“I’m an awful fool,” he said. “I was frightened, and I can’t think why. Just as if you weren’t protection enough against anything. Oh, Father, you’re a brick: I do love you.”
Colin drew the boy down on the edge of the bed, and sat close to him.
“But what was the matter, my darling?” he said. “Tell me about it.”
“It wasn’t anything,” said Dennis. “I’m a bloody fool—sorry.—But, just for a second, it was nightmare again, and I thought somehow it wasn’t you standing there. It was like some awful conjuring-trick.... And I wanted you. And I’ve got you. I won’t be such an ass again.”
“Sure you’re all right?” said Colin. “We can’t have you getting panics, Dennis, and being an ass.”
Dennis laughed.
“You shan’t,” he said. “It’s all gone. I say, I’m keeping you up. I must undress and go to bed, or you’ll never get there.”
Dennis got up, and stood there between his father’s knees, erect and tranquil again. He peeled off his hose and vest, and put on his pyjamas. Just then his eye fell on the great sapphire that lay on the floor.
“Why, you’ve dropped the sapphire, Father,” he said.
“So I see. Never mind that. I’ll pick it up. Now into bed with you.”
“How can I when you’re sitting there? No, don’t get up. I’ll crawl in.”
Dennis inserted one leg between his pillow and where Colin sat and drew himself into bed, curling himself against his father.
“There, that’s all snug,” he said.
“Good night, then,” said Colin.
Dennis raised himself in bed, and kissed him.
“It’s been a lovely evening,” he said. “And it’ll be just as lovely to-morrow with you and mother and me. I wish I wasn’t going back to Eton on Thursday.”
Colin, with the stone in his hand, went out and down the few steps of the corridor to the door of his room. Once again, and this time with a more direct and personal defeat, Dennis had routed him. Before, he had directed the force that governed and protected him on the boy as he slept, and who could tell in what fury of lambent evil it had begun to encompass him? But now, he himself, whom above all Dennis loved and trusted, had approached him with the same initiation, and yet all his love and trust had not given Dennis confidence: the spiritual semaphore of his instinct had hung out the red light of danger. The boy had recoiled from what he brought with a shrinking that was not reassured by the fact that it was his father who brought it. He had detected the nature of it, and all his affection would not suffer him to take it, even from the hands he loved, and this time Dennis had been broad awake, knowing well what he was doing. Here then was a more personal rebuff: it appeared that all Colin’s trouble to endear himself to the boy (and with what success he had accomplished that!) was useless for the purpose for which he had intended it. Indeed it was far worse than useless, for in the process Dennis had somehow entered his heart, and for the second time he had been unable to persist.
The fault then, in great part, lay with himself. He made no doubt that if, with Dennis’s love for him to assist him, he had reasoned and persuaded, telling him that in sober truth this ancient bargain was valid still, and that, when the day of his choice came, he could have all that had been so richly showered on his father, something of what he said would have remained in the boy’s mind, quietly fermenting there. But he had failed to do anything of the kind: some incalculable impulse had seized him, and he had thought of nothing except to reassure him.
He stood in his room, the door of which he had not even closed, looking at the sapphire that blazed in his hand. That azure fire bade him go back to Dennis now, and, conquering this despicable softness in himself, tell him, with all the gusto of a splendid surprise (and he knew that a tongue of skill and persuasion would be given him), that the legend was alive to-day, that a power, mightier than the kings of the earth, was alert and eager to befriend him, at so cheap a cost, for theprice was no more than that he should root out of his heart the sickly and sentimental stuff, the injurious weakness called love which saps the strength of a man and enslaves him to others. That was all that was meant by the bargain and the signing of the soul away. That was the true and the sensible way to look at it; and those who talked of it as being a consignment to the outer darkness and eternal damnation, were merely trying to frighten people by hoisting bogies.... Dennis would not understand, but that wonderful and impressionable thing, a boy’s memory, would retain letter and form of it, till bit by bit he began to understand it, and then, from its having dwelt long in his mind, it would appear familiar and friendly. Dennis would already be half asleep, and his father would just sit and talk to him a minute or two, quietly and affectionately, sowing seed, and smoothing the rich fruitful earth of the boy’s mind over it....
He moved towards the door, opened it and went into the passage. And then, as his hand was on the latch of Dennis’s door, he knew that even if he went in, with his intention hot within him, his expedition would be in vain. Dennis would sit up in bed, sleepily smiling, and welcoming the intrusion, on any or no excuse, so long as the intruder was he. Once more he would be disarmed by the defenceless.
The change that had to be wrought must begin with himself. There was no doubt that he had allowed himself to get fond of the boy, and for that reason he winced at the thought of the first incision. He must anneal himself to the gay ruthlessness with which he dealt with others, with which he had mocked Pamela to her doom, and jeered at his brother Raymond struggling with the broken lids of ice, before he attempted to deal with Dennis again. If only the boy was not so affectionate, how easy it would be! He had thought of Dennis’s affection for him as a weapon in his own hand, but at present it was a weapon in Dennis’s. Perhaps he would have to snap that, or, wresting it from him, turn it against him. At any rate he must anneal himself: he must weld the armour of hate against love....
The general dispersal took place next morning; for an hour an almost incessant stream of motors left the door, andDennis and his father were like ferry-boats conveying their visitors from the gallery where they said good-bye to Violet to the hall. Vastly as the boy had enjoyed this fortnight of crowd and turmoil, he got even gayer as it streamed away, and when the last had left he executed a wild rampageous dance in the hall.
“Hurrah, they’ve all gone!” he cried, “and now it’s just us, Father. What shall we do all day? It’s my last day, you know; you must let me have you all the time. What shall we do first?”
What was the use of spoiling Dennis’s last day, Colin asked himself. The boy would be gone to-morrow for the next twelve weeks, and then would be the time to rout out the intruder. Indeed, that uprooting should begin to-night, that change in himself, that recantation of his recent apostasy. At midnight, when Dennis had gone to bed, he would renew his vows, and partake in the mockery of Love itself.
“Dennis, don’t whirl round me like that,” he said. “You make me giddy. And it’s very grumpy of you, do you know, to be glad that your friends have gone? How many tipped you?”
“Oh, a frightful lot,” said Dennis. “I’m rolling in riches. Will you come and play golf? Or tennis, do you think? Or what about potting rabbits? Or don’t you want to be bothered with me?”
“We’ll do just what you like,” said Colin. “Sit down and make up your mind.”
“Oh, but it’s made up,” said the boy. “Golf first: we’ll drive over to Rye in the two-seater. I’ll drive.”
Colin paused a moment.
“You don’t want to look at the Memoirs then?” he asked. “I’ll read interesting bits to you, if you like.”
Dennis’s eyebrows drew themselves together. Some remembrance, was it, of his vanished fears?
“Oh, I’d sooner play golf,” he said.
All day the two were together, and at dinner, for Aunt Hester had gone back with the rest to London, there were just the four of them, at a small round table in the dining-room, which last night had resounded to the gaiety of fifty, and blazed with the costumes of Elizabeth. And yet all thatwas essentially Stanier was gathered undiluted there; the splendour and the sparkle of these last days had been no more than a casual decoration it had plucked for itself and worn a little while and thrown away again. Last night old Lady Yardley had sat up till the very end of the ball, and all the week she had attended whatever entertainment was provided, but these unusual hours seemed to have made no call on her strength, and now bright-eyed and somehow terribly alive, beneath that immobile alabastrine sheath of her body, she looked from Dennis to his father and back again, as if searching, searching for some assurance, some confirmation of what she desired. Of Violet, as usual, she seemed unconscious.
The ball of laughter and talk had been thrown hither and thither merrily enough all dinner time; Dennis and Colin were the chief performers, and Violet had taken but little part in it. All day she had wrestled with a secret jealousy; not once had Dennis, to whose last day at home she usually devoted herself, appeared to want her, and since their guests had left in the morning he had been exclusively with his father. It was all very natural: his exuberance wanted his golf and his rabbit-shooting and the activities of his budding manhood. And yet it was not the boy’s fault that he had not spared her a half-hour out of his day, for at the conclusion of each diversion, Colin had been at hand with another. Was it simply for her discomfiture, and the exhibition of his own triumphant rivalry that he had done that? Certainly that would have been a sufficient motive for him, but she felt there was something else as well, a larger issue, an ampler cause. If it had been that alone, he would have had little oblique mockeries for her, would have called her attention to his success, would even have told Dennis to go and talk to her, and that when he had had a “nice talk” he was ready to fish or play tennis.
And then, like a blown flame, those little surface-jealousies went out. Was Colin planning some final employment for Dennis to-night? She knew he had sent for Mr. Douglas this evening, and had had some private interview with him, for she had unwittingly interrupted it, and seen the breaking off of their topic when she entered the room.... At the thought,that small green flame was quenched, and cold apprehension gripped her. As dinner went on she ceased to take any part in those gay crossing volleys, and became, like old Lady Yardley, silent and watchful and aware. She seemed to enter into the spirit of all those generations of silent and frozen women who were the wives and mothers of the race. They had always been like that who were knit into the line through which the legend was transmitted, and now she seemed to comprehend the nature of that vesture of ice that clothed them, for they knew that it was through their blood and the love of their conceiving bodies that the Satanic bargain was kept alive, and that their sons were the inheritors of the bond. Was that not enough to freeze the mother the fruit of whose womb would be dedicated to hell, who watched the growing strength and beauty of her son, and knew the consecration of evil to which, at his choice, he gave his soul? She would see him prosperous beyond all other heritors, beauty and health, honour and wealth, would be his, and her spirit would freeze and burn in the ice of knowing that all this was but the payment in dross for that which in the eyes of God was worth the ransom of the precious blood.... Would she get used to that, she wondered, so that the knowledge became part of her nature, and, as the flocks of grey-winged years passed over her head, she would become so one with Stanier, that the prosperity and continuance of the house would grow into the very fibre of her nature. It was so, she guessed, with old Lady Yardley; Colin and Dennis were the connotation of the world to her. Over all else the penumbra and eclipse of age had passed, and just that rim and nothing else was illuminated. Neither evil nor good, nor love nor hate perhaps, existed for her any more, the sense of Stanier was her only reaction to the exterior world.
Dinner was over and the coffee handed, and still Lady Yardley had not broken that frost of her silence. But now there came a sudden uncongealment.
“Stanier is itself again to-night,” she said. “They have gone, all the fine folk who come like dogs when my Colin whistles to them. They lick his hand and he feeds them.”
Colin turned to her.
“Granny dear, what nonsense!” he said. “And youshouldn’t call our distinguished guests dogs. Didn’t you like having them here? I thought you were enjoying it all.”
That wraith of a smile dimpled her mouth.
“Yes, I enjoyed it,” she said. “I enjoyed seeing them all doing homage to Stanier, to my Colin.”
She looked from him to Dennis.
“And here is my Colin as he was when he was a boy,” she said. “When he grows up they will do homage to him too. But before then he must know the legend instead of only hearing it. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. The prayer-book says that about the legend.”
Colin pushed back his chair.
“Granny, you are charming,” he said, “but we settled the first night that I was here that we were to have no prophesying at dinner.”
“But I am not prophesying,” said she. “I am only saying what you and I know and what presently he will know. It will be pleasant when we all know, for then we can talk freely. Shall I tell him now, Colin? Shall I break the sheet of ice? I would be out in the sun then, instead of being cold. I will melt my frost——”
He took her stick and put it into her hand.
“Get up,” he said. “Go and melt the frost by the fire in the gallery, where your card-table is ready for you. Now not a word more.”
She rose, still smiling, as if content with what she had said. She had borne witness to what she knew, and what Colin knew, and whether he was sharp with her or not was insignificant compared to that. Leaning on her stick, she went out, followed by Violet.
Colin watched Dennis’s troubled face as he came back to the table after closing the door behind the others. When first three weeks ago old Lady Yardley had ‘prophesied,’ he had been puzzled, but excited and fascinated. But since then he had learned something; waking or asleep he had seen the outline of a terrible shadow, and it seemed to be the same as that, whatever it was, of which she had just spoken.
“What does she mean?” he said. “What was all that about her telling me and melting the frost?”
“Dottiness,” said Colin at once. “You discovered shewas dotty weeks ago. And just now, you remember, she thought that you were me as a boy again. That wasn’t very clear-headed, was it? And all the rest was just as muddled. Don’t think anything more about it, Dennis.”
That cloud did not clear away at once from Dennis’s forehead. His father had clearly wanted to tell him something last night, and, by an unerring instinct, he divined that this same something lurked behind what he had just stopped old Lady Yardley from saying. It concerned the legend, clearly; some practical personal application of the legend....
“Dennis, you’re not doing what I told you,” said Colin sharply. “You’re thinking of Grannie’s dottiness.”
Dennis pulled in that sail of his mind which was still catching that mysterious breeze.
“Righto,” he said.
“Come and sit next me then, you exclusive brute,” said Colin, “instead of sitting at the other side of the table.... And you’ve liked your last day, have you, Dennis?”
“Oh, Father, it has been lovely,” said Dennis, drawing a chair quite close to him. “Why, they all went away at eleven, and I’ve been with you ever since except when I had my bath, and even then you came in in the middle. Ten solid hours with you. Not bad.”
“No, not very bad. You’ve made an elderly gent like me play golf and tennis and shoot pigeons. I shall have a rest-cure after you’ve gone.”
“Do. Come and have it at Eton. There’s a nursing home somewhere in the town. Elderly gent!”
“Well, don’t rub it in,” said Colin. “Come on, Dennis. We must go and play whist. You and I will rook your mother and Granny. And then, after being up till nearly four last night, you shall go softly and silently to bed like the Snark.”
“Not silent. You’ll come and talk, won’t you?”
“Perhaps I’ll look in, but I don’t promise. I must sit up and do some jobs.”
“Why?” said Dennis.
“Because you’ve prevented my doing them all day.”
Colin smiled to himself as he said that. It was most emphatically true: he would concentrate on his jobs to-night.
Violet went upstairs with Dennis at bed-time, relieved of her immediate fear, for Colin made no move to detain the boy, and whatever he had planned for himself, he did not look for Dennis’s partnership. Colin sat in his room when the others had gone up, and for half an hour, while he was waiting for midnight, he read and mused over the Memoirs of his ancestor. How symmetrical and consistent he had been till that senile ague of terror palsied him in the last year of his life! Never once in those fascinating pages was there a hint of any struggle in his soul, any stirrings of compassion or love which disturbed the poise of his undivided allegiance. Nor even at the end, did he waver in spirit, for it was easy to see that his belated pieties, his formal acts of pity and charity, sprang not from any turning of him in spirit towards God, but from the mere physical terror of his approaching doom. He only added cowardice, in fact, to his other sins, and went forth with a blacker load than ever.... So early, too, must he have initiated his two sons into the doctrines of the gospel, for long before the time came for their choice they were ripe and ready.
Colin dropped his reading. There was yet time to go upstairs and bid Dennis dress and come with him. But still the excuse held that the boy’s soul was not ready for the sacrament of evil: he had to learn the sweetness of evil for evil’s sake before he could take part in its worship. He would understand nothing: the rite would be meaningless, or, worse than that, would perhaps disgust and horrify him, and it was not in disgust and horror that he must be drawn, but must spring with a leap of the spirit towards a congenial mystery. And still Colin knew that all this was an excuse only: and his reason for not fetching the boy was that obstinate intruder in his own heart, which made him recoil from the notion of Dennis being frightened or revolted. It was, in fact, himself with whom he had to deal: he must cleanse his own heart of the tenderness which was in bud there, and by the inspiration of evil root out that alien weed. He must concentrate his mind on defiance and hate....
There came a tap at the door which led into the corridor up to the chapel. This was always kept locked, and the key to it, like a latch-key, he wore on his watch-chain. Otherwisethe chapel could only be approached through Mr. Douglas’s lodging. He opened the door and found Vincenzo standing there.
“Pronto, signor,” said Vincenzo, and fell behind him as he walked up the corridor, leaving him at the door into the chapel, while he went through to the priest’s dwelling to vest himself as server. Colin entered: the chapel was redolent of stale incense, soon to be refreshed and renewed, and blazed with lights.
Presently the priest entered, served by Vincenzo. He was robed in that wonderful cope which, once stolen from some Italian sacristy, had been bought by Colin in Naples. For a minute or so, he knelt with his back to the altar and then, making the sign of the cross reversed, rose and began.
Though he knew the ritual well, Colin closely followed the service in the vellum-leaved book on his faldstool. Douglas had copied this in his exquisite formal handwriting from the missal of wondrous blasphemies, illuminating the initial letters with appropriate decoration and sacrilegious parodies of holy scenes. Two years had it taken him, a labour of love, and Colin, by keeping his attention on the book, strove to devote his mind to the spirit of the blasphemy. He confessed his fallings and his lapses from his vowed life, he tried to root Dennis out of his heart. He let his mind dwell on evil and cruelty and hate. And now the new clouds of incense rose from the censer that Vincenzo swung, the altar gleamed through the fragrant sanctification, and the supreme moment approached.
Colin felt the stir of the power seething round him, but he knew he no longer went out to meet it with welcome and heart’s surrender. All the pressure of his will was bent on doing so, but it was as if some grain of grit had got into the psychic mechanism of his soul: it checked and laboured, it did not respond with full smooth strokes. Why could he not be like Vincenzo who knelt there, his face working with some diabolical rapture? Vincenzo’s hands were clasped in front of him, his mouth grinned and slavered, he shook and swayed in that fierce gale of possession. The priest’s arms were raised now for consecration, and Vincenzo’s eyes were fixed on them; in a moment more, on the completion of the act, hewould pull the rope of the bell that hung by him, and the three muffled strokes....
Even as Colin looked, half-envying him, half-horrified at the tension of the man’s face, Vincenzo suddenly rose to his feet, with hands stretched out in front of him. He swayed as he stood, as if blown by a great wind, and then crashed forward and fell full length on the altar-step.
The priest, with the wafer still unconsecrated in his hand, turned at the thud of his fall. He placed the wafer back on the paten, and beckoning to Colin stooped down by the man’s side. Vincenzo had rolled on to his face and lay there trembling and twitching. They turned him over; his eyes wide open seemed to be focussed in blank terror at something close in front of them, and at the corners of his mouth foam had gathered.
The priest felt for his pulse.
“What happened?” he said to Colin.
“He fell forward.... Well? Is he alive? Is he dead?”
“I can’t find any flicker of pulse,” said Douglas. “Can you get some brandy? I’ve got none.”
“Yes, there’s sure to be a tray in the gallery. I’ll go and get it.”
Colin nodded towards the altar.
“Take the vessels back to your room,” he said, “and disrobe. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Father Douglas knew something of first aid, but it was in vain that they tried to restore the stricken man. The brandy, unswallowed, trickled out of his mouth again, the raising and lowering of his arms started no flicker of vitality.
“We must send for the doctor,” said Douglas. “But——”
Colin nodded, understanding him.
“Yes, not here of course,” he said. “We must move him. Now, for hell’s sake, don’t let us make any mistake which we can’t correct afterwards. First of all, we must take his cotta and cassock off.... Get a pair of scissors, quick: we must cut the sleeves.”
Colin was perfectly alert and collected; coolly and swiftly he thought over what was to be done. Just one glance ofangry disgust he gave to that distorted whitening face, which was the cause of all this trouble, but for the present he needed all his wits to grapple with the dispositions which must be made instantly and without the possibility of correction afterwards. His brain was busy as they slipped the severed vestments off Vincenzo, and he began to see the road.
“Lay him down again,” he said, when this was done. “We mustn’t move him at all till we’ve settled everything. Cover his face, though; I hate those dimmed glass eyes. God, what terror is there!”
He sat down on the step with his back to the body. “I want to smoke,” he said. “Nothing like a cigarette for filtering your thoughts. Now look here, Douglas, of course he mustn’t be found here at all: no doctor or anybody else must come in here. Therefore it’s clear we’ve got to move him. Luckily it’s late: the servants will have gone to bed: we shall have the house to ourselves.”
The priest’s hands were trembling, he was utterly unnerved by the catastrophe. Memories of years long past when he was a priest of God, and when to the dying he gave the Bread of Angels for their soul’s refreshment and support, stood before him like white statues, silent and aware. Now, he was priest of a creed that mocked and defied, and at the moment of supreme blasphemy this stroke had fallen. Was the visitation from God or from Satan? Under which king? He buried his face in his hands.
“The horror of it,” he whispered. “The terror——”
Colin turned sharply to him.
“Here, take some brandy,” he said, “as—as nobody else will. And you can enjoy your terrors afterwards. At present you’ve got to help. We’ve got to carry him away first. Good Lord, man, you’re not frightened of the dead, are you? The world must be a jumpy place for you with its millions of dead generations. And Vincenzo worshipped Satan: what better death do you want for him?... Well, we’ll talk theology by and by. Think, man, help me to make up a story that’s question-proof. And we must be quick, too, these doctors have a trick of knowing how long a man’s been dead. Perhaps he’s not even dead: we’re not doctors and we can’t tell.”
Colin smoked in silence a moment, frowning but bright-eyed. “Damned lot of use you are,” he said. “But hold your tongue now. I’m getting at it.”
He got up briskly and began walking up and down the black marble floor of the chapel.
“Come along,” he said. “You’ve got to help me to carry him out down the corridor, and through my room and into the hall, and then, you’ll be pleased to hear, all you’ve got to do is not to know that anything at all has happened. You’ll come back here afterwards and put things away, and then get to your bed and sleep or lie awake just as you feel inclined. Look, there’s the censer overturned, and burning a hole in that carpet. Spit on it or something.... My word, you’re lucky that this didn’t happen when you were alone with him, but had someone with you who doesn’t suffer from terror of the spirit. Now catch hold of him under his knees and lift him when I’ve got hold of his shoulders. Why, the man’s as light as a child. That’s the devout life.”
Under Colin’s directions they carried their burden with the slit cassock still over his face, and the arm hanging limply down, out into the hall, and laid him sprawling there, much as he had fallen. Then Colin twitched the cassock from the face, and gave it to the priest.
“Lock up that and the cotta,” he said, “and bury them to-morrow in your bit of garden. Or weight them, that will be better, and make a parcel of them and chuck them into the lake above the sluice. And now go back to the chapel, make everything ship-shape, just as you would have done if this had not occurred, and get to bed. You know nothing, nothing.”
Colin looked at his ashen face, in contemptuous pity. “You’re all to bits,” he said. “I suppose I shall have to come back and help you or you’ll forget to lock the chapel or something. Wait a minute!”
He went to the telephone and got connected with the house of the doctor at Rye.
“I’m Lord Yardley,” he said, as soon as he got a reply “and I’m so sorry to trouble you, but would you make all haste to come up to Stanier? My servant has had some sort of fit; he’s still unconscious. Thank you very much.”
Colin saw Father Douglas through with his part of the business and then waited in the hall, where he would hear the doctor’s wheels. There on the floor lay the body curiously insignificant, and now he noticed that the famous picture of old Colin, with the supposed deed of bargain let into the frame, was on the wall just above where it lay. There was something rather suitable about that.... But he gave no further thought to it: over and over in his mind he conned what he was going to say: framing answers to any questions that might be put, and above all rehearsing his own initial statement. That was the important thing, it was that which he must make so familiar to himself that he really believed it to be true, for no doubt he would have to repeat it again at the inquest. Over all else, though it teemed with surmise and wonder, he drew an impenetrable curtain. Nothing else mattered just now but what he must say to the doctor.
Before he had begun to expect his arrival, he heard the crunch of motor-wheels, and undid the bolts of the door.
“Come in, Doctor,” he said. “It is good of you to have been so quick. It’s my servant, Vincenzo, who has been with me a long time. There he lies, exactly as he fell. I thought it wise not to move him in any way. I tried to get him to swallow a mouthful of brandy, but I couldn’t.”
“Very wise of you, Lord Yardley,” said the doctor. “A man taken by a seizure should always be left till it is ascertained of what nature his seizure is. Now let me examine him.”
Dr. Martin knelt down by his patient. He felt for his pulse, he listened at his chest, and with a light brought close he looked with narrow scrutiny into the eyes. Then he rose to his feet.
“I’m sorry to say I can do nothing,” he said. “The man is dead.”
“Ah, poor fellow—poor Vincenzo,” said Colin. “It is terrible, terrible.”
“Perhaps you would tell me exactly what happened,” said Dr. Martin.
“Yes, yes. Let us come into my room.... Sit down, Doctor. Now let me think for a moment, my wits seem all abroad.”
Colin covered his eyes with his hand a moment: the clock on the mantelpiece chimed the three quarters after twelve. He pointed to it, and spoke.
“Vincenzo always sat up till I went to bed,” he said, “but often, if I was sitting up late, I would ring for him, and tell him he needn’t wait. This evening when my wife and my boy went upstairs, I came in here: it must have been not long after eleven. I began reading the type-written copy of an old family memoir, got interested in it, and did not notice how the time went. When I looked up I saw that it was late: twenty minutes past twelve or thereabouts. I had not finished my reading, and so I rang the bell here, in order to tell Vincenzo that he need not sit up. Almost immediately I heard the noise of some heavy fall. The house had been silent for some time, and it startled me considerably. I went out into the hall which we have just quitted and found the poor fellow lying there. From the fact that I heard this noise immediately after ringing my bell, I suppose that he had been waiting in the hall, where he would hear my bell. I instantly rang you up, and remained there with him till you came. I thought perhaps he might come to himself, and I could be of use. It occurred to me to call some of the other servants, but since I felt sure that it would be safer not to move him, there seemed to be no object in that. Ah, yes, I tried to make him swallow some brandy.”
“Quite so. You acted very wisely.”
Colin looked imploringly at the doctor.
“It would be a great relief to my mind,” he said, “if you could definitely tell me that there was nothing I could have done to help him.”
“I am positive there was nothing. Probably he was dead when he fell. There is a question or two I should like to ask. When you rang me up, you said he had had some sort of a fit. Had he suffered from fits before?”
Colin almost smiled with pleasure at that question.
“He told me once that when he was a boy he was subject to them,” he said. “He supposed he had outgrown them.”
“I see. Of course this was not a fit, medically speaking. No sign of an epileptic seizure or anything of the kind. Sudden death: that’s all we can say at present.”
“And from what, do you conjecture?” asked Colin.
“It is quite impossible to say. That of course will have to be ascertained.”
“You can form no idea?”
“One would imagine he had some terrible shock. There was an expression in his eyes of the most abject terror.”
Dr. Martin got up.
“Now would you like to summon one of your men to help us?” he said. “We must move the body, of course. Is there some room near at hand where we can place him till morning, when I will be back early to make all arrangements—some room which you can lock up and give me the key or keep it yourself?”
“Yes, there’s the smoking-room close at hand,” said Colin. “But there is no need to call anybody. I will help you.”
They laid him on a sofa there, covering the face with a rug, and presently, after the key was turned, and Colin had taken it from the lock, he saw the doctor to the door. In his admirable way he had conveyed the impression of being terribly shocked and keeping a firm hand on himself.
“You can rest assured, Lord Yardley,” said the doctor, “that you did all that could be done. You acted with great wisdom in not moving him, and in sending at once for me. I wish I could have been of any use. Put your mind quite at rest about that. You’ll sleep I hope?”
Colin raised soft swimming eyes.
“I feel as if I should,” he said. “Now it is all over I feel most awfully tired. Good night, Dr. Martin. Ever so many thanks.”
Colin bolted and barred the door, switched off the lights in the hall and went upstairs. Passing Dennis’s door, he saw that it still stood ajar, and a line of brightness was rectangled round it. He pushed it quietly open, expecting to see that Dennis had again fallen asleep while waiting for him to come and say good night. This time, however, the boy was wide-awake.
“Oh, Father, what an age you’ve been,” he said. “What have you been doing?”
It was as if some shutter had been snapped down in Colin’s mind. Behind it lay all that had happened in this last hour, bright and vivid as in some decked shop window but now cut off from view.
“Dennis, you little wretch,” he said. “You ought to have been asleep long ago.”
Dennis laughed.
“Oh don’t be silly,” he said. “You didn’t think I was going to sleep without saying good night to you on my last night, did you? Come and sit down for two minutes.”
Dennis wriggled away to the middle of the bed, leaving room for his father to sit on the edge of it, and put up his knees to form a back for him.
“I expected you to be snoring,” said Colin.
“I never snore!” said the indignant Dennis. “As for being asleep, I didn’t want to go to sleep.... Finished your jobs?”
“Pretty well. I can leave the rest till morning.”
Dennis sniffed, wrinkling up his nose like a young terrier.
“Where have you been?” he said. “Your coat smells of Roman Catholic churches.”
“Rot, my dear. Cigarettes.”
“But it isn’t rot. Well, never mind. I say, Father, we have had a ripping holiday. And to-day’s been the best of all. And it’s ever so much nicer here than in London. I love Stanier.”
“That’s a family affliction,” said Colin. “I wonder what you’ll do with it, when I’m dead and you get it.”
“Oh, shut up. As if I should care about it without you.”
“Dennis, what compliments!” said Colin.
Colin went to his room, and let that shutter in his mind rattle up and looked into that lighted window. Between the catastrophe and the coming of the doctor his acuteness had been entirely busy over the account he would be called upon to give, and there his cool ingenuity had served him well: his story had been coherent and consistent, and he had eliminated from it everyone but himself and the dead man, who could bring forward no conflicting testimony. But for the moment he looked only absently at that sensationally deckedwindow, for he congratulated himself on his wisdom in rejecting that wayward thought of taking Dennis with him at midnight, only a little more than an hour ago, into the chapel. If he had done that, what face would Dennis be wearing now? Would he have curled down in bed so quietly and followed his father as he went to the door with the shining of his tranquil, affectionate eyes? Already he knew (and had shuddered to know) that there was in the legend something more than a fairy story, something alive and Satanic from the touch of which he shrank when it came near him. Colin would have told him that what he was to see in the chapel was the worship of that power which through the centuries had so wonderfully befriended the house, and while he quivered in the face of that initiation, there would have come this appalling, this unexpected stroke. The boy would have been distraught with terror; evil which, for its own sake, he must sometime choose as guardian of his soul and body, would have been to him for ever a force that smote its suppliant with death, sudden and terrific. It would have been disastrous if Dennis had seen that.
Colin looked into the lighted window. There, vivid as when the scene itself was before his amazed eyes, he scrutinized the image of Vincenzo, already writhing in the ecstasy of possession, and then falling forward like that. Why had that happened? What was its psychical significance? He had died, it appeared, of some shock of terror: panic yelled in his wide silent eyes. Had there come to him some appalling revelation of ultimate absolute evil, even as it had come to old Colin himself when, at his birthday feast, he had shrieked out, “No! No!” and with repelling hands had fallen dead across the table? Or had he looked in the eyes of God, and seen there the infinite love of Him at Whom he mocked?
Colin felt himself shudder at that thought. That indeed would be enough to shrivel the spirit of a man, like a burnt feather in a furnace. Hell could not contain such torment as to realize that, through the night and blackness of absolute evil, the love of God still shone without change or dimness, even as the light of a steadfast star burns unblown by the puny violence of terrestrial tempests.... If there had come to Vincenzo at the moment of death only some vision or internalrealization of the wrath of God, that surely, to one whose joy it was to mock and defy Him, would have been like a waved banner of victory, a sign that his mockery had reached its mark: God’s anger would be a testimonial to his success. But it would have been hell indeed to know that all his defiance and rebellion had never caused the infinite Love and pity to waver, that for him still ‘Christ’s blood streamed in the firmament.’ That would have been sufficient to glaze with the terror of utter and ultimate defeat, those dying eyes....
“See where Christ’s blood stream is the firmament”.... Colin muttered the words to himself. They came, he remembered now, from the last scene in Marlowe’s Faustus, just before the stroke of midnight, on which Mephistopheles came to exact the payment of Faustus’s soul. That to Faustus had been the ultimate anguish, and what if it had been so too to him who now lay in the locked room downstairs?
Colin shrank from that thought, even as Dennis had shrunk from the terror of his nightmare. It was better to suppose that there had come to the man some fresh intuition into the power of evil, and that in the panic of his eyes was the knowledge that his time was come, and that he was eternally consigned to the protection of what he had worshipped. At that so easily the flesh might quaver, in the dissolution of the body from the spirit. That in comparison was a comforting thought: he felt himself at home there and not afraid. He himself had chosen evil for his good, and hell surely could be no other than the eternal severance of the soul from God. It was physical terror merely that had distorted Vincenzo’s face: and with that thought there sprang up in him the desire to look on the dead once more, and convince himself that there were imprinted on it just the tokens of this natural cowering before the face of death. He had with him the key of the locked smoking-room, where the body lay, and now, taking off his shoes so that his step should be noiseless, he let himself out into the passage again. The switch was to his hand just outside his door, and at his touch the passage and the hall below flashed into light.
He paused after fitting the key into the door of the smoking-room. The great portrait of old Colin seemed to smile on him; on the floor in front of it was the rug on which Vincenzo’s body had sprawled, it was crumpled into ridges where they had taken it up again. He entered the death-chamber. There on the sofa with its face covered lay the body, and standing there beside it he told himself again what he had come to see, namely the tokens of physical terror, the shrinking of the flesh at the touch of death. Then he drew the covering away.
Vincenzo’s eyes were closed—perhaps the doctor had done that. The face was perfectly composed and tranquil, and looked younger than his years. He did not seem to be dead: it was more reasonable to think that he was asleep, and the mouth, slightly smiling, suggested that he dreamed of happy affairs, of friends, of home. In life there had been something a little sinister about his expression: now he looked contented and kind.
Colin covered his face again with a sullen spasm of misgiving. He feared that tranquillity, he hated the conjectured cause of it; death had stamped that face with terror, and something stronger than death had smoothed that terror out again.
He went upstairs. Had the events of the evening begun to get on his nerves, spurring them to unreal imaginings? Perhaps it was normal that, after death, the face should grow tranquil again. But its tranquillity was more disturbing by far than its distortion of terror had been.
Colinwent into his wife’s room early next morning and gave her his official version of Vincenzo’s death. They were both agreed that Dennis should be told nothing of it, and before the hour for the removal of the body came, to await the inquest in Rye, he took the boy out for a final morning of rabbit-shooting. He had slept well and woke with nerves quieted and refreshed: Dennis’s ignorance, too, both of what had actually occurred and what was supposed to have occurred was in itself a healing to those troubled fancies of the midnight, just as this warm April morning was healing in its physical tonic to his nerves.
Indeed Stanier had never seemed so tranquil and serene an abode of prosperous peace, as now when he walked with this tall fair son of his along the terrace, and up the wooded slope beyond the chapel, where the ruby glass of the windows was penetrated by the gleaming sunshine, and shone like a fire. To be out of doors this morning was better than being within, and better it was to walk in the warm wind than to breathe stale incense smoke. Below them the broad lake glittered, and for a moment, in a gap between the rhododendron bushes along the sluice-wall, the figure of the priest, black against the vivid green of the young-leafed trees beyond, came into sight and vanished again. He had gone down there, no doubt, to do his part concerning the secret version of the events of the night: Colin was pleased to have caught that glimpse of him. Later, when Dennis had gone, he would have to see him.
But just for the present he let all that concerned thedrowning of slit cassock and cotta slip down into the depths of his mind, even as those relics with the weight to sink them had dwindled into the darkness of the deep water, where once Raymond lay. Soon he would have to fish these problems and perplexities up again, and discuss them with the priest; but for an hour or two, till Dennis departed, he would keep on the sunny surface of this windy morning. There lay the house that he loved more than anything or anyone in the world; he could almost fancy himself, if this April day were only eternal, being happy here, as the deer were happy, browsing on the fresh growth of spring time, and letting that love of hate and of evil in his heart sink into quiescence, even evaporate away. Would life lose all its effervescence without it? Supposing now that the whole history of the legend from its inception to his own passionate participation in it was a dream; supposing it rolled away like those moving mists which an hour ago lay fleecy and thick over the plain, and that with an opening of his eyes and a tranquil awakening he found himself just here, mounting the steep slope with Dennis chattering by him, and the house gleaming rosy-red below, and that all which had given to him the thrill and the motive of life passed into unsubstantial nothingness, so that even the memory of it was elusive and hard to capture—would he look forward over the coming years as over a desert featurelessness of barren sand?... The notion occurred to him for just long enough to frame itself into a definite mental question, but the moment it presented itself like that, he saw that any answer to it must be inconceivable, simply because the question itself was so. He could not with deliberation even frame the question for, in itself, it presupposed an obliteration of all that which consciousness implied. He might as well ask himself what he would think about if his brain was incapable of thought.
He took Dennis down to the station after lunch, and on his return, meaning to ask Douglas to come to see him, was told that he had already asked if he could do so, and was waiting in his room. He went there, but had he met in a crowd away from Stanier the figure that rose on his entrance, he would scarcely have recognized it. The man’s upright, athletic carriage was bowed and bent, he stumbled as hewalked, and the fresh-coloured face was a drawn white mask. So this was the diver with whose help he had to try to bring up to the surface the submerged burden of the night....
Colin did not mind other people looking ill. Their weakness only emphasized to him his own superb health.
“Hullo,” he said. “You look rather poorly, Douglas. I might almost say you look ghastly. Oh, by the way, I caught a glimpse of you this morning, telling your beads no doubt down by the lake. I take it then that you’ve done that little job. Is that so?”
“Yes, I did exactly what you asked me.”
“Capital. Then all that remains for you is to realize that up till this moment you are not aware that anything unusual occurred. So much so, in fact, that you must listen to a sad piece of news I’ve got for you. Listen. My Italian servant, Vincenzo, had a sudden seizure shortly after midnight in the hall. I had just rung my bell to tell him not to sit up, and it appears that he was waiting for that. He was in the hall in fact already. He got up, it would seem, to come to this room here, when a seizure took him and he fell. I heard the noise of his fall, and found him there, and, as one should never touch a man in a fit, I telephoned for the doctor, who said he was dead. There will be an inquest which I shall have to attend. Sad news, isn’t it? I shall miss him. I thought I had better tell you. Any questions to ask? We’ll take your sympathy for granted.”
Colin moved quietly about the room as he spoke. He lit a cigarette and pointed to a chair.
“And now that I’ve taken that off your mind,” he said, “let us discuss something quite different. Look at me, Douglas, and tell me, in your capacity as spiritual expert, black and white, what happened last night? Or, rather what caused that which we both saw?”
The priest raised his eyes to Colin. Terror, deep and still as a summer sea, gleamed and darkled in them. The words came slowly at first, for his twitching mouth stammered as he spoke.
“I can tell you what happened,” he said. “Just at the moment when evil and defiance were mounting in a blaze oftriumph in his soul, he saw God. There is nothing else that can account for it. If he had seen Satan himself, would the terror that smote soul and body asunder have come to him? He might have fallen in a trance of adoration, but what cause would there have been for terror? There was cause only for ecstasy. But was that ecstasy which you and I saw on his face? I tell you it was the despair of final defeat. He was at the mercy of Him whom he had made his enemy. As I raised my hands in consecration, God came.”
Was it the infection only of that mute panic in the priest’s eyes that caused Colin’s heart to beat suddenly small and quick, and his hands to grow cold?
“That occurred to me,” he said.
There was a moment’s silence. The clock ticked, and just outside the window a thrush sang.
Colin made a violent effort with himself. He attacked his fear, driving it before him.
“We’re rotten Satanists, you and I,” he said. “We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. As I tell you, that idea did occur to me, but I was, without knowing it, overwrought last night and excited. I, too, when I saw that terror in his face, thought that the sight of God alone, merciful and pitiful, could have caused it, and I thought so even more strongly when, half an hour later, I looked at his face again, and saw it was quiet and serene. But I needn’t go into that. What I intend to do now and for ever from this moment, is to put that notion away.”
“It doesn’t matter if you put it away or not,” said the priest. “It is true.”
Colin made that silent, effortless relaxation, that opening of his heart to the power that he loved and served, which is the essence of prayer. He had just to remain like that, till it began to tingle and throb within him, till he was charged and brimming with it. Soon he spoke.
“Of course the ways of God are inscrutable,” he observed, “but I don’t take the slightest interest in them. Of course He’ll win in the end somehow—it’s such a score to be Omnipotent. But it isn’t the end yet. I’m going to have a good long run for my money first. Besides, the notion is quite illogical: it doesn’t hold water. You were the principalculprit last night, weren’t you? Why, in the name of justice, weren’t you bagged instead of Vincenzo?”
“I wish to God I had been,” said the priest.
“Now will you explain why?”
“Because I am in hell.”
“This pleasant room?” asked Colin.
The priest got up.
“Can’t you understand?” he said. “Vincenzo has been conquered: he has made his submission. He saw the truth of what he denied and mocked: it was made real to him, in some manner inscrutable to us. And if that was the end of life, it was the end of hell also.”
“Oh, I thought hell was eternal,” said Colin.
“Every moment holds eternity,” said the other. “Millions of years multiplied by millions of years are no nearer eternity than the millionth part of a second. Eternity isn’t quantity, it is quality.”
Something shone on Colin at that, as from an immense distance over stormy water there shines some steadfast beam from a harbour light. Instantly his whole will, strong in the power that possessed it, mocked and derided.
“Ah, fine durable quality,” he said.
That abyss of terror in the priest’s eyes was veiled for a moment.
“Yes, the quality of God,” he said. “Nothing else but it exists at all.”
Colin stretched himself in his chair.
“Oh damn,” he said quietly. “I’m sure I beg your pardon, Douglas, but when I try to impart a little lightness to your solemn gibberish, you flop back again. Let us quit theology or demonology, or whatever we’re talking about—I’m sure I haven’t the slightest idea what it is—and be a little more practical. Now I hear you asked to see me. What did you want to say?”
“I wanted to tell you that I am leaving Stanier to-day,” said Douglas.
Colin raised his eyebrows.
“That’s rather sudden, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes. It’s very sudden. What happened last night was sudden and what it wrought in me.”
“And so I’m to be left without my—my librarian at a moment’s notice?” said Colin.
“It would make no difference if I stopped,” said Douglas. “I could never do my office again.”
Colin laid his hand on the priest’s shoulder, and put into his manner all the whining charm which was his.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “you mustn’t think that I’m unsympathetic. You’ve had a frightful shock, and it has absolutely upset your nerves. It has had no effect on mine, as you see, but I quite understand that you’re all abroad to-day. Now take a complete holiday for a month, and don’t go near the—the library. We’re having a divine spring, May is delicious down here. And then after a month you’ll find you’re yourself again.”
Douglas shook his head.
“I couldn’t possibly stop here,” he said.
“Well, then, go out to Capri for a month or so. The villa is at your disposal, and, of course, you’ll be my guest, though I shan’t be there.”
“That is kind of you,” said Douglas, “but I couldn’t do that either. I must go.”
“But I can’t permit it,” said Colin. “You’re part of Stanier now, a very important part too. Why, it’s through you that old Colin’s original designs are complete. I built the chapel he planned before he turned traitor, but what’s the use of a chapel, without a priest? It’s no more than an empty picture frame. Last night was very upsetting, I quite grant you that, but for a fit of the nerves you mustn’t break up the very shrine of Stanier’s hidden life. Do you suppose it was chance that caused us to meet? Why, we’ve often agreed it was the most miraculous design. You can’t smash it up like that. Take a holiday by all means, but you must come back.”
“I cannot stop here, and I can never come back here,” said Douglas. “The place—how shall I say it—is saturated.”
Colin moved a step away from him.
“I think your attitude requires explanation,” he said. “Is Capri saturated too?”
Douglas faced him.
“My attitude is perfectly simple,” he said. “For twelveyears the worship of evil has been my spiritual life, and last night my eyes were opened to what I have been. Whether I can find salvation I don’t know, but what I can do is to hate and loathe myself, and break off all connection with those who are as I have been.”
“Ah, now we’re getting at it,” said Colin. “The saturation you speak of—I am the saturator, I perceive. Is that it?”
“Yes: you and the evil which you worship.”
Colin’s blue eyes were still smiling and kind.
“I think you’re inconsistent,” he said. “Shouldn’t the zeal of the convert inspire you to missionary work? A brand plucked from the burning ought surely to want to spoil the fire by pulling out another brand.”
Douglas hesitated.
“I am afraid,” he said.
“Not of me?” asked Colin.
“Yes. You have a power for evil that is terrible. The legend is true: I can’t stand up against you. And yet....”
“Go on,” said Colin.
“It’s this, and these are my last words to you. I have watched you this last month, and you have changed. At least there is the shadow of change over you. Till last night you have never come to the chapel, and last night I could feel that you felt no true devotion. If I could hope to assist that change, I might stop, but it has nothing to do with me. You have let love approach you.... Dennis.... He loves you as you know very well, and there is something in you, crush and throttle it as you will, which goes out to him.”
Colin suddenly shot out his hand at him. Never, not even in the days of Raymond, had he known so blistering and undiluted a stream of hate flood his soul. This man, with whom he had been knit in the worship of evil, not only had thrown it and him aside, but he had seen and spoken of that which, like a disgrace, he had tried to cover up and excuse from himself.
“That’s enough!” he said. “And let me tell you that you never spoke words more ill-advised for your purpose than these. It’s the truth in them that damns them. Do you think I don’t know that as well as you? And don’t you seethat if anything was wanted to encourage me to root that change out of my heart, it would be that you, you trembling renegade, should tell me of its shadow lying on me?”
He came close up to him again; there was not much of a smile in his eyes now, and he spoke with a cold and deadly concentration.
“I know that I’ve been weak,” he said, “and it’s a tonic you’ve given me for my weakness. There’ll be no more complaint of my lack of fervour: what has frightened you has put resolve and courage into me. You, and your truckling submission! Why, I shall hear of you teaching in a Sunday school next. Perhaps you’d like Dennis to come and sit under you. I’ll wring the weakness out of my heart as you wring the last drop of moisture from a wet cloth, and out of Dennis’s heart I’ll pluck the weeds of love and plant the flowers of hate there, thick as the spring daffodils on the hill-side.”
Colin broke off suddenly.
“Go away,” he said, “while you have time. If you stop here you’ll see something that will curl you up like Vincenzo. It won’t be the face of God, but it will be something you can’t bear. You’re trembling in every limb now. By God, there’ll be two inquests instead of one if you stop here! You’re afraid of me, as you said, and that’s very prudent of you.”
How the power surged and foamed through him: it was like fire and wine in his veins, buoyant and intoxicating.
“I would kill you now,” he said, “except for the fuss and bother that would involve me in. There’s one mysterious death to be investigated already, and you may thank your luck that it is so.”
It was true enough that Douglas had shrunk before him, holding up his arm as if to ward off some impending blow. But now he suddenly straightened himself up, as if new force had nerved him, and in the strength of that he stood steadfast and unafraid before the power that flickered in Colin’s eyes.
“I was afraid of you,” he said, “but it was my blindness that made me afraid. Now,de profundis, I call on God, whom I have mocked at and defied, but in whom you believe just as I do. I daresay you could kill my body, for that is mortal, it is weak with sin and defilement, but against me you are powerless as hate in the presence of love. You know thatyourself. And one day you will be conquered and make your submission, too. You will go down into hell, as I have done, and find that God is there also.”
He waited a moment watching, now without dismay, the furious impotence of the other’s face. But no word came from Colin, and presently he moved to the door.
“Good-bye, Lord Yardley,” he said. “And God will have mercy on your soul in spite of you.”
Colin stood where he was, hearing Douglas’s steps pass across the gallery and into the hall. His fingers still twitched with rage, he felt himself charged and crackling with the friendly power, and he had no doubt in his own soul that by the mere exercise of his will he could have brought to bear some disastrous force on the man who had just quitted him, that should exhibit itself in illness or misfortune, or in ways more swift and terrible. And yet though the mere opening of the sluice of pent-up evil would have done it, and though with every conscious fibre of him he hated and wished evil, he did not do it. For what might happen to Douglas was a side issue, not worth pursuing, and as regards the main issue, namely his soul’s abhorrence of the power in Whose name Douglas had withstood him, he knew that he was defeated already. He had come up against something that did not fight him nor strive against him; it merely stood there, patient and pitiful, serenely existing.
He confessed defeat, but he did not acquiesce in it. Rather it stirred in him, as he had said to Douglas, a more determined antagonism, and took him farther than ever from any notion of submission. But Douglas was right in saying that there was a breach in his defences, and that in the breach stood Dennis, boyish and smiling and clad in that armour of love and innocence. Somehow he must be stripped of that, and wounded, and driven away from the crumbling wall of Colin’s defences, else he would never be able to repair it. Of course the boy was not convent-bred, he was no pious barley-sugar little saint, but a high-spirited, vigorous fellow with a good leaven of mischief and boyish naughtiness, but that was nothing. His armoured innocence lay in his utter lack of the love of evil; when it came near him in the abstract, he choked and shuddered at it, instinctively recoiling. Dennis hadno notion of hate, of the desire to hurt; the rudiments of cruelty, that bramble full of thorns and red fruit, which when it has taken root in the soul spreads over it quicker than any other lust, and chokes and stabs to death any growth that impedes it, had no existence in him. He liked enjoying himself, and there perhaps lay the seeds of selfishness, but selfishness was a negative quality, compared with the other.
And there, more impregnable yet, the very breastplate of Dennis’s armour which covered his heart, was his propensity for love. Colin knew that, in these three weeks of his Easter holidays, he had made a sad mess in attempting to use that as a weapon in his own hand. He had thought that by making Dennis attached to himself he would be able to influence the boy to his own ends, and lay his soul open for the introduction of that which he intended to implant there. But a strangely miscalculated result had ensued. Easily, indeed, by the exercise of that charm which was his to command, had he won the boy’s heart, but; by some mischance of carelessness, he had let Dennis’s love ooze into himself. That leak must be stopped up. As it was, his house of hate was not impervious to those soft April rains. Why was it, he wondered, that Dennis penetrated like this, whereas Violet, whose love for him still lived, could make no entrance? He could sit, so to speak, in the window and watch her streaming on the pane, and never a drop come in, but Dennis dripped from the roof, and entered through chink and cranny. Was it that with Violet’s love there was mingled fear of him and horror, which cloyed its power of penetration, whereas Dennis was pure limpid water? Dennis had neither fear nor horror of him: he had clung to him in the midnight hour of his fear, as to a rock and a sure defence, unknowing that it was from there that he was assailed, and that he fled to him from whom he was fleeing. There was love in all its innocence, and its awful power.
Above all, then, he must kill Dennis’s love for him. The weapon he had thought to forge out of that had only been turned against himself, and at the same time it was, in itself, Dennis’s chief protection. Dennis loved no one, Colin was sure, as he loved him, and there was his cuirass of security, which must be hammered into fragments which should pierce and wound him, until he drew them out of his ownbreast, and cast them from him as poisoned things, which were the origin of all his woe.
“Yes, that damned Douglas was right,” thought Colin, “and I’m grateful to him for warning me. I’ll see to it.”
He sat there a few moments longer, then ejected the topic from his mind altogether, and for distraction moved across to the window. The superb and luminous afternoon was already near its close, and the tide of clear shadow was creeping up the terrace. Below, the lake reflecting the sky was a mirror of steely blue: beyond, the plain was dim with the mists rising from its intersecting dykes. Its further edge and the line of the sea which bounded it had vanished altogether, for a sea fog hung over the Channel and was slowly drifting inland. Towards sunset in the chill of evening following on warm days like this, it often spread right across the plain, opaque and impenetrable, covering it completely, and, like a sea, lapped round the lower edges of the higher ground, turning its contours into bays and headlands. The hill of Rye rose above it like an island, and the tops of any tall trees in the plain would float like derelicts on its surface, but it submerged the featureless flat beyond, and till it dispersed again, with a rising wind or the warmth of dawn, it was bewildering and blinding, and a man caught by it unawares, where there was no path to guide him, might lose his bearings altogether, and wander half the night in aimless circles over pastures perfectly familiar to him. To-night, reinforced by the moisture rising from the dykes, the dense mist spread very rapidly and, even as Colin watched, the whole plain vanished before his eyes. From the sea, the foghorns were already hooting with hollow, long-drawn wails.
Colin turned from the window: the luminous west had grown pale, and this march of the shadows and the mists was rather a dreary spectacle. But within it was scarcely better. Two days ago at this time the house had been seething with life and the fancy-dress ball was yet to come. Then yesterday morning the guests had all gone, but there was still Dennis here, and what a festival they had made of his last day! Then had come that midnight catastrophe, of which the sequel had been the scene which he had just gone through, and thedeparture of Douglas: that was over, and there was no object to be served by brooding upon it. But above all it was the absence of Dennis that contributed to this mood of slack purposelessness, which was so unusual with him. Only this morning, as he trudged up the slope with the boy for the silly rabbit-shooting, he had, taking himself unawares, fancied that he could be content to expunge all that had given the zest and alacrity to life, and browse here animal-like, so long as he was at Stanier and Stanier was his. Here he was at Stanier, but for some reason mists, chilly and obliterating, had crept up round it, penetrating everywhere. Surely they had come before they were due?—it was not evening with him yet, but broad noon, and many years must pass before for him the sun set, and the frost of death came on him, and Dennis plucked the reins from his nerveless hands.
For a moment he let himself visualise what manner of impotence would be his at that hour. Just the power of hate would be left him, he thought, and even the red of that would be fading, like the sunset outside, into the grey encompassing mists, but surely as long as one touch of colour remained there he would be hating the very existence of Stanier because it was his no longer but Dennis’s, and hating Dennis for the dawning pride of his ownership. How would he long then to summon some cataclysmic force which would annihilate heritage and heritor alike! What worse torment could there be for those uncharted aeons that should follow, than to be condemned to exist, unseen and unheard here where he stood now, and be actively aware of Dennis in possession with sons growing up who would inherit after him, while he himself drifted impalpably about, surrounded by the warmth of life which yet could not thaw that ice-cold bubble that contained his consciousness? He must school himself to think of Dennis enjoying all that had been torn from him. Already Dennis was his potential foe, his supplanter....