One morning, within a month of his departure from Stanier, Philip was coming slowly up from his bathing and basking on the beach, pleasantly fatigued, agreeably hungry, and stupefied with content. He had swum and floated in the warm crystal of the sea, diving from deep-water rocks into the liquid caves, where the sunlight made a shifting net of luminous scribbles over the jewelled pebbles; he had lain with half-shut eyes watching the quivering of the hot air over the white bank of shingle, with the sun warm on his drying shoulders and penetrating, it seemed, into the marrow of his bones and illuminating the very hearth and shrine of his spirit. The hours had passed but too quickly, and now he was making his leisurely way through vineyards and olive-farms back to the road where a little jingling equipage would be waiting to take him up to his villa on the hill above the town of Capri. On one side of the path was a sun-flecked wall, where, in the pools of brightness, lizards lay as immobile as the stones themselves; the edges of these pools of light bordered by continents of bluish shadow wavered with the slight stirring of the olive trees above them. Through the interlacement of these boughs he caught glimpses of the unstained sky and the cliffs that rose to the island heights. On the other side the olive groves declined towards the edge of the cliff, and through their branches the sea, doubly tinged with the sky’s blueness, was not less tranquil than the ether.
Presently, still climbing upwards, he emerged from the olive groves, while the vineyards in plots and terraces followed the outline of the hill. Mingled with them were orchards of lemon trees bearing the globes of the young green fruit together with flower; and leaf and flower and{48} fruit alike reeked of an inimitable fragrance. There were pomegranates bearing crimson flowers thick and waxlike against the wall of an ingle house that bordered the narrow path; a riot of morning-glory was new there every day with fresh unfoldings of blown blue trumpets. Out of the open door came an inspiriting smell of frying, and on the edge of the weather-stained balcony were rusty petroleum tins in which carnations bloomed. A space of level plateau, with grass already bleached yellow by this spell of hot weather, crowned the hill, and again he descended between lizard-tenanted walls through vineyards and lemon groves.
His rickety little carriage was waiting, the horse with a smart pheasant’s feather erect on its head, the driver with a carnation stuck behind his ear; the harness, for the sake of security, was supplemented with string. The whip cracked, the horse tossed its pheasant’s feather and jingled its bells, and, followed by a cloud of dust, Philip creaked away up the angled road, musing and utterly content.
He could scarcely believe, as the little equipage ambled up the hill, that the individual known by his name, and wearing his clothes, who had lived darkly like a weevil in that joylessness of stately gloom, was the same as this sun-steeped sprawler in the creaking carriage. He had come out of a nightmare of tunnel into the wholesome and blessed day, and was steeped in the colour of the sun. It was but a few weeks ago that, without anticipation of anything but relief from an intolerable situation, he had stolen out of Stanier, but swift ?ons of evolution had passed over him since then. There was not more difference between the darkness of those English winter days that had brooded in the halls and galleries of Stanier and this caressing sun that pervaded sea and sky, than there was between his acceptance of life then and his embrace of life now. Now it was enough to be alive: the very conditions of existence spelled content, and at the close of every day he would have welcomed a backward shift of{49} the hours so that he might have that identical day again, instead of welcoming the close of each day in the assurance of that identical day not coming again. There would be others, but from the total sum one unit had been subtracted. It had perished: it had dropped into the well of years.
Philip had no need to ask himself what constituted the horror of those closed years, for it was part of his consciousness, which called for no catechism, that it was his father’s existence; just the fact of him distilled the poison, thick as dew on a summer night, which made them thus. He had to the full the Stanier passion for the home itself, but as long as his father lived, the horror of the man so pervaded the place, so overrode all other sentiments with regard to it, that he could not think of the one apart from the other, for hatred, acid and corrosive, grew like some deadly mildew on the great galleries and the high halls.
It was no mere passive thing, an absence of love or affection, but a positive and prosperous growth: a henbane or a deadly nightshade sprouted and flowered and flourished there. Dwelling on it even for the toss of his horse’s head, as they clattered off the dusty road on to the paved way outside the town, Philip felt his hands grow damp.
He had come straight through to Rome and plunged himself, as in a cooling bath, in the beauty and magnificence of the antique city. He had wandered through galleries, had sat in the incense-fragrant dusk of churches, had spent long hours treading the vestiges of the past, content for the time to feel the spell of healing which the mere severing himself from Stanier had set at work. But soon through that spell there sounded a subtler incantation, coming not from the haunts of men nor the achievements of the past, but from the lovely heart of the lovely land itself which had called forth these manifestations.
He had drifted down to Naples, and across the bay to the enchanted island hanging like a cloud on the horizon{50} where the sea and sky melted into each other. As yet he wanted neither man nor woman, the exquisite physical conditions of the southern summer were in themselves the restoration he needed, with a truce from all human entanglements. Potent, indeed, was their efficacy; they ran through his heart like wine, rejuvenating and narcotic together, and to-day he could scarcely credit that a fortnight of eventless existence had flowed over him in one timeless moment of magic, of animal, unreflecting happiness.
Curious good fortune in elementary material ways had attended him. On the very day of his arrival, as he strolled out from his hotel in the dusk up the moon-struck hill above the town, he had paused beneath the white garden wall of a villa abutting on the path, and even as in imagination he pictured the serenity and aloofness of it, his eye caught a placard, easily legible in the moonlight, that it was to let, and with that came the certainty that he was to be the lessee.
Next morning he made inquiry and inspection of its cool whitewashed rooms, tiled, floored and vaulted. Below it lay its terraced garden, smothered with neglected rose-trees and from the house, along a short paved walk, there ran a vine-wreathed pergola, and a great stone pine stood sentinel. A capable contadina with her daughter were easily found who would look after him, and within twenty-four hours he had transferred himself from the German-infested hotel. Soon, in answer to further inquiries, he learned that at the end of his tenure a purchase might be effected, and the negotiations had begun.
To-day for the first time he found English news awaiting him, and the perusal of it was like the sudden and vivid recollection of a nightmare. Lord Yardley, so his mother wrote, was getting more capable every day; he had even gone out riding. He had asked no questions as to where Philip had gone, or when he would return, but he had given orders that his name should not be mentioned, and once when she had inadvertently done so,{51} there had been a great explosion of anger. Otherwise life went on as usual: Sir Thomas had paid a visit yesterday, and was very much gratified by his examination of his patient, and said he need not come again, unless any unfavourable change occurred, for another month. His father sat long after dinner, and the games of whist were often prolonged till midnight....
Philip skimmed through the frozen sheets ... his mother was glad he was well, and that sea-bathing suited him.... It was very hot, was it not?—but he always liked the heat.... The hay had been got in, which was lucky, because the barometer had gone down.... He crumpled them up with a little shudder as at a sudden draught of chilled air....
There was another from his sister Hester.
“So you’ve run away, like me, so the iceberg tells me,” she wrote. “I only wonder that you didn’t do it long ago. This is just to congratulate you. She says, too, that father is ever so much better, which I think is a pity. Why should he be allowed to get better? Mother says it is like a miracle, and if it is, I’m sure I know who worked it.
“Really, Phil, I am delighted that you have awoke to the fact that there is a world outside Stanier—good Lord, if Stanier was all the world, what a hell it would be! You used never to be happy away from the place, I remember, but I gather from what mother says that it became absolutely impossible for you to stop there.
“There’s a blight on it, Phil: sometimes I almost feel that I believe in the legend, for though it’s twenty years since I made my skip, if ever I have a nightmare, it is that I dream that I am back there, and that my father is pursuing me over those slippery floors in the dusk. But I shall come back there, if you’ll allow me, when he’s dead: it’s he who makes the horror....”
Once again Philip felt a shiver of goose-flesh, and sending his sister’s letter to join the other in the empty grate, strolled out into the hot stillness of the summer afternoon,{52} and he hailed the sun like one awakening from such a nightmare as Hester had spoken of. All his life he had been sluggish in the emotions, looking at life in the mirror of other men’s minds, getting book knowledge of it only in a cloistered airlessness, not experiencing it for himself—a reader of travels and not a voyager. But now with his escape from Stanier had come a quickening of his pulses, and that awakening which had brought home to him the horror of his father had brought to him also a passionate sense of the loveliness of the world.
Regret for the wasted years of drowsy torpor was there, also; here was he already on the meridian of life, with so small a store of remembered raptures laid up as in a granary for his old age, when his arm would be too feeble to ply the sickle in the ripe cornfields. A man, when he could no longer reap, must live on what he had gathered: without that he would face hungry and empty years. When the fire within began to burn low, and he could no longer replenish it, it was ill for him if the house of his heart could not warm itself with the glow that experience had already given him. He must gather the grapes of life, and tread them in his winepress, squeezing out the uttermost drop, so that the ferment and sunshine of his vintage would be safe in cellar for the comforting of the days when in his vineyard the leaves were rotting under wintry skies. Too many days had passed for him unharvested.
That evening, after his dinner, he strolled down in the warm dusk to the piazza. The day had been a festa in honour of some local saint, and there was a show of fireworks on the hill above the town, and in consequence the piazza and the terrace by the funicular railway, which commanded a good view of the display, was crowded with the young folk of the island. Rockets aspired, and bursting in bouquets of feathered fiery spray, dimmed the stars and illumined the upturned faces of handsome boys and swift-ripening girlhood. Eager and smiling mouths started out of the darkness as the rockets broke into{53} flower, eager and young and ready for love and laughter, fading again and vanishing as the illumination expired.
It was this garden of young faces that occupied Philip more than the fireworks, these shifting groups that formed and reformed, smiling and talking to each other in the intervals of darkness. The bubbling ferment of intimate companionship frothed round him, and suddenly he seemed to himself to be incapsulated, an insoluble fragment floating or sinking in this heady liquor of life. There came upon him sharp and unexpected as a blow dealt from behind, a sense of complete loneliness.
Every one else had his companion: here was a group of chattering boys, there of laughing girls, here the sexes were mingled. Elder men and women had a quieter comradeship: they had passed through the fermenting stage, it might be, but the wine of companionship with who knew what memories were in solution there, was theirs still. All these rapturous days he had been alone, and had not noticed it; now his solitariness crystallised into loneliness.
With a final sheaf of rockets the display came to an end, and the crowd began to disperse homewards. The withdrawal took the acuteness from Philip’s ache, for he had no longer in front of his eyes the example of what he missed, his hunger was not whetted by the spectacle of food.
The steps of the last loiterers died away, and soon he was left alone looking out over the vine-clad slope of the steep hill down to the Marina. Warm buffets of air wandered up from the land that had lain all day in its bath of sunlight, rippling round him like the edge of some spent wave; but already the dew, moistening the drought of day, was instilling into the air some nameless fragrance of damp earth and herbs refreshed. Beyond lay the bay, conjectured rather than seen, and, twenty miles away, a thin necklet of light showed where Naples lay stretched and smouldering along the margin of the sea. If a wish could have transported Philip there, he{54} would have left the empty terrace to see with what errands and adventures the city teemed, even as the brain teems with thoughts and imaginings.
Into the impersonal seduction of the summer night some human element of longing had entered, born of the upturned faces of boys and girls watching the rockets, and sinking back, bright-eyed and eager, into the cover of darkness, even as the sword slips into its sheath again. Youth, in the matter of years, was already past for him, but in his heart until now youth had not yet been born. No individual face among them all had flown a signal for him, but collectively they beckoned; it was among such that he would find the lights of his heart’s harbour shining across the barren water, and kindling desire in his eyes.
It was not intellectual companionship that he sought nor the unity and absorption of love, for Philip was true Stanier and had no use for love; but he craved for youth, for beauty, for the Southern gaiety and friendliness, for the upleap and the assuagement of individual desire. Till middle-age he had lived without the instincts of youth; his tree was barren of the golden fruits of youth’s delight. Now, sudden as his change of life, his belated springtime flooded him.
It was in Naples that he found her, in the studio of an acquaintance he had made when he was there first, and before midsummer Rosina Viagi was established in the villa. She was half English by birth, and in her gold hair, heavy as the metal and her blue eyes, she shewed her mother’s origin. But her temperament was of the South—fierce and merry, easily moved to laughter, and as easily to squalls of anger that passed as swiftly as an April shower, and melted into sunlight again. She so enthralled his senses that he scarcely noticed, for those first months, the garish commonness of her mind: it scarcely mattered; he scarcely heeded what she said so long as it was those full lips which formed the silly syllables. She was greedy, and he knew it, in the matter of{55} money, but his generosity quite contented her, and he had got just what he had desired, one who entirely satisfied his passion and left his mind altogether unseduced.
Then with the fulfillment of desire came the leanness that follows, a swift inevitable Nemesis on the heels of the accomplishment of an unworthy purpose. He had dreamed of the gleam of romance in those readings of his at Stanier, and awoke to find but a smouldering wick. And before the summer was dead, he knew he was to become a father.
In the autumn the island emptied of its visitors, and Rosina could no longer spend her evenings at the café or on the piazza, with her countrywomen casting envious glances at her toilettes, and the men boldly staring at her beauty. She was genuinely fond of Philip, but her native gaiety demanded the distraction of crowds, and she yawned in the long evenings when the squalls battered at the shutters and the panes streamed with the fretful rain.
“But are we going to stop here all the winter?” she asked one evening as she gathered up the piquet cards. “It gets very melancholy. You go for your great walks, but I hate walking; you sit there over your book, but I hate reading.”
Philip laughed. “Am I to clap my hands at the rain,” he said, “and say, ‘Stop at once! Rosina wearies for the sun’?”
She perched herself on the arm of his chair, a favourite attitude for her supplications. “No, my dear,” she said, “all your money will not do that. Besides, even if the rain obeyed you and the sun shone, there would still be nobody to look at me. But you can do something.”
“And what’s that?”
“Just a little apartment in Naples,” she said. “It is so gay in Naples even if the sirocco blows or if the tramontana bellows. There are the theatres; there are crowds; there is movement. I cannot be active, but there{56} I can see others being active. There are fresh faces in the street, there is gaiety.”
“Oh, I hate towns!” said Philip.
She got up and began to speak more rapidly. “You think only of yourself,” she said. “I mope here; I am miserable. I feel like one of the snails on the wall, crawling, crawling, and going into a dusty crevice. That is not my nature. I hate snails, except when they are cooked, and then I gobble them up, and wipe my mouth and think no more of them. You can read your book in a town just as well as here, and you can take a walk in a town. Ah, do, Philip!”
Suddenly and unexpectedly Philip found himself picturing his days here alone, without Rosina. He did not consciously evoke the image; it presented itself to him from outside himself. The island had certainly cast its spell over him: just to be here, to awake to the sense of its lotus-land tranquillity, and to go to sleep knowing that a fresh eventless day would welcome him, made him content. He could imagine himself now alone in this plain vaulted room, with the storm swirling through the stone-pine outside, and the smell of burning wood on the hearth without desiring Rosina’s presence.
“Well, it might be done,” he said. “We could have a little nook in Naples, if you liked. I don’t say that I should always be there.”
Rosina’s eyes sparkled. “No, no, that would be selfish of me,” she said. “You would come over here for a week when you wished, as you are so fond of your melancholy island....” She stopped, and her Italian suspiciousness came to the surface. “You are not thinking of leaving me?” she asked.
“Of course I am not,” he said impatiently. “You imagine absurdities.”
“I have heard of such absurdities. Are you sure?”
“Yes, you silly baby,” said he.
She recovered her smiles. “I trust you,” she said. “Yes, where were we? You will come over here when{57} you want your island, and you will be there when you want me. Oh, Philip, do you promise me?”
Her delicious gaiety invaded her again, and she sat herself on the floor between his knees.
“Oh, you are kind to me!” she said. “I hope your father will live for ever, and then you will never leave me. There is no one so kind as you. We will have a flat, will we not? I know just such an one, that looks on to the Castello d’Ovo, and all day the carriages go by, and we will go by, too, and look up at our home, and wonder who are the happy folk who live there, and every one who sees me will envy me for having a man who loves me. And we will go to the restaurants where there are lights and glitter, and the band plays, and I will be happier than the day is long. Let us go over to-morrow. I will tell Maria to pack....”
It was just this impetuous prattling childishness which had enthralled him at first, and even while he told himself now how charming it was, he knew that he found it a weariness and an unreality. The same Rosina ten minutes before would be in a gale of temper, then, some ten minutes after, under a cloud of suspicious surmise. His own acceptance of her proposal that they would be together at times, at times separate, was, in reality, a vast relief to him, yet chequering that relief was that curious male jealousy that the woman whom he had chosen to share his nights and days should contemplate his absences with his own equanimity. While he reserved to himself the right of not being utterly devoted to her, he claimed her devotion to him.
It had come to that. It was not that his heart beat to another tune, his eyes did not look elsewhere; simply the swiftly-consumed flame of passion was now consciously dying down, and while he took no responsibility for his own cooling, he resented her share in it. He treated her, in fact, as Staniers had for many generations treated their wives, but she had an independence which none of those unfortunate females had enjoyed. He had already made{58} a handsome provision for her; and he was quite prepared to take a full financial responsibility for his fatherhood. Yet, while he recognised how little she was to him, he resented the clear fact of how little he was to her.
He got up. “You shall have it all your own way, darling,” he said. “We’ll go across to Naples to-morrow; we’ll find a flat—the one you know of—and you shall see the crowds and the lights again....”
“Ah, you are adorable,” said she. “I love you too much, Philip.”
He established her to her heart’s content, and through the winter divided the weeks between Naples and the island. She had no hold on his heart, and on his mind none; but, at any rate, he desired no one else but her, and as the months went by there grew in him a tenderness which had not formed part of the original bond. Often her vanity, her childish love of ostentation, a certain querulousness also which had lately exhibited itself, made him long for the quiet solitude across the bay. Sometimes she would be loth to let him go, sometimes in answer to her petition he would put off his departure, and then before the evening was over she would have magnified some infinitesimal point of dispute into a serious disagreement, have watered it with her tears, sobbed out that he was cruel to her, that she wished he had gone instead of remaining to make himself a tyrant. He shared her sentiments on that topic, and would catch the early boat next morning.
And yet, even as with a sigh of relief he settled himself into his chair that night by the open fireplace, and congratulated himself on this recapture of tranquillity, he would miss something.... She was not there to interrupt him, to scold him, to rage at him, but she had other moods as well, when she beguiled and enchanted him. That was no deep-seated spell, nor had it ever been. Its ingredients were but her physical grace, and the charm of her spontaneous gaiety.
Perhaps next morning he would get a long scrawled{59} letter from her, saying that he had been a brute to leave her, that she had not been out all day, but had sat and cried, and at that he would count himself lucky in his solitude. And even while he felt as dry as sand towards her, there would come seething up through its aridity this moist hidden spring of tenderness.
He had made just such an escape from her whims and wilfulness one day towards the end of February, but before the evening was half over he had tired of this solitude that he had sought. His book did not interest him, and he felt too restless to go to bed. Restlessness, at any rate, might be walked off, and he set out to tramp and tranquillise himself.
The moon was near to its full, the night warm and windless, and the air alert with the coming of the spring. Over the garden beds hung the veiled fragrance of wallflowers and freezias, and their scent in some subtle way suggested her presence. Had she been there she would, in the mood in which he had left her, have jangled and irritated him, but if a wish would have brought her he would have wished it.
He let himself out of the garden gate, and mounted the steep path away from the town, thinking by brisk movement to dull and fatigue himself and to get rid of the thought of her. But like a wraith, noiseless and invisible, she glided along by him, and he could not shake her off. She did not scold him or nag at him: she was gay and seductive, with the lure of the springtime tingling about her, and beckoning him. Soon he found himself actively engaged in some sort of symbolic struggle to elude her, and taking a rough and steeper path, thought that he would outpace her.
Here the way lay over an uncultivated upland, and as he pounded along he drank in the intoxicating ferment of the vernal night. The earth was dew-drenched, and the scent of the aromatic plants of the hillside served but as a whet to his restless thoughts, and still, hurry as he might, he could not escape from her and from a certain{60} decision that she seemed to be forcing on him. Finally, regardless of the dew, and exhausted with the climb, he sat down and began to think it out.
They had been together now for eight months, and though she often wearied and annoyed him, he could not imagine going back to the solitary life which, when first he came to Capri, had been so full of enchantment. They had rubbed and jarred against each other, but never had either of them, loose though the tie had been, considered leaving each other. They had been absolutely faithful, and were, indeed, married in all but the testimony of a written contract.
It had been understood from the first that, on his father’s death, Philip would take up the reins of his government at home, leaving her in all material matters independent and well off, and in all probability her dowry, cancelling her history, would enable her to make a favourable marriage. But though that had been settled between them, Philip found now, as he sat with her wraith still silent, still invisible, but insistently present, that not till this moment had he substantially pictured himself without her, or seen himself looking out for another woman to be mother of his children. He could see himself going on quarrelling with Rosina and wanting her again, but the realisation of his wanting any one else was beyond him.
On the other hand, his father, in this miraculous recovery of his powers, might live for years, and who knew whether, long before his death, both he and Rosina might not welcome it as a deliverance from each other?
But not less impossible also than the picturing of himself without Rosina, was the imagining of her installed as mistress at Stanier. Try as he might, he could not make visible to himself so unrealisable a contingency. Rosina at Stanier ... Rosina.... Yet, so soon, she would be the mother of his child.
The moon had sunk, and he must grope his way down the hillside which he had mounted so nimbly in the hope{61} 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;{62} 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?{63}”
The fresh bottle was brought, and he poured himself out a glassful and passed it to his son.
“By God, I haven’t been so happy for years as I’ve been this last week,” he said. “You’ve made a beginning now, my boy; you’ll have a son next. And to think of Philip, mouldering away all this time. He’s forty-six now; he’ll not get in your way. A useless fellow, Philip; sitting like a crow all day in the library, like some old barren bird. I should like to have seen his face when he got the news. But I’ll write him to-morrow myself, and say that if he cares to come home I’ll treat him civilly.”
“Poor old Phil!” said Ronald. “Do write to him, father. I daresay he would like to come back. He has been gone a year, come May.”
Lord Yardley helped himself again. His hand was quite steady, but his face was violently flushed. Every night now, since the birth of Ronald’s baby, he had drunk deeply, and but for this heightened colour, more vivid to-night than usual, the wine seemed scarcely to produce any effect on him. All day now for a week he had lived in this jovial and excited mood, talking of little else than the event which had so enraptured him.
“And Janet’s but thirty yet,” he went on, forgetting again about Philip, “and she comes of a fruitful stock: the Armitages aren’t like us; they run to quantity. Not that I find fault with the quality. But a boy, Ronald.”
A servant had come in with a telegram, which he presented to Lord Yardley, who threw it over to Ronald.
“Just open it for me,” he said. “See if it requires any answer.”
Ronald drew a candle nearer him; he was conscious of having drunk a good deal, and the light seemed dim and veiled. He fumbled over the envelope, and drawing out the sheet, unfolded it. He stared at it with mouth fallen open.
“It’s a joke,” he said in a loud, unsteady voice. “It’s some silly joke.{64}”
“Let’s have it, then,” said his father. “Who’s the joker?”
“It’s from Philip,” said he. “He says that he’s married, and that his wife has had twins to-day—boys.”
Lord Yardley rose to his feet, the flush on his face turning to purple. Then, without a word, he fell forward across the table, crashing down among the glasses and decanters.
 
A fortnight after the birth of the twins, Rosina, who till then had been doing well, developed disquieting symptoms with high temperature. Her illness declared itself as scarlet fever, and on the 6th of April she died.
Surely in those spring weeks there had been busy superintendence over the fortunes of the Staniers. Philip, till lately outcast from his home and vagrant bachelor, had succeeded to the great property and the honours and titles of his house. Two lusty sons were his, and there was no Rosina to vex him with her petulance and common ways. All tenderness that he had had for her was diverted into the persons of his sons, and in particular of Colin. In England, in this month of April, the beloved home awaited the coming of its master with welcome and rejoicing.