WITH the declining wheel of the sun to the west, the shadow of the great yew-hedge began to flow like some tide, dark and clear, over the paved terrace which since morning had basked in the blaze of the July day. It had been planted by Colin Stanier first Earl of Yardley, when he laid the foundations of his house in the time of Elizabeth, and the three-sided serge rampart, now thick and solid as a fortress-wall, ran out from the corners of the façade, and formed a frame for the lawn below the terrace. Beyond, the ground declined in smooth slopes of short-cut turf to the lake. This lake also was the creation of the first Lord Yardley, for he had built the broad dam now clothed with rhododendrons across the dip of the valley, so that the stream which flowed down it was pent to form this triangular expanse of water. At the top end it was shallow, but by the sluice in the centre of the dam fifteen feet of dark water reflected the banks of blossom.
Beyond again and below the hill-side tumbled rapidly down to the heat-hazed levels of the Romney marsh, and over all the great house kept watch, stately and steadfast as the hill from which it sprang, a presiding presence and symbol of the three centuries of unbroken prosperity which had blessed the fortunes of the Staniers. Whatever uprooting tornado of revolution had swept across England, devastating or impoverishing the great families of the past, they seemed anchored and protected beyond all power of ruinous vicissitudes. They were no fat or brainless race, who but battened and dozed in material magnificence, but served their country well in public ministries. As for their private lives, the Staniers have always considered that such were their own concern.
The family rose to the splendour which it still enjoys in the reign of Elizabeth. Its founder was one Colin Stanier, the son of a small local farmer, who, on the occasion of the Queen’s visit to Rye as she toured her Cinque Ports, went into the town to see the pageant pass. As Her Grace rode down the steep cobbled way from the church, her horse stumbled, and the boy, some eighteen years old at the time, had the privilege by his quickness to save the Queen from a serious fall. She looked on his amazing comeliness with an admiring eye, and bade him wait on her next day at the Manor of Brede.... That night, according to the family tradition, as he worked and slept in a shepherd’s hut on the marsh, busy with the midwifery of his father’s ewes at lambing-time, he was visited by a personage even greater than the Queen, one no less than Satan himself, who, for the signing away of his soul, offered, not only to him but to those of his descendants who chose to associate themselves with the bargain, health and wealth and honour up to the fulness of their hearts’ desire. A deed was thereupon executed between the two which Colin signed with the blood of his pricked arm and which is supposed still to exist, let into the frame of the famous portrait of him at the family seat of Stanier. This curious story has been known from that day to this as the Stanier Legend.
The advent of Colin’s good fortune made no long tarrying, for early next morning, after his interview with His Satanic Majesty, he waited on Her Susceptible Majesty at the place appointed. Ruddy and fair he was to look upon, and even as the Lord took David, as he followed the ewes great with young, and made him King in Israel, so from the sheepfolds did Elizabeth take Colin Stanier and made him her page, and presently her most confidential secretary, and conferred on him at the age of twenty-five the monastic lands of Tillingham with the Earldom of Yardley and the Knighthood of the Garter. So, whether the student can accept or not as true the Stanier Legend, he is forced to credit Colin’s rise of fortune which is hardly less miraculous, for certainly he was a shepherd-boy one day, and a page of the Queen the next, and thereafter, while still a young man, attained a position such as few subjects have ever enjoyed. He wrote a voluminous memoir of his life which is preserved in the library at Stanier, and, yet unpublished, contains some very curious matter. In it he recorded without reticence or shame the manner of his days, his ruthless cruelty and relentlessness to those who crossed him, his building of the great house at Stanier, his ceaseless quest for pictures and tapestries, for statues and furniture, and described with the faithfulness of detail the bargain that he struck with Satan, and his conviction that he owed to it all the good fortune and prosperity that so unfailingly attended his earthly pilgrimage. That belief was confirmed by the characters of his descendants who by his bargain came under the diabolical protection, for in all history you will not find a family so consistently prosperous nor one so infamous. For more than a century after his death, the eldest son of the house made, on his twenty-first birthday, his formal choice as to whether he accepted for himself the legendary bargain, or dissociated himself from it, and during that period one only, Philip, the third Earl, would have no part in it, and he, within a month of his accession to his lordship, was smitten with a mysterious and terrible disease of which he soon died.
The rest all claimed their inheritance and mightily prospered, but in the eighteenth century their belief in so extravagant a legend faded in the light of more modern materialism. The solemn ritual of choice was performed no more, but, though the formality was given up, the subsequent successors to the bargain mostly acted up to the spirit of it, and their lives, if not their lips, acknowledged it. For, in general, their wickednesses have been as notable as their prosperity; pity, and its greater kinsman, love, can find no seed-cranny in their hearts where they can take root, but both alike wither in that iron soil. The Staniers have always been loveless folk, and it is strange that, though love is alien to their natures, they have often so madly inspired it, and with a glance have kindled in others the fire which is powerless to warm them. They sate their passions, and, when that is done, toss the outworn minister away, or, if that minister is wife and mother to their children, she freezes in the Arctic cold of lovelessness. Many a bride has come to Stanier all ardent and a-flame, on whom that congealing blight has fallen, which has turned her into a figure of ice doing the honours of the house with stately courtesy, wearing the great jewels which are the insignia of her servitude, and bearing beautiful sons for the perpetuation of the race. The love that adorned her advent was frozen, maybe, into hate and horror of him with whom she was indissolubly one, and whose soul was in pawn to Satan.
The Staniers have never run to large families: two or at the most three children have been born to the Lord Yardley of the day. In the last generation there were three: Philip the eldest, a daughter Hester, and Ronald, father of Violet Stanier, now Countess of Yardley. At the time of her birth Philip, who had quarrelled with his intolerable sire, and was still unmarried, was living at a villa he had bought on the island of Capri with an Italian girl whom he had made his mistress. She was with child by him, and less than a month before her delivery news came to Philip, that this younger brother of his had begotten a daughter. He thereupon married Rosina Biagi, who soon presented him with twin boys. Philip telegraphed the news of his marriage and their birth to his father, and the despatch arrived as he and Ronald, heavy drinkers both of them, sat tipsily over their wine. Lord Yardley had had a stroke some two years before, and now he fell forward with a crash among the glasses and died without speech. Within a few weeks Philip’s wife died also, and he came home with his two sons to enter on his inheritance.
Of these the elder by half an hour was Raymond, a dark and ugly fellow, black of temper, and between him and his brother Colin, as they grew up, flowered an implacable enmity. On Colin the gods had lavished the utmost of their gifts; he was the beloved of his father and of all who came near him, and Raymond, the uncouth and unpleasing, envied and detested him. This hatred was hotly returned by the other. Raymond was an abomination in Colin’s eyes, not only for what he was but because, thanks to that half-hour’s seniority, he was heir to all that he himself so passionately coveted, title and revenues and, not least, the lordship of the wonder-house at Stanier. Through all their generations the Staniers have adored the place: it is said that none of them is completely happy if he is away from it for long. That passion was shared by Violet, who was an exact contemporary of her twin-cousins, and was brought up with them there, and it was for the sake of being its mistress that, at the age of twenty, she promised to marry Raymond. But her heart was already not her own to give, and, though as yet she scarcely knew it, Colin held it.
Then he beckoned to her, and, discarding the graceless Raymond, she married him, and forthwith, as if a lamp had suddenly been lit which showed her his black heart, she knew that, in loving him, she loved one in whom the Stanier Legend found such fulfilment as none of its inheritors had manifested yet. In person he might have been the very incarnation of their Elizabethan ancestor, who had founded the house, for there in life was the matchless beauty of the great portrait, the gold hair, the beautiful mouth, the dancing azure of the eyes in which gleamed the greeting of his enchanting grace; in him blossomed the fairest that Nature and inheritance could bestow. Luck favoured him, even as it had favoured his ancestor, in all he did, for shortly after his marriage Raymond was miserably doomed as he skated on the lake at Christmas-time, and within a few months his father died also, and Colin his son reigned in his stead. He and Violet, fair as a spring day, numbered but forty years between them; they were an April couple with all the splendour of the summer waiting for them.
But the dawn of love for Violet had been the dawn, too of a nightmare of unfathomable darkness. For Colin, excelling all of his race who had been merely indifferent to love, knew very well what love meant, and bitterly hated it. He was not content to shrug his shoulders at it, and pass on to gratify his pleasures, for the sweetest of them to him was love’s discomfiture, and his joy to strike at it and wound it.... Often Violet wished he could have killed her love for him, for then would have died withal that eternal struggle within her between love and her horror of him, whose soul, whether in fulfilment of the legend, or from his inherent wickedness, was as surely Satan’s as if with his own blood he had signed the fabled bond. Yet as often as she wished that she cried out on herself at so blasphemous a desire, for she knew that by love alone, though in some manner inscrutable, could redemption come to him.
That creed was inscribed on her heart’s core: it was the fabric on which was stitched the embroidery of her days.