“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 endhe 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 LadyHester 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, withoutsaying 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....
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 andfruit 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 ofthe 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 horizonwhere 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 capablecontadinawith 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 afestain 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 intoflower, 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, hewould 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 ofmoney, 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 thereI 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 whenyou 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 madea 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 scrawledletter 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 certaindecision 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 hopeof 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.
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 athousand 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, “NisiDominus 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 anattempt 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 onone 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 farend 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 downthe 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.