Colin

by E. F. Benson

He left his seat with a final reversal of the decanter and banged out of the room.

Then, as likely as not, the old man would begin to whimper. Though, apparently, he did all he could to make residence at Stanier impossible for his sons, he seemed above all to fear that he would succeed in doing so.

“Your brother gets so easily angered with me,” he would say. “I’m sure I said nothing to him that a loving father shouldn’t. Go after him, Phil, and ask him to come back and drink a friendly glass with his poor father.”

“I think you had better let him be, sir,” said Philip. “He didn’t relish what you said of his wife and his childlessness.”

“Well, I meant nothing, I meant nothing. Mayn’t a father have a bit of chaff over his wine with his sons? As for his wife, I’m sure she’s a very decent woman, and if it was that which offended him, there’s that diamond collar my lady wears. Bid her take it off and give it to Janet as a present from me. Then we shall be all comfortable again.”

“I should leave it alone for to-night,” said Philip. “You can give it her to-morrow. Won’t you come and have your rubber of whist?”

His eye would brighten again at that, for in his day he had been a great player, and if he went to the cards straight from his wine, which for a little made order in the muddle and confusion of his brain, he would play a hand or two with the skill that had been an instinct with him. His tortoise-shell kitten must first be brought him, for that was his mascotte, which reposed on his lap, and for the kitten there was a saucerful of chopped fish to keep it quiet. It used to drag fragments from the dish on to the riband of the Garter, and eat from there.

He could not hold the cards himself, and they were arranged in a stand in front of him, and his attendant pulled out the one to which he pointed a quivering finger. If the cards were not in his favour he would chuck the kitten off his knee. “Drown it; the devil’s in it,” he would mumble. Then, before long, the gleam of lucidity rent in his clouds by the wine would close up again, and he would play with lamentable lunatic cunning, revoking and winking at his valet, and laughing with pleasure as the tricks were gathered. At the end he would calculate his winnings and insist on their being paid. They were returned to the loser when his valet had abstracted them from his pocket....

Any attempt to move him from Stanier had to be abandoned, for it brought on such violent agitation that his life was endangered if it were persisted in, and even if it had been possible to certify him as insane, neither Philip nor his brother nor his wife would have consented to his removal to a private asylum, for some impregnable barrier of family pride stood in the way. Nor, perhaps, would it have been easy to obtain the necessary certificate. He had shown no sign of homicidal or suicidal mania, and it would have been hard to have found any definite delusion from which he suffered. He was just a very terrible old man, partly paralytic, who got drunk and lucid together of an evening. He certainly hated Philip, but Philip’s habits and Philip’s celibacy were the causes of that; he cheated at cards, but the sane have been known to do likewise.

Indeed, it seemed as if after their long and glorious noon in which, as by some Joshua-stroke, the sun had stayed his course in the zenith, that the fortunes of the Staniers were dipping swiftly into the cold of an eternal night. In mockery of that decline their wealth, mounting to more prodigious heights, resembled some Pharaoh’s pyramid into which so soon a handful of dust would be laid. In the last decade of the nineteenth century the long leases of the acres which a hundred years ago had been let for building land at Brighton were tumbling in, and in place of ground-rents the houses came into their possession, while, with true Stanier luck, this coincided with a revival of Brighton as a watering-place. Fresh lodes were discovered in their Cornish properties, and the wave of gold rose ever higher, bearing on it those who seemed likely to be the last of the name. Philip, now a little over forty years old, was still unmarried; Ronald, ten years his junior, was childless; and Lady Hester Brayton, now a widow, had neither son nor daughter to carry on the family.