“Because I walked up in bare feet over the grass, Aunt Hester,” said Colin. “It’s good for the nerves. Come and do it after dinner.”
Lord Yardley supposed that Colin had not previously seen his brother, and that seeing him now did not care to notice his presence. So, with the same chill desire to be fair in all ways to Raymond, he said:
“Raymond has come, Colin.”
“Yes, father, we’ve already embraced,” said he. “Golly, I don’t call that soup. It’s muck. Hullo, granny dear, I haven’t seen you all day. Good morning.”
Lady Yardley’s face relaxed; there came on her lips some wraith of a smile. Colin’s grace and charm of trivial prattle was the only ray that had power at all to thaw the ancient frost that had so long congealed her. Ever since her husband’s death, twenty years ago, she had lived some half of the year here, and now she seldom stirred from Stanier, waiting for the end. Her life had really ceased within a few years of her marriage; she had become then the dignified lay-figure, emotionless and impersonal, typical of the wives of Staniers, and that was all that her children knew of her. For them the frosthad never thawed, nor had she, even for a moment, lost its cold composure, even when on the night that the news of Raymond’s and Colin’s birth had come to Stanier, there came with it the summons that caused her husband to crash among the glasses on the table. Nothing and nobody except Colin had ever given brightness to her orbit, where, like some dead moon, she revolved in the cold inter-stellar space.
But at the boy’s salutation across the table, she smiled. “My dear, what an odd time to say good morning,” she said. “Have you had a nice day, Colin?”
“Oh, ripping, grandmamma!” said he. “Enjoyed every minute of it.”
“That’s good. It’s a great waste of time not to enjoy....” Her glance shifted from him to Lady Hester. “Hester, dear, what a strange gown,” she said.
“It’s Aunt Hester’s go-away gown after her marriage,” began Colin. “She....”
“Colin,” said his father sharply, “you’re letting your tongue run away with you.”
Very unusually, Lady Yardley turned to Philip. “You mustn’t speak to Colin like that, dear Philip,” she said. “He doesn’t know about those things. And I like to hear Colin talk.”
“Very well, mother,” said Philip.
“Colin didn’t have a mother to teach him what to say, and what not to say,” continued Lady Yardley; “you must not be harsh to Colin.”
The stimulus was exhausted and she froze into herself again.
Colin had been perfectly well aware during this, that Raymond was present, and that nothing of it was lost on him. It would be too much to say that he had performed what he and Violet called “the grandmamma trick” solely to rouse Raymond’s jealousy, but to know that Raymond glowered and envied was like a round of applause to him. It was from no sympathy or liking for his grandmother that he thawed her thus and brought her back from herremoteness; he did it for the gratification of his own power in which Raymond, above all, was deficient.... Like some antique bird she had perched for a moment on Colin’s finger; now she had gone back into her cage again.
Colin chose that night to take on an air of offended dignity at his father’s rebuke, and subsided into silence. He knew that every one would feel his withdrawal, and now even Uncle Ronald who, with hardly less aloofness than his mother, for he was buried in his glass and platter, and was remote from everything except his vivid concern with food and drink, tried to entice the boy out of his shell. Colin was pleased at this: it was all salutary for Raymond.
“So you’ve been bathing, Colin,” he said.
“Yes, Uncle Ronald,” said he.
“Pleasant in the water?” asked Uncle Ronald.
“Quite,” said Colin.
Aunt Hester made the next attempt. They were all trying to please and mollify him. “About that walking in the grass in bare feet,” she said. “I should catch cold at my age. And what would my maid think?”
“I don’t know at all, Aunt Hester,” said Colin very sweetly.
Raymond cleared his throat. Colin was being sulky and unpleasant, and he, the eldest, would make things agreeable again. No wonder Colin subsided after that very ill-chosen remark about Aunt Hester.
“There’s a wonderful stride been made in this wireless telegraphy, father,” he said. “There were messages transmitted to Newfoundland yesterday, so I saw in the paper. A good joke about it inPunch. A fellow said, ‘They’ll be inventing noiseless thunder next.’”
There was a dead silence, and then Colin laughed loudly.
“Awfully good, Raymond,” he said. “Very funny. Strawberries, Aunt Hester?”
That had hit the mark. Leaning forward to pull the dish towards him, he saw the flush on Raymond’s face.
“Really? As far as Newfoundland?” said Lord Yardley.
By now the major-domo was standing by the dining-room door again, and Philip rose. His mother got up and stood, immobile and expressionless, till the other women had passed out in front of her. Then, as she went out, she said exactly what she had said for the last sixty years.
“You will like a game of whist, then, soon?”
Generally when the women had gone, the others moved up towards the host. To-night Philip took up his glass and placed himself next Colin. The decanters were brought round and placed opposite him, and he pushed them towards Raymond.
“Help yourself, Raymond,” he said.
Then he turned round in his armchair to the other boy.
“Still vexed with me, Colin?” he said quietly.
“Of course not, father,” he said. “Sorry I sulked. But you did shut me up with such a bang.”
“Well, open yourself at the same place,” said Philip.
“Rather. Aunt Hester’s dress, wasn’t it? Isn’t she too divine? If she ever dies, which God forbid, you ought to have her stuffed and dressed just like that, and put in a glass case in the hall to shew how young it is possible to be when you’re old. But, seriously, do get a portrait done of her to hang here. There’s nothing of her in the gallery.”
“Any other orders?” asked Philip.
“I don’t think so at present. Oh, by the way, are you going to Italy this year?”
“Yes, I think I shall go out there before long for a few weeks as usual. Why?”
“I thought that perhaps you would take me. I’ve got four months’ vacation, you see, now that I’m at Cambridge, and I’ve never been to Italy yet.”
Philip paused; he was always alone in Italy. Thatwas part of the spell. “You’d get dreadfully bored, Colin,” he said. “I shall be at the villa in Capri: there’s nothing to do except swim.”
Colin divined in his father’s mind some reluctance other than that which he expressed. He dropped his eyes for a moment, then raised them again to his father’s face, merry and untroubled.
“You don’t want me to come with you, father,” he said. “Quite all right, but why not have told me so?”
Philip looked at the boy with that expression in his face that no one else ever saw there; the tenderness for another, the heart’s need of another, which had shot into fitful flame twenty years ago, had never quite been extinguished; it had always smouldered there for Colin.
“I’ll think it over,” he said, and turned round in his chair.
“You were telling me something about wireless, Raymond,” he said. “As far as Newfoundland! That is very wonderful. A few years ago scientists would have laughed at such an idea as at a fairy-tale or a superstition. But the superstitions of one generation become the science of the next.”
Raymond by this time was in a state of thorough ill-temper. He had witnessed all the evening Colin’s easy triumphs; he had seen how Colin, when annoyed, as he had been at his father’s rebuke, went into his shell, and instantly every one tried to tempt him out again. Just now in that low-voiced conversation between his brother and his father, he had heard his father say, “Still vexed with me?” in a sort of suppliance.... He determined to try a manœuvre that answered so well.
“I should have said just the opposite,” he remarked, re-filling his glass. “I should have thought that the science and beliefs of one generation became the superstitions of the next. Our legend, for instance; that was soberly believed once.”
Philip Yardley did not respond quite satisfactorily. “Ah!” he said, getting up. “Well, shall we be going?”
Raymond had just poured himself out a glass of port, and, very unfortunately, he remembered a precisely similar occasion on which his father, just when Colin had done the same, proposed an adjournment. He repeated the exact words Colin had used then.
“Oh, you might wait till I’ve finished my port,” he said.
That did not produce the right effect. On the previous occasion his father had said, “Sorry, old boy,” and had sat down again.
“You’d better follow us, then,” said Philip. “But don’t drink any more, Raymond. You’ve had as much as is good for you.”
Raymond’s face blazed. To be spoken to like that, especially in front of his uncle and brother, was intolerable. He got up and pushed his replenished glass away, spilling half of it. Instantly Colin saw his opportunity, and knowing fairly well what would happen, he put his hand within Raymond’s arm in brotherly remonstrance.
“Oh, I say, Raymond!” he said.
Raymond shook him off. “Leave me alone, can’t you?” he said angrily.
Then he turned to his father. “I didn’t mean to spill the wine, father,” he said. “It was an accident.”
“Accidents are liable to happen, when one loses one’s temper,” said Philip. “Ring the bell, please.”
There were two tables for cards laid out in the drawing-room, and Raymond, coming in only a few seconds after the others, found that, without waiting for him, the bridge-table had already been made up with Lady Hester, Violet, his father, and Colin. They had not given him a chance to play there, and now for the next hour he was condemned to play whist with his grandmother and his uncle and aunt, a dreary pastime.
At ten old Lady Yardley went dumbly to bed, and there was the choice between sitting here until the bridge was over, or of following Uncle Ronald into the smoking-room. But that he found he could not do; his jealousy of Colin, both as regards his father and as regards Violet,constrained him as with cords to stop and watch them, and contrast their merriment with his own ensconced and sombre broodings.
And then there was Violet herself. Colin’s conjecture had been perfectly right, for in the fashion of Staniers, he must be considered as in the process of falling in love with her. The desire for possession, rather than devotion, was the main ingredient in the bubbling vat, and that was very sensibly present. She made a ferment in his blood, and though he would not have sacrificed anything which he really valued, such as his prospective lordship of Stanier, for her sake, he could not suffer the idea that she should not be his. He knew, too, how potent in her was the Stanier passion for the home, and that he counted as his chief asset, for he had no illusion that Violet was in love with him. Nor was she, so he thought, in love with Colin; the two were much more like a couple of chums than lovers.
So he sat and watched them round the edge of the newspaper which had beguiled Uncle Ronald’s impatience for dinner. The corner where he sat was screened from the players by a large vase of flowers on the table near them, and Raymond felt that he enjoyed, though without original intention, the skulking pleasures of the eavesdropper.
Colin, as usual, was to the fore. Just now he was dummy to his partner, Aunt Hester, who, having added a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles to complete her early-Victorian costume, was feeling a shade uneasy. She had just done what she most emphatically ought not to have done, and was afraid that both her adversaries had perceived it. Colin had perceived it, too; otherwise the suit of clubs was deficient. Violet had already alluded to this.
“Oh, Aunt Hester!” cried Colin. “What’s the use of pretending you’ve not revoked? Don’t cling on to that last club; play it, and have done with it. If you don’t, you’ll revoke again.”
Aunt Hester still felt cunning; she thought she might be able to bundle it up in the last trick. “But I ain’t got a club, Colin,” she said, reverting to mid-Victorian speech.
“Darling Aunt Hester, you mean ‘haven’t,’”said Colin. “‘Ain’t’ means ‘aren’t,’ and it isn’t grammar even then, though you are my aunt. ‘Ain’t....’”
Lord Yardley, leaning forward, pulled Colin’s hair. It looked so golden and attractive, it reminded him.... “Colin, are you dummy, or ain’t you?” he asked.
“Certainly, father. Can’t you see Aunt Hester’s playing the hand? I shouldn’t call it playing, myself. I should call it playing at playing. Club, please, Aunt Hester.”
“Well, if you’re dummy, hold your tongue,” said Lord Yardley. “Dummy isn’t allowed to speak, and....”
“Oh, those are the old rules,” said Colin. “The new rules make it incumbent on dummy to talk all the time. Hurrah, there’s Aunt Hester’s club, aren’t it? One revoke, and a penalty of three tricks....”
“Doubled,” said his father.
“Brute,” said Colin, “and no honours at all! Oh yes, fourteen to us above. Well played, Aunt Hester! Wasn’t it a pity? Your deal, Vi.”
Colin, having cut the cards, happened to look up at the big vase of flowers which stood close to the table. As he did so, there was a trivial glimmer, as of some paper just stirred, behind it. He had vaguely thought that Uncle Ronald and Raymond had both gone to the smoking-room, but there was certainly some one there, and which of the two it was he had really no idea. Every one else, adversaries and partner, was behaving as if there was no one else in the room, so why not he?
“Raymond’s got the hump this evening,” he said cheerfully. “He won at whist—Lord, what a game!—because I saw Aunt Janet pay him half-a-crown with an extraordinarily acid expression, and ask for change. So as he’s won at cards, he will be blighted in love. I expect he’s had a knock from the young thing at the tobacconist’s in King’s Parade. I think she likes me best, father. But it’ll be the same daughter-in-law. She breathes through her nose, and is marvellously genteel. Otherwise she’s just like Violet.”
“Pass,” said Violet.
“Hurrah! I knew it would make you pessimistic to be called like a tobacconist’s....”
Philip Yardley laid down his cards and actually laughed. “Colin, you low, vulgar brute,” he said, “don’t talk so much!”
Colin imitated Raymond’s voice and manner to perfection. “I should have said just the opposite,” he remarked. “I should have thought you wanted me to talk more, and make trumps.”
Violet caught on. “Oh, you got him exactly, Colin,” she said. “What did he say that about?”
“Go on, Colin,” said his father. “We shall never finish.”
Colin examined his hand. “Three no-trumps,” he said. “Not one, nor two, but three. Glorious trinity!”
There was no counter-challenge, and as Lord Yardley considered his lead, Colin looked up through the vase of flowers once more. There was some one there still, and he got up to fetch a match from a side-table. That gave him a clearer view of what lay beyond.
“Hullo, Raymond?” he said. “Thought you’d gone to the smoking-room.”
“No; just looking at the paper,” said Raymond. “I’m going now.”
“Oh, but we’ll have another rubber,” said Colin. “Cut in?”
“No, thanks,” said Raymond.
Colin waited till the door had closed behind him. “Lor!” he said.
“Just shut that door, Colin,” said Lord Yardley.
Lady Hester was thrilled about the tobacconist’s young thing; it really would be rather a good joke if one of theboys, following his father’s example, married a “baggage” of that sort, and she determined to pursue the subject with Colin on some future occasion. She loved such loose natural talk as he treated her to; he told her all his escapades. He was just such a scamp as Colin the first must have been, and with just such gifts and utter absence of moral sense was he endowed.
Indeed, the old legend, so it seemed to her, lived again in Colin, though couched in more modern terms. It was the mediæval style to say that for the price of the soul, Satan was willing to dower his beneficiary with all material bounty and graces; more modernly, you said that this boy was an incorrigible young Adonis, who feared neither God nor devil. True, the lordship of Stanier was not yet Colin’s, but something might happen to that grim, graceless Raymond.
How the two hated each other, and how different were the exhibitions of their antagonism! Raymond hated with a glowering, bilious secrecy, that watched and brooded; Colin with a gay contempt, a geniality almost. But if the shrewd old Lady Hester had been asked to wager which of the two was the most dangerous to the other, she would without hesitation have put her money on Colin.
The second rubber was short, but as hilarious as the first, and on its conclusion Lady Hester hurried to bed, saying that she would be “a fright” in the morning if she lost any more sleep. Violet followed her, Philip withdrew to his own room, and Colin sauntered along to the smoking-room in quest of whisky. His Uncle Ronald was still there, rapidly approaching the comatose mood of midnight, which it would have been inequitable to call intoxication and silly to call sobriety. Raymond sprawled in a chair by the window.
“Hullo, Uncle Ronald, still up?” said Colin. “You’ll get scolded.”
Uncle Ronald lifted a sluggish eyelid. “Hey?” he said. “Oh, Colin, is it? What’s the time, my boy?”
“Half-past twelve,” said Colin, adding on another half-hour. He wanted to get rid of his uncle and see how he stood with his brother. No doubt they would have a row.
“Gobbless me,” said Ronald. “I shall turn in. Just a spot more whisky. Good night, boys.”
As soon as he had gone Raymond got out of his chair and placed himself where he could get his heels on the edge of the low fender-kerb. He hated talking “up” to Colin, and this gave him a couple of inches.
“I want to ask you something,” he said.
“Ask away,” said Colin.
“Did you know I was in the room when you imitated me just now?”
“Hadn’t given a thought to it,” said Colin.
“It’s equally offensive whether you mimic me before my face or behind my back,” said Raymond. “It was damned rude.”
“Shall I come to you for lessons in manners?” asked Colin. “What do you charge?”
Colin spoke with all the lightness of good-humoured banter, well aware that if Raymond replied at all, he would make some sledge-hammer rejoinder. He would swing a cudgel against the rapier that pricked him, yet never land a blow except on the air, or, maybe, his own foot.
“It’s beastly insolence on your part,” said Raymond.
“And that’s very polite,” said Colin. “You may mimic me how and where and when you choose. If it’s like, I shall laugh. If it isn’t, well, I shall still laugh.”
“I haven’t got your sense of humour,” said Raymond.
“Clearly, nor Violet’s. She thought I had got you to a ‘t.’ You probably heard what she said from your sequestered corner behind your newspaper.”
Raymond advanced a step. “Look here, Colin, do you mean to imply that I was listening?”
Colin laughed. “And I want to ask you a question,” he said. “Didn’t you know that we all thought you had gone away?”
Raymond disregarded this. “Then there’s another thing. What do you mean by telling father about the girl at the tobacconist’s? You know it was nothing at all.”
“Rather,” said Colin. “I said so. You seem to forget that I told him that I was the favourite. That’s the part you didn’t like.”
Raymond flushed. “It’s all very well for you to say that,” he said. “But you know perfectly well that my father doesn’t treat us alike. Things which are quite harmless in his eyes when you do them appear very different to him when I’m the culprit. I had had a knock from a tobacconist’s girl, had I? You’re a cad to have told him that quite apart from its being a lie.”
Colin laughed with irritating naturalness. “Is this the first lesson in manners?” he said. “I’m beginning to see the hang of it. You call the other fellow a cad and a liar. About my father’s not treating us alike, that’s his affair. But I should never dream of calling you a liar for saying that. We’re not alike: why should he treat us alike? You’ve got a foul temper, you see; that doesn’t add to your popularity with anybody.”
He spoke in the same voice in which he might have told Raymond that he had a speck of dust on the coat, and yawned rather elaborately.
“Take care you don’t rouse it,” said Raymond.
“Why not? It rather amuses me to see you in a rage.”
“Oh, it does, does it?” said Raymond with his voice quivering.
“I assure you of it. I’m having a most amusing evening, thanks to you. And this chat has been the pleasantest part of it. Pity that it’s so late.”
Raymond, as usual, had throughout, the worst of these exchanges and was quite aware of it. He had been ill-bred and abusive through his loss of temper while Colin, insolent though his speech and his manner had been, had kept within the bounds of civil retort in his sneers and contempt. In all probability he would give an accountof it all to Violet to-morrow, and there was no need for him to embroider; a strictly correct version of what had passed was quite disagreeable enough.
This Raymond wanted to avoid in view of his desire that Violet should look on him as favourably as possible. Whether he meant to propose to her during his visit here, he hardly knew himself, but certainly he wanted to be in her good books. This, and this alone, prompted him now; he hated Colin, all the more because he had been absolutely unable to ruffle him or pierce the fine armour of his composure, but as regards Violet, and perhaps his father, he feared him.
“I’m afraid I’ve lost my temper, Colin,” he said. “And I owe you an apology for all I’ve said. You had annoyed me by mimicking me and by telling father about that girl at Cambridge.”
Colin felt that he had pulled the wings off a fly that had annoyed him by its buzzing; the legs might as well follow....
“Certainly you owe me an apology,” he said. “But, considering everything, I don’t quite know whether you are proposing to pay it.”
Raymond turned on him fiercely. “Ah, that’s you all over!” he said.
“Oh, we’re being quite natural,” said Colin. “So much better.”
He paused a moment.
“Now I don’t want to be offensive just now,” he said, “so let’s sit down and try to tolerate each other for a minute. There.”
Raymond longed to be at his throat, to feel his short, strong fingers throttling the life out of that smooth white neck. But some careless superior vitality in Colin made him sit down.
“Let’s face it, Raymond,” he said. “We loathe each other like poison, and it is nonsense to pretend we don’t. Unfortunately, you are the eldest, so in the end you will score, however much I annoy you. But put yourself inmy place; imagine yourself the younger with your foul temper. You would probably try to kill me. Of course, by accident. But I’m not intending to kill you. I am very reasonable; you must be reasonable, too. But just put yourself in my place.”
Raymond shifted in the chair in which Colin, with a mere gesture of a finger, had made him sit. “Can’t we possibly get on better together, Colin?” he said. “After all, as you say, I come into everything on my father’s death. I have Stanier, I have the millions where you have the thousands. I can be very useful to you. You adore the place, and I can let you come here as often and as long as you like, and I can also prevent your setting foot in it. If you’ll try to be decent to me, I promise you that you shan’t regret it.”
Colin put his head on one side and looked at his brother with an air of pondering wonder. “Oh, that cock won’t fight,” he said. “You know as well as I do that when you are master here, I would sooner go to hell than come here, and you would sooner go to hell than let me come. Perhaps I’ve got a dull imagination, but it’s no use my trying to imagine that. Do be sensible. If you could do anything to injure me at this moment when you are proposing a truce, you know that you would do it. But you can’t. You can’t hurt me in any way whatever. But what you do know is that I can hurt you in all sorts of ways. I can poison my father’s mind about you—it’s pretty sick already. I can poison Violet’s mind, and that’s none too healthy. You see, they both like me most tremendously, and they don’t very much like you. It’s just the same at Cambridge. I’ve got fifty friends: you haven’t got one. I dare say it’s not your fault: anyhow, we’ll call it your misfortune. But you want me to do something for you in return for nothing you can do for me, or, perhaps, nothing that you will do for me.”
Raymond frowned; when he was thinking he usually frowned. When Colin was thinking he usually smiled.
“If in the future there is anything I can do for you,Colin,” he said, “I will do it. I want to be friends with you. Good Lord, isn’t that reasonable? We’re brothers.”
Colin leaned forward in his chair. He was aware of the prodigious nature of what he was meaning to say. “Give me Stanier, Raymond,” he said. “With what father is leaving me, and with what Aunt Hester is leaving me, I can easily afford to keep it up. I don’t ask you for any money. I just want Stanier. Of course, it needn’t actually be mine. But I want to live here, while you live somewhere else. There’s the Derbyshire house, for instance. I’ve got Stanier in my blood. If, on father’s death, you’ll do that, there’s nothing I won’t do for you.”
He paused.
“I can do a good deal, you know,” he said. “And I can refrain from doing a good deal.”
The proposal was so preposterous that Raymond fairly laughed. Instantly Colin got up.
“That sounds pleasant,” he said. “Good night, Raymond. I wouldn’t have any more whisky, if I were you. Father seemed to think you’d had enough drink before the end of dinner.”
Breakfast at Stanier was a shade less stately than dinner. The table was invariably laid for the complete tale of its possible consumers, and a vicarious urn bubbled at the end of the board with an empty teapot in front of it, in case of old Lady Yardley coming down to breakfast and dispensing tea. She had not come down for over twenty years, but the urn still awaited her ministrations.
On the arrival of tidings that she was having breakfast in her room, the urn was taken away, and if news filtered through the butler to the footman that some one else was breakfasting upstairs, a place at the table was removed. Hot dishes above spirit-lamps stood in a row on the sideboard, and there remained till somebody had come down or till, from the removal of knives and forks, it was clear that nobody was coming.
But when Lady Hester was in the house, these dishes were always sure of a partaker, for, after her cold bath, she breakfasted downstairs, as she considered her bedroom a place to sleep and dress in, not to eat in. The urn would have been removed by this time, for Lady Yardley’s maid would have taken her tray upstairs, and for Lady Hester and for any one else who appeared there was brought in a separate equipage of tea or coffee, hot and fresh, and deposited in front of the occupied chair.
This morning she was the first to arrive, dressed in a white coat and blouse and a jaunty little straw hat turned up at the back and decorated with pheasants’ feathers. Provision of fish and bacon was brought her, and an ironed copy of a daily paper. There were still four places left at the table unremoved, and she promised herself a chatty breakfast.
Raymond was the next comer, but he did not much conduce to chattiness. He looked heavy-eyed and sulky, only grunted in response to her salutation, and immured himself behind theDaily Mail. Lady Hester made one further attempt at sociability, and asked him if he had slept well, but as he had nothing to add to his “No, not very,” she considered herself free from any further obligation.
Then there came a very welcome addition to his grievous company, for Colin entered through the door that opened on to the terrace. Flannel trousers, coat and shirt open at the neck was all his costume, and there was a bathing towel over his shoulder.
“Morning, Aunt Hester,” he said. “Morning, Raymond.”
He paused in order to make quite sure that Raymond made no response, and sat down next his aunt.
“Been bathing,” he said. “Hottest morning that ever was. Why didn’t you come, too, Aunt Hester? You’d look like a water-nymph. I say, what a nice hat! Whom are you going to reduce to despair? Hullo, three letters!”
“How many of them are love-letters?” asked Aunt Hester archly.
“All, of course,” said Colin. “There’s one from Cambridge.”
“That’ll be the young woman in the tobacconist’s shop whom you told us about,” began Aunt Hester.
“Sh!” said Colin, nodding towards Raymond. “Sore subject.”
Raymond, pushing back his chair, could not control himself from casting one furious glance at Colin, and went out.
“Well, that’s one bad-tempered young man gone,” said Lady Hester severely. She could understand people being thieves and liars, but to fail in pleasantness and geniality was frankly unintelligible to her.
“Why does he behave like that, my dear?” she continued. “He hadn’t a word to chuck at me like a boneto a dog, when I wished him good morning. What makes him like that? He ain’t got a belly-ache, has he?”
Colin, as he swam in the sunshine this morning, had devoted some amount of smiling reflection as to his policy with regard to Raymond. Raymond had rejected his amazing proposal with a derisive laugh; he did not think that an alliance with his brother was worth that price, and he must take the consequences of his refusal.
Violet entered at this moment; that was convenient, for she, too, could hear about the quarrel last night at one telling.
“Oh, we had a row last night,” he said. “It was pitched a little higher than usual, and I suppose Raymond’s suffering from after-effects. He was perfectly furious with me for having mimicked him, and wasn’t the least soothed by my saying he might mimic me as often as he pleased. Then I was told I was a cad and a liar for that nonsense I talked about the tobacconist’s. After I had stood as much as I could manage, I left him to his whisky, and I don’t imagine there’ll be much left of it. Oh, I say, Violet, did you shut the door when you came in? I believe it’s open; I’ll do it.”
Colin got up, went to the door which was indeed ajar, and looked out into the long gallery. Raymond, it so happened, was sitting in the nearest window-seat lighting his pipe.
Colin nodded to him. “Just shutting the door,” he said, and drew back into the dining-room, rattling and pushing the door to make sure that the latch had gone home. He felt sure that what he had just said to Raymond (that very innocent piece of information!) would go home, too.
“He was just outside,” said Colin softly, returning to the breakfast-table. “Wasn’t it lucky I thought of shutting the door?”
“Go on; what else?” asked Violet.
“Nothing more. Of course, it was very awkward his having overheard what we all said at our bridge. Thathad riled him. It was best to be sure that there wouldn’t be a repetition of it this morning. But if people will sit behind a newspaper and a vase of flowers, it’s difficult to be aware of their presence. People ought to betray their presence in the usual manner by coughing or sneezing. I shall have a thorough search of the room first before I say anything about anybody. If I want to say you are an old darling, Aunt Hester, I shall look behind the coal-scuttle first.”
Colin, whatever his private sentiments were, had an infinite lightness of touch in the expression of them. He had declared, not to Violet alone, but to Raymond himself, that he frankly detested him, and yet there was a grace about the manner of the presentment that rendered his hatred, if not laudable, at any rate, venial. And his account of the quarrel last night was touched with the same graceful brush. Without overstepping the confines of truth, he left the impression that he had been reasonable and gentle, Raymond headstrong and abusive.
This, too, was part of his policy; when others were present, he would make himself winningly agreeable to Raymond, and shew a control and an indulgence highly creditable in view of his brother’s brusque ways, and take no provocation at his hands. That would accentuate the partisanship of the others, which already was his, and would deprive Raymond of any lingering grain of sympathy. When he and Raymond were alone, he would exercise none of this self-restraint; he would goad and sting him with a thousand biting darts.
The three strolled out presently into the gallery; Lady Hester and Violet passed Raymond without speech, but Colin sauntered up to him.
“Coming out to play tennis presently?” he asked.
Colin’s careful closing of the dining-room door had not been lost on his brother. Raymond had interpreted it just as Colin wished him to, and he was boiling with rage.
“No, I’m not,” said he.
Colin turned to where Violet was standing, justshrugged his shoulders with a lift of the eyebrows, and went on towards her without spoken comment.
“Tennis soon, Vi?” he asked. “We’ll have to play a single.”
“Right. That will be jolly,” said Violet. “In half an hour?”
Colin nodded, and passed on to Lady Hester. “Come out, Aunt Hester, and let’s sit in the shade somewhere till Vi’s ready. It’s lovely outside.”
“I must have me sunshade,” said she, “or I shall spoil me complexion.”
“That’ll never do,” said Colin. “None of your young men will fall in love with you, if you do that. I’ll get it for you. Which will you have, the blue one with pink ribands, or the pink one with blue ribands?”
“Neither, you wretch,” said Aunt Hester. “The yaller one.”
They found an encampment of basket-chairs under the elms beyond the terrace, and Colin went straight to the business on which he wanted certain information. This, too, was an outcome of his meditations in the swimming-pool.
“I asked father to take me out to Italy this summer,” he said, “and it was quite clear that he had some objection to it. Have you any idea what it was?”
“My dear, it’s no use asking me,” said Aunt Hester. “Your father’s never spoken to me about anything of the sort, and he ain’t the sort of man to ask questions of. But for all these years he has gone off alone for a month every summer. Perhaps he only just wants to get rid of us all for a while.”
Colin extended himself on the grass, shading his eyes against the glare with his hand. His ultimate goal was still too far off to be distinguished even in general outline, far less in any detailed aspect. He was but exploring, not knowing what he should find, not really knowing what he looked for.
“Perhaps that’s it,” he said. “In any case, it doesn’t matter much. But I did wonder why father seemed not to welcome the idea of my going with him. He usually likes to have me with him. He’s devoted to Italy, isn’t he, and yet he never talks about it.”
Colin spoke with lazy indifference, knowing very well that the surest way of getting information was to avoid any appearance of anxiety to obtain it, and, above all, not to press for it. Suggestions had to be made subconsciously to the subject.
“Never a word,” said Lady Hester, “and never has to my knowledge, since he brought you and Raymond back twenty years ago.”
“Were you here then?” asked Colin.
“Yes, and that was the first time I saw Stanier since I was seventeen. Your grandfather never spoke to me after my marriage, and for that matter, I wouldn’t have spoken to him. He was an old brute, my dear, was your grandfather, and Raymond’ll be as like him as two peas.”
“Not as two peas, darling,” said Colin, “as one pea to another pea.”
“Oh, bother your grammar,” said Lady Hester. “Speech is given us to show what we mean. You know what I mean well enough. But as soon as your grandfather died, Philip made me welcome here, and has made me welcome ever since. Yes, my dear, the first I saw of you, you were laughing, and you ain’t stopped since.”
“Did you know my mother?” asked Colin quietly.
He was getting on to his subject again, though Lady Hester was not aware of it.
“No. Never set eyes on her. Nobody of the family knew she existed until you were born, and less than a month after that she was dead. Your father had left home, one May or June it must have been, for he couldn’t stand your grandfather any more than I could, and not a word did any one but your grandmother hear of him, and that only to say it was a fine day, and he was well, till there came that telegram to say that he was married andhad a pair of twins. Your grandfather was at dinner, sitting over his wine with your Uncle Ronald—he used to drink enough to make two men tipsy every night of his life—and up he got when your uncle read the telegram to him, and crash he went among the decanters, and that was the end of him. Then your mother died, and back came your father with you and Raymond, within a twelvemonth of the time he’d gone away. And not a word about that twelvemonth ever passes his lips.”
Colin let a suitable pause speak for the mildness of his interest in all this. “He must have been married, then, very soon after he went to Italy,” he said.
“Must have, my dear,” said Lady Hester.
It was exactly then that Colin began to see a faint outline, shrouded though it was by the mists of twenty years, that might prove to be the object of his exploration. Very likely it was only a mirage, some atmospheric phantom, but he intended to keep his eye on it, and, if possible, get nearer to it. A certainnuanceof haste and promptitude with which Lady Hester had agreed to his comment perhaps brought it in sight.
He sat up, clasping his knees with his hands, and appeared to slide off into generalities. “How exceedingly little we all know of each other,” he said. “What do I know of my father, for instance? Hardly anything. And I know even less of my mother. Just her name, Rosina Viagi, and I shouldn’t know that if it wasn’t for the picture of her in the gallery. Who are the Viagis, Aunt Hester? Anybody?”
“Don’t know at all, my dear,” said she. “I know as little about them as you. Quite respectable folk, I daresay, though what does it matter if they weren’t?”
“Not an atom. Queen Elizabeth wished she was a milk-maid, didn’t she?”
“Lord, she’d have upset the milk-pails and stampeded the cows!” observed Lady Hester. “Better for her to be a queen. Why, here’s your father.”
This was rather an unusual appearance, for Lord Yardley did not generally shew himself till lunch-time. Colin instantly jumped up.
“Hurrah, father!” he said. “Come and talk. Cigarette? Chair?”
Lord Yardley shook his head. “No, dear boy,” he said. “I sent for you and heard you were out, so I came to look for you. Have five minutes’ stroll with me.”
Colin took his father’s arm. “Rather,” he said. “Tell Vi that I’ll be back in a few minutes if she comes out, will you, Aunt Hester?”
Philip stopped. “Another time will do, Colin,” he said, “if you’ve made any arrangement with Violet.”
“Only vague tennis.”
They walked off up the shady alley of grass to where, at the end, an opening cut in the trees gave a wide view over the plain. The ground in front fell sharply away in slopes of steep turf, dotted with hawthorns a little past the fulness of their flowering. A couple of miles away the red roofs of Rye smouldered in the blaze of the day, outlined against the tidal water of the joined rivers, that went seawards in expanse of dyke-contained estuary. On each side of it stretched the green levels of the marsh, with Winchelsea floating there a greener island on the green of that grassy ocean, and along its margin to the south the sea like a silver wire was extended between sky and land. To the right for foreground lay the yew-encompassed terraces, built and planted by Colin the first, the lowest of which fringed the broad water of the lake, and along them burned the glory of the June flower-beds. Behind, framed in the trees between which they had passed, the south-east front of the house rose red and yellow between the lines of green.
The two stood silent awhile.
“Ah, Colin,” said his father, “we’re at one about Stanier. It beats in your blood as it does in mine. I wish to God that when I was dead....”
He broke off.
“I want to talk to you about two things,” he said.“Raymond’s one of them, but we’ll take the other first. About Italy. I’ll take you with me if you want to come. I was reluctant, but I am reluctant no longer. Apart from my inclination which, as I tell you, is for it now not against it, you’ve got a certain right to come. You and I will live in the villa where I lived with your mother. I’ve left it you, by the way. My romance, my marriage with her, and our life together, was so short and was so utterly cut off from everybody else that, as you know, I’ve always kept it like that, severed from all of you. But you’re her son, my dear, and in some ways you are so like her that it’s only right you should share my memories and my ghosts. They’re twenty-one years old now, and they’ve faded, but they are there. There’s only one thing I want of you; that is, not to ask me any questions about her. Certain things I’ll tell you, but anything I don’t tell you....”
He broke off for a moment.
“Anything I don’t tell you is my private affair,” he said.
“I understand, father,” said Colin.
“You’ll probably see your Uncle Salvatore,” continued Philip. “So be prepared for a shock. He usually comes over when he hears I am at the villa ... but never mind that. He takes himself off when he’s got his tip. So that’s settled. If you get bored you can go away.”
“That is good of you, father,” said the boy.
“Now about the second point,” said Philip; “and that’s Raymond. He’s a sulky, dark fellow, that brother of yours, Colin.”
Colin laughed. “Oh, put all the responsibility on me,” he said.
“Well, what’s to be done with him? He was in the long gallery just now as I came out, and I spoke to him and was civil. But there he lounged, didn’t even take his feet off the window-seat, and wouldn’t give me more than a grunted ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ So I told him what I thought of his manners.”
“Oh, did you? How good for him.”
“Well, I didn’t see why he should sulk at me,” said Philip. “After all, it’s my house for the present, and if he is to quarter himself there, without either invitation or warning, the least he can do is to treat me like his host. I try to treat him like a guest, and like a son, for that matter. Don’t I?”
“Yes, dear father,” said Colin. “You always try.”
“What do you mean, you impertinent boy?”
Colin laughed again. “Well, you don’t always succeed, you know. You cover up your dislike of him....”
“Dislike?”
“Rather. You hate him, you know.”
Philip pondered over this. “God forgive me, I believe I do,” he said. “But, anyhow, I try not to, and that’s the most I can do. And I will be treated civilly in my own house. How long is he going to stop, do you know?”
“I asked him that yesterday,” said Colin. “He said that, with my permission—sarcastic, you know—he was going to stop as long as he pleased.”
Philip frowned. “Oh, did he?” he said. “Perhaps my permission will have something to do with it.”
“Oh, do tell him to pack off!” said Colin. “It was so ripping here before he came. I had a row with him last night, by the way.”
“What about?”
“Oh, he chose to swear at me for mimicking him. That is how it began. But Raymond will quarrel over anything. He’s not particular about the pretext. Then there was what I said about the tobacconist’s wench.”
They had passed through the box-hedge on to the terrace just below the windows of the long gallery. Colin raised his eyes for one half-second as they came opposite the window-seat which Raymond had been occupying, and saw the top of his black head just above the sill. He raised his voice a little.
“Poor old Raymond,” he said. “We’ve got to makethe best of him, father. I suppose he can’t help being so beastly disagreeable.”
“He seems to think he’s got a monopoly of it,” said Philip. “But I’ll show him I can be disagreeable, too. And if he can’t mend his ways, I’ll just send him packing.”
“Oh, it would be ripping without him,” said Colin. “He might come back after you and I have gone to Italy.”
In pursuance of his general policy, Colin made the most persevering attempts at lunch to render himself agreeable to his brother, for the impression he wished to give was that he was all amiability and thereby throw into blackest shadow against his own sunlight, Raymond’s churlishness. A single glance at that glowering face was sufficient to convince Colin that he had amply overheard the words which had passed between his father and himself below the open window of the gallery, and that he writhed under these courtesies which were so clearly of the routine of “making the best of him.” All the rest of them would see how manfully Colin persevered, and this geniality was a goad to Raymond’s fury; he simply could not bring himself to answer with any appearance of good-fellowship.
“What have you been at all morning, Raymond?” Colin asked him as he entered. “I looked for you everywhere.”
“Been indoors,” said Raymond.
Colin just shook his head and gave a little sigh of despair, then began again, determined not to be beaten. He saw his father watching and listening, and Raymond knew that Lord Yardley was applauding Colin’s resolve to “make the best of him.”
“You ought to have come down to the tennis-court and taken on Vi and me together,” he said. “We shouldn’t have had a chance against you, but we’d have done our best. Father, you must come and look at Raymond the next time he plays; he’s become a tremendous crack.”
Raymond knew perfectly well that either Colin or Violet could beat him single-handed. Yet how answer this treacherous graciousness?
“Oh, don’t talk such rot, Colin!” he said.
He looked up angrily just in time to see Colin and his father exchange a glance.
“Well, what shall we do this afternoon?” said Colin, doggedly pleasant. “Shall we go and play golf? It would be awfully nice of you if you’d drive me down in your car.”
“You know perfectly well that I loathe golf,” said Raymond.
“Sorry,” said Colin.
Colin laughed, and without the smallest touch of ill-humour, gave it up and turned to Violet.
“We’ll have our game in that case, shall we, Vi?” he asked. “Father, may we have a car to take us down?”
“By all means,” said Philip. “Hester and I will come down with you, go for a drive, and pick you up again. You’d like that, Hester?”
“Oh, but that will leave Raymond alone....” began Colin.
Raymond broke in: “That’s just what I want you to do with me,” he snapped.
Colin got up. “I’ll just go and see granny for a minute,” he said. “I told her I would look in on her after lunch....”
Philip had listened to Colin’s advances and Raymond’s rebuffs with a growing resentment at his elder son’s behaviour, and as the others went out he beckoned him to stop behind.
“Look here, Raymond,” he said when the door had closed. “I had to speak to you after breakfast for your rudeness to me, and all lunch-time you’ve been as disagreeable as you knew how to be to your brother. And if you think I’m going to stand these sulks and ill-temper, you’ll very speedily find yourself mistaken. Colin did all that a good-natured boy could to give you a chance ofmaking yourself decently agreeable, and every time he tried you snapped and growled at him.”
“Do you wish me to answer you or not, sir?” asked Raymond.
“Certainly. I have every desire to be scrupulously fair to you,” said Philip. “I will hear anything you wish to say.”
“Then, father, I wish to say that you’re not fair to me. If I’m late for dinner, do you chaff me in the way you do Colin? Last night you asked him with a chuckle, ‘Urgent private affairs?’ That was all the rebuke he got. If he says he hasn’t finished his wine, you sit down again, and say ‘Sorry.’ If I haven’t, you tell me I’ve had enough already. Colin’s your favourite, and you show it every minute of the day. You dislike me, you know.”
There was quite enough truth in this to make the hearing of it disagreeable to his father. “I didn’t ask you to discuss my conduct, but to consider your own,” he said. “But you shall have it your own way. My conduct to you is the result of yours to me, and yours to everybody else. Look at yourself and Colin dispassionately, and tell me whether I could be as fond of you as of him. I acknowledge I’m not. Are you fond of me, if it comes to that? But I’m polite to you, until you annoy me beyond endurance, as you are continually doing. If Colin had behaved at lunch as you’ve behaved, I should have thought he was ill.”
“And I’m only sulky,” said Raymond.
“You’re proving it every moment,” said his father. “That’s quite a good instance.”
Raymond paused, biting his lip. “You judge Colin’s behaviour to me, father,” he said, “by what you see of it. You think he’s like that to me when we’re alone. He’s not: he’s fiendish to me. Don’t you understand that when you’re there, or anybody else is there, he acts a part, to make you think that he’s ever so amiable?”
“And how do you behave to him when you’re alone together?” asked Philip. “If I take your word about Colin, I must take Colin’s about you.”
“You’ve done that already, I expect,” said Raymond.
His father got up. “I see I haven’t made myself clear,” he said. “Try to grasp that that’s the sort of remark I don’t intend to stand from you for a moment. If I have any further complaint to make of you, you leave the house. You’ve got to be civil and decently behaved. Otherwise you go. I do not choose to have my general enjoyment of life, or Colin’s, or your uncle’s, or your aunt’s, spoiled by your impertinences and snarlings. You’ll have to go away; you can go to St. James’s Square if you like, but I won’t have you here unless you make a definite effort to be a pleasanter companion. As I told Colin this morning, you seem to think that being disagreeable is a monopoly of your own, but you’ll find that I can be disagreeable, too, and far more effectively than lies in your power.”
Philip was quite aware that he was speaking with extreme harshness, with greater harshness, in fact, than he really intended. But the sight of that heavy brooding face, the knowledge that this was his elder son, who would reign at Stanier when he was dead to the exclusion of Colin, made his tongue bitter beyond control.
“Well, that’s all I’ve got to say to you,” he said. “I won’t have you insolent and uncivil to me or any one in this house. I’m master here for the present, and, rightly or wrongly, I shall do as I choose. And I won’t have you quarrelling with Colin. You tell me that when I’m not here and when you’re alone with him, he’s fiendish to you; that was the word you used. Now don’t repeat that, because I don’t believe it. You’re jealous of Colin, that’s why you say things like that; you want to injure him in my eyes. But you only injure yourself.”
At that moment there came into Philip’s mind some memory, now more than twenty years old, of himself in Raymond’s position, stung by the lash of his father’s vituperations, reduced to the dumb impotence of hatred.Though he felt quite justified in all he had said to the boy, he knew that his dislike of him had plumed and barbed his arrows, and he experienced some sort of reluctant sympathy with him.
“I’ve spoken strongly,” he said, “because I felt strongly, but I’ve done. If you’ve got anything more to say to me, say it.”
“No,” said Raymond.
“Very good. I shan’t refer to it all again, and it’s up to you to do better in the future. Put a check on yourself. Believe me, that if you do you will have a better time with me and every one else.... Think it over, Raymond; be a sensible fellow.”
The departure of the others gave Raymond abundance of leisure for solitary reflection, and his father’s remarks plenty of material for the same. Stinging as those hot-minted sentences had been, he felt no resentment towards the orator; from his own point of view—a perfectly reasonable one—his father was justified in what he said. What he did not know, and what he refused to know, was the truth about Colin, who neglected no opportunity which quickness of speech and an unrivalled instinct gave him as to what rankled and festered, of planting his darts when they were alone together. Raymond accepted Colin’s hatred of him, just as he accepted his own of Colin, as part of the established order of things, but what made him rage was this new policy of his brother’s to win sympathy for himself and odium for him, by public politeness and affectionate consideration. No one observing that, as his father had done, could doubt who was the aggressor in their quarrels—the genial, sweet-tempered boy, or he, the morose and surly. And yet, far more often than not, it was Colin who intentionally and carefully exasperated him. It amused Colin, as he had said, to see his brother in a rage, and he was ingenious at providing himself with causes of entertainment.
And what, above all, prompted his father’s slating of him just now? Again it was Colin; it was his championship of his favourite which had given the sting to his tongue. Here, too, Raymond acquitted his father of any motive beyond the inevitable one. Nobody could possibly help liking Colin better than himself, and it was the recognition of that which made his mind brush aside all thought of his father, and attach itself with claws and teeth to the root of all this trouble. He was slow in his mental processes whereas Colin was quick, and Colin could land a hundred stinging darts, could wave a hundred maddening flags at him, before he himself got in a charge that went home. That image of the arena entirely filled his thought. Colin, the light, applauded matador, himself the savage, dangerous animal.
But one day—and Raymond clenched his hands till the nails bit the skin, as he pictured it—that light, lissome figure, with its smiling face and its graceful air, would side-step and wheel a moment too late, and it would lie stretched on the sand, while he gored and kneaded it into a hash of carrion. “Ah!” he said to himself, “that’ll be good; that’ll be good.”
The intensity and vividness of the image surprised him; he came to himself, sitting on the terrace, with the hum of bees drowsy in the flower-beds, as if from some doze and dream. He had not arrived at it from any consecutive interpretation of his hate for Colin; it had not been evolved out of his mind, but had been flashed on to it as by some vision outside his own control. But there it was, and now his business lay in realising it.
He saw at once that he must be in no hurry. Whether that goring and kneading of Colin was to be some act of physical violence or the denouement of a plot which should lead to some disgraceful exposure, Raymond knew he must plan nothing rashly, must test the strength of every bolt and rivet in his construction. Above all, he must appear, and continue to appear, to have taken his father’s strictures to heart, and for the sake, to put it at its lowest, of being allowed to stay on at Stanier, to observe thegeneral amenities of sociability, and in particular to force himself into cordial responses to Colin’s public attentions.
Temporarily, that would look bitterly like a victory for Colin; with his father to back him, it would seem as if Colin had reduced his brother to decent behaviour. But that could not be helped; he must for many weeks yet cultivate an assiduous civility and appear to have seen the error of his sulky ways in order to lull suspicion fast asleep. At present Colin was always watchful for hostile manœuvres; it would be a work of time and patience before he would credit that Raymond had plucked his hostility from him.
Then there was Violet. Not only had his intemperate churlishness damaged him with his father, but not less with her. That had to be repaired, for though to know that Stanier was to her, even as to Colin, an enchantment, an obsession, she might find that the involved condition of marrying him in order to become its mistress was one that she could not face. She did not love him, she did not even like him, but he divined that her obsession about Stanier, coupled with the aloofness and independence that characterised her, might make her accept a companionship that was not positively distasteful to her.
It was not the Stanier habit to love; love did not form part of the beauty with which nature had dowered them. The men of the family sought a healthy mate; for the women of the family, so few had there ever been, no rule could be deduced. But Violet, so far as he could tell, followed the men in this, and for witness to her inability to love, in the sense of poets and romanticists, was her attitude to Colin.
Had he been the younger, Raymond would have laughed at himself for entertaining any notion of successful rivalry. Colin, with the lordship of Stanier, would have been no more vulnerable than was the moon to a yokel with a pocket-pistol. But he felt very sure that love, as a relentless and compelling factor in this matter, had no part in her strong liking for Colin. Neither her feelingfor him nor his for her was ever so slightly dipped in any infinite quality; it was ponderable, and he himself had in his pocket for weight in the other scale, her passion for Stanier.
Colin strolled gracefully into the smoking-room that evening when the whist and bridge were over, marvelling at the changed Raymond who had been so courteous at dinner and so obligingly ready to play whist at poor granny’s table. He himself had kept up that policy of solicitous attention to his brother, which had made Raymond grind his teeth at lunch that day, but the effect this evening was precisely the opposite. Raymond had replied with, it must be supposed, the utmost cordiality of which he was capable. It was a grim, heavy demeanour at the best, but such as it was....
No doubt, however, Raymond was saving up for such time as they should be alone, the full power of his antagonism, and Colin, pausing outside the smoking-room, considered whether he should not go to bed at once and deprive his brother of the relief of unloading himself. But the desire to bait him was too strong, and he turned the door-handle and entered.
“So you got a wigging after lunch to-day,” he remarked. “It seems to have brought you to heel a bit. But you can let go now, Raymond. You haven’t amused me all evening with your tantrums.”
Raymond looked up from his illustrated paper. He knew as precisely what “seeing red” meant as did the bull in the arena. He had to wait a moment till that cleared.
“Hullo, Colin,” he said. “Have you come for a drink?”
“Incidentally. My real object was to see you and to have one of our jolly chats. Did father pitch it in pretty hot? I stuck up for you this morning when we talked you over.”
Raymond was off his guard, forgetting that certain knowledge he possessed was derived from overhearing.“Yes, you said you must make the best of me ...” he began.
Colin was on to that like a flash. “Now, how on earth could you have known that?” he asked. “Father didn’t tell you.... I know! I said that just as I was passing under the window in the gallery where you were sitting after breakfast. My word, Raymond, you’ve a perfect genius for eavesdropping. It was only last night that you hid behind the flower-vase and heard me mimic you, and if I hadn’t shut the door of the dining-room this morning, you’d have listened to what Aunt Hester and Violet and I were saying, and then you overhear my conversation with father. You’re a perfect wonder.”
Raymond got up, his eyes blazing. “Take care, Colin,” he said. “Don’t go too far.”
Colin laughed. “Ah, that’s better,” he said. “Now you’re more yourself. I thought I should get at you soon.”
Raymond felt his mouth go dry, but below the violence of his anger there was something that made itself heard. “You’ll spoil your chance if you break out,” it said. “Keep steady....” He drained his glass and turned to his brother.
“Sorry, Colin,” he said, “but I’m not going to amuse you to-night.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Colin. “I’ve hardly begun yet. Your manner at dinner, now, and your amiability. It was not really a success. No naturalness about it. It sat on you worse than your sulkiest moods. You reminded me of some cad in dress-clothes trying to catch the note of the ordinary well-bred man. Better be natural. I’ll go on sticking up for you; I’ll persuade father not to pack you off. I’ve a good deal of influence with him. I shall say you’re injuring yourself by not behaving like a sulky boor. Besides, you can’t do it; if your geniality at dinner was an attempt to mimic me, I must tell you that nobody could guess who it was meant for. Vi was very funny about it.”
“Really? What did she say?” asked Raymond.
“Oh, naturally I can’t give her away,” said Colin. “But perhaps you’ll hear her say it again if you’re conveniently placed.”
“You know quite well Vi didn’t say anything about it,” said Raymond at a venture.
“Naturally, you know best. And, talking of Vi, are you going to propose to her? I wouldn’t if I were you; take my hint and save yourself being laughed at.”
“Most friendly of you,” said Raymond. “But there are some things that are my business.”
“And not an affectionate brother’s?” asked Colin. “You don’t know how I feel for you. It makes me wince when I see you blundering and making the most terriblegaffes. It’s odd that I should have had a brother like you, and that you should be a Stanier at all.”
Colin threw a leg over the arm of his chair. It was most astonishing that not only in public but now, when there was no reason that Raymond should keep up a semblance of control, that he should be so impervious to the shafts that in ordinary stung him so intolerably.
“You’re so awkward, Raymond,” he said. “However much you try, you can’t charm anybody or make any one like you. You’ve neither manners, nor looks, nor breeding. You’ve got the curse of the legend without its benefits. You’re a coward, too; you’d like nothing better than to slit my throat, and yet you’re so afraid of me that you daren’t even throw that glass of whisky and soda in my face.”
For a moment it looked as if Raymond was about to do precisely that; the suggestion was almost irresistible. But he loosed his hand on it again.
“That would only give you the opportunity to go to my father and tell him,” he said. “You would say I had lost my temper with you. I don’t intend to give you any such opportunity.”