“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.”