Colin II.
THROUGHOUT this hot afternoon of July the terrace had lain empty and soaked in sunshine, and it was not till the shadow of the yew-hedge had crept half-way along it from the west, that Violet Yardley stepped out of the long window of the gallery which lay along the front of the house. Colin was in town; he had said he might possibly return to-day, but, if so, he would telephone. Violet had just asked if any message had come from her husband, and it was with a feeling of relief and remission that she had heard that there was none.
She paused in the doorway with puckered eyelids, as she emerged from the cool dimness of the house into that reverberating brightness. She was bareheaded, and the gold of her hair was so pierced by the sun that it looked as if it shone from some illumination within itself. She had the blue eyes of her race, its fineness of feature and arrogance of bearing, and so like she was to Colin that they could still almost have repeated that jest of his school-days when, on the occasion of a fancy-dress ball, the two had changed costumes with each other half-way through the evening, and had been undetected till Colin’s sudden spasm of half-cracked laughter, when a school-friend of his had made a suitable speech to so enchanting a girl, had given them away.... She had changed very little since then, her figure had still the adorable slimness of girl-hood.
There was a small encampment of chairs, with a table laid for tea at the shady end of the terrace and she seemed to be the first to come out from the coolness of the house. Aunt Hester would be here soon or perhaps Violet’s father still hobbling from a rather sharp attack of gout, and presently Dennis, her fourteen month-old baby, would be wheeled up and down the terrace by his nurse for his evening airing, and make some more of those intrepid experiments in voluntary locomotion, which were meeting with an increasing but still hazardous success. He appeared to consider his legs as an impediment more than an aid to movement: they got in his way and caused stumbling, but he was rapidly teaching them not to interfere. Colin would be pleased to see the progress his young son had made in his fortnight’s absence.
Violet’s eyes wandered from the terrace to the blaze of the flower-borders round the lawn below, and beyond to the bright surface of the lake. So still was it and unruffled by any breeze that it might have been covered with a sheet of ice that gleamed blue with the reflection from the sky. At the thought of ice on the lake, there started unbidden into her mind the memory of that terrible morning, only eighteen months ago, when Raymond, Colin’s elder twin-brother, had taken his skates down there and had never been seen alive again. She and his father had followed him not long afterwards, and had found his boots on the bank, and a great hole in the ice at the deep end by the sluice, where the rhododendron bushes hung over the lake. It had been terrible, and was there something more terrible yet? Had no-one ever seen Raymond alive after the moment when he left the house? Colin had once said something of casual application, about a drowning man coming up to the surface not three times, as popularly supposed, but once only, and somehow that had suggested to her that he had seen Raymond struggling in the water. There was no cause why so ghastly an idea should ever have occurred to her; it was more like the unsubstantial remembrance of a nightmare than a waking thought, but it had the haunting vividness of dreams.
There came the brisk tapping of heels along the terrace and Aunt Hester approached. She was small in stature, and carried her sixty years with a dainty lightness. She had on a gay print dress, short in the skirt in true modern fashion, which shewed to great advantage her neat slim calves and tiny ankles. On her head was a broad-brimmed straw-hat, a garden of monstrous blue convolvuluses, and her face was hidden beneath swathes of pale pink veil. Her tripping gait suggested a bird scouring the lawn for its breakfast, and her speech was the argot of smart young ladies in the mid-Victorian epoch.
“Well, thank God, this wretched sun’s got behind the trees at last,” she said, “and I can take off my veil. Sunshine’s a plague to the complexion, my dear. How you stand it, I don’t know. Give me my cup of tea, there’s a good girl; I’m as dry as the desert.”
She unpinned her layers of veil, as Violet poured out her tea, disclosing the prettiest little face, pink and white, of porcelain delicacy.
“Girls to-day ain’t got one decent skin among a score of them,” she observed. “They go playing golf and smoking cigarettes till their faces are like kippers, and then they make them twice as bad by smudging themselves with rouge and powder and muck, till they’re in such a mess as never was. How a young man nowadays can bring himself to kiss one of them without wanting to wash his face afterwards, I don’t know. I like my tea strong, my dear. Hope it’s been standing.”
Violet held out the cup.
“Will that do, Aunt Hester?” she asked. “Or will you wait a little?”
“No, I’ll take that,” said she, “and the next cup will be a bit stronger. Then I shall go for my walk, and get a good perspiration, and have my cold tub, and be ready for my dinner. That’s the way to keep well.”
Violet laughed.
“You’re a marvel, Aunt Hester,” she said. “Colin always says he’ll never be as young as you, even if he lives to be a hundred.”
“Colin’s a wretch,” said Aunt Hester, selecting a piece of hot buttered bun. “He’s making fun of me, pulling my leg as they call it nowadays. Anything been heard of him? Is he coming down to-night?”
“He hasn’t telephoned to say so.”
“Well, I wish he would. Stanier ain’t really Stanier when Colin’s not here. I shall have to run up to town and see what he’s after; mischief I’ll be bound. But Colin’s sunshine’s the only sunshine I’ve any use for. Lord, how his father used to dote on him. And pleased he was, my dear, when you gave poor Raymond the chuck, and took Colin instead.”
“I was thinking about Raymond just now,” said Violet.
“Well, I should have thought you could have found a pleasanter subject than that,” said Lady Hester. “He was a sulky bad-tempered boy was Raymond, and I daresay God knew best, when He let him drown. Not but what I’m sorry for him, but as for pretending to like people just because they’re dead, I call that bunkum, and if I ever die, my dear, which God forbid, I hope you and Colin won’t talk any trash about me, and say I was the model of all the virtues. Such a pack of nonsense! But don’t let’s talk about that.”
She looked round, and her eyes sharp as a terrier’s noticed what Violet had not seen yet. At the far end of the terrace had appeared a wheeled chair pushed by a woman in nurse’s costume.
“Why there’s my mother,” said Lady Hester. “Fancy her coming out!”
This was indeed a most unusual appearance. Old Lady Yardley, mother of Colin’s father, of Lady Hester and of Ronald Stanier was now seldom seen until the hour of dinner, when she with her bath-chair was brought down in the lift from her rooms, was wheeled into the long gallery, and, with the help of her crutch-handled stick, transferred herself to the brocaded chair by the fireplace near the dining-room. In the grate, whatever the weather, a couple of logs smouldered into white ash, and by it she sat till the rest were assembled. So she had done for sixty-three years, when first as a bride of eighteen she came to the house, waiting till all were ready when, according to immemorial usage, the major-domo threw open the doors of Lord Yardley’s room at the far end of the gallery, and he entered. That had been the custom in the days of her father-in-law, and when her husband reigned, and when her son reigned, up till now when Colin, her grandson, still kept up the ancestral tradition. She seldom spoke but sat through dinner, eating in silence what was put before her, and, in the manner of the very old, regarding now one, now another of her companions with eyes blank and unwinking, but half-veiled with the drooping lids of age. After dinner she played a couple of rubbers of whist, and when they were done she was conveyed back into the silence and sequestration of her room again. There she remained, thickly rimed by the Stanier frost, until the hour came round for her again to put on her jewels and her evening-gown, and wait by the fireplace for Lord Yardley, be he father-in-law or husband or son or grandson. Colin alone had always the power to galvanize her into life; his presence blew away the white ash that seemed to cover her mind, as it covered those smouldering logs in the fireplace, and disclosed some mysterious pale fire that still burned within. She would nod and smile at him when he kissed her, would listen with pleasure to what he said to her, would ask him sometimes some question about his doings. She might enquire what he had actually done to-day: equally well she might enquire whether he had been out with Raymond, who had been dead this year and a half, or whether his grandfather, who had fallen lifeless across the dining-room table, on the very day that Colin was born, would make one of their whist-table that night. Colin always had some answer that pleased and satisfied her, and sometime next day or maybe a week afterwards she would shew she remembered it by some further question or comment. But she seemed to have no cognizance of any of the others, unless she wanted to know something about Colin. She ate her dinner in silence and in silence played her whist, and waited for the next evening.
She was wheeled now half-way down the terrace, and there her nurse would have turned again, but she gesticulated and pointed to where Violet and Lady Hester were sitting.
“I can’t make out what she wants, my lady,” said the nurse to Violet. “She told me she wished to come out. But it’s so warm, it can’t hurt her.”
Violet went to the side of the bath-chair.
“Well, Granny,” she said. “Have you come out to have tea with Aunt Hester and me?”
Old Lady Yardley looked at her in silence: then transferred that unwinking gaze to Lady Hester. Lady Hester particularly disliked this grim silent observation: it gave her ‘the creeps.’
“I’ll be going for my walk,” she said. “Whatever Mamma wants, my dear, she doesn’t want us.”
“Where’s Colin?” asked old Lady Yardley.
“He hasn’t come, Granny,” said Violet. “I don’t think he’s coming to-day.”
“Yes, he’s coming to-day,” said Lady Yardley. “Is he here now? Is he with Raymond? I want Colin.”
“Granny dear, he’s in London,” said Violet. “We’ll let you know the moment he comes.”
“Just a fad she’s got, my lady,” said the nurse.... It was impossible to speak of old Lady Yardley as if she was there. There was no-one truly there, unless Colin was there, too. The nurse turned to her charge.
“You’d better let me take you back to your rooms, my lady,” she said, “and have a nice rest till dinner-time. You’ve seen for yourself that his lordship isn’t here.”
Old Lady Yardley paid not the smallest attention to this. “I shall wait for Colin on the terrace,” she said to Violet. “I shall wait there till Colin comes. He is coming.”
“Wheel her up and down then,” said Violet to the nurse.
To Aunt Hester’s great relief, old Lady Yardley consented to have her chair turned round, and be wheeled away again.
“She gives me the creeps, my dear,” said Aunt Hester, “though I know she’s my own mother. But there it is! Ever since I can remember she was cold and dead: the iceberg your Uncle Philip and I used to call her. A beautiful woman she was, too: it’s strange that your Uncle Philip and your father were such plain men.”
“You took all her good looks, Aunt Hester,” said Violet. Aunt Hester loved firm little compliments, laid on with the full spade.
“Well, I had my share of them,” she said, “but beauty ran to prettiness in me, and that’s a sad seeding. The Stanier style skipped my generation, and I daresay that’s why it came out strong in the next. Your Uncle Philip and your father, as I say, two plain men if ever there was one, and yet one was the father of Colin, and the other of you. You two have got it all: that’s what’s happened. There was never such a pair of Staniers as you, and as like as two peas. Make haste, my dear, and have a dozen sons and daughters, and there’ll be a dinner-table worth photographing when you’ve got your family growing up. Let them all be as wicked as hell, and as long as they have the good looks of their mother and father I’ll forgive ’em. There are enough plain folk in the world already who can be models of piety, but when I see a handsome boy, I want to see him kissing a pretty girl, as I’m too old for him now.”
“Aunt Hester, you’re a pagan,” observed Violet.
“I always was, my dear,” said she, “and it’s pagans who make the world go round. It ain’t for long that anyone’s fit to look at, so, while youth lasts, for God’s sake let them make the most of it. There’ll be time for them to lead a godly life when no-one asks them to do anything else. That’s what I say.”
With which atrocious sentiments, Aunt Hester walked briskly off to get her good perspiration to prepare her for her cold tub and her dinner.
The Staniers had always been patriarchal folk, and indeed in that immense house there was room for the exercise of this family virtue, without any inconvenient jostling of the generations: it was an asylum and almshouse for the antiquated members of the family. Four generations indeed were now installed there: old Lady Yardley represented the earliest, and next in succession came her two children, Lady Hester and Ronald Stanier with his wife, all of whom inhabited what Colin called the Dowager-wing. If he wished to say something special about Violet’s father, he called it the Home for Inebriates, or if her mother had to be characterized, the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen. Old Lady Yardley was a permanent inmate: since her husband’s death twenty-one years ago, she had never left Stanier, and Ronald, Violet’s father, was scarcely less constant, for he only absented himself for a curative month at Aix or Marienbad every August, which should enable him to continue eating and drinking too much for the remainder of the year, or passed an occasional fortnight in his much less comfortable flat in town. When there he spent most of his time at his Club presenting the back of his head to St. James’s Street, and dozing over a succession of morning and evening papers: the morning and evening papers were for him the current day. When Colin and his wife were in London, he would still stay on here, dining nightly in silence with his mother, and sitting with her afterwards, nodding and snorting under her steady and malevolent gaze till she was wheeled off by her nurse, and he would fuddle the rest of the evening away over a couple of cigars and the whisky bottle.
Ronald’s wife, Margaret, also was usually in residence here, an eclipsed and negligible presence, whom it was difficult to be aware of, and impossible to miss. There had never been any real parental or filial relationship between her and Violet. She behaved with controlled propriety on all occasions, sad or festive, and emotion withered in her immaculate vicinity. The Stanier frost which falls on those who marry into that family had long ago congealed her: there was no telling what (if anything) lay beneath that cold chalky surface. She drank hot water with her meals (though it never thawed her), always replied if spoken to, took a walk every morning in the Park, if the day was fine, and if not, sat in her sitting-room in the Dowager’s wing and played Patience. Her career in life was to write out the menu-cards for the dinner-table in French, with accents where required. Violet made occasional efforts to get in touch with her, but there was nothing to touch; her hand merely became numb with the cold mist in which it groped. Margaret Stanier went with her husband to Aix for his yearly cure: she kept house for him in London, but for the greater part of the year they were here, not welcome exactly, but not unwelcome, merely part of the house like stair-carpets in unfrequented passages which were sometimes taken up, and then laid down again. It had always been so at Stanier: brothers and sons of earlier generations were part of the house, if they chose to make themselves so, until the day came when they were borne on their short journey to the family vault in the church that stood not two hundred yards away.
Lady Hester was the fourth but less chronic inhabitant of the Dowager’s wing, for she had still a lively appreciation of the gaieties and stir of life, and chiefly confined her visits to the times when “that wretch” Colin made things “go a bit.” “For where’s the use, my dear,” she used to say, “in my sitting to be stared at by Mamma, or in watching poor Ronald fuddle himself? I like a bit more spunk than that.” But she, like Violet, like Colin, like her brother, had that feeling about Stanier, just the place itself, which for generations all the family have shared. To them all it meant something intimate and indefinable, something for which Violet, for instance, had been willing to marry the dark uncouth Raymond, if, by that, she might become mistress of the house. True, that had not been required of her: she had married Hyperion instead of the Satyr, and had harvested love and that deep-set terror that prowled about in the darkness below these magnificent surfaces. Had she been challenged as to whether she believed in the legend in any literal sense, she would perhaps have denied it, but she would have given her soul to deny that, as regards Colin, there was no spiritual significance in it. Whether it was actually true or not, did not matter: that belonged to the dust of mediævalism. But there was a darkness deeper than that.... None of the others, not Aunt Hester with her gay paganism, not old Lady Yardley with her half-closed eyes and steady gaze, knew Colin as she knew him. They saw the charm of him, the beauty, the sunshine of his gaiety, and just occasionally winced under the quick lash of his tongue. But none of them shuddered at what lay below his sunshine.
There came out of the gallery door that presence which alone had power to scare off these black ill-omened birds of thought from Violet’s mind. Here was the fourth of the generations that inhabited the house, Dennis in his perambulator being wheeled out for his evening airing and for whatever fresh discoveries about the use of legs might reward his daring. Just as he came out, the bath-chair with its withdrawn and antique occupant was passing the door, and dramatically enough, so it seemed to Violet, the two were face to face across the gulf of eighty years which divided them, both attended and conveyed, the one owing to the infirmity of faded energies, the other from the immaturity of them. Occasionally old Lady Yardley seemed to take some notice of Dennis; the faint dawning of the smile with which she looked on his father, would begin to hover on her mouth, and the heavy eyelids lifted a little. To-day, as Violet saw, that blink of recognition was there, but immediately Lady Yardley’s face clouded again. “No, that’s not Colin,” she said to her nurse, “but he’s coming.” Then as the bath-chair in its peregrinations came close to the tea-table again her eyes were alert to see if he was there, but for Violet they had no spark of recognition. It was always for Colin that she searched: no-one else could reward that silent scrutiny.
Violet got up when the bath-chair had turned and gone back, for here was the perambulator with Dennis in it. Her baby was the emblem and incarnation of those early days of her marriage, before she believed in that spiritual fulfilment of the legend which since had clouded the fair morning of her love with its gross darkness, and there lived for her again the hours when Colin was her adored lover in Southern nights at Capri, where, at his father’s villa, they had spent their honeymoon. Dennis was to her the untainted blossom of those days.
There he was, drumming with his hands on the apron of his perambulator, demanding with shrill cheerful crowings to be let out to make fresh discoveries about the laws of motion. He saw her coming towards him and the crowings swelled into enraptured squeals.
“Take him out, Nurse,” said Violet. “Now, Dennis, come and walk to me.”
That was precisely what Dennis wanted to do if he could, but the squeals subsided over the extreme seriousness of the undertaking. He stood, swaying slightly, as his nurse’s arms released him, and regarding with fixed attention the two dimpled sandalled feet which certainly had some share in the proposed excursion, though it was still a matter of doubt as to what that share was. After having examined them both, he decided to put his best foot foremost. This was a complete success, and he shouted “Daddy!” which wasn’t quite so clever. That effort somehow disturbed his equilibrium, and he fell down.
“Clumsy,” said his mother. “Try again, Dennis.”
Dennis had not the slightest intention of trying again just now. There was a crack between two paving-stones which was more interesting than the problems of locomotion. But destiny, in the habiliment of his nurse, set him on his feet and Violet moved a little nearer in order to make the tremendous gulf of yards that separated them yawn less impossibly. Then staggering like a ship at sea, he launched himself again, and after a wild semi-circular career he fell against her skirts.
But exploration is exhausting work, taxing to the nerves and imagination as much as to the muscles, and presently he was wheeled away again for bath and bed. But still up and down the terrace, now pausing, now moving on again, went Lady Yardley’s bath-chair, as she waited for Colin to come and bring her back out of the mists where she moved into the clear twilight, which, though veiled and dim, rendered visible the phantoms that peopled it. But when the dressing-bell sounded she spoke:
“Take me in,” she said. “Colin will be here for dinner, and I must not be late.”
To-night Ronald Stanier was the first down. He had been something of a buck in his earlier years, and the habit of impressing the world with his gallant appearance, had remained with him though dishevelling age and a remarkable fondness for food and drink had rendered his task more difficult. His forehead and crown were completely bald, but he grew his hair, of a bright suspicious auburn and unflecked by any line of grey, very long on one side of his head, and espaliered it carefully over the shiny pink skin of his pate. He wore clothes that were meant to make him look slim, but only succeeded in looking tight themselves; a monocle, a large solitaire and a carnation were the other salient points of his decorative scheme. His face, loose and fleshy, had a trampled look about it, as of a muddy lane over which a flock of sheep had passed: he limped a little as he came down the gallery. His wife, thin and dry, followed him shortly after, and presently old Lady Yardley was wheeled in. She took no notice whatever of the others, and, with the help of her stick, transferred herself to the brocaded chair by the fireplace, where that invariable couple of logs sent up a vacillating thread of blue smoke. Why on so hot a night a fire should have been there was beyond conjecture; but so it always was: perhaps a hundred years ago someone, when they assembled here for dinner, had unexpectedly found the room chilly.
They all sat silent. Why should any of them speak, and put somebody else to the trouble of a reply? Nothing had happened since, twenty-four hours ago, they had last met here: no fresh interest had stirred the toneless tranquillity. Ronald’s slight attack of gout was certainly better, and he meant to drink his port again to-night: his wife’s Patience had ‘come out’ twice; as for Lady Yardley, was she living in to-day at all, or in times long buried beneath the years? Then Lady Hester joined them, brisk from her walk and her ‘tub.’ She asked Ronald how he was, she told them where she had been, and then she, too, succumbed, and sat silent. Violet followed, made a general apology for being late, and the doors into the dining-room were thrown open.
“Will you take Grandmamma in?” she said to her father, and the other three followed.
Though the evening sky was still radiant, and there was light enough to have dined with unshuttered windows, curtains were drawn and the room lit with many candles, for Staniers dined by candlelight, quantities of candlelight, whatever the sun happened to be doing. Round the panelled walls were a dozen family portraits, each with its concealed electric illumination that made them look as if they had stepped forward from the walls, and were part of that little knot of their heirs and inheritors who sat round the table. For all their unbroken continuity, the Staniers had always grown on a slender stem, and to-night, with Dennis rosily sleeping upstairs on the floor above, only Colin was wanting to complete the full number of the clan. From generation to generation all collateral lines descended from daughters or younger sons had died out, but the silver cord of the direct descent had never been broken. Now from the walls, the past ages joined the present: here seated in the soft glow of candles was the fruit and distillation of the years, Ronald with his heavy wine-bibber’s face, Hester, in whom, as she had said, beauty had run to seed in prettiness, and Violet. The other two, Ronald’s wife and old Lady Yardley, had been, so to speak, but the fuel that made the Stanier fire burn. The younger, Violet’s mother, was no more than a burned-out cinder in the grate, she had done her part, and the dustman would sometime call and remove her; the elder, watchful and alive below the ash, still glowed with some inscrutable vigour. Through her had passed the spark that now blazed in Colin and Violet alike, and something of it still lived in her embers. For more than sixty years, Stanier and all that it stood for had soaked into her: she had become a sort of incarnation of the Stanier consciousness, and, sunk far below the surface, except when Colin was present, into whose gay hands she could resign her watchful responsibility, she witnessed and recorded.
The stately silent meal went on, unutterably dull, and impeccably exquisite. A vagabond or a hungry tramp would almost have preferred to go unfed than to have his cravings so joylessly satisfied, but then the Staniers were not tramps or vagabonds, and this was the way they had dinner. Alone with Aunt Hester or even with the additional incumbrance of her father and mother, Violet could have hoisted the standard of ordinary human sociability, and made a normal little festival of the meal, but neither she nor Aunt Hester could struggle long, without the dispelling influence of Colin’s beam, against that paralyzing effect of old Lady Yardley’s presence, her silence and her steady watchfulness. It was like talking in the presence of an open coffin, where lay something corpse-like yet alive....
Violet, as usual, had begun dinner with her invariable effort to pull them all out of that deadly pit into which they nightly descended.
“Dennis walked at least ten yards this evening, Mamma, without falling down once,” she said to Mrs. Stanier. “Colin will be surprised to see how he has got on.”
For a second Lady Yardley’s eyelids flickered at the name of Colin.
“He will get on quickly now,” said Mrs. Stanier. “When babies once begin to walk, they soon pick it up.”
This was a very just observation but lacked any initiative touch.
“I think he’s rather forward,” said Violet. “He’s only fourteen months old.”
“Yes, just fourteen months,” said Mrs. Stanier. “Fancy!”
Violet wheeled to Lady Hester.
“And where did you go, Aunt Hester?” she said. “Did you find any coolness? It’s the hottest day we’ve had this year.”
“Yes, my dear, it’s like an oven,” said Lady Hester. “I hate the summer. It broils my bones, and then there’s a thunder-storm, which scares me stiff.”
“Yes, a glass of sherry,” said Ronald. He took up the menu-card and held it up to his monocled eye.
A short silence fell. Violet tried again.
“And when are you going off to Aix, father?” she said. “I hear it’s tremendously full this year.”
“Next week,” said Ronald.
Violet let her eyes sweep round the pictured walls. Just opposite her was the picture of Colin, painted by the most famous artist of the day. He more than any of the other portraits seemed to have drawn close to the dinner-table. He had stepped boldly forth, in another moment he would be standing at old Lady Yardley’s elbow....
Lady Hester made an effort. The midges had bitten her during her walk, and she felt what she would have called ‘scratchy.’
“Well, I could never see the sense of filling yourself up with stinking waters,” she said, “and being pounded as if you were a heap of clothes at the wash.”
Ronald put down his menu-card. Always he pretended not to be deaf.
“Beg your pardon, Hester?” he said.
There are many things which it is easy to say once but impossible to repeat. This seemed one of them, and the next silence was rather longer.
“You will like your game of whist to-night, Granny?” asked Violet at length.
Lady Yardley did not answer. She held up her finger as if listening, not to what Violet said but to something inaudible to the others. Then she turned to the butler.
“Give me my stick,” she said. “I hear wheels. That is Colin.”
“No, Granny, he’s not coming to-night,” said Violet.
Lady Yardley grasped her stick and had half-risen from her place, when there came a step along the gallery floor, and the door opened.
“It is Colin,” said she.
Colin entered: it was as if the sunlight came in with him. The room seemed to leap into brightness.
“Ah, what a dreadful time to arrive!” he said. “Don’t get up anybody, or I shall go away again. Violet, darling! How blessed to see you! Granny, my dear Granny! Aunt Hester ... everybody. Just push me a chair in, and let me sit down with you. Where shall it be put? I don’t know. I want to sit next everybody.”
He sat