Colin

by E. F. Benson

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 But, then, it must be remembered that Staniers, as far as we can find out from old letters and diaries and mere historical documents, never wanted friendship nor, indeed, comprehended it.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.

George IV., for instance, when Prince Regent, stayed there, it may be remembered, for nearly a fortnight, having been asked for three days, during which time the entire House of Lords with their wives spent in noble sections two nights at Stanier, as well as many much younger and sprightlier little personages just as famous in the proper quarter. The entire opera from Drury Lane diverted their evening one night, baccarat (or its equivalent) beguiled another, on yet another the Prince could not be found....

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 (for usually throughout the shooting season there were guests in the house), 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 (as she always did) 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.

A hundred years later the Emperor William II. of Germany had a reminder of it which caused him considerable surprise. On one of his visits to England he deigned to pass a week-end at Stanier, and though received as a reigning monarch with opening of the glass doors, he found that his condescension in remembering that he was connected with the family was not received with the rapture of humility which he had expected. He had asked to be treated by the members of the family as Cousin Willie, and they did so with a nonchalance that was truly amazing.

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