neither superstition nor spiritual aspiration signified anything particular to the staniers, and for many generations now they had been accustomed to regard their rather sinister family legend with cynical complacency. age had stolen the strength from it, as from some long-cellared wine, and in the victorian era they would, to take their collective voice, have denied that, either drunk or sober, they believed it. but it was vaguely pleasant to have so antique a guarantee that they would be so sumptuously looked after in this world, while as for the next....
the legend dated from the time of elizabeth, and was closely connected with the rise of the family into the pre-eminent splendour which it had enjoyed ever since. the queen, in one of her regal journeys through her realm (during which she slept in so incredible a number of beds), visited the affiliated cinque port of rye, and, after taking dinner with the mayor, was riding down one of the steep, cobbled ways when her horse stumbled and came down on its knees.
she would certainly have had a cruel fall if a young man had not sprung forward from the crowd and caught her before her grace’s head was dashed against the stones. he set her on her feet, swiftly releasing the virgin’s bosom from his rough embrace, and, kneeling, kissed the hem of her skirt.{8}
the queen bade him rise, and, as she looked at him, made some elizabethan ejaculation of appreciative amazement—a “zounds,” or a “gadzooks,” or something.
there stood colin stanier in the full blossom of his twenty summers, ruddy as david and blue-eyed as the sea. his cap had fallen off, and he must needs toss back his head to free his face from the tumble of his yellow hair. his athletic effort to save her grace had given him a moment’s quickened breath, and his parted lips showed the double circle of his white teeth.
but, most of all, did his eyes capture the fancy of his sovereign; they looked at her, so she thought, with the due appreciation of her majesty, but in their humility there was mingled something both gay and bold, and she loved that any man, young or old, high or humble, should look at her thus.
she spoke a word of thanks, and bade him wait on her next day at the manor of brede, where she was to lie that night. then, motioning her courtiers aside with a testy gesture, she asked him a question or two while a fresh horse was being caparisoned and brought for her, and allowed none other but colin to help her to mount....
it was thought to be significant that at supper that night the virgin sighed, and made her famous remark to my lord of essex that she wished sometimes that she was a milk-maid.
colin stanier’s father was a man of some small substance, owning a little juicy land that was fine grazing for cattle, and the boy worked on the farm. he had some strange, magical power over the beasts; a savage dog would slaver and fawn on him, a vicious horse sheathed its violence at his touch, and, in especial at this season of lambing-time, he wrought wonders of midwifery on the ewes and of nursing on the lambs. this authoritative deftness sprang from no kindly love of animals; cleverness and contempt, with a dash of pity, was all he worked with, and this evening, after the queen had passed on, it was reluctantly enough that he went down to the low-lying{9} fields where his father’s sheep were in pregnancy. the old man himself, as colin ascertained, had taken the excuse of her grace’s visit to get more than usually intoxicated, and the boy guessed that he himself would be alone half the night with his lantern and his ministries among the ewes.
so, indeed, it proved, and the moon had sunk an hour after midnight, when he entered the shed in the lambing-field to take his bite of supper and get a few hours’ sleep. he crunched his crusty bread and bacon in his strong teeth, he had a draught of beer, and, wrapping himself in his cloak, lay down. he believed (on the evidence of his memoirs) that he then went to sleep.
up to this point the story is likely enough; a pedant might unsniffingly accept it. but then there occurred (or is said to have occurred) the event which forms the basis of the stanier legend, and it will certainly be rejected, in spite of a certain scrap of parchment still extant and of the three centuries of sequel, by all sensible and twentieth-century minds.
for, according to the legend, colin woke and found himself no longer alone in the shed; there was standing by him a finely-dressed fellow who smiled on him. it was still as dark as the pit outside—no faintest ray of approaching dawn yet streaked the eastern sky, yet for all that colin could see his inexplicable visitor quite plainly.
the stranger briefly introduced himself as his satanic majesty, and, according to his usual pleasant custom, offered the boy all that he could wish for in life—health and beauty (and, indeed, these were his already) and wealth, honour, and affluence, which at present were sadly lacking—on the sole condition that at his death his soul was to belong to his benefactor. the bargain—this was the unusual feature in the stanier legend—was to hold good for all his direct descendants who, unless they definitely renounced the contract on their own behalf, would be partakers in these benefits and debtors in the other small matter.{10}
for his part, colin had no sort of hesitation in accepting so tempting an offer, and satan thereupon produced for his perusal (he was able to read) a slip of parchment on which the conditions were firmly and plainly stated. a scratch with his knife on the forearm supplied the ink for the signature, and satan provided him with a pen. he was bidden to keep the document as a guarantee of the good faith of his bargainer; the red cloak flashed for a moment in front of his eyes, dazzling him, and he staggered and fell back on the heap of straw from which he had just risen.
the darkness was thick and impenetrable round him, but at the moment a distant flash of lightning blinked in through the open door, showing him that the shed was empty again. outside, save for the drowsy answer of the thunder, all was quiet, but in his hand certainly was a slip of parchment.
the same, so runs the legend, is reproduced in the magnificent holbein of the young man which hangs now above the mantelpiece in the hall of stanier. colin stanier, first earl of yardley, looking hardly older than he did on this momentous night, stands there in garter robes with this little document in his hand. the original parchment, so the loquacious housekeeper points out to the visitors who to-day go over the house on the afternoons when it is open to the public, is let into the frame of the same portrait.
certainly there is such a piece of parchment there, just below the title of the picture, but the ink has so faded that it is impossible to decipher more than a word or two of it. the word “diabolus” must be more conjectured than seen, and the ingenious profess to decipher the words “quodcunque divitiarum, pulchritud” ... so that it would seem that colin the shepherd-boy, if he signed it, must have perused and understood latin.
this in itself is so excessively improbable that the whole business may be discredited from first to last. but there is no doubt whatever that colin stanier did some time{11} sign a latin document (for his name in ink, now brown, is perfectly legible) which has perished in the corroding years, whether he understood it or not, and there seems no doubt about the date in the bottom left-hand corner....
the constructive reader will by this time have got ready his interpretation about the whole cock-and-bull story, and a very sensible one it is. the legend is surely what mythologists call ?tiological. there was—he can see it—an old strip of parchment signed by colin stanier, and this, in view of the incredible prosperity of the family, coupled with the almost incredible history of their dark deeds, would be quite sufficient to give rise to the legend. in medi?val times, apparently, such satanic bargains were, if not common, at any rate not unknown, and the legend was, no doubt, invented in order to account for these phenomena, instead of being responsible for them.
of legendary significance, too, must be the story of philip stanier, third earl, who is said to have renounced his part in the bargain, and thereupon fell from one misfortune into another, was branded with an incurable and disfiguring disease, and met his death on the dagger of an injured woman. ronald stanier, a nephew of the above, was another such recusant; he married a shrew, lost a fortune in the south sea bubble, and had a singularly inglorious career.
but such instances as these (in all the long history there are no more of them, until credence in the legend faded altogether), even if we could rely on their authenticity, would only seem to prove that those who renounced the devil and all his works necessarily met with misfortune in this life, which is happily not the case, and thus they tend to disprove rather than confirm the whole affair.
finally, when we come to more modern times, and examine the records of the stanier family from, let us say, the advent of the hanoverian dynasty, though their splendour and distinction is ever a crescent, not a waning moon, there can be no reason to assign a diabolical origin to such{12} prosperity. there were black sheep among them, of course, but when will you not find, in records so public as theirs, dark shadows thrown by the searchlight of history? bargains with the powers of hell, in any case, belong to the romantic dusk of the middle ages, and cannot find any serious place in modern chronicles.
but to quit these quagmires of superstition for the warranted and scarcely less fascinating solidity of fact, colin stanier next day obediently craved audience with the queen at the manor of brede. by a stroke of intuition which does much to account for his prosperous fortune, he did not make himself endimanché, but, with his shepherd’s crook in his hand and a new-born lamb in his bosom, he presented himself at the house where the queen lodged. he would have been contemptuously turned back with buffets by the halberdiers and yeomen who guarded the entrance, but the mention of his name sufficed to admit him with a reluctant alacrity.
he wore but the breeches and jerkin in which he pursued his work among the beasts, his shapely legs were bare from knee to ankle, and as he entered the porch, he kicked off the shoes in which he had walked from rye. his crook he insisted on retaining, and the lamb which, obedient to the spell that he exercised over young living things, lay quiet in his arms.
some fussy controller of the queen’s household would have ejected him and chanced the consequences, but, said colin very quietly, “it is by her majesty’s orders that i present myself, and whether you buffet me or not, prithee tell the queen’s grace that i am here.”
there was something surprising in the dignity of the boy; and in the sweet-toned, clear-cut speech, so unlike the utterance of the mumbling rustic, and the controller, bidding him wait where he was, shuffled upstairs, and came back with extraordinary expedition.
“the queen’s grace awaits you, mr.——”
“stanier,” said colin.{13}
“mr. stanier. but your crook, your lamb——”
“let us do her majesty’s bidding,” said colin.
he was ushered into the long hall of brede manor, and the controller, having thrown the door open, slipped away with an alertness that suggested that his presence was desirable there no more, and left the boy, barefooted, clasping his lamb, with a rush-strewn floor to traverse. there was a table down the centre of it, littered with papers, and hemmed in with chairs that suggested that their occupants had hurriedly vacated them. at the end was seated a small, bent figure, conspicuous for her ruff and her red hair, and her rope of pearls, and her eyes bright and sharp as a bird’s.
colin, sadly pricked on the soles of his feet by the rushes, advanced across that immeasurable distance, looking downwards on his lamb. when he had traversed the half of it, he raised his eyes for a moment, and saw that the queen, still quite motionless, was steadily regarding him. again he bent his eyes on his lamb, and when he had come close to that formidable figure, he fell on his knees.
“a lamb, madam,” he said, “which is the first-fruits of the spring. my crook, which i lay at your grace’s feet, and myself, who am not worthy to lie there.”
again colin raised his eyes, and the wretch put into them all the gaiety and boldness which he gave to the wenches on the farm. then he dropped them again, and with his whole stake on the table, waited, gambler as he was, for the arbitrament.
“look at me, colin stanier,” said the queen.
colin looked. there was the tiny wrinkled face, the high eyebrows, the thin-lipped mouth disclosing the discoloured teeth.
“madam!” he said.
“well, what next?” said elizabeth impatiently.
“my body and soul, madam,” said colin, and once more he put into his eyes and his eager mouth that semblance of desire which had made mistress moffat, the{14} wife of the mayor, box his ears with a blow that was more of a caress.
the queen felt precisely the same as mistress moffat, and drew her hand down over his smooth chin. “and it is your wish to be my shepherd-boy, colin?” she asked. “you desire to be my page?”
“i am sick with desire,” said colin.
“i appoint you,” she said. “i greet and salute you, colin stanier.”
she bent towards him, and neither saint nor devil could have inspired colin better at that moment. he kissed her (after all, he had been offered the greeting) fairly and squarely on her withered cheek, and then, without pause, kissed the hem of her embroidered gown. he had done right, just absolutely right.
“you bold dog!” said the queen. “stand up.”
colin stood up, with his arms close by his side, as if at attention in all his shapeliness and beauty, and the queen clapped her hands.
the side door opened disclosing halberdiers, and through the door by which colin had entered came the controller.
“colin stanier is my page,” she said, “and of my household. summon my lords again; we have not finished with our spanish business. the lamb—i will eat that lamb, and none other, at the feast of easter.”
within the week colin was established in attendance on the queen, and the daring felicity which had marked his first dealings with her never failed nor faltered. his radiant youth, the gaiety of his boyish spirits, the unfailing tact of his flattery, his roguish innocence, the fine innate breeding of the yeoman-stock, which is the best blood in england, wove a spell that seemed to defy the usual fickleness of her favouritism. certainly he had wisdom as far beyond his years as it was beyond his upbringing, and wisdom coming like pure water from the curves of that beautiful young mouth, made him frankly irresistible to the fiery and shrewd old woman.{15}
from being her page he was speedily advanced to the post of confidential secretary, and queer it was to see the boy seated by her side at some state council while she rated and stormed at her lords for giving her some diplomatic advice which her flame-like spirit deemed spiritless. then, in mid-tirade, she would stop, tweak her secretary by his rosy ear, and say, “eh, colin, am i not in the right of it?”
very often she was not, and then colin would so deftly insinuate further considerations, prefacing them by, “as your grace and majesty so wisely has told us” (when her grace and majesty had told them precisely the opposite) that elizabeth would begin to imagine that she had thought of these prudent things herself.
the court in general followed the example of their royal mistress, and had not colin’s nature, below its gaiety and laughter, been made of some very stern stuff, he must surely have degenerated into a spoilt, vain child, before ever he came to his full manhood. men and women alike were victims of that sunny charm; to be with him made the heart sing, and none could grudge that a boy on whom god had showered every grace of mind and body, should find the mere tawdry decorations of riches and honour his natural heritage.
then, too, there was this to consider: the queen’s fickle and violent temper might topple down one whom she had visited but yesterday with her highest favours, and none but colin could induce her to restore the light she had withdrawn. if you wanted a boon granted, or even a vengeance taken, there was no such sure road to its accomplishment as to secure colin’s advocacy, no path that led so straight to failure as to set the boy against you. for such services it was but reasonable that some token of gratitude should be conferred on him by the suppliant, some graceful acknowledgment which, in our harsh modern way, we should now term “commission,” and colin’s commissions, thus honestly earned, soon amounted to a very pretty figure. whether he augmented them or not{16} by less laudable methods, by threats or what we call by that ugly word “blackmail,” is a different matter, and need not be gone into.
yet, surrounded as he was by all that might have been expected to turn a boy’s head, colin remained singularly well-balanced, and whatever tales might be told about his virtue, the most censorious could find no fault with his prudence. the queen created him at the age of twenty-five knight of the garter and earl of yardley, a title which his descendants hold to this day, and presented him with the manor of yardley in buckinghamshire, and the monastic lands of tillingham on the hills above the romney marsh. he incorporated the fine dwelling-house of the evicted abbot into the great and glorious mansion of stanier, the monks’ quarters he demolished altogether, and the abbey church became the parish church of tillingham for worship, and the chapel and burying-place of the staniers for pride.
but, though the queen told him once and again that it was time her colin took a wife, he protested that while her light was shed on him not venus herself could kindle desire in his heart. this was the only instance in which he disobeyed gloriana’s wishes, but gloriana willingly pardoned his obduracy, and rewarded it with substantial benefits.
on her death, which occurred when he was thirty, he made a very suitable match with the heiress of sir john reeves, who brought him, in addition to a magnificent dowry, the considerable acreage which to-day is part of the london estate of the staniers. he retired from court-life, and divided the year between stanier and london, busy with the embellishment of his houses, into which he poured those treasures of art which now glorify them.
he was, too, as the glades and terraces of stanier testify, a gardener on a notable scale, and his passion in this direction led him to evict his father from the farm where colin’s own boyhood was passed, which lay on the level land below the hill, in order to make there the long,{17} ornamental water which is one of the most agreeable features of the place.
his father by this time was an old man of uncouth and intemperate habits, and it could not perhaps be expected that the young earl should cherish his declining years with any very personal tenderness. but he established him in a decent dwelling, gave him an adequate maintenance with a permission to draw on the brewery for unlimited beer, and made only the one stipulation that his father should never attempt to gain access to him. the old man put so liberal an interpretation on his beer-rights, that he did not enjoy them very long.
this taint of hardness in colin’s character was no new feature. he had left the home of his boyhood without regret or any subsequent affection of remembrance: he had made his pleasurable life at court a profitable affair, whereas others had spent their salaries and fortunes in maintaining their suitable magnificence, and, like the great marlborough a few generations later, he had allowed infatuated women to pay pretty handsomely for the privilege of adoring him, and the inhumanities, such as his eviction of his father, with which his married life was garlanded, was no more than the reasonable development of earlier tendencies. always a great stickler for the majesty of the law, he caused certain sheep-stealers on the edge of his property to be hanged for their misdeeds, and why should not the lord of tillingham have bought their little properties from their widows at a more than reasonable price?
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{18} 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{19} 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{20} 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.
the day of his seventieth birthday arrived: the house was full of guests, and in honour of the occasion there was a feast for the tenants of the estate in the great hall,{21} while his own friends, making a company of some fifty, sat at the high table on the dais. all day distant thunder had muttered obscurely among the hills, and by the time that the lights were lit in the hall, and the drinking deep, a heavy pall had overspread the sky.
lord yardley was in fine spirits that night. for years he had had a presentiment that he would do no more than reach the exact span appointed for the life of men, and would die on his seventieth birthday, and here was the day as good as over, and if that presentiment proved to be unfulfilled he felt that he would face with a stouter scepticism the other terror. he had just risen from his place to reply to the toast of the evening, and stood, tall and comely, the figure of a man still in the prime of life, facing his friends and dependents. then, even while he opened his lips to speak, the smile was struck from his face, and instead of speech there issued from his mouth one wild cry of terror.
“no, no!” he screamed, and with his arm pushed out in front of him as if to defend himself against some invisible presence, he fell forward across the table.
at that moment the hall leaped into blinding light, and an appalling riot of thunder answered. some said that he had been struck and, indeed, on his forehead there was a small black mark as of burning, but those nearest felt no shock, and were confident that the stroke which had fallen on him preceded the flash and the thunder: he had crashed forward after that cry and that gesture of terror, before even the lightning descended.... and ronald reigned in his stead.
by the patent of nobility granted to colin stanier by elizabeth, the estates and title descended not through heirs male only, but through the female line. if an earl of yardley died leaving only female issue, the girl became countess of yardley in her own right, to the exclusion of sons begotten by her father’s or grandfather’s younger{22} brother. it was perhaps characteristic of the queen to frame the charter thus—she had done so of her own invention and devising—for thus she gratified her own sense of the capability of her sex, and also felt some phantom of posthumous delight in securing, as far as she could, that the honours that she had showered on her favourite should descend in direct line. but for many generations her foresight and precaution seemed needless, since each holder of the title bore sons only, and the line was straight as a larch, from father to son. by some strange arbitrament of fate it so happened that younger sons (following the unchaste example of philip) died in legal celibacy, or, if they married, were childless, or became so in that generation or the next. thus the family is unique in having to this day no collateral branches, and in this the fancifully disposed may be prone to see a certain diabolical observance of the original bond. no dowries for daughters had to be provided, and such portions as were made for younger sons soon rolled back again into the sea of family affluence.
the purchase of land formed the main outlet for the flood of ever-increasing revenue, and as surely as lord yardley entered upon his new acreages, mineral wealth would be discovered on the freshly-acquired property (as was the case in the cornish farms, where the stanier lode of tin was found), or if when, at a later date, as in a mere freak, he purchased barren fields fit only for grazing, by the sea, it was not long before the prince regent found that the sussex coast enjoyed a bracing and salubrious air, and lo! all the grazing-lands of lord stanier became building sites. whatever they touched turned to gold, and that to no an?mic hands incapable of enjoying the lusts and splendours of life. honours fell on them thick as autumn leaves: each holder of the title in turn has won the garter, and never has the garter been bestowed on them without solid merit to carry it. three have been prime ministers, further three ambassadors to foreign countries on difficult and delicate businesses; in{23} the napoleonic wars there was a great general.... but all these records are public property.
less known, perhaps, is the fact that no lord yardley has ever yet died in his bed or received the religious consolation that would fit him to go forth undismayed on his last dark, solitary journey, and though each in turn (with the sad exception of philip, third earl, and his nephew, the recusant ronald) has lived to the comfortable age of seventy, swift death, sometimes with violence, has been the manner of his exit. colin, fourth earl, committed suicide under circumstances which made it creditable that he should do so; otherwise strange seizures, accompanied, it would appear, by some inexplicable terror, has been the manner of the demise.
and what, in this brief history of their annals, can be said of the legend, except that from being a terrible truth to colin, first earl, it has faded even as has faded the ink which records that mythical bargaining? it is more than a hundred years ago now that the lord yardley of the day caused the parchment to be inserted in the frame of his infamous ancestor, where it can be seen now every thursday afternoon from three to five, when stanier is open, without fee, to decently-clad visitors, and the very fact that lord yardley (temp. george iii.) should have displayed it as a curiosity, is the measure of the incredulity with which those most closely concerned regarded it. a man would not put up for all the world to see the warrant that he should burn eternally in the fires of hell if he viewed it with the slightest tremor of misgiving. it was blasphemous even to suppose that worldly prosperity (as said the excellent parson at stanier who always dined at the house on sunday evening and slept it off on monday morning) was anything other than the mark of divine favour, and many texts from the psalmist could be produced in support of his view. thus fortified by port and professional advice, lord yardley decreed the insertion of the document into the frame that held the picture of that ancestor of his whose signature it bore, and gave a{24} remarkably generous subscription to the organ-fund. faded as was the writing then, it has faded into greater indecipherability since, and with it any remnant of faith in its validity.
yet hardly less curious to the psychologist is the strange nature of these staniers. decked as they are with the embellishment of distinction, of breeding, and beauty, they have always seemed to their contemporaries to be lacking in some quality, hard to define but easy to appreciate or, in their case, to miss. a tale of trouble will very likely win from them some solid alleviation, but their generosity, you would find, gave always the impression of being made not out of love or out of sympathy, but out of contempt.
their charm—and god knows how many have fallen victims to it—has been and is that of some cold brilliance, that attracts even as the beam of a lighthouse attracts the migrating birds who dash themselves to pieces against the glass that shields it; it can scarcely be said to be the fault of the light that the silly feathered things broke themselves against its transparent, impenetrable armour. it hardly invited: it only shone on business which did not concern the birds, so there was no definite design of attraction or cruelty in its beams, only of brilliance and indifference. that is the habit of light; such, too, are the habits of birds; the light even might be supposed by sentimentalists faintly to regret the shattered wing and the brightness of the drowned plumage.
but, so it is popularly supposed, it is quite easy, though not very prudent, to arouse unfavourable emotion in a stanier; you have but to vex him or run counter to his wish, and you will very soon find yourself on the target of a remorseless and vindictive hate. no ray of pity, so it is said, softens the hardness of that frosty intensity; no contrition, when once it has been aroused, will thaw it. forgiveness is a word quite foreign to their vocabulary, and its nearest equivalent is a contemptuous indifference. gratitude, in the same way, figures as an{25} obsolete term in the language of their emotions. they neither feel it nor expect it: it has no currency. whatever you may be privileged to do for a stanier, he takes as a mite in the endowment which the world has always, since the days of our elizabethan colin, poured into their treasuries, while if he has done you a good turn, he has done so as he would chuck a picked bone to a hungry dog: the proper course for the dog is to snatch it up and retire into its corner to mumble it.
it would be strange, then, if, being without ruth or love, a stanier could bestow or aspire to friendship with man or woman, and, indeed, such an anomaly has never occurred. but, then, it must be remembered that staniers, as far as we can find out from old letters and diaries and mere historical documents, never wanted friendship nor, indeed, comprehended it. their beauty and their charm made easy for them the creation of such relationships as they desired, the assuaging of such thirst as was theirs, after which the sucked rind could be thrown away; and though through all their generations they have practised those superb hospitalities which find so apt a setting at stanier, it is rather as gods snuffing up the incense of their worshippers than as entertaining their friends that they fill the great house with all who are noblest by birth or distinction.
george iv., for instance, when prince regent, stayed there, it may be remembered, for nearly a fortnight, having been asked for three days, during which time the entire house of lords with their wives spent in noble sections two nights at stanier, as well as many much younger and sprightlier little personages just as famous in the proper quarter. the entire opera from drury lane diverted their evening one night, baccarat (or its equivalent) beguiled another, on yet another the prince could not be found....
not so fortunate, perhaps, save in being the mistresses of all this splendour, and invariably the mothers of hand{26}some sons, have been the successive wives in this illustrious line. for with whatever natural gaiety, with whatever high and independent spirit these ladies married the sons of the house, they seemed always to have undergone some gloomy and mysterious transformation. it was as if they were ground in a mill, and ground exceeding small, and as if the resulting powder of grain was mixed and kneaded and baked into the stanier loaf.
especially was this the case with her who married the young lord stanier of the day; long before she succeeded to her full honours she had been crushed into the iron mould designed for the countesses of yardley. in public, dignity and stateliness and fine manner would distinguish her, but below these desirable insignia of her station, her character and individuality seemed to have been reduced to pulp, to have been frozen to death, to have been pounded and brayed in some soul-shattering mortar. perhaps when first as a bride she entered through the glass doors which were only opened when the eldest son brought home his wife, or when there was welcomed at stanier some reigning monarch, her heart would be all afire with love and virgin longing for him with whom she passed through those fatal portals, but before the honeymoon was over this process that tamed and stifled and paralysed would have begun its deadly work.
for the eldest son and his wife there was reserved a floor in one of the wings of the house; they had no other establishment in the country, and here, when not in london, the family dwelt in patriarchal fashion. when no guests were present, the heir-apparent and his wife breakfasted and lunched in the privacy of their wing, if so they chose; they had their own horses, their own household of servants, but every evening, when the warning bell for dinner sounded, the major-domo came to the door of their apartments and preceded them down to the great gallery where, with any other sons and daughters-in-law, they awaited the entrance of lord yardley and his wife. then came the stately and almost speechless dinner,{27} served on gold plate, and after that a rubber of whist, decorous and damning, until lady yardley retired on the stroke of ten, and the sons joined their father in the billiard-room.
such evenings were rare (for usually throughout the shooting season there were guests in the house), but from them we can conjecture some sketch of the paralysing process: this was the conduct of a family evening in the mere superficial adventure of dining and passing a sociable evening, and from it we can estimate something of the effect of parallel processes applied to the thoughts and the mind and the aspirations and the desires of a young wife. no stanier wanted love or gave it; what he wanted when he took his mate was that in obedience and subjection she should give him (as she always did) a legitimate and healthy heir. she was not a stanier, and though she wore the family pearls like a halter, she was only there on sufferance and of necessity, and though her blood would beat with the true ichor in the arteries of the next generation, she was in herself no more than the sucked orange-rind.
the staniers were too proud to reckon an alliance with any family on the face of the earth as anything but an honour for the family concerned; even when, as happened at the close of the eighteenth century, a princess of the hohenzollern line was married to the heir, she was ground in the mill like any other. in her case she shared to the full in the brutal arrogance of her own family, and had imagined that it was she who, by this alliance, had conferred, not accepted, an honour. she had supposed that her husband and his relations would give her the deference due to royalty, and it took her some little time to learn her lesson, which she appears to have mastered.
a hundred years later the emperor william ii. of germany had a reminder of it which caused him considerable surprise. on one of his visits to england he deigned to pass a week-end at stanier, and though received as a reigning monarch with opening of the glass{28} doors, he found that his condescension in remembering that he was connected with the family was not received with the rapture of humility which he had expected. he had asked to be treated by the members of the family as cousin willie, and they did so with a nonchalance that was truly amazing.
such, in brief, was the rise of the staniers, and such the outline of their splendour.
