From the first some call of his Italian blood had made itself audible to
Colin; even as their train emerged out of the drip and roaring darkness
of the Mont Cenis tunnel, there had been a whisper in his ears that this
was the land of his birth to which he had come, and that whisper had
grown into full-voiced welcome when, at the hot close of day, he and his
father had strolled out after dinner along the sea-front of Naples.
Though he had never been here yet, sight, scent, and sound alike told
him that he was not so much experiencing what was new as recognising
what, though dormant, had always been part of him, bred into the very
fibre and instinct of him. It was not that he hailed or loved this lure
of the South; it would be more apt to say that he nodded to it, as to an
old acquaintance--taken for granted rather than embraced.
This claiming and appropriation by Colin of his native place unfroze in
his father the reticence that he had always observed with regard to that
year he had spent in Italy into which had entered birth and death, and
all that his life held of romance. That, till now, had been incapsulated
within him, or at the most, like the ichor in some ductless gland, was
performing some mysterious function in his psychology. Now this claim of
Colin’s on the South, his easy stepping into possession by right of his
parentage, unsealed in Philip the silence he had so long preserved.
Colin, as he regarded his surroundings with friendly and familiar eyes,
was visibly part of his old romance; the boy’s mother lived again in
that sunny hair, those eyes, and the clear olive skin, just as surely as
did old Colin of the Holbein portrait. But now Stanier was far away, and
the spell of the South as potent as when Philip, flying from the glooms
and jibes of that awful old man, his father, first came under its
enchantment. And Colin, of all that dead time, alone was a vital and
living part of its manifestation. Through the medium of memory he
stirred his father’s blood; Philip felt romance bubble in him again as
he walked along the familiar ways with the flower that had blossomed
from it. He felt, too, that Colin silently (for he asked no question)
seemed to claim the right to certain knowledge; he seemed to present
himself, to be ready, and, indeed, it would be singular if, having
brought him here, his father did not speak of that which, every year,
had taken him on his solitary pilgrimage to the South.
They were to spend the greater part of the next day in Naples, leaving
by the afternoon boat for Capri, and as they finished their breakfast on
a shady veranda, Philip spoke:
“Well, we’ve got all the morning,” he said, “to trundle about in. The
museum is very fine; would you like to see it?”
“No, I should hate it,” said Colin.
“But it’s a marvellous collection,” said Philip.
“I daresay; but to see a museum would make me feel like a tourist. At
present I don’t, and it’s lovely.”
He looked at his father as he spoke, and once again, this time
compellingly, Philip saw confident expectancy in his eyes. Colin was
certainly waiting for something.
“Then will you come with me on a sentimental journey?” he asked.
“Ah, father, won’t I just!” he said. “After all, you and I are on a
sentimental journey.”
There seemed to Philip in his devotion to Colin, something exquisitely
delicate about this. He had wanted but, instinctively had not asked,
waiting for his rights to be offered him.
“Come, then,” he said. “I’ll show you where we lived, your mother and I.
I’ll show you our old haunts, such as survive. You belong to that life,
Colin.”
Colin paused a moment, sitting quite still, for a span of clear,
concentrated thought. He desired to say precisely the right thing, the
thing that his father would most value. It was not in the smallest
degree affection for his father which prompted that; it was the wish
that the door should be thrown open as wide as possible--that all the
keys should be put into his hand.
“I know I do,” he said. “I’ve known that for years, but I had to wait
for you to want me to share it. It had to be you who took me into it.”
He saw approval gleam in his father’s eyes. This was clearly the right
tack.
“And you must remember I know nothing whatever about your life with my
mother,” he said. “You’ve got to begin at the beginning. And ... and make
it long, father.”
It was not surprising that Colin’s presence gave to this sentimental
journey a glow which it had lacked during all those years when Philip
made his annual solitary visit here. Already the mere flight of years,
and the fact that he had never married again, had tinged that long-past
time with something of the opalescence which sunlit mist confers on
objects which in themselves hardly rise above the level of the mean and
the prosaic; and what now survived for him in memory was Rosina’s
gaiety, her beauty, her girlish charm, with forgetfulness for her vapid
vanity, her commonness, and the speed with which his senses even had
been sated with her. But it was an unsubstantial memory of blurred and
far-off days, girt with regrets and the emptiness of desires dead and
unrecoverable.
Now Colin’s presence gave solidity to it all; it was as if the sunlit
mist had been withdrawn from the dim slopes which it covered, and lo!
the reality was not mean or prosaic, but had absorbed the very tints and
opalescences which had cloaked it. There was Colin, eager and
sympathetic, yet checking any question of his own, and but thirsty for
what his father might give him, and in the person of the boy who was the
only creature in the world whom Philip loved, and in whom Rosina lived,
that tawdry romance of his was glorified. To tell Colin, about his
mother here, in the places where they had lived together, was to make a
shrine of them.
The flat which he and Rosina had occupied in Naples, when the autumnal
departure of visitors from Capri rendered the island so desolating to
her urban nature, happened to be untenanted, and a couple of lire
secured their admittance. It still held pieces of furniture which had
been there twenty years ago, and Colin, moving quietly to and fro, his
eyes alight with interest in little random memories which his father
recalled, was like a ray of sunlight shining into a place that had long
slept in dust and shadows. Mother and son reacted on each other in
Philip’s mind; a new tenderness blossomed for Rosina out of his love for
Colin, and he wondered at himself for not having brought them together
like this before.
Here were the chairs which they used to pull out on to the veranda when
the winter sun was warm; here was the Venetian looking-glass which
Rosina could never pass without a glance at her image, and now, as Colin
turned towards it, there were Rosina’s eyes and golden hair that flashed
back at Philip out of the past and made a bridge to the present.
And there, above all, was the bedroom, with the glitter of sun on the
ceiling cast there from the reflecting sea, where, at the close of a
warm, windy day of March, the first cry of a new-born baby was heard.
And by that same bedside, at the dawn of an April morning, Philip had
seen the flame of Rosina’s life flicker and waver and expire. He
regretted her more to-day than at the hour when she had left him. Some
unconscious magic vested in Colin cast that spell.
For all these recollections Colin had the same eager, listening face and
the grave smile. Never even in his baiting of Raymond had he shewn a
subtler ingenuity in adapting his means to his end. He used his father’s
affection for him to prize open the locks of a hundred caskets, and
enable him to see what was therein. He wanted to know all that his
father would tell him about that year which preceded his birth, and not
asking questions was the surest way of hearing what he wanted.
Already he had found that his Aunt Hester knew very little about that
year, or, if she knew, she had not chosen to tell him certain things.
His curiosity, when he had talked to her under the elms, had been but
vague and exploratory, but, it will be remembered, it had become
slightly more definite when, in answer to his comment that his father
and mother must have been married very soon after his arrival in Italy,
Aunt Hester had given a very dry assent.
Now his curiosity was sharply aroused about that point, for with all his
father’s communicativeness this morning, he had as yet said no word
whatever that bore on the date of their marriage. Colin felt by an
instinct which defied reason, that there was something to be known here;
the marriage, the scene, the date of it, must have passed through his
father’s mind, and yet he did not choose, in all this sudden breakdown
of long reticence, to allude to it. That was undeniably so; a question,
therefore, would certainly be useless, for believing as he did, that his
father had something to conceal, he would not arrive at it in that way.
They were standing now in the window looking over the bay, and Philip
pointed to the heat-veiled outline of Capri, floating, lyre-shaped, on
the fusing-line of sea and sky.
“We were there all the summer,” he said, “in the villa you will see this
evening. Then your mother found it melancholy in the autumn and we came
here--I used to go backwards and forwards, for I couldn’t quite tear
myself away from the island altogether.”
That struck Colin as bearing on his point; it was odd, wasn’t it, that a
newly-married couple should do that? You would have expected them to
live here or there, but together.... Then, afraid that his father would
think he was pondering on that, he changed the topic altogether.
“I have loved hearing about it all,” he said. “But somehow--don’t be
shocked, father--I can’t feel that Raymond comes into it one atom. We’ve
been realising you and my mother and the squalling thing that I was. But
I can’t feel Raymond with us then any more than he’s with us now. Let’s
keep Italy to ourselves, father. Poor old Raymond!”
That shifting of the topic was skilfully designed and subtly executed.
Colin confessed to alienation from Raymond and yet with a touch of
affectionate regret. His father was less guarded.
“Raymond’s got nothing to do with Italy,” he said. “There’s not a single
touch of your mother in him. We’ve got this to ourselves, Colin. Raymond
will have Stanier.”
“Lucky dog!” said Colin.
There was one item connected with the marriage that he might safely ask,
and as they went downstairs he put it to his father, watching him very
narrowly.
“I feel I know all about my mother now,” he said, “except just one
thing.”
Lord Yardley turned quickly to him. “I’ve told you all I can tell you,”
he said sharply.
That was precisely what Colin had been waiting for. There was something
more, then. But the question which he was ready with was harmless
enough.
“I only wanted to know where you were married,” he said. “That’s the one
thing you haven’t told me.”
There was no doubt that this was a relief to his father; he had clearly
expected something else, not the “where” of the boy’s question, but the
“when,” which by now had definitely crystallised in Colin’s mind.
“Oh, that!” he said. “Stupid of me not to have told you. We were married
at the British Consulate.”
They passed out into the noonday.
“Mind you remember that, Colin,” said his father. “On my death the
marriage will have to be proved; it will save a search. Your birth was
registered there, too. And Raymond’s.”
Such was the sum of information that Colin took on board with him that
afternoon when they embarked on the steamer for Capri, and though in one
sense it took him back a step, in another it confirmed the idea that had
grown up in his mind. He felt certain (here was the confirmation) that
if he had asked his father when the marriage took place, he would have
been told a date which he would not have believed. Lord Yardley would
have said that they had been married very soon after his arrival
twenty-one years ago. He had waited with obvious anxiety for Colin’s one
question, and he had hailed that question with relief, for he had no
objection to the boy’s knowing where the contract was made.
And the retrograde step was this: that whereas he had been ready to
think that his father’s marriage was an event subsequent to his own
birth and Raymond’s, he was now forced to conclude (owing to the fact
that his father told and impressed on him to remember, that it had been
performed at the British Consulate) that he and Raymond were
legitimately born in wedlock. That seemed for the present to be a
_cul-de-sac_ in his researches.
The warm, soft air streamed by, and the wind made by the movement of the
boat enticed Colin out from under the awning into the breeze-tempered
blaze of the sun. He went forward and found in the bows a place where he
could be alone and study, like a map, whatever could be charted of his
discoveries.
That willingness of his father to tell him where the marriage had taken
place was somehow disconcerting; it implied that the ceremony made valid
whatever had preceded it. He had himself been born in mid-March, and he
did not attempt to believe that his father had been married in the
previous June, the month when he had first come to Italy. But he could
not help believing that his father had married before his own birth.
Colin was one of those rather rare people who can sit down and think.
Everybody can sit down and let his mind pleasantly wander over a hundred
topics, but comparatively few can tether it, so to speak, so that it
grazes on a small circle only. This accomplishment Colin signally
possessed, and though now there could be no practical issue to his
meditations, he set himself to carve out in clear, cutting strokes what
he would have done in case he had discovered that he and Raymond alike
were born out of wedlock. He imagined that situation to himself; he
cropped at it, he grazed on it....
The disclosure, clearly, if the fact had been there, would not have come
out till his father’s death, and he could see himself looking on the
face of the dead without the slightest feeling of reproach. He knew that
his father was leaving him all that could be left away from Raymond; he
was heir also to Aunt Hester’s money.
But in that case Stanier, and all that went with the title, would not be
Raymond’s at all; Raymond would be nameless and penniless. And Colin’s
beautiful mouth twitched and smiled. “That would have been great fun,”
he said to himself. “Raymond would have been nobody and have had
nothing. Ha! Raymond would not have had Stanier, and I should have
ceased to hate him. I should have made him some small allowance.”
Yes, Stanier would have passed from Raymond, and it and all that it
meant would have gone to Violet ... and at that the whole picture
started into life and colour. If only now, at this moment, he was
possessed of the knowledge that he and Raymond alike were illegitimate,
with what ardour, with what endless subtlety, would he have impelled
Violet to marry him! How would he have called upon the legendary
benefactor who for so long had prospered and befriended the Staniers, to
lend him all the arts and attractions of the lover! With such wiles to
aid him, he would somehow have forced Violet to give up the idea of
marrying Raymond in order to get Stanier, and instead, renouncing
Stanier, take him, and by her renunciation for love’s sake, find in the
end that she had gained (bread upon the waters) all that she had
imagined was lost.
And he, Colin, in that case, would be her husband, master of Stanier to
all intents and purposes. Willingly would he have accepted, eagerly
would he have welcomed that. He wanted what he would never get unless
Raymond died, except at some such price as that. But it was no use
thinking about it; his father’s insistence on the place where he and
Rosina were married made it certain that no such fortunate catastrophe
could be revealed at his death.
Presently Lord Yardley joined him as they passed along the headland on
which Sorrento stands, and there were stories of the visit that he and
Rosina made here during the summer. Colin listened to these with
suppressed irritation; what did he care whether they had spent a week at
Sorrento or not? Of all that his father had to tell him, he had mastered
everything that mattered, and he began to find in these recollections a
rather ridiculous sentimentality. He knew, of course, that he himself
was responsible for this; it was he, Rosina’s son, and his father’s love
for him, that conjured up these tendernesses. He was responsible, too,
in that all the morning he had listened with so apt a sympathy to
similar reminiscences. But then he hoped that he was about to learn
something really worth knowing, whereas now he was convinced that there
was nothing of that sort to know. Fond as his father had always been of
him, he easily detected something new in his voice, his gestures, the
soft eagerness of his eyes; it was as if in him his father was falling
in love with Rosina.
Sunset burned behind Capri as their steamer drew near to it, and the
eastern side lay in clear shadow though the sea flared with the
reflected fires of the sky, and that, too, seemed to produce more
memories.
“You are so like her, Colin,” said his father, laying his arm round the
boy’s neck, “and I can imagine that twenty-one years have rolled back,
and that I am bringing her across to Capri for the first time. It was
just such an evening as this, sunset and a crescent moon. I had already
bought the villa; we were going back to it together.”
“Straight from the Consulate?” asked Colin quietly.
“What?” asked Philip.
“From the Consulate, father,” he repeated.
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Philip quickly, and his voice seemed to ring
utterly untrue. “Straight from the Consulate. Ha! there’s Giacomo, my
boatman. He sees us.”
“Does he remember my mother?” asked Colin.
“Surely. But don’t ask him about her. These fellows chatter on for ever,
and it’s half lies.”
Colin laughed. “As I shouldn’t understand one word of it,” he said, “it
would make little difference whether it was all lies.”
Once again, and more markedly than ever, as they drove up the angled
dusty road set in stone walls and bordered by the sea of vineyards, the
sense of homecoming seized Colin. It was not that his father was by him
or that he was going to his father’s house; the spell worked through the
other side of his parentage, and he felt himself strangely more akin to
the boys who, trudging homewards, shouted a salutation to their driver,
to the girls who clustered on the doorsteps busy with their needle, than
to the grave man who sat beside him and watched with something of a
lover’s tenderness his smiles and glances and gestures. Philip read
Rosina into them all, and she who had so soon sated him till he wearied
of her, woke in him, through Colin, a love that had never before been
given her.
“I cannot imagine why I never thought of bringing you out to Italy
before,” said Philip, “or why, when you asked me to take you, I
hesitated.”
Colin tucked his arm into his father’s. He was wonderfully skilful in
displaying such little signs of affection, which cost him nothing and
meant nothing, but were so well worth while.
“Do I seem to fit into it all, father?” he said. “I am so glad if I do.”
“You more than fit into it, my dear,” said Philip. “You’re part of it.
Why on earth did I never see that?”
“Part of it, am I? That’s exactly what I’ve been feeling all day. I’m at
home here. Not but what I’m very much at home at Stanier.”
Lord Yardley clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I wish to God you
were my eldest son,” he said. “I would give anything if that were
possible. I would close my eyes ever so contentedly when my time comes
if I knew that you were going to take my place.”
“Poor old Raymond!” said Colin softly. “He’s doing his best, father.”
“I suppose he is. But you’re a generous fellow to say that; I shan’t
forget it. Here we are; bundle out.”
Their carriage had stopped in the piazza, and Colin getting out, felt
his lips curl into a smile of peculiar satisfaction. That his father
should believe him to be a generous fellow was pleasant in itself, and
the entire falsity of his belief added spice to the morsel. He seemed to
like it better just because it was untrue.
* * * * *
Colin stepped into the drifting summer existence of visitors to the
island with the same aptness as that which had graced his entry to his
mother’s native land. He went down to the bathing-beach after breakfast
with a book and a packet of cigarettes, and spent a basking amphibious
morning. Sometimes his father accompanied him, and after a
constitutional swim, sat in the shade while Colin played the fish in the
sea or the salamander on the beach. On other mornings Lord Yardley
remained up at the villa, which suited Colin quite well, for this
uninterrupted companionship of his father was very tedious. But he
always managed to leave the impression that he wanted Lord Yardley to
come with him.
And so much this morning did Colin want to be alone that, had Philip
said that he was coming with him, he would probably have pleaded a
laziness or indisposition, for he had that morning received a letter
from Violet which called for solitary and uninterrupted reflection.
To-day, however, Philip’s brother-in-law, Salvatore Viagi, had announced
his advent, “to pay his fraternal respects and give his heart’s
welcome,” so ran his florid phrase--and Philip remained at the villa to
receive these tributes.
“It’s a nuisance,” he said, “for I should have liked a dip. But I should
have to hurry back to get here before him.”
Colin laughed. “You speak as if he might steal the silver,” he said.
“Perfectly capable of it,” said his father. “No, I shouldn’t have said
that. But he’s perfectly capable of asking for it.”
Colin perceived that there was no danger of his father’s coming down to
bathe with him. “Surely he can wait till we get back,” he said. “Come
down and bathe, father!”
Philip shook his head. “No, I can’t,” he said. “Salvatore would think it
very odd and rude if I were not here. He wouldn’t understand: he would
think I was intentionally unceremonious.”
“He sounds rather a bounder,” observed Colin.
“He does,” said Philip drily.
* * * * *
Colin took Violet’s letter down to the beach with him, and after a short
dip of refreshment from his dusty walk, came out cool and shining from
the sea to dispose himself on the beach that quivered in the hot sun,
and ponder over it. He read it again twice through, stirring it into his
brains and his emotions, till it seemed to form part of him....
So Raymond had proposed to her, and, having asked for a week’s delay in
her answer, she, while the matter was still private, had to tell Colin
that, as far as she knew her own intentions, she was meaning to accept
him. And yet this letter in which she said that she was going to marry
his brother, seemed hardly less than a love-letter to himself.
She appeared to remember that last evening at Stanier when, under the
moon-cast shadow of the yews, she had given him the kiss he asked for,
just as vividly as did Colin. It was vivid to him because he had asked
for that with a definite calculated end in view, and with the same end
in view he had exclaimed how maddening it was to think that Raymond
would kiss her next. No doubt Raymond had done so, and Violet, though
she said she meant to marry him, had, perhaps, begun to know something
more of her own heart. That was why the evening was vivid to her,
exactly as he had intended it should be. She had learned that there was
a difference between him and Raymond, which being mistress at Stanier
might counterbalance, but did not cancel.
The wetness had dried from Colin’s sun-tanned shoulders, and, lying down
at length on the beach, he drew from his pocket Violet’s letter in order
to study one passage again which had puzzled him. Here it was:
“You were perfectly brutal to Raymond that evening,” she wrote,
“and he was admirable in his answer to your rudeness. If we are to
remain friends you must not behave to him like that. You don’t like
each other, but he, at any rate now, has control over himself, and
you must copy his example.”
(“Lord! me copying Raymond’s example,” thought Colin to himself, in
an ecstatic parenthesis.)
“I shall always do my best to make peace between you, for I am very
fond of you, but Raymond’s side will in the future be mine. You
were nice to me afterwards, but, dear Colin, you mustn’t ask me to
kiss you again. Raymond wouldn’t like it....”
With this perusal all that was puzzling vanished. “That’s not genuine;
none of that’s genuine,” thought Colin. “She says what she’s trying to
feel, what she thinks she ought to feel, and doesn’t feel.” He turned
the page.
“I hope my news won’t hurt you,” she went on. “After all, we’ve
settled often enough that we weren’t in love with each other, and
so when that night you said it was maddening to think of Raymond
kissing me next, it couldn’t make any difference to you as you
aren’t in love with me....”
No, the news did not hurt Colin, so he told himself, in the way that
Violet meant, and she was quite right about the reason of that: he was
not in love with her. But it struck him that the news must undeniably
hurt Violet herself; she was trying to wriggle away from it, while at
the same time she tried to justify herself and that unfortunate (or
should he call it fortunate?) kiss she had given him.
He glanced hastily over the rest; there were more allusions to that last
evening, more scolding and exhortations about his conduct to Raymond,
and, as a postscript, the request that he should send her just one line,
to say he wasn’t hurt. This letter of hers was absolutely private, but
she had to tell him what was about to happen. In a week’s time both she
and Raymond would write to his father, who, so Raymond thought, was not
unprepared.
Colin tore off the final half-sheet of Violet’s letter, and with his
stylograph scribbled his answer on it. He had long ago made up his mind
what he should say:
“VIOLET, MY DEAR” (he wrote),
“It was delightful of you to tell me, and I send you a million
congratulations. I am so pleased, for now you will be mistress of
Stanier, and you seem quite to have fallen in love with Raymond. I
must be very nice to him, or he’ll never let me come to Stanier in
days to come, and you will take his side, as you say. But how could
I be hurt at your news? It is simply charming.
“Father and I are having a splendid time out here. I shall try to
persuade him to stop on after this month. Of course we shall come
back before your marriage. When is it to be, do you think?
“Best love from
“COLIN.”
The ink in this hot sun dried almost as quickly as he wrote, and he had
scarcely signed his own name when it wore the appearance not of a
tentative sketch but of a finished communication ready for the post,
and, reading it over, he found that this was so: he could not better it.
So slipping it back into his pocket, he went across the beach again for
a longer swim, smiling to himself at the ease with which he had divined
Violet’s real mind, and at the fitness of his reply. As he swam he
analysed his own purpose in writing exactly like that.
He had expressed himself with all the cordial geniality of which he was
capable: he had welcomed Violet’s choice. He had endorsed, as regards
his own part of the situation, her proposition that he ought not to be
hurt, since they were not in love with each other, and the eagerness of
his endorsement (that swift enthusiastic scrawl) would quite certainly
pique her. He had adopted her attitude, and knew that she would wish he
had another; the same, in fact, which he had expressed when he had said
that it was maddening to think that she would be kissing Raymond next.
Colin knew well how fond she was of him, and his letter would be like
this plunge into the clear crystal of the sea which, while it cooled
you, was glowingly invigorating.
He was quite prepared to find that in a week’s time she and Raymond
would write to his father saying that they were engaged, but not for a
moment did he believe that they would ever be married. He had but to
keep up his cordial indifference till Violet found it intolerable. To
have remonstrated with her, to have allowed that her news hurt him, was
to give Violet just what she wanted. A loveless marriage faced her,
while all the time she was not heart-whole, and however much she wanted
Stanier, she would be daily more conscious that the conditions on which
she got it were a diet of starvation.
“She _is_ rather in love with me,” thought Colin, “and very likely my
letter will drive her into accepting him. But if only I can keep cool
and pleasant, she’ll never marry him. Devilish ingenious! And then
there’s Raymond!”
Colin laughed aloud as he thought of Raymond, who really lay at the
bottom of all these plans. Even if it had been possible now, before
Violet accepted him, to intervene in some way and cause her to refuse
instead of to take him, he would not have stirred a finger, for thus he
would baulk himself of the completeness of Raymond’s discomfiture, since
Raymond would feel the breaking off of his engagement more bitterly than
an original refusal. Let Violet accept him first and then throw him
over. That would be a real counter-irritant to the sting of Raymond’s
primogeniture, an appreciable counterweight to his future possession of
Stanier.
It had been a check in that fraternal feud that Raymond’s birth and his
own were certainly legitimate, and that nothing now could stand in the
way of his brother’s succession, but if the check in that direction had
not occurred, there would never have been any chance of Violet’s
marrying him, and Raymond would have been spared the wounding
humiliation which instinctively, Colin felt sure, was to be dealt him.
Raymond was genuinely desirous of her; he would feel her loss very
shrewdly. If only, by some diabolical good fortune, Raymond could lose
them both! Colin saw himself, Violet by his side, smilingly observing
Raymond’s final departure from Stanier, and hoping that he would have a
pleasant journey.
* * * * *
Alas! it was time to swim shorewards again, for the morning boat from
Naples which was carrying Salvatore Viagi had already gone by on its
tourist route to the Blue Grotto, and Salvatore would have disembarked
at the Marina. He felt curious to see Uncle Salvatore, and was
determined to make himself uncommonly pleasant, for there might be
things which Salvatore knew which his father had not told him. The date
of the marriage, for instance; though he despaired of any practical use
arising from that, Colin would like to know when it took place.
He dressed and strolled up through the vineyards through which,
twenty-one years ago, his father had gone, tasting for the first time
the liberty and gaiety of the South, and found his little jingling
conveyance awaiting him. His quiet concentrated hate of Raymond sat
smiling beside him up the dusty road, and he rejoiced in its
companionship.
Colin found that Salvatore had arrived, and his father was waiting lunch
for him, and so without decoration of himself in the way of brushings or
putting on tie or socks, he went straight to the salon. There was
sitting there a very gorgeously-dressed gentleman, and his heart fell as
he saw him, for it would be difficult to cultivate cordial relationships
with so exquisite a bounder, whatever information might be the reward of
his efforts.
Salvatore was clad in ill-fitting broadcloth, florid with braid; he wore
patent leather shoes, a tie of pink billows in which nestled a
preposterous emerald, cuffs and collar clearly detachable, and a gold
watch-chain from which a large, cheap locket depended. Luxuriant hair,
suspiciously golden and carefully curled, crowned his face; fierce
moustaches, brushed and waxed, were trained away to show a mouth full of
dazzling teeth, and his features were just those of a wax bust,
representing the acme of masculine beauty, that may be seen in the
window of a hairdresser.
With this troubadour was sitting his father, stiff and starched and
iced. Colin guessed that this period of waiting had been embarrassing,
for both seemed highly relieved at his entry, and the troubadour bounded
to his feet with a tenor cry of welcome.
“_Collino mio!_” he exclaimed, kissing him, to Colin’s great surprise,
on both cheeks. “Ah, the joy of the day when I behold my own nephew! And
you are so like her, so like her. Look on the image of her which I ever
carry about with me! I do not forget her, no, no!”
He opened the locket, and showed Colin a photograph faded into
illegibility.
“Her eyes, her nose, her mouth,” he said. “I see again the features of
my adored Rosina!”
This was so much worse than could possibly have been expected, that the
only thing to be done was to treat it all as some game, some monstrous
charade. This was the stock of which he had come; his mother was sister
to this marvellous mountebank. At that moment Colin hated his father;
how could he have joined himself to any of such a family? It was clearer
than ever that, whatever the history of that year preceding his birth
had been, it had not begun with marriage. His father had been prey to a
pretty face.
Then he set himself to play the game.
“Dear Uncle Salvatore!” he said. “I can’t tell you how I’ve been looking
forward to seeing you. I hurried in, as you see, when I heard you were
here, without dressing or tidying myself. I could not wait. And you
think I am like my mother?”
“But you are a true Viagi! You are the very image of her. And if I place
myself beside you, my noble brother-in-law will not, I think, fail to
mark a certain family resemblance.”
He put his hand on Colin’s shoulder as if for a Bank Holiday photograph,
and rose on his toes to make himself the taller.
At that his noble brother-in-law, catching Colin’s merry glance, which
shouted to him, “Play up, father, play up!” seemed to determine to make
the best of it, too.
“Amazing resemblance,” he said, rising. “Two brothers. Shall we go in to
lunch? Please go on, Salvatore.”
“With the escort of my brother Colin,” said Salvatore, in tremendous
good spirits. He had clearly, so he thought, found a friendly heart in
Colin, who would no doubt in time warm the heart of his brother-in-law,
which at present seemed inclined to be chilly. It was desirable that a
more generous warmth should be diffused there, before they came to speak
of financial matters.
Philip’s efforts in answer to Colin’s unspoken bidding, to see the
humorous side of their visitor, were put to a sad strain before that
portentous meal was over. Salvatore was bent on making a fine and
dashing impression, and adopted for that end a manner compounded of brag
and rich adulation.
“Your cousins, Collino, my own beloved children!” he exclaimed. “Never
will Vittoria and Cecilia forgive me, if I do not on my return prove to
have got your promise to pay them a visit before you quit Italy. We must
persuade your father to spare you for a day; you must dine and sleep,
and, ho, ho! who knows but that when our ladies have gone to bed, you
and I will not play the bachelor in our gay Naples? It would, I am
afraid, be useless to urge you, my dear Philip, to be of the party, but
ah! the happiness, ah! the honour that there would be in the Palazzo
Viagi, if Lord Yardley would make himself of the family! But I know, I
know: you come here to enjoy your quiet and blessed memories.”
“Very good of you, Salvatore,” said Philip. “But, as you say, I come
here for quiet. I am afraid I shall hardly be able to get across to
Naples.”
“Ah! _Il eremito_, as we say! The hermit, is it not?”
“You speak excellent English, Uncle Salvatore,” said Colin.
“And should I not? Was not English the language of my adored mother? It
is Vittoria’s dream to go to England. Some day, perhaps, I will take
Vittoria to see the home of her English ancestors, of her grandmother
and of yours, my Colin. But the expense! _Dio!_ the expense of travel.
Once it was not so with the Viagi; they did not need to count their
soldi, and now there are no soldi to count! They were rich once; their
wealth was colossal, and had it not been for nefarious enemies,
slanderers, and swindlers, they would be rich still, and a line of
princes. As it is, they have nothing left them but their pride, and from
that, whatever their poverty, they will never part. I, the head of the
family, proclaim that to the world.”
“Very proper,” said Philip.
Salvatore had hit himself quite a severe blow on the chest as he
proclaimed his pride, which had set him coughing. This was curable by a
considerable draught of hock, which started him again on the adulatory
tack.
“A nectar! Nectar of the gods,” he exclaimed. “There is no such wine to
be obtained in my beggarly country. But you must be a millionaire to
drink it. I would die happy drowned in wine like that.”
“You must take a bottle or two away with you,” said Philip, rising. “If
you will excuse me for ten minutes, there are a couple of letters I want
to finish for this afternoon’s post. And then, perhaps, you will spare
me a quarter of an hour, Salvatore, for a talk. There will be plenty of
time before your boat goes.”
“Dear friend, my time is yours,” said Salvatore, “and the boat may go to
Naples without me if we have not finished. I brought a small toilet bag
in case I stopped the night. I can no doubt find a room at some modest
hotel.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Philip, leaving him and
Colin together.
Salvatore poured himself out some more of the nectar when the door had
closed (he was making sure of taking a bottle at least with him), and
pointed dramatically to his heart.
“My noble and venerated brother-in-law has never rallied from the shock
of your mother’s death,” he said. “His heart broke. He lives only for
the day when he will rejoin her. Till then it is a solace to him to
minister to those who were nearest and dearest to Rosina. So generous a
heart! Do you think I made a good impression on him to-day?”
“Admirable! Excellent!” said Colin. “Now talk to me about the old days,
Uncle Salvatore. A glass of brandy? Did you see my father that year he
spent in Italy, when he married my mother, and when I was born?”
Salvatore paused in the sipping of his brandy and made a splendid scowl
with gesture of fist and rolling eyes. Quick as a lizard, Colin saw that
he must appear to know facts which hitherto were only conjecture to him,
if he was to learn the cause of these grimaces.
“I know all, of course, Uncle Salvatore,” he said. “You can speak to me
quite freely.”
“And yet you ask if I was there!” said Salvatore. “Should I have
permitted it? I was but a boy of eighteen, and in a bank at Rome, but,
had I known, boy as I was, I should have gone to your father and have
said, ‘Marry my sister out of hand or face the vengeance of Salvatore
Viagi.’”
Colin held out his hand. “You would have done well, Uncle Salvatore,” he
said. “I thank you for my mother’s sake.”
This was so deeply affecting to Salvatore that he had to take a little
more brandy. This made him take a kindlier view of his noble
brother-in-law.
“Yet I wrong him,” he said. “There was no need for Salvatore Viagi to
intervene for his sister’s honour. She died Countess of Yardley, an
alliance honourable to both of our families.”
“Indeed, yes,” said Colin. “I am proud of my Viagi blood. The marriage
was at the British Consulate, of course. What day of the month was it,
do you remember?”
Salvatore made a negative gesture. “The exact date escapes me,” he said.
“But it was spring: March, it would have been March, I think. Two
letters I got from my beloved Rosina at that time; in one she told of
the marriage, in the next of the birth of her sons. I have those letters
still. Treasured possessions, for the next news of my Rosina was that
her sweet soul had departed! My God, what lamentations were mine! What
floods of never-ceasing tears!”
Colin thought rapidly and intently as he replenished his uncle’s glass
with brandy. No definite scheme formed itself in his mind, but, whatever
possibilities future reflection might reveal to him, it would clearly be
a good thing to get hold of those letters. He might conceivably want to
destroy them.
He leaned forward towards Salvatore. “Dear Uncle Salvatore,” he said, “I
am going to ask a tremendous favour of you. I have nothing of my
mother’s, and I never saw her, as you know. But I am learning to love
her, and those letters would be so treasured by me. You have the memory
of her, all those delightful days you must have spent together. Will you
give me those letters? I hope before long to come across to Naples and
see you and my cousins, and it would good of you if you would give me
them. Then I shall have something of hers.”
A sob sounded in Salvatore’s voice. “You shall have them, my Colin,” he
said, “and in turn perhaps you can do something for me. Intercede, I
pray you, with your father. He is a generous, a noble soul, but he does
not know my needs, and I am too proud to speak of them. Tell him, then,
that you wrung out of me that I am in abject poverty. Vittoria is
growing up, and dowerless maidens are not sought after.”
“Of course I will do all I can,” said Colin warmly. “I will talk to my
father as soon as you have gone. And I may say that he listens to me.”
“I will send off the letters to you to-night,” he said. “And what joy
will there be in Casa Viagi, when my girls know that their cousin Colin
is to visit us! When will that happy day be?”
“Ah, I must write to you about that,” said Colin, noticing that the
Palazzo had become a Casa. “Leave me your card. And now it is time for
you to talk to my father; I will see if he is ready. But not a word of
all we have been saying, to him.”
“Trust me, my nephew,” said Salvatore gaily.