Colin

by E. F. Benson

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.