Colin used his good offices with his father to such effect that he succeeded in procuring for Salvatore a further substantial cheque, in addition to that which he had carried off with the two bottles of wine that afternoon. His uncle apparently thought better of his reckless generosity in sending the letters of which Colin was desirous quite unconditionally, but the receipt of the second cheque was sufficient, and the morning’s post two days later brought them. They were written in ill-spelled English, and contained precisely what his uncle had told him. The first, dated March 1, gave the information that she had been married that morning to Philip Lord Stanier; the second, dated March 17, stated that a week ago she had given birth to twins. They were quite brief, conveyed no other news, and had evidently been preserved with care, for the purple ink in which they were written was quite unfaded. But apart from the fact now definitely known to Colin that his father had legalised his life with Rosina but ten days before he himself and Raymond were born, they did not help in any way towards the attainment of the double object which now was putting out firm, fibrous roots in his mind as the ideal project, namely to prove by some means yet utterly unconjecturable the illegitimacy of Raymond and himself, and, by marrying Violet, who in that case would succeed to the title and the estates, to become master of Stanier. Indeed these letters were but a proof the more of what was no doubt sufficiently attested in the register of the British Consulate, namely, that the marriage had taken place previously to his own birth.
It seemed a hopeless business. Even if, by some rare and lucky mischance, there was any irregularity in the{141} record at the Consulate, these letters, so long as they were in existence, constituted, if not a proof, at any rate a strong presumption in favour of the marriage having taken place on the first of the month, and it might be better to destroy them out of hand so that such testimony as they afforded could not by any possibility be produced. And yet he hesitated; somehow, in his subconscious mind, perhaps, there was a stir and a ferment which bubbled with a suggestion that had not yet reached his consciousness. Might not something conceivably be done with them?... It was maddening that just ten days out of all those uneventful hundreds of days which had elapsed since, should suffice to wreck any project that he might make.
And then a bubble of that ferment broke into his conscious mind. There was the letter, announcing the marriage which had taken place that day dated March 1. There was the letter dated March 17 announcing the birth of himself and Raymond a week previously. What if by the insertion of a single numeral in front of the “1” of the first date, he converted it into March 31st? As far as these two letters went, they would in that case show precisely what he desired.
Psychologically, too, there would be a reasonable interpretation. In his father, it would be argued, there had sprung up after the birth of his sons, a tenderness and an affection for the mother of them, and he had married her so that she, in the future, might bear him legitimate offspring. Already she had borne two lusty and healthy sons; the union was vigorous and fruitful.
Colin got up from the long chair in his bedroom where he had taken these letters, and began softly pacing up and down the floor, lithe and alert, and smiling. His father was coming down with him to bathe that morning, but there was a quarter of an hour yet before he need join him downstairs, and a great deal of thinking might be put into a quarter of an hour if you could only concentrate.{142}
He knew he was very far yet from the attainment of his ambition, for that register at the Consulate, which somehow he must manage to see, might contain insuperable obstacles to success. There might, for instance, be other entries between March 1 of that year and March 31, so that even if he could contrive to alter the first date into the second it would throw those other entries, if such existed, out of their chronological order; the marriage contracted on March 31 would precede those that lay in between the two dates. In that case he might have to tear out the page in which this entry occurred, and that might be quite impossible of accomplishment.
It would not be wise, at any rate, to tamper with the date on this first letter of his mother’s, till he knew how the ground lay at the Consulate. But given that it proved possible to make some alteration in the register or tear out a page, how conclusively would his case be established, if, in support of that, there were produced those letters of his mother?
Salvatore the troubadour.... Colin frowned and bit his lip at the thought of Salvatore, who would be ready to swear that, when he parted with those letters to Colin, the one that conveyed the news of his sister’s marriage was dated March 1, not March 31. There were experts on such subjects, too; prying, meticulous men who made a profession of detecting little things like altered dates, and produced evidence about a difference of hand or a difference in the analysis of two inks.
Yet if the register at the Consulate was found to endorse the evidence of the letters? The same detective-minded folk would examine the record at the Consulate, and might arrive at the damnable conclusion that it, too, had been tampered with. And if the letters which bore signs of being tampered with were in Colin’s possession, and he was known to have visited the register at the Consulate, there would be an unwelcome conclusion as to{143} who had committed a forgery. Penal servitude was not an agreeable substitute for Stanier.
Colin focused his clear brain, as if it had been a lens, on Salvatore. He had been very decorative and melodramatic on the subject of his sister’s honour, but there had been much of cheap strutting, of tinsel, of footlights about that. And Salvatore, so Colin reasoned with a melting and a smoothing out of his frown, was not all strutting and swagger. There was a very real side to that impecunious uncle with his undowered Vittoria. His concern for his sister’s honour was not surely so dominant in him as his desire for coin. A suitable cheque would no doubt induce him to recollect that the first of Rosina’s letters announced the births of the twins, the second, that of March 31, her marriage.
Salvatore, for love of Vittoria (to put it at that), would probably see the sense of allowing his memory of the dates at the head of this letter to be faulty. He would not be obliged to perjure himself in any way; all he had got to do (given that a page had been torn out of the register at the Consulate, or that the date of the marriage as recorded there was March 31) was to swear that his sister’s letters had always been in his possession until he had given them to his attractive nephew.... Yes, Salvatore would surely not prove an insuperable obstacle; he would rate the living, himself and Vittoria, higher than the dead.
For one moment, brief as that in which, according to the legend, the ancestral Colin had considered whether he should close with that strange offer made him in the sheep-fold, his descendant, his living incarnation, hesitated when he thought of his father. His father had always been devoted to him, and such affection as Colin was capable of was his. But, after all, Philip would necessarily be dead when (and if) the discovery was made that Rosina’s letter to her brother gave the date of the marriage as March 31, and when, on search being{144} made in the register of the British Consulate, it was discovered that, owing to a page being missing, there was no record of the marriage at all, or that the date given there corresponded with that of Rosina’s letter.
Colin had no intention of producing this evidence in his father’s lifetime; there might be counter-proofs which his father could produce. If he could only make some dealing with the register and with the date on the letter, he would let the whole matter sleep till his father was dead. Then nothing could hurt him; you cannot hurt the dead. Even if—Colin gave little thought to this—the spirit of the dead survived in consciousness of the living, would not his father’s spirit gladly make this posthumous sacrifice of his earthly honour and rejoice to see Colin, his beloved, master of Stanier? So his hesitation was fleeting as breath on a frosty morning, it appeared but mistily, and dispersed.
His father, out in the garden, was calling him, and with a cheerful response he picked up his towels and went downstairs. For the present there was but one necessary step to be taken; he had to get a day in Naples before he left, and pay a visit to the British Consulate. It was no use making any further plans beyond that, in his ignorance of what he should find there. A visit to his uncle, and a night spent there, might possibly serve as an excuse.
Philip had also heard from his brother-in-law this morning: the communication was not so satisfactory to him, as Colin’s post had been.
“I’ve heard from Salvatore,” he said. “He’s a nauseating fellow, Colin.”
“Oh, no; only a comic, father,” said Colin gaily. “You take him too heavily.”
“Read that,” said Philip.
The letter was certainly characteristic, and as Colin read his smile broadened into a laugh. The writer spoke of the deep humiliation it was for a Viagi to take gifts from any; it had not been so with them once, for the family had been the dispensers of a royal bounty. Indeed,{145} two considerations only made it possible for him to do so, the first his paternal devotion to his two sweet maids, Vittoria and Cecilia, the second his fraternal devotion to his noble and generous relative. That sentiment did honour to them both, and with happy tears of gratitude he acknowledged the safe receipt of the cheque. He wrote with some distraction, for his sweet maids kept interrupting him to know if he had sent their most respectful love to their uncle, and had reminded their dearest Colin that they looked for his advent with prodigious excitement and pleasure. They demanded to know when that hour would dawn for them. One bottle of the nectar of France would be preserved for that day to drink the health of his friend, his relative, his noblest of benefactors. He signed himself “Viagi,” as if the princely honours had been restored.
“Oh, but priceless,” said Colin. “Haven’t you got a sense of humour, father?”
“Not where Salvatore is concerned. As for your going over to dine and sleep, I shan’t let you. Do you know we’ve only got a fortnight more here, Colin?”
“I know; isn’t it awful?” said Colin with a sigh. “But about my going over for a night. I wonder if I hadn’t better do that. It would be kind, you know. He would like it.”
Philip passed his hand over the boy’s shoulders.
“Colin, are you growing wings?” he said.
“Yes, and they don’t go well with my cloven hoofs. In other words, I should loathe spending the night there, and yet Uncle Salvatore would like it. Then I don’t want to leave you.”
“Don’t then. Salvatore, thanks to you, has got double his usual allowance. You’ve done enough for him.”
“Yes, but that didn’t cost me anything,” said Colin. “It only cost you. I’ve still my debt to pay for the wonderful entertainment he gave me here. Besides he is actually my uncle: I’m a Viagi. Princely line, father!”
“Don’t marry one of the young princesses,” said his father.{146}
Colin had one moment’s acute thought before he answered. It struck him that his father could hardly have said that if in his very self he had loved his mother. But what he had said just came from his very self.... He laughed.
“I’ll promise not to, however entrancing Vittoria is,” he said. “Ah, how divine the sea looks this morning. I long to be in it.”
A sudden idea occurred to him.
“Do let us stop on another fortnight, father,” he said. “Can’t we?”
“I can’t,” said he. “I must get back by the end of the month. But—” he paused a moment and Colin knew that he had caught his own idea, which his suggestion was designed to prompt. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have another fortnight here if you want,” he said.
Colin had fallen behind his father on the narrow path to the bathing-place, and gave a huge grin of satisfaction at his own subtlety.
“Oh, I should love that!” he said, “though it won’t be half as much fun as if you would stop too. And then I can go over to Naples with you when you start homewards, and make my wings sprout by staying with Uncle Salvatore.”
Nothing could have fallen out more conveniently, and Colin, as for the next two hours he floated in the warm sea and basked on the hot pebbles, had a very busy mind in his lazy, drifting body. His father’s absence would certainly make his investigations easier. He could, for instance, present Lord Yardley’s card at the Consulate with his own, and get leave to inspect the register with a view to making a copy of it, in accordance with his father’s wishes. Better yet, he could spend a few days in Naples, make the acquaintance of the Consul in some casual manner, and produce his request on the heels of an agreeable impression. He would not, in any case, be limited to a single visit, or tied by the necessity of acting at once.{147} He would not have to fire his bribe, with regard to the letters like a pistol in Salvatore’s face, he would be careful and deliberate, not risking a false step owing to the need of taking an immediate one. And all the time the suggestion of stopping on here alone had not come from himself at all. His father had made it.
On the way up to the villa again after the morning’s bathe, they often called at the post-office in the piazza for letters that had arrived by the midday post. To-day these were handed under the grille to Colin, and, sorting them out between his father and himself, he observed that there were two for Lord Yardley in the handwritings of Raymond and Violet. Possibly these were only the dutiful and trivial communications of those at home, but possibly Violet’s week of postponement had been shortened.
“Two from Stanier for you, father,” he said. “Violet and Raymond. The rest for me.”
His father looked at the envelopes.
“Yes, Raymond’s spider scrawl is evident enough,” he said. “I never saw such a handwriting except yours; his and yours I can never tell apart. One wants leisure to decipher you and Raymond.”
Colin simmered with impatience to see his father put both of these letters into his pocket, and simmered even more ebulliently when, having put them on the table at lunch, his father appeared to forget completely about them, and left them there when lunch was over. But Colin could remind him of that, and presently the one from Violet lay open.
His father gave an exclamation of surprise, and then was absorbed in it. It appeared to be short, for presently he had finished, and, still without a word to Colin, opened the letter from Raymond. Here exclamations of impatience at the ugly, illegible handwriting took the place of surprise, and it was ten minutes more before he spoke to Colin. He, meantime, had settled with himself, in case these letters contained what he guessed for certain that they must contain, that since Violet’s previous{148} warning to him was private, he would let the news that his father would presently tell him be a big emotional surprise to him. This would entail dissimulation, but that was no difficulty. Colin knew himself to be most convincing when his brain, not his sincerity, dictated his behaviour.
“Have Violet and Raymond written to you to-day?” asked his father.
Colin yawned. He generally took a siesta after the long morning in the sea and sun, and it was already past his usual hour. There was a pleasant fiction that he retired to write letters.
“No,” he said, getting up. “Well, I’m off, father. Lots of letters....”
“Wait a moment. Violet and Raymond send me news which pleases me very much. They’re engaged to be married.”
Colin stared, then laughed.
“I’d forgotten it was the first of April,” he said. “I thought we were in June.”
“We are,” said his father. “But it’s no joke, Colin. I’m quite serious.”
Colin looked fixedly at his father for a moment.
“Ah!” he said, and getting up walked to the window. He stood there with his back to the room twirling the blind-string, and seeming to assimilate the news. Then, as if making a strong effort with himself, he turned himself again, all sunshine.
“By Jove, Raymond will be happy!” he said. “How—how perfectly splendid! He’s head over ears in love with her, has been for the last six months. Lucky dog! He’s got everything now!”
He could play on his father like some skilled musician, making the chord he wanted to sound with never a mistake. Those words “he’s got everything now,” conveyed exactly the impression he intended, namely, that Violet was, to him, an important part in Raymond’s possessions. That was the right chord.{149}
It sounded.
“But it was a great surprise to you, Colin,” he said.
“Yes, father,” said Colin.
“The surprise, then, was that Violet has accepted him,” said Lord Yardley gently. He felt himself be probing Colin’s mind ever so tenderly, while Colin looked at him wide-eyed like a child who trusts his surgeon.
“Yes, father,” he said again. “It surprised me very much.”
This was magnificent; he knew just what was passing in his father’s mind; unstinted admiration of himself for having so warm-heartedly welcomed the news of Raymond’s good fortune, and unstinted sympathy because his father had guessed a reason why Violet’s engagement was a shock to him. This was immensely to the good, for when, as he felt no doubt would happen, Violet threw over Raymond for himself, Lord Yardley would certainly remember with what magnanimous generosity he had congratulated Raymond on his success. Whether anything came of his project about the register or not, he was determined to marry Violet, for so the thirst of his hatred of his brother would be assuaged. But how long and how sweet would the drink be, if in the cup was mingled the other also.
His father came across the room to where he still stood by the window, and laid loving hands on his shoulders.
“Colin, old boy,” he said. “Are you fond of Violet—like that?”
Colin nodded without speech.
“I had no idea of it,” said Lord Yardley. “I often watched you and her together, and I thought you were only as brother and sister. Upon my word, Raymond seems to have got everything.”
Colin’s smile was inimitable. It seemed to fight its way to his beautiful mouth.
“I’ve got you, father,” he said, out of sheer exuberance of wickedness.
The subject was renewed that night when they sat under{150} the vine-wreathed pergola where they had dined. The sun, bowling down the steep cliff away westward, had just plunged into the sea, and darkness came swiftly over the sky, without that long-drawn period of fading English twilight in which day is slowly transformed into night. Here night leaped from its lair in the East and with a gulp absorbed the flames of sunset and swiftly the stars sprang from the hiding-places where all day they had lain concealed, and burning large and low made a diffused and penetrating greyness of illumination that dripped like glowing rain from the whole heavens.
Dim and veiled though that luminance was, compared to the faintest of the lights of day, it gave a curious macabre distinctness to everything, and Colin’s face, in a pool of star-shine that filtered between the trailing garlands of the vines, wore to his father some strange, wraith-like aspect. So often had he sat here in such light as this with Rosina opposite him, and all that he loved in Rosina seemed now to have been reincarnated, spectre-like, in the boy he cared more for than he cared for all the rest of the world. All that he had missed in the woman who had satisfied and so soon sated his physical senses, flowered in Colin with his quick intelligence, his sunny affection.... And his father, for all his longing, could do nothing to help him in this darkness which had overshadowed the dawn of love for him.
Instead of Colin, Raymond had got all, that son of his whom he had never liked even, and had always, in some naturally-unnatural manner, been jealous of, in that he would inherit all that his own fingers would one day relax their hold on. Had it been Colin who would grasp the sceptre of the Staniers, Philip would, as he had said, close his eyes for his last sleep in unenvious content. And now Raymond had got the desire of his heart as well, which, too, was the desire of Colin’s heart.
All day, since the arrival of those letters, Colin had been very quiet, yet without any bitterness; grave and sweet, but only a shadow, a ghost of himself for gaiety.{151} Now his face, pale in the starlight, was ghostlike also, and his father divined in it an uncomplaining suffering, infinitely pathetic.
“Colin, I wish I could do anything for you,” he said, with unusual emotion. “You are such a dear fellow, and you bear it all with such wonderful patience. Wouldn’t it do you good now to curse Raymond a little?”
Colin felt that he must not overdo the angelic r?le.
“Oh, I’ve been doing so,” he said, “but I think I shall stop. It’s no use. It wouldn’t hurt Raymond, even if he knew about it, and it doesn’t help me. And it’s certainly time I stopped sulking. Have I been very sulky all evening, father? Apologies.”
“You’ve been a brick. But about stopping out here alone. Are you sure you won’t mope and be miserable? Perhaps I might manage to stay out with you an extra week.”
That would not do at all. Colin hastened to put that out of the question.
“Oh, but you must do nothing of the kind,” he said quickly. “I know you’ve got to get back. I shan’t mope at all. And I think one gets used to things quicker alone. There’s only just one thing I wonder about. Have we both been quite blind about Violet? Has she been in love with Raymond without our knowing it? I, at any rate, had no idea of it. She’s in love with him now, I suppose. Did her letter give you that impression?”
Philip hesitated. Violet’s letter, short and unemotional, had not given him any such impression. But so triumphantly successful had been Colin’s assumption of the unembittered, though disappointed, lover, that he paused, positively afraid that Colin would regret that Violet’s heart was not so blissfully engaged as his brother’s. Before he answered Colin spoke again:
“Ah, I see,” he said. “She’s in love with him, and you are afraid it will hurt me to know it. Ripping of you.... After all, she’s lucky, too, isn’t she? She’s got the fellow she loves, and she’ll be mistress of Stanier.{152} I think she adores Stanier almost as much as you and I, father.”
Colin felt he could not better this as a conclusion. He rose and stretched himself.
“There!” he said. “That expresses what I feel in my mind. It has been cramped all day, and now I’ve stretched it, and am not going to have cramp any more. What shall we do? Stroll down to the piazza, or sit here and play piquet? I vote for the piazza. Diversion, you know.”
Colin pleaded sleepiness on their return from the piazza as an excuse for early retirement, but the sleepiness was not of the sort that led to sleep, and he lay long awake, blissfully content and wondering at himself with an intense and conscious interest. Never before had it so forcibly struck him that deception was a thing that was dear to him through some inherent attraction of its own, irrespective of what material advantages it might bring him; it was lovely in itself, irrespective of the fruit it bore. Never yet, too, had it struck him at all that he disliked love, and this was a discovery worth thinking over.
Often, especially during these last weeks, he had known that his father’s love for him bored him, as considered as an abstract quality, though he welcomed it as a means to an end. That end invariably had been not only the material advantages it brought him, but the gratification of his own hatred of Raymond. For, so he unerringly observed, his own endearing of himself to his father served to displace Raymond more and more, and to-day’s man?uvres were a brilliant counter-attack to the improved position Raymond had made for himself in those last weeks at Stanier. But, apart from these ends, he had no use for any love that was given him, nor any desire to give in return. To hate and to get, he found, when he looked into himself, was the mainspring which moved thought, word, and action.
Outside, the evening breeze had quite died down, but the silent tranquillity of the summer night was broken{153} by the sound of a footfall on the garden terrace below the window, which he knew must be that of his father strolling up and down there. For a moment that rather vexed him; it seemed to disturb his own isolation, for he wanted to be entirely encompassed in himself. It was inconsiderate of his father to go quarter-decking out there, intruding into his own consciousness; besides, Colin had told him that he was sleepy, and he should have kept quiet.
But then the explanation of his ramble up and down occurred to Colin. There could be no doubt that his father was troubled for him, and was made restless by thinking of him and his disappointment. That made Colin smile, not for pleasure in his father’s love, but for pleasure in his trouble. He was worrying himself over Colin’s aching heart, and the boy had a smile for that pleasing thought; it had an incense for him.
 
He began to wonder, idly at first, but with growing concentration, whether he hated his father. He did not wish him ill, but ... but supposing this business of the register was satisfactorily accomplished, and supposing he succeeded, as he felt no doubt he would, in causing Violet to throw over Raymond and marry himself, he did not see that there would be much gained by his father’s continued existence. He would be in the way then, he would stand between him and his mastership, through Violet, of Stanier. That, both from his passion for the place, and from the joyous triumph of ejecting Raymond, was the true object of his life: possession and hatred, to get and to hate. His father, when these preliminary feats had been carried through, would be an obstacle to his getting, and he supposed that he would hate him then.
Lying cool and naked under his sheet, Colin suddenly felt himself flush with the exuberance of desire and vitality. Hate seemed as infinite as love; you could not plumb the depths of the former any more than you could scale the heights of the other, while acquisition, the clutching and the holding, stretched as far as renunciation; he who{154} lived for himself would not be satisfied until he had grasped all, any more than he who lived for others would not be satisfied until he had given all, retaining nothing out of self-love.
With Violet as his wife, legal owner of Stanier, and Raymond outcast and disinherited, it seemed to Colin that he would have all he wanted, and yet in this flush of desire that combed through him now, as the tide combs through the weeds of the sea, he realised that desire was infinite and could never be satisfied when once it had become the master passion. No one who is not content will ever be content, and none so burned with unsatisfied longing as he. If he could not love he could hate, and if he could not give he could get.
The steps on the terrace below had long ceased, though, absorbed in this fever of himself, he had not noticed their cessation. His activity of thought communicated itself to his body, and it was impossible in this galvanic restlessness to lie quiet in bed. Movement was necessary, and, wrapping his sheet round him, he went to his open window and leaned out.
The night was starlit and utterly tranquil; no whisper of movement sounded from the stone-pine that stood in the garden and challenged by its stirring the most imperceptible of breezes. Yet to his sense the quiet tingled with some internal and tremendous vibration; a force was abroad which held it gripped and charged to the uttermost, and it was this force, whatever it was, that thrilled and possessed him. The warm, tingling current of it bathed and intoxicated him; it raced through his veins, bracing his muscles and tightening up the nerves and vigour of him, and, stretching out his arms, he let the sheet drop from him so as to drink it in through every thirsting pore of his body. Like the foaming water in a loch, it rose and rose in him, until the limit of his capacity was reached, and his level was that of the river that poured it into him. And at that, so it seemed, when now he had opened himself out to the utmost to receive it, the pres{155}sure which had made him restless was relieved, and, unutterably tired and content, he went back to bed, and instantly sank into the profound gulfs of healthy and dreamless slumber.
His father had usually finished breakfast when Colin appeared, but next morning it was the boy who was in advance.
“Hurrah, I’ve beaten you for once, father,” he said when Lord Yardley appeared. “The tea’s half cold; shall I get you some more?”
“No, this will do. Slept well, Colin?”
“Like a top, like a pig, like a hog, like a dog.”
“Good.”
Lord Yardley busied himself with breakfast for a while.
“Curious things dreams are,” he said. “I dreamed about things I hadn’t thought of for years. You were so vividly mixed up in them, too, that I nearly came into your room to see if you were all right.”
“I was,” said Colin. “I was wonderfully all right. What was the dream?”
“Oh, one of those preposterous hashes. I began dreaming about Queen Elizabeth and old Colin. She was paying him a visit at Stanier and asked to see the parchment on which he signed the bond of the legend. He shewed it her, but the blood in which he had signed his own name was so faded that she told him he must sign it again if he wanted it to be valid. I was present and saw it all, but I had the feeling that I was invisible. Then came the nightmare part. He pricked his arm to get the ink, and dipped a pen in it. And then, looking closely at him, I saw that it wasn’t old Colin at all, but you, and that it wasn’t Queen Elizabeth but Violet. I told you not to sign, and you didn’t seem conscious of me, and then I shouted at you, in some nightmare of fear, and awoke, hearing some strangled scream of my own, I suppose.”
Colin had been regarding his father as he spoke with wide, eager eyes. But at the conclusion he laughed and lit a cigarette.{156}
“Well, if you had come in, you certainly wouldn’t have found me signing anything,” he said. “But I cut myself shaving this morning. I call that a prophetic dream. And I must write to Vi and Raymond this morning, so that will be the signing.”