CHAPTER II
By the middle of the nineteenth century the fading of the actual deed signed by Colin Stanier had scarcely kept pace with the fading of the faith in it: this had become the mildest of effete superstitions. About that epoch, also, the continuity of Stanier tradition was broken, for there was born in the direct line not only two sons but a daughter, Hester, who, a couple of centuries ago, would probably have been regarded as a changeling, and met an early fate as such. She was as lovely as the dawn, and had to the full, with every feminine grace added, a double portion of the Stanier charm, but in her disposition no faintest trace of traditional inheritance could be found; instead of their inhuman arrogance, their icy self-sufficiency, she was endowed with a gaiety and a rollicking gutter-snipe enjoyment of existence, which laughed to scorn the dignity of birth.
Being of the inferior sex, her father decreed that she should be brought up in the image of the tradition which ground so small the women who had married into the family; she must become, like her own mother, aloof and calm and infinitely conscious of her position. But neither precept nor example had the smallest effect on her: for dignity, she had boisterousness; for calm, buoyant, irrepressible spirits; and for self-control, a marked tendency to allure and kindle the susceptibilities of the other sex, were he peer or ploughboy.
Alone, too, of her race, she had no spark of that passionate affection for her home that was one of the most salient characteristics of the others.
She gave an instance of this defect when, at the age of fifteen, she ran away from Stanier half-way through August, while the family were in residence after the season in London, being unable to stand the thought of that deadly and awful stateliness which would last without break till January, when the assembling of the Houses of Parliament would take them all back to the metropolis which she loved with extraordinary fervour. Part of the way she went in a train, part of the way she rode, and eventually arrived back at the huge house in St. James’s Square, now empty and sheeted, and persuaded the caretaker, who had been her nurse and adored her with unique devotion, to take her in and send no news to Stanier of her arrival.
“Darling Cooper,” she said, with her arms round the old woman’s neck and her delicious face bestowing kisses on her, “unless you promise to say nothing about my coming here, I shall leave the house and get really lost. They say a healthy girl can always get a living.”
“Eh, my dear,” said Cooper, much shocked, “what are you saying?”
Hester’s look of seraphic ignorance that she had said anything unusual reassured Cooper.
“What am I saying?” asked Hester. “I’m just saying what I shall do. I shall buy a monkey and a barrel-organ and dress like a gipsy and tell fortunes. But I won’t go back to that awful Stanier.”
“But it’s your papa’s house,” said Cooper. “Young ladies have to live with their families till they are married.”