The moon had sunk, and he must grope his way down the hillside which he had mounted so nimbly in the hope of escape from the presence that hovered by him. All night it was with him, waiting patiently but inexorably for the answer he was bound to give. He could not drive it away, he could not elude it.
There arrived for him next morning an iced budget from his mother. All went on as usual with that refrigerator. There had been a gale, and four elm trees had been blown down.... Easter was early this year; she hoped for the sake of the holiday-makers that the weather would be fine.... It was odd to hear of the warm suns and the sitting out in the evening.... Was he not tired of his solitary life?...
Philip skimmed his way rapidly through these frigidities, and then suddenly found himself attending.
“I have kept my great news to the end,” his mother wrote, “and it makes us all, your father especially, very happy. We hope before March is over that Ronald will have an heir. Janet is keeping very well, and your father positively dotes on her now. The effect on him is most marked. He certainly feels more kindly to you now that this has come, for the other day he mentioned your name and wondered where you were. It was not having a grandchild that was responsible for a great deal of his bitterness towards you, for you are the eldest....”
Philip swept the letter off the table and sat with chin supported in the palms of his hands, staring out of the open window, through which came the subtle scent of the wallflower. As a traveller traces his journey, so, spreading the situation out like a map before him, he saw how his road ran direct and uncurving. Last night, for all his groping and searching, he could find no such road marked; there was but a track, and it was interrupted by precipitous unnegotiable places, by marshes and quagmires through which no wayfarer could find a path. But with the illumination of this letter it was as if an army of road-makers had been busy on it. Over the quagmire there was a buttressed causeway, through the precipitous cliffs a cutting had been blasted. There was yet time; he would marry Rosina out of hand, and his offspring, not his brother’s, should be heir of Stanier.
The marriage making their union valid and legitimatising the child that should soon be born, took place on the first of March at the English Consulate, and a week later came the news that a daughter had been born to his sister-in-law. On the tenth of the same month Rosina gave birth to twins, both boys. There was no need for any riband to distinguish them, for never had two more dissimilar pilgrims come forth for their unconjecturable journey. The elder was dark like Philip, and unlike the most of his father’s family; the other blue-eyed, like his mother, had a head thick-dowered with bright pale gold. Never since the days of Colin Stanier, founder of the race and bargainer in the legend, had gold and blue been seen together in a Stanier, and “Colin,” said Philip to himself, “he shall be.”
During that month the shuttle of fate flew swiftly backwards and forwards in the loom of the future. Thirty-six years had passed since Ronald, the latest born of his race, had come into life, ten years more had passed over Philip’s head before, within a week of his brother and within a fortnight of his marriage, he saw the perpetuation of his blood. And the shuttle, so long motionless for the Staniers, did not pause there in its swift and sudden weavings.
At Stanier that evening Ronald and his father sat long over their wine. The disappointment at Ronald’s first child being a girl was utterly eclipsed in Lord Yardley’s mind by the arrival of an heir at all, and he had eaten heavily in boisterous spirits, and drunk as in the days when wine by the tumblerful was needed to rouse him into coherent speech. But now no attendant was needed to hold his glass to his lips: he was as free of movement as a normal man.
“We’ll have another bottle yet, Ronnie,” he said. “There’ll be no whist to-night, for your mother will have gone upstairs to see after Janet. Ring the bell, will you?”
The fresh bottle was brought, and he poured himself out a glassful and passed it to his son.