

Certainly there is such a piece of parchment there, just below the title

of the picture, but the ink has so faded that it is impossible to

decipher more than a word or two of it. The word “diabolus” must be more

conjectured than seen, and the ingenious profess to decipher the words

“quodcunque divitiarum, pulchritud” ... so that it would seem that Colin

the shepherd-boy, if he signed it, must have perused and understood

Latin.

This in itself is so excessively improbable that the whole business may

be discredited from first to last. But there is no doubt whatever that

Colin Stanier did some time sign a Latin document (for his name in ink,

now brown, is perfectly legible) which has perished in the corroding

years, whether he understood it or not, and there seems no doubt about

the date in the bottom left-hand corner....

The constructive reader will by this time have got ready his

interpretation about the whole cock-and-bull story, and a very sensible

one it is. The legend is surely what mythologists call ætiological.

There was--he can see it--an old strip of parchment signed by Colin

Stanier, and this, in view of the incredible prosperity of the family,

coupled with the almost incredible history of their dark deeds, would be

quite sufficient to give rise to the legend. In mediæval times,

apparently, such Satanic bargains were, if not common, at any rate not

unknown, and the legend was, no doubt, invented in order to account for

these phenomena, instead of being responsible for them.

Of legendary significance, too, must be the story of Philip Stanier,

third Earl, who is said to have renounced his part in the bargain, and

thereupon fell from one misfortune into another, was branded with an

incurable and disfiguring disease, and met his death on the dagger of an

injured woman. Ronald Stanier, a nephew of the above, was another such

recusant; he married a shrew, lost a fortune in the South Sea bubble,

and had a singularly inglorious career.

But such instances as these (in all the long history there are no more

of them, until credence in the legend faded altogether), even if we

could rely on their authenticity, would only seem to prove that those

who renounced the devil and all his works necessarily met with

misfortune in this life, which is happily not the case, and thus they

tend to disprove rather than confirm the whole affair.

Finally, when we come to more modern times, and examine the records of

the Stanier family from, let us say, the advent of the Hanoverian

dynasty, though their splendour and distinction is ever a crescent, not

a waning moon, there can be no reason to assign a diabolical origin to

such prosperity. There were black sheep among them, of course, but when

will you not find, in records so public as theirs, dark shadows thrown

by the searchlight of history? Bargains with the powers of hell, in any

case, belong to the romantic dusk of the Middle Ages, and cannot find

any serious place in modern chronicles.

* * * * *

But to quit these quagmires of superstition for the warranted and

scarcely less fascinating solidity of fact, Colin Stanier next day

obediently craved audience with the Queen at the Manor of Brede. By a

stroke of intuition which does much to account for his prosperous

fortune, he did not make himself _endimanché_, but, with his shepherd’s

crook in his hand and a new-born lamb in his bosom, he presented himself

at the house where the Queen lodged. He would have been contemptuously

turned back with buffets by the halberdiers and yeomen who guarded the

entrance, but the mention of his name sufficed to admit him with a

reluctant alacrity.

He wore but the breeches and jerkin in which he pursued his work among

the beasts, his shapely legs were bare from knee to ankle, and as he

entered the porch, he kicked off the shoes in which he had walked from

Rye. His crook he insisted on retaining, and the lamb which, obedient to

the spell that he exercised over young living things, lay quiet in his

arms.

Some fussy Controller of the Queen’s household would have ejected him

and chanced the consequences, but, said Colin very quietly, “It is by

her Majesty’s orders that I present myself, and whether you buffet me or

not, prithee tell the Queen’s Grace that I am here.”

There was something surprising in the dignity of the boy; and in the

sweet-toned, clear-cut speech, so unlike the utterance of the mumbling

rustic, and the Controller, bidding him wait where he was, shuffled

upstairs, and came back with extraordinary expedition.

“The Queen’s Grace awaits you, Mr.----”

“Stanier,” said Colin.

“Mr. Stanier. But your crook, your lamb----”

“Let us do her Majesty’s bidding,” said Colin.

He was ushered into the long hall of Brede Manor, and the Controller,

having thrown the door open, slipped away with an alertness that

suggested that his presence was desirable there no more, and left the

boy, barefooted, clasping his lamb, with a rush-strewn floor to

traverse. There was a table down the centre of it, littered with papers,

and hemmed in with chairs that suggested that their occupants had

hurriedly vacated them. At the end was seated a small, bent figure,

conspicuous for her ruff and her red hair, and her rope of pearls, and

her eyes bright and sharp as a bird’s.

Colin, sadly pricked on the soles of his feet by the rushes, advanced

across that immeasurable distance, looking downwards on his lamb. When

he had traversed the half of it, he raised his eyes for a moment, and

saw that the Queen, still quite motionless, was steadily regarding him.

Again he bent his eyes on his lamb, and when he had come close to that

formidable figure, he fell on his knees.

“A lamb, madam,” he said, “which is the first-fruits of the spring. My

crook, which I lay at your Grace’s feet, and myself, who am not worthy

to lie there.”

Again Colin raised his eyes, and the wretch put into them all the gaiety

and boldness which he gave to the wenches on the farm. Then he dropped

them again, and with his whole stake on the table, waited, gambler as he

was, for the arbitrament.

“Look at me, Colin Stanier,” said the Queen.

Colin looked. There was the tiny wrinkled face, the high eyebrows, the

thin-lipped mouth disclosing the discoloured teeth.

“Madam!” he said.

“Well, what next?” said Elizabeth impatiently.

“My body and soul, madam,” said Colin, and once more he put into his

eyes and his eager mouth that semblance of desire which had made

Mistress Moffat, the wife of the mayor, box his ears with a blow that

was more of a caress.

The Queen felt precisely the same as Mistress Moffat, and drew her hand

down over his smooth chin. “And it is your wish to be my shepherd-boy,

Colin?” she asked. “You desire to be my page?”

“I am sick with desire,” said Colin.

“I appoint you,” she said. “I greet and salute you, Colin Stanier.”

She bent towards him, and neither saint nor devil could have inspired

Colin better at that moment. He kissed her (after all, he had been

offered the greeting) fairly and squarely on her withered cheek, and

then, without pause, kissed the hem of her embroidered gown. He had done

right, just absolutely right.

“You bold dog!” said the Queen. “Stand up.”

Colin stood up, with his arms close by his side, as if at attention in

all his shapeliness and beauty, and the Queen clapped her hands.

The side door opened disclosing halberdiers, and through the door by

which Colin had entered came the Controller.

“Colin Stanier is my page,” she said, “and of my household. Summon my

lords again; we have not finished with our Spanish business. The lamb--I

will eat that lamb, and none other, at the feast of Easter.”

Within the week Colin was established in attendance on the Queen, and

the daring felicity which had marked his first dealings with her never

failed nor faltered. His radiant youth, the gaiety of his boyish

spirits, the unfailing tact of his flattery, his roguish innocence, the

fine innate breeding of the yeoman-stock, which is the best blood in

England, wove a spell that seemed to defy the usual fickleness of her

favouritism. Certainly he had wisdom as far beyond his years as it was

beyond his upbringing, and wisdom coming like pure water from the curves

of that beautiful young mouth, made him frankly irresistible to the

fiery and shrewd old woman.

From being her page he was speedily advanced to the post of confidential

secretary, and queer it was to see the boy seated by her side at some

state council while she rated and stormed at her lords for giving her

some diplomatic advice which her flame-like spirit deemed spiritless.

Then, in mid-tirade, she would stop, tweak her secretary by his rosy

ear, and say, “Eh, Colin, am I not in the right of it?”

Very often she was not, and then Colin would so deftly insinuate further

considerations, prefacing them by, “As your Grace and Majesty so wisely

has told us” (when her Grace and Majesty had told them precisely the

opposite) that Elizabeth would begin to imagine that she had thought of

these prudent things herself.

The Court in general followed the example of their royal mistress, and

had not Colin’s nature, below its gaiety and laughter, been made of some

very stern stuff, he must surely have degenerated into a spoilt, vain

child, before ever he came to his full manhood. Men and women alike were

victims of that sunny charm; to be with him made the heart sing, and

none could grudge that a boy on whom God had showered every grace of

mind and body, should find the mere tawdry decorations of riches and

honour his natural heritage.

Then, too, there was this to consider: the Queen’s fickle and violent

temper might topple down one whom she had visited but yesterday with her

highest favours, and none but Colin could induce her to restore the

light she had withdrawn. If you wanted a boon granted, or even a

vengeance taken, there was no such sure road to its accomplishment as to

secure Colin’s advocacy, no path that led so straight to failure as to

set the boy against you. For such services it was but reasonable that

some token of gratitude should be conferred on him by the suppliant,

some graceful acknowledgment which, in our harsh modern way, we should

now term “commission,” and Colin’s commissions, thus honestly earned,

soon amounted to a very pretty figure. Whether he augmented them or not

by less laudable methods, by threats or what we call by that ugly word

“blackmail,” is a different matter, and need not be gone into.

Yet, surrounded as he was by all that might have been expected to turn a

boy’s head, Colin remained singularly well-balanced, and whatever tales

might be told about his virtue, the most censorious could find no fault

with his prudence. The Queen created him at the age of twenty-five

Knight of the Garter and Earl of Yardley, a title which his descendants

hold to this day, and presented him with the Manor of Yardley in

Buckinghamshire, and the monastic lands of Tillingham on the hills above

the Romney Marsh. He incorporated the fine dwelling-house of the evicted

abbot into the great and glorious mansion of Stanier, the monks’

quarters he demolished altogether, and the abbey church became the

parish church of Tillingham for worship, and the chapel and

burying-place of the Staniers for pride.

But, though the Queen told him once and again that it was time her Colin

took a wife, he protested that while her light was shed on him not Venus

herself could kindle desire in his heart. This was the only instance in

which he disobeyed Gloriana’s wishes, but Gloriana willingly pardoned

his obduracy, and rewarded it with substantial benefits.

On her death, which occurred when he was thirty, he made a very suitable

match with the heiress of Sir John Reeves, who brought him, in addition

to a magnificent dowry, the considerable acreage which to-day is part of

the London estate of the Staniers. He retired from court-life, and

divided the year between Stanier and London, busy with the embellishment

of his houses, into which he poured those treasures of art which now

glorify them.

He was, too, as the glades and terraces of Stanier testify, a gardener

on a notable scale, and his passion in this direction led him to evict

his father from the farm where Colin’s own boyhood was passed, which lay

on the level land below the hill, in order to make there the long,

ornamental water which is one of the most agreeable features of the

place.

His father by this time was an old man of uncouth and intemperate

habits, and it could not perhaps be expected that the young earl should

cherish his declining years with any very personal tenderness. But he

established him in a decent dwelling, gave him an adequate maintenance

with a permission to draw on the brewery for unlimited beer, and made

only the one stipulation that his father should never attempt to gain

access to him. The old man put so liberal an interpretation on his

beer-rights, that he did not enjoy them very long.

This taint of hardness in Colin’s character was no new feature. He had

left the home of his boyhood without regret or any subsequent affection

of remembrance: he had made his pleasurable life at Court a profitable

affair, whereas others had spent their salaries and fortunes in

maintaining their suitable magnificence, and, like the great Marlborough

a few generations later, he had allowed infatuated women to pay pretty

handsomely for the privilege of adoring him, and the inhumanities, such

as his eviction of his father, with which his married life was

garlanded, was no more than the reasonable development of earlier

tendencies. Always a great stickler for the majesty of the law, he

caused certain sheep-stealers on the edge of his property to be hanged

for their misdeeds, and why should not the lord of Tillingham have

bought their little properties from their widows at a more than

reasonable price?

Though his own infidelities were notorious, the settlements of his

marriage were secure enough, and when he had already begotten two sons

of the hapless daughter of Sir John Reeves, he invoked the aid of the

law to enable him to put her away and renew his vow of love and honour

to the heiress of my Lord Middlesex. She proved to be a barren crone,

and perhaps had no opportunity of proving her fruitfulness, but she was

so infatuated with him that by the settlements she gave him

unconditionally the Broughton property which so conveniently adjoined

his own.

* * * * *

To go back again for a moment to that obscure matter of the Stanier

legend, it appears that on the day on which each of his sons came of

age, their father made them acquainted with the agreement he had made on

behalf of himself and the heirs of his body, and shewed them the signed

parchment. They had, so he pointed out to them, the free choice of

dissociating themselves from that bargain, and of taking the chance of

material prosperity here and of salvation hereafter; he enjoined on them

also the duty of transmitting the legend to their children in the manner

and at the time that it had been made known to themselves.

Neither Ronald, the elder, nor his brother Philip felt the least qualm

about the future, but they both had a very considerable appreciation of

the present, and on each occasion the parchment was restored to its

strong box with no loss of validity as regards the next generation.

Ronald soon afterwards made one of those prudent marriages for which for

generations the Staniers have been famous; Philip, on the other hand,

who presently made for himself at the Court a position hardly less

brilliant than his father’s had been, found celibacy, with its

accompanying consolations, good enough for him.

This is too polite an age to speak of his infamies and his amazing

debauches, but his father was never tired of hearing about them, and

used to hang on the boy’s tales when he got leave of absence from the

Court to spend a week at home. Ronald was but a prude in comparison with

the other two, protesting at Philip’s more atrocious experiences. His

notion, so he drunkenly tried to explain himself (for his grandfather’s

pleasures made strong appeal to him) was that there were things that no

gentleman would do, whatever backing he had, and with a curious

superstitious timidity he similarly refused to play dice on the

Communion table in the old monastic chapel....

For full forty years after the death of the Queen, Colin, Knight of the

Garter and first Earl of Yardley, revelled at the banquet of life. All

that material prosperity could offer was his; his princely purchases,

his extravagances, his sumptuous hospitalities were powerless to check

the ever-swelling roll of his revenues; he enjoyed a perfect bodily

health, and up to the day of his death his force was unabated, his eye

undimmed, and the gold in his hair untouched by a single thread of

silver.

As the years went on, his attachment to this stately house of Stanier

grew to a passion, and however little credence we may give to the

legend, it is certain that his descendants inherit from Colin Stanier

that devotion to the place where they were born. No Stanier, so it is

said, is ever completely happy away from the great house that crowns the

hill above the Romney Marsh; it is to them a shrine, a Mecca, a golden

Jerusalem, the home of their hearts, and all the fairest of foreign

lands, the most sunny seas, the most sumptuous palaces are but

wildernesses or hovels in comparison with their home. To such an extent

was this true of Colin, first Earl, that for the last ten years of his

life he scarcely left the place for a night.

But though his bodily health remained ever serene and youthful, and

youth’s excesses, continued into old age, left him unwrinkled of skin

and vigorous in desire, there grew on him during the last year of his

life a malady neither of body nor of mind, but of the very spirit and

essence of his being. The compact that he believed himself to have made

had been fully and honestly observed by the other high contracting

party, and as the time drew near that his own share in the bargain must

be exacted from him, his spirit, we must suppose, conscious that the

imprint of the divine was so shortly to be surcharged with the stamp and

superscription of hell, was filled with some remorseful terror, that in

itself was a foretaste of damnation.

He ate, he drank, he slept, he rioted, he brought to Stanier yet more

treasures of exquisite art--Italian pictures, bronzes of Greek

workmanship, Spanish lace, torn, perhaps, from the edges of

altar-cloths, intaglios, Persian Pottery, and Ming porcelain from China.

His passion for beauty, which had all his life been a torch to him, did

not fail him, nor yet the wit and rapier-play of tongue, nor yet the

scandalous chronicles of Philip. But in the midst of beauty or

debauchery, there would come to his mind with such withering of the

spirit as befel Belshazzar when the writing was traced on the wall, the

knowledge of his approaching doom.

As if to attempt to turn it aside or soften the inexorable fate, he gave

himself to deeds of belated pity and charitableness. He endowed an

almshouse in Rye; he erected a fine tomb over his father’s grave; he

attended daily service in the church which he had desecrated with his

dice-throwings. And all the time his spirit told him that it was too

late, he had made his bed and must lie on it: for he turned to the God

whom he had renounced neither in love nor in sincerity, nor in fear of

Him, but in terror of his true master.

But when he tried to pray his mind could invoke no holy images, but was

decked with pageants of debauchery, and if he formed his lips to pious

words there dropped from them a stream of obscenities and blasphemy. At

any moment the terror would lay its hand on his spirit, affecting

neither body nor mind, but addressing itself solely to the immortal and

deathless part of him. It was in vain that he attempted to assure

himself, too, that in the ordering of the world neither God nor devil

has a share, for even the atheism in which he had lived deserted him as

the hour of his death drew near.

The day of his seventieth birthday arrived: the house was full of

guests, and in honour of the occasion there was a feast for the tenants

of the estate in the great hall, while his own friends, making a

company of some fifty, sat at the high table on the dais. All day

distant thunder had muttered obscurely among the hills, and by the time

that the lights were lit in the hall, and the drinking deep, a heavy

pall had overspread the sky.

Lord Yardley was in fine spirits that night. For years he had had a

presentiment that he would do no more than reach the exact span

appointed for the life of men, and would die on his seventieth birthday,

and here was the day as good as over, and if that presentiment proved to

be unfulfilled he felt that he would face with a stouter scepticism the

other terror. He had just risen from his place to reply to the toast of

the evening, and stood, tall and comely, the figure of a man still in

the prime of life, facing his friends and dependents. Then, even while

he opened his lips to speak, the smile was struck from his face, and

instead of speech there issued from his mouth one wild cry of terror.

“No, no!” he screamed, and with his arm pushed out in front of him as if

to defend himself against some invisible presence, he fell forward

across the table.

At that moment the hall leaped into blinding light, and an appalling

riot of thunder answered. Some said that he had been struck and, indeed,

on his forehead there was a small black mark as of burning, but those

nearest felt no shock, and were confident that the stroke which had

fallen on him preceded the flash and the thunder: he had crashed forward

after that cry and that gesture of terror, before even the lightning

descended.... And Ronald reigned in his stead.

* * * * *

By the patent of nobility granted to Colin Stanier by Elizabeth, the

estates and title descended not through heirs male only, but through the

female line. If an Earl of Yardley died leaving only female issue, the

girl became Countess of Yardley in her own right, to the exclusion of

sons begotten by her father’s or grandfather’s younger brother. It was

perhaps characteristic of the Queen to frame the charter thus--she had

done so of her own invention and devising--for thus she gratified her

own sense of the capability of her sex, and also felt some phantom of

posthumous delight in securing, as far as she could, that the honours

that she had showered on her favourite should descend in direct line.

But for many generations her foresight and precaution seemed needless,

since each holder of the title bore sons only, and the line was straight

as a larch, from father to son. By some strange arbitrament of fate it

so happened that younger sons (following the unchaste example of Philip)

died in legal celibacy, or, if they married, were childless, or became

so in that generation or the next. Thus the family is unique in having

to this day no collateral branches, and in this the fancifully disposed

may be prone to see a certain diabolical observance of the original

bond. No dowries for daughters had to be provided, and such portions as

were made for younger sons soon rolled back again into the sea of family

affluence.

The purchase of land formed the main outlet for the flood of

ever-increasing revenue, and as surely as Lord Yardley entered upon his

new acreages, mineral wealth would be discovered on the freshly-acquired

property (as was the case in the Cornish farms, where the Stanier lode

of tin was found), or if when, at a later date, as in a mere freak, he

purchased barren fields fit only for grazing, by the sea, it was not

long before the Prince Regent found that the Sussex coast enjoyed a

bracing and salubrious air, and lo! all the grazing-lands of Lord

Stanier became building sites. Whatever they touched turned to gold, and

that to no anæmic hands incapable of enjoying the lusts and splendours

of life. Honours fell on them thick as autumn leaves: each holder of the

title in turn has won the Garter, and never has the Garter been bestowed

on them without solid merit to carry it. Three have been Prime

Ministers, further three ambassadors to foreign countries on difficult

and delicate businesses; in the Napoleonic wars there was a great

general.... But all these records are public property.

Less known, perhaps, is the fact that no Lord Yardley has ever yet died

in his bed or received the religious consolation that would fit him to

go forth undismayed on his last dark, solitary journey, and though each

in turn (with the sad exception of Philip, third Earl, and his nephew,

the recusant Ronald) has lived to the comfortable age of seventy, swift

death, sometimes with violence, has been the manner of his exit. Colin,

fourth Earl, committed suicide under circumstances which made it

creditable that he should do so; otherwise strange seizures,

accompanied, it would appear, by some inexplicable terror, has been the

manner of the demise.

And what, in this brief history of their annals, can be said of the

legend, except that from being a terrible truth to Colin, first Earl, it

has faded even as has faded the ink which records that mythical

bargaining? It is more than a hundred years ago now that the Lord

Yardley of the day caused the parchment to be inserted in the frame of

his infamous ancestor, where it can be seen now every Thursday afternoon

from three to five, when Stanier is open, without fee, to decently-clad

visitors, and the very fact that Lord Yardley (_temp._ George III.)

should have displayed it as a curiosity, is the measure of the

incredulity with which those most closely concerned regarded it. A man

would not put up for all the world to see the warrant that he should

burn eternally in the fires of hell if he viewed it with the slightest

tremor of misgiving. It was blasphemous even to suppose that worldly

prosperity (as said the excellent parson at Stanier who always dined at

the house on Sunday evening and slept it off on Monday morning) was

anything other than the mark of divine favour, and many texts from the

Psalmist could be produced in support of his view. Thus fortified by

port and professional advice, Lord Yardley decreed the insertion of the

document into the frame that held the picture of that ancestor of his

whose signature it bore, and gave a remarkably generous subscription to

the organ-fund. Faded as was the writing then, it has faded into greater

indecipherability since, and with it any remnant of faith in its

validity.

Yet hardly less curious to the psychologist is the strange nature of

these Staniers. Decked as they are with the embellishment of

distinction, of breeding, and beauty, they have always seemed to their

contemporaries to be lacking in some quality, hard to define but easy to

appreciate or, in their case, to miss. A tale of trouble will very

likely win from them some solid alleviation, but their generosity, you

would find, gave always the impression of being made not out of love or

out of sympathy, but out of contempt.

Their charm--and God knows how many have fallen victims to it--has been

and is that of some cold brilliance, that attracts even as the beam of a

lighthouse attracts the migrating birds who dash themselves to pieces

against the glass that shields it; it can scarcely be said to be the

fault of the light that the silly feathered things broke themselves

against its transparent, impenetrable armour. It hardly invited: it only

shone on business which did not concern the birds, so there was no

definite design of attraction or cruelty in its beams, only of

brilliance and indifference. That is the habit of light; such, too, are

the habits of birds; the light even might be supposed by sentimentalists

faintly to regret the shattered wing and the brightness of the drowned

plumage.

But, so it is popularly supposed, it is quite easy, though not very

prudent, to arouse unfavourable emotion in a Stanier; you have but to

vex him or run counter to his wish, and you will very soon find yourself

on the target of a remorseless and vindictive hate. No ray of pity, so

it is said, softens the hardness of that frosty intensity; no

contrition, when once it has been aroused, will thaw it. Forgiveness is

a word quite foreign to their vocabulary, and its nearest equivalent is

a contemptuous indifference. Gratitude, in the same way, figures as an

obsolete term in the language of their emotions. They neither feel it

nor expect it: it has no currency. Whatever you may be privileged to do

for a Stanier, he takes as a mite in the endowment which the world has

always, since the days of our Elizabethan Colin, poured into their

treasuries, while if he has done you a good turn, he has done so as he

would chuck a picked bone to a hungry dog: the proper course for the dog

is to snatch it up and retire into its corner to mumble it.

It would be strange, then, if, being without ruth or love, a Stanier

could bestow or aspire to friendship with man or woman, and, indeed,

such an anomaly has never occurred. But, then, it must be remembered

that Staniers, as far as we can find out from old letters and diaries

and mere historical documents, never wanted friendship nor, indeed,

comprehended it. Their beauty and their charm made easy for them the

creation of such relationships as they desired, the assuaging of such

thirst as was theirs, after which the sucked rind could be thrown away;

and though through all their generations they have practised those

superb hospitalities which find so apt a setting at Stanier, it is

rather as gods snuffing up the incense of their worshippers than as

entertaining their friends that they fill the great house with all who

are noblest by birth or distinction.

George IV., for instance, when Prince Regent, stayed there, it may be

remembered, for nearly a fortnight, having been asked for three days,

during which time the entire House of Lords with their wives spent in

noble sections two nights at Stanier, as well as many much younger and

sprightlier little personages just as famous in the proper quarter. The

entire opera from Drury Lane diverted their evening one night, baccarat

(or its equivalent) beguiled another, on yet another the Prince could

not be found....

* * * * *

Not so fortunate, perhaps, save in being the mistresses of all this

splendour, and invariably the mothers of handsome sons, have been the

successive wives in this illustrious line. For with whatever natural

gaiety, with whatever high and independent spirit these ladies married

the sons of the house, they seemed always to have undergone some gloomy

and mysterious transformation. It was as if they were ground in a mill,

and ground exceeding small, and as if the resulting powder of grain was

mixed and kneaded and baked into the Stanier loaf.

Especially was this the case with her who married the young Lord Stanier

of the day; long before she succeeded to her full honours she had been

crushed into the iron mould designed for the Countesses of Yardley. In

public, dignity and stateliness and fine manner would distinguish her,

but below these desirable insignia of her station, her character and

individuality seemed to have been reduced to pulp, to have been frozen

to death, to have been pounded and brayed in some soul-shattering

mortar. Perhaps when first as a bride she entered through the glass

doors which were only opened when the eldest son brought home his wife,

or when there was welcomed at Stanier some reigning monarch, her heart

would be all afire with love and virgin longing for him with whom she

passed through those fatal portals, but before the honeymoon was over

this process that tamed and stifled and paralysed would have begun its

deadly work.

For the eldest son and his wife there was reserved a floor in one of the

wings of the house; they had no other establishment in the country, and

here, when not in London, the family dwelt in patriarchal fashion. When

no guests were present, the heir-apparent and his wife breakfasted and

lunched in the privacy of their wing, if so they chose; they had their

own horses, their own household of servants, but every evening, when the

warning bell for dinner sounded, the major-domo came to the door of

their apartments and preceded them down to the great gallery where, with

any other sons and daughters-in-law, they awaited the entrance of Lord

Yardley and his wife. Then came the stately and almost speechless

dinner, served on gold plate, and after that a rubber of whist,

decorous and damning, until Lady Yardley retired on the stroke of ten,

and the sons joined their father in the billiard-room.

Such evenings were rare (for usually throughout the shooting season

there were guests in the house), but from them we can conjecture some

sketch of the paralysing process: this was the conduct of a family

evening in the mere superficial adventure of dining and passing a

sociable evening, and from it we can estimate something of the effect of

parallel processes applied to the thoughts and the mind and the

aspirations and the desires of a young wife. No Stanier wanted love or

gave it; what he wanted when he took his mate was that in obedience and

subjection she should give him (as she always did) a legitimate and

healthy heir. She was not a Stanier, and though she wore the family

pearls like a halter, she was only there on sufferance and of necessity,

and though her blood would beat with the true ichor in the arteries of

the next generation, she was in herself no more than the sucked

orange-rind.

The Staniers were too proud to reckon an alliance with any family on the

face of the earth as anything but an honour for the family concerned;

even when, as happened at the close of the eighteenth century, a

princess of the Hohenzollern line was married to the heir, she was

ground in the mill like any other. In her case she shared to the full in

the brutal arrogance of her own family, and had imagined that it was she

who, by this alliance, had conferred, not accepted, an honour. She had

supposed that her husband and his relations would give her the deference

due to royalty, and it took her some little time to learn her lesson,

which she appears to have mastered.

A hundred years later the Emperor William II. of Germany had a reminder

of it which caused him considerable surprise. On one of his visits to

England he deigned to pass a week-end at Stanier, and though received as

a reigning monarch with opening of the glass doors, he found that his

condescension in remembering that he was connected with the family was

not received with the rapture of humility which he had expected. He had

asked to be treated by the members of the family as Cousin Willie, and

they did so with a nonchalance that was truly amazing.

Such, in brief, was the rise of the Staniers, and such the outline of

their splendour.

CHAPTER II

By the middle of the nineteenth century the fading of the actual deed

signed by Colin Stanier had scarcely kept pace with the fading of the

faith in it: this had become the mildest of effete superstitions. About

that epoch, also, the continuity of Stanier tradition was broken, for

there was born in the direct line not only two sons but a daughter,

Hester, who, a couple of centuries ago, would probably have been

regarded as a changeling, and met an early fate as such. She was as

lovely as the dawn, and had to the full, with every feminine grace

added, a double portion of the Stanier charm, but in her disposition no

faintest trace of traditional inheritance could be found; instead of

their inhuman arrogance, their icy self-sufficiency, she was endowed

with a gaiety and a rollicking gutter-snipe enjoyment of existence,

which laughed to scorn the dignity of birth.

Being of the inferior sex, her father decreed that she should be brought

up in the image of the tradition which ground so small the women who had

married into the family; she must become, like her own mother, aloof and

calm and infinitely conscious of her position. But neither precept nor

example had the smallest effect on her: for dignity, she had

boisterousness; for calm, buoyant, irrepressible spirits; and for

self-control, a marked tendency to allure and kindle the

susceptibilities of the other sex, were he peer or ploughboy.

Alone, too, of her race, she had no spark of that passionate affection

for her home that was one of the most salient characteristics of the

others.

She gave an instance of this defect when, at the age of fifteen, she ran

away from Stanier half-way through August, while the family were in

residence after the season in London, being unable to stand the thought

of that deadly and awful stateliness which would last without break till

January, when the assembling of the Houses of Parliament would take them

all back to the metropolis which she loved with extraordinary fervour.

Part of the way she went in a train, part of the way she rode, and

eventually arrived back at the huge house in St. James’s Square, now

empty and sheeted, and persuaded the caretaker, who had been her nurse

and adored her with unique devotion, to take her in and send no news to

Stanier of her arrival.

“Darling Cooper,” she said, with her arms round the old woman’s neck and

her delicious face bestowing kisses on her, “unless you promise to say

nothing about my coming here, I shall leave the house and get really

lost. They say a healthy girl can always get a living.”

“Eh, my dear,” said Cooper, much shocked, “what are you saying?”

Hester’s look of seraphic ignorance that she had said anything unusual

reassured Cooper.

“What am I saying?” asked Hester. “I’m just saying what I shall do. I

shall buy a monkey and a barrel-organ and dress like a gipsy and tell

fortunes. But I won’t go back to that awful Stanier.”

“But it’s your papa’s house,” said Cooper. “Young ladies have to live

with their families till they are married.”

“This one won’t,” said Hester. “And I believe it’s true, Cooper, that we

own it through the power of the devil. It’s a dreadful place: there’s a

blight on it. Grandmamma was turned to stone there, and mamma has been

turned to stone, and they’re trying to turn me to stone.”

Poor Cooper was in a fair quandary; she knew that Hester was perfectly

capable of rushing out of the house unless she gave her the desired

promise, and then with what face would she encounter Lord Yardley, how

stammer forth the miserable confession that Hester had been here? Not

less impossible to contemplate was the housing of this entrancing imp,

and keeping to herself the secret of Hester’s whereabouts. Even more

impossible was the third count of giving Hester the promise, and then

breaking it by sending a clandestine communication to her mother, for

that would imply the loss of Hester’s trust in her, and she could not

face the idea of those eyes turned reproachfully on her as on some

treacherous foe.

She hesitated, and the artful Hester noted her advantage.

“Darling Cooper, you wouldn’t like me to be turned to stone,” she said.

“I know I should make a lovely statue, but it’s better to be alive.”

“Eh, my dear, be a good girl and go back to Stanier,” pleaded Cooper.

“Think of your mamma and the anxiety she’s in about you.”

Hester made “a face.” “It’s silly to say that,” she said. “Mamma

anxious, indeed! Mamma couldn’t be anxious: she’s dead inside.”

Cooper felt she could not argue the point with any conviction, for she

was entirely of Hester’s opinion.

“And I’ve had no tea, Cooper,” said the girl, “and I am so hungry.”

“Bless the child, but I’ll get you your tea,” said Cooper. “And then

you’ll be a good girl and let me send off a telegram....”

What Hester’s future plans really were she had not yet determined to

herself; she was still acting under the original impulse which had made

her run away. Come what might, she had found the idea of Stanier utterly

impossible that morning; the only thing that mattered was to get away.

But as Cooper bustled about with the preparations of the tea, she began

to consider what she really expected. She was quite undismayed at what

she had done, and was on that score willing to confront any stone faces

that might be-Gorgon her, but her imagination could not picture what she

was going to do. Would she live here _perdue_ for the next six months

till the family of stone brought their Pharaoh-presence into London

again? She could not imagine that. Was it to come, then, to the

threatened barrel-organ and the monkey and the telling of fortunes? Glib

and ready as had been her speech on that subject, it lacked reality when

seriously contemplated in the mirror of the future.

But if she was not proposing to live here with Cooper, or to run away

definitely--a prospect for which, at the age of fifteen, she felt

herself, now that it grimly stared her in the face, wholly unripe--there

was nothing to be done, but to-day or to-morrow, or on one of the

conceivable to-morrows, to go back again. And yet her whole nature

revolted against that.

She was sitting in the window-seat of the big hall as this dismal debate

went on in her head, but all the parties to that conference were agreed

on one thing--namely, that Cooper should not telegraph to her mother,

and that, come what might, Cooper should not be imagined to be an

accomplice. Just then she heard a step on the threshold outside, and

simultaneously the welcome jingle of a tea-tray from the opposite

direction. Hester tiptoed towards the latter of these sounds, and found

Cooper laden with good things on a tray advancing up the corridor.

“Go back to your room, Cooper,” she whispered; “there is some one at the

door. I will see who it is.”

“Eh, now, let me open the door,” said Cooper, visibly apprehensive.

“No! Go away!” whispered Hester, and remained there during imperative

peals of the bell till Cooper had vanished.

She tried, by peeping sideways out of the hall window, to arrive at the

identity of this impatient visitor, but could see nothing of him. Then,

with cold courage, she went to the front-door and opened it. She

expected something bad--her mother, perhaps, or her brothers’ tutor, or

the groom of the chambers--but she had conjectured nothing so bad as

this, for on the doorstep stood her father.

That formidable figure was not often encountered by her. In London she

practically never saw him at all; in the country she saw him but once a

day, when, with the rest of the family, she waited in the drawing-room

before dinner for his entrance with her mother. Then they all stood up,

and paired off to go in to dinner. In some remote manner Hester felt

that she had no existence for him, but that he, at close quarters, had a

terrible existence for her. Generally, he took no notice whatever of

her, but to-day she realised that she existed for him in so lively a

manner that he had come up from Stanier to get into touch with her. Such

courage as she had completely oozed out of her: she had become just a

stone out of the family quarry.

“So you’re here,” he said, shutting the door behind him.

“Yes,” said Hester.

“And do you realise what you’ve done?” he asked.

“I’ve run away,” said she.

“I don’t mean that,” said he; “that’s soon remedied. But you’ve made me

spend half the day travelling in order to find you. Now you’re going to

suffer for it. Stand up here in front of me.”

As he spoke he drew off his fine white gloves and put the big sapphire

ring that he wore into his pocket. At that Hester guessed his purpose.

“I shan’t,” she said.

He gave her so ill-omened and ugly a glance that her heart quailed. “You

will do as I tell you,” he said.

Hester felt her pulses beating small and quick. Fear perhaps accounted

for that, but more dominant than fear in her mind was the sense of her

hatred of her father. He was like a devil, one of those contorted

waterspouts on the church at home. She found herself obeying him.

“Now I am going to punish you,” he said, “for being such a nuisance to

me. By ill-luck you are my daughter, and as you don’t know how a

daughter of mine ought to behave, I am going to show you what happens

when she behaves as you have done. Your mother has often told me that

you are a wilful and vulgar child, disobedient to your governesses, and,

in a word, common. But now you have forced your commonness upon my

notice, and I’m going to make you sorry for having done so. Hold your

head up.”

He drew back his arm, and with his open hand smacked her across her

cheek; with his left hand he planted a similar and stinging blow. Four

times those white thin fingers of his blazoned themselves on her face,

and then he paused.

“Well, why don’t you cry?” he said.

“Because I don’t choose to,” said Hester.

“Put your head up again,” said he.

She stood there firm as a rock for half a dozen more of those bitter

blows, and then into his black heart there came a conviction, bitterer

than any punishment he had inflicted on her, that he was beaten. In

sheer rage at this he took her by her shoulders and shook her violently.

And then came the end, for she simply collapsed on the floor, still

untamed. Her bodily force might fail, but she flew no flag of surrender.

She came to herself again with the sense of Cooper near her. She turned

weary eyes this way and that, but saw nothing of her father.

“Oh, Cooper, has that devil gone?” she asked.

“Eh, my lady,” said Cooper, “who are you talking of? There’s no one here

but his lordship.”

Hester raised herself on her elbow and saw that awful figure standing by

the great chimneypiece. The first thought that came into her mind was

for Cooper.

“I wish to tell you that ever since I entered the house Cooper has been

saying that she must telegraph to you that I was here,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s all right then, Cooper,” he said.

Hester watched her father take the sapphire ring from his waistcoat

pocket. He put this on, and then his gloves.

“Her ladyship will stay here to-night, Cooper,” he said. “And you will

take her to the station to-morrow morning and bring her down to

Stanier.”

He did not so much as glance at Hester, and next moment the front door

had closed behind him.

* * * * *

Hester arrived back at Stanier next day after this abortive expedition,

and it was clear at once that orders had been issued that no word was to

be said to her on the subject of what she had done. She had mid-day

dinner with her governess, rode afterwards with her brothers, and as

usual stood up when her father entered the drawing-room in the evening.

The awful life had closed like a trap upon her again, rather more

tightly than before, for she was subject to a closer supervision.

But though the apparent victory was with her father, she knew (and was

somehow aware that he knew it, too) that her spirit had not yielded one

inch to him, and that he, for all his grim autocracy, was conscious, as

regards her, of imperfect mastery. If he had broken her will, so she

acutely argued, she would not now have been watched; her doings would

not, as they certainly were, have been reported to him by the governess.

That was meat and drink to her. But from being a mere grim presence in

the background he had leaped into reality, and with the whole force of

her nature, she hated him.

The substance of the Stanier legend, faint though the faith in it had

become, was, of course, well known to her, and every morning, looking

like some young sexless angel newly come to earth, she added to her very

tepid prayers the fervent and heartfelt petition that the devil would

not long delay in exacting his part of the bargain.

* * * * *

Two years passed, and Hester became aware that there were schemes on

foot for marrying her off with the utmost possible speed. The idea of

marriage in the abstract was wholly to her mind, since then she would be

quit of the terrible life at Stanier, but in the concrete she was not

so content with her selected deliverer. This was the mild and highborn

Marquis of Blakeney, a man precisely twice her age, of plain, serious

mind and irreproachable morals. He adored her in a rapt and tongue-tied

manner, and no doubt Hester had encouraged him with those little smiles

and glances which she found it impossible not to bestow on any male

denizen of this earth, without any distinct ulterior views. But when it

became evident, by his own express declaration made with the permission

of her father, that he entertained such views, Hester wondered whether

it would be really possible to kiss that seal-like whiskered face with

any semblance of wifely enthusiasm.

Had there been any indication that her pious petition with regard to the

speedy ratification of the Stanier legend as regards her father would be

granted, she would probably have recommended the mild Marquis to take

his vows to other shrines, but her father seemed to be suffering no

inconvenience from her prayers, and she accepted the rapt and

tongue-tied devotion. Instantly all the bonds of discipline and

suppression were relaxed; even in her father’s eyes her engagement made

her something of a personage, and Hester hated him more than ever.

And then the vengeance of winged, vindictive love, more imperious than

her father, overtook and punished her, breaking her spirit, which he had

never done. At a dance given at Blakeney Castle to celebrate the

engagement, she saw young Ralph Brayton, penniless and debonair, with no

seal-face and no marquisate, and the glance of each pierced through the

heart of the other. He was the son of the family solicitor of Lord

Blakeney, and even while his father was drawing out the schedule of

munificent settlements for the bride-to-be, the bride gave him something

more munificent yet, and settled it, her heart, upon him for all

perpetuity.

She did her best to disown, if not to stifle, what had come upon her,

and had her marriage but been fixed for a month earlier than the day

appointed, she would probably have married her affianced bridegroom,

and let love hang itself in its own silken noose and chance its being

quite strangled. As it was, even while her room at Stanier was silky and

shimmering with the appurtenances of a bride, she slipped out one night

as the moon set, and joined her lover at the park gates. By dawn they

had come to London, and before evening she was safe in the holding of

her husband’s arms.

On the news reaching Lord Yardley he had a stroke from which he did not

recover for many years, though he soon regained sufficient power of

babbling speech to make it abundantly clear that he would never see

Hester again. As she was equally determined never to see him, their

wills were in complete harmony. That brutal punishment she had received

from those thin white hands two years before, followed by the bondage of

her life at home, had rendered her perfectly callous as regards him. Had

he been sorry for it, she might have shrugged her pretty shoulders and

forgotten it; for that cold pale slab of womanhood, her mother, she felt

nothing whatever.

This outrageous marriage of Hester’s, followed by her father’s stroke,

were contrary to all tradition as regards the legend, for these

calamities, indeed, looked as if one of the high contracting parties was

not fulfilling his share of the bargain, and the behaviour of Philip,

Lord Stanier, the stricken man’s eldest son, added weight to the

presumption that the luck of the Staniers (to put it at that) was on the

wane--fading, fading like the ink of the original bond. Instead of

marrying at the age of twenty or twenty-one, as his father and

forefathers had done, he remained obstinately celibate and ludicrously

decorous. In appearance he was dark, heavy of feature, jowled even in

his youth by a fleshiness of neck, and built on massive lines in place

of the slenderness of his race, though somehow, in spite of these

aberrations from the type, he yet presented an example, or, rather, a

parody, of the type. But when you came to mind, and that which lies

behind body and mind alike, that impenetrable essence of individuality,

then the professors in heredity would indeed have held up bewildered

hands of surrender. He was studious and hesitating, his mental processes

went with a tread as deliberate as his foot, and in place of that swift

eagerness of the Stanier mind, which, so to speak, threw a lasso over

the mental quarry with one swing of a lithe arm, and entangled it, poor

Philip crept on hands and knees towards it and advanced ever so

imperceptibly nearer. In the matter of mode of life the difference

between him and the type was most marked of all. Hitherto the eldest son

had married early and wisely for the sole object of the perpetuation of

the breed, and having arrived at that, pursued the ways of youth in

copious indiscretions which his wife, already tamed and paralysed, had

no will to resent. Philip, on the other hand, living in the gloom of the

house beneath the stroke and the shadow that had fallen on his father,

seemed to have missed his youth altogether. Life held for him no

bubbling draught that frothed on his lips and was forgotten; he

abstained from all the fruits of vigour and exuberance. One family

characteristic alone was his--the passionate love of his home, so that

he preferred even in these conditions to live here than find freedom

elsewhere. There he dreamed and studied, and neither love nor passion

nor intrigue came near him. He cared little for his mother; his father

he hated and feared. And yet some germ of romance, perhaps, lay dormant

but potential in his soul, for more and more he read of Italy, and of

the swift flowering of love in the South....

* * * * *

It seemed as if the hellish bargain made three hundred years ago had

indeed become obsolete, for the weeks and months added themselves

together into a swiftly mounting total of years, while a nightmare of

eclipsed existence brooded over the great house at Stanier. Since the

stroke that had fallen on him after Hester’s runaway match, Lord Yardley

would have no guests in the house, and with the constancy of the

original Colin, would never leave the place himself. Grinning and

snarling in his bath-chair, he would be drawn up and down its long

galleries by the hour together, with his battered and petrified spouse

walking by his side, at first unable to speak with any coherence, but as

the years went on attaining to a grim ejaculatory utterance that left no

doubt as to his meaning.

Sometimes it was his whim to enter the library, and if Philip was there

he would give vent to dreadful and stuttering observations as he

clenched and unclenched the nerveless hands that seemed starving to

throttle his son’s throat. Then, tired with this outpouring of emotion,

he would doze in his chair, and wake from his doze into a paroxysm of

tremulous speechlessness. At dinner-time he would have the riband of the

Garter pinned across his knitted coat and be wheeled, with his wife

walking whitely by his side, into the gallery, where the unmarried

Philip, and his newly-married brother and his wife, stood up at his

entrance, and without recognition he would pass, jibbering, at the head

of that small and dismal procession, into the dining-room.

He grew ever thinner and more wasted in body, but such was some

consuming fire within him that he needed the sustenance of some growing

and gigantic youth. He was unable to feed himself, and his attendant

standing by him put into that open chasm of a mouth, still lined with

milk-white teeth, his monstrous portions. A couple of bites was

sufficient to prepare for the gulp, and again his mouth was ready to

receive.

Then, when the solid entertainment was over, and the women gone, there

remained the business of wine, and, sound trencherman though he was, his

capacity over this was even more remarkable. He took his port by the

tumblerful, the first of which he would drink like one thirsty for

water, and this in some awful manner momentarily restored his powers of

speech. Like the first drops before a storm, single words began dripping

from his lips, as this restoration of speech took place, his eye,

brightening with malevolence, fixed itself on Philip, and night after

night he would gather force for the same lunatic tirade.

“You sitting there,” he would say, “you, Philip, you aren’t a Stanier!

Why don’t you get a bitch to your kennel, and rear a mongrel or two? You

heavy-faced lout, you can’t breed, you can’t drink, you can do nought

but grow blear-eyed over a pack of printed rubbish. There was Hester:

she married some sort of sweeper, and barren she is at that. I take

blame to myself there: if only I had smacked her face a dozen times

instead of once, I’d have tamed her: she would have come to heel. And

the third of you, Ronald there, with your soapy-faced slut of a wife,

you’d be more in your place behind a draper’s counter than here at

Stanier. And they tell me that there’s no news yet that you’re going to

give an heir to the place. Heir, good God....”

Ronald had less patience than his brother. He would have drunk pretty

stiffly by now, and he would bang the table and make the glasses jingle.

“Now you keep a civil tongue in your head, father,” he said, “and I’ll

do the same for you. A pretty figure you cut with your Garter and your

costermonger talk. It’s your own nest you’re fouling, and you’ve fouled

it well. There was never yet a Stanier till you who took to a bath-chair

and a bib and a man to feed him when he couldn’t find the way to his own

mouth.”

“Here, steady, Ronald!” Philip would say.

“I’m steadier than that palsy-stricken jelly there,” said Ronald. “If he

leaves me alone I leave him alone: it isn’t I who begin. But if you or

he think I’m going to sit here and listen to his gutter-talk, you’re in

error.”

He left his seat with a final reversal of the decanter and banged out of

the room.

Then, as likely as not, the old man would begin to whimper. Though,

apparently, he did all he could to make residence at Stanier impossible

for his sons, he seemed above all to fear that he would succeed in doing

so.

“Your brother gets so easily angered with me,” he would say. “I’m sure I

said nothing to him that a loving father shouldn’t. Go after him, Phil,

and ask him to come back and drink a friendly glass with his poor

father.”

“I think you had better let him be, sir,” said Philip. “He didn’t relish

what you said of his wife and his childlessness.”

“Well, I meant nothing, I meant nothing. Mayn’t a father have a bit of

chaff over his wine with his sons? As for his wife, I’m sure she’s a

very decent woman, and if it was that which offended him, there’s that

diamond collar my lady wears. Bid her take it off and give it to Janet

as a present from me. Then we shall be all comfortable again.”

“I should leave it alone for to-night,” said Philip. “You can give it

her to-morrow. Won’t you come and have your rubber of whist?”

His eye would brighten again at that, for in his day he had been a great

player, and if he went to the cards straight from his wine, which for a

little made order in the muddle and confusion of his brain, he would

play a hand or two with the skill that had been an instinct with him.

His tortoise-shell kitten must first be brought him, for that was his

mascotte, which reposed on his lap, and for the kitten there was a

saucerful of chopped fish to keep it quiet. It used to drag fragments

from the dish on to the riband of the Garter, and eat from there.

He could not hold the cards himself, and they were arranged in a stand

in front of him, and his attendant pulled out the one to which he

pointed a quivering finger. If the cards were not in his favour he would

chuck the kitten off his knee. “Drown it; the devil’s in it,” he would

mumble. Then, before long, the gleam of lucidity rent in his clouds by

the wine would close up again, and he would play with lamentable lunatic

cunning, revoking and winking at his valet, and laughing with pleasure

as the tricks were gathered. At the end he would calculate his winnings

and insist on their being paid. They were returned to the loser when his

valet had abstracted them from his pocket....

Any attempt to move him from Stanier had to be abandoned, for it brought

on such violent agitation that his life was endangered if it were

persisted in, and even if it had been possible to certify him as insane,

neither Philip nor his brother nor his wife would have consented to his

removal to a private asylum, for some impregnable barrier of family

pride stood in the way. Nor, perhaps, would it have been easy to obtain

the necessary certificate. He had shown no sign of homicidal or suicidal

mania, and it would have been hard to have found any definite delusion

from which he suffered. He was just a very terrible old man, partly

paralytic, who got drunk and lucid together of an evening. He certainly

hated Philip, but Philip’s habits and Philip’s celibacy were the causes

of that; he cheated at cards, but the sane have been known to do

likewise.

Indeed, it seemed as if after their long and glorious noon in which, as

by some Joshua-stroke, the sun had stayed his course in the zenith, that

the fortunes of the Staniers were dipping swiftly into the cold of an

eternal night. In mockery of that decline their wealth, mounting to more

prodigious heights, resembled some Pharaoh’s pyramid into which so soon

a handful of dust would be laid. In the last decade of the nineteenth

century the long leases of the acres which a hundred years ago had been

let for building land at Brighton were tumbling in, and in place of

ground-rents the houses came into their possession, while, with true

Stanier luck, this coincided with a revival of Brighton as a

watering-place. Fresh lodes were discovered in their Cornish properties,

and the wave of gold rose ever higher, bearing on it those who seemed

likely to be the last of the name. Philip, now a little over forty years

old, was still unmarried; Ronald, ten years his junior, was childless;

and Lady Hester Brayton, now a widow, had neither son nor daughter to

carry on the family.

Already it looked as if the vultures were coming closer across the

golden sands of the desert on which these survivors were barrenly

gathered, for an acute and far-seeing solicitor had unearthed a family

of labourers living in a cottage in the marsh between Broomhill and

Appledore, who undoubtedly bore the name of Stanier, and he had secured

from the father, who could just write his name, a duly-attested document

to the effect that if Jacob Spurway succeeded in establishing him in the

family possessions and honours, he would pay him the sum of a hundred

thousand pounds in ten annual instalments. That being made secure, it

was worth while secretly to hunt through old wills and leases, and he

had certainly discovered that Colin Stanier (_æt._ Elizabeth) had a

younger brother, Ronald, who inhabited a farm not far from Appledore and

had issue. That issue could, for the most part, be traced, or, at any

rate, firmly inferred right down to the present. Then came a most

gratifying search through the chronicles and pedigrees of the line now

in possession, and, explore as he might, John Spurway could find no

collateral line still in existence. Straight down, from father to son,

as we have seen, ran the generations; till the day of Lady Hester

Brayton, no daughter had been born to an Earl of Yardley, and the line

of such other sons as the lords of Stanier begot had utterly died out.

The chance of establishing this illiterate boor seemed to Mr. Jacob

Spurway a very promising one, and he not only devoted to it his time and

his undoubted abilities, but even made a few clandestine and judicious

purchases. There arrived, for instance, one night at the Stanier cottage

a wholly genuine Elizabethan chair in extremely bad condition, which was

modestly placed in the kitchen behind the door; a tiger-ware jug found

its way to the high chimneypiece and got speedily covered with dust, and

a much-tarnished Elizabethan sealtop spoon made a curious addition to

the Britannia metal equipage for the drinking of tea.

But if this drab and barren decay of the direct line of Colin Stanier

roused the interest of Mr. Spurway, it appeared in the year 1892 to

interest others not less ingenious, and (to adopt the obsolete terms of

the legend) it really looked as if Satan remembered the bond to which he

was party, and bestirred himself to make amends for his forgetfulness.

And first--with a pang of self-reproach--he turned his attention to this

poor bath-chaired paralytic, now so rapidly approaching his seventieth

year. Then there was Philip to consider, and Ronald.... Lady Hester he

felt less self-reproachful about, for, unhampered by children, and

consoled for the loss of her husband by the very charming attentions of

others, she was in London queen of the smart Bohemia, which was the only

court at all to her mind, and was far more amusing than the garden

parties at Buckingham Palace to which, so pleasant was Bohemia, she was

no longer invited.

So then, just about the time that Mr. Spurway was sending Elizabethan

relics to the cottage in the Romney Marsh, there came over Lord Yardley

a strange and rather embarrassing amelioration of his stricken state.

From a medical point of view he became inexplicably better, though from

another point of view it could be as confidently stated that he became

irretrievably worse. His clouded faculties were pierced by the sun of

lucidity again, the jerks and quivers of his limbs and his speech gave

way to a more orderly rhythm, and his doctor congratulated himself on

the eventual success of a treatment that for twenty years had produced

no effect whatever. Strictly speaking, that treatment could be more

accurately described as the absence of treatment: Sir Thomas Logan had

said all along that the utmost that doctors could do was to assist

Nature in effecting a cure: a bath-chair and the indulgence of anything

the patient felt inclined to do was the sum of the curative process. Now

at last it bore (professionally speaking) the most gratifying fruit.

Coherence visited his speech, irrespective of the tumblers of port

(indeed, these tumblers of port produced a normal incoherence), his

powerless hands began to grasp the cards again, and before long he was

able to perambulate the galleries through which his bath-chair had so

long wheeled him, on his own feet with the aid of a couple of sticks.

Every week that passed saw some new feat of convalescence and the

strangeness of the physical and mental recovery touched the fringes of

the miraculous.

But while Sir Thomas Logan, in his constant visits to Stanier during

this amazing recovery, never failed to find some fresh and surprising

testimonial to his skill, he had to put away from himself with something

of an effort certain qualms that insisted on presenting themselves to

him. It seemed even while his patient’s physical and mental faculties

improved in a steady and ascending ratio of progress, that some

spiritual deterioration balanced, or more than balanced, this recovery.

Hard and cruel Lord Yardley had been before the stroke had fallen on

him--without compassion, without human affection--now, in the renewal of

his vital forces, these qualities blazed into a conflagration, and it

was against Philip, above all others, that their heat and fury were

directed.

While his father was helpless Philip had staunchly remained with him,

sharing with his mother and with Ronald and his wife the daily burden of

companionship. But now there was something intolerable in his father’s

lucid and concentrated hatred of him. Daily now Lord Yardley would come

into the library where Philip was at his books, in order to glut his

passion with proximity. He would take a chair near Philip’s, and, under

pretence of reading, would look at him in silence with lips that

trembled and twitching fingers. Once or twice, goaded by Philip’s steady

ignoring of his presence, he broke out into speeches of hideous abuse,

the more terrible because it was no longer the drunken raving of a

paralytic, but the considered utterance of a clear and hellish brain.

Acting on the great doctor’s advice, Philip, without saying a word to

his father, made arrangements for leaving Stanier. He talked the matter

over with that marble mother of his, and they settled that he would be

wise to leave England for the time being. If his father, as might so

easily happen, got news of him in London or in some place easily

accessible, the awful law of attraction which his hatred made between

them might lead to new developments: the more prudent thing was that he

should efface himself altogether.

Italy, to one of Philip’s temperament, appeared an obvious asylum, but

beyond that his whereabouts was to be left vague, so that his mother,

without fear of detection in falsehood, could say that she did not know

where he was. She would write him news of Stanier to some forwarding

agency in Rome, with which he would be in communication, and he would

transmit news of himself through the same channel.

One morning before the house was astir, Philip came down into the great

hall. Terrible as these last years had been, rising to this climax which

had driven him out, it was with a bleeding of the heart that he left the

home that was knitted into his very being, and beat in his arteries. He

would not allow himself to wonder how long it might be before his

return: it did not seem possible that in his father’s lifetime he should

tread these floors again, and in the astounding rejuvenation that there

had come over Lord Yardley, who could say how long this miracle of

restored vitality might work its wonders?

As he moved towards the door a ray of early sunlight struck sideways on

to the portrait of Colin Stanier, waking it to another day of its

imperishable youth. It illumined, too, the legendary parchment let into

the frame; by some curious effect of light the writing seemed to Philip

for one startled moment to be legible and distinct....

CHAPTER III

One morning, within a month of his departure from Stanier, Philip was

coming slowly up from his bathing and basking on the beach, pleasantly

fatigued, agreeably hungry, and stupefied with content. He had swum and

floated in the warm crystal of the sea, diving from deep-water rocks

into the liquid caves, where the sunlight made a shifting net of

luminous scribbles over the jewelled pebbles; he had lain with half-shut

eyes watching the quivering of the hot air over the white bank of

shingle, with the sun warm on his drying shoulders and penetrating, it

seemed, into the marrow of his bones and illuminating the very hearth

and shrine of his spirit.

The hours had passed but too quickly, and now he was making his

leisurely way through vineyards and olive-farms back to the road where a

little jingling equipage would be waiting to take him up to his villa on

the hill above the town of Capri. On one side of the path was a

sun-flecked wall, where, in the pools of brightness, lizards lay as

immobile as the stones themselves; the edges of these pools of light

bordered by continents of bluish shadow wavered with the slight stirring

of the olive trees above them. Through the interlacement of these boughs

he caught glimpses of the unstained sky and the cliffs that rose to the

island heights. On the other side the olive groves declined towards the

edge of the cliff, and through their branches the sea, doubly tinged

with the sky’s blueness, was not less tranquil than the ether.

Presently, still climbing upwards, he emerged from the olive groves,

while the vineyards in plots and terraces followed the outline of the

hill. Mingled with them were orchards of lemon trees bearing the globes

of the young green fruit together with flower; and leaf and flower and

fruit alike reeked of an inimitable fragrance. There were pomegranates

bearing crimson flowers thick and waxlike against the wall of an ingle

house that bordered the narrow path; a riot of morning-glory was new

there every day with fresh unfoldings of blown blue trumpets. Out of the

open door came an inspiriting smell of frying, and on the edge of the

weather-stained balcony were rusty petroleum tins in which carnations

bloomed. A space of level plateau, with grass already bleached yellow by

this spell of hot weather, crowned the hill, and again he descended

between lizard-tenanted walls through vineyards and lemon groves.

His rickety little carriage was waiting, the horse with a smart

pheasant’s feather erect on its head, the driver with a carnation stuck

behind his ear; the harness, for the sake of security, was supplemented

with string. The whip cracked, the horse tossed its pheasant’s feather

and jingled its bells, and, followed by a cloud of dust, Philip creaked

away up the angled road, musing and utterly content.

He could scarcely believe, as the little equipage ambled up the hill,

that the individual known by his name, and wearing his clothes, who had

lived darkly like a weevil in that joylessness of stately gloom, was the

same as this sun-steeped sprawler in the creaking carriage. He had come

out of a nightmare of tunnel into the wholesome and blessed day, and was

steeped in the colour of the sun. It was but a few weeks ago that,

without anticipation of anything but relief from an intolerable

situation, he had stolen out of Stanier, but swift æons of evolution had

passed over him since then. There was not more difference between the

darkness of those English winter days that had brooded in the halls and

galleries of Stanier and this caressing sun that pervaded sea and sky,

than there was between his acceptance of life then and his embrace of

life now. Now it was enough to be alive: the very conditions of

existence spelled content, and at the close of every day he would have

welcomed a backward shift of the hours so that he might have that

identical day again, instead of welcoming the close of each day in the

assurance of that identical day not coming again. There would be others,

but from the total sum one unit had been subtracted. It had perished: it

had dropped into the well of years.

Philip had no need to ask himself what constituted the horror of those

closed years, for it was part of his consciousness, which called for no

catechism, that it was his father’s existence; just the fact of him

distilled the poison, thick as dew on a summer night, which made them

thus. He had to the full the Stanier passion for the home itself, but as

long as his father lived, the horror of the man so pervaded the place,

so overrode all other sentiments with regard to it, that he could not

think of the one apart from the other, for hatred, acid and corrosive,

grew like some deadly mildew on the great galleries and the high halls.

It was no mere passive thing, an absence of love or affection, but a

positive and prosperous growth: a henbane or a deadly nightshade

sprouted and flowered and flourished there. Dwelling on it even for the

toss of his horse’s head, as they clattered off the dusty road on to the

paved way outside the town, Philip felt his hands grow damp.

He had come straight through to Rome and plunged himself, as in a

cooling bath, in the beauty and magnificence of the antique city. He had

wandered through galleries, had sat in the incense-fragrant dusk of

churches, had spent long hours treading the vestiges of the past,

content for the time to feel the spell of healing which the mere

severing himself from Stanier had set at work. But soon through that

spell there sounded a subtler incantation, coming not from the haunts of

men nor the achievements of the past, but from the lovely heart of the

lovely land itself which had called forth these manifestations.

He had drifted down to Naples, and across the bay to the enchanted

island hanging like a cloud on the horizon where the sea and sky melted

into each other. As yet he wanted neither man nor woman, the exquisite

physical conditions of the southern summer were in themselves the

restoration he needed, with a truce from all human entanglements.

Potent, indeed, was their efficacy; they ran through his heart like

wine, rejuvenating and narcotic together, and to-day he could scarcely

credit that a fortnight of eventless existence had flowed over him in

one timeless moment of magic, of animal, unreflecting happiness.

Curious good fortune in elementary material ways had attended him. On

the very day of his arrival, as he strolled out from his hotel in the

dusk up the moon-struck hill above the town, he had paused beneath the

white garden wall of a villa abutting on the path, and even as in

imagination he pictured the serenity and aloofness of it, his eye caught

a placard, easily legible in the moonlight, that it was to let, and with

that came the certainty that he was to be the lessee.

Next morning he made inquiry and inspection of its cool whitewashed

rooms, tiled, floored and vaulted. Below it lay its terraced garden,

smothered with neglected rose-trees and from the house, along a short

paved walk, there ran a vine-wreathed pergola, and a great stone pine

stood sentinel. A capable _contadina_ with her daughter were easily

found who would look after him, and within twenty-four hours he had

transferred himself from the German-infested hotel. Soon, in answer to

further inquiries, he learned that at the end of his tenure a purchase

might be effected, and the negotiations had begun.

To-day for the first time he found English news awaiting him, and the

perusal of it was like the sudden and vivid recollection of a nightmare.

Lord Yardley, so his mother wrote, was getting more capable every day;

he had even gone out riding. He had asked no questions as to where

Philip had gone, or when he would return, but he had given orders that

his name should not be mentioned, and once when she had inadvertently

done so, there had been a great explosion of anger. Otherwise life went

on as usual: Sir Thomas had paid a visit yesterday, and was very much

gratified by his examination of his patient, and said he need not come

again, unless any unfavourable change occurred, for another month. His

father sat long after dinner, and the games of whist were often

prolonged till midnight....

Philip skimmed through the frozen sheets ... his mother was glad he was

well, and that sea-bathing suited him.... It was very hot, was it

not?--but he always liked the heat.... The hay had been got in, which

was lucky, because the barometer had gone down.... He crumpled them up

with a little shudder as at a sudden draught of chilled air....

There was another from his sister Hester.

“So you’ve run away, like me, so the iceberg tells me,” she wrote. “I

only wonder that you didn’t do it long ago. This is just to congratulate

you. She says, too, that father is ever so much better, which I think is

a pity. Why should he be allowed to get better? Mother says it is like a

miracle, and if it is, I’m sure I know who worked it.

“Really, Phil, I am delighted that you have awoke to the fact that there

is a world outside Stanier--good Lord, if Stanier was all the world,

what a hell it would be! You used never to be happy away from the place,

I remember, but I gather from what mother says that it became absolutely

impossible for you to stop there.

“There’s a blight on it, Phil: sometimes I almost feel that I believe in

the legend, for though it’s twenty years since I made my skip, if ever I

have a nightmare, it is that I dream that I am back there, and that my

father is pursuing me over those slippery floors in the dusk. But I

shall come back there, if you’ll allow me, when he’s dead: it’s he who

makes the horror....”

Once again Philip felt a shiver of goose-flesh, and sending his sister’s

letter to join the other in the empty grate, strolled out into the hot

stillness of the summer afternoon, and he hailed the sun like one

awakening from such a nightmare as Hester had spoken of. All his life he

had been sluggish in the emotions, looking at life in the mirror of

other men’s minds, getting book knowledge of it only in a cloistered

airlessness, not experiencing it for himself--a reader of travels and

not a voyager. But now with his escape from Stanier had come a

quickening of his pulses, and that awakening which had brought home to

him the horror of his father had brought to him also a passionate sense

of the loveliness of the world.

Regret for the wasted years of drowsy torpor was there, also; here was

he already on the meridian of life, with so small a store of remembered

raptures laid up as in a granary for his old age, when his arm would be

too feeble to ply the sickle in the ripe cornfields. A man, when he

could no longer reap, must live on what he had gathered: without that he

would face hungry and empty years. When the fire within began to burn

low, and he could no longer replenish it, it was ill for him if the

house of his heart could not warm itself with the glow that experience

had already given him. He must gather the grapes of life, and tread them

in his winepress, squeezing out the uttermost drop, so that the ferment

and sunshine of his vintage would be safe in cellar for the comforting

of the days when in his vineyard the leaves were rotting under wintry

skies. Too many days had passed for him unharvested.

That evening, after his dinner, he strolled down in the warm dusk to the

piazza. The day had been a _festa_ in honour of some local saint, and

there was a show of fireworks on the hill above the town, and in

consequence the piazza and the terrace by the funicular railway, which

commanded a good view of the display, was crowded with the young folk of

the island. Rockets aspired, and bursting in bouquets of feathered fiery

spray, dimmed the stars and illumined the upturned faces of handsome

boys and swift-ripening girlhood. Eager and smiling mouths started out

of the darkness as the rockets broke into flower, eager and young and

ready for love and laughter, fading again and vanishing as the

illumination expired.

It was this garden of young faces that occupied Philip more than the

fireworks, these shifting groups that formed and reformed, smiling and

talking to each other in the intervals of darkness. The bubbling ferment

of intimate companionship frothed round him, and suddenly he seemed to

himself to be incapsulated, an insoluble fragment floating or sinking in

this heady liquor of life. There came upon him sharp and unexpected as a

blow dealt from behind, a sense of complete loneliness.

Every one else had his companion: here was a group of chattering boys,

there of laughing girls, here the sexes were mingled. Elder men and

women had a quieter comradeship: they had passed through the fermenting

stage, it might be, but the wine of companionship with who knew what

memories were in solution there, was theirs still. All these rapturous

days he had been alone, and had not noticed it; now his solitariness

crystallised into loneliness.

With a final sheaf of rockets the display came to an end, and the crowd

began to disperse homewards. The withdrawal took the acuteness from

Philip’s ache, for he had no longer in front of his eyes the example of

what he missed, his hunger was not whetted by the spectacle of food.

The steps of the last loiterers died away, and soon he was left alone

looking out over the vine-clad slope of the steep hill down to the

Marina. Warm buffets of air wandered up from the land that had lain all

day in its bath of sunlight, rippling round him like the edge of some

spent wave; but already the dew, moistening the drought of day, was

instilling into the air some nameless fragrance of damp earth and herbs

refreshed. Beyond lay the bay, conjectured rather than seen, and, twenty

miles away, a thin necklet of light showed where Naples lay stretched

and smouldering along the margin of the sea. If a wish could have

transported Philip there, he would have left the empty terrace to see

with what errands and adventures the city teemed, even as the brain

teems with thoughts and imaginings.

Into the impersonal seduction of the summer night some human element of

longing had entered, born of the upturned faces of boys and girls

watching the rockets, and sinking back, bright-eyed and eager, into the

cover of darkness, even as the sword slips into its sheath again. Youth,

in the matter of years, was already past for him, but in his heart until

now youth had not yet been born. No individual face among them all had

flown a signal for him, but collectively they beckoned; it was among

such that he would find the lights of his heart’s harbour shining across

the barren water, and kindling desire in his eyes.

It was not intellectual companionship that he sought nor the unity and

absorption of love, for Philip was true Stanier and had no use for love;

but he craved for youth, for beauty, for the Southern gaiety and

friendliness, for the upleap and the assuagement of individual desire.

Till middle-age he had lived without the instincts of youth; his tree

was barren of the golden fruits of youth’s delight. Now, sudden as his

change of life, his belated springtime flooded him.

It was in Naples that he found her, in the studio of an acquaintance he

had made when he was there first, and before midsummer Rosina Viagi was

established in the villa. She was half English by birth, and in her gold

hair, heavy as the metal and her blue eyes, she shewed her mother’s

origin. But her temperament was of the South--fierce and merry, easily

moved to laughter, and as easily to squalls of anger that passed as

swiftly as an April shower, and melted into sunlight again. She so

enthralled his senses that he scarcely noticed, for those first months,

the garish commonness of her mind: it scarcely mattered; he scarcely

heeded what she said so long as it was those full lips which formed the

silly syllables. She was greedy, and he knew it, in the matter of

money, but his generosity quite contented her, and he had got just what

he had desired, one who entirely satisfied his passion and left his mind

altogether unseduced.

Then with the fulfillment of desire came the leanness that follows, a

swift inevitable Nemesis on the heels of the accomplishment of an

unworthy purpose. He had dreamed of the gleam of romance in those

readings of his at Stanier, and awoke to find but a smouldering wick.

And before the summer was dead, he knew he was to become a father.

In the autumn the island emptied of its visitors, and Rosina could no

longer spend her evenings at the café or on the piazza, with her

countrywomen casting envious glances at her toilettes, and the men

boldly staring at her beauty. She was genuinely fond of Philip, but her

native gaiety demanded the distraction of crowds, and she yawned in the

long evenings when the squalls battered at the shutters and the panes

streamed with the fretful rain.

“But are we going to stop here all the winter?” she asked one evening as

she gathered up the piquet cards. “It gets very melancholy. You go for

your great walks, but I hate walking; you sit there over your book, but

I hate reading.”

Philip laughed. “Am I to clap my hands at the rain,” he said, “and say,

‘Stop at once! Rosina wearies for the sun’?”

She perched herself on the arm of his chair, a favourite attitude for

her supplications. “No, my dear,” she said, “all your money will not do

that. Besides, even if the rain obeyed you and the sun shone, there

would still be nobody to look at me. But you can do something.”

“And what’s that?”

“Just a little apartment in Naples,” she said. “It is so gay in Naples

even if the sirocco blows or if the tramontana bellows. There are the

theatres; there are crowds; there is movement. I cannot be active, but

there I can see others being active. There are fresh faces in the

street, there is gaiety.”

“Oh, I hate towns!” said Philip.

She got up and began to speak more rapidly. “You think only of

yourself,” she said. “I mope here; I am miserable. I feel like one of

the snails on the wall, crawling, crawling, and going into a dusty

crevice. That is not my nature. I hate snails, except when they are

cooked, and then I gobble them up, and wipe my mouth and think no more

of them. You can read your book in a town just as well as here, and you

can take a walk in a town. Ah, do, Philip!”

Suddenly and unexpectedly Philip found himself picturing his days here

alone, without Rosina. He did not consciously evoke the image; it

presented itself to him from outside himself. The island had certainly

cast its spell over him: just to be here, to awake to the sense of its

lotus-land tranquillity, and to go to sleep knowing that a fresh

eventless day would welcome him, made him content. He could imagine

himself now alone in this plain vaulted room, with the storm swirling

through the stone-pine outside, and the smell of burning wood on the

hearth without desiring Rosina’s presence.

“Well, it might be done,” he said. “We could have a little nook in

Naples, if you liked. I don’t say that I should always be there.”

Rosina’s eyes sparkled. “No, no, that would be selfish of me,” she said.

“You would come over here for a week when you wished, as you are so fond

of your melancholy island....” She stopped, and her Italian

suspiciousness came to the surface. “You are not thinking of leaving

me?” she asked.

“Of course I am not,” he said impatiently. “You imagine absurdities.”

“I have heard of such absurdities. Are you sure?”

“Yes, you silly baby,” said he.

She recovered her smiles. “I trust you,” she said. “Yes, where were we?

You will come over here when you want your island, and you will be

there when you want me. Oh, Philip, do you promise me?”

Her delicious gaiety invaded her again, and she sat herself on the floor

between his knees.

“Oh, you are kind to me!” she said. “I hope your father will live for

ever, and then you will never leave me. There is no one so kind as you.

We will have a flat, will we not? I know just such an one, that looks on

to the Castello d’Ovo, and all day the carriages go by, and we will go

by, too, and look up at our home, and wonder who are the happy folk who

live there, and every one who sees me will envy me for having a man who

loves me. And we will go to the restaurants where there are lights and

glitter, and the band plays, and I will be happier than the day is long.

Let us go over to-morrow. I will tell Maria to pack....”

It was just this impetuous prattling childishness which had enthralled

him at first, and even while he told himself now how charming it was, he

knew that he found it a weariness and an unreality. The same Rosina ten

minutes before would be in a gale of temper, then, some ten minutes

after, under a cloud of suspicious surmise. His own acceptance of her

proposal that they would be together at times, at times separate, was,

in reality, a vast relief to him, yet chequering that relief was that

curious male jealousy that the woman whom he had chosen to share his

nights and days should contemplate his absences with his own equanimity.

While he reserved to himself the right of not being utterly devoted to

her, he claimed her devotion to him.

It had come to that. It was not that his heart beat to another tune, his

eyes did not look elsewhere; simply the swiftly-consumed flame of

passion was now consciously dying down, and while he took no

responsibility for his own cooling, he resented her share in it. He

treated her, in fact, as Staniers had for many generations treated their

wives, but she had an independence which none of those unfortunate

females had enjoyed. He had already made a handsome provision for her;

and he was quite prepared to take a full financial responsibility for

his fatherhood. Yet, while he recognised how little she was to him, he

resented the clear fact of how little he was to her.

He got up. “You shall have it all your own way, darling,” he said.

“We’ll go across to Naples to-morrow; we’ll find a flat--the one you

know of--and you shall see the crowds and the lights again....”

“Ah, you are adorable,” said she. “I love you too much, Philip.”

He established her to her heart’s content, and through the winter

divided the weeks between Naples and the island. She had no hold on his

heart, and on his mind none; but, at any rate, he desired no one else

but her, and as the months went by there grew in him a tenderness which

had not formed part of the original bond. Often her vanity, her childish

love of ostentation, a certain querulousness also which had lately

exhibited itself, made him long for the quiet solitude across the bay.

Sometimes she would be loth to let him go, sometimes in answer to her

petition he would put off his departure, and then before the evening was

over she would have magnified some infinitesimal point of dispute into a

serious disagreement, have watered it with her tears, sobbed out that he

was cruel to her, that she wished he had gone instead of remaining to

make himself a tyrant. He shared her sentiments on that topic, and would

catch the early boat next morning.

And yet, even as with a sigh of relief he settled himself into his chair

that night by the open fireplace, and congratulated himself on this

recapture of tranquillity, he would miss something.... She was not there

to interrupt him, to scold him, to rage at him, but she had other moods

as well, when she beguiled and enchanted him. That was no deep-seated

spell, nor had it ever been. Its ingredients were but her physical

grace, and the charm of her spontaneous gaiety.

Perhaps next morning he would get a long scrawled letter from her,

saying that he had been a brute to leave her, that she had not been out

all day, but had sat and cried, and at that he would count himself lucky

in his solitude. And even while he felt as dry as sand towards her,

there would come seething up through its aridity this moist hidden

spring of tenderness.

He had made just such an escape from her whims and wilfulness one day

towards the end of February, but before the evening was half over he had

tired of this solitude that he had sought. His book did not interest

him, and he felt too restless to go to bed. Restlessness, at any rate,

might be walked off, and he set out to tramp and tranquillise himself.

The moon was near to its full, the night warm and windless, and the air

alert with the coming of the spring. Over the garden beds hung the

veiled fragrance of wallflowers and freezias, and their scent in some

subtle way suggested her presence. Had she been there she would, in the

mood in which he had left her, have jangled and irritated him, but if a

wish would have brought her he would have wished it.

He let himself out of the garden gate, and mounted the steep path away

from the town, thinking by brisk movement to dull and fatigue himself

and to get rid of the thought of her. But like a wraith, noiseless and

invisible, she glided along by him, and he could not shake her off. She

did not scold him or nag at him: she was gay and seductive, with the

lure of the springtime tingling about her, and beckoning him. Soon he

found himself actively engaged in some sort of symbolic struggle to

elude her, and taking a rough and steeper path, thought that he would

outpace her.

Here the way lay over an uncultivated upland, and as he pounded along he

drank in the intoxicating ferment of the vernal night. The earth was

dew-drenched, and the scent of the aromatic plants of the hillside

served but as a whet to his restless thoughts, and still, hurry as he

might, he could not escape from her and from a certain decision that

she seemed to be forcing on him. Finally, regardless of the dew, and

exhausted with the climb, he sat down and began to think it out.

They had been together now for eight months, and though she often

wearied and annoyed him, he could not imagine going back to the solitary

life which, when first he came to Capri, had been so full of

enchantment. They had rubbed and jarred against each other, but never

had either of them, loose though the tie had been, considered leaving

each other. They had been absolutely faithful, and were, indeed, married

in all but the testimony of a written contract.

It had been understood from the first that, on his father’s death,

Philip would take up the reins of his government at home, leaving her in

all material matters independent and well off, and in all probability

her dowry, cancelling her history, would enable her to make a favourable

marriage. But though that had been settled between them, Philip found

now, as he sat with her wraith still silent, still invisible, but

insistently present, that not till this moment had he substantially

pictured himself without her, or seen himself looking out for another

woman to be mother of his children. He could see himself going on

quarrelling with Rosina and wanting her again, but the realisation of

his wanting any one else was beyond him.

On the other hand, his father, in this miraculous recovery of his

powers, might live for years, and who knew whether, long before his

death, both he and Rosina might not welcome it as a deliverance from

each other?

But not less impossible also than the picturing of himself without

Rosina, was the imagining of her installed as mistress at Stanier. Try

as he might, he could not make visible to himself so unrealisable a

contingency. Rosina at Stanier ... Rosina.... Yet, so soon, she would be

the mother of his child.

The moon had sunk, and he must grope his way down the hillside which he

had mounted so nimbly in the hope of escape from the presence that

hovered by him. All night it was with him, waiting patiently but

inexorably for the answer he was bound to give. He could not drive it

away, he could not elude it.

There arrived for him next morning an iced budget from his mother. All

went on as usual with that refrigerator. There had been a gale, and four

elm trees had been blown down.... Easter was early this year; she hoped

for the sake of the holiday-makers that the weather would be fine.... It

was odd to hear of the warm suns and the sitting out in the evening....

Was he not tired of his solitary life?...

Philip skimmed his way rapidly through these frigidities, and then

suddenly found himself attending.

“I have kept my great news to the end,” his mother wrote, “and it makes

us all, your father especially, very happy. We hope before March is over

that Ronald will have an heir. Janet is keeping very well, and your

father positively dotes on her now. The effect on him is most marked. He

certainly feels more kindly to you now that this has come, for the other

day he mentioned your name and wondered where you were. It was not

having a grandchild that was responsible for a great deal of his

bitterness towards you, for you are the eldest....”

Philip swept the letter off the table and sat with chin supported in the

palms of his hands, staring out of the open window, through which came

the subtle scent of the wallflower. As a traveller traces his journey,

so, spreading the situation out like a map before him, he saw how his

road ran direct and uncurving. Last night, for all his groping and

searching, he could find no such road marked; there was but a track, and

it was interrupted by precipitous unnegotiable places, by marshes and

quagmires through which no wayfarer could find a path. But with the

illumination of this letter it was as if an army of road-makers had been

busy on it. Over the quagmire there was a buttressed causeway, through

the precipitous cliffs a cutting had been blasted. There was yet time;

he would marry Rosina out of hand, and his offspring, not his brother’s,

should be heir of Stanier.

The marriage making their union valid and legitimatising the child that

should soon be born, took place on the first of March at the English

Consulate, and a week later came the news that a daughter had been born

to his sister-in-law. On the tenth of the same month Rosina gave birth

to twins, both boys. There was no need for any riband to distinguish

them, for never had two more dissimilar pilgrims come forth for their

unconjecturable journey. The elder was dark like Philip, and unlike the

most of his father’s family; the other blue-eyed, like his mother, had a

head thick-dowered with bright pale gold. Never since the days of Colin

Stanier, founder of the race and bargainer in the legend, had gold and

blue been seen together in a Stanier, and “Colin,” said Philip to

himself, “he shall be.”

During that month the shuttle of fate flew swiftly backwards and

forwards in the loom of the future. Thirty-six years had passed since

Ronald, the latest born of his race, had come into life, ten years more

had passed over Philip’s head before, within a week of his brother and

within a fortnight of his marriage, he saw the perpetuation of his

blood. And the shuttle, so long motionless for the Staniers, did not

pause there in its swift and sudden weavings.

At Stanier that evening Ronald and his father sat long over their wine.

The disappointment at Ronald’s first child being a girl was utterly

eclipsed in Lord Yardley’s mind by the arrival of an heir at all, and he

had eaten heavily in boisterous spirits, and drunk as in the days when

wine by the tumblerful was needed to rouse him into coherent speech. But

now no attendant was needed to hold his glass to his lips: he was as

free of movement as a normal man.

“We’ll have another bottle yet, Ronnie,” he said. “There’ll be no whist

to-night, for your mother will have gone upstairs to see after Janet.

Ring the bell, will you?”

The fresh bottle was brought, and he poured himself out a glassful and

passed it to his son.

“By God, I haven’t been so happy for years as I’ve been this last week,”

he said. “You’ve made a beginning now, my boy; you’ll have a son next.

And to think of Philip, mouldering away all this time. He’s forty-six

now; he’ll not get in your way. A useless fellow, Philip; sitting like a

crow all day in the library, like some old barren bird. I should like to

have seen his face when he got the news. But I’ll write him to-morrow

myself, and say that if he cares to come home I’ll treat him civilly.”

“Poor old Phil!” said Ronald. “Do write to him, father. I daresay he

would like to come back. He has been gone a year, come May.”

Lord Yardley helped himself again. His hand was quite steady, but his

face was violently flushed. Every night now, since the birth of Ronald’s

baby, he had drunk deeply, and but for this heightened colour, more

vivid to-night than usual, the wine seemed scarcely to produce any

effect on him. All day now for a week he had lived in this jovial and

excited mood, talking of little else than the event which had so

enraptured him.

“And Janet’s but thirty yet,” he went on, forgetting again about Philip,

“and she comes of a fruitful stock: the Armitages aren’t like us; they

run to quantity. Not that I find fault with the quality. But a boy,

Ronald.”

A servant had come in with a telegram, which he presented to Lord

Yardley, who threw it over to Ronald.

“Just open it for me,” he said. “See if it requires any answer.”

Ronald drew a candle nearer him; he was conscious of having drunk a good

deal, and the light seemed dim and veiled. He fumbled over the envelope,

and drawing out the sheet, unfolded it. He stared at it with mouth

fallen open.

“It’s a joke,” he said in a loud, unsteady voice. “It’s some silly

joke.”

“Let’s have it, then,” said his father. “Who’s the joker?”

“It’s from Philip,” said he. “He says that he’s married, and that his

wife has had twins to-day--boys.”

Lord Yardley rose to his feet, the flush on his face turning to purple.

Then, without a word, he fell forward across the table, crashing down

among the glasses and decanters.

* * * * *

A fortnight after the birth of the twins, Rosina, who till then had been

doing well, developed disquieting symptoms with high temperature. Her

illness declared itself as scarlet fever, and on the 6th of April she

died.

Surely in those spring weeks there had been busy superintendence over

the fortunes of the Staniers. Philip, till lately outcast from his home

and vagrant bachelor, had succeeded to the great property and the

honours and titles of his house. Two lusty sons were his, and there was

no Rosina to vex him with her petulance and common ways. All tenderness

that he had had for her was diverted into the persons of his sons, and

in particular of Colin. In England, in this month of April, the beloved

home awaited the coming of its master with welcome and rejoicing.

_Book Two_

CHAPTER I

Colin Stanier had gone straight from the tennis-court to the

bathing-place in the lake below the terraced garden. His cousin Violet,

only daughter of his uncle Ronald, had said that she would equip herself

and follow him, and the boy had swum and dived and dived and swum

waiting for her, until the dressing-bell booming from the turret had

made him reluctantly quit the water. He was just half dry and not at all

dressed when she came.

“Wretched luck!” she said. “Oh, Colin, do put something on!”

“In time,” said Colin; “you needn’t look!”

“I’m not looking. But it was wretched luck. Mother....”

Colin wrapped a long bath-towel round himself, foraged for cigarettes

and matches in his coat pocket, and sat down by her.

“Mother?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Mother was querulous, and so she wanted some one to be

querulous to.”

“Couldn’t she be querulous to herself?” asked Colin.

“No, of course not. You must have a partner or a dummy if you’re being

querulous. I wasn’t more than a dummy, and so when she had finished the

rest of it she was querulous about that. She said I was unsympathetic.”

“Dummies usually are,” said Colin. “Cigarette?”

“No, thanks. This one was, because she wanted to come and bathe. Did you

dive off the top step?”

“Of course not. No audience,” said Colin. “What’s the use of doing

anything terrifying unless you impress somebody? I would have if you had

come down.”

“I should have been thrilled. Oh, by the way, Raymond has just

telephoned from town to say that he’ll be here by dinner-time. He’s

motoring down.”

Colin considered this. “Raymond’s the only person older than myself whom

I envy,” he said. “He’s half an hour older than me. Oh, I think I envy

Aunt Hester, but then I adore Aunt Hester. I only hate Raymond.”

“Just because he’s half an hour older than you?” asked the girl.

“Isn’t that enough? He gets everything just because of that unlucky

half-hour. He’ll get you, too, if you’re not careful.”

Colin got up and gathered his clothes together.

“He’ll have Stanier,” he observed. “Isn’t that enough to make me detest

him? Besides, he’s a boor. Happily, father detests him, too; I think

father must have been like Raymond at his age. That’s the only comfort.

Father will do the best he can for me. And then there’s Aunt Hester’s

money. But what I want is Stanier. Come on.”

“Aren’t you going to dress?” asked Violet.

“Certainly not. As soon as I get to the house I shall have to undress

and dress again.”

“Not shoes?” asked she.

“Not when the dew is falling. Oh, wet grass is lovely to the feet. We’ll

skirt the terrace and go round by the lawn.”

“And why is it that you envy Aunt Hester?” asked the girl.

“Can’t help it. She’s so old and wicked and young.”

Violet laughed. “That’s a very odd reason for envying anybody,” she

said. “What’s there to envy?”

“Why, the fact that she’s done it all,” said Colin frowning. “She has

done all she pleased all her life, and she’s just as young as ever. If I

wasn’t her nephew, she would put me under her arm, just as she did her

husband a thousand years ago, and marry me to-morrow. And then you

would marry Raymond, and--and there we would all be. We would play whist

together. My dear, those ghastly days before we were born! Grandfather

with his Garter over his worsted jacket and a kitten on his knee, and

grandmamma and Aunt Janet and your father and mine! They lived here for

years like that. How wonderful and awful!”

“They’re just as wonderful now,” said Violet. “And....”

“Not quite so awful; grandfather isn’t here now, and he must have been

the ghastliest. Besides, there’s Aunt Hester here to tone them up, and

you and I, if it comes to that. Not to mention Raymond. I love seeing my

father try to behave nicely to Raymond. Dead failure.”

Colin tucked his towel round him; it kept slipping first from one

shoulder, then the other.

“I believe Raymond is falling in love with you,” he said. “He’ll propose

to you before long. Your mother will back him up, so will Uncle Ronald.

They would love to see you mistress here. And you’d like it yourself.”

“Oh--like it?” said she. She paused a moment. “Colin, you know what I

feel about Stanier,” she said. “I don’t think anybody knows as well as

you. You’ve got the passion for it. Wouldn’t you give anything for it to

be yours? Look at it! There’s nothing like it in the world!”

They had come up the smooth-shaven grass slope from the lake, and stood

at the entrance through the long yew-hedge that bordered the line of

terraces. There were no ghastly monstrosities in its clipped bastion; no

semblance of peacocks and spread tails to crown it: it flowed downwards,

a steep, uniform embattlement of stiff green, towards the lake,

enclosing the straight terraces and the deep borders of flower-beds. The

topmost of these terraces was paved, and straight from it rose the long

two-storied façade of mellow brick balustraded with the motto, “Nisi

Dominus ædificavit,” in tall letters of lead, and from floor to roof it

was the building of that Colin Stanier whose very image and incarnation

stood and looked at it now.

So honest and secure had been the workmanship that in the three

centuries which had elapsed since first it nobly rose to crown the hill

above Rye scarcely a stone of its facings had been repaired, or a

mouldering brick withdrawn. It possessed, even in the material of its

fashioning, some inexplicable immortality, even as did the fortunes of

its owners. Its mellowing had but marked their enrichment and stability;

their stability rivalled that of the steadfast house. The sun, in these

long days of June, had not yet quite set, and the red level rays made

the bricks to glow, and gave a semblance as of internal fire to the

attested guarantee of the motto. Whoever had builded, he had builded

well, and the labour of the bricklayers was not lost.

A couple of years ago Colin, still at Eton, had concocted a mad freak

with Violet. There had been a fancy-dress ball in the house, at which he

had been got up to represent his ancestral namesake, as shewn in the

famous Holbein. There the first Colin appeared as a young man of

twenty-five, but the painter had given him the smooth beauty of boyhood,

and his descendant, in those rich embroidered clothes, might have passed

for the very original and model for the portrait.

This, then, had been their mad freak: Violet, appearing originally in

the costume of old Colin’s bride, had slipped away to her room, when the

ball was at its height, and changed clothes with her cousin. She had

tucked up her hair under his broad-brimmed jewelled hat, he had

be-wigged himself and easily laced his slimness into her stiff brocaded

gown, and so indistinguishable were they that the boys, Colin’s friends

and contemporaries, had been almost embarrassingly admiring of him,

while her friends had found her not less forward. A slip by Colin in the

matter of hoarse laughter at an encircling arm and an attempt at a kiss

had betrayed him into forgetting his brilliant falsetto and giving the

whole thing away.

Not less like to each other now than then, they stood at the entrance of

the terraces. He had gained, perhaps, a couple of inches on her in

height, but the piled gold of her hair, and his bare feet equalised

that. No growth of manhood sheathed the smoothness of his cheeks; they

looked like replicas of one type, still almost sexless in the glow of

mere youth. Theirs was the full dower of their race, health and

prosperity, glee and beauty, and the entire absence of any moral

standard.

Faun and nymph, they stood there together, she in the thin blouse and

white skirt of her tennis-clothes, he in the mere towel of his bathing.

He had but thrown it on anyhow, without thought except to cover himself,

and yet the folds of it fell from his low square shoulders with a

plastic perfection. A hand buried in it held it round his waist, tightly

outlining the springing of his thighs from his body. With her, too, even

the full tennis-skirt, broad at the hem for purposes of activity, could

not conceal the exquisite grace of her figure; above, the blouse

revealed the modelling of her arms and the scarcely perceptible swell of

her breasts. High-bred and delicate were they in the inimitable grace of

their youth; what need had such physical perfection for any dower of the

spirit?

She filled her eyes with the glow of the sunlit front, and then turned

to him. “Colin, it’s a crime,” she said, “that you aren’t in Raymond’s

place. I don’t like Raymond, and yet, if you’re right and he means to

propose to me, I don’t feel sure that I shall refuse him. It won’t be

him I refuse, if I do, it will be Stanier.”

“Lord, I know that!” said Colin. “If I was the elder, you’d marry me

to-morrow.”

“Of course I should, and cut out Aunt Hester. And the funny thing,

darling, is that we’re neither of us in love with the other. We like

each other enormously, but we don’t dote. If you married Aunt Hester I

shouldn’t break my heart, nor would you if I married Raymond.”

“Not a bit. But I should think him a devilish lucky fellow!”

She laughed. “So should I,” she said. “In fact, I think him devilish

lucky already. Colin, if I do refuse him, it will be because of you.”

“Oh, chuck it, Violet!” said he.

She nodded towards the great stately house. “It’s a big chuck,” she

said.

From the far side of the house there came the sound of motor-wheels on

the gravel, and after a moment or two the garden door at the centre of

the terrace opened, and Raymond came out. He was not more than an inch

or so shorter than his brother, but his broad, heavy, short-legged build

made him appear short and squat. His eyebrows were thick and black, and

already a strong growth of hair fringed his upper lip. While Colin might

have passed for a boy of eighteen still, the other would have been taken

for a young man of not less than twenty-five. He stood there for a

minute, looking straight out over the terrace, and the marsh below.

Then, turning his eyes, he saw the others in the dusky entrance through

the yew-hedge, and his face lit up. He came towards them.

“I’ve only just come,” he said. “Had a puncture. How are you, Violet?”

“All right. But how late you are! We’re all late, in fact. We must go

and dress.”

Raymond looked up and down Colin’s bath-towel, and his face darkened

again. But he made a call on his cordiality.

“Hullo, Colin,” he said. “Been bathing? Jolly in the water, I should

think.”

“Very jolly,” said Colin. “How long are you down for?”

He had not meant any particular provocation in the question, though he

was perfectly careless as to whether Raymond found it there or not. He

did, and his face flushed.

“Well, to be quite candid,” he said, “I’m down here for as long as I

please. With your permission, of course.”

“How jolly!” said Colin in a perfectly smooth voice, which he knew

exasperated his brother. “Come on, Vi, it’s time to dress.”

“Oh, there’s twenty minutes yet,” said Raymond. “Come for a few minutes’

stroll, Vi.”

Colin paused for her answer, slightly smiling, and looking just above

Raymond’s head. The two always quarrelled whenever they met, though

perhaps “quarrel” is both too strong and too superficial a word to

connote the smouldering enmity which existed between them, and which the

presence of the other was sufficient to wreathe with little flapping

flames. Envy, as black as hell and as deep as the sea, existed between

them, and there was no breath too light to blow it into incandescence.

Raymond envied Colin for absolutely all that Colin was, for his skin and

his slimness, his eyes and his hair, and to a degree unutterably

greater, for the winning smile, the light, ingratiating manner that he

himself so miserably lacked, even for a certain brusque heedlessness on

Colin’s part which was interpreted, in his case, into the mere

unselfconsciousness of youth. In the desire to please others, Raymond

held himself to be at least the equal of his brother, yet, where his

efforts earned for him but a tepid respect, Colin would weave an

enchantment. If Raymond made some humorous contribution to the

conversation, glazed eyes and perfunctory comment would be all his

wages, whereas if Colin, eager and careless, had made precisely the same

offering, he would have been awarded attention and laughter.

Colin, on the other hand, envied his brother not for anything he was,

but for everything he had. Theirs was no superficial antagonism; the

graces of address and person are no subjects for light envy, nor yet the

sceptred fist of regal possessions. That fist was Raymond’s; all would

be his; even Violet, perhaps, Stanier certainly, would be.

At this moment the antagonism flowered over Violet’s reply. Would she go

for a stroll with Raymond or wouldn’t she? Colin cared not a blade of

grass which she actually did; it was her choice that would feed his

hatred of his brother or make him chuckle over his discomfiture. For an

infinitesimal moment he diverted his gaze from just over Raymond’s head

to where, a tiny angle away, her eyes were level with his. He shook his

head ever so slightly; some drop of water perhaps had lodged itself from

his diving in his ear.

“Oh, we shall all be late,” said she, “and Uncle Philip hates our being

late. Only twenty minutes, did you say? I must rush. Hair, you know.”

She scudded off along the paved terrace without one glance behind her.

“Want a stroll, Raymond?” said Colin. “I haven’t got to undress, only to

dress. I needn’t go for five minutes yet.”

Raymond had seen the headshake and Colin’s subsequent application of the

palm of a hand to his ear was a transparent device. Colin, he made sure,

meant him to see that just as certainly as he meant Violet to do so. The

success of it enraged him, and not less the knowledge that it was meant

to enrage him. Colin’s hand so skilfully, so carelessly, laid these

traps which silkenly gripped him. He could only snarl when he was

caught, and even to snarl was to give himself away.

“Oh, thanks very much,” he said, determined not to snarl, “but, after

all, Vi’s right. Father hates us being late. How is he? I haven’t seen

him yet.”

“Ever so cheerful,” said Colin. “Does he know you are coming, by the

way?”

“Not unless Vi has told him. I telephoned to her.”

“Pleasant surprise,” said Colin. “Well, if you don’t want to stroll, I

think I’ll go in. Vi’s delighted that you’ve come.”

Once again Raymond’s eye lit up. “Is she?” he asked.

“Didn’t you think so?” said Colin, standing first on one foot and then

on the other, as he slipped on his tennis shoes to walk across the

paving of the terrace.

* * * * *

There had been no break since the days of Colin’s grandfather in the

solemnity of the ceremonial that preceded dinner. Now, as then, the

guests, if there were any, or, if not, the rest of the family, were

still magnificently warned of the approach of the great hour, and,

assembling in the long gallery which adjoined the dining-room, waited

for the advent of Lord Yardley.

That piece of ritual was like the Canon of the Mass, invariable and

significant. It crystallised the centuries of the past into the present;

dinner was the function of the day, dull it might be, but central and

canonical, and the centre of it all was the entrance of the head of the

family. He would not appear till all were ready; his presence made

completion, and the Staniers moved forward by order. So when the

major-domo had respectfully enfolded the flock in the long gallery, he

took his stand by the door into the dining-room. That was the signal to

Lord Yardley’s valet who waited by the door at the other end of the

gallery which led into his master’s rooms. He threw that open, and from

it, punctual as the cuckoo in the clock, out came Lord Yardley, and

every one stood up.

But in the present reign there had been a slight alteration in the minor

ritual of the assembling, for Colin was almost invariably late, and the

edict had gone forth, while he was but yet fifteen, and newly promoted

to a seat at dinner, that Master Colin was not to be waited for: the

major-domo must regard his jewelled flock as complete without him. He,

with a “Sorry, father,” took his vacant place when he was ready, and his

father’s grim face would soften into a smile. Raymond’s unpunctuality

was a different matter, and he had amended this weakness.

To-night there were no guests, and when the major-domo took his stand at

the dining-room door to fling it open on the remote entry of Lord

Yardley from the far end of the gallery, all the family but Colin were

assembled. Lord Yardley’s mother, now over eighty, white and watchful

and bloodless, had been as usual the first to arrive, and, leaning on

her stick, had gone to her chair by the fireplace, in which, upright and

silent, she waited during these canonical moments. She always came to

dinner, though not appearing at other meals, for she breakfasted and

lunched in her own rooms, where all day, except for a drive in the

morning, she remained invisible. Now she held up her white hand to

shield her face from the fire, for whatever the heat of the evening,

there was a smouldering log there for incense.

Ronald Stanier sat opposite her, heavy and baggy-eyed, breathing sherry

into the evening paper. His wife, the querulous Janet, was giving half

an ear to Raymond’s account of his puncture, and inwardly marvelling at

Lady Hester’s toilet. Undeterred by the weight of her sixty years, she

had an early-Victorian frock of pink satin, high in the waist and of

ample skirt. On her undulated wig of pale golden hair, the colour and

lustre of which had not suffered any change of dimness since the day

when she ran away with her handsome young husband, she wore a wreath of

artificial flowers; a collar of pearls encircled her throat which was

still smooth and soft. The dark eyebrows, highly arched, gave her an

expression of whimsical amusement, and bore out the twinkle in her blue

eyes and the little upward curve at the corner of her mouth. She was

quite conscious of her sister-in-law’s censorious gaze; poor Janet had

always looked like a moulting hen....

By her stood Violet, who had but this moment hurried in, and whose

entrance was the signal for Lord Yardley’s valet to open the door. She

had heard Colin splashing in his bath as she came along the passage,

though he had just bathed.

Then, with a simultaneous uprising, everybody stood, old Lady Yardley

leaned on her stick, Ronald put down the evening paper, and Raymond

broke off the interesting history of his punctured wheel.

Philip Yardley went straight to his mother’s chair, and gave her his

arm. In the dusk, Raymond standing between him and the window was but a

silhouette against the luminous sky. His father did not yet know that he

had arrived, and mistook him for his brother.

“Colin, what do you mean by being in time for dinner?” he said. “Most

irregular.”

“It’s I, father,” said Raymond.

“Oh, Raymond, is it?” said Lord Yardley. “I didn’t know you were here.

Glad to see you.”

The words were sufficiently cordial, but the tone was very unlike that

in which he had supposed himself to be addressing Colin. That was not

lost on Raymond; for envy, the most elementary of all human passions, is

also highly sensitive.

“You came from Cambridge?” asked his father, when they had sat down, in

the same tone of studious politeness. “The term’s over, I suppose.”

“Yes, a week ago,” said Raymond. As he spoke he made some awkward

movement in the unfolding of his napkin, and upset a glass which crashed

on to the floor. Lord Yardley found himself thinking, “Clumsy brute!”

“Of course; Colin’s been here a week now,” he said, and Raymond did not

miss that. Then Philip Yardley, considering that he had given his son an

adequate welcome, said no more.

These family dinners were not, especially in Colin’s absence and in

Raymond’s presence, very talkative affairs. Old Lady Yardley seldom

spoke at all, but sat watching first one face and then another, as if

with secret conjectures. Ronald Stanier paid little attention to

anything except to his plate and his glass, and it was usually left to

Violet and Lady Hester to carry on such conversation as there was. But

even they required the stimulus of Colin, and to-night the subdued blink

of spoons on silver-gilt soup-plates reigned uninterrupted. These had

just ceased when Colin appeared, like a lamp brought into a dusky room.

“Sorry, father,” he said. “I’m late, you know. Where’s my place? Oh,

between Aunt Hester and Violet. Ripping.”

“Urgent private affairs, Colin?” asked his father.

“Yes, terribly urgent. And private. Bath.”

The whole table revived a little, as when the gardener waters a drooping

bed of flowers.

“But you had only just bathed,” said Violet.

“That’s just why I wanted a bath. Nothing makes you so messy and sticky

as a bathe. And there were bits of grass between my toes, and a small

fragment of worm.”

“And how did they get there, dear?” asked Aunt Hester, violently

interested.

“Because I walked up in bare feet over the grass, Aunt Hester,” said

Colin. “It’s good for the nerves. Come and do it after dinner.”

Lord Yardley supposed that Colin had not previously seen his brother,

and that seeing him now did not care to notice his presence. So, with

the same chill desire to be fair in all ways to Raymond, he said:

“Raymond has come, Colin.”

“Yes, father, we’ve already embraced,” said he. “Golly, I don’t call

that soup. It’s muck. Hullo, granny dear, I haven’t seen you all day.

Good morning.”

Lady Yardley’s face relaxed; there came on her lips some wraith of a

smile. Colin’s grace and charm of trivial prattle was the only ray that

had power at all to thaw the ancient frost that had so long congealed

her. Ever since her husband’s death, twenty years ago, she had lived

some half of the year here, and now she seldom stirred from Stanier,

waiting for the end. Her life had really ceased within a few years of

her marriage; she had become then the dignified lay-figure, emotionless

and impersonal, typical of the wives of Staniers, and that was all that

her children knew of her. For them the frost had never thawed, nor had

she, even for a moment, lost its cold composure, even when on the night

that the news of Raymond’s and Colin’s birth had come to Stanier, there

came with it the summons that caused her husband to crash among the

glasses on the table. Nothing and nobody except Colin had ever given

brightness to her orbit, where, like some dead moon, she revolved in the

cold inter-stellar space.

But at the boy’s salutation across the table, she smiled. “My dear, what

an odd time to say good morning,” she said. “Have you had a nice day,

Colin?”

“Oh, ripping, grandmamma!” said he. “Enjoyed every minute of it.”

“That’s good. It’s a great waste of time not to enjoy....” Her glance

shifted from him to Lady Hester. “Hester, dear, what a strange gown,”

she said.

“It’s Aunt Hester’s go-away gown after her marriage,” began Colin.

“She....”

“Colin,” said his father sharply, “you’re letting your tongue run away

with you.”

Very unusually, Lady Yardley turned to Philip. “You mustn’t speak to

Colin like that, dear Philip,” she said. “He doesn’t know about those

things. And I like to hear Colin talk.”

“Very well, mother,” said Philip.

“Colin didn’t have a mother to teach him what to say, and what not to

say,” continued Lady Yardley; “you must not be harsh to Colin.”

The stimulus was exhausted and she froze into herself again.

Colin had been perfectly well aware during this, that Raymond was

present, and that nothing of it was lost on him. It would be too much to

say that he had performed what he and Violet called “the grandmamma

trick” solely to rouse Raymond’s jealousy, but to know that Raymond

glowered and envied was like a round of applause to him. It was from no

sympathy or liking for his grandmother that he thawed her thus and

brought her back from her remoteness; he did it for the gratification

of his own power in which Raymond, above all, was deficient.... Like

some antique bird she had perched for a moment on Colin’s finger; now

she had gone back into her cage again.

Colin chose that night to take on an air of offended dignity at his

father’s rebuke, and subsided into silence. He knew that every one would

feel his withdrawal, and now even Uncle Ronald who, with hardly less

aloofness than his mother, for he was buried in his glass and platter,

and was remote from everything except his vivid concern with food and

drink, tried to entice the boy out of his shell. Colin was pleased at

this: it was all salutary for Raymond.

“So you’ve been bathing, Colin,” he said.

“Yes, Uncle Ronald,” said he.

“Pleasant in the water?” asked Uncle Ronald.

“Quite,” said Colin.

Aunt Hester made the next attempt. They were all trying to please and

mollify him. “About that walking in the grass in bare feet,” she said.

“I should catch cold at my age. And what would my maid think?”

“I don’t know at all, Aunt Hester,” said Colin very sweetly.

Raymond cleared his throat. Colin was being sulky and unpleasant, and

he, the eldest, would make things agreeable again. No wonder Colin

subsided after that very ill-chosen remark about Aunt Hester.

“There’s a wonderful stride been made in this wireless telegraphy,

father,” he said. “There were messages transmitted to Newfoundland

yesterday, so I saw in the paper. A good joke about it in _Punch_. A

fellow said, ‘They’ll be inventing noiseless thunder next.’”

There was a dead silence, and then Colin laughed loudly.

“Awfully good, Raymond,” he said. “Very funny. Strawberries, Aunt

Hester?”

That had hit the mark. Leaning forward to pull the dish towards him, he

saw the flush on Raymond’s face.

“Really? As far as Newfoundland?” said Lord Yardley.

* * * * *

By now the major-domo was standing by the dining-room door again, and

Philip rose. His mother got up and stood, immobile and expressionless,

till the other women had passed out in front of her. Then, as she went

out, she said exactly what she had said for the last sixty years.

“You will like a game of whist, then, soon?”

Generally when the women had gone, the others moved up towards the host.

To-night Philip took up his glass and placed himself next Colin. The

decanters were brought round and placed opposite him, and he pushed them

towards Raymond.

“Help yourself, Raymond,” he said.

Then he turned round in his armchair to the other boy.

“Still vexed with me, Colin?” he said quietly.

“Of course not, father,” he said. “Sorry I sulked. But you did shut me

up with such a bang.”

“Well, open yourself at the same place,” said Philip.

“Rather. Aunt Hester’s dress, wasn’t it? Isn’t she too divine? If she

ever dies, which God forbid, you ought to have her stuffed and dressed

just like that, and put in a glass case in the hall to shew how young it

is possible to be when you’re old. But, seriously, do get a portrait

done of her to hang here. There’s nothing of her in the gallery.”

“Any other orders?” asked Philip.

“I don’t think so at present. Oh, by the way, are you going to Italy

this year?”

“Yes, I think I shall go out there before long for a few weeks as usual.

Why?”

“I thought that perhaps you would take me. I’ve got four months’

vacation, you see, now that I’m at Cambridge, and I’ve never been to

Italy yet.”

Philip paused; he was always alone in Italy. That was part of the

spell. “You’d get dreadfully bored, Colin,” he said. “I shall be at the

villa in Capri: there’s nothing to do except swim.”

Colin divined in his father’s mind some reluctance other than that which

he expressed. He dropped his eyes for a moment, then raised them again

to his father’s face, merry and untroubled.

“You don’t want me to come with you, father,” he said. “Quite all right,

but why not have told me so?”

Philip looked at the boy with that expression in his face that no one

else ever saw there; the tenderness for another, the heart’s need of

another, which had shot into fitful flame twenty years ago, had never

quite been extinguished; it had always smouldered there for Colin.

“I’ll think it over,” he said, and turned round in his chair.

“You were telling me something about wireless, Raymond,” he said. “As

far as Newfoundland! That is very wonderful. A few years ago scientists

would have laughed at such an idea as at a fairy-tale or a superstition.

But the superstitions of one generation become the science of the next.”

Raymond by this time was in a state of thorough ill-temper. He had

witnessed all the evening Colin’s easy triumphs; he had seen how Colin,

when annoyed, as he had been at his father’s rebuke, went into his

shell, and instantly every one tried to tempt him out again. Just now in

that low-voiced conversation between his brother and his father, he had

heard his father say, “Still vexed with me?” in a sort of suppliance....

He determined to try a manœuvre that answered so well.

“I should have said just the opposite,” he remarked, re-filling his

glass. “I should have thought that the science and beliefs of one

generation became the superstitions of the next. Our legend, for

instance; that was soberly believed once.”

Philip Yardley did not respond quite satisfactorily. “Ah!” he said,

getting up. “Well, shall we be going?”

Raymond had just poured himself out a glass of port, and, very

unfortunately, he remembered a precisely similar occasion on which his

father, just when Colin had done the same, proposed an adjournment. He

repeated the exact words Colin had used then.

“Oh, you might wait till I’ve finished my port,” he said.

That did not produce the right effect. On the previous occasion his

father had said, “Sorry, old boy,” and had sat down again.

“You’d better follow us, then,” said Philip. “But don’t drink any more,

Raymond. You’ve had as much as is good for you.”

Raymond’s face blazed. To be spoken to like that, especially in front of

his uncle and brother, was intolerable. He got up and pushed his

replenished glass away, spilling half of it. Instantly Colin saw his

opportunity, and knowing fairly well what would happen, he put his hand

within Raymond’s arm in brotherly remonstrance.

“Oh, I say, Raymond!” he said.

Raymond shook him off. “Leave me alone, can’t you?” he said angrily.

Then he turned to his father. “I didn’t mean to spill the wine, father,”

he said. “It was an accident.”

“Accidents are liable to happen, when one loses one’s temper,” said

Philip. “Ring the bell, please.”

There were two tables for cards laid out in the drawing-room, and

Raymond, coming in only a few seconds after the others, found that,

without waiting for him, the bridge-table had already been made up with

Lady Hester, Violet, his father, and Colin. They had not given him a

chance to play there, and now for the next hour he was condemned to play

whist with his grandmother and his uncle and aunt, a dreary pastime.

At ten old Lady Yardley went dumbly to bed, and there was the choice

between sitting here until the bridge was over, or of following Uncle

Ronald into the smoking-room. But that he found he could not do; his

jealousy of Colin, both as regards his father and as regards Violet,

constrained him as with cords to stop and watch them, and contrast their

merriment with his own ensconced and sombre broodings.

And then there was Violet herself. Colin’s conjecture had been perfectly

right, for in the fashion of Staniers, he must be considered as in the

process of falling in love with her. The desire for possession, rather

than devotion, was the main ingredient in the bubbling vat, and that was

very sensibly present. She made a ferment in his blood, and though he

would not have sacrificed anything which he really valued, such as his

prospective lordship of Stanier, for her sake, he could not suffer the

idea that she should not be his. He knew, too, how potent in her was the

Stanier passion for the home, and that he counted as his chief asset,

for he had no illusion that Violet was in love with him. Nor was she, so

he thought, in love with Colin; the two were much more like a couple of

chums than lovers.

So he sat and watched them round the edge of the newspaper which had

beguiled Uncle Ronald’s impatience for dinner. The corner where he sat

was screened from the players by a large vase of flowers on the table

near them, and Raymond felt that he enjoyed, though without original

intention, the skulking pleasures of the eavesdropper.

Colin, as usual, was to the fore. Just now he was dummy to his partner,

Aunt Hester, who, having added a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles to

complete her early-Victorian costume, was feeling a shade uneasy. She

had just done what she most emphatically ought not to have done, and was

afraid that both her adversaries had perceived it. Colin had perceived

it, too; otherwise the suit of clubs was deficient. Violet had already

alluded to this.

“Oh, Aunt Hester!” cried Colin. “What’s the use of pretending you’ve not

revoked? Don’t cling on to that last club; play it, and have done with

it. If you don’t, you’ll revoke again.”

Aunt Hester still felt cunning; she thought she might be able to bundle

it up in the last trick. “But I ain’t got a club, Colin,” she said,

reverting to mid-Victorian speech.

“Darling Aunt Hester, you mean ‘haven’t,’” said Colin. “‘Ain’t’ means

‘aren’t,’ and it isn’t grammar even then, though you are my aunt.

‘Ain’t....’”

Lord Yardley, leaning forward, pulled Colin’s hair. It looked so golden

and attractive, it reminded him.... “Colin, are you dummy, or ain’t

you?” he asked.

“Certainly, father. Can’t you see Aunt Hester’s playing the hand? I

shouldn’t call it playing, myself. I should call it playing at playing.

Club, please, Aunt Hester.”

“Well, if you’re dummy, hold your tongue,” said Lord Yardley. “Dummy

isn’t allowed to speak, and....”

“Oh, those are the old rules,” said Colin. “The new rules make it

incumbent on dummy to talk all the time. Hurrah, there’s Aunt Hester’s

club, aren’t it? One revoke, and a penalty of three tricks....”

“Doubled,” said his father.

“Brute,” said Colin, “and no honours at all! Oh yes, fourteen to us

above. Well played, Aunt Hester! Wasn’t it a pity? Your deal, Vi.”

Colin, having cut the cards, happened to look up at the big vase of

flowers which stood close to the table. As he did so, there was a

trivial glimmer, as of some paper just stirred, behind it. He had

vaguely thought that Uncle Ronald and Raymond had both gone to the

smoking-room, but there was certainly some one there, and which of the

two it was he had really no idea. Every one else, adversaries and

partner, was behaving as if there was no one else in the room, so why

not he?

“Raymond’s got the hump this evening,” he said cheerfully. “He won at

whist--Lord, what a game!--because I saw Aunt Janet pay him half-a-crown

with an extraordinarily acid expression, and ask for change. So as he’s

won at cards, he will be blighted in love. I expect he’s had a knock

from the young thing at the tobacconist’s in King’s Parade. I think she

likes me best, father. But it’ll be the same daughter-in-law. She

breathes through her nose, and is marvellously genteel. Otherwise she’s

just like Violet.”

“Pass,” said Violet.

“Hurrah! I knew it would make you pessimistic to be called like a

tobacconist’s....”

Philip Yardley laid down his cards and actually laughed. “Colin, you

low, vulgar brute,” he said, “don’t talk so much!”

Colin imitated Raymond’s voice and manner to perfection. “I should have

said just the opposite,” he remarked. “I should have thought you wanted

me to talk more, and make trumps.”

Violet caught on. “Oh, you got him exactly, Colin,” she said. “What did

he say that about?”

“Go on, Colin,” said his father. “We shall never finish.”

Colin examined his hand. “Three no-trumps,” he said. “Not one, nor two,

but three. Glorious trinity!”

There was no counter-challenge, and as Lord Yardley considered his lead,

Colin looked up through the vase of flowers once more. There was some

one there still, and he got up to fetch a match from a side-table. That

gave him a clearer view of what lay beyond.

“Hullo, Raymond?” he said. “Thought you’d gone to the smoking-room.”

“No; just looking at the paper,” said Raymond. “I’m going now.”

“Oh, but we’ll have another rubber,” said Colin. “Cut in?”

“No, thanks,” said Raymond.

Colin waited till the door had closed behind him. “Lor!” he said.

“Just shut that door, Colin,” said Lord Yardley.

Lady Hester was thrilled about the tobacconist’s young thing; it really

would be rather a good joke if one of the boys, following his father’s

example, married a “baggage” of that sort, and she determined to pursue

the subject with Colin on some future occasion. She loved such loose

natural talk as he treated her to; he told her all his escapades. He was

just such a scamp as Colin the first must have been, and with just such

gifts and utter absence of moral sense was he endowed.

Indeed, the old legend, so it seemed to her, lived again in Colin,

though couched in more modern terms. It was the mediæval style to say

that for the price of the soul, Satan was willing to dower his

beneficiary with all material bounty and graces; more modernly, you said

that this boy was an incorrigible young Adonis, who feared neither God

nor devil. True, the lordship of Stanier was not yet Colin’s, but

something might happen to that grim, graceless Raymond.

How the two hated each other, and how different were the exhibitions of

their antagonism! Raymond hated with a glowering, bilious secrecy, that

watched and brooded; Colin with a gay contempt, a geniality almost. But

if the shrewd old Lady Hester had been asked to wager which of the two

was the most dangerous to the other, she would without hesitation have

put her money on Colin.

The second rubber was short, but as hilarious as the first, and on its

conclusion Lady Hester hurried to bed, saying that she would be “a

fright” in the morning if she lost any more sleep. Violet followed her,

Philip withdrew to his own room, and Colin sauntered along to the

smoking-room in quest of whisky. His Uncle Ronald was still there,

rapidly approaching the comatose mood of midnight, which it would have

been inequitable to call intoxication and silly to call sobriety.

Raymond sprawled in a chair by the window.

“Hullo, Uncle Ronald, still up?” said Colin. “You’ll get scolded.”

Uncle Ronald lifted a sluggish eyelid. “Hey?” he said. “Oh, Colin, is

it? What’s the time, my boy?”

“Half-past twelve,” said Colin, adding on another half-hour. He wanted

to get rid of his uncle and see how he stood with his brother. No doubt

they would have a row.

“Gobbless me,” said Ronald. “I shall turn in. Just a spot more whisky.

Good night, boys.”

As soon as he had gone Raymond got out of his chair and placed himself

where he could get his heels on the edge of the low fender-kerb. He

hated talking “up” to Colin, and this gave him a couple of inches.

“I want to ask you something,” he said.

“Ask away,” said Colin.

“Did you know I was in the room when you imitated me just now?”

“Hadn’t given a thought to it,” said Colin.

“It’s equally offensive whether you mimic me before my face or behind my

back,” said Raymond. “It was damned rude.”

“Shall I come to you for lessons in manners?” asked Colin. “What do you

charge?”

Colin spoke with all the lightness of good-humoured banter, well aware

that if Raymond replied at all, he would make some sledge-hammer

rejoinder. He would swing a cudgel against the rapier that pricked him,

yet never land a blow except on the air, or, maybe, his own foot.

“It’s beastly insolence on your part,” said Raymond.

“And that’s very polite,” said Colin. “You may mimic me how and where

and when you choose. If it’s like, I shall laugh. If it isn’t, well, I

shall still laugh.”

“I haven’t got your sense of humour,” said Raymond.

“Clearly, nor Violet’s. She thought I had got you to a ‘t.’ You probably

heard what she said from your sequestered corner behind your newspaper.”

Raymond advanced a step. “Look here, Colin, do you mean to imply that I

was listening?”

Colin laughed. “And I want to ask you a question,” he said. “Didn’t you

know that we all thought you had gone away?”

Raymond disregarded this. “Then there’s another thing. What do you mean

by telling father about the girl at the tobacconist’s? You know it was

nothing at all.”

“Rather,” said Colin. “I said so. You seem to forget that I told him

that I was the favourite. That’s the part you didn’t like.”

Raymond flushed. “It’s all very well for you to say that,” he said. “But

you know perfectly well that my father doesn’t treat us alike. Things

which are quite harmless in his eyes when you do them appear very

different to him when I’m the culprit. I had had a knock from a

tobacconist’s girl, had I? You’re a cad to have told him that quite

apart from its being a lie.”

Colin laughed with irritating naturalness. “Is this the first lesson in

manners?” he said. “I’m beginning to see the hang of it. You call the

other fellow a cad and a liar. About my father’s not treating us alike,

that’s his affair. But I should never dream of calling you a liar for

saying that. We’re not alike: why should he treat us alike? You’ve got a

foul temper, you see; that doesn’t add to your popularity with anybody.”

He spoke in the same voice in which he might have told Raymond that he

had a speck of dust on the coat, and yawned rather elaborately.

“Take care you don’t rouse it,” said Raymond.

“Why not? It rather amuses me to see you in a rage.”

“Oh, it does, does it?” said Raymond with his voice quivering.

“I assure you of it. I’m having a most amusing evening, thanks to you.

And this chat has been the pleasantest part of it. Pity that it’s so

late.”

Raymond, as usual, had throughout, the worst of these exchanges and was

quite aware of it. He had been ill-bred and abusive through his loss of

temper while Colin, insolent though his speech and his manner had been,

had kept within the bounds of civil retort in his sneers and contempt.

In all probability he would give an account of it all to Violet

to-morrow, and there was no need for him to embroider; a strictly

correct version of what had passed was quite disagreeable enough.

This Raymond wanted to avoid in view of his desire that Violet should

look on him as favourably as possible. Whether he meant to propose to

her during his visit here, he hardly knew himself, but certainly he

wanted to be in her good books. This, and this alone, prompted him now;

he hated Colin, all the more because he had been absolutely unable to

ruffle him or pierce the fine armour of his composure, but as regards

Violet, and perhaps his father, he feared him.

“I’m afraid I’ve lost my temper, Colin,” he said. “And I owe you an

apology for all I’ve said. You had annoyed me by mimicking me and by

telling father about that girl at Cambridge.”

Colin felt that he had pulled the wings off a fly that had annoyed him

by its buzzing; the legs might as well follow....

“Certainly you owe me an apology,” he said. “But, considering

everything, I don’t quite know whether you are proposing to pay it.”

Raymond turned on him fiercely. “Ah, that’s you all over!” he said.

“Oh, we’re being quite natural,” said Colin. “So much better.”

He paused a moment.

“Now I don’t want to be offensive just now,” he said, “so let’s sit down

and try to tolerate each other for a minute. There.”

Raymond longed to be at his throat, to feel his short, strong fingers

throttling the life out of that smooth white neck. But some careless

superior vitality in Colin made him sit down.

“Let’s face it, Raymond,” he said. “We loathe each other like poison,

and it is nonsense to pretend we don’t. Unfortunately, you are the

eldest, so in the end you will score, however much I annoy you. But put

yourself in my place; imagine yourself the younger with your foul

temper. You would probably try to kill me. Of course, by accident. But

I’m not intending to kill you. I am very reasonable; you must be

reasonable, too. But just put yourself in my place.”

Raymond shifted in the chair in which Colin, with a mere gesture of a

finger, had made him sit. “Can’t we possibly get on better together,

Colin?” he said. “After all, as you say, I come into everything on my

father’s death. I have Stanier, I have the millions where you have the

thousands. I can be very useful to you. You adore the place, and I can

let you come here as often and as long as you like, and I can also

prevent your setting foot in it. If you’ll try to be decent to me, I

promise you that you shan’t regret it.”

Colin put his head on one side and looked at his brother with an air of

pondering wonder. “Oh, that cock won’t fight,” he said. “You know as

well as I do that when you are master here, I would sooner go to hell

than come here, and you would sooner go to hell than let me come.

Perhaps I’ve got a dull imagination, but it’s no use my trying to

imagine that. Do be sensible. If you could do anything to injure me at

this moment when you are proposing a truce, you know that you would do

it. But you can’t. You can’t hurt me in any way whatever. But what you

do know is that I can hurt you in all sorts of ways. I can poison my

father’s mind about you--it’s pretty sick already. I can poison Violet’s

mind, and that’s none too healthy. You see, they both like me most

tremendously, and they don’t very much like you. It’s just the same at

Cambridge. I’ve got fifty friends: you haven’t got one. I dare say it’s

not your fault: anyhow, we’ll call it your misfortune. But you want me

to do something for you in return for nothing you can do for me, or,

perhaps, nothing that you will do for me.”

Raymond frowned; when he was thinking he usually frowned. When Colin was

thinking he usually smiled.

“If in the future there is anything I can do for you, Colin,” he said,

“I will do it. I want to be friends with you. Good Lord, isn’t that

reasonable? We’re brothers.”

Colin leaned forward in his chair. He was aware of the prodigious nature

of what he was meaning to say. “Give me Stanier, Raymond,” he said.

“With what father is leaving me, and with what Aunt Hester is leaving

me, I can easily afford to keep it up. I don’t ask you for any money. I

just want Stanier. Of course, it needn’t actually be mine. But I want to

live here, while you live somewhere else. There’s the Derbyshire house,

for instance. I’ve got Stanier in my blood. If, on father’s death,

you’ll do that, there’s nothing I won’t do for you.”

He paused.

“I can do a good deal, you know,” he said. “And I can refrain from doing

a good deal.”

The proposal was so preposterous that Raymond fairly laughed. Instantly

Colin got up.

“That sounds pleasant,” he said. “Good night, Raymond. I wouldn’t have

any more whisky, if I were you. Father seemed to think you’d had enough

drink before the end of dinner.”