This outrageous marriage of Hester’s, followed by her father’s stroke, were contrary to all tradition as regards the legend, for these calamities, indeed, looked as if one of the high contracting parties was not fulfilling his share of the bargain, and the behaviour of Philip, Lord Stanier, the stricken man’s eldest son, added weight to the presumption that the luck of the Staniers (to put it at that) was on the wane—fading, fading like the ink of the original bond. Instead of marrying at the age of twenty or twenty-one, as his father and forefathers had done, he remained obstinately celibate and ludicrously decorous. In appearance he was dark, heavy of feature, jowled even in his youth by a fleshiness of neck, and built on massive lines in place of the slenderness of his race, though somehow, in spite of these aberrations from the type, he yet presented an example, or, rather, a parody, of the type. But when you came to mind, and that which lies behind body and mind alike, that impenetrable essence of individuality, then the professors in heredity would indeed have held up bewildered hands of surrender. He was studious and hesitating, his mental processes went with a tread as deliberate as his foot, and in place of that swift eagerness of the Stanier mind, which, so to speak, threw a lasso over the mental quarry with one swing of a lithe arm, and entangled it, poor Philip crept on hands and knees towards it and advanced ever so imperceptibly nearer. In the matter of mode of life the difference between him and the type was most marked of all. Hitherto the eldest son had married early and wisely for the sole object of the perpetuation of the breed, and having arrived at that, pursued the ways of youth in copious indiscretions which his wife, already tamed and paralysed, had no will to resent. Philip, on the other hand, living in the gloom of the house beneath the stroke and the shadow that had fallen on his father, seemed to have missed his youth altogether. Life held for him no bubbling draught that frothed on his lips and was forgotten; he abstained from all the fruits of vigour and exuberance. One family characteristic alone was his—the passionate love of his home, so that he preferred even in these conditions to live here than find freedom elsewhere. There he dreamed and studied, and neither love nor passion nor intrigue came near him. He cared little for his mother; his father he hated and feared. And yet some germ of romance, perhaps, lay dormant but potential in his soul, for more and more he read of Italy, and of the swift flowering of love in the South....
It seemed as if the hellish bargain made three hundred years ago had indeed become obsolete, for the weeks and months added themselves together into a swiftly mounting total of years, while a nightmare of eclipsed existence brooded over the great house at Stanier. Since the stroke that had fallen on him after Hester’s runaway match, Lord Yardley would have no guests in the house, and with the constancy of the original Colin, would never leave the place himself. Grinning and snarling in his bath-chair, he would be drawn up and down its long galleries by the hour together, with his battered and petrified spouse walking by his side, at first unable to speak with any coherence, but as the years went on attaining to a grim ejaculatory utterance that left no doubt as to his meaning.
Sometimes it was his whim to enter the library, and if Philip was there he would give vent to dreadful and stuttering observations as he clenched and unclenched the nerveless hands that seemed starving to throttle his son’s throat. Then, tired with this outpouring of emotion, he would doze in his chair, and wake from his doze into a paroxysm of tremulous speechlessness. At dinner-time he would have the riband of the Garter pinned across his knitted coat and be wheeled, with his wife walking whitely by his side, into the gallery, where the unmarried Philip, and his newly-married brother and his wife, stood up at his entrance, and without recognition he would pass, jibbering, at the head of that small and dismal procession, into the dining-room.
He grew ever thinner and more wasted in body, but such was some consuming fire within him that he needed the sustenance of some growing and gigantic youth. He was unable to feed himself, and his attendant standing by him put into that open chasm of a mouth, still lined with milk-white teeth, his monstrous portions. A couple of bites was sufficient to prepare for the gulp, and again his mouth was ready to receive.
Then, when the solid entertainment was over, and the women gone, there remained the business of wine, and, sound trencherman though he was, his capacity over this was even more remarkable. He took his port by the tumblerful, the first of which he would drink like one thirsty for water, and this in some awful manner momentarily restored his powers of speech. Like the first drops before a storm, single words began dripping from his lips, as this restoration of speech took place, his eye, brightening with malevolence, fixed itself on Philip, and night after night he would gather force for the same lunatic tirade.
“You sitting there,” he would say, “you, Philip, you aren’t a Stanier! Why don’t you get a bitch to your kennel, and rear a mongrel or two? You heavy-faced lout, you can’t breed, you can’t drink, you can do nought but grow blear-eyed over a pack of printed rubbish. There was Hester: she married some sort of sweeper, and barren she is at that. I take blame to myself there: if only I had smacked her face a dozen times instead of once, I’d have tamed her: she would have come to heel. And the third of you, Ronald there, with your soapy-faced slut of a wife, you’d be more in your place behind a draper’s counter than here at Stanier. And they tell me that there’s no news yet that you’re going to give an heir to the place. Heir, good God....”
Ronald had less patience than his brother. He would have drunk pretty stiffly by now, and he would bang the table and make the glasses jingle.
“Now you keep a civil tongue in your head, father,” he said, “and I’ll do the same for you. A pretty figure you cut with your Garter and your costermonger talk. It’s your own nest you’re fouling, and you’ve fouled it well. There was never yet a Stanier till you who took to a bath-chair and a bib and a man to feed him when he couldn’t find the way to his own mouth.”
“Here, steady, Ronald!” Philip would say.
“I’m steadier than that palsy-stricken jelly there,” said Ronald. “If he leaves me alone I leave him alone: it isn’t I who begin. But if you or he think I’m going to sit here and listen to his gutter-talk, you’re in error.”