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.