Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

“Not hurt is he, Violet?” he called.

She looked round, her face still all aglow. But her brightness faded as she saw him.

“Oh no, I’m sure he isn’t,” she said. “Put him on his feet again, Nurse. Come, Dennis, you’re half way already.”

Colin waited a moment longer, till the adventure outside was happily accomplished, rather astonished at himself for having taken any notice of it. He had felt, he supposed, just a sporting interest to see whether Dennis would stay the course: he was sorry when he came to grief. Then he went back to his far more congenial occupation.

He embarked now on the account of the building of Stanier, and the collection of its treasures: this, for the next two years, was clearly the great diversion and achievement of his ancestor’s energies. The Queen’s death, which occurred when he was thirty, was but casually mentioned, with a shrewd recognition of her greatness, and an impatient gibe for her vanity, and a congratulation for himself for having used her weakness as a quarry for the building of his own wealth and splendour. Her last gift to him was the great sapphire, that flawless and unique stone, which the Queen had worn every day when her fleet was out to meet the Armada. Priceless in itself, it was supposed to be a talisman which brought its owner prosperity in all he undertook. After her death there had been an attempt on the part of the Crown (renewed again when the Hanoverian dynasty came to the throne) to repossess itself of the jewel, on the grounds that it belonged to the regalia, and so could not be bestowed, but both times these efforts had failed, and the winking cornflower splendour still reposed in the jewel-safe at Stanier, a queen’s gift worth a king’s ransom. “Lucky it was,” said the Memoirs’ author, “that so few days before Her Grace’s death I had so mightily pleased her, for that was her last and noblest gift to me, and that was the finest fruit that I had plucked from my bargain. To my Lord and Benefactor I owe it, who shewed me how to please Her Grace so mightily that she gave me the most precious of all her jewels.” Equally cursory was the mention of his marriage with the daughter and heiress of Sir John Reeve, though he gave a detailed list of property which this ill-fated young woman brought to the house. Two sons were born to him, and soon after, having secured these great estates, he secured his wife’s divorce, and presently married the only daughter and child of Lord Middlesex. She gave him no further heirs, but brought considerable addition to his estates. “An unseemly woman,” so ran her husband’s comment, “and of a most unseemly temper, of which I would have none. She was red as a fox, but rich.”

But these events (apart perhaps from the birth of his two sons) were no more than acts of routine in his career, his passion was the creation of this palace and pleasaunce of Stanier. Only twelve years had elapsed between the day when he had gone, a bare-footed shepherd boy with his crook and his lamb, to wait upon the Queen at Brede, and now at her death he retired from Court life and came back, Earl and Knight of the Garter, to his estates at Tillingham. His father’s farm was close by, where the “drunken old sot” still lived, and Colin, coveting it for the completion of his gardens, found a way to dispute the ownership, claiming that it was part of the monastic land devised him by the Queen, and turned the old man out. He gave him, however, a decent enough dwelling-place for a man of his station, and adequate maintenance, and further allowed him to draw on his brewery for unlimited ale, making only the provision that the old man should never attempt to see him or obtain access to him: otherwise his maintenance should be withheld. This indulgence in the matter of the brewery may have been kind in intention, for assuredly the old man was fond of beer, but the effect was that he did not long enjoy the bounty. He was oftener drunk than sober, and, before the year was up, he had a stroke of which he died. Meantime the great house was rising rapidly, and in two years was complete up to the lettered balustrade, where you might read in Latin that, unless the Lord built the house, their labour was but lost that built it, and into it Lord Yardley poured the treasures that he was constantly acquiring: Oriental carpets, and French Tapestries, Chinese porcelain, Greek marbles, and Italian pictures: all arts and ages were sought by him, for there was kinship in all fine work, and a Greek relief of Heracles and Hylas might be flanked by a crucifixion by Tintoret on one side, and a portrait by Rembrandt on the other. He made, too, a wonderful collection of occult and magical books, that told the student how he might acquire supernatural powers, and among them was a missal, as Colin read “of wondrous blasphemies”.... Out of doors the work was pushed forward with the same expedition: the great terraced garden to the south of the house was levelled and stepped and encircled by the yew-hedge: below, the dam was pushed out across the dip of the valley in which had stood the house of his youth, and the lake formed. He planted, too, on the bare upland east of the house the oaks that flourished there now.

At this point in the type-written manuscript, there came an annotation directing him to a certain page in the original Memoirs, and Colin turned it up, and found that it referred to a loose sheet in the book dated 1642, which was the year before the author died. On this page was a rough sketch of the house and gardens as designed then, and as they existed now, but with the addition of certain buildings which apparently had never been erected. But while the plan of the house as it stood was only roughly indicated, this addition was drawn with considerable care and detail. It looked therefore, as if, after the completion of the house, this building was contemplated and planned, but never carried out. It consisted of a long passage, leading out of the room where he now sat, which had always been Lord Yardley’s private room, and communicating with a small house that stood, at the distance of sixty yards, on a knoll just outside the gardens. It was one-storied, and consisted of three rooms en suite labelled ‘parlour,’ ‘bedchamber,’ and ‘dining-room,’ with a kitchen and quarters for a servant. But on the south side of it there was a spacious oblong room, equal in length to the three rooms adjoining, with a descriptive word attached to it. This was only faintly pencilled in, and was difficult to decipher. The initial letter ‘S’ was clear enough: the second might have been ‘o’ or ‘c’: then came a long letter that might have been either ‘t’ or ‘l,’ followed (with room for another letter between) by ‘arium,’ which was distinct and legible. Colin puzzled over this, and then a very reasonable solution struck him; the word no doubt was ‘solarium,’ implying an open gallery, facing south on the long side, as this did, and either open to the air or fronted with big windows, a winter-sitting-room, a sunning place.... Simultaneously, with a laugh, the significance of this discreet little establishment struck him. No doubt it was intended to be the quarters of the companion for the time being (for he soon wearied of each) with whom Lord Yardley solaced his leisure. There would be an impropriety perhaps in her being actually housed in the same dwelling as his wife and his sons; convenience and propinquity were alike served by her having her pleasant little establishment (with its solarium) at a short distance from the house and communicating with his own room. The interpretation was reasonable, simple and entertaining, but, to be sure, it did not seem very characteristic of his ancestor’s methods to be so tender of the feelings of his wife, and guard the morals of his sons from loose presences, and though Colin was pleased with his explanation and his decipherment of ‘Solarium,’ he was not quite satisfied with it, and put a slip of paper in the place, meaning to refer to it again. He turned back to the type-written copy, of which now not many pages remained for his perusal.

There was a short description of how, on the coming of age of his two sons, they each chose to be associated with the bargain he had made in the shepherd’s hut, and indeed, from the few details given about their characters and their escapades, the choice could not have been a matter of much difficulty to these young gentlemen. The younger, in especial, attached to the Court of his Majesty King James, seemed to have been as perfect and appalling a young rogue as even his father could have wished. Then there followed the entry that to-day was the author’s sixty-ninth birthday, and, thanks to the ever-constant goodness of his Lord and Benefactor, his health and strength were still unabated, and the pleasures of his youth still his. He blessed the day, now fifty-one years ago, when he had chosen so wisely and well, as the parchment, now preserved in his strong-room, testified, “How would I rejoice,” he wrote, “to build some shrine in honour of my Lord, where I would worship him who has wrought so great benefits upon me, some sanctuary, where I might worthily adore him”—and then suddenly in the middle of a sentence the Memoirs came to an end.

Colin put down the last sheet of the manuscript, and leaned back in his chair. He felt as if, Narcissus-like, he had all the morning been regarding himself as shewn in this Elizabethan mirror of his ancestor’s confessions. It was his own spirit so undeviatingly reflected there, and the contemplation of it was an act of self-recognition. All that he had read was a three hundred year old portrait of himself, even as he might have sat for the great picture in the hall, into the frame of which was now inserted the signed parchment of the bargain. Whatever was the literal and the material truth about that (his ancestor, clearly, who might be expected to know, confirmed it) there could be none about its spiritual authenticity. No-one who had seen the Memoirs could possibly have any doubt about that, and Colin knew that he, like most others of his race, eagerly associated himself with the bargain. He knew, too, that his choice was solid and real and no fantastic imagining; there was God on one side, there was Satan on the other. He had rejected God, and, not only for the benefits attached, but because he preferred evil to good, he had chosen Satan. Hate and evil were dear to him, he had no use for love.

There came the sound of the bell for luncheon, and he got up.... It was a strange thing that anyone so diligent in evil as the old man had been, should at the end of his life have turned coward and twitterer in the way he had done. His last year on earth had been a terrible one, for, so family tradition averred (and indeed the thing was attested), terror of what was coming fastened on his flesh like a monstrous growth, and he wrote no more in his diary of the sins that were so dear to him. He practised pious and charitable deeds, restoring the monastery church, on the altar of which he had often played dice. He endowed almshouses in Rye. He bought great tomes of the works of Christian fathers, and of the meditations of the Saints, and hour after hour he used to sit in the library to study these under the tuition of a priest who resided in the house, and ministered at the church, and no doubt it was then that he destroyed or dispersed that great collection of magical and occult works which he had brought together, for no vestige of them was now extant here. He cut himself off from the pleasures of youth, he fasted and prayed, in the hope of turning away the fate at which all his life he had mocked, and it was said that when on his knees he attempted to address the God whom he had rejected, no prayer or holy words would come from his lips, but that he mumbled unspeakable and obscene blasphemies. He seemed in fact, so it appeared to Colin, to have gone crazy, and though he continued throughout that year in the full serenity of his physical health, he let himself be the prey of his disordered and terrified soul, turning and truckling, not in love but in abject fear of the destiny he had chosen, to Him whose spirit he had defied. It was firmly rooted in his head, that he would die on his seventieth birthday, and that indeed (no doubt because he so firmly believed it) came to pass, and in an appalling manner. For he gave a feast that night to his tenants in honour of his birthday, and had risen to speak to them at the end of supper, when he put out his arm, as if pushing away some invisible presence, and shrieking “No, no!” fell forward, dead, across the table. At that moment there came a blinding flash of lightning, which certainly struck the hall, but those who were nearest to him said that his seizure had preceded the flash, and that it and the roar of thunder that followed were rather the endorsement of that judgment than the judgment itself. That year, anyhow, thought Colin, was a common and craven conclusion to his brilliant life; he did not fancy that he himself would suffer so deplorable a collapse, legend or no legend. But in the interval, he had more than all his ancestor’s lust for pleasure, and his hatred of love....