Colin

by E. F. Benson

Though his own infidelities were notorious, the settlements of his marriage were secure enough, and when he had already begotten two sons of the hapless daughter of Sir John Reeves, he invoked the aid of the law to enable him to put her away and renew his vow of love and honour to the heiress of my Lord Middlesex. She proved to be a barren crone, and perhaps had no opportunity of proving her fruitfulness, but she was so infatuated with him that by the settlements she gave him unconditionally the Broughton property which so conveniently adjoined his own.

To go back again for a moment to that obscure matter of the Stanier legend, it appears that on the day on which each of his sons came of age, their father made them acquainted with the agreement he had made on behalf of himself and the heirs of his body, and shewed them the signed parchment. They had, so he pointed out to them, the free choice of dissociating themselves from that bargain, and of taking the chance of material prosperity here and of salvation hereafter; he enjoined on them also the duty of transmitting the legend to their children in the manner and at the time that it had been made known to themselves.

Neither Ronald, the elder, nor his brother Philip felt the least qualm about the future, but they both had a very considerable appreciation of the present, and on each occasion the parchment was restored to its strong box with no loss of validity as regards the next generation. Ronald soon afterwards made one of those prudent marriages for which for generations the Staniers have been famous; Philip, on the other hand, who presently made for himself at the Court a position hardly less brilliant than his father’s had been, found celibacy, with its accompanying consolations, good enough for him.

This is too polite an age to speak of his infamies and his amazing debauches, but his father was never tired of hearing about them, and used to hang on the boy’s tales when he got leave of absence from the Court to spend a week at home. Ronald was but a prude in comparison with the other two, protesting at Philip’s more atrocious experiences. His notion, so he drunkenly tried to explain himself (for his grandfather’s pleasures made strong appeal to him) was that there were things that no gentleman would do, whatever backing he had, and with a curious superstitious timidity he similarly refused to play dice on the Communion table in the old monastic chapel....

For full forty years after the death of the Queen, Colin, Knight of the Garter and first Earl of Yardley, revelled at the banquet of life. All that material prosperity could offer was his; his princely purchases, his extravagances, his sumptuous hospitalities were powerless to check the ever-swelling roll of his revenues; he enjoyed a perfect bodily health, and up to the day of his death his force was unabated, his eye undimmed, and the gold in his hair untouched by a single thread of silver.

As the years went on, his attachment to this stately house of Stanier grew to a passion, and however little credence we may give to the legend, it is certain that his descendants inherit from Colin Stanier that devotion to the place where they were born. No Stanier, so it is said, is ever completely happy away from the great house that crowns the hill above the Romney Marsh; it is to them a shrine, a Mecca, a golden Jerusalem, the home of their hearts, and all the fairest of foreign lands, the most sunny seas, the most sumptuous palaces are but wildernesses or hovels in comparison with their home. To such an extent was this true of Colin, first Earl, that for the last ten years of his life he scarcely left the place for a night.

But though his bodily health remained ever serene and youthful, and youth’s excesses, continued into old age, left him unwrinkled of skin and vigorous in desire, there grew on him during the last year of his life a malady neither of body nor of mind, but of the very spirit and essence of his being. The compact that he believed himself to have made had been fully and honestly observed by the other high contracting party, and as the time drew near that his own share in the bargain must be exacted from him, his spirit, we must suppose, conscious that the imprint of the divine was so shortly to be surcharged with the stamp and superscription of hell, was filled with some remorseful terror, that in itself was a foretaste of damnation.

He ate, he drank, he slept, he rioted, he brought to Stanier yet more treasures of exquisite art—Italian pictures, bronzes of Greek workmanship, Spanish lace, torn, perhaps, from the edges of altar-cloths, intaglios, Persian Pottery, and Ming porcelain from China. His passion for beauty, which had all his life been a torch to him, did not fail him, nor yet the wit and rapier-play of tongue, nor yet the scandalous chronicles of Philip. But in the midst of beauty or debauchery, there would come to his mind with such withering of the spirit as befel Belshazzar when the writing was traced on the wall, the knowledge of his approaching doom.

As if to attempt to turn it aside or soften the inexorable fate, he gave himself to deeds of belated pity and charitableness. He endowed an almshouse in Rye; he erected a fine tomb over his father’s grave; he attended daily service in the church which he had desecrated with his dice-throwings. And all the time his spirit told him that it was too late, he had made his bed and must lie on it: for he turned to the God whom he had renounced neither in love nor in sincerity, nor in fear of Him, but in terror of his true master.

But when he tried to pray his mind could invoke no holy images, but was decked with pageants of debauchery, and if he formed his lips to pious words there dropped from them a stream of obscenities and blasphemy. At any moment the terror would lay its hand on his spirit, affecting neither body nor mind, but addressing itself solely to the immortal and deathless part of him. It was in vain that he attempted to assure himself, too, that in the ordering of the world neither God nor devil has a share, for even the atheism in which he had lived deserted him as the hour of his death drew near.