Читать книгу Colin - E F Benson - Страница 6

“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.

Already it looked as if the vultures were coming closer across the golden sands of the desert on which these survivors were barrenly gathered, for an acute and far-seeing solicitor had unearthed a family of labourers living in a cottage in the marsh between Broomhill and Appledore, who undoubtedly bore the name of Stanier, and he had secured from the father, who could just write his name, a duly-attested document to the effect that if Jacob Spurway succeeded in establishing him in the family possessions and honours, he would pay him the sum of a hundred thousand pounds in ten annual instalments. That being made secure, it was worth while secretly to hunt through old wills and leases, and he had certainly discovered that Colin Stanier (æt. Elizabeth) had a younger brother, Ronald, who inhabited a farm not far from Appledore and had issue. That issue could, for the most part, be traced, or, at any rate, firmly inferred right down to the present. Then came a most gratifying search through the chronicles and pedigrees of the line now in possession, and, explore as he might, John Spurway could find no collateral line still in existence. Straight down, from father to son, as we have seen, ran the generations; till the day of Lady Hester Brayton, no daughter had been born to an Earl of Yardley, and the line of such other sons as the lords of Stanier begot had utterly died out. The chance of establishing this illiterate boor seemed to Mr. Jacob Spurway a very promising one, and he not only devoted to it his time and his undoubted abilities, but even made a few clandestine and judicious purchases. There arrived, for instance, one night at the Stanier cottage a wholly genuine Elizabethan chair in extremely bad condition, which was modestly placed in the kitchen behind the door; a tiger-ware jug found its way to the high chimneypiece and got speedily covered with dust, and a much-tarnished Elizabethan sealtop spoon made a curious addition to the Britannia metal equipage for the drinking of tea.

But if this drab and barren decay of the direct line of Colin Stanier roused the interest of Mr. Spurway, it appeared in the year 1892 to interest others not less ingenious, and (to adopt the obsolete terms of the legend) it really looked as if Satan remembered the bond to which he was party, and bestirred himself to make amends for his forgetfulness. And first—with a pang of self-reproach—he turned his attention to this poor bath-chaired paralytic, now so rapidly approaching his seventieth year. Then there was Philip to consider, and Ronald.... Lady Hester he felt less self-reproachful about, for, unhampered by children, and consoled for the loss of her husband by the very charming attentions of others, she was in London queen of the smart Bohemia, which was the only court at all to her mind, and was far more amusing than the garden parties at Buckingham Palace to which, so pleasant was Bohemia, she was no longer invited.

So then, just about the time that Mr. Spurway was sending Elizabethan relics to the cottage in the Romney Marsh, there came over Lord Yardley a strange and rather embarrassing amelioration of his stricken state. From a medical point of view he became inexplicably better, though from another point of view it could be as confidently stated that he became irretrievably worse. His clouded faculties were pierced by the sun of lucidity again, the jerks and quivers of his limbs and his speech gave way to a more orderly rhythm, and his doctor congratulated himself on the eventual success of a treatment that for twenty years had produced no effect whatever. Strictly speaking, that treatment could be more accurately described as the absence of treatment: Sir Thomas Logan had said all along that the utmost that doctors could do was to assist Nature in effecting a cure: a bath-chair and the indulgence of anything the patient felt inclined to do was the sum of the curative process. Now at last it bore (professionally speaking) the most gratifying fruit. Coherence visited his speech, irrespective of the tumblers of port (indeed, these tumblers of port produced a normal incoherence), his powerless hands began to grasp the cards again, and before long he was able to perambulate the galleries through which his bath-chair had so long wheeled him, on his own feet with the aid of a couple of sticks. Every week that passed saw some new feat of convalescence and the strangeness of the physical and mental recovery touched the fringes of the miraculous.

But while Sir Thomas Logan, in his constant visits to Stanier during this amazing recovery, never failed to find some fresh and surprising testimonial to his skill, he had to put away from himself with something of an effort certain qualms that insisted on presenting themselves to him. It seemed even while his patient’s physical and mental faculties improved in a steady and ascending ratio of progress, that some spiritual deterioration balanced, or more than balanced, this recovery. Hard and cruel Lord Yardley had been before the stroke had fallen on him—without compassion, without human affection—now, in the renewal of his vital forces, these qualities blazed into a conflagration, and it was against Philip, above all others, that their heat and fury were directed.

While his father was helpless Philip had staunchly remained with him, sharing with his mother and with Ronald and his wife the daily burden of companionship. But now there was something intolerable in his father’s lucid and concentrated hatred of him. Daily now Lord Yardley would come into the library where Philip was at his books, in order to glut his passion with proximity. He would take a chair near Philip’s, and, under pretence of reading, would look at him in silence with lips that trembled and twitching fingers. Once or twice, goaded by Philip’s steady ignoring of his presence, he broke out into speeches of hideous abuse, the more terrible because it was no longer the drunken raving of a paralytic, but the considered utterance of a clear and hellish brain.

Acting on the great doctor’s advice, Philip, without saying a word to his father, made arrangements for leaving Stanier. He talked the matter over with that marble mother of his, and they settled that he would be wise to leave England for the time being. If his father, as might so easily happen, got news of him in London or in some place easily accessible, the awful law of attraction which his hatred made between them might lead to new developments: the more prudent thing was that he should efface himself altogether.

Italy, to one of Philip’s temperament, appeared an obvious asylum, but beyond that his whereabouts was to be left vague, so that his mother, without fear of detection in falsehood, could say that she did not know where he was. She would write him news of Stanier to some forwarding agency in Rome, with which he would be in communication, and he would transmit news of himself through the same channel.

One morning before the house was astir, Philip came down into the great hall. Terrible as these last years had been, rising to this climax which had driven him out, it was with a bleeding of the heart that he left the home that was knitted into his very being, and beat in his arteries. He would not allow himself to wonder how long it might be before his return: it did not seem possible that in his father’s lifetime he should tread these floors again, and in the astounding rejuvenation that there had come over Lord Yardley, who could say how long this miracle of restored vitality might work its wonders?

As he moved towards the door a ray of early sunlight struck sideways on to the portrait of Colin Stanier, waking it to another day of its imperishable youth. It illumined, too, the legendary parchment let into the frame; by some curious effect of light the writing seemed to Philip for one startled moment to be legible and distinct....