Colingot out of his motor when it stopped at the lodge-gates at Stanier, and struck into the woods through which a short cut led to the house. He had been in London for the last month, and had driven down after lunch on this April afternoon through glints of sunshine and scuds of windy rain. But now with the fall of day the sky had cleared, and, after the pavements and fogs of the town, he longed to immerse himself in the sense of Stanier and spring woods and bird-song.
All round him were the melodies and the enchantments of the spring. The turf underneath the foot was elastic with the thick growth of the young grass, and vivid with little round cushions of greenest moss, and the smell of the damp earth was fresh and fragrant. Neither oak nor ash were yet more than budding, but the great hawthorns that studded the slopes up from the lodge to the high ground were covered with the varnished clusters of young leaf, the hazels and alders by the stream that ran into the lake were gay with pendulous catkins and mole-skin buttons, and the copses of birch and hornbeam were full-fledged. Clumps of primroses and sheets of anemonies were in flower in plantations where the young trees had been felled last year, and outside on the turf the wild daffodils bloomed among the curled heads of the young bracken. Once and again a copper-coloured cock pheasant scurried away from beside the path with head low and stealthy stride; in the covers thrushes were vocal with evensong, and in some remote tree-top the chiff-chaff was metallically chirping. From the firs pigeons started out with clapping wings, and a heron, disturbed at his fishing, flapped ponderously away.
The path rose steeply, and presently he came to the top of the ridge, and passed through the deer-fence into the Old Park. Here the trees, planted by Elizabeth’s Colin, on what was once bare down, were of statelier growth, and more widely spaced, so that between their trunks broad stretches of the reclaimed marsh-land below could be seen, and beyond, the faint melted rim of the sea. A warm spring air out of the south-west flowed up from the plain, seasoned with saltness, and he drew in long breaths of its refreshment. Ten minutes more brisk walking along the height brought him to the end of the ridge, and below, he saw the roof of Stanier and its red walls smouldering in the clear dusk. The thrill of home vibrated in him; he could never look on Stanier, after an absence, without a smile of pleasure and welcome on his lips.
There came into his mind, vaguely and distantly, the memory of someone looking at Stanier with him, and ironically saying to him “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” That had happened on the terrace one night in an after-dinner stroll, and almost immediately he recalled the incident wondering at the tenacity of the memory. It was Pamela Hunt who had said that, when she came down here, at her own suggestion, for a domestic Sunday in the country. How infinitely remote and meaningless was the recollection of Pamela! He did not suppose he had thought of her half-a-dozen times in the last half-dozen years. After all there was no reason why he should have thought of her, for it must be close on twelve years since he had seen her. Yes, when August came it would be twelve years since she had paid him that visit in Capri.... That had been an affair of ludicrous tragedy: long ago it had lost all personal connection with him, and had become no more than a sensational episode, which, though no doubt it had happened to him, might equally well have been something he had been told or something he had read in a book of short stories, a book of sketches and episodes....
He sat down on a fallen tree-trunk—several of old Colin’s oaks had blown down in the fierce gales of March—and as his eyes wandered over the wide plain and distant sea below, his mind dwelt idly on that remote month in Capri. What had affected him far more intimately than Pamela’s death was thesequel that Nino had refused to stay in his service. Nino had been utterly devoted to him, but something strange had come over the fellow from the hour that he learned of Pamela’s melodramatic suicide. He had simply frozen up: his gaiety and devotion had been replaced by some sort of abject terror of Colin; he had become like one of those women on whom the frost and blight of Stanier had fallen. He started and stammered if he was spoken to: he looked at him with eyes behind which lurked some deadly fear.... He had no answer to give when he was asked what ailed him: he said “Nieute, signor,” and quaked. Finally, within a week, he had said he could stop with him no longer. Colin had used his utmost persuasions, but without avail, and from persuasion he passed to warning and to threats, reminding him that it did not go well with those who crossed him, as Nino had seen not so long ago. But there was no keeping him, and Colin naturally resented Nino’s desertion, for his companionship, his gay paganism thoroughly suited him. Yet he seemed to himself to have done no more than let this resentment flow where it willed without conscious direction. Certainly he did not concentrate and aim it at Nino: he but shrugged his shoulders, and said to himself “Well, it’s Nino’s fault if anything happens”. And sure enough Nino sickened of that ill-defined fever which was rife in the island and in Naples that summer, and not long afterwards Colin had to give his cook and his housemaid a half-day’s holiday to attend his funeral....
It had served Nino right, thought Colin; for if he had remained up at the villa he would not have gone back to live in that insanitary hovel by the Marina, where the fever was so prevalent, and he wondered whether, in a sense, it had served him right too, for there was no denying that he had been really fond of him, and that was an offence to his Lord and Benefactor. To-day the memory of Nino was far more vivid than that of Pamela, who was a tiresome woman, greedy and graceless, and often even now, when he lazily awoke in the morning, he found himself sleepily imagining that it was Nino who was moving about the room.... It had been very stupid of him to behave like that: Colin had always been kind to him: he need never have feared for himself. It was Nino’s fear that had driven him into danger: if he had only stopped wherehe was, and remained gay and companionable, he would have run no risks. But his fright, his mad attempt at escape, had been his undoing; he had run underneath the very wheels like a startled fowl on the high-road.
That month, in fact, had been full of incidents, tragic for others, but strangely prosperous for himself: episodes had taken place then far-reaching in consequence, that fitted into each other with more than casual coincidence. At Stanier, before he left, for instance, there had been the discovery and certain solution of that pencil plan in his ancestor’s diary, followed, when he got to Capri, by the finding of what beyond doubt was old Colin’s book of wondrous blasphemies, of which he had so easily possessed himself. And the chain of odd occurrences had not been broken there, for within a week of his having obtained that he saw for the first time Hugh Douglas, now librarian at Stanier.
The memory of that was very vivid, and had none of the episodic insignificance of his recollections about Pamela or indeed about Nino.... He had gone down to the Marina one evening to meet Violet, from whom he had received a telegram immediately after the catastrophe saying that she was starting at once for Capri. That had been both wise and kind of her; she had not previously known that Pamela was there, and had seen one day in the daily Press the notice of Pamela’s death when staying with Lord Yardley at his villa at Capri. With quite admirable wisdom, she had thereupon sent notices to half a dozen papers that she wasreturningfrom Capri in a fortnight’s time, and had instantly started. Colin had no taste for the foolish scandal of wagging tongues, and Violet’s prompt action, making it appear for the benefit of the world at large that she had been with him all the time, was a most effectual silencer. Even those who knew that she had not been there when the catastrophe occurred would look on it with quite different eyes when they knew that she had gone there at once, and Colin had unreservedly applauded her intuition. No doubt, by now, any scandal that might then have arisen would have been as episodic and obsolete as the cause of it, but Colin in this lazy retrospect of that marvellous month permitted himself to stand aside a moment and say “Well done, Violet.”
He took up the thread of the far more significant happenings and let his mind dwell on each, recalling details, fingering them like a rosary.... He had gone down, as he had recalled, to meet her, and waited on the quay for the disembarkation in small boats of the passengers from the steamer. There she was, and as she stepped out of the boat, at the quay side, he saw a young man put out to her an assisting hand. She did not avail herself of it, and Colin’s eye met that of the man who would have helped her. Instantly he knew that the glance had some significance for him. The face he saw was alert and clean-shaven, and it had stamped on it that unmistakable quality of a priest’s face, a quality impossible to define and impossible to miss. He was not in clerical dress, but that detracted nothing from the certainty. If the man had worn spangles and pink tights, he would have been a priest....
Day by day, as Colin had seen him, always alone, at the café, or lounging in the piazza, or at the bathing-place, the conviction of his calling and of his significance (whatever that should prove to be) in his own life, grew stronger. He entered into casual conversation with him, introducing himself, and saw at once there was reserve and suspicion to be overcome. But the young man gave him his name, Hugh Douglas; he was out for a holiday, he said, and expected to be here some weeks. As they idly talked, sitting at a café in the street, it so happened that a priest came by. At the sight of him Douglas rose to his feet and deliberately spat on the ground, and in his eyes was a smoking blaze of hatred.
“So you are a priest,” thought Colin, “with no love for priesthood.”
Then Colin asked him up to dine one evening after Violet’s departure, and set a wonderful example of frankness and unreserve. He told him about the legend, and saw his interest kindle: he felt he was somehow on the right track, though still he did not guess where it led.
“But the old fellow was craven at the last,” he said, “and tried to escape from his Lord and Benefactor. He abandoned the building of the shrine he had planned, where, beyond doubt, he meant to celebrate some Satanic rite——”
He paused a moment with intention. The other turned quickly to him.
“That is most interesting, Lord Yardley,” he said. “You have no notion, I suppose, of what he contemplated?”
Colin laughed.
“Indeed I have,” he said. “In fact there has lately come into my hands a book, which beyond doubt was actually his, for it bears his coronet and arms of the correct date, and I feel sure he intended to use it in his chapel. A missal in fact, though following the English use. He refers to it in his memoirs.”
Douglas’s face was alight with eagerness.
“Indeed!” he said. “Have you it here? I should enormously like to see it.”
Colin leaned forward to him across the table.
“Yes, I have it here,” he said, “and perhaps I’ll show it you, for I feel that I’m meant to show it you. But first, doesn’t it strike you that I’m telling you a good deal, and that you’re telling me nothing?”
Instantly the man shrank back into himself.
“There is nothing that could interest you,” he said. “I have no profession——”
Colin felt on absolutely sure ground.
“Yes, you’re a priest,” he said quietly.
“I am nothing of the kind,” said Douglas.
“Oh, once a priest, always a priest,” said Colin. “No man nor any body of men can take from you the power that has been given you of doing the great miracle at the altar.... You were a priest, Mr. Douglas: and you know that perfectly well. I’m not the least inquisitive, and I don’t want to hear why you no longer wear priest’s dress, unless you care to tell me. You hate the priesthood now, I saw that for myself the other day, and perhaps you hate that which makes a priest a priest....”
Colin summoned all that gave him his charm, and all that gave him his force.
“Aren’t you wrong not to trust me?” he said. “Hasn’t our meeting, and what I hope will be our friendship been wonderfully contrived for us?... How can I make you trust me? I am building, I may tell you, what my ancestor left undone.”
At that he saw the man’s soul leap in fire to his face, andnot only without shame, but with pride, as to one who would appreciate, he told his story. Ever since he was a boy, he had been conscious of his secret love of evil just for its own sake. His own profanities horrified him, and yet below his horror there was love. Under the whip of his horror he had striven to mortify that lust for evil within his soul, and yet all the time that he tried to suppress it he looked on himself not as a sinner but as a martyr. He had taken orders in the Catholic Church, had joined an English community with vows of obedience and chastity, and the joy of sins, secret and abominable, became all the sweeter because, in the name of all that was holy, he had renounced them. He found himself like a spy in the camp of the enemy, talking their language, practising their manœuvres, and making war on the powers to which his heart’s allegiance was given. Only a few weeks ago, exposure had come, and he left England for fear of a criminal prosecution....
All this came out in gasps and jerks of speech. Sometimes there was a pause, and the pause would be succeeded by the pent, exultant torrent of what had never been told yet. At the end, Colin got up.
“I see we shall be friends,” he said. “I will show you the book I spoke to you of....”
All these things were welded together like links in a chain, the discovery of the plan of the Sanctuarium, and then of the missal, and then of the priest. Each linked on to the next. Indeed it would be an imbecile who saw in these events a mere grouping of fortuitous circumstances. And there was more, too, a chiselling and chasing of these links, decorative detail you might say....
Nino, in spite of persuasions and threats, had gone, so soon to sicken of the fever, and Colin had let it be known that he wanted a servant to take his place. There were many applicants, for it had been seen how Nino, just a barefooted boatman’s son, had become almost a signor himself with fine clothes to wear and money to spend, and the friend and companion as much as the servant of the marvellous youth rich and noble and beautiful as a god, for the sake of whom, Capri made no doubt, the English lady had popped herself over thehigh cliff. Among them was a young Neapolitan, employed during the summer season as waiter at one of the hotels, shrewd and monkey-like in face, some incarnation of pure animalism. Hugh Douglas was with Colin when he came up to be interviewed, and the boy made his obeisance as to a priest.
“Why do you do that?” asked Colin. “Why do you behave as if this gentleman was a priest?”
The fellow looked at him once more and smiled. When he smiled his ears moved, and Colin noticed how pointed they were.
“But I am not wrong, am I?” he said. “When I was a boy, I was an acolyte.”
Douglas rose.
“I’ll leave you,” he said, and he nodded at Colin as he went out.
The boy had spoken in perfect English, and when the door had closed Colin came up to him, put his hands on his shoulders and smiled into his eyes. What he was going to say was derived from no process of reasoning in his own mind, scarcely even from observation....
“Let me see, your name’s Vincenzo, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, Vincenzo, I like your face: it’s the face of a devil. Did no-one ever tell you that? You must have been a queer sort of acolyte. Did they choose you for your sanctified face? And when you crossed yourself did you cross yourself like this?”
Colin made the sign backwards.
“Like that was it?” he said. “I have never been to a mass where they did like that.... I should like to see you serve mass, for I shall have a chapel at my house in England, and maybe I shall wish you to serve again. And you were right about that gentleman. He is a priest; so go to him now and tell him I have sent you to say you will serve him....”
How vivid it all was to him still, and most vivid of all that which took place that very evening.... He had been hitherto like someone receiving instruction merely, now he was received into the church of his religion. The room where Pamela had slept, and to which her body had been brought,was decked as a chapel, and in symbols and desecrated rites he set the seal on his faith. He had bought not long before in Naples a cope of fifteenth century needlework, in which the celebrant was vested, and Douglas read from the missal of wondrous blasphemies. He threw his cope wide when Vincenzo censed him.... As the supreme moment approached some ecstasy stirred in the very centre and shrine of Colin’s being, and from there spread to his mind and his physical frame. Would God permit the approaching defiance and blasphemy? He did not doubt that He could by some swift judgment assert the infinity and the omnipotence of Love, and it was just that belief which spiced the defiance. Or was Love itself powerless against this supreme act of Hate and Mockery?
Colin rose from his seat on the fallen oak, and began the descent of the long smooth slope towards the house. Never before that evening at Capri or ever since had he attained to so clear a realization of the spirit of evil: his initiation had also contained the ultimate revelation. Often in the years that followed he had, here at Stanier, attended the Black Mass, but, his allegiance once definitely and symbolically made, the repetition of it had progressively failed in fervour. It was not so with those whose souls worshipped Love: the more they mystically joined themselves, in acts of faith and worship, to their Lord, the more closely, if you judged from the chronicles of the Saints, were they knit to Him. Had Love, then, some quality which Hate lacked? Hate had often seemed to him as infinite as Love, but now he wondered if you could attain to the absolute in Hate, to the realization of pitch darkness than which nothing could be darker, whereas you could never attain to absolute Light; for some fresh sun from all the millions which Love lit and moved would add its spark to the illumination. Or was there, on the other hand, no such thing as absolute darkness of the spirit, just as scientists assured you that there was no such thing as absolute physical darkness? Did some ray always penetrate it? Was there no place utterly devoid of God? In either case you arrived at the utmost possible in Hate, and could go no further.
Colin let the question go unanswered; the abstract never much concerned him compared with the concrete and thepractical.... How purely episodic his life had been, and how full of prosperous conclusions. Episodes of his boyhood, episodes in Capri, episodes here and in London, strung like beads on the thread of his own personality, but each distinct from the other, accounted for the whole of it. He desired nothing for long; he got it, whatever it was, so quickly, sucked it dry and threw the rind away. All that wealth and position could bring him, all that health could bestow were his; no desire of his went unfulfilled: all he had to do was to find something he wanted, and if it was the gift of his Lord and Benefactor—and wide was his bounty—it was his as soon as he cared to put out a firm hand to take it. And yet in spite of this perfect freedom, which he had used to the uttermost to do exactly what his desire or fancy prompted, to eat any fruit on the tree of evil without fear of scruples interfering, like a seed or a stone, with its lusciousness, he knew that this liberty was somehow built on the foundation of a slavery which enchained him. He was in pawn and in bondage to evil, and these episodes were links of his fetters.... As fast as one was hammered and welded, there would be another one, an appetite gratified, or perhaps an account revengefully squared, as in the case of Raymond his brother, and of Pamela. Often, as in the case of Raymond, the catastrophe fell without his active intervention at all: it just followed on his wish: or again the victim might bring it on himself, as that wretched Nino had done.... Episodes, just episodes. To find things to wish for, to find experiences and expressions that excited and absorbed him! He had already begun to recognize that this was not so easy as it had been. Life was full of amusements, his vigour, now that he was in his thirty-fifth year, still retained all the elasticity of youth, but it was hard to find for it experiences that were not staled by custom. He had to find those, it appeared, for himself. His Lord and Benefactor did no more (as if that was not enough!) than give him what he wanted. Well, there were a dozen people coming to-morrow, and for the Easter vacation the house would be crammed from cellar to garret with a huge party and diversions would spring up like mushrooms.... And then he remembered that Dennis was at home for his holidays, now his fourteenth in year and at school at Eton.
Colin had come to the east end of the building which he had erected in execution of the plan he had found in his ancestor’s memoirs. He had stopped long in Capri the year that was built, and when he came back the fabric was complete. Before he left he had shewn the plan to Violet, telling her that this was an addition to the house, planned in Elizabethan times, and never executed. There was a little apartment, he said, for a priest, and a sanctuary adjoining. It was this which was now to be built....
“A sanctuary?” she had said.
“Yes, darling, a little chapel. Old Colin was a very fervent sort of man. It was for his private devotions, no doubt, that he planned it.”
He thought she had understood, and this impression had been born out by the fact that never had she alluded to the ‘little chapel’ again. She knew that it was approached by a corridor from his room; she knew that this librarian, Mr. Douglas, whom he had brought back with him from Capri, lived in the apartment there, but she had never asked Colin anything about it, nor had he volunteered any information. But that she guessed the general purpose of it, he had no doubt: ‘old Colin’s private devotions’ was sufficiently explicit, and she had understood.
“Violet takes no interest in what means so much to me,” he thought now. “Shall I try to make her a little more sympathetic?” She had had a very easy time lately, with him away so much, and perhaps it would be a good thing to wake her up to her wifehood.
As he passed he saw that the chapel was lit within. The east window was of plain ruby-coloured glass, frosted on the outside so that none could see in, and he lingered there a moment, and thought he caught the sound of a voice within. Douglas, his chaplain and librarian, was there, and perhaps Vincenzo, who had driven down from London with his master, was there also in his more ecclesiastical capacity. The shrewd, monkey-faced boy of twelve years ago, had grown into a dark-faced silent man, wonderfully efficient as a servant. But as a server.... Colin had never seen anything so like possession: the ape-like gestures twitching and vehement, the rapt surrender, the tearing animal passion of devotion. And when the ritewas over, he lay sometimes on the altar step, panting with gleaming eyes of a surfeited ecstasy. Then the mask of humanity covered him again, and he became the impassive watchful valet, anticipating Colin’s wants almost before he was conscious of them himself. But these seizures (for they were really nothing less than that) were terrible. Colin wondered sometimes if he himself would ever know such physical frenzy, such mingling apparently of torture and exaltation.
He passed on round the corner of the yew-hedge: he was late for whatever was going on, and indeed he had no particular mind to be present. But he felt as if some force like that of a great engine that beat in pulsations momently increasing in power was at work there. Then the bell in the turret sounded three strokes, and, in the pause that followed before those strokes were repeated, he felt himself thrilled and charged with the mysterious dynamic energy that spread through the still air in invisible waves of inspiration, and into his mind there came the vision of himself kneeling there at some such moment as this with Dennis by him. That, of course, would not be yet: the boy was at present far too young to understand even the nature of the moral choice on which the rites were based. Not yet did he know the force of love and hate; he only liked and disliked. He had to feel the power of love, before he could loathe it or comprehend the infinite seduction of evil. The essential qualities of love had to be apprehended before they could be rejected and mocked at. He must know them first, he must know too what hate meant, before he could realize the presence of its inspirer. That, and the things which some day Dennis would see with his father in the chapel there, would be inexplicable and indeed meaningless to him until in his blood there was developed the perception that gave them life. Certain of these rites would seem to him merely grotesque or disgusting till he was hot with the passions of which they were a symbol. He would be puzzled: he might even be amused at these grimaces and contortions of Vincenzo. He would want explanations, and even then would not understand....
All this was not so much a train of thought in Colin’s mind, as a flash of perception that vibrated through it at thesound of the bell in the turret of the chapel, and, dismissing principles, he let himself into the door on the garden front that opened into the long gallery. Principles would take care of themselves provided your practice was in accordance with them, and, with the thrill of home-coming to this beloved Stanier, he stepped out of the glimmering dusk into the lit house.
He got one comprehensive glance at the two who were there before his entrance was perceived. Violet was sitting in a low chair by the fireplace at the far end of the gallery, her face all alight with love, and on the floor, full length in front of the fire, was Dennis lying. His head was bent back and he looked up into his mother’s face, as he told her something in his boyish voice, high treble one moment, and suddenly cracking into a man’s tones. Whatever it was that he said, it made her suddenly burst into laughter, and she threw herself back in her chair.
“Oh, Dennis, how wicked of you,” she said. “Go on, darling. What did the master do?”
Colin stood very still. Was it really Violet who could laugh like that, with that pure abandonment to amusement? Was it she who shone with that serene and radiant love?...
She sat up again after that burst of laughter, and saw him. In an instant her face changed to the face he knew. It changed from the face of a mother, girlish still, though that big boy sprawled there, to the frozen beauty which she presented to the world. No faintest glint of laughter lingered on her mouth or in her eyes. And yet, amazingly, they were still alight with love. Something that had beamed there for Dennis still beamed there for him, though it was shrouded, like a gleam of fire through smoke, by the blight and the frost.
“Ah, Colin,” she said. “There you are! Get up, Dennis: here’s your father.”
For a moment, sharp as a stabbed nerve, and coming from some ice-bound cave of consciousness, a pang of regret shot through Colin that it was not in his nature, nor in theirs, that he could join the group of mother and son, and partake of their mood, their laughter and their ease, and all that it implied. They looked so jolly, and his hunger for pleasurealways envied those who were enjoying themselves, for all enjoyment ought to belong to him. But the instantaneousness with which Violet’s care-free laughter had withered from her face, shewed that she instinctively recognized the inconceivableness of that. It was not to be wondered at, after all: she always froze in his presence.
And then he looked at the boy who had jumped to his feet, and pride at having begotten anyone so beautiful supplanted for the moment every other consideration. He was very tall for his age, already his head was nearly on a level with his mother’s, and, bred as he was on both sides from Stanier blood, he seemed the very flower of his race. Loose-limbed and lithe he stood there, with shoulders low and broad, and neck rising square from them, and there was the small head, yellow-haired and blue-eyed, the straight short nose, and the mouth as perfect as Violet’s own. Colin had not seen him since the Christmas holidays, in the interval he had greatly grown, and his boyhood had emerged from the sheath of its childish sexlessness: now the father saw in his son his own magnificent youth carried to a stage finer yet; physical perfection could go no further.... And, on the heels of that exultant pride in his son’s beauty, there came the vision again of going with Dennis up the corridor from his room and into the chapel. What a peerless offering to bring his Lord and Benefactor!
The boy had always been much fonder of his mother than of him, and here at once was a thing to be taken in hand. Dennis must learn to be at ease with him, to open his heart to him, and eagerly to receive what was good for him to learn. That was the first requisite: hitherto Dennis had been rather shy with him, and apt to be on his good behaviour. He must be charmed out of that and learn to be comfortable with him and lie on the floor and tell him stories about school.
He put his arm round Dennis’s neck and kissed him.
“Why, you dear boy,” he said. “This is nice. Dennis, you’ve grown in a perfectly indecent manner. Stand up there with your back to your mother——”
Suddenly he remembered that he had not yet said a word to Violet. Violet had Dennis’s heart at present, thereforeDennis must see how dear she was to his father, for that would predispose him favourably.
“Violet darling,” he said, kissing her. “How are you? I needn’t ask, though. You’re always well, thank God. And such shrieks of laughter, as I heard, when I came in! What was it all about? Dennis, I believe you’ve been telling your mother something quite unfit for a parent’s ears. So you must tell me too, and let me judge. My word, it is nice to be home again!”
“Have you had tea, Colin?” she asked.
“Now have I, or have I not? I don’t believe I have, but I don’t want any. I shall sit on the floor, if Dennis can make room for me. Lie down again, Dennis, exactly as you were before, and we’ll all be fearfully comfortable. Now what’s the story?”
“Oh, it’s only a rotten yarn, Father,” he said. “The master I’m up to doesn’t like mice. So—so someone bought a clockwork mouse and wound it up, and set it running in small circles—you know how they go—just under his chair. You never saw anything so funny. He thought it was real till he heard it buzz.”
Dennis had sat down again on the floor: Colin, with a shout of laughter, put his fingers in the back of his collar, and pulled him down across his knees.
“I think I’ve got hold of that ‘someone’ by the short hairs,” he said. “What brutes you boys are! What shall we do with this brute? How long are the holidays, Dennis?”
“Three weeks and a bit.”
“And where do you want to spend them?”
“Oh here, of course.”
“You’re just like me. I never want to go away from here, unless it’s to Capri. Now let’s talk in a whisper, so that your mother can’t hear. She doesn’t like Capri, Dennis. She’s not been there for twelve years. That summer, don’t you remember, when you were one year old?”
“Of course I don’t remember,” said Dennis.
“That’s because you didn’t attend. You must be more attentive next time you’re one year old. But there it is: she’ll never come with me—we’re still talking in a whisper—so next summer, if you’ll promise not to put mice in my bed, perhaps I’ll take you.”
“Oh, I say, how ripping!” said Dennis. “You bathe all day, Mr. Douglas told me.”
“Except when you’re basking in the sun. How is Mr. Douglas, by the way? I haven’t seen him. May I ask him to dine to-night, Vi? I know you don’t like him, darling, but he has a pretty lonely time when we’re away. I think we ought to have him in as often as we can when we’re here. He shall sit next Granny; he shan’t sit by you. And how is Granny?”
Dennis was finding a father that he had never known before, and he felt himself expanding to him. Colin had released his hand from the boy’s collar, but Dennis’s head still lay contentedly on his knees.
“Granny’s dotty, I think,” he observed. “I mean your granny, Father.”
“Dennis, dear!” said Violet.
She turned to Colin.
“Granny’s been expecting you all day,” she said. “She always knows when you’re coming. She was out on the terrace this afternoon in her bath-chair, and when she saw Dennis, she thought it was you——”
“Yes, Mother, that’s what I mean by dotty. It is dotty,” said Dennis.
Colin tucked his hand under the boy’s head.
“You shouldn’t call your aged relatives dotty, Dennis,” he said. “Your mother’s quite right. When I’m as old as your great-grandmamma, which will be in a week or two for time goes so fast, I shall be exceedingly vexed with you if you say I’m dotty. So there, old boy. She probably thought you were dotty when you told her you weren’t me——”
“And then she thought I was Uncle Raymond,” continued Dennis. “That just shews——”
“It just shews that you’re an ugly little devil,” observed Colin. “When you come down to dinner to-night——”
“But I don’t,” said Dennis. “I have supper upstairs——”
“Well, I ask you to come and have dinner with me to-night. Don’t drink too much port like your grandfathers andgreat-grandfathers.... What was I going to say? Oh, I know. Nip round, like a good boy, to Mr. Douglas’s rooms, and ask him to come to dinner to-night. Say it’s to have the honour of meeting you.”
“He’s probably in the library, isn’t he?” asked Dennis.
“No, he’s probably not. And then come back here, and I’ll have a game of billiards with you.”
Colin waited till Dennis had gone, then turned to Violet.
“How the boy is growing up!” he said. “Was I as big as that at fourteen, darling? He’s a splendid fellow, we ought to congratulate ourselves. He’ll develop swiftly now. How interesting to watch that, eh, dear Violet, and to train and influence him?... You’ve kept him all to yourself hitherto. It’s time that a father’s care——”
She had long feared this moment, and, now that it had come, it roused in her not her womanly motherhood alone but something of the tigress-motherhood that will fight for its young, with any who threatens them, even if he is her own mate.... But it was the woman who spoke first.
“Oh, Colin, leave me Dennis,” she said.
He laughed.
“How funnily you said that,” he remarked. “You speak as if I were meaning to take him away from you. You speak as if he was a piece of private property of yours. Mayn’t a father take an interest in his own son? And, as I say, he’s growing up. He knows nothing of his inheritance at present, or of his family history. He must learn. Yes, yes, he must learn.”
Colin shifted his position, and leaned his back against the chair in which Violet was sitting.
“I feel awfully remiss,” he said. “I feel as if I had neglected Dennis shamefully. But surely he’s grown suddenly, not in inches only, but in sex and temperament. I seemed to feel that. He’s entrancing: my heart goes out to him. But he must be moulded and educated, mustn’t he? What a wonderful fruit of our love, Vi! What joy for us to see it ripen! And physically, what a young Apollo. You and I were rather a pretty pair at his age, but Dennis beats us hollow.”
He leaned his head back to see Violet’s face. Well heknew what he would find there, for he had felt his words go home. But he was not prepared for the fierceness of it.
“You shan’t have him,” she said. “And you know what I mean when I say that. He’s a manly, sweet-hearted boy. Oh, as naughty as you please, but he’s a good boy. That’s the part you shall never have.”
She got up, stepping sideways away from him.
“Colin, we’ve been strangers for many years now,” she said. “You’ve frozen me with horror at what you are. But you’ve never frozen my power of love. It’s there, and it’s always melting the ice. And by that I know that you won’t get Dennis, for it’s stronger than you.”
Colin raised his eyebrows.
“Well then there’s no more to be said about it,” he remarked. “I hate arguing, anyhow. If one wants to prove a thing, the simplest plan is to go and do it, and then it proves itself without any palaver. Ah, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about, but here’s Dennis back again.... Well, Dennis, will Mr. Douglas have the honour of meeting you?”
Dennis was looking excited.
“Oh, yes, that’s all right,” he said. “And Vincenzo was there. He was lying on Mr. Douglas’s sofa, looking—looking like nothing at all. Looking awfully queer. But Mr. Douglas said he would be all right soon.”
“I expect he knows,” said Colin. “Vincenzo’s devoted to Mr. Douglas.... Dennis, I’ve been catching it hot since you left me. Your mother’s been scolding me. Whose side do you take? Hers or mine?”
Dennis looked from one to the other. But he moved towards Violet.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But aren’t we going to have a game of billiards?”
The Dowager’s wing at Stanier, of which Colin had made so summary a clearance twelve years before, had never become repopulated again. Aunt Hester was still alive, very much alive, indeed, but never, since the morning when she had ‘interfered’ about Pamela, had she set foot in Stanier. “Colin behaved like a devil to me, my dear,” she had said to Violet of that occasion. “He meant to turn me out andmade that his excuse. Well, you don’t catch me going where I’m not wanted. I hope I’ve got too much spirit for that.” Violet, however, often took Dennis to see her when they were in town, and he had lunched with her and been handsomely tipped by her to-day on his way from Eton. Aunt Hester adored Dennis; she saw in him the Colin she had loved, and Dennis, for his part, thought her one of the most enterprizing old ladies he had ever come across. Why she did not come to see them at Stanier, he did not know, and she was remarkably brisk at changing the subject when it came up, but he meant to ask his father about it.
Of the others, Ronald Stanier and his wife, though deprived of their permanent domicile, had been occasional guests here, till when, a year or two ago, on one of their visits, he had had a stroke one night, as he sat over his wine after dinner, quite in the traditional Stanier style, and had gone down with the decanter flying. His widow, strongly reacting, had gone to live at Winchester where she drove out daily in a brougham, gave small sad little dinner-parties, from which everyone went away at half-past ten, and was similarly entertained by her elderly guests. Once or twice a year she came to Stanier for a few nights, and played patience, and put some flowers on her husband’s grave, but she had no real existence. Stanier, as it had so often done to those who married into the house, had frozen her or perhaps rather burned up all such inflammable material as she had once possessed, and she lay now, so to speak, in the fender, clinking a little from time to time as she cooled, and disintegrating into ash....
But the fourth occupant of the Dowager’s wing was still there, and still every night old Lady Yardley was wheeled down to the long gallery five minutes before dinner-time, and sat by the fireplace near the dining-room till the others had assembled, and then with the aid of her two sticks went in to dinner, and afterwards played her phantom game of whist. She was now over ninety years of age, she ate and she slept, she had her sight and her hearing, but she lived in some withdrawn twilight, peopled it would seem by shadowy figures of her century of memories. Certain rays could still illuminate that crepuscular kingdom: Colin’s presence wasa sure lamp there, and Dennis was beginning to be another, perhaps from his likeness to Colin twenty years ago, perhaps because she realized that in him lay the perpetuation of the house, for the dim archives of her mind contained only the records that concerned Stanier.... Strangely enough, Hugh Douglas was the third who could lighten that black darkness; probably she did not know his name, and he belonged to the later years of which she had normally no memory, but it was clear that she regarded him as somehow significant, and often, if he dined with them, she would sit looking at him with that unwinking gaze that saw no-one knew what, and begin speaking of days of fifty and sixty and seventy years ago. Others, her nurses, for instance, and Violet, made no reaction on her mind: she was no more directly conscious of them than she was of the chair where she sat, or the carpet she walked on, and they cast no shining glimmer on the memories that reached back and back, to years when not only were none of those present born, but not even her own children of the generation before, Colin’s father, and Violet’s, and Aunt Hester, and when she herself was newly come as a bride to Stanier. Physically, by some miracle of vitality, she was upright still: and her skin, instead of hanging in parchment-like laps and folds over her face, was one with it: she looked as if she was made of bloodless, imperishable alabaster. When she sat motionless and without speech she seemed scarcely alive, and then her wrinkled eyelids would lift and she spoke in that quiet uninflected voice of those who had been dead sixty years and more, as if they were still here. To her, they probably were.
Colin felt a sort of fascinated pride in her—“She’s clearly immortal,” he said, “in fact she’s a sort of totem—isn’t that what they call it?—a tribal god. She belongs to myth and legend, especially legend. I wonder if she signed a bond too....”
To-night she was in her place when Violet came in. As usual she took no notice of her, and Violet sat down with the evening paper and did not see Douglas’s entrance, till suddenly old Lady Yardley began to talk.
“My grandson Colin came home from school to-day,” she said. “He has grown——”
Violet looked up.
“Ah, good evening, Mr. Douglas,” she said. “Colin and Dennis have been playing billiards, but they’ll be here in a moment. You saw Dennis, I think?”
Douglas shook hands with her. More markedly than ever was his face that of a priest. He knew very well that Violet disliked him: dislike perhaps was too superficial a word. He had seen just that same horror in her eyes when she looked at her husband. He wondered sometimes what she knew....
“Yes, Dennis came up to my flat,” he said. “How he has grown. Developed, too, I thought, as well.”
Dennis and Colin came in together.
“Dennis’s fault that we’re late,” he said. “He took so long to beat his poor old father. Well, Granny, how are you? I believe you grow younger every day. Dennis and I are going to take you in to dinner, one on each side.”
She got out of her chair, and stood erect.
“Ah, I knew Colin was coming,” she said. “I told them Colin was coming. Now all will be well at Stanier.”
She pointed at Douglas.
“I want him,” she said. “He must sit by me, because he and Colin know, and I know. Those who know must sit close and talk in whispers.”
Colin laughed.
“So we will, Granny,” he said. “Dennis dear, you take in your mother; Granny’s got no use for you.”
Dennis put Violet’s arm within his own.
“Lord, what pomp!” he said. “Shall I always come down to dinner now, Mother? Oh, and I beat Father at billiards!”
“Well, don’t trample on me, now I’m down,” said Colin. “You’ve no feeling of chivalry for the aged, Dennis.”
Old Lady Yardley looked from one to the other. They dined at a small round table; Colin and Douglas were on each side of her, Dennis and Violet between them. Her eyes travelled past Violet as if there was no one there, but at Dennis she looked long. To-night the stimulus of these three was strong; and she began to say things she had never said before.
“The boy there,” she said. “That’s my Colin before he grew to be a man. He’s come back to us as a boy. He doesn’t know the legend yet.”
“Oh, but I do, Granny,” said Dennis. “It was when the devil——”
“No, dear, you don’t know it yet,” said she. “You’ve only heard it, that’s a very different thing. My son Philip never knew: he only heard——”
Colin intervened.
“Now, Granny, eat your soup,” he said, “or we shall never get through dinner. Tell us about it afterwards.”
He looked up at Dennis, just one passing glance, and saw that the boy’s attention was violently arrested.
“And does Mr. Douglas know?” asked Dennis, “Is that what you wanted to whisper about? Father, what is it that you know and I’ve only heard?”
It was odd how the atmosphere was suddenly charged with impalpable tension. Lady Yardley alone, whatever she said, could not have produced it; it required Dennis and his innocent boyish inquisitiveness at the other end.
Violet interrupted. Dennis mustn’t ask, Dennis mustn’t know.
“Dennis dear, you saw Aunt Hester to-day, didn’t you?” she said. “Didn’t she send any message to me?”
Dennis’s whole mind was fixed on this other puzzling matter. But at his mother’s voice he seemed to detach himself.
“Yes: her love,” he said. “And I’m going to write to her to-morrow—so’s Father: two letters, and a motor’s going up to London to take them to her. And it’ll bring her down here, we think.”
Colin turned to Violet.
“Darling, you’ll be nice to her, won’t you?” he said. “It’s so long ago, all that misunderstanding.... And she loves Stanier. I was going to tell you, of course.”
Violet felt there was no need for explanation; she knew Colin. He had represented to Dennis evidently that Aunt Hester never came to Stanier, because of some bygone quarrel between herself and her. Dennis had asked why she never came—it must be like that—and that had been the answer. Then Colin had concocted just such a plot as a boy loves, to ask her in spite of it and bring Mother and hertogether.... Colin was the peacemaker, she was the person to be propitiated....
The wonderful falsity of it all! There was nothing too small nor too great for Colin in the accomplishment of his ends. Here there was no question of what his ends were: they were the wooing of Dennis by him, the detachment of Dennis from herself.
She could not sit down under this.
“But it was you who turned her out, Colin,” she said. “You quarrelled with her; you sent her away. What have you been telling Dennis?”
Colin was seated next her. He laid his hand on hers.
“Darling, before the servants....” he said gently. “Besides, it’s all over, years ago.”
Old Lady Yardley was looking fixedly at Dennis again.
“He’s growing up,” she said. “Soon he must make his choice. Staniers will never fail as long as they choose wisely and well. I am an autumn leaf now on the old tree, but the sap hasn’t left me yet, and though the leaves fall, fresh leaves come. This is a beautiful young leaf: it is spring-time with the tree again, and the birds are singing in its branches. It will always be spring at Stanier, if they take care of the young leaves.”
Colin turned from Violet to her.
“Granny dear, the spirit of prophecy is upon you, but you really mustn’t prophesy at dinner. Everyone finds it so disconcerting, darling. Now there are some friends of mine coming to-morrow, and you must promise me not to prophesy at dinner. Otherwise you shall have dinner upstairs and no whist at all.”
For once she paid no attention to him.
“I watched them building twelve years ago,” she said. “They made a chapel for the prosperity of Stanier. Aha! That makes the legend thrive——”
Colin saw Dennis’s wide-eyed gaze, fascinated and puzzled. He had settled that he did not want the boy to know anything about that at present.... And yet surely you sowed in winter the seed that did not germinate till the spring. How marvellously dramatic, too, that Dennis, still hardly free from the soft enveloping sheath of childhood,should learn the beginning of wisdom from this aged Sibyl. It was like taking a child to learn about Druids from Stonehenge.... But Dennis was too young yet: it would never do to initiate him into the final revelation, till he had learned the rudiments and the alphabet of the creed. Simultaneously Violet spoke to him.
“Oh, Colin, stop her,” she whispered. “She mustn’t go on. She mustn’t tell him about the chapel.”
....So Violet knew: he always guessed she had known. He turned to old Lady Yardley again.
“Granny, you’re being very naughty,” he said. “I promise you you shan’t come down to dinner again unless you’re quiet. I won’t have it: do you understand? Now go away with Violet. If you say a word more, you shan’t have any whist at all. Take her away. Violet.”
Violet got up.
“Come along, Granny,” she said. “And you too, Dennis.”
“Nothing of the sort,” said Colin sharply. “Dennis is going to stay with us.”
He waited till Violet and the old lady had gone.
“Dennis, old boy,” he said. “You were quite right when you said your great-grandmother was dotty. She was talking gibberish. There wasn’t a word of sense in what she was saying.”
Dennis looked unconvinced.
“But she must have meant something, Father,” he said. “Did she mean the chapel by Mr. Douglas’s rooms?”
Colin was always swift in invention.
“Very likely. But you know all about that. I built it, as I’ve told you before, to complete the original plan of the house. Very likely old Colin intended to be buried there. Memorial chapel, you know. Just think of the old lady as dotty. She’s got the legend on her mind. She always had. Why, I really believe that if Satan came to her now, and said ‘Sign, please,’ as they do in shops, she’d find one drop of blood in her body still and use it up. Give Mr. Douglas some port, and take half a glass yourself. Not more, Dennis: we can’t have you like your grandfather Ronald before you grow up.”
Dennis gave that delicious half-treble croak of laughter.
“Good Lord, I shouldn’t like to be like Grandfather Ronald,” he said. “He was a rum ’un.... Father, did he know about the legend, in the way Granny meant?”
“No, Dennis, I should say he didn’t. But we’ve finished with the legend for to-night. Someday I’ll tell you more about it.”
“Hurrah! When?”
“When I think that you will be able to understand it. Mr. Douglas and I will set you an examination paper.”
“Oh, not in the holidays,” said the boy.
“You won’t know it’s being set you,” said his father.
“That’s an improvement on the Eton plan,” remarked Dennis.
Dennis was sent up to bed when old Lady Yardley had had her two rubbers of whist, and presently Mr. Douglas went too.
“And now we’re alone, Vi,” said Colin, “and I haven’t seen you for a month. Mayn’t we have a little talk? In fact, I’ve got several things to say. About Aunt Hester now.”
“Yes, I think you owe me an explanation of that,” said she.
“Darling, don’t talk about ‘owing explanations,’ in that way. You speak as if I had run up a bill with you, and wouldn’t pay it. Probably that’s just what you do think.”
Colin moved across to the fire where the traditional log smouldered.
“I hate explaining,” he said, “and really you can understand for yourself. But if you insist on it, it’s this. Dennis asked me point-blank why Aunt Hester never came to Stanier. Well, I couldn’t tell him about her impertinence with regard to poor Pamela, her imagining that I had an intrigue with her.... Good Lord, didn’t the sequel exculpate me? An edifying incident, wasn’t it?”
“You know what I think about that,” said she.
“Yes: I remember your saying you wished I was in love with Pamela. And I kept telling Pamela that I was in love with you. But she rushed on disaster. Odd—I was thinking only this afternoon how long it was since I had given a thoughtto Pamela, and now she comes up in connection with Aunt Hester. Well, I couldn’t tell Dennis about that. You would have been very much shocked with me if I had. I couldn’t tell him that the woman was in love with me, and his mother wished I was in love with her. Such a dreadful thing to tell a young boy at the most impressionable age! You agree?”
“You distort it all,” she said. “But I agree.”
“Oh, distortion!” he said. “Everyone else’s point of view is distorted when viewed from one’s own. We all have our own individual perspective, which shews everybody else’s out of drawing. But, as you agree, I had to give some other reason. I gave one that naturally occurred to me, namely, that you resented and found unforgivable something poor Aunt Hester had done. I was pleased when I thought of that.”
“You always think of everything,” she said.
“Yes, darling, I am pretty thorough. And you see why I was pleased, don’t you?”
“Perfectly well. You wanted to give Dennis a new impression of me, as being hard and unforgiving, and of yourself as kind.”
Colin softly clapped his hands.
“Ah! I knew you really understood,” he said. “I knew you didn’t need any explanations. But why not have said so at first? You shewed you knew at dinner.”
She moved the screen that stood by her. That might have been to shut out of her eyes the flame that had broken out from the smouldering log, or it might have been to shut out his face....
“I didn’t mean that when I asked for explanations,” she said. “The explanation I wanted, if there was one, was any justification for what you did.”
Colin stretched out his hand to the blaze; the shapely smooth fingers looked redly luminous as the fire shone through them.
“The justification is that it was part of my policy,” he said. “Dennis is devoted to you at present. I must detach him. He must be devoted to me: he must love what I love, and hate what I hate. No man can serve two masters.”
She slid from her chair on to her knees, holding up herhands to him. The face of the future, now that it was coming close, was terrible.
“Ah, Colin, no, no!” she cried. “Your soul’s your own, and you’ve chosen for yourself. But Dennis’s soul is his: his and God’s. You daren’t tamper with it.”
Colin laughed.
“Oh, but you’re inconsistent,” he said. “You’ve told me that love is stronger than me, and that I’m powerless. Now you seem to be afraid that there is something pretty powerful to back me. Have faith, darling.”
She had no personal fear of him now that Dennis was in question: the instinct of protection swallowed it up.
“I know you’ve got something powerful to back you,” she said. “You’ve got the power of Hell to back you. No one who believes in God dares despise that; he hates and fears it.”
Colin drove the poker into the blazing log, and a squib of sparks shot up. His face in that brightness seemed to shine from some inward illumination.
“Very wise,” he said. “Now another thing. It’s clear to me that you know about the sanctuary. Clever of you, darling, because I’ve only once mentioned it to you, when I settled to build it, telling you old Colin had planned it for his private devotions. Did you guess then I wonder? Did you imagine for what purpose he had planned it, and for what purpose I carried out his plans?”
“It wasn’t a guess,” she said. “I knew. In whose honour must he have planned it, and in whose honour must you have executed it?”
“That’s logical, certainly,” he said. “But how about Grandmamma? I never said a word to her, and I don’t suppose you have. But yet she knows. Has she got some sort of second sight, do you imagine? Is she a sort of incarnated genius of Stanier, so that by instinct she knows all that concerns the welfare of the house? Sometimes I scarcely believe that she’s human at all. Will she go on living for hundreds of years, a sort of priestess? My word, we’re an amazing institution, you know.”
Colin turned round away from the fire, and yet it seemed to her that his face glowed.
“I wish my family were more with me in my convictions,” he said. “Dennis doesn’t know, and you don’t sympathize. Supposing Dennis was to die before he had come to the full knowledge? Once he had chosen, he would be protected——”
Violet felt her mouth go dry.
“Colin, you’re not meaning to take Dennis there, are you?” she whispered.
“Aha, now we come to the root of it,” he said. “Of course I mean to take Dennis there as soon as he’s learnt, well, the rudiments of the faith. I see he’s not fit for it yet, but he soon will be. He’s got high spirits, and the lust of life is beginning to bubble in him. That just has to be directed. Then the moment he is ripe, and a boy like that ripens quickly——”
Violet’s face whitened and hardened.
“You daren’t,” she said. “That would be the sin for which there’s no pardon. Don’t you understand?”
Marvellously Colin’s eyes glittered. It was as if they were faceted and caught a hundred points of light.
“And don’t you understand,” he said, “that that’s the very reason for my doing it? I pine for unpardonable sin!”
From outside there came the sudden stir of wind. It rattled at the window, and then blew with a great gust. He paused, holding up his hand and listening, and within him, swift as inspiration, the fire kindled.
“Just so it used to blow in the stone-pine in the garden at Capri,” he said. “It was there I heard it first. That’s no common wind. Violet! It’s a message: it’s a herald. The power is abroad and I hail it. Listen, isn’t that, even to your ears, something more than the common wind! You know it is. Fear it and loathe it, or worship it and adore it. But don’t deny it. Ah, the thrill of it! The splendid Pentecost.”
Never had she seen him like this, and whether it was that his exaltation communicated itself to her, or whether there was something present there inherent in that sonorous sudden gale, she felt her very spirit shudder and flicker like the blown flame of a candle.
He sprang to his feet, and took hold of her arm.
“Come with me now to the chapel,” he said. “We’ll get Father Douglas. Yes, of course you know he’s FatherDouglas. Join with me, Violet, throw scruple and struggle away. Who has the best time after all, you with your agonizings and fears, or I, who don’t know what pain of soul or body means, whose every whim is gratified? Come and see: see if I haven’t chosen well, see if you don’t exult and glory in the power that I serve and that serves me! A midnight mass: you’ll see me as an acolyte—I make a damned handsome one—and the book Father Douglas will use is the very book, the missal of wondrous blasphemies, that old Colin speaks of in his memoirs. I’ve got tepid about worship, but with you there it will be new again to me. It’s in your blood, you’re a Stanier just as I am. It will boil up in your blood.”
She stood quite still, letting his hand still rest on her arm but sundering from herself the distraction of all the flood of desires and yearnings, of fears and of terrors, that had been streaming from her. She did not articulately pray, she did not implore and agonize for protection, she simply spread out her soul with an act of unreserved surrender to the spirit of God, and, in this turmoil within and without, let the peace that passed understanding seek her of its own accord and encompassingly hold her. Her only effort was to make no effort, to make herself utterly helpless....
The timeless moment passed, and she knew that the stress of some spiritual crisis was over. The wind outside, which seemed to have been raging round the very fortress of her soul, died down and ceased.
Colin spoke again. But the ecstasy of direct inspiration had died out of his voice. For a little while he had been like one possessed; now he was himself again, terrible indeed but not terror itself, Satanic but not Satan.
“Violet, if you don’t come,” he said, “I shall go and get Dennis. I said I would go up and say good night to him, and he shall dress and come with me to the chapel. Rather like Abraham taking Isaac to sacrifice him: rather Biblical. It’s you or he. I mean precisely what I say. He will obey me.”
Violet’s choice made itself without any question. But it was made under the compulsion of Love, and under Love’s protection.
“Then of course I will come,” she said. “You’ve given me my choice and there it is. But you won’t like it if I come,Colin. I should only despise and scoff at what you believe in. And the power on which you lean is failing, and you know it. Where’s the ecstasy that filled you just now? It has all evaporated: it has leaked away.”
Rage and rebel as he might, he knew the truth of what she said, reading it in her quiet eyes, and her pitiful mouth. Definitely, and for the first time to his full consciousness, he had failed. Something stronger than the wind of the powers of the air had interposed between him and its inspiration.
He looked at her with quiet hellish eyes.
“I think you will be sorry for this, Vi,” he said.
Some inner plane on which this scene had been transacted seemed to her to slide away again. She had been on it: it had sustained her. Now she was back again on normal levels, conscious only of a supreme fatigue. But the memory of that uplifting still held her. One power had englobed her, another him, and somehow, inscrutably, the two had come into direct contact, and at the touch his had been shattered like a film of glass.
“I do not think so,” she said. “I think I shall be glad of it, thankful for it, as long as I live.”
He turned on her, but his eyes were no longer bright with that quality with which he had heard the wind rise and roar.
“Do you suppose you’ve beaten me?” he said. “Are you really such a fool as that?”
She moved a step nearer to him, and pointed to the curtained door out on to the terrace.
“Colin,” she said, “do you remember coming in at that door this evening and finding Dennis and me talking by the fire? You were jealous of him then and jealous of me, because you knew why we were so happy together. You wanted, in spite of yourself, to have a share in it.”