It seemed as if the hellish bargain made three hundred years ago had indeed become obsolete, for the weeks and months added themselves together into a swiftly mounting total of years, while a nightmare of eclipsed existence brooded over the great house at Stanier. Since the stroke that had fallen on him after Hester’s runaway match, Lord Yardley would have no guests in the house, and with the constancy of the original Colin, would never leave the place himself. Grinning and snarling in his bath-chair, he would be drawn up and down its long galleries by the hour together, with his battered and petrified spouse walking by his side, at first unable to speak with any coherence, but as the years went on attaining to a grim ejaculatory utterance that left no doubt as to his meaning.
Sometimes it was his whim to enter the library, and if Philip was there he would give vent to dreadful and stuttering observations as he clenched and unclenched the nerveless hands that seemed starving to throttle his son’s throat. Then, tired with this outpouring of emotion, he would doze in his chair, and wake from his doze into a paroxysm of tremulous speechlessness. At dinner-time he would have the riband of the Garter pinned across his knitted coat and be wheeled, with his wife walking whitely by his side, into the gallery, where the unmarried Philip, and his newly-married brother and his wife, stood up at his entrance, and without recognition he would pass, jibbering, at the head of that small and dismal procession, into the dining-room.
He grew ever thinner and more wasted in body, but such was some consuming fire within him that he needed the sustenance of some growing and gigantic youth. He was unable to feed himself, and his attendant standing by him put into that open chasm of a mouth, still lined with milk-white teeth, his monstrous portions. A couple of bites was sufficient to prepare for the gulp, and again his mouth was ready to receive.
Then, when the solid entertainment was over, and the women gone, there remained the business of wine, and, sound trencherman though he was, his capacity over this was even more remarkable. He took his port by the tumblerful, the first of which he would drink like one thirsty for water, and this in some awful manner momentarily restored his powers of speech. Like the first drops before a storm, single words began dripping from his lips, as this restoration of speech took place, his eye, brightening with malevolence, fixed itself on Philip, and night after night he would gather force for the same lunatic tirade.