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Ebook has 2055 lines and 113853 words, and 42 pages

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" 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.

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 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.

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 , 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 anaemic 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 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.

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.

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 , 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 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.

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

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."

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