It was time to eject these comfortless imaginings: all that he need retain of them was this new conception of Dennis, for that surely might prove an antidote to affection—and he went out of his room into the long gallery, where Violet, all alone, was seated at her tea-table. She put down the book she was reading as he sauntered up.
“Anyone dining to-night?” he said. “Or are you and Granny and I going to spend a quiet evening of domestic bliss?”
She poured him out his cup of tea.
“We shall be alone as far as I know,” she said. “Would you like to ask Mr. Douglas?”
Colin paused: that subject was one of those he had meant to put away from him. But she should have it if she liked.
“Douglas has gone,” he observed.
“Gone?” asked she.
“Yes, I said ‘gone,’ didn’t I?” said Colin. “To spare you any more questions, I don’t know where he’s gone, because he didn’t tell me. Sometimes I thought he would be rather a good tutor for Dennis in his holidays a little later on.”
He just glanced at Violet and saw she had understood.
“But that’s all over now,” he continued. “I shall have to conduct Dennis’s holiday education myself.... Yes, the atmosphere of Stanier didn’t suit Douglas. He was impolite enough to say that it was saturated with me and that he couldn’t bear it for a moment longer. You’re delighted I suppose, aren’t you?”
“I saw very little of him,” said Violet. “As you know, I didn’t like him.”
“How very unchristian of you. What was the fault you found with him?”
“I don’t think we need go into that,” said she.
“How reticent you are, darling,” he said. “Sad, isn’t it, that there’s so little mutual confidence and trust between us. I wonder if you’re glad that Vincenzo has gone, too. Would you feel inclined to come to the inquest with me, and say that Vincenzo was a lovable, God-fearing fellow who had nothing on his mind, no fears, no worries?”
She looked at him with a sudden spasm of alarm.
“Colin, what do you mean?” she said. “He didn’t kill himself?”
He liked producing that look of terror in her eyes: he liked playing with her fears.
“Of course I haven’t told you what really happened,” he said, “for, as you know, I am always considerate and should hate to shock you. Perhaps I will tell you sometime. Butsuicide, no, it wasn’t suicide. There’s a little puzzle for you, Violet, to occupy your leisure, now that the duties of a hostess no longer take all your time. Vincenzo dies very suddenly one night, and Douglas finds he can’t breathe the same atmosphere as me next day.... Ah, I guess what you’re conjecturing, but it’s wrong. I wasn’t the cause, directly or indirectly, of Vincenzo’s death. What a mind you’ve got, darling, to let that suspicion ever peep into it!”
Colin spoke with a soft deliberation: he was like a great purring cat with a mouse between his paws.
“You did think that, you know,” he said, “just as you still think that I had, well, let’s say the tip of a finger in poor Pamela’s death. Altogether, I feel rather lonely and deserted this afternoon. Here are you, with dark suspicions about me, and then my old friend Douglas has gone, and my old servant (he was a friend, too) Vincenzo has gone, and then Dennis has gone, and all within twenty-four hours.”
He put down his cup and sat down on the rug by her feet, clasping his knees.
“And I find so little sympathy,” he said. “I believe you’re not sorry that Douglas and Vincenzo have gone, and I wonder, I really do wonder, whether you’re sorry that Dennis has gone.”
There was a fiendish ingenuity. Violet suspected, at the bottom of this question. How well he divined her mind! How like him, as if he was some deft conjurer, to guess what was in it!
“Why, I miss Dennis most awfully,” she said. “The house seems dead without him.”
Colin smiled.
“Yes, very pretty and Madonna-like,” he said. “But that wasn’t what I asked you. I asked you if you were sorry Dennis had gone. That’s a direct question enough: can’t you answer it directly?”
She rose with all her nerves on edge. But that would never do. If she was to reach Colin at all, with the love that was the only efficient power she had, she must eradicate her fear of him, brushing aside all that she shuddered at, for that, cramped and clogged her movement towards him.
“The question is direct enough,” she said, “but I can’t give you a direct answer. You’ve made the boy devoted to you, that’s beyond question, and sometimes I’ve been afraid, and wished he was not here. But then I’ve wondered whether I haven’t misjudged you altogether. Dennis is just as sweet and innocent as he has always been. And then I’ve asked myself whether you haven’t begun to love him.... Oh, Colin, if that’s only so! You know I would give my life for that.”
Colin jumped to his feet.
“If you think I’m going to listen to your damned sentimental maunderings,” he said, “you’re awfully mistaken. Dennis is devoted to me, that is perfectly true. I effected that for two reasons. One, which concerns you, was in order to cut you out, dear Violet. I’ve done that, and I’ve seen how you’ve writhed with jealousy once or twice under the knowledge. The second reason was more important. I made Dennis love me, in order that I might have unbounded influence over him, for, as you’ve often told me, love is infinite in power. No wonder you were afraid; but, as a matter of fact, I haven’t used that influence over him, in the way that you expected. And now (perhaps this will be a relief to you) I’m going to change my tactics. I don’t like love you know; I’m going to make Dennis sorry he loved me. He hasn’t yet seen me with any—shall we call it with any clarity of vision? So important for a boy to form habits of accurate observation! He must get to dislike love, too, because it wounds him and makes him bleed.”
There spoke the very spirit and essence of wickedness, and yet Violet felt that it struggled for utterance, fighting its way to his lips. His purpose was plain, but there was something which contested it, an impediment that threatened its free exercise. He, so she guessed, was aware of it too, for though he had never been in more deadly and bitter a mood, never swifter with those characteristic gibes that pierced and stung, she felt that there was an effort about them, as if the bow that shot them had to be strung again and again instead of being always ready. In superficial and trivial ways also, in the days that followed, that struggle, whatever it was, seemed to manifest itself in strange little indecisions which irritatedhim and made him unlike himself. One day, for instance, he would tell her that connubial solitude, with an immortal grandmother thrown in, was too delicate a form of happiness, and that he would go up to London that afternoon, and an hour later he would have changed his mind, and told her to ask down a party for the week-end. Then, before she had done that, he would change his mind again, and say that he wanted nobody, and spent the day rambling about the park, or, in this hot spell of May weather, bathing and basking by the lake. Another day he started off to drive to Eton and see Dennis, to whom he had promised an early visit, but when that evening she asked him how Dennis was, he told her he had not been there.
They were at dinner, just the three of them, when he rapped this out at her, and it roused in old Lady Yardley some dim, disordered train of thought, for she began to speak in that level monotone which came out of her twilight mists.
“Yes, much wiser, much wiser,” she said. “Let there be no force, not even persuasion. Let him come to it naturally: it is bred in the bone. Do not make him drink of the spring: he will be thirsty someday, and then he will go to it.”
Colin turned sharply round.
“Go to what, Granny?” he said. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“Aha, I am talking of what I know and what you know. We talk in parables that are plain to us. He knew, too—that man who never comes here now. Yes, and yet another. They have both gone. Only Colin and I are left now, and the chapel is empty.”
She stopped as suddenly as she had begun, and rose, leaning on her sticks.
But all through these days, while spring every hour was weaving fresh embroideries, some black pattern was being worked, stitch by stitch, so Violet felt, into Colin’s heart. Sometimes the needle was nimbly plied, and then, despite herself, she shuddered at the depths that lay beneath the bright surface of his gaiety, for it was when some black business within went well that his mood was sunniest. Such was the case when he came back from the inquest held on the body of Vincenzo. “There was an autopsy,” he told her, “and though theyrummaged about, so Dr. Martin told me, with great thoroughness, they could find no cause of death whatever. Visitation of God, that was all they could make of it, and I daresay they were quite right. He was like Enoch, apparently: he was translated. I wonder how Vincenzo would bear translation. I wonder what he was translated into.”
It was difficult not to shudder at that.
“Colin, don’t talk like that,” she said. “You’re terrible.”
“Terrible? Why? I didn’t translate him. And then I gave my evidence, and we were all very polite and complimentary, and bowed at each other with respectful and mournful little smiles. I told them just what I told you, and they all agreed I had acted with great wisdom and prudence. That was quite true: they had no idea how true that was; and then we all bowed again like—like a minuet. By the way, have you made anything of that little puzzle I set you about the departure of Douglas following so closely on the death of Vincenzo, and the reason he gave for it?”
Violet made no reply.
“Your manners are getting very bad, darling,” said Colin. “I asked you a civil enough question. Now, here’s another queer thing. Both the doctor and his assistant noticed a very curious smell about the frail earthly tabernacle of poor Vincenzo. What do you think that was? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you. There was a strong odour of incense. Now where can that have come from? I could throw no light on it. Can you?”
She got up.
“Colin, supposing I told them there was more about Vincenzo’s death than they know?” she said.
“Ah! That’s a great idea. What fun! Write an anonymous letter to the coroner. And what will you say it was that they don’t know?... I thought that information about the incense might interest you. Consider it in connection with the puzzle.”
Another day, it seemed as if things did not go well with the black embroidery, for he was savage and silent. Then it was she guessed that something was struggling with him for its existence, and that he stabbed at it, and tried to strangle it. Yet such days, lashed by blasts of his bitter tongue, were morewelcome to her than those on which he was smiling and content and in harmony with himself.
As these weeks of May went by, Violet saw more and more clearly that she had no significance for him at all, and it was just that which gave the days their unspeakable tension. Sometimes she was the butt of his irony, sometimes he completely disregarded her, but, whichever it was, he was not concerned with her. She was just the traditional Stanier wife, whose duty it was to provide an heir; after that she might freeze. He knew she loved him, he knew she feared him, and he was quite indifferent to both. It was Dennis round whom all his thoughts and all this strange hidden contest centred, and unerringly she knew who were the combatants now beginning to come into touch with each other. On the one side was all that the legend stood for, the love of hate, and the hate of love. Colin, all his life, had been an apt pupil in that deadly school: perhaps no such scholar as he had ever graduated there. Already he had tried to use love as an instrument of corruption, and he had failed and changed his plan. Now, he was out to kill love, and in command of the black panoply he was arraying himself to fight against a young boy who stood there unaware that there was anyone but the father he adored coming to meet him. He had no defence except love ... and yet was there a traitor in the very heart of his foes?
And she had to stand aside and watch. Of what use was it to warn Dennis? What form could that warning take? All he knew was that it was his father coming to him. If she could somehow throw herself between them, Colin would pass on over her, indifferent, scarcely even aware of her. One thing only perhaps she could do, and that was to stamp out her fear of him, for the only effect of fear was to paralyse....
Thus then, dimly and mistily, was the new situation forming. But it would not present itself like that: it would take shape, when Dennis was home again, in daily domestic ways, in ways cunning and cruel, in ways perhaps affectionate and winning. But they would all contribute to the end in view.
TheEton term came to an end in the last week of July, and Dennis found that, by leaving at some timeless hour, he could get down to Stanier by the middle of the morning. The idea was irresistible, for there would be time to have an hour or so bathing with his father before lunch, and keep the afternoon intact, and so, though the original plan had been to lunch with Aunt Hester, and, tipped and gorged, go on to Stanier afterwards, he telegraphed to her that he ‘had to’ go straight home, and sent a second telegram to his father to say that he would arrive at Rye at half-past eleven. He knew that Colin was there, for his mother had written to him a day or two before to say they had left London and were at Stanier.
The heat of the day promised well for the pleasure of diversions such as bathing, and the addition of excited anticipation made Dennis strip off his coat, when he had got into his train from London, and turn up his shirt sleeves to the elbow. These long summer holidays, with an extra week at the end in honour of a certain Royal visit to the school, contained an eternity of joys: not only was there Stanier to look forward to, but that visit to Capri with his father, which had been promised him. As the train neared Rye he hung out of the window to catch the first sight of the house glowing among its woods. There was just a glimpse of it, with its flag flying on the tower, and then the trees hid it again, and he must bounce across to the other side of the carriage to see his father standing on the platform, and wave to him. He would be there to meet him as certainly as Stanier was waiting for him on the hill.
The platform was rather full, and Dennis was still searchingfor Colin when the train drew up. He descended with arms full of agreeable impedimenta and then the very natural explanation of Colin’s absence occurred to him: without doubt he had driven down in the little two-seater, and was waiting for him outside. He went through the gate of egress, but in the station-yard there was no two-seater, nor any other conveyance from Stanier. Again an explanation was easy: his telegram had not yet been delivered. This was not quite the ecstasy of arrival that he had anticipated, but it was entirely his own fault.
The cab laboured up the long hill and jogged very sedately along the level up to the lodge-gate. At this rate he could traverse the short cut on foot more quickly than this deliberate quadruped would make the detour. Getting out at the lodge he struck across its park, arriving at the house before the cab came within sight. He ran through the hall and burst into his father’s room. But the room was empty.
There was his mother, anyhow, in a shady corner of the garden below the terrace, and he hailed her, and next moment was running down the steps and leaping the flower-beds. She rose to meet him, and caught him to her, close and clinging.
“Dennis, darling,” she said. “This is lovely. And, oh, my dear, what a heat you’re in!”
“I know: I ran across the park and got here before the old cab. And where’s Father?”
“He started an hour ago to drive up to London.”
“Oh, how rotten! I think that’s beastly of him. And didn’t he get my telegram to say I was coming this morning?”
Violet hesitated.
“Yes, dear, he did get it,” she said. “He thought that, having said you would come in the afternoon, you ought to have kept to your first plan.”
Dennis looked impartially at this verdict.
“I suppose I ought,” he said. “But as I found I could get here earlier, of course I did. And so he scored off me by making me come up in a cab, and going away himself. When will he be back?”
“Some time to-day. Late perhaps, he thought.”
Dennis’s sun was very certainly clouded, but sufficientbrightness remained to illuminate a pleasant day. There was a bathe before lunch, and Violet took him to play golf, after a slight demur over the chance of his father arriving during their absence, and there was tea on the terrace, and a stroll through the woods with his gun. All these things had been rapturous in anticipation, and though nothing could quite rob them of their honey, it was not of that transcendent order.... Well did Violet understand that, and well she understood why Colin had suddenly settled to go up to town that day. Then came dinner, where his place was laid but unoccupied, and old Lady Yardley groping in the twilight which was darkening round her, now thinking that this was Colin back from school, now asking where Colin was.
But still he did not come, and about eleven Dennis, visibly perturbed and depressed, and his mother went up to bed.
“And you’re sure he hasn’t had an accident?” he asked.
“Yes, darling, quite sure. You mustn’t think of that.”
A bright idea struck Dennis.
“Oh, Mother, somebody must sit up for him to let him in,” he said. “Mayn’t I?”
“No, dear. I know he wouldn’t wish you to. Go to bed, darling, and get a long night. You were up early enough to-day.”
Dennis sighed.
“Well, I’ve had a ripping day with you, anyhow,” he said.
Dennis’s room looked out on to the front of the house, and before he got into bed he set his door ajar, and the window wide, so that by no chance could he miss the sound of his father’s arrival, and, without turning off his light, sat propped up in bed, prepared for any length of vigil, for, in spite of the day-long disappointments, he was sure that Colin would look in on him when he came, and it would never do to miss that conference. There were millions of things to tell and be told, but better than any would be the fact of his father’s presence sitting here on his bed, and after ever so long a talk wishinghim good night and leaving him to fall asleep with the sense of him still lingering in the room.
It was not long before he heard the crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels of the motor, and he jumped out of bed to look out of the window and call to him. But they had been equally quick in letting him in, and Dennis had no more than a glimpse of him standing in the oblong of light from the open door, before it closed again behind him. But that was of no consequence: he would be here immediately, and Dennis leaped back into bed.
The minutes passed, but very likely Colin would want something to eat after his drive from London, before he came upstairs. Soon there came along the passage a step that Dennis knew, and his eyes, sparkling with the imminent joy, were fixed on his door, to see it swing open. But the steps stopped short before they reached it, and another door a little way down the passage was opened and closed.
“I suppose he thought it was very late, and that I should be asleep,” said Dennis to himself as he put out his light.
He slept late next morning and hurried downstairs to breakfast. His father, dressed in flannels with his hair still wet from his bathe, was standing by the window, opening his letters.
“Oh, there you are at last,” said Dennis, springing to him. Colin gave him a rather absent hand.
“Hullo, Dennis,” he said.
“Hullo, Father. I say, how late you were last night, and you never came to see me.”
“No. I managed to curb my impatience till this morning,” said Colin.
“O-oh! Sarcasm! And have you been bathing? Why didn’t you fetch me?”
“I didn’t imagine you had forgotten your way down to the lake, if you wanted to bathe.”
Dennis gave him one quick anxious glance. There was something wrong: perhaps the business in London yesterday had worried him, or perhaps his father was vexed with him, though it seemed very inexplicable, about that matter of the train yesterday.
“I’m sorry about my coming in the morning yesterday,” he said, “after I had told you the afternoon. But I thought it would be so ripping to get here before lunch.”
“Oh yes: that’s all right,” said Colin absently.
At this moment Violet came in, and Colin’s manner instantly changed.
“Ah, Vi, darling,” he said. “There you are! I got back very late last night, for I thought I would dine with Aunt Hester. She was quite delightful: also quite astounding. About eleven she went off to a dance in a short pink dress and a wreath of flowers. She promised to come down here to-day, and stop till I go to Capri.”
Dennis pricked an ear at this.
“Oh, when will that be, Father?” he said.
“One of these days.... And then, if she likes, and you don’t mind, darling, she can stop on here, though I really believe she would like best to come to Capri, and disport herself like a small, imperishable, highly-coloured sea-nymph. How she would astonish the islanders!”
Dennis gave a cackle of laughter at this picture. Best of all was the gay good humour in his father’s voice. Colin turned to him.
“Dennis, she told me that you had promised to lunch with her yesterday,” he said, “and that you sent a telegram saying you had to get down here. There was no compulsion on you to get down here that I’m aware of.”
“Oh, but I wanted to get down here so frightfully,” said Dennis.
“I see: anything you want frightfully has to happen,” said Colin, “and I suppose anything you want not to happen, isn’t allowed to. But in spite of that, next time you say you’ll go to see Aunt Hester and then throw her over at the last minute, it’s just conceivable that something may happen which you don’t like. Go and put your mother’s plate down for her.”
This was all bewildering, but Dennis did as he was told, and having finished his breakfast came and stood by his father’s chair.
“Well, what do you want?” asked Colin sharply.
Dennis flushed.
“Oh, nothing,” he said.
“Don’t hang about then. You can go if you’ve finished your breakfast.”
Dennis had a spirit of his own, and one thing was perfectly clear to him as he left the room, namely, that if his father did not want to be bothered with him, he was not going to make any importunate requests for his companionship. It was a horrid state of things, but no doubt temporary: he could parallel it by the bleakness which sometimes fell upon his house-master at school, for no apparent reason. This paternal bleakness, unknown in those last glorious Easter holidays, was of course far more depressing, for it took all the colour out of life. He was absolutely ignorant what cause of offence he had given; throwing over Aunt Hester and coming by another train were clearly inadequate as the reason for it, and all he could do, while it lasted, was to be prompt and obedient, and above everything to spring to him, whenever his sun should shine out again, without any shadow of resentment or reserve. This treatment was wounding and inexplicable, but he must keep his hurt to himself, and most certainly he must not go to his mother with querulous wonder as to what it was about. It concerned his father and himself, and nobody else: it would be disloyal to his unshaken allegiance to make moan.
Dennis had ample opportunity for loyalty in the next few days, for he could do nothing right in his father’s eyes. He scarcely saw him or had speech with him except at meals, and then, if he talked he was told not to jabber, if he was silent he was asked why he was so sulky. It was a heart-rending and inexplicable affair, and all the more puzzling because except with him Colin was in his gayest and most entrancing mood. Aunt Hester, who apparently had not in the least minded Dennis’s conduct, received the most delightful welcome for an indefinite period, and Colin chaffed her and made much of her, till she beamed again. With Violet he was the same; only Dennis had the power to check his geniality and cause him to rap out a reprimand of some kind. In the evening the four of them, with old Lady Yardley, played their whist, and he was left to amuse himself as he best could. Even then he could not escape censure. If he watched them; a dreary enough occupation, he was asked why he didn’t get a book and read a bit after his day of enjoyment: if he read it was supposed that whist was too old-fashioned for the young generation to interest themselves in. Once Aunt Hester intervened.
“Let him read or look on as he likes, dear,” she said to Colin. “He can please himself, surely.”
On that occasion only Colin was sharp with her.
“Dear Aunt Hester,” he said, “perhaps you’d mind your own business. We’re waiting for you to play.”
And then, after the dismal whist, there was the dismal going up to his room, with the knowledge that the door would not open, nor his father look in and sit on his bed, and make delightful plans for the next day.
A darker phase succeeded.
In the following week an Eton friend came to stay, and now at least there was someone to play with. Jim Airedale was an engaging and good-looking boy, devoted to Dennis, and even in this eclipse, the two of them, with all the resources of Stanier to chose from, might entertain themselves with considerable enjoyment. But all went more grievously for Dennis than ever. Colin appeared to take a great fancy to his friend, and at dinner, on the day of his arrival, talked to him delightfully, with occasional interspersions of snubs for Dennis. No one—as Dennis was bitterly aware—knew so well the road to a boy’s heart; he made Jim at ease in a couple of minutes, set him chattering in a couple more, and it was a hilarious meal that followed. After dinner he set Dennis down to play that weary whist, and took the other boy off to play billiards. When the whist was over, Dennis joined them and marked for them. Then at bedtime Colin took Jim up to his room, to see that everything was comfortable, and lingered there talking, while next door Dennis, half-undressed, sat on his bed, waiting for those merry sounds to cease. When all was quiet, he slipped out of his room to have a few words with Jim, and perhaps Colin was waiting for that, for as he passed his door, it opened quietly and there his father stood.
“Hullo, where are you going?” he asked.
Something in Dennis seemed to strain almost to breaking-point at the cold hostility of his tone.
“I’m just going to see Jim,” he said.
“Well, then, you had better just go back to your room again,” said Colin.
Next morning he took Jim off in the two-seater to play golf—Dennis would lend him his clubs—and they came back late for lunch, better friends than ever. Afterwards there was some rabbit-potting, at which Jim excelled, and Colin found occasion to say to Dennis, “I wonder if you’ll ever learn to shoot like that.” And there were dreadful games of lawn tennis, in which Colin, saying that he was the worst player of the four, must play with Jim, against Violet and Dennis. He really was the best, so of course they won. All this was sufficient to turn the boy’s head, and Jim became slightly condescending to his friend. But when he said to Dennis:
“I say, you’re father’s pretty rough on you sometimes,” with the intention of being consolatory and friendly, he found he had strangely miscalculated. Up went Dennis’s chin.
“Rough on me?” he said. “What on earth do you mean? He’s perfectly ripping to me.”
Finally, on the last evening of that nightmare week, Colin made it impossible for Jim, after a decent allowance of champagne at dinner, to refuse a couple of glasses of port. He became rather tipsy, and when, with a rolling eye and a menacing sense of rising nausea, he hurried away to his room, Colin watched him go with a shrug of the shoulders. “Nice sort of friends you bring to the house, Dennis,” he said. That seemed to round off the visit very pleasantly.
Colin was sitting up alone that night after the others had gone upstairs. He had been more brutal than usual with Dennis at dinner, and for the first time he had seen Dennis bite his lip, obviously to keep tears back.... But, in spite of all his pitiless persecution, he knew that he was no nearer to the attainment of his purpose. As far as Dennis himself was concerned, he had systematically and continuously hurt and wounded him in that attempt to which he was committed, to kill his love, but no failure could at present have been more complete. Often when the whip of his tongue had been cruellest, and his cunning to hurt most diabolical, he had looked at Dennis saying, “Well, answer me, can’t you?” and Dennis had raised to him troubled and bewildered eyesin which no spark of hate smouldered. There was no meekness about Dennis; he could answer back with his head up, quite unsubdued and unafraid, but in vain Colin looked for any sign that his love was ailing or like to die. And occasionally when he relaxed, and gave him a kind word, love leaped sparkling to his eyes and his beautiful mouth. What confirmed this impression was the pride of the boy, for he never, as Colin knew, uttered to his mother a single word of complaint, or went to her for comfort. Little as Colin knew of love, he knew that here was the noble pride of love, which would never admit failing or blemish in the object of its high affection.
Colin opened the door on to the terrace and strolled out into the warm pregnant night. There was something more indicative of failure than this impregnable loyalty of Dennis’s, and that was his own unchanged affection for the boy. In every possible way that could be devised by his alert perceptive brain, he had wounded and injured Dennis’s heart, and though there is no such royal road towards hate as to injure, he had made no headway at all. His devotion to hatred, his vow to himself, so faithfully kept, to all that was evil, had often made him bubble with secret glee to see Dennis wince under those barbed attacks, but all the time there existed that soft aching tenderness for him, so easy to stifle but so impossible to smother. Like eternity, as he had sneered to Douglas, it seemed of very durable stuff. All this fortnight’s persecution had done nothing to break it up. Uninvited, it had entered his heart, and nothing could stir it. He could act as if he had no other feeling for the boy than this contemptuous aversion, but something ached....
The night-breeze drew landward from the sea and sometimes it fell altogether, and there was dead calm, and again he heard its whispered approach in the trees by the lake, and presently it flowed over the garden and streamed on to the terrace. He tried, as he so often had done, to lay himself open to the spell that had woven the prosperity of Stanier; he thought of Dennis heir to all its glories and possessor of them when he had gone from this world, and at that the flicker of jealousy, a strange offspring of love and hate, shot up in his heart. But supposing Dennis died before he did.... Wouldhe sooner see him lying dead, and know that he, at any rate, would never succeed to Stanier and its magnificence, or when death drew near to himself, see Dennis by his bedside, and picture him assuming what was his to enjoy no longer? On his deathbed surely he would entirely hate Dennis, and wish that he lay there in his stead.
At the end of the long façade there stood the chapel unused since Douglas’s departure, and Colin going back into his room let himself into the corridor which led to it, turning up the lights as he went. He had not been there since the night of Vincenzo’s death, and now it seemed to him that if he sat and meditated there, where so often he had made the consecration of himself to evil, he could arrive at some clearer and conscious realization of it. He told himself that he hated love, and delighted in hate, but no fervour warmed his creed. In that sanctuary of Satan the truth of that might shine more vividly on him, and he might get rid of that fancy that Dennis’s eyes, eager and ready to kindle; or sad but without reproach, were watching him. Surely they would not follow him where Dennis had never been.
Colin sat quiet in his place looking at the altar. The faint odour of incense still hung about, but emotionally the place was dead. He thought of Vincenzo twitching and grinning as he knelt: he thought of Douglas, lifting high the consecrated elements, so soon to be a mockery and a derision, but his mind gave no welcome or greeting to the remembrance....
Well, his deeds must atone for his lack of fervour, and presently he rose and went back through the silent house, and upstairs along the dim-lit passage.
Suddenly the desire came to him just to look at Dennis. The boy would certainly be asleep by now, for he must have learned that it was not much good to keep awake, on the chance of his father coming in to say good night. He would just open the door, turn on the light for a second and look at him and leave him. He told himself he wanted to remind himself that the boy would inherit all that he now loved and enjoyed; what he concealed from himself, stuffing it away out of sight, was that some human craving hungered for the sight of him. Dennis would be asleep; he would get no pleasure from what he did not know.
Colin opened the door quietly, and saw the room was light, and there was Dennis sitting up in bed. His face was bright with the unexpected surprise: and he stretched out his arms. There was something appealing and timid in the gesture.
“Oh, Father, how ripping!” he said.
Colin was helpless in the grip of that welcome. He tried to frame his tongue to some chilling reprimand, but none came.
“Dennis! Not asleep yet? And your light on? What does it mean?” he asked.
The boy broke out into a little bubble of a laugh.
“Why, I always keep it on till I hear you go to your room,” he said.
“Why?” asked Colin.
“Of course on the chance that you’d come in, as you always used to do. I knew you would sometime. Jolly glad I kept it on. Oh, come and sit down.”
Against his will and his purpose Colin came up to the bed. Dennis wriggled aside to make room for him, and put up his knees for him to lean against.
“I can’t stop,” said Colin, sitting down. “It’s fearfully late and you’re a villain for being awake.”
“All right: I’m a villain,” said Dennis.
“And you wait for me every night?” asked Colin.
Dennis nodded. Just then he could not trust himself to speak, but his shining eyes spoke for him.
“What shall we talk about,” asked Colin, “just for a minute?”
“Oh anything: it doesn’t matter a bit, as long as it’s you.”
At that moment Colin was happy. But he had hardly realized that, before, just as he had heard the night-wind coming up and whispering in the trees by the lake, he knew that there was approaching the blast of hate and evil which he had tried to conjure up in the chapel. He leant towards Dennis, put his arm round his neck and kissed him.
“Good night, old boy,” he said. “I won’t stop now. Sleep well.”
“Ever so well,” said Dennis.
Colin clicked out the light, and went to his room. Alreadyhis brain seethed with images of evil, vivid and alluring, and fierce at this treason of his. They swarmed like a loyal garrison to that breach in his defences where Dennis had stood, and drove him off. They urged Colin to pursue, to go back to the boy’s room, to let loose on him their assault, to defile and desecrate his innocence, to show him the ecstasy of evil, the charm of cruelty. What matter if panic or horror made nightmare round him? He would wake from them with new currents coursing in his veins, new desires stinging him to their fulfilment. Where was the good of his being heir to the legend if he did not enter into his birthright?
Fierce was the stress of that possession. Colin withstood it, feeling that if he yielded the very bonds of sanity would be loosed. If he went back to Dennis’s room now, he would go as a devil unchained, ready and eager to perpetrate any spiritual outrage and desecration, and who knew whether the very balance and poise of Dennis’s being, whom he had just left with all his serenity restored and the lamp of love bravely burning, might not be upset altogether? Already he was scarcely in his own control, and, maddened to an invincible lust of evil by the sight of that tender victim, he might let himself cross the boundary which separates the territories of human life from the untamed welter and chaos of prodigious forces which both threaten and maintain it. He had served Satan all his life alike in spirit and in works, and would serve him still, but while this stress, which seemed like some dervish possession, was on him, he could not trust himself with Dennis. Something of irremediable violence might happen, some fatal laceration of the fibres of the boy’s soul.
The crisis passed, leaving him conscious only of immense fatigue. There had been a struggle, not between himself alone and this Satanic power, but between it and something in himself, but not of himself, which opposed it. He was too tired to think any more, and, throwing off his clothes, sank into the dark of dreamless sleep.
He slept late, and waking brought with it a certain incredulousness at his memory of the night before; what had happened seemed buried, at any rate, under deep layers of consciousness, so that he could not handle and examine it. Much more accessible was the memory of his weakness ingoing in to Dennis at all. Whatever fruits might have ripened from this fortnight’s harshness to the boy, were certainly frost-bitten now, for Dennis knew, and hugged himself to know, that below these bleak cruelties the father he loved existed still. It was a foolish thing to have done, not only for that reason, but because he had weakened himself in allowing that spasm of affection to assert itself. But it is never too late, he thought, to mend foolishness by wise courses.
Dennis had finished breakfast when he got down, and he heard from Violet that he had gone for a morning in the water, leaving an urgent message for his father to follow.
“And the boy’s radiant this morning,” she said. “He told me you came into his room last night and were ‘ripping,’ so he said.”
Colin was busy at the side table.
“Oh! What else did he say?” he asked.
“Just that. I am glad you did it. That couple of minutes made him forget all the woes of these holidays.”
“Ah! He’s forgotten about them, has he?” said Colin.
“Absolutely; they’ve vanished. Oh yes, he wondered if I knew when you and he were going; to Capri. I said you hadn’t told me.”
“I shall go to-morrow. But how it concerns Dennis, I don’t know, unless, as is highly probable, he’s glad to get rid of me.”
“But aren’t you taking him?” asked Violet. “You promised to take him.”
“Did I? Well, now I promise you not to. Entirely for your sake, of course, darling. You’ll love having him here to yourself. You’ll be able to make up lost ground. Now I don’t want to hear anything more about Capri. I’ll tell Dennis myself. Why should I drag a brat like that about with me?”
Before long Colin strolled down to the lake. There was Dennis’s yellow head far out on the water, and his browned arms, glistening with wet, lifting themselves alternately as he surged back to the shed. By the time Colin had come to the smooth turf that margined the lake, he had got to land, and stood knee-deep in the shallow water, slim and shiningwith an April-face of happiness. He gave a great whoop of welcome when he saw his father.
“Hurrah, Father!” he said. “You have been quick. The water’s lovely; let’s bathe and lie about all morning. Oh, I say, I was diving just now, and found an awfully funny thing in the mud at the bottom. Looks as if it was lace of sorts. Catch!”
Dennis picked up a sodden grey ball which he had put on the bank and threw it at his father. At the moment Colin’s attention was attracted by some water-fowl swimming at the far end of the lake, and Dennis’s missile, wet and muddy, hit him full in the face.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dennis. “I thought you were looking.”
The missile had fallen at Colin’s feet, and he saw at once that it must be the lace cotta which had been torn off Vincenzo’s body.
At the sight a horde of recollections drove in upon him; once more Vincenzo twitched and grinned, and the incense smoked. Those instincts of hate and cruelty which had dozed last night in the chapel, leaped up, bright-eyed and snarling. Then, too, this recovered relic had splashed him, the mud slimy and evil-smelling had dropped on to his white coat.
“Dennis, you’re a damned nuisance,” he said. “I’ll teach you to behave. What the devil do you mean by doing that?”
He plucked two lithe shoots of willow from a tree that grew by the water’s edge and stripped off the leaves.
“Come out,” he said, “and stand here with your back to me.”
Dennis looked at his father, and saw blind rage and fury in his face, as he peeled the willow wands.
“I’m awfully sorry, Father,” he said.
“You’ll be sorrier in a minute. Come here. I’m going to give you six of the smartest cuts you’ve ever had. It hurts more when you’re wet.”
Dennis stepped out of the water, and stood where his father pointed, and four strokes, savagely delivered, fell across his shoulders. He stood perfectly steady, gasping a little at the burning sting of them. As Colin slashed at him, he felt anexultant glee that at last he was hurting him to some purpose. He had spoiled the effect of his fortnight’s cruelty by that concession last night: this should start him afresh, with no apostasy to follow. He saw the red criss-cross of the strokes and the weals rising on the boy’s skin with some such ecstasy of satisfaction as he had seen Pamela standing in his room one night at Capri. And then in the middle of this chastisement he knew he could not strike Dennis again.
“That will do,” he said. “Turn round.”
Dennis turned and looked him straight in the eyes. In spite of the sharpness of the pain his face was in perfect control, his mouth was just a little compressed. And once more Colin knew that he had failed, for he saw there pain and bewilderment, mute reproach, but of fear not a trace nor yet of hate. With regard to himself he had failed also, for he had been literally unable to finish the punishment he had promised, and now he wanted to put his arm round Dennis’s neck, and kiss him, and tell him that he knew what a devil he was, and beg the boy’s forgiveness....
The very consciousness of that failure made him rage again.
“Well, did you like that?” he said. “It hurt, I expect.”
“Yes,” said Dennis.
“Why don’t you cry then?” asked Colin.
“I don’t choose to.”
Colin sat down on the grass and lit a cigarette.
“Well, there’s another pleasure in store for you,” he said. “I’m going to Capri to-morrow, and your mother says you think you’re coming with me. That’s an error on your part—that’s all.”
“Yes,” said Dennis again. He walked to where his clothes lay on a bench and began dressing.
“Aren’t you going on with your bathe?” asked Colin. “It will take the sting out.”
“No, Father, I’ve finished,” said Dennis.
Colin began taking his clothes off.
“Going to sulk, I suppose,” he said. “But please yourself.”
Smarting of skin, but far sorer at heart, Dennis walked quietly off when he had dressed, and skirting the lake went up along the bracken-covered slopes of the park that looked outover the marsh. He longed to confide in his mother, and ask if she could account in any way for this Pentecost of trouble which the holidays had brought, and which had culminated in this thrashing, but in spite of the comfort she might have brought from the mere knowledge of her sympathy, he could not tell her of that, not because it was a humiliation to him, but because it was a disgrace to his father, and that must never be known to her. The offence which provoked it was no cause at all; in the Easter holidays he might have done that until seventy times seven, and his father would only have laughed, and called him a little devil, and thrown the missile back at him. And the same policy of repression must be preserved about his other woes. In whatever manner his father treated him, that was an affair that concerned themselves alone: mere manliness forbade him to go whimpering to anybody, and more stringent yet was the prohibition that his own love for his father enjoined on him. It was impossible to complain: he had got to shoulder his own burden whatever injustice and harshness had laid it on him.
He waded through the waist-high bracken with the scuttle of rabbits about him. There were patches of bare turf between the clumps of fern; it was great sport to walk through the bracken with a gun, and get a pot-shot at a rabbit that bolted across these clearings. Often had he done that with his father, but to-day he had not the least inclination to fetch his gun. He wanted only, since speaking to his mother was out of the question, to be alone, and stare this intolerable state of affairs in the face, and he sat down in one of these open spaces, with the aromatic smell of the woodland round him, and tried to focus it. He smarted with the blows he had received and with the utter injustice of them, but most of all his heart cried out against the virulent glee in his father’s face, when he told him to turn round again and asked him how he enjoyed it. If only he was like some other fellows at school who either disliked or just put up with their fathers, he would merely have been angry at this abominable treatment, and delighted that the beastly man was taking himself off to-morrow. But Dennis felt none of these natural sentiments; in spite of these harshnesses he would rapturously have gone with his father to Capri, if that had been allowed, unshaken in the faith(which for a minute or two last night had been so joyfully justified) that to-day or to-morrow his father would turn to him again, and be ‘ripping’ as no-one else in the world could be. But his father—and what had he himself done to evoke this desolating displeasure?—had altogether changed to him, he disliked him, and he wanted to hurt him, and finely he succeeded. As the sense of this bitter tragedy grew on him, Dennis could bear it no longer, but rolled over on his face, and, for the first time in this awful fortnight, sobbed with the pain of his wounded affection.
After a while he sat up again: there was no earthly use in indulging in such sloppy tricks, and, pulling himself together, he walked back to the house. It was close on lunch-time, and he made himself neat, for fear of provoking sarcastic comments, and sat in the gallery over a picture paper. Presently his mother and Colin came in together.
“Well, dear, nice bathe?” she said to him.
“Yes, mother, jolly and warm,” he said.
She came over to his chair, and leaned over him, putting her hands on his shoulders. Dennis could not help wincing at that.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she said.
“Nothing. I scratched my back against a snag as I was bathing,” he said. “Rather sore.”
Colin heard that, and instantly he thought to himself, “Now I’ll tell her: that will humiliate him.” But on the heels of that came some sudden glow of pride at the staunchness of the boy. He guessed that he said that, not to spare himself, but to spare him, and, as last night, the yearning for him, the affection he had not yet succeeded in killing, pulled at his heart.
It was an unutterable relief to Violet when, next morning, with charming farewells to her and Aunt Hester, and with a nod to Dennis, Colin drove off to catch his boat at Folkestone. She had ached and mourned over her boy’s misery, but at the same time she had rejoiced in that reticence he had observed to her, for there indeed was the banner of love flying bravely. If he had struck that, and come to her for comfort and with complaint, indeed there would have been no matter for wonder, but she delighted in the fact that he flew it still.But it was good that Colin was gone: poor Dennis had had a rotten time, and she longed to give him pleasanter days. Naturally, he had no inkling of the meaning of his tribulations, of the significance that underlay them, and she had no notion of telling him that, in her belief, a battle was going on that somehow centred round him, in which he, boyishly unheeding, was standing his ground in the face of black and bitter assaults. She knew well that it was not yet over, nor yet nearly over; he had but held his own, and fresh assaults, fiercer yet perhaps, would come. But just for the next few weeks there was truce, and she was thankful for that.
The summer days passed on: another school-friend came to stay with Dennis, and after him another, and Dennis seemed happy, though no one could kindle in him that abandoned radiance which Colin so easily lit. Colin had been away a month now, and, according to his plans, would be back for Dennis’s last week at home. But one evening there came a letter to Violet saying that he was intending to stop on in the island for another fortnight.
She read this to Dennis as they sat together that night for a bed-time talk after old Lady Yardley’s whist was finished, and Aunt Hester had hurried away in horror of the lateness of the hour and the fear of missing her beauty sleep. One piece of the letter was not for his ears: Colin asked if she was making up lost ground with Dennis, and supposed they had hatched plenty of conspiracies against him: he also sent a message to Dennis to say that he need not trouble to ink his fingers over writing to him, as his letters were quite illegible. Violet thought it unnecessary to deliver that message, but, reading out the postponement of his father’s return, she saw Dennis’s face fall.
“Then I shan’t see Father before I go back to Eton,” he observed.
Violet considered the dates.
“No, dear, you’ll have gone back several days before he comes,” she said.
The cloud deepened on Dennis’s face.
“Did Father say anything about the letters I’ve written him?” he asked.
She laughed.
“Yes, dear, he did say something,” she said, “about their not being particularly easy to read.”
“No other message for me?” asked the boy.
Violet’s heart began to ache for him.
“Let’s see: where have I got to?” she said. “Wonderful vintage, he says, in the lovely hot weather they’re having.... He’s been bathing all the morning, and has had lunch, and is going to sleep....”
“But no message for me?” persisted Dennis.
Violet finished the letter and tore it up. There was a good deal about Dennis, though nothing for him. But it struck her that these uncomplimentary comments were forced. In one Colin had first written ‘the boy,’ but had crossed that out and substituted ‘the brat.’ He had not thought of him as ‘the brat’ originally: ‘the brat’ was the image under which he schooled himself to think of him. The sentences had no spontaneous ring about them; they expressed what he tried to feel. She felt sure that her interpretation was no fanciful one.
Dennis had accepted her silence to his repeated question.
“And what else has he been doing?” he said.
“Dining out in the garden every night,” said Violet, “and looking at them making the wine. The garden is a good deal burned up with the heat. Nothing else. The bathing takes half the day.”
Dennis crossed from the far side of the hearth-rug and made a back for himself against her knees.
“It sounds awfully ripping and lazy,” he said. “Father loves it, doesn’t he? I should have liked to have gone with him for a bit.”
“Perhaps another year he’ll take you,” said Violet. She felt no sense of injury in the fact that Dennis wanted to be out there with him, rather than at home with her. She thanked God that it was so, that all these wretched days, when his father had persecuted him, had left no stain on the luminous brightness of his affection. At all costs she wanted that to retain its shining quality. Even if Dennis suffered, he suffered in the cause of love: if he had not loved his father, he would have thought of him now as merely a very disagreeable personwhose absence was a matter for congratulation. But even now Dennis wanted to be with him; he was disappointed that his postponed return would rob him of a glimpse before he went back to Eton.
“I wonder if he will,” said Dennis. “I wonder——”
Violet felt that the boy was on the verge of speech. She drew him back against her knees, encompassing his shoulders.
“Yes, darling, what do you wonder?” she said.
Dennis drew a long breath.
“I wonder what made Father so beastly to me when I came home this time,” he said. “I can’t think of anything that I had done. I didn’t mean to speak of it, but ... but had I done anything, Mother?”
“No, darling,” she said gently.
“Then it’s not my fault, anyhow,” he said. “That’s something. Oh Lord, I have thought about it so much. So if it’s not me, it’s something that has just got hold of Father.... I wish it would let go. He came up to my room one night, you know, and was just as he used to be. I believe.... I believe he’s fond of me all the time, really. What am I to do?”
She wondered how near the truth he had come. The words, “something has got hold of Father.... I wish it would let go,” were extraordinarily apt. But she could not tell him that his father loved hate, and hated love, and that in her belief love was beginning to assert itself against that black dominion. To tell him that, to speak of the legend and of the choice which Colin had renewed for himself, might spoil the instinctive simplicity with which Dennis faced it all. She could not tell him that his father had tried to corrupt him, and, failing there, was trying to kill his love. The truth, baldly stated, might easily produce in him, if he understood it, just that atmosphere of horror in which love gasped for breath.
“Dennis darling,” she said. “You can help your father in a way that nobody else can.”
“How?” said Dennis quickly. “And what’s it all about?”
“It doesn’t matter what it’s all about,” she said. “But you can help him by doing just what you are doing. Go on loving him, dear. Never let yourself cease loving him.”
“As if I could help doing that!” said Dennis.
He was busy next morning. He scribbled a long letter to his father, and copied it out with extreme care. No one could possibly say it was illegible....
Itwas not until the first of the autumn shooting parties at Stanier was nearly due that Colin came back from his island, and from then till early in December a succession of guests passed through. Sometimes he went up to town with the party that was leaving, returning a few days afterwards with the new relay, and then again he was busy with his duties as host. Sometimes he stopped here in the emptied house, but even then Violet was never once alone with him for any private talk. He pointedly avoided all chance of this, and on the only occasion when she had attempted to break this ring of his seclusion from her, he had flamed into devilish anger.
“Oh, for God’s sake clear out!” he said, “if you’ve come for a heart-to-heart talk. You’ll know fast enough if I’ve got anything to say to you.”
“But I want to talk to you,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since you left here in August.”
He gave her one furious glance.
“You’d better go,” he said.
Dennis, she knew, wrote to him, for sometimes she would see that laborious and legible script on one of his letters, so different from the cursive scrawl which he gave her. Colin certainly read these, but he never wrote to the boy, and one day there came to Violet, at the end of one of Dennis’s letters, a postscript without comment. “Father has told me not to write to him any more.” There was no reply to be made to that: Dennis had stated it without comment, and without comment it had better remain, for they understood each otheron the subject which it concerned. And yet, for some reason which she could not justify and could scarcely even define, Violet felt that, underneath the harshness of that injunction, there lay not so much the desire to wound as the deliberate intention of so doing. Colin had sat down and thought of that: it had not sprung from the open garden of his mind, but had been reared with deliberate care. It had not been derived from instinct, but from craft; that waspish little prohibition was no spontaneous product. She might even regard it as a missile discharged not in offence but in defence.... And then he never spoke of Dennis: not once did the boy’s name pass his lips. To her who knew him so well, and had so often shuddered at what he was, this carried the same interpretation. He wanted no suggestion or reminder of Dennis to come near him, not even to her did he mention him, though it was just here that she was most vulnerable to the taunts and gibes that wounded. It was not like him to spare the most sensitive spot for fear of hurting her; it was much more probable that, somehow or other, he was sensitive there himself, and forbore from a contact at which he would have himself winced.
They were alone for a few minutes together, one evening early in December. Old Lady Yardley’s whist, at which her nurse had made the fourth, was just over. These sepulchral games were now, in the dimness that was falling ever duskier over her mind, no more than the mere approximate symbol of a game; she held her cards and played them quite fortuitously, and smiled as she gathered the random tricks. But after a few hands of this phantom game had been dealt and disposed of, she was quite content when told that her two rubbers were over, and that she had won them both, though she would whimper in some vague distress if she thought she was not going to get her whist. Even Colin had become now to her a shadow among shadows; just occasionally some faint ray from her mind illuminated him, but for the most part he was but a piece of that grey background, ever receding, of the visible world. To-night, however, some thought of him quickened her, just as she was being wheeled out of the room, though all evening she had seemed unconscious of his presence, for she turned in her chair and said, “My Colin iscoming back from Eton before long, and it will be well with Stanier again.”
Colin had got up and was half way along the gallery on his passage to his own room, leaving Violet there. But at this he came back, and stood in front of the fire.
“When does ‘her Colin’—I suppose she means that brat of yours and mine—come home?” he asked.
Violet gave him the date, some five days before Christmas.
“I suppose you’ve made a calendar, as one used to do at school,” he sneered, “and tear the days off as they pass.”
“Oh, no: I can remember without that,” said she. “There are eight days more.”
“And what happens at Christmas?” he asked. “The usual intoxicating family gathering?”
“Aunt Hester’s coming,” said Violet, “and my mother.”
“Very exhilarating,” observed Colin.
“Then why don’t you go to some friend for Christmas, if you feel like that?” said she. “There’s no reason why you should be here, with a handful of women.”
“There is, if you’ll excuse my contradicting you,” he said. “I must make Dennis’s Christmas happy and joyful. And after all I have a certain right to be at Stanier if I like. Or have you planned to give Dennis a taste of what it will be like to be master here, when I’m out of the way, just as my father gave you and me a taste of it one year, after your discarded Raymond was out of the way? How well I remember that somehow! Raymond was still at Cambridge, and my father made you and me hostess and host at a big party, before Raymond came down. Perhaps you’ve counted on my absence at Christmas, knowing how exhilarating I find the company of my aunts, and are asking a large party with Dennis to play host. Sure you haven’t?”
The question was too preposterous to need an answer, and he continued:
“I shall be here for Christmas with your permission,” he said, “just to give Dennis a treat. You may have him alone a bit first and—and tonic him up for so much pleasure. He kept writing to me when I was in Capri, saying he wished I was here, and that he was sorry I should not be back before hewent to Eton. There was a sarcastic touch about that which made me laugh.”
Violet shook her head.
“No, you’re wrong there,” she said. “There was nothing sarcastic about it.”
He looked at her with a sort of malignant pity.
“You make me feel sick sometimes,” he said, “with that sort of remark. I suppose Dennis thought it a positive joy to be thrashed by me.”
“You thrashed him?” said she.
“Do you really expect me to believe he hasn’t told you that?” sneered Colin, “and that you haven’t wept over me for it?”
“It doesn’t matter to me whether you believe it or not,” said she. “Dennis never said a word about it. What had he done?”
Colin smiled. “Nothing very particular——”
“And so you thrashed him! That was brutal of you.”
“Thank you for that kind word,” said he. “But I wish you wouldn’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence. I didn’t thrash him for what he did, but for what he was.”
It was just on occasions like these, when Colin, as now, was in his most fiendish mood, that she felt this sudden pang of compassion for him.
“Oh, my poor Colin!” she said. “That’s what is the matter with you. It isn’t what you do; it’s what you are.”
“The noble art of tu quoque,” remarked Colin. “But it’s a rather meaningless art. Don’t my actions express me pretty well? I fancied I shewed myself fairly frankly to Dennis in the summer.”
“No, you only shewed him what you’re trying to be,” said Violet.
“You shall explain that in a minute,” he said. “I was saying that I gave a sincere exposition of myself. I hate Dennis, you see: I hate the fact of his existence. Stanier will be his when I’ve gone to hell; probably the knowledge of that will be what constitutes hell for me, and I allow it will be damnable. But until then I can make it pretty damnable for him.”
Colin took a cigarette.
“But there’s more than that,” he said. “I hate love and, if you’re right—thanks for the hint—Dennis loves me. I’m going to kill that, not only because I abominate it, but because it will help to wither Dennis’s soul. I want to make him like me: I should delight in him then. I might even be pleased to know that Stanier would be his. Is that all clear? If so, you might explain what you meant when you said I only shewed him what I’m trying to be.”
She looked at him as she might have looked at some sick child.
“It’s very simple,” she said. “You’re trying to hate Dennis, and you’re trying to make him hate you. You’re acting as if you hated him. But you’re not succeeding.”
She felt that she had never known him till then, so nakedly his soul leaped into his eyes. She had no physical fear of him, it did not seem to matter if he struck her or if he killed her, but at that moment she looked into the nethermost pit, and her spirit cried out for the horror of it. That reacted on her physically, she knew she turned as white as paper, and that her heart fluttered in her throat like a bird ready to take wing, but all that was a secondary effect. She knew that she had spoken truly and she knew also that he recognized that, for otherwise he would not have flamed into that icy fire of anger.
He took a step towards her, and she saw him clench his fists, so that the knuckles shewed white on his brown hands.
“Stand up,” he said. “Are you mad that you speak to me like that?”
With a violent effort she controlled the shaking of her knees, and stood in front of him with her hands hanging defencelessly by her side.
“No, Colin, I’m not mad at all,” she said.
He drew back his arm as if to strike her.
“I’ll give you one chance,” he said. “Are you sorry?”
“No. If you’re going to knock me down, do so. I shan’t tell Dennis.”
She looked him perfectly straight in the face, waiting for the blow. And then suddenly she perceived that her defencelessness had beaten him.
“You’d better go,” he said. “You haven’t made things easier for Dennis, I may tell you.”
Instantly all her courage which had sufficed for herself surrendered.
“Colin, it’s nothing to do with him,” she said. “Do what you like to me, but don’t strike me through him.”