CHAPTER I

_By the Same Author_

COLIN

VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE

MISS MAPP

DODO WONDERS

ROBIN LINNET

QUEEN LUCIA

_COLIN II._ _A NOVEL_

_By E. F. BENSON_ :: ::

_Author of “Colin,” “Visible and Invisible”_ :

_THIRD EDITION_

_LONDON: HUTCHINSON & CO._

_PATERNOSTER ROW_

_Published August, 1925._

PREFACE

The Preface to “Colin” (published in 1923) informed such readers as

peruse prefaces that a further volume would complete the history of his

association with the bargain his ancestor struck with Satan.... “Colin

II.” therefore must not be regarded as a sequel to “Colin,” but as the

second half of that romance.

The interval between the appearance of the two books has been longer

than I anticipated, for I was not aware of the difficulties that lay

ahead.

E. F. BENSON.

INTRODUCTION

With the declining wheel of the sun to the west, the shadow of the great

yew-hedge began to flow like some tide, dark and clear, over the paved

terrace which since morning had basked in the blaze of the July day. It

had been planted by Colin Stanier first Earl of Yardley, when he laid

the foundations of his house in the time of Elizabeth, and the

three-sided serge rampart, now thick and solid as a fortress-wall, ran

out from the corners of the façade, and formed a frame for the lawn

below the terrace. Beyond, the ground declined in smooth slopes of

short-cut turf to the lake. This lake also was the creation of the first

Lord Yardley, for he had built the broad dam now clothed with

rhododendrons across the dip of the valley, so that the stream which

flowed down it was pent to form this triangular expanse of water. At the

top end it was shallow, but by the sluice in the centre of the dam

fifteen feet of dark water reflected the banks of blossom.

Beyond again and below the hill-side tumbled rapidly down to the

heat-hazed levels of the Romney marsh, and over all the great house kept

watch, stately and steadfast as the hill from which it sprang, a

presiding presence and symbol of the three centuries of unbroken

prosperity which had blessed the fortunes of the Staniers. Whatever

uprooting tornado of revolution had swept across England, devastating or

impoverishing the great families of the past, they seemed anchored and

protected beyond all power of ruinous vicissitudes. They were no fat or

brainless race, who but battened and dozed in material magnificence, but

served their country well in public ministries. As for their private

lives, the Staniers have always considered that such were their own

concern.

The family rose to the splendour which it still enjoys in the reign of

Elizabeth. Its founder was one Colin Stanier, the son of a small local

farmer, who, on the occasion of the Queen’s visit to Rye as she toured

her Cinque Ports, went into the town to see the pageant pass. As Her

Grace rode down the steep cobbled way from the church, her horse

stumbled, and the boy, some eighteen years old at the time, had the

privilege by his quickness to save the Queen from a serious fall. She

looked on his amazing comeliness with an admiring eye, and bade him wait

on her next day at the Manor of Brede.... That night, according to the

family tradition, as he worked and slept in a shepherd’s hut on the

marsh, busy with the midwifery of his father’s ewes at lambing-time, he

was visited by a personage even greater than the Queen, one no less than

Satan himself, who, for the signing away of his soul, offered, not only

to him but to those of his descendants who chose to associate themselves

with the bargain, health and wealth and honour up to the fulness of

their hearts’ desire. A deed was thereupon executed between the two

which Colin signed with the blood of his pricked arm and which is

supposed still to exist, let into the frame of the famous portrait of

him at the family seat of Stanier. This curious story has been known

from that day to this as the Stanier Legend.

The advent of Colin’s good fortune made no long tarrying, for early next

morning, after his interview with His Satanic Majesty, he waited on Her

Susceptible Majesty at the place appointed. Ruddy and fair he was to

look upon, and even as the Lord took David, as he followed the ewes

great with young, and made him King in Israel, so from the sheepfolds

did Elizabeth take Colin Stanier and made him her page, and presently

her most confidential secretary, and conferred on him at the age of

twenty-five the monastic lands of Tillingham with the Earldom of Yardley

and the Knighthood of the Garter. So, whether the student can accept or

not as true the Stanier Legend, he is forced to credit Colin’s rise of

fortune which is hardly less miraculous, for certainly he was a

shepherd-boy one day, and a page of the Queen the next, and thereafter,

while still a young man, attained a position such as few subjects have

ever enjoyed. He wrote a voluminous memoir of his life which is

preserved in the library at Stanier, and, yet unpublished, contains some

very curious matter. In it he recorded without reticence or shame the

manner of his days, his ruthless cruelty and relentlessness to those who

crossed him, his building of the great house at Stanier, his ceaseless

quest for pictures and tapestries, for statues and furniture, and

described with the faithfulness of detail the bargain that he struck

with Satan, and his conviction that he owed to it all the good fortune

and prosperity that so unfailingly attended his earthly pilgrimage. That

belief was confirmed by the characters of his descendants who by his

bargain came under the diabolical protection, for in all history you

will not find a family so consistently prosperous nor one so infamous.

For more than a century after his death, the eldest son of the house

made, on his twenty-first birthday, his formal choice as to whether he

accepted for himself the legendary bargain, or dissociated himself from

it, and during that period one only, Philip, the third Earl, would have

no part in it, and he, within a month of his accession to his lordship,

was smitten with a mysterious and terrible disease of which he soon

died.

The rest all claimed their inheritance and mightily prospered, but in

the eighteenth century their belief in so extravagant a legend faded in

the light of more modern materialism. The solemn ritual of choice was

performed no more, but, though the formality was given up, the

subsequent successors to the bargain mostly acted up to the spirit of

it, and their lives, if not their lips, acknowledged it. For, in

general, their wickednesses have been as notable as their prosperity;

pity, and its greater kinsman, love, can find no seed-cranny in their

hearts where they can take root, but both alike wither in that iron

soil. The Staniers have always been loveless folk, and it is strange

that, though love is alien to their natures, they have often so madly

inspired it, and with a glance have kindled in others the fire which is

powerless to warm them. They sate their passions, and, when that is

done, toss the outworn minister away, or, if that minister is wife and

mother to their children, she freezes in the Arctic cold of

lovelessness. Many a bride has come to Stanier all ardent and a-flame,

on whom that congealing blight has fallen, which has turned her into a

figure of ice doing the honours of the house with stately courtesy,

wearing the great jewels which are the insignia of her servitude, and

bearing beautiful sons for the perpetuation of the race. The love that

adorned her advent was frozen, maybe, into hate and horror of him with

whom she was indissolubly one, and whose soul was in pawn to Satan.

The Staniers have never run to large families: two or at the most three

children have been born to the Lord Yardley of the day. In the last

generation there were three: Philip the eldest, a daughter Hester, and

Ronald, father of Violet Stanier, now Countess of Yardley. At the time

of her birth Philip, who had quarrelled with his intolerable sire, and

was still unmarried, was living at a villa he had bought on the island

of Capri with an Italian girl whom he had made his mistress. She was

with child by him, and less than a month before her delivery news came

to Philip, that this younger brother of his had begotten a daughter. He

thereupon married Rosina Biagi, who soon presented him with twin boys.

Philip telegraphed the news of his marriage and their birth to his

father, and the despatch arrived as he and Ronald, heavy drinkers both

of them, sat tipsily over their wine. Lord Yardley had had a stroke some

two years before, and now he fell forward with a crash among the glasses

and died without speech. Within a few weeks Philip’s wife died also, and

he came home with his two sons to enter on his inheritance.

Of these the elder by half an hour was Raymond, a dark and ugly fellow,

black of temper, and between him and his brother Colin, as they grew up,

flowered an implacable enmity. On Colin the gods had lavished the utmost

of their gifts; he was the beloved of his father and of all who came

near him, and Raymond, the uncouth and unpleasing, envied and detested

him. This hatred was hotly returned by the other. Raymond was an

abomination in Colin’s eyes, not only for what he was but because,

thanks to that half-hour’s seniority, he was heir to all that he himself

so passionately coveted, title and revenues and, not least, the lordship

of the wonder-house at Stanier. Through all their generations the

Staniers have adored the place: it is said that none of them is

completely happy if he is away from it for long. That passion was

shared by Violet, who was an exact contemporary of her twin-cousins, and

was brought up with them there, and it was for the sake of being its

mistress that, at the age of twenty, she promised to marry Raymond. But

her heart was already not her own to give, and, though as yet she

scarcely knew it, Colin held it.

Then he beckoned to her, and, discarding the graceless Raymond, she

married him, and forthwith, as if a lamp had suddenly been lit which

showed her his black heart, she knew that, in loving him, she loved one

in whom the Stanier Legend found such fulfilment as none of its

inheritors had manifested yet. In person he might have been the very

incarnation of their Elizabethan ancestor, who had founded the house,

for there in life was the matchless beauty of the great portrait, the

gold hair, the beautiful mouth, the dancing azure of the eyes in which

gleamed the greeting of his enchanting grace; in him blossomed the

fairest that Nature and inheritance could bestow. Luck favoured him,

even as it had favoured his ancestor, in all he did, for shortly after

his marriage Raymond was miserably doomed as he skated on the lake at

Christmas-time, and within a few months his father died also, and Colin

his son reigned in his stead. He and Violet, fair as a spring day,

numbered but forty years between them; they were an April couple with

all the splendour of the summer waiting for them.

But the dawn of love for Violet had been the dawn, too of a nightmare of

unfathomable darkness. For Colin, excelling all of his race who had been

merely indifferent to love, knew very well what love meant, and bitterly

hated it. He was not content to shrug his shoulders at it, and pass on

to gratify his pleasures, for the sweetest of them to him was love’s

discomfiture, and his joy to strike at it and wound it.... Often Violet

wished he could have killed her love for him, for then would have died

withal that eternal struggle within her between love and her horror of

him, whose soul, whether in fulfilment of the legend, or from his

inherent wickedness, was as surely Satan’s as if with his own blood he

had signed the fabled bond. Yet as often as she wished that she cried

out on herself at so blasphemous a desire, for she knew that by love

alone, though in some manner inscrutable, could redemption come to him.

That creed was inscribed on her heart’s core: it was the fabric on which

was stitched the embroidery of her days.

PART I

Colin II.

CHAPTER I

Throughout this hot afternoon of July the terrace had lain empty and

soaked in sunshine, and it was not till the shadow of the yew-hedge had

crept half-way along it from the west, that Violet Yardley stepped out

of the long window of the gallery which lay along the front of the

house. Colin was in town; he had said he might possibly return to-day,

but, if so, he would telephone. Violet had just asked if any message had

come from her husband, and it was with a feeling of relief and remission

that she had heard that there was none.

She paused in the doorway with puckered eyelids, as she emerged from the

cool dimness of the house into that reverberating brightness. She was

bareheaded, and the gold of her hair was so pierced by the sun that it

looked as if it shone from some illumination within itself. She had the

blue eyes of her race, its fineness of feature and arrogance of bearing,

and so like she was to Colin that they could still almost have repeated

that jest of his school-days when, on the occasion of a fancy-dress

ball, the two had changed costumes with each other half-way through the

evening, and had been undetected till Colin’s sudden spasm of

half-cracked laughter, when a school-friend of his had made a suitable

speech to so enchanting a girl, had given them away.... She had changed

very little since then, her figure had still the adorable slimness of

girl-hood.

There was a small encampment of chairs, with a table laid for tea at the

shady end of the terrace and she seemed to be the first to come out

from the coolness of the house. Aunt Hester would be here soon or

perhaps Violet’s father still hobbling from a rather sharp attack of

gout, and presently Dennis, her fourteen month-old baby, would be

wheeled up and down the terrace by his nurse for his evening airing, and

make some more of those intrepid experiments in voluntary locomotion,

which were meeting with an increasing but still hazardous success. He

appeared to consider his legs as an impediment more than an aid to

movement: they got in his way and caused stumbling, but he was rapidly

teaching them not to interfere. Colin would be pleased to see the

progress his young son had made in his fortnight’s absence.

Violet’s eyes wandered from the terrace to the blaze of the

flower-borders round the lawn below, and beyond to the bright surface of

the lake. So still was it and unruffled by any breeze that it might have

been covered with a sheet of ice that gleamed blue with the reflection

from the sky. At the thought of ice on the lake, there started unbidden

into her mind the memory of that terrible morning, only eighteen months

ago, when Raymond, Colin’s elder twin-brother, had taken his skates down

there and had never been seen alive again. She and his father had

followed him not long afterwards, and had found his boots on the bank,

and a great hole in the ice at the deep end by the sluice, where the

rhododendron bushes hung over the lake. It had been terrible, and was

there something more terrible yet? Had no-one ever seen Raymond alive

after the moment when he left the house? Colin had once said something

of casual application, about a drowning man coming up to the surface not

three times, as popularly supposed, but once only, and somehow that had

suggested to her that he had seen Raymond struggling in the water. There

was no cause why so ghastly an idea should ever have occurred to her; it

was more like the unsubstantial remembrance of a nightmare than a waking

thought, but it had the haunting vividness of dreams.

There came the brisk tapping of heels along the terrace and Aunt Hester

approached. She was small in stature, and carried her sixty years with a

dainty lightness. She had on a gay print dress, short in the skirt in

true modern fashion, which shewed to great advantage her neat slim

calves and tiny ankles. On her head was a broad-brimmed straw-hat, a

garden of monstrous blue convolvuluses, and her face was hidden beneath

swathes of pale pink veil. Her tripping gait suggested a bird scouring

the lawn for its breakfast, and her speech was the argot of smart young

ladies in the mid-Victorian epoch.

“Well, thank God, this wretched sun’s got behind the trees at last,” she

said, “and I can take off my veil. Sunshine’s a plague to the

complexion, my dear. How you stand it, I don’t know. Give me my cup of

tea, there’s a good girl; I’m as dry as the desert.”

She unpinned her layers of veil, as Violet poured out her tea,

disclosing the prettiest little face, pink and white, of porcelain

delicacy.

“Girls to-day ain’t got one decent skin among a score of them,” she

observed. “They go playing golf and smoking cigarettes till their faces

are like kippers, and then they make them twice as bad by smudging

themselves with rouge and powder and muck, till they’re in such a mess

as never was. How a young man nowadays can bring himself to kiss one of

them without wanting to wash his face afterwards, I don’t know. I like

my tea strong, my dear. Hope it’s been standing.”

Violet held out the cup.

“Will that do, Aunt Hester?” she asked. “Or will you wait a little?”

“No, I’ll take that,” said she, “and the next cup will be a bit

stronger. Then I shall go for my walk, and get a good perspiration, and

have my cold tub, and be ready for my dinner. That’s the way to keep

well.”

Violet laughed.

“You’re a marvel, Aunt Hester,” she said. “Colin always says he’ll never

be as young as you, even if he lives to be a hundred.”

“Colin’s a wretch,” said Aunt Hester, selecting a piece of hot buttered

bun. “He’s making fun of me, pulling my leg as they call it nowadays.

Anything been heard of him? Is he coming down to-night?”

“He hasn’t telephoned to say so.”

“Well, I wish he would. Stanier ain’t really Stanier when Colin’s not

here. I shall have to run up to town and see what he’s after; mischief

I’ll be bound. But Colin’s sunshine’s the only sunshine I’ve any use

for. Lord, how his father used to dote on him. And pleased he was, my

dear, when you gave poor Raymond the chuck, and took Colin instead.”

“I was thinking about Raymond just now,” said Violet.

“Well, I should have thought you could have found a pleasanter subject

than that,” said Lady Hester. “He was a sulky bad-tempered boy was

Raymond, and I daresay God knew best, when He let him drown. Not but

what I’m sorry for him, but as for pretending to like people just

because they’re dead, I call that bunkum, and if I ever die, my dear,

which God forbid, I hope you and Colin won’t talk any trash about me,

and say I was the model of all the virtues. Such a pack of nonsense! But

don’t let’s talk about that.”

She looked round, and her eyes sharp as a terrier’s noticed what Violet

had not seen yet. At the far end of the terrace had appeared a wheeled

chair pushed by a woman in nurse’s costume.

“Why there’s my mother,” said Lady Hester. “Fancy her coming out!”

This was indeed a most unusual appearance. Old Lady Yardley, mother of

Colin’s father, of Lady Hester and of Ronald Stanier was now seldom seen

until the hour of dinner, when she with her bath-chair was brought down

in the lift from her rooms, was wheeled into the long gallery, and, with

the help of her crutch-handled stick, transferred herself to the

brocaded chair by the fireplace near the dining-room. In the grate,

whatever the weather, a couple of logs smouldered into white ash, and by

it she sat till the rest were assembled. So she had done for sixty-three

years, when first as a bride of eighteen she came to the house, waiting

till all were ready when, according to immemorial usage, the major-domo

threw open the doors of Lord Yardley’s room at the far end of the

gallery, and he entered. That had been the custom in the days of her

father-in-law, and when her husband reigned, and when her son reigned,

up till now when Colin, her grandson, still kept up the ancestral

tradition. She seldom spoke but sat through dinner, eating in silence

what was put before her, and, in the manner of the very old, regarding

now one, now another of her companions with eyes blank and unwinking,

but half-veiled with the drooping lids of age. After dinner she played a

couple of rubbers of whist, and when they were done she was conveyed

back into the silence and sequestration of her room again. There she

remained, thickly rimed by the Stanier frost, until the hour came round

for her again to put on her jewels and her evening-gown, and wait by the

fireplace for Lord Yardley, be he father-in-law or husband or son or

grandson. Colin alone had always the power to galvanize her into life;

his presence blew away the white ash that seemed to cover her mind, as

it covered those smouldering logs in the fireplace, and disclosed some

mysterious pale fire that still burned within. She would nod and smile

at him when he kissed her, would listen with pleasure to what he said to

her, would ask him sometimes some question about his doings. She might

enquire what he had actually done to-day: equally well she might enquire

whether he had been out with Raymond, who had been dead this year and a

half, or whether his grandfather, who had fallen lifeless across the

dining-room table, on the very day that Colin was born, would make one

of their whist-table that night. Colin always had some answer that

pleased and satisfied her, and sometime next day or maybe a week

afterwards she would shew she remembered it by some further question or

comment. But she seemed to have no cognizance of any of the others,

unless she wanted to know something about Colin. She ate her dinner in

silence and in silence played her whist, and waited for the next

evening.

She was wheeled now half-way down the terrace, and there her nurse would

have turned again, but she gesticulated and pointed to where Violet and

Lady Hester were sitting.

“I can’t make out what she wants, my lady,” said the nurse to Violet.

“She told me she wished to come out. But it’s so warm, it can’t hurt

her.”

Violet went to the side of the bath-chair.

“Well, Granny,” she said. “Have you come out to have tea with Aunt

Hester and me?”

Old Lady Yardley looked at her in silence: then transferred that

unwinking gaze to Lady Hester. Lady Hester particularly disliked this

grim silent observation: it gave her ‘the creeps.’

“I’ll be going for my walk,” she said. “Whatever Mamma wants, my dear,

she doesn’t want us.”

“Where’s Colin?” asked old Lady Yardley.

“He hasn’t come, Granny,” said Violet. “I don’t think he’s coming

to-day.”

“Yes, he’s coming to-day,” said Lady Yardley. “Is he here now? Is he

with Raymond? I want Colin.”

“Granny dear, he’s in London,” said Violet. “We’ll let you know the

moment he comes.”

“Just a fad she’s got, my lady,” said the nurse.... It was impossible to

speak of old Lady Yardley as if she was there. There was no-one truly

there, unless Colin was there, too. The nurse turned to her charge.

“You’d better let me take you back to your rooms, my lady,” she said,

“and have a nice rest till dinner-time. You’ve seen for yourself that

his lordship isn’t here.”

Old Lady Yardley paid not the smallest attention to this. “I shall wait

for Colin on the terrace,” she said to Violet. “I shall wait there till

Colin comes. He is coming.”

“Wheel her up and down then,” said Violet to the nurse.

To Aunt Hester’s great relief, old Lady Yardley consented to have her

chair turned round, and be wheeled away again.

“She gives me the creeps, my dear,” said Aunt Hester, “though I know

she’s my own mother. But there it is! Ever since I can remember she was

cold and dead: the iceberg your Uncle Philip and I used to call her. A

beautiful woman she was, too: it’s strange that your Uncle Philip and

your father were such plain men.”

“You took all her good looks, Aunt Hester,” said Violet. Aunt Hester

loved firm little compliments, laid on with the full spade.

“Well, I had my share of them,” she said, “but beauty ran to prettiness

in me, and that’s a sad seeding. The Stanier style skipped my

generation, and I daresay that’s why it came out strong in the next.

Your Uncle Philip and your father, as I say, two plain men if ever there

was one, and yet one was the father of Colin, and the other of you. You

two have got it all: that’s what’s happened. There was never such a

pair of Staniers as you, and as like as two peas. Make haste, my dear,

and have a dozen sons and daughters, and there’ll be a dinner-table

worth photographing when you’ve got your family growing up. Let them all

be as wicked as hell, and as long as they have the good looks of their

mother and father I’ll forgive ’em. There are enough plain folk in the

world already who can be models of piety, but when I see a handsome boy,

I want to see him kissing a pretty girl, as I’m too old for him now.”

“Aunt Hester, you’re a pagan,” observed Violet.

“I always was, my dear,” said she, “and it’s pagans who make the world

go round. It ain’t for long that anyone’s fit to look at, so, while

youth lasts, for God’s sake let them make the most of it. There’ll be

time for them to lead a godly life when no-one asks them to do anything

else. That’s what I say.”

With which atrocious sentiments, Aunt Hester walked briskly off to get

her good perspiration to prepare her for her cold tub and her dinner.

* * * * *

The Staniers had always been patriarchal folk, and indeed in that

immense house there was room for the exercise of this family virtue,

without any inconvenient jostling of the generations: it was an asylum

and almshouse for the antiquated members of the family. Four generations

indeed were now installed there: old Lady Yardley represented the

earliest, and next in succession came her two children, Lady Hester and

Ronald Stanier with his wife, all of whom inhabited what Colin called

the Dowager-wing. If he wished to say something special about Violet’s

father, he called it the Home for Inebriates, or if her mother had to be

characterized, the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen. Old Lady Yardley was a

permanent inmate: since her husband’s death twenty-one years ago, she

had never left Stanier, and Ronald, Violet’s father, was scarcely less

constant, for he only absented himself for a curative month at Aix or

Marienbad every August, which should enable him to continue eating and

drinking too much for the remainder of the year, or passed an occasional

fortnight in his much less comfortable flat in town. When there he spent

most of his time at his Club presenting the back of his head to St.

James’s Street, and dozing over a succession of morning and evening

papers: the morning and evening papers were for him the current day.

When Colin and his wife were in London, he would still stay on here,

dining nightly in silence with his mother, and sitting with her

afterwards, nodding and snorting under her steady and malevolent gaze

till she was wheeled off by her nurse, and he would fuddle the rest of

the evening away over a couple of cigars and the whisky bottle.

Ronald’s wife, Margaret, also was usually in residence here, an eclipsed

and negligible presence, whom it was difficult to be aware of, and

impossible to miss. There had never been any real parental or filial

relationship between her and Violet. She behaved with controlled

propriety on all occasions, sad or festive, and emotion withered in her

immaculate vicinity. The Stanier frost which falls on those who marry

into that family had long ago congealed her: there was no telling what

(if anything) lay beneath that cold chalky surface. She drank hot water

with her meals (though it never thawed her), always replied if spoken

to, took a walk every morning in the Park, if the day was fine, and if

not, sat in her sitting-room in the Dowager’s wing and played Patience.

Her career in life was to write out the menu-cards for the dinner-table

in French, with accents where required. Violet made occasional efforts

to get in touch with her, but there was nothing to touch; her hand

merely became numb with the cold mist in which it groped. Margaret

Stanier went with her husband to Aix for his yearly cure: she kept house

for him in London, but for the greater part of the year they were here,

not welcome exactly, but not unwelcome, merely part of the house like

stair-carpets in unfrequented passages which were sometimes taken up,

and then laid down again. It had always been so at Stanier: brothers and

sons of earlier generations were part of the house, if they chose to

make themselves so, until the day came when they were borne on their

short journey to the family vault in the church that stood not two

hundred yards away.

Lady Hester was the fourth but less chronic inhabitant of the Dowager’s

wing, for she had still a lively appreciation of the gaieties and stir

of life, and chiefly confined her visits to the times when “that wretch”

Colin made things “go a bit.” “For where’s the use, my dear,” she used

to say, “in my sitting to be stared at by Mamma, or in watching poor

Ronald fuddle himself? I like a bit more spunk than that.” But she, like

Violet, like Colin, like her brother, had that feeling about Stanier,

just the place itself, which for generations all the family have shared.

To them all it meant something intimate and indefinable, something for

which Violet, for instance, had been willing to marry the dark uncouth

Raymond, if, by that, she might become mistress of the house. True, that

had not been required of her: she had married Hyperion instead of the

Satyr, and had harvested love and that deep-set terror that prowled

about in the darkness below these magnificent surfaces. Had she been

challenged as to whether she believed in the legend in any literal

sense, she would perhaps have denied it, but she would have given her

soul to deny that, as regards Colin, there was no spiritual significance

in it. Whether it was actually true or not, did not matter: that

belonged to the dust of mediævalism. But there was a darkness deeper

than that.... None of the others, not Aunt Hester with her gay paganism,

not old Lady Yardley with her half-closed eyes and steady gaze, knew

Colin as she knew him. They saw the charm of him, the beauty, the

sunshine of his gaiety, and just occasionally winced under the quick

lash of his tongue. But none of them shuddered at what lay below his

sunshine.

* * * * *

There came out of the gallery door that presence which alone had power

to scare off these black ill-omened birds of thought from Violet’s mind.

Here was the fourth of the generations that inhabited the house, Dennis

in his perambulator being wheeled out for his evening airing and for

whatever fresh discoveries about the use of legs might reward his

daring. Just as he came out, the bath-chair with its withdrawn and

antique occupant was passing the door, and dramatically enough, so it

seemed to Violet, the two were face to face across the gulf of eighty

years which divided them, both attended and conveyed, the one owing to

the infirmity of faded energies, the other from the immaturity of them.

Occasionally old Lady Yardley seemed to take some notice of Dennis; the

faint dawning of the smile with which she looked on his father, would

begin to hover on her mouth, and the heavy eyelids lifted a little.

To-day, as Violet saw, that blink of recognition was there, but

immediately Lady Yardley’s face clouded again. “No, that’s not Colin,”

she said to her nurse, “but he’s coming.” Then as the bath-chair in its

peregrinations came close to the tea-table again her eyes were alert to

see if he was there, but for Violet they had no spark of recognition. It

was always for Colin that she searched: no-one else could reward that

silent scrutiny.

Violet got up when the bath-chair had turned and gone back, for here was

the perambulator with Dennis in it. Her baby was the emblem and

incarnation of those early days of her marriage, before she believed in

that spiritual fulfilment of the legend which since had clouded the fair

morning of her love with its gross darkness, and there lived for her

again the hours when Colin was her adored lover in Southern nights at

Capri, where, at his father’s villa, they had spent their honeymoon.

Dennis was to her the untainted blossom of those days.

There he was, drumming with his hands on the apron of his perambulator,

demanding with shrill cheerful crowings to be let out to make fresh

discoveries about the laws of motion. He saw her coming towards him and

the crowings swelled into enraptured squeals.

“Take him out, Nurse,” said Violet. “Now, Dennis, come and walk to me.”

That was precisely what Dennis wanted to do if he could, but the squeals

subsided over the extreme seriousness of the undertaking. He stood,

swaying slightly, as his nurse’s arms released him, and regarding with

fixed attention the two dimpled sandalled feet which certainly had some

share in the proposed excursion, though it was still a matter of doubt

as to what that share was. After having examined them both, he decided

to put his best foot foremost. This was a complete success, and he

shouted “Daddy!” which wasn’t quite so clever. That effort somehow

disturbed his equilibrium, and he fell down.

“Clumsy,” said his mother. “Try again, Dennis.”

Dennis had not the slightest intention of trying again just now. There

was a crack between two paving-stones which was more interesting than

the problems of locomotion. But destiny, in the habiliment of his nurse,

set him on his feet and Violet moved a little nearer in order to make

the tremendous gulf of yards that separated them yawn less impossibly.

Then staggering like a ship at sea, he launched himself again, and after

a wild semi-circular career he fell against her skirts.

But exploration is exhausting work, taxing to the nerves and imagination

as much as to the muscles, and presently he was wheeled away again for

bath and bed. But still up and down the terrace, now pausing, now moving

on again, went Lady Yardley’s bath-chair, as she waited for Colin to

come and bring her back out of the mists where she moved into the clear

twilight, which, though veiled and dim, rendered visible the phantoms

that peopled it. But when the dressing-bell sounded she spoke:

“Take me in,” she said. “Colin will be here for dinner, and I must not

be late.”

* * * * *

To-night Ronald Stanier was the first down. He had been something of a

buck in his earlier years, and the habit of impressing the world with

his gallant appearance, had remained with him though dishevelling age

and a remarkable fondness for food and drink had rendered his task more

difficult. His forehead and crown were completely bald, but he grew his

hair, of a bright suspicious auburn and unflecked by any line of grey,

very long on one side of his head, and espaliered it carefully over the

shiny pink skin of his pate. He wore clothes that were meant to make him

look slim, but only succeeded in looking tight themselves; a monocle, a

large solitaire and a carnation were the other salient points of his

decorative scheme. His face, loose and fleshy, had a trampled look about

it, as of a muddy lane over which a flock of sheep had passed: he limped

a little as he came down the gallery. His wife, thin and dry, followed

him shortly after, and presently old Lady Yardley was wheeled in. She

took no notice whatever of the others, and, with the help of her stick,

transferred herself to the brocaded chair by the fireplace, where that

invariable couple of logs sent up a vacillating thread of blue smoke.

Why on so hot a night a fire should have been there was beyond

conjecture; but so it always was: perhaps a hundred years ago someone,

when they assembled here for dinner, had unexpectedly found the room

chilly.

They all sat silent. Why should any of them speak, and put somebody else

to the trouble of a reply? Nothing had happened since, twenty-four hours

ago, they had last met here: no fresh interest had stirred the toneless

tranquillity. Ronald’s slight attack of gout was certainly better, and

he meant to drink his port again to-night: his wife’s Patience had ‘come

out’ twice; as for Lady Yardley, was she living in to-day at all, or in

times long buried beneath the years? Then Lady Hester joined them, brisk

from her walk and her ‘tub.’ She asked Ronald how he was, she told them

where she had been, and then she, too, succumbed, and sat silent. Violet

followed, made a general apology for being late, and the doors into the

dining-room were thrown open.

“Will you take Grandmamma in?” she said to her father, and the other

three followed.

Though the evening sky was still radiant, and there was light enough to

have dined with unshuttered windows, curtains were drawn and the room

lit with many candles, for Staniers dined by candlelight, quantities of

candlelight, whatever the sun happened to be doing. Round the panelled

walls were a dozen family portraits, each with its concealed electric

illumination that made them look as if they had stepped forward from the

walls, and were part of that little knot of their heirs and inheritors

who sat round the table. For all their unbroken continuity, the Staniers

had always grown on a slender stem, and to-night, with Dennis rosily

sleeping upstairs on the floor above, only Colin was wanting to complete

the full number of the clan. From generation to generation all

collateral lines descended from daughters or younger sons had died out,

but the silver cord of the direct descent had never been broken. Now

from the walls, the past ages joined the present: here seated in the

soft glow of candles was the fruit and distillation of the years, Ronald

with his heavy wine-bibber’s face, Hester, in whom, as she had said,

beauty had run to seed in prettiness, and Violet. The other two,

Ronald’s wife and old Lady Yardley, had been, so to speak, but the fuel

that made the Stanier fire burn. The younger, Violet’s mother, was no

more than a burned-out cinder in the grate, she had done her part, and

the dustman would sometime call and remove her; the elder, watchful and

alive below the ash, still glowed with some inscrutable vigour. Through

her had passed the spark that now blazed in Colin and Violet alike, and

something of it still lived in her embers. For more than sixty years,

Stanier and all that it stood for had soaked into her: she had become a

sort of incarnation of the Stanier consciousness, and, sunk far below

the surface, except when Colin was present, into whose gay hands she

could resign her watchful responsibility, she witnessed and recorded.

The stately silent meal went on, unutterably dull, and impeccably

exquisite. A vagabond or a hungry tramp would almost have preferred to

go unfed than to have his cravings so joylessly satisfied, but then the

Staniers were not tramps or vagabonds, and this was the way they had

dinner. Alone with Aunt Hester or even with the additional incumbrance

of her father and mother, Violet could have hoisted the standard of

ordinary human sociability, and made a normal little festival of the

meal, but neither she nor Aunt Hester could struggle long, without the

dispelling influence of Colin’s beam, against that paralyzing effect of

old Lady Yardley’s presence, her silence and her steady watchfulness. It

was like talking in the presence of an open coffin, where lay something

corpse-like yet alive....

Violet, as usual, had begun dinner with her invariable effort to pull

them all out of that deadly pit into which they nightly descended.

“Dennis walked at least ten yards this evening, Mamma, without falling

down once,” she said to Mrs. Stanier. “Colin will be surprised to see

how he has got on.”

For a second Lady Yardley’s eyelids flickered at the name of Colin.

“He will get on quickly now,” said Mrs. Stanier. “When babies once begin

to walk, they soon pick it up.”

This was a very just observation but lacked any initiative touch.

“I think he’s rather forward,” said Violet. “He’s only fourteen months

old.”

“Yes, just fourteen months,” said Mrs. Stanier. “Fancy!”

Violet wheeled to Lady Hester.

“And where did you go, Aunt Hester?” she said. “Did you find any

coolness? It’s the hottest day we’ve had this year.”

“Yes, my dear, it’s like an oven,” said Lady Hester. “I hate the summer.

It broils my bones, and then there’s a thunder-storm, which scares me

stiff.”

“Yes, a glass of sherry,” said Ronald. He took up the menu-card and held

it up to his monocled eye.

A short silence fell. Violet tried again.

“And when are you going off to Aix, father?” she said. “I hear it’s

tremendously full this year.”

“Next week,” said Ronald.

Violet let her eyes sweep round the pictured walls. Just opposite her

was the picture of Colin, painted by the most famous artist of the day.

He more than any of the other portraits seemed to have drawn close to

the dinner-table. He had stepped boldly forth, in another moment he

would be standing at old Lady Yardley’s elbow....

Lady Hester made an effort. The midges had bitten her during her walk,

and she felt what she would have called ‘scratchy.’

“Well, I could never see the sense of filling yourself up with stinking

waters,” she said, “and being pounded as if you were a heap of clothes

at the wash.”

Ronald put down his menu-card. Always he pretended not to be deaf.

“Beg your pardon, Hester?” he said.

There are many things which it is easy to say once but impossible to

repeat. This seemed one of them, and the next silence was rather longer.

“You will like your game of whist to-night, Granny?” asked Violet at

length.

Lady Yardley did not answer. She held up her finger as if listening, not

to what Violet said but to something inaudible to the others. Then she

turned to the butler.

“Give me my stick,” she said. “I hear wheels. That is Colin.”

“No, Granny, he’s not coming to-night,” said Violet.

Lady Yardley grasped her stick and had half-risen from her place, when

there came a step along the gallery floor, and the door opened.

“It is Colin,” said she.

Colin entered: it was as if the sunlight came in with him. The room

seemed to leap into brightness.

“Ah, what a dreadful time to arrive!” he said. “Don’t get up anybody, or

I shall go away again. Violet, darling! How blessed to see you! Granny,

my dear Granny! Aunt Hester ... everybody. Just push me a chair in, and

let me sit down with you. Where shall it be put? I don’t know. I want to

sit next everybody.”

He sat down between old Lady Yardley and Hester, and ran his hand

through his hair.

“I’m dusty, I’m dirty, I’m dishevelled,” he said, “but I needn’t go and

wash, need I, Granny? I want dinner. Don’t send me away to wash, and

brush my hair, as you used to do when I was little.”

“I knew you were coming, Colin,” she said. “I told them all you were

coming.”

“You’re a witch, Granny,” he said. “I’m not sure you oughtn’t to be

burned. You shall have your game of whist afterwards, and then we’ll

make a fire of the cards and burn you. But you expected me, didn’t you?

I telephoned, or somebody telephoned surely?”

Colin knew that he had not telephoned, or told anybody to telephone: the

fact that his statement was not true, made a mild reason for uttering

it. It had only occurred to him a couple of hours ago to come down, and

he had driven straight off with Nino, his young Italian servant. The

image of Stanier, spacious and cool among its woods, had drifted across

the reek of the grilling streets, and gave him the impulse: he never

resisted an impulse....

“Darling Aunt Hester,” he said, “I couldn’t get on without you a minute

more. Everyone in London was old and cross, and I wanted to feel young

again. Good gracious me, have you got to dessert already? You mustn’t

wait for me. My fault for being so late. Uncle Ronald will keep me

company over his wine. No, I don’t want any soup. Give me some cold ham

or something. Granny, I’m going to be like you for the future, and

never leave Stanier any more. We’ll grow old together.”

She was leaning forward, listening to him, and laid her hand on his.

“No, Colin, you must never grow old,” she said. “You mustn’t grow old or

die. It isn’t good to die. And you haven’t brought Raymond with you,

have you? I don’t want Raymond.”

Colin patted her hand.

“No, he’s not come with me,” he said. “He couldn’t manage to come.”

He spoke quickly and low to Violet.

“Get up, dear, and take her away,” he said. “I want to have my dinner in

peace.”

“What is that you’re saying, Colin?” asked Lady Yardley.

“Nothing, Granny. Now you go and sit in the gallery, and presently we’ll

have our game of whist.”

“But I want to have my dinner with you,” said she.

Something ugly and impatient gleamed in those blue eyes of his for a

moment, but it sheathed itself again.

“Nonsense, Granny,” he said. “You’ve had your dinner.”

Violet had come round the table.

“Won’t you let her stop with you,” she said quietly. “She’s been looking

out for you all the evening.”

“No, darling, I won’t,” he said. “Not much competition for her, eh, Vi?

Take her away.... Go on, Granny, Violet’s waiting for you. Uncle Ronald

and I will come after you when we’ve had a glass of wine together.”

The door closed behind the women, and Colin sat down again.

“Granny seems to be immortal,” he observed. “That’s a great score.

She’ll see you and me into our graves, Uncle Ronald. The gout’s better,

I’m glad to see, and permits you to have port again. Have some more?”

“Well, perhaps another glass, while you’re eating your dinner,” said

Ronald. He was never very comfortable alone with Colin, but he wanted

port. Though not a person of very quick perception, he felt as if he was

in the presence of some lithe fierce creature, which might suddenly

snap at him. When other people were there, they served as bars.

“That’s right,” said Colin. “You see if you can get through a bottle of

port by the time I’ve finished dinner. I’ll bet that you can. Aren’t we

a sadly degenerated race, Uncle Ronald? I hardly ever touch wine. Tell

me about the old days when you and my grandfather used to sit soaking at

this table hour after hour. Bring another bottle of port,” he said to

the butler.

“No, indeed, Colin, there’s plenty here,” said Ronald. “Just one glass

more for me, and then I’ve done.”

Colin felt himself scintillating with evil purpose. The atmosphere, the

environment of Stanier was always charged with currents that vivified

and stimulated him. If no more subtle entertainment offered itself at

the moment, he could at least induce Uncle Ronald to drink more than was

good for him. Perhaps he would get tipsy, perhaps his gout would begin

jabbing him again: it would all afford amusement.

“Oh, I know what your one glass more means,” he said. “Besides you’re

going to Aix soon, and that will set it right. I think I must learn to

drink, for there’s clearly pleasure in it, and it is criminal to deny

oneself a pleasure. Ah, there’s the fresh bottle. Sunshine, you know,

Uncle Ronald. It was the sunshine that brooded over some vineyard before

I was born that produced that wine. Without the sunshine there would

never have been any wine that year. There’s romance for you! That’s not

a bottle of wine really: it’s a bottle of sunshine and the warm air of

the South. Just what’s so good for gout.”

Ronald took a few seconds to follow the course of this admirable

reasoning; then he gave an appreciative chuckle.

“Upon my word, that’s a new way of looking at it,” he said. “Makes it

seem as if it will be positively good for me.”

“Of course it will,” said Colin. “That’s the whole system of modern

physics. If you think anything is good for you, it does you good.”

Ronald clapped his loose lips to the glass, and smacked them.

“Nectar!” he said. “You miss a lot, Colin, by not joining me. But not a

word to your Aunt Margaret, mind--I should get a scolding if she knew I

had had more than one glass.”

“No, I won’t tell her,” said Colin. “We’ll see if she discovers it

without being told.”

Ronald, twiddling the stem of his wine-glass, faintly wondered what

Colin meant. Certainly it was a wonderful bottle of port that had been

brought him, and it did not matter much what Colin meant. He emptied his

glass and with an absent air refilled it again.

“Much going on in town?” he asked. “Dances? Dinners? Ah, when I was a

young fellow I don’t suppose I dined at home once in a month, nor got

back there till three or four in the morning.”

Colin found his fingers twitching with sudden dislike of this buckish

old wine-bibber. Why, after all, did he let him and his thin-lipped

scarecrow wife feed and board themselves here? Her return for her keep

was to write out the menu-cards, his to consume, as fast as was

reasonable to expect of any one man, all the best bins. True, it was a

custom in great houses at one time to keep a professional fool on the

premises for entertainment, but when he became a bore, you sent him down

to the scullery, or wherever he lived. He must really consider the

question of conveying to Uncle Ronald and his wife that their visit had

been rather a long one, for they had lived here since before Violet’s

birth. He might begin now.

“Oh, it’s been quite lively,” he said. “And I daresay you’ll have a gay

autumn. I suppose you and Aunt Margaret will settle down in London when

you get back from Aix.”

Ronald finished his glass in rather a hurry.

“Bless me, no,” he said, “there’s no thought of that. My London gaieties

are over, but for a week or two occasionally, and naturally I couldn’t

think of leaving your grandmother.”

Again Colin’s fingers twitched with dislike. Why should he at this

moment be sitting here with this boring old man with his tremulous hand

and his plastered hair, who couldn’t think of ever leaving Stanier? He

might be assisted to think of it....

“Couldn’t you indeed?” he said. “Why, of course, that settles it,

doesn’t it? Let me fill your glass for you.”

Ronald made a clumsy feint of putting his hand over the bowl.

“No, upon my word, not a drop more,” he said.

Colin inserted the lip of the decanter between his glass and the

covering hand, and filled it up again.

“Of course that settles it,” he repeated.

This reiterated observation seemed to give Ronald food for thought. He

began to see that Colin might be speaking ironically; he did sometimes.

But his glass was full again, and it was wiser not to pursue an

uncomfortable topic at a convivial hour. Better to be genial and

companionable.

“And if you haven’t filled up my glass again!” he said. “Well, Stanier

was always a hospitable house, and very worthily, my dear fellow, you

carry on the tradition.”

Colin got up. Uncle Ronald’s little doxology might be brought to bear on

the hospitality he had enjoyed for so many years.

“Kind of you to say so, but I have my limits,” he observed. “Perhaps you

had better finish your wine, Uncle Ronald, or we shall have my

grandmother back looking for you. You mustn’t leave her, as you said

just now.”

Ronald got to his feet. He was still a little lame, and Colin moved

towards him.

“You’d better take my arm,” he said. “Or Aunt Margaret will see you’ve

had another glass of port without anybody telling her.”

Ronald gave his gross chuckle.

“That would be a singular thing,” he said, “if a Stanier couldn’t carry

the drop of wine I’ve drunk without inconvenience. It’s only the fag-end

of my attack of gout that makes me lame.”

Colin, however, pressed a friendly arm on him, and together they went

into the gallery.

“Granny dear, we’ve left you a long time,” said he, “but Uncle Ronald

was so amusing that I couldn’t tear myself away. Now, Uncle Ronald, you

sit quietly there on the sofa.”

Colin steered his uncle to the sofa, thus conveying the impression that

there was need for guidance.

“Now, Granny,” he said, “we’ll get to our whist. Whom shall we ask to

play with us? Here’s Violet and Aunt Margaret; oh, that leaves Aunt

Hester out.”

Aunt Hester instantly disclaimed any desire to play. She had got hold of

a number of ‘_Vogue_,’ with a very dainty picture of a young lady on the

cover, with a hat that she thought would suit her....

At half-past ten old Lady Yardley’s bath-chair was wheeled in for her,

and as soon as the second rubber came to an end she was taken off.

Ronald had already left his sofa and drifted away, without doubt to the

smoking-room. Aunt Hester, who had cut into the second rubber, gathered

up her winnings.

“And I’ll be off, too,” she said, “or I shall lose my beauty-sleep.

Bless me, have I won all those silver shillings! Somebody will want to

marry me for my money.”

“Aunt Hester knows that every handsome young man in London would like to

marry her if she hadn’t a penny,” observed Colin.

“You’re a sad rascal,” said Aunt Hester, fearfully pleased. “Goodnight,

everybody.”

Aunt Margaret followed, and Violet would have done so, but at the door

Colin stopped her.

“Not five minutes’ chat, Vi?” he said. “I haven’t had a word with you

all the evening.... Ah, that’s dear of you. Come out on the terrace.

Let’s take a stroll. I want to talk to you.”

“Anything special?” asked Violet.

“Oh, just bits of things. Mayn’t a man want to talk to his wife

sometimes?”

He paused for a moment as they stepped out. The moonlight shone

full-orbed on the front of the house in vivid but colourless

illumination, making a warm neutral tone of its mellow redness. Below

the lake gleamed silver grey, across it was ruled the velvet blackness

of the yew-hedge, and beyond, the marsh stretched level to the sea.

Colin’s eyes sparkled as he looked on the heritage that he loved, but

came back quickly to Violet.

“My word, you’re a beautiful woman!” he said. “I was in luck, wasn’t I,

with my wooing? Did you hear Granny ask me if Raymond had come? I wish

he had. I often wish Raymond was here to look on our happiness.”

He took her arm, and began walking towards the yew-hedge. Stanier always

stimulated him to be himself, and it was through some little revelation

of himself that he could most surely make her wince.

“I often thought of telling you something about Raymond,” he said,

“which perhaps you never guessed. Do you know I actually saw him drown?

Only just for a second but such an interesting one. I can see it now,

like some scene on the movies. I had gone down to the lake after him,

heard the crash of the ice, and there he was in the water. There was

nothing to be done. If I had jumped in after him I should only have

drowned as well, and you wouldn’t have liked that. Nor would I.”

Violet felt herself shudder, not at what Colin had done or what he had

not done but at what he _was_.... That trembling passed down the bare

arm in which Colin had linked his.

“That’s not really news to me,” she said. “I guessed it.”

Colin pressed her arm.

“I wondered if you had,” he said. “Characteristic of me, wasn’t it, to

be in at the death. My dear, how horrified you are at me. You’re

trembling. I rather like your being horrified at me, and yet I rather

resent it. What odd people we are, to be sure.... Are you glad to see

me, Vi? Pleased I came down? Rather a difficult question, isn’t it? I

make you shudder sometimes; I make you freeze. And yet you love me.

That’s what tortures you.... Look, there’s the door in the yew hedge! It

was exactly there you stood, when you found out you loved me. And the

next morning you threw Raymond over. I adored that morning. However,

we’ll leave these romantic reminiscences, and come on to this evening.

Cigarette? My God, Violet, what an evening!”

He offered her his case, and then took one himself, nursing the match in

his hollowed hands. His face vividly lit, glowed with some elfish glee.

“What a menagerie!” he said. “I don’t suppose if you searched through

all England, and goodness knows there are monstrosities enough

everywhere, that you’d find such a collection. The whole lot of them

ought to go into Barnum’s show. Look at Granny! She would be the

‘World-famous Animated Corpse.’ She’s not alive, she’s been dead for

centuries, and I’ve got some uncanny power of animating her. Is she

immortal, do you think?--- an immortal corpse? Will she see us all out?

I shouldn’t wonder.”

Colin sat down on a bench by the yew hedge drawing Violet gently with

him.

“But after all she only comes on for her evening ‘turn,’” he said, “and

it rather amuses me to hear her talk about Raymond. She’s almost a

museum piece, isn’t she? They’ll send down from the British Museum some

day, and say her case is ready for her, and they’ll put her in some room

full of Anglo-Saxon remains. Really I’m rather proud of her: she’s a

bore, of course, but there are worse things than bores. Aunt Hester, for

instance. What an awful old woman! What a grizzly kitten! She’s prinking

before the glass now, I’ll bet, because I said all the handsome young

men in London were in love with her. There’s an object lesson for you,

as to how not to grow old. A cocotte of sixty--I think I shall tell Nino

to make love to her. She would marry him, I’m sure, if he asked her.”

Colin paused, and Violet could guess what was coming next.

“Yet there’s a sort of entertainment about Aunt Hester,” he said. “It

amuses me to see how silly and preposterous she can be. But what about

your deadly old father, darling? What can be said for Uncle Ronald?”

He waited to see if Violet could find anything to say for Uncle Ronald.

“Don’t bother your head over trying to find a decent point about him,”

he said. “It’s so comfortable being able to talk him over quite frankly

with you, because you’ve never had the slightest real feeling for him,

and so I can say what’s in my mind without fear of hurting you. And

probably I know him better than you, for it’s my privilege to sit over

the table with him when you’ve taken the female part of the menagerie

out of dinner, and to see him at his most characteristic moments. He’s

really himself you know then, when I entice him out of his eclipse of

sobriety, and he gets a little squiffy. He comes out then: the shadow

of temperance passes off his bloated old face.”

She interrupted him, still shuddering at him.

“Ah, you’re dreadful!” she said. “Why do you let him get like that? You

encourage him to: it amuses you in some horrible manner to see him

degrade himself.”

“Lord! He doesn’t need much encouragement,” said Colin. “I fancy he

encourages himself quite sufficiently when I’m not there to help him.

To-morrow I shall just look at the cellar-book, and see how much he has

encouraged himself since I’ve been away. Don’t misunderstand me now,

wilfully or unintentionally, and think that I grudge him drinking a

bottle or two of port every night, even though he’s rapidly finishing

all the 1860 vintage which is quite irreplaceable. What I object to is

that I should have to sit there and see him growing more purple and

nauseous while he’s doing it. But clearly, as long as he’s with us, I

can’t be so inhospitable as to stint my own uncle and your father of the

only thing he cares about. Certainly I wish he would take to whisky, so

that other guests of mine might get a few glasses of wine before he has

finished it all, but Uncle Ronald doesn’t begin on whisky till he goes

to the smoking-room.... The filthy old pig. Cigarette, darling? It will

soothe you.”

Violet got up.

“Colin, I can’t stay and listen to you talking about my father like

that,” she said. “It amuses you to make him drink, and it’s horrible of

you.”

Colin lit his cigarette with great deliberation.

“Well, if you can’t stay and listen to me,” he said, “you can go away.

But you’re not going: you want to hear what I’ve got to say next. Ah!

You sit down again, I notice.”

He threw the match away, and again put his arm through Violet’s.

“I don’t grudge him his wine,” he said, “because I want everybody to do

as he pleases. He may drink himself into his grave as soon as he likes

or sooner for all I care, and in fact I give him the shovel, so to

speak, to dig himself in. But what I do grudge is the damnable

infliction of his company on me. And Uncle Ronald seems to think that

Stanier belongs to him. I hinted, ever so gently to-night, that I

supposed he would settle down in London when he comes back from Aix,

and he said that was out of the question, because he couldn’t possibly

think of leaving Granny. Now I hated that. To begin with Granny has no

more use for him than she has for a toothache, and also it’s quite

untrue. Supposing Granny--it doesn’t seem likely--were to die, he

wouldn’t dream of leaving Stanier, unless I kicked him out. And what I

hated most was his notion that he has a right to live at Stanier, and

guzzle and snore his days away. He’s got a house in London; let him go

and live there, and since he can’t leave Granny, I suppose he’ll take

her with him. Aunt Margaret will go too then, though it doesn’t matter

what Aunt Margaret does, as it’s impossible to tell whether she’s there

or not. Sometimes I’m afraid of sitting down on her by mistake: it’s

dreadfully difficult to be aware of her. Of course when one is aware of

her, she’s a crashing bore. She fills up space somehow, without putting

anything there. Such a lady, too! All her nature is swallowed up in

being a lady. After all, Vi, they’ve paid Stanier a nice long visit.

Something over twenty years, off and on, and chiefly on. But isn’t it

time almost that the menagerie went to a new place? Barnum used to

travel, you know: they all do.”

Violet had never contemplated any possibility of such a thing, nor

imagined that Colin would. Always at Stanier there had been this

background of relatives; what would it be like to be here alone with

Colin? As if he had heard her unspoken thought, he answered it.

“And you and I are never together alone, Vi,” he said. “Never since our

honeymoon at Capri have we been alone.”

“Do you want to be?” she asked.

He laughed.

“No, darling: I should hate it. I only wanted to see how you would look

if I suggested it. You looked just as I imagined you would. But I

daresay that won’t often happen: don’t be alarmed.... Now I’ve inserted

into Uncle Ronald’s mind the notion that perhaps, when he comes back to

England from Aix, he might live at his own charges for a bit, and I want

you to-morrow, to touch on it again. In a little while he will get it

into his head.... Not at once, of course: one couldn’t expect that. Tell

him he may take away all the 1860 port that he hasn’t already drunk.

That may be an inducement, or there mayn’t be much in it: I will go

through the cellar-book. Granny, I’m afraid, won’t go with him, though

he can’t leave her. We shall have a lot of people here all the autumn, I

expect, and Uncle Ronald isn’t--well, he isn’t really up to parties any

more. He behaves as if he was alone: he makes windy noises in his

throat. And we’ll begin to ask Aunt Hester for certain dates, don’t you

know: the twelfth to the seventeenth, underlined.”

“Stanier has always been a home to the older generation,” said Violet.

“I don’t know how Father will take it.”

“He’ll take it neat, probably,” said Colin. “But I really don’t see why,

because Stanier has always been a geological museum for family fossils,

it should continue to be. That’s all about that, darling. Please do as I

tell you. Ah, and how’s Dennis?”

“Very flourishing, and learning to walk so quickly.”

“That’s good. And any signs of character yet emerging?” asked Colin.

“Only the desire to investigate and explore.... Colin, about the other

matter----”

He interrupted her.

“I know what you are going to say, darling,” he said. “You will tell me

to do my own dirty work, though, of course, you’ll put it much more

politely. Was that it?”

“Yes. It’s your house, and if you choose to turn my father and mother

out you must do it yourself.”

Colin patted her hand.

“Well, well: don’t let us quarrel on the very evening I come home,” he

said. “I just note that you don’t intend to do as I ask you, but I

daresay you’ll be very glad to before long. Now about Dennis. He likes

investigating and exploring, does he? That’s like me. We must feed him

with plenty of material, direct his attention, as he grows, to all sorts

of things. Early impressions are so important: they form a child’s

character and mind, so psycho-analysts say. And you never can tell what

may be impressing itself. I must see a lot of Dennis.”

He laughed quietly to himself, a soft purring laugh, and a sudden wave

of terror came over her at this beautiful and awful boy--he looked no

more than a boy--whom she loathed and loved. To her there was something

sinister and menacing in his saying that he must see a lot of Dennis,

that a child’s character was determined by its early impression. What

impressions would he feed Dennis with?...

“Oh, Colin,” she cried, clutching at his hand, “for God’s sake, let

Dennis escape the curse of the legend. Don’t make him evil....”

Colin threw back his head and laughed aloud.

“Was there ever such a ridiculous woman?” he cried. “What on earth do

you mean? You speak as if I was intending to mix brandy with his milk to

give him a taste for drink, or bid him look at Aunt Hester to get a

taste for cocottes, or at dear Aunt Margaret to stunt his intelligence.

Really, darling, the moon must be exercising a lunatic influence on you.

You’re not very complimentary, you know; in fact I should say you were

damned rude, only I never say that sort of thing. You tell me I’m a

wicked fellow with a taste for corrupting the mind of a baby at the

bottle. Let’s go indoors, or there’ll be a mad-woman to add to the

menagerie.”

CHAPTER II

Colin woke next morning to a serene sense of well-being; while still too

drowsy to question himself on the cause of this sunny sleepy happiness,

he knew it was there. Then he remembered that he was at Stanier, which

alone might account for this content at waking, and one after another

fresh interests and anticipated amusements came bubbling into his mind.

That talk with Violet in the moonlight last night embodied several of

them, but there was another which interested him more.

He drew himself up in bed, and took from the table by it a great pile of

typewritten sheets, the perusal of which had caused him so late and

absorbed a session last night. There was the transcript, now made for

the first time, of the memoirs written by his Elizabethan ancestor, to

whom and to whose bargain the fortunes of the house were wondrously due.

When last he went to London he had taken the original volume with him

for reproduction in more legible form, for the text was written in a

strange, crabbed hand, the ink of which was dim with age, and was so

difficult to follow, that the mere decipherment of it occupied the mind

to the exclusion of the appreciation of the text. But the fragments

which he had puzzled out were so sprightly and entertaining that he had

determined to procure a less distracted study of the whole.

Colin had read last night with fascinated glee the account of the early

life of his ancestral namesake, who analysed his own nature, not in

tedious terms of abstract tendencies, but by the far more convincing

method of putting down just what he did, and letting his actions analyse

for him. He admirably sketched his boyhood in the days when the marsh

was still largely undrained, and the white-plumed avocets bred there,

when the tall ships came up full-sailed on the tide to Rye, and the

smugglers brought in barrels of Hollands, and if caught were summarily

hanged. His father, Ronald Stanier, whom he succinctly described as “a

drunken sot” (how charmingly did heredity reproduce the type) was a

farmer with fat acres and full flocks, who dissolved his substance in

drink. He was barbarously harsh to the boy and to his wife, whom he

tamed from her shrewish ways into obedience and silence, and used to

beat them both till there came a day when Colin had no mind to take any

more strappings, and soundly thrashed his own father. “And this I did,”

he wrote, “with great pleasure, not only because I served him as he had

served me, and with a stronger arm, but because I had always hated him.”

He described his own queer power over animals: a savage dog would never

bite him, an unruly horse behaved itself when he came near it, “and that

was strange, because I had no love for animals, and indeed no love at

all. I made good pretence, for so folk were kind to me, and I liked a

wench well enough for my own pleasure to which she ministered, but all I

loved was my own strength, and my own beauty, which they loved too....”

Colin had got to this point last night, and now, sitting up in bed, ran

over the pages again. How amazingly history repeated itself; there more

than three centuries ago was Ronald Stanier the drunken sot, and the

tamed silent wife, who was the mother of Staniers: and there above all,

three centuries ago, was his very self, incarnate surely in the bodily

tabernacle of his ancestor, he and his handsome face which the wenches

loved, and his heart which hated love and loved hate.

And then came the story of the Legend, told with sober conviction by the

beneficiary himself. The boy had gone that day (it was a week before

Easter) to see the Queen pass through Rye, and luck attended him, for he

had been at hand when Her Grace’s horse stumbled, and she would have had

a fall had he not run forward and caught her in his arms.

“And I knelt, after she had released me from her flat bosom,” he

recounted, “and gave her just such a look as I would give to a wench at

a fair, and I saw this pleased her.” She told him to wait on her at the

Manor of Brede next day, and he went back to the lambing, for the ewes

were fruitful, and his father was drunk, and all that afternoon and deep

into the night he was busy with his midwifery, and finally he threw

himself down on a heap of straw in the shepherd’s hut, for a few hours’

sleep before morning. He woke, while it was yet dark, but, dark though

it was, he could see that a fine tall fellow dressed in red stood by

him, who revealed himself as none other than Satan. He promised him all

that his heart could desire, of health and wealth, of beauty and honour

and affluence, if in return for these gifts he would sign away his soul.

“I cared little for my soul,” so ran the account, “and I cared much for

honour and wealth, and further he did promise me that our bargain should

hold good for the heirs and descendants of this my body, if they should

choose to take advantage of it. So quickly we were at terms, and he gave

me pen and parchment and I pricked my arm for ink and signed in my blood

the deed he had prepared, which deed he bade me keep as testimony to our

pleasant bargain. Then shone there a strong flash of light in my eyes,

and I cried out and fell back on the straw, where I had been sleeping,

and he was gone from me, and the night was yet black round me. But this

was no dream, for the parchment was in my hand, and then came a blink of

lightning, and I saw that my signature of blood was still wet.”

Colin gave a gasp of pure pleasure and surprise. What an inimitable

touch of veracity was that! No one could have invented that; the

experience, fantastic and dipped in mediæval superstition was absolutely

and literally real to the writer. He described what he saw. In this

first-hand contemporary record, the legend of Faust lived again in

unadorned and literal simplicity. Since then it had come into sad

disrepute, becoming merged in cooked-up tales and elaborate myths:

Marlowe had made a tragedy of it, and Goëthe fishing it up had built a

dreary and tedious philosophy on it, and Gounod had made an opera of it.

But here was the same story plain and vivid without comment or

moralizing. Faust himself was describing just what _happened_....

Colin turned the page. Authentic and eye-witnessed surely as was that

touch about the blood being still wet, there were difficulties,

insuperable ones, about accepting the story of the Legend in connection

with the parchment now let into the frame of old Colin’s portrait. Here

was a perfectly ignorant shepherd-boy, who almost certainly could

neither read nor write, subscribing his name to a document which was, if

the parchment was authentic, written in Latin. The most credulous could

hardly swallow that....

He read on. “I had no skill then either to read or write, but there

still wet and red was what I had written. After that I slept soundly,

and in the morning I got home and hid away the parchment, and went to

wait on the Queen’s Grace as she had bade me, at the Manor of Brede. Of

that I will tell presently, but here first will I tell of the parchment,

and what befell. For presently I was attached to Her Grace’s Court, as

her page, and there I learned both to read and write, and Latin I

learned too, for she loved to speak in Latin, and show her wisdom and

learning which indeed was no great affair. Then could I see that though,

on that night in the sheepfold, I had no knowledge of writing, yet I had

signed my name, very scholarly and clerk-like, and in the hand that was

mine when I had learned to write. Then, too, I could read what therein

was promised me, riches and honour all of which came to pass. As for the

parchment itself, I kept that secretly, and told no man of it, for they

burn at the stake those who have had dealings with my Lord and

benefactor, and I had no wish to suffer such a fate. For my soul I have

no care; I do not reckon my soul at the worth of a doit, but it would be

a grievous thing to be burned, thought I, while my life was yet strong

in me and the lusts of the flesh sweet. So I told no man of the matter,

except only in after years my two sons, each of them, when he came of

age. I had brought them up with both precept and example for their

profit, and they knew what manner of man their father was, and how

mightily he prospered, and how it went ill with those who crossed him,

and so, when their time came to know of the parchment, and to make their

choice, it was no wonder that they chose with wisdom and prudence, even

as I had done.... Now let me write what so wonderfully befell when next

morning I walked to Brede and waited on the Queen....”

Just so far had Colin got in his reading, when Nino, his valet, came in

to call him. Usually Colin slept like a child till he was roused; often

Nino had to twitch his bedclothes or rattle with cans before he could

raise him out of these tranquil deeps.

“Awake, signor?” said Nino in surprise.

“Yes, very much so,” said Colin. “Morning, Nino. I’ve been reading about

what I was like rather more than three hundred years ago.”

Nino put his letters and the morning paper by the bedside. There was no

one in the world to whom Colin felt more akin than to him. Nino was

Southern and gay, and had the morals of a sleek black panther. In the

Italian fashion, he had made Colin his chief interest in life: he was

devoted to him and was quite without fear of him. In Nino’s eyes

whatever Colin did was right.

Nino beamed over this unintelligible remark. All that mattered was that

Colin was pleased.

“And used I to call you in the morning then?” he asked.

“No-one called me in the morning as far as I’ve got,” said Colin. “I was

a shepherd-boy with bare feet. What sort of a day is it, Nino?”

“I brought it straight from Capri,” said Nino. “Hot, hot, ever so hot.”

“I’ll bathe then,” said Colin, getting out of bed. “Bring some clothes

along, Nino. Just flannels. Come and bathe, too. I hate bathing alone.

And bring my tea with you. I’ll drink it after my bath.”

The morning as Nino had said was already very hot, but the dew of the

night before had been heavy, and in the shadow the grass was still

shining with it, and the smell of the wet earth was fragrant with liquid

freshness. Colin kicked off his shoes for the pleasure of walking

barefooted; and for very lightness of heart ran whistling down the grass

slope to the lake. There was a bathing shed on the bank towards the deep

end with steps and spring-board, and next moment he had stripped off his

pyjamas, and stood poised to cleave the deep water, where the

rhododendrons and the white balustrade of the sluice were unwaveringly

reflected. Taut as an arrow of sunlit limbs he flicked outwards from

the board and disappeared in a fountain of foam.

He rose to the surface and struck out into the lake, swimming with

overhead stroke, his shoulders gleaming as they lifted themselves

alternately, his golden head now a-wash and now glistening in the

sunlight as it emerged. Then when he was half-way across the lake, and

opposite the sluice, he turned and swam straight towards it.... There

the water was deepest, and there it slept in the shadow of the bushes,

and now he dipped his head and dived, scooping with his arms, and

pulling himself downwards. Down, down he pressed, till the twilight of

the depths closed round him, and the bright surface above was veiled and

dim. The water was markedly colder here, and he thought how cold it must

have been to Raymond when the ice was thick above.... Then turning he

kicked out, and shot upwards again into the sunshine and the sweet air.

Nino had followed hard on him, bringing his clothes and his tea, and as

Colin came to the surface again, there he was on the header-board ready

to dive. Colin swam towards him.

“See if you can get to the bottom, Nino,” he said, “where it’s deep

opposite the sluice.”

Nino rose from his plunge, and laughed, shaking the water from his face.

“Scusi, signor,” he said, “but I do not like the depth below. That is

the place for the dead.”

Colin laughed back at him.

“So it is,” he said. “‘Down among the dead men’: there’s a song about

it. I don’t insist on your going there yet.”

“Grazie: molte grazie!” said Nino.

Soon Colin paddled to land, and lay basking on the grass. Never had he

felt the current of life run more strongly through him, tingling for

some outlet of self-expression. And yet just to be alive was enough,

here in the home of his inheritance, which he, about whom he had been

reading last night and this morning, had built to the glory of himself

and those who came after. And it was more than kinship he seemed to

claim with that engaging ruffian, it was identity; the memoirs shewed

him his own mirrored self, astonishingly revealed. There was much more

of them to come, at present he had but read a chapter or two, the

sincerity of which he could vouch for by the picture it gave not of the

writer only but of himself. He burned with his passions, bubbled with

his hatreds, revelled in the largesse of ‘his Lord and benefactor.’ He

had his son, too, whom one day he would initiate into the evil

sacrament, and like Colin of old he would let Dennis see how mightily

his father prospered in his allegiance, and how it went ill with those

who crossed him, so that when the time came for Dennis’s choice he would

choose with wisdom and prudence, as old Colin’s sons had done. As yet he

was but a baby, scarcely able to walk, but soon he would learn what

splendid paths were hewn for him, how royal a road....

The future lay before Colin wrapped in this sunlit mist, much as the

plain of the marsh lay swathed in pearly vapours. Soon the heat would

fold up that soft mantle of the cool night, and the plain glitter in the

sun-steeped noon; and just so with him would the future emerge and shew

its discovered delights. He had no wish to brush the mists away, or dive

and grope into that obscurity. All would grow clear as his own life rose

towards its noon ... as for the evening and the decay of day which would

follow, it was idle to give a thought to them. Days were long in summer,

and the day was given for enjoyment: he was a fool who wasted its goodly

hours in thinking of what came next after it was done: sufficient unto

the day was the good thereof.

He lay back on the cool green grass, while his body and limbs, still wet

with his bathe, drank in the kindly heat, purring with sheer physical

satisfaction. The activity of his vigour for the moment was satiated

with his plunge and his swim, the bodily demands desired nothing more

than this freshness and effulgence which soaked through his skin into

his very marrow, and fed it with youth and pliant strength. Sinew and

nerve and bone lay still and sunned and stretched, content with this

blissful passivity. It could not last long: soon their vigour would stir

and twitch in them again; and, even as they drowsed and purred, so for

the moment his soul and the desires that lay behind the body were

satisfied with the mere fact that he was at Stanier, in the midst of

all that was his. Uncle Ronald with his gaping cod-fish mouth, Aunt

Hester with her ridiculous sprightliness, his grandmother, that image of

death in life, Violet even with her horror and love of him were mere

puppets of a show over which he pulled down the curtain.

But this quiescence of the spirit was less lasting than that of his

physical vigour, and even while he lay slack and stretched with his arm

over his eyes to shield them from the glare, and his body still sunned

itself without asking anything more than to lie open and naked,

alertness and the twitch of activity began to beat in the pulses of his

brain again. There was a broth of immediate interest bubbling there....

Violet had been tiresome last night: she had said she would not give a

hint to her father and mother that they were not wanted; he must move in

that matter himself then, and make her sorry she had struck that filial

attitude ... and then there were the memoirs to read, which revealed him

to himself ... and there was Dennis.

This stirring of his soul began to react on his body; it was delicious

to lie here with the cool grass below and the sun above, but one could

not do that for ever. He rolled over on to his side, and saw Nino

sitting by him.

“Nino, it’s almost like basking at Capri,” he said. “I shall come down

again after breakfast.--What time is it?”

Nino pulled a watch out of the pocket of his coat that lay on the grass.

“Ten o’clock,” he said.

Colin sat up.

“Then why the devil didn’t you tell me it was getting late?” he snapped.

“I thought you looked happy,” said Nino. “What does the time matter,

signor, if you’re happy?”

Colin laughed.

“That’s a very sound observation,” he said. “But you ought to have told

me I was already late for breakfast. Never mind, give me my clothes.

I’ve got a lot to do. Yes, shirt and trousers and shoes. That’s all I

want.”

Nino, but for a towel round his loins, was still as Nature had made him.

But she had done it very nicely, and as he handed his master his

clothes, Colin looked at his shapely shoulders and broad chest.

“You’d make an awfully good bronze statue, Nino,” he said. “You’d look

nice in a museum, covered with verdigris, and with an arm and leg

missing. How would you like to be an antique?”

“I like better being young,” said Nino.

Colin pulled his shirt over his head.

“So do I,” he said. “But Time’s a thief, Nino, and you can’t insure

against his burglaries.”

This was too much for Nino’s English, and he raised a puzzled eye.

“You understand what I mean, though you don’t understand what I say,”

observed Colin. “Do you believe in God, Nino?”

The boy crossed himself.

“Si, signor.”

“Then why are you such a dreadful bad lot?” asked Colin. “Don’t you know

that He will punish you when you’re dead?”

Nino shrugged his brown shoulders.

“May be,” he said, “but I’m not dead yet.”

Colin laughed.

“Nor am I,” he said. “But why talk theology before breakfast?”

“Scusi!” said Nino. “But who began?”

Colin leaned against him as he stepped into his flannel trousers.

“I did,” he said. “Do you know, you’re extremely like me, Nino? I think

you must be a Stanier. I wonder if the old fellow I’ve been reading

about had an Italian mistress from whom you’re descended. We both

believe in God, and are determined to go to the devil.... There you are

talking theology again, and I told you to shut up!”

“I am dumb as a sheep,” said Nino.

“Ba-a-a,” said Colin.

* * * * *

Colin found his menagerie at breakfast, as he came in coatless, with his

hair drying back into curls again, and his shirt open at the neck, with

sleeves rolled up to his elbow. There was Aunt Hester, looking, so he

thought to himself, like some aged hag under the delusion that it was

still spring-time with her, the absurd old woman with her short skirt

and girlish blouse, and beribboned hat. And there was Uncle Ronald,

bleary-eyed and unsavoury beyond all words, in a velveteen coat, with

his gouty knobbed hand all a-tremble as he lifted his tea-cup. And there

was Aunt Margaret, looking, as she always did, as if the bells were

ringing for church on Sunday morning, and she was just ready to

start....

“I wonder what she finds to accuse herself of in the Confession,”

thought Colin: “a want of diligence over her Patience, I suppose....”

And there, with face suddenly and involuntarily lit up at his entrance,

and as suddenly clouded again, was Violet.

“Good morning, everybody,” he said. “I’m late, and I’m not dressed, and

I’m not sorry because I’ve been enjoying myself. Darling Aunt Hester,

why didn’t you come down to bathe? You would make the most seductive

water-nymph. And why has nobody got a complexion like yours? Give me a

kiss, if you don’t mind my being unshaved.”

“Face like a peach,” said Hester. “Talk of complexions----”

“Aunt Hester, we mustn’t flirt with so many relatives present,” said

Colin. “You’ll shock Violet. Uncle Ronald, you look awfully fit this

morning. That’s the effect of good Doctor Colin coming home and seeing

that you took that medicine for your gout. Now I’m going to make a nice

dog’s dinner for myself, fish and bacon and a poached egg all on one

plate. What’s everybody going to do this morning?”

“Sit in my skeleton, like that wag Sidney Smith,” said Aunt Hester.

“When and where?” asked Colin. “I want to come and look. You must have

got a delicious skeleton, Aunt Hester, needn’t ask what Violet’s going

to do. She’s going to attend a three-hours’ service of baby-worship.

Violet and I talked about Dennis last night, didn’t we, darling? She

wants to make him a string of amulets to keep off evil spirits. Sensible

idea: it’s a wicked world. And Aunt Margaret’s going to write out

menu-cards, and Uncle Ronald’s to take a glass of my famous sun-medicine

at eleven. You’re all provided for.”

“Well, and what are you going to do?” asked Hester.

“Me? Studious morning, Aunt Hester, over my books.”

“Books, indeed!” said Aunt Hester. “Where’s the use of reading books

when you’re young? When you’ve got to sit by the chimney-corner and keep

your feet warm, then’s the call for books, for they pass the time and

make you drop off and have a snooze. I’ve not taken to books yet, thank

God.”

Colin laughed.

“My dear, you talk about taking to books as if it was like taking to

drink,” he said. “Doesn’t she, Uncle Ronald?”

“Eh, what, I beg your pardon, Colin,” said he. Uncle Ronald was not very

bright at breakfast, he liked to be left alone to drink several cups of

strong tea. After that he could toy with a little toast and marmalade.

“I was only saying that Aunt Hester regards reading as a vice in the

young, like drink, and hopes I shan’t take to it yet.”

Colin let his laughing eye dwell on Ronald long enough to be assured

that he took in some of this, and then on Violet to see that she had

arrived.... Then he turned to Aunt Hester again.

“One of the books I am going to read this morning is entirely about

drink, Aunt Hester,” he said, “and nobody can guess what it is. There’s

nothing but drink in it from beginning to end. Guess, Aunt Hester!”

“Oh, one of those rubbishy novels,” said Hester. “Seven and sixpence

worth of gibberish. Don’t ask me!”

“Not a novel at all,” said Colin. “Every word in it is true. In fact

it’s the cellar-book, and I shall see how much gin you’ve drunk, Aunt

Hester, since I’ve been away. And then if I find you’ve drunk it all, so

that there’s none left for Uncle Ronald and me, I shall go down to the

lake and drown myself, and haunt you ever afterwards. Oh Lord, I wish

somebody would stop me talking such awful drivel. Tell us about your new

Patience, Aunt Margaret.”

Mrs. Stanier folded up her napkin very neatly. She would do the same

with the napkin given her at lunch. She would fold up her napkin when

the Last Trump sounded....

“I’m afraid I haven’t got a new Patience, Colin,” she said.

“Ah, the old is better. You must teach me one of your Patiences someday.

Violet and I must learn Patience, to occupy the autumn evenings when

we’re alone here.”

* * * * *

Colin was half-inclined to reconsider his plan for sending the menagerie

on tour. Just as the lover is happiest when the object of his affection

is with him, so dislike and contempt sun themselves in the presence of

their derision, for it supplies them with fuel. It was amusing to plant

little stinging darts, to speak of drink to Uncle Ronald, to flick

Violet with an allusion to their solitary evenings in the autumn, to

make everybody uncomfortable with the threat that he would drown himself

in the lake, for that reminded them of Raymond. These darts were

feathered with his gay inimitable geniality, which charmed and

enchanted, with that sunniness that warmed their cold old bones, for so

the point stung more smartly. Certainly that allusion to the time when

he and Violet would be alone here gave them all something to think

about....

Colin, before settling down to the Memoirs again, sent for his butler

and the cellar-book, and rather enjoyed the fact that Uncle Robert had

been consuming the 1860 port at a steady average of a bottle and a half

a day. He was a sodden old brute, of course, but, as drink was all that

he cared about, it shewed sense to annex as much as possible of the very

best, for he always, it appeared, asked for that memorable vintage. But,

though it was an agreeable diversion to look at his tremulous

unsightliness of a morning, it did not counterweigh the heavy burden of

his presence, and he had better go.... Violet would have to convey that

to him, if only for the reason that she had said she would not. Colin

thought he had a persuasive device about that....

All this was very trumpery, and, with a sense of turning to something

better worth his attention, he took up the Memoirs again, and soon found

himself delightfully absorbed in them. Never was there so sincere and

unvarnished an autobiography; the author rejoiced in his presentation of

himself. Most men when they paint themselves cannot avoid dipping their

brush in the medium, if not of conscious falsity, at least in that of

self-deception. They view themselves with a kindly eye, they gloss over

or tone down, even to the point of omission, their uglier

characteristics; they emphasise what is creditable, they find a

sympathetic reason for their occasional frailties. All this may be

honest enough in intention, for the reason that they have hoodwinked

themselves and really see themselves in such and such a light, but here

Colin found an honesty transcendent and diverting. For this ancestor of

his had no desire, conscious or subconscious, to fashion an edifying

image of himself; he had no mind to be decorated with virtuous

phylacteries, and with plain deft strokes he presented this evil and

sincere picture of himself. That picture was mirror as well as portrait,

and it took Colin’s breath away to see himself so unerringly delineated.

....So the shepherd-boy waited on the Queen next morning, at the Manor

of Brede. He had not dressed himself up in his best, but came in his

shepherd’s garb, shirt and breeches and shoes, and he carried with him

his crook and a young lamb. The varlets would have driven him from the

door, but that he said it was by the Queen’s orders that he presented

himself, and they, knowing the whims of that fiery dame, sent word to

the Controller of her household that a lousy lad demanded audience of

Her Grace. “Lad indeed I was,” indited the writer, “but no lousy one,

for I had washed the muck of my lambing off me, and had bathed myself in

the Rother, and I was cleaner and sweeter than any of they. So out came

the Queen’s Controller, a pursey fellow, and he too would have shoo’ed

me away, but I told him fairly there would be trouble for him, if Her

Grace knew that I had been turned from her door. He went to tell Her

Grace, and presently came back faster than he had gone, and brought me

speedily into the Queen’s presence, me and my lamb and my crook. There

she sat at the end of a great table, where she had been holding a

Council, and she said never a word, but watched me. So I bent my eyes on

the ground, but I lifted up my heart to my Lord and Benefactor, and

prayed that he should guide my doings, and well he counselled me. I put

myself in his hands, and thought no more what I should do or say but

trusted him, and I walked past the long table towards where she sat, and

the rushes on the floor pricked the soles of my feet, for I had left my

shoes outside. Once only did I look up, and saw her still watching me,

out of those sharp eyes, with their high eyebrows. How little was her

face, I thought, and how red her hair, and how fine her ruff and how

yellow her skin, and this was the Queen of England. Then I looked down

again, and walked until I saw close in front of my bare toes the tip of

her shoes set with pearls. And then I knelt down, and bowed myself and

said:

“‘A lamb, madam, which is the first fruits of the spring. My crook which

I lay at your Grace’s feet, and myself who am not worthy to lie there.’

“Then I raised my eyes and looked at her, gay and bold, as I look at the

wenches, for wench she was, though the Queen of England. And then once

more, as if blinded by her splendour, I abased myself, and she spoke.

“‘Look at me, Colin Stanier,’ she said.

“‘Madam,’ said I.

“‘Well, what next?’ quoth she impatiently.

“‘My body and soul, madam,’ said I. And I made my eyes dance at her, and

my mouth to be eager.... She bent towards me, and drew her hand down my

cheek.

“‘And is your desire to be my shepherd-boy, Colin?’ she asked. ‘You

desire to be my page?’

“‘I am sick with desire,’ said I.

“‘I appoint you,’ says she. ‘I greet and salute you, Colin Stanier.’

“Now I had just that pause for consideration as she stroked my cheek and

tweaked my chin, but even then, when I was but a downy boy, I never

thought long whether I should do this or that, or should forbear, and I

knew that a man fares better by taking risks than by shunning them, if

he has his way to make. I knew, too, how a wench looks at a lad when she

would like to be kissed by him, how her neck goes forward to him, and

she turns her chin, and Queen or whore they are all alike in that. So my

mind was made up, and straight I kissed her cheek, for she had saluted

me as her page, and was I not to salute my Queen? Which when I had done,

I abased myself again and kissed her smelly shoe.

“‘You bold dog!’ says she. ‘Stand up. I might well have you whipped for

that.’

“‘And I should still be the infinite gainer, your Majesty,’ said I, and

she laughed.

“That good thought then was the first of the benefits which my Lord gave

me, and there was no whipping for me, but for the slap she gave me on

the ear, and Her Grace clapped her hands, and in came the Controller of

her household.

“‘Colin Stanier is my page,’ said she, ‘and attached to my person. See

to it. And at the feast of Easter, I will dine off his lamb. Begone,

Colin Stanier, and learn your duties, and see that you serve not the

wenches as you have served me!’”

So there was Colin Stanier who last night had been among the ewes

translated as at the wave of a magician’s wand into the Queen’s page. He

returned home only to take from its hiding-place the bond he had signed,

and within a week he had his fine new clothes and was in waiting on his

mistress. Never for a moment, such was the conviction that inspired the

record of his swift advancement in the favour of the Queen, and in the

idolatry, no less, of the Court, did he doubt to whom he owed his

amazing good fortune. Swiftly he acquired the art of reading and

writing, and by the next Easter time he was the Queen’s page no longer,

but her private and confidential adviser and secretary. The same

felicity which had marked his first audacious dealing with her in the

character of wench, never failed him, but he had a true appreciation of

her fiery magnificence and courage as well as of those aged tendernesses

of a childless woman who makes an idol of a boy or a lapdog to quench

the thirst of her virginity. No lapdog indeed, was Colin, he could stand

up to her in her foaming rages with her ministers, when they gave her

spiritless advice in her dealings with trouble at home and political

crises abroad, and with an oath she would say, “I cannot abide their

twittering diplomacy: I shall go my own way, for when all is said and

done I am Queen of England. Eh, Colin, am I not in the rights of it?”

and she tweaked her secretary’s rosy ear, as he sat at her elbow. Very

often she was not in the rights of it, and then Colin would indicate

further arguments, prefacing them by saying, “As Your Grace has

sagaciously told us, there is this too to be considered,” with such

deftness that, though she had but so lately affirmed the flat contrary,

he would make her believe that she had pointed these things out herself.

Whoever rose or fell in that fickle favour, Colin remained there firmly

rooted, and his advocacy with the Queen was the surest way to secure the

granting of a boon, or the lightening of her displeasure.

“My Lord of Leicester came to me one day,” he recorded, “for he was

sadly out of favour with Her Grace, and besought me to intercede for

him. Nothing that he could do or say would meet with her approbation, he

feared she would deprive him of his offices and worse than that, if her

anger against him blazed up. He knew well that a word from me would

cause it to do so, for I had but to tell her that he had laughed at her

Latinity, and said that any youth in King’s College at Cambridge would

be whipped for such grammatical errors as she made. It was pleasant to

me to remind him of that, for not long before he had called me an

upstart and a bumpkin from the marshes, and now he was a suppliant to

the bumpkin. And well he had to pay for the bumpkin’s good word with the

Queen, and it was not for that alone that he must sue to me. First, by

reason of his insolence, he must make me his friend, and bleed for his

unwisdom in slighting me. Otherwise, I threatened him that it would be

my sad duty to inform Her Grace how poorly he thought of her Latinity.

He was wise enough to see with my eyes, and rich enough to load my

pocket, and so I bled him famously, and when I supped alone with Her

Grace that night, and had delighted her with the bawdy talk that she

loves, I told her that my lord of Leicester was the unhappiest of her

subjects, for she had withdrawn her light from him, and, fool though he

was, he had the wisdom to know that he must presently perish of cold, if

the beam of her favour was not restored to him. She was loathe to hear

me at first, but I pleaded with her and let her cuddle me, and said it

befitted not her splendour to grudge a ray to my lord’s sorry dunghill.

No flattery was too gross for her; she would believe she lit the stars

at night, and presently I had my way with her. And I was wise in keeping

faith with Lord Leicester, though it would have pleased me better to

have taken his money, and then have told the Queen that he thought very

poorly of her Latin, and I doubt not that my Lord and Benefactor would

have liked me so to do, but I had yet my way to make and my future to

see to, and none would sue to me if I did not keep my bargains.”

“Sheer blackmail,” said Colin to himself, as he turned the page. “And he

delights in it. That was half the fun. I wonder what my lord of

Leicester paid him!...”

While he was yet but five and twenty, the Queen created him Earl of

Yardley, decorated him with the Most Noble Order of the Garter, and

bestowed on him the monastery and lands of Tillingham, where soon he

built the house of Stanier. She often told him that it was time for her

Colin to take a wife to himself, but in this, with a sure wisdom, he

positively refused to obey her, saying that Venus herself had no charms

for him while Gloriana’s light was shed on him; and thus, though he

disobeyed the letter of Her Grace’s command, she did not disapprove of

the spirit which prompted his obstinacy. But he sought and copiously

found consolations for his celibacy, and he devoted a long section of

his memoirs to the account of them and of the diversions of his

bachelorhood. He gave a list of the women whose favours he sought and

obtained, “but indeed,” he commented, “it was they rather who sought me,

though I was nothing loathe, for youth is the time for pleasure,” and

enumerated their charms or their defects. As in his dealings with my

lord of Leicester his favours must be paid for, “though I accomplished

some pretty seductions for my own pleasure of which I was speedily

weary.” Never a hint of love, of devotion, or of affection seemed to

have dawned on him; he sought his own pleasure and profit, and what

above all made to him the spice of these adventures was their

wickedness.... He described at length how the spectacle of the love and

devotion between a certain Sir James Bland and his young wife irritated

him, and how, with a view to wrecking it, he first made friends with the

husband, thereby to gain an intimate footing in their house, and cover

his ulterior purpose, while he made himself cold to his friend’s wife.

“She was accustomed to draw the eyes of men after her, though she had no

eyes for any but her lord, and it piqued her to see I was indifferent to

her. Presently, for all wenches are alike in heart, she must needs lay

herself out to attract me and I softened towards her, so that there were

not three gayer folk in all London than this devoted pair and their

attached friend. This way and that I drew her into my net, so that she

cooled to her husband, and became weary and restless and discontent. And

then my Lord and Benefactor whispered to me that the time was ripe, and

before long nought would restrain her but she cast herself at my feet,

and so I gave her her way once or twice, but very soon she was tedious

to me. But I was very merry all that month.”

Colin threw back his head and laughed. “I was very merry all that month”

... how well he knew the inward glee that this old kinsman of his must

have experienced at the accomplishment of this pleasing design. He had

been in harmony with himself all that month: that was what made him

merry. And of course when the thing was done, it was done, and who, that

was truly alive, cared to dwell on an achievement? He had bitten into

the fruit, and swallowed its mellow flesh, and now there was but the

rind and the stone, which he spat out. There were plenty more such

fruits when he felt thirsty: no need then to mouth the stone and squeeze

out the last drop of juice from the rind. Naked cruelty and the pleasure

of seeing others suffer gave the savour to this and other adventures,

and he described how he had gone to see a recusant tortured on the rack,

till the joints were wrenched from their sockets.... Colin could

understand that too.

He got up out of his chair, stretched himself and strolled to the window

which looked out over the terrace and the lake. There was Aunt Hester

sitting in the shade of the yew-hedge looking like some foolish autumnal

butterfly, and close at hand on the terrace was Dennis in his

perambulator. Some day Colin would read these Memoirs with him and

explain what he did not understand. There would be some years to wait

yet, eleven or twelve perhaps, till Dennis had been a term or two at

school. That kneaded the dough of a boy’s mind: it was ready then to be

moulded: it was soft and pliable and leavened.... Then Violet came out

of the house, she stood close to the window out of which Colin looked.

She did not see him for her eyes were on her son.

“Take him out of his pram, Nurse,” she called, “and see if he can get as

far as me. Dennis! Come to me, Dennis.”

Dennis was lifted out paddling in the air and set down on the terrace.

Again Violet called, and he looked this way and that, unable to

localize the sound, though recognizing his name. Suddenly he saw his

mother, and giving a crow of delight staggered towards her.

Colin forgot about the Memoirs for a moment. There was Violet stooping

down with arms outstretched to the boy, her face all radiant with

motherhood and love, and, at the sight of her, Colin felt that

exasperated impatience which love always provoked in him. It was not for

anything that Dennis could give her, that this beam transfigured her, it

was just because he was Dennis. From her he looked at the child

maintaining that difficult balance, which every moment threatened to

topple, and there, too, in that dimpled laughing face, bright with the

glory of this heroic adventure, there shone the same. That was even more

exasperating to his mind. While a child’s intelligence was as elementary

and undeveloped as this, there was this instinct triumphantly asserting

itself. Love seemed to be as natural as breathing, and far more natural

than walking.

Dennis had now got on the high seas: the safe harbour of the nurse with

the perambulator was to him hugely remote, and equally remote was the

harbour for which he was steering, and though he was progressing bravely

across the billows of this perfectly level sea, the awful loneliness of

his position suddenly overcame him. He staggered, he put his advancing

foot in a most untenable position, collapsed on the ground, and sent up

a signal of distress in a piercing yell. Before Colin knew what he was

doing, he had opened the window.

“Not hurt is he, Violet?” he called.

She looked round, her face still all aglow. But her brightness faded as

she saw him.

“Oh no, I’m sure he isn’t,” she said. “Put him on his feet again, Nurse.

Come, Dennis, you’re half way already.”

Colin waited a moment longer, till the adventure outside was happily

accomplished, rather astonished at himself for having taken any notice

of it. He had felt, he supposed, just a sporting interest to see whether

Dennis would stay the course: he was sorry when he came to grief. Then

he went back to his far more congenial occupation.

He embarked now on the account of the building of Stanier, and the

collection of its treasures: this, for the next two years, was clearly

the great diversion and achievement of his ancestor’s energies. The

Queen’s death, which occurred when he was thirty, was but casually

mentioned, with a shrewd recognition of her greatness, and an impatient

gibe for her vanity, and a congratulation for himself for having used

her weakness as a quarry for the building of his own wealth and

splendour. Her last gift to him was the great sapphire, that flawless

and unique stone, which the Queen had worn every day when her fleet was

out to meet the Armada. Priceless in itself, it was supposed to be a

talisman which brought its owner prosperity in all he undertook. After

her death there had been an attempt on the part of the Crown (renewed

again when the Hanoverian dynasty came to the throne) to repossess

itself of the jewel, on the grounds that it belonged to the regalia, and

so could not be bestowed, but both times these efforts had failed, and

the winking cornflower splendour still reposed in the jewel-safe at

Stanier, a queen’s gift worth a king’s ransom. “Lucky it was,” said the

Memoirs’ author, “that so few days before Her Grace’s death I had so

mightily pleased her, for that was her last and noblest gift to me, and

that was the finest fruit that I had plucked from my bargain. To my Lord

and Benefactor I owe it, who shewed me how to please Her Grace so

mightily that she gave me the most precious of all her jewels.” Equally

cursory was the mention of his marriage with the daughter and heiress of

Sir John Reeve, though he gave a detailed list of property which this

ill-fated young woman brought to the house. Two sons were born to him,

and soon after, having secured these great estates, he secured his

wife’s divorce, and presently married the only daughter and child of

Lord Middlesex. She gave him no further heirs, but brought considerable

addition to his estates. “An unseemly woman,” so ran her husband’s

comment, “and of a most unseemly temper, of which I would have none. She

was red as a fox, but rich.”

But these events (apart perhaps from the birth of his two sons) were no

more than acts of routine in his career, his passion was the creation of

this palace and pleasaunce of Stanier. Only twelve years had elapsed

between the day when he had gone, a bare-footed shepherd boy with his

crook and his lamb, to wait upon the Queen at Brede, and now at her

death he retired from Court life and came back, Earl and Knight of the

Garter, to his estates at Tillingham. His father’s farm was close by,

where the “drunken old sot” still lived, and Colin, coveting it for the

completion of his gardens, found a way to dispute the ownership,

claiming that it was part of the monastic land devised him by the Queen,

and turned the old man out. He gave him, however, a decent enough

dwelling-place for a man of his station, and adequate maintenance, and

further allowed him to draw on his brewery for unlimited ale, making

only the provision that the old man should never attempt to see him or

obtain access to him: otherwise his maintenance should be withheld. This

indulgence in the matter of the brewery may have been kind in intention,

for assuredly the old man was fond of beer, but the effect was that he

did not long enjoy the bounty. He was oftener drunk than sober, and,

before the year was up, he had a stroke of which he died. Meantime the

great house was rising rapidly, and in two years was complete up to the

lettered balustrade, where you might read in Latin that, unless the Lord

built the house, their labour was but lost that built it, and into it

Lord Yardley poured the treasures that he was constantly acquiring:

Oriental carpets, and French Tapestries, Chinese porcelain, Greek

marbles, and Italian pictures: all arts and ages were sought by him, for

there was kinship in all fine work, and a Greek relief of Heracles and

Hylas might be flanked by a crucifixion by Tintoret on one side, and a

portrait by Rembrandt on the other. He made, too, a wonderful collection

of occult and magical books, that told the student how he might acquire

supernatural powers, and among them was a missal, as Colin read “of

wondrous blasphemies”.... Out of doors the work was pushed forward with

the same expedition: the great terraced garden to the south of the house

was levelled and stepped and encircled by the yew-hedge: below, the dam

was pushed out across the dip of the valley in which had stood the house

of his youth, and the lake formed. He planted, too, on the bare upland

east of the house the oaks that flourished there now.

At this point in the type-written manuscript, there came an annotation

directing him to a certain page in the original Memoirs, and Colin

turned it up, and found that it referred to a loose sheet in the book

dated 1642, which was the year before the author died. On this page was

a rough sketch of the house and gardens as designed then, and as they

existed now, but with the addition of certain buildings which apparently

had never been erected. But while the plan of the house as it stood was

only roughly indicated, this addition was drawn with considerable care

and detail. It looked therefore, as if, after the completion of the

house, this building was contemplated and planned, but never carried

out. It consisted of a long passage, leading out of the room where he

now sat, which had always been Lord Yardley’s private room, and

communicating with a small house that stood, at the distance of sixty

yards, on a knoll just outside the gardens. It was one-storied, and

consisted of three rooms _en suite_ labelled ‘parlour,’ ‘bedchamber,’

and ‘dining-room,’ with a kitchen and quarters for a servant. But on the

south side of it there was a spacious oblong room, equal in length to

the three rooms adjoining, with a descriptive word attached to it. This

was only faintly pencilled in, and was difficult to decipher. The

initial letter ‘S’ was clear enough: the second might have been ‘o’ or

‘c’: then came a long letter that might have been either ‘t’ or ‘l,’

followed (with room for another letter between) by ‘arium,’ which was

distinct and legible. Colin puzzled over this, and then a very

reasonable solution struck him; the word no doubt was ‘solarium,’

implying an open gallery, facing south on the long side, as this did,

and either open to the air or fronted with big windows, a

winter-sitting-room, a sunning place.... Simultaneously, with a laugh,

the significance of this discreet little establishment struck him. No

doubt it was intended to be the quarters of the companion for the time

being (for he soon wearied of each) with whom Lord Yardley solaced his

leisure. There would be an impropriety perhaps in her being actually

housed in the same dwelling as his wife and his sons; convenience and

propinquity were alike served by her having her pleasant little

establishment (with its solarium) at a short distance from the house and

communicating with his own room. The interpretation was reasonable,

simple and entertaining, but, to be sure, it did not seem very

characteristic of his ancestor’s methods to be so tender of the feelings

of his wife, and guard the morals of his sons from loose presences, and

though Colin was pleased with his explanation and his decipherment of

‘Solarium,’ he was not quite satisfied with it, and put a slip of paper

in the place, meaning to refer to it again. He turned back to the

type-written copy, of which now not many pages remained for his perusal.

There was a short description of how, on the coming of age of his two

sons, they each chose to be associated with the bargain he had made in

the shepherd’s hut, and indeed, from the few details given about their

characters and their escapades, the choice could not have been a matter

of much difficulty to these young gentlemen. The younger, in especial,

attached to the Court of his Majesty King James, seemed to have been as

perfect and appalling a young rogue as even his father could have

wished. Then there followed the entry that to-day was the author’s

sixty-ninth birthday, and, thanks to the ever-constant goodness of his

Lord and Benefactor, his health and strength were still unabated, and

the pleasures of his youth still his. He blessed the day, now fifty-one

years ago, when he had chosen so wisely and well, as the parchment, now

preserved in his strong-room, testified, “How would I rejoice,” he

wrote, “to build some shrine in honour of my Lord, where I would worship

him who has wrought so great benefits upon me, some sanctuary, where I

might worthily adore him”--and then suddenly in the middle of a sentence

the Memoirs came to an end.

Colin put down the last sheet of the manuscript, and leaned back in his

chair. He felt as if, Narcissus-like, he had all the morning been

regarding himself as shewn in this Elizabethan mirror of his ancestor’s

confessions. It was his own spirit so undeviatingly reflected there, and

the contemplation of it was an act of self-recognition. All that he had

read was a three hundred year old portrait of himself, even as he might

have sat for the great picture in the hall, into the frame of which was

now inserted the signed parchment of the bargain. Whatever was the

literal and the material truth about that (his ancestor, clearly, who

might be expected to know, confirmed it) there could be none about its

spiritual authenticity. No-one who had seen the Memoirs could possibly

have any doubt about that, and Colin knew that he, like most others of

his race, eagerly associated himself with the bargain. He knew, too,

that his choice was solid and real and no fantastic imagining; there was

God on one side, there was Satan on the other. He had rejected God, and,

not only for the benefits attached, but because he preferred evil to

good, he had chosen Satan. Hate and evil were dear to him, he had no use

for love.

There came the sound of the bell for luncheon, and he got up.... It was

a strange thing that anyone so diligent in evil as the old man had been,

should at the end of his life have turned coward and twitterer in the

way he had done. His last year on earth had been a terrible one, for, so

family tradition averred (and indeed the thing was attested), terror of

what was coming fastened on his flesh like a monstrous growth, and he

wrote no more in his diary of the sins that were so dear to him. He

practised pious and charitable deeds, restoring the monastery church, on

the altar of which he had often played dice. He endowed almshouses in

Rye. He bought great tomes of the works of Christian fathers, and of the

meditations of the Saints, and hour after hour he used to sit in the

library to study these under the tuition of a priest who resided in the

house, and ministered at the church, and no doubt it was then that he

destroyed or dispersed that great collection of magical and occult works

which he had brought together, for no vestige of them was now extant

here. He cut himself off from the pleasures of youth, he fasted and

prayed, in the hope of turning away the fate at which all his life he

had mocked, and it was said that when on his knees he attempted to

address the God whom he had rejected, no prayer or holy words would come

from his lips, but that he mumbled unspeakable and obscene blasphemies.

He seemed in fact, so it appeared to Colin, to have gone crazy, and

though he continued throughout that year in the full serenity of his

physical health, he let himself be the prey of his disordered and

terrified soul, turning and truckling, not in love but in abject fear of

the destiny he had chosen, to Him whose spirit he had defied. It was

firmly rooted in his head, that he would die on his seventieth birthday,

and that indeed (no doubt because he so firmly believed it) came to

pass, and in an appalling manner. For he gave a feast that night to his

tenants in honour of his birthday, and had risen to speak to them at the

end of supper, when he put out his arm, as if pushing away some

invisible presence, and shrieking “No, no!” fell forward, dead, across

the table. At that moment there came a blinding flash of lightning,

which certainly struck the hall, but those who were nearest to him said

that his seizure had preceded the flash, and that it and the roar of

thunder that followed were rather the endorsement of that judgment than

the judgment itself. That year, anyhow, thought Colin, was a common and

craven conclusion to his brilliant life; he did not fancy that he

himself would suffer so deplorable a collapse, legend or no legend. But

in the interval, he had more than all his ancestor’s lust for pleasure,

and his hatred of love....

He put the manuscript in a drawer of his table, and with it the original

copy of the diary, for he was not satisfied about the plan of that

establishment with the ‘solarium.’ It seemed unlikely.... But if the

word which designated that building was not ‘Solarium,’ what on earth

could it be?

CHAPTER III

Colin went back to his room after the invariable rubber of whist that

evening, with the intention of studying this plan more minutely, but,

though the others had gone upstairs, he was not surprised to hear his

door open, and Violet asking if she could speak to him. Indeed, he

almost expected that interruption, and he smiled to himself when she

entered....

There had been a horrid little scene at the close of dinner, a

dovecote-fluttering in the menagerie, arising from Colin’s having

instructed Nino to dispense the wine, and to be lavish in his

ministrations to Uncle Ronald’s glass. The wine in question was Dagonet

1880, to which he was incapable of putting up the smallest resistance,

and Nino did his duty so thoroughly that Uncle Ronald had got on very

quickly, and had told a story which might possibly have passed with a

snigger in a smoking-room of broad-minded men. Even Aunt Hester, who was

as broad-minded as most people, had said “Better hold your tongue,

Ronald: you’re disgracing yourself,” while that perfect piece of

Patience, Aunt Margaret, bridled and folded her napkin, and diligently

perused the menu-card which she had so neatly written out, though at

that period of dinner its information was obsolete.... And then, when

the women had adjourned, Uncle Ronald, having been told that there was

not much 1860 port left, had partaken so freely of what there was, that

he had become wonderfully voluble about the old days when he and his

father used to sit here together. Colin had taken Nino’s place as

dispenser of wine, and so sedulous was he that Uncle Ronald presently

lost the power of coherent speech altogether, and, when he tried to

rise, leaned lamentably against the table, and was assisted upstairs by

the butler and Nino, which again was quite in accordance with the

tradition of the house. Colin had joined the ladies alone, and said that

his uncle had gone to bed with a nasty cough, such a troublesome cough,

which made him feel a little giddy, and clogged the free functioning of

the vocal chords.

All this, of course, was directed against Violet, who must be taught

that if Colin expressed a wish that she should undertake some little

mission, like telling her father and mother that they must no longer

consider Stanier their house, she must be a good wife and obey....

Colin was just unlocking the drawer where he kept the Memoirs when she

entered, and he hailed her with a smile and a word of welcome.

“That you, Vi?” he said. “Have you come for a little talk? That is nice.

Sit down.”

She looked at him in silence as he brought the book out, continuing to

stand.

“I thought I told you to sit down,” he said.

“No, I’ll stand,” she said.

He glanced at her still smiling.

“You had better do what I tell you,” he said. “That’s right. How simple,

isn’t it? Now what have you come about? It’s something tedious, I

suppose. About your father, eh? Wasn’t he horrid at dinner? He made me

blush for his dyed hair. Such a story! Awful for you and Aunt Margaret.

Granny, too, at her age! And the servants.”

She looked at him again in silence, then dropped her eyes.

“I suppose it is your plan to make him tipsy every night,” she said,

“until I tell him that he and my mother are not to come back here after

their visit to Aix.”

Colin nodded at her with that sunny smile of his.

“Absolutely correct,” he said. “How well we understand each other, dear!

And you’ve come here to tell me you’re going to be good, and do as

you’re told. Is that it?”

“Yes. I can’t sit by and see my father as I saw him to-night. What do

you want me to say to him?”

“Oh, just that. Say that you understand that he’ll be settling down in

London for the autumn, or for ever and ever.... Just a little tact and

pleasantness.”

“Colin, it’s awfully hard on him,” she said. “He and mother have

practically lived here since their marriage.”

“Yes, darling: a nice long visit, as I said yesterday. He must put his

name in the visitors’ book, Saturday, 1890, or whenever it was, till

Monday, 1913. And though I don’t often criticize you, I must remind you

that you shouldn’t always think of yourself.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked she.

“I’ll explain. You’ve got no real filial feeling for either your father

or mother, and that pricks your conscience. So, to mollify that smart,

you take their side and want them to have a comfortable home here. That

doesn’t cost you anything, and it gives you an atoning feeling inside.

It is your cheap manner of making amends to them.”

There was just that grain of truth in this which made it impossible for

Violet to deny it completely. She had not consciously thought of that,

but, when he pointed it out, she knew it was so. There were plenty of

other reasons, kindliness, affection, compassion, which prompted her,

but he with his amazing subtlety had put his finger on the smallest and

meanest of them all.

“You are an adept at seeing the worst side of everybody,” she said.

“Would it be rude if I suggested that the reason for that is that the

worst side of people is so much more to the front than their best?”

asked Colin. “We all put our worst foot foremost.... And then think of

Dennis, Vi. Would you like him to have among the early recollections of

his boyhood the memory of his grandfather telling bawdy stories and

reeling up to bed after dinner in a squall of hiccups? And then, last

and least, there’s myself. Your father bores and disgusts me. I hinted

to him that he was not perhaps such a fixture here as he seemed to

imagine, and now, please, you’re going to repeat that timid conviction,

so that he may see that on this, as on every point, we’re at one. Mind,

the suggestion has got to come from yourself not from me: otherwise he

will think that I have asked you to make it. Now we’ve spent too much

time and speech already over a trivial matter. You think I’m a brute,

but then you often do that. I’m used to that: getting almost callous

about it.”

He held up the sheaf of typed pages which had occupied him all the

morning.

“I’ve had a delicious day,” he said, “for I’ve been reading the Memoirs

of old Colin. I had them type-written, and they’re entrancing. He

realized himself so wonderfully. There was neither false shame nor

conceit about him. He was neither proud nor the reverse of being such a

devil. I thought of letting some learned Antiquarian Society publish

them. Odd, isn’t it, how all the puritanical, pure-minded people,

chiefly women, who shiver and are shocked at what they call a bad man,

and won’t visit him or have him to dinner, and heave any sort of brick

at him, greedily devour any indecent memoir, and simply roll in it, like

dogs when they’ve found some putrescent muck.... You’d have thought

that, if they shudder at wickedness, they wouldn’t care to read about

it. But they say it’s the historical interest that makes them devour it,

which isn’t true. It’s the insatiable fascination that wickedness has

for prudes. However, the Memoirs are enchanting: they ring so absolutely

true: you feel you are looking at the very man himself. I even found

myself believing in the literal truth of the legend. Sit down and dip

into them, darling; you won’t find a dull page anywhere. Meantime I’m

puzzling out a curious plan of some projected addition to the house,

which he never executed.”

“I won’t read them to-night,” she said. “It is rather late.”

“Very good. I won’t insist on that as you’ve been a good girl otherwise.

But you must read them some day. I want to know if a certain thing

strikes you as it struck me.”

“What is that?” she asked.

“Why, that old Colin was a sort of prophet. I felt all the time as if he

was writing not about himself but about me. How types repeat themselves:

there is another character he mentions which so closely resembles

someone we both know. Old Colin’s father in fact, Ronald Stanier, whom

he describes as a drunken old sot. Good night, darling. Not a kiss? I

suppose I don’t deserve one. You’re punishing me for being such a

brute.”

She paused at the door. There he stood, looking gaily and yet wistfully

at her, with his mouth a little open, and the soft fire of his youth

burning in his eyes, and she yearned for him. Surely it was not only his

beauty that she adored, that physical perfection of him. There was

somebody, surely, imprisoned there, who called to her through the bars

of his nature and its love of evil and its hate of love. As often as she

had tried to reach that prisoner it was as if the guardians of his soul,

monstrous and terrifying, pushed her panic-stricken away. She hated and

feared them, and their ruthless wickedness, but in spite of them she

knew that she would never cease from trying to get past them, and

rescuing him who lay there in iron bondage.

She turned back into the room, her eyes troubled and eager, full of

love, full of fear. Some gust of inspiration came to her.

“Colin, you hate love,” she said, “and I can’t help giving it you. I

pity you so, you know; all my heart pours itself out round you in pity.

You’ve tried to kill my love, but you can’t. It’s so much stronger than

either you or me----”

He whipped round on her.

“Good Lord, you must have misheard me,” he said. “I asked you for a

kiss, not a sermon. But I don’t want either. Go to bed.”

The door closed behind her, and he stood there a moment, simmering with

anger and contempt at her undesired homily, with its puerile message. He

could have laughed at the idea of love being strong: love was the most

helpless and defenceless of all the pieces on the savage chessboard. It

was vulnerable at every point, you could wound it wherever you thrust at

it. Any clumsy stroke penetrated and made it bleed. Or you could rope it

down to the rack, and quite without effort pull the lever that wrenched

and distorted it, and made it white with silent agony.... But how

strange that just now Violet should give vent to gabble like this, when

a moment before she had shrunk from him and his brutality in his

dealings with her and her father! In her small way she was like the

martyrs praising and blessing God, as their limbs writhed with anguish,

that they were accounted worthy to suffer for His sake. She was like

that comely smoothed-limbed S. Sebastian in the gallery, for which Nino

might have been the model, who seraphically smiled while he was being

made a pin-cushion for arrows. Certainly Colin had tried, as she said,

to kill her love, and often he had wounded it, though none of those

thrusts, it would seem, had proved mortal.... He shrugged his shoulders;

there were plenty more weapons in his armoury. Above all, there was one

which as yet was not ready for use, for its blade was still soft and

unannealed. But he wondered if her love would survive the thrust when

Dennis was a sword of wickedness in his hand.

He brought out again the sketch-plan that had puzzled him, and examined

it through a magnifying glass. Certainly the word which he had

conjectured to be ‘Solarium’ did not stand this closer scrutiny, and now

when he looked again at the plan itself, this oblong room, thus

conjecturally labelled, could not be a solarium, for on the south, where

you would expect it to be open, or to present a row of big windows to

admit the sun, there were but two very narrow apertures marked there. At

the east end, however, there was indicated a very big window, which took

up nearly the whole length of the wall.

Colin turned his attention to the written word again. ‘Solarium’ it

certainly was not, for the second letter was a ‘c’ surely, not an ‘o,’

and there was a faint cross-stroke over the ‘l’ which made a ‘t’ of it,

and another letter, quite illegible, preceded the final ‘arium.’

“S,c,t,” thought Colin ... and suddenly a new solution dawned on him. It

must be ‘S’ctuarium,’ abbreviated from ‘sanctuarium,’ a chapel, a

shrine. As he scrutinized it, he was more than ever certain that he had

hit on the true decipherment, but this only complicated the puzzle

instead of solving it. For how was it possible to account for the author

of these Memoirs planning to build a sanctuary? Sanctuary, however, it

certainly was, and this identification explained the narrow lancets on

the south wall, and the big east window.

He considered the history of his ancestor’s last year on earth, how, as

the time approached for his death, he turned to God, not from love of

Him but from fear of hell’s damnation. He broke off the chronicle of his

iniquities, he built almshouses and indulged in fastings and charities

with a view to avert the destiny that he had chosen and rejoiced in.

That all fell in with the notion of his building a chapel, which

communicated with his own room in the house, so that he could go there

by day or night, for cowardly prayer and search for forgiveness of his

trespasses. Then, too, on this assumption, the little dwelling-place

that adjoined it could be explained: no doubt he intended that a priest

should reside there, as domestic physician of his soul.

For the moment this hypothesis seemed to account for the whole project,

and Colin unwillingly accepted it. It was disappointing: it was just

another instance of that collapse and cowardice which came over his

ancestor, and made his last year on earth such a pitiful surrender. And

yet ... why did he not then put his plan into execution, if this was the

design of it? For a whole year after the date recorded on this drawing,

he practised his belated pieties, and yet never a sod was cut nor a

brick laid in the erection of this chapel. Surely he would have hastened

on the building of it with the same speed and enthusiasm with which he

had built the house for his own glory. Clearly, if this solution was

correct, and he had intended to build a chapel here with lodging for a

priest, he abandoned it. But why, if his soul was set on pieties and

repentance?

Colin got up from the chair in which he had been sitting for the last

half-hour since Violet had left him, frowning and puzzling over this

riddle. He felt that there was a key, which would fit the facts, and

that he was hovering round its discovery. It was close at hand, but some

sluggish mist of his own mind obscured it. He paced up and down his room

for a minute or two, then went to the window, open behind its tapping

blind, which he drew half up. Only the faintest night-wind stirred, the

sky was bare, and the full moon rode high in the south among the stars.

Just in front the terrace lay grey, and the garden dark, but beyond the

square black line of the yew-hedge the lake shone so bright in the

moonlight that it seemed a sheet of pale flame, brimming and molten. To

right and left rose the swelling uplands of the park, and all this

spacious stateliness within and without was the creation of that

ancestor of his who had planned a sanctuary. Colin felt no doubt that

his spirit survived in some remorseful hell, and what more poignant hell

could there be for it, now shorn of its pomp and prosperity, and naked

in the immaterial world, than the splendour of its earthly habitation

where it no longer had a place? Somehow his spirit seemed close and

ready to communicate: could it not give to one who so rapturously

claimed kinship and sympathy with it, some hint, some expression of

itself that should awake in him the comprehension of its strange desire

to build a sanctuary?...

Colin stood quite still, looking out on to the silent tranquillity, not

cudgelling his brain with conjecture any more, but letting it lie open

and quiet to the midnight, to see if, from outside or from its own

subconscious activity, there did not emerge what he was seeking for. It

was curious that a satisfactory solution of this point seemed of such

immense importance, but, rightly or wrongly, he believed that it held

some great significance.... And certainly there was a power abroad

to-night, something that tingled and throbbed in his veins. It was hard

to keep still under it, not to let his brain busy itself with ingenious

surmise, but he had done that already to the utmost of his power, and

now, with this stir of force round him, he must let himself stay passive

and receptive....

Suddenly the faint stirring of the night-breeze grew stronger, it

ruffled his hair, it blew the cracking, flapping blind out horizontal

into the room, and the pages of the manuscript on his table whispered

and shivered as if they were talking to themselves and giggling

together. And then the mist that had obscured his mind was whisked away,

and he knew he had the explanation for which he had been seeking. In a

couple of steps he was back at his table, and, open in the manuscript he

had been reading all day, there lay before his eyes the final words of

it which he had read uncomprehendingly before, but now saw to contain

the key he looked for.

“How I would rejoice,” he said aloud, “to build some shrine in honour of

my Lord, where I would worship him who has wrought so great benefits

upon me; some sanctuary where I might worthily adore him----”

There was no need to search further: all was clear. It was indeed a

sanctuary he had planned, in honour not of God but of him who had given

him all that his soul desired. Clear, too, at last, was the reason why

he had never built it, for just then, when it was freshly planned, fear

began to darken round him, and the shadows to stalk, and he turned from

his Lord and Benefactor, and wrote no more in his praise, but prayed and

fasted in impious piety.

One o’clock had already sounded, and Colin replaced the Memoirs in a

drawer and turned the key on them. The gust from outside that seemed

literally to have blown the mist from him, so that he saw sharp and

distinct across the sundering centuries the purpose of this design and

the sure reason for its abandonment, died into stillness again, but the

night seemed charged and alive with consciousness. All day he had put

himself to soak, so to speak, in the spirit that infused these Memoirs

with so sympathetic a vitality: now, even when the book was finished, it

was friendly round him, stimulating and quickening him, so that

reinforced with its vigour the idea of the physical refreshment of sleep

seemed ludicrous. To sleep was to abandon your consciousness for the

sake of its recuperation: it was the expression of his consciousness

that he needed.

He put his hand on the low window-sill, and vaulted out on to the

terrace, where he had watched Dennis’s early essays in locomotion. In

the stillness, past and present seemed melted into one: the centuries no

longer represented the movement of time, they had not been borne away on

its stream, but were static as if portrayed in a picture. It might have

been on this very night that the original bargain was made, it might

have been here and now that his ancestor was devising the sanctuary on

the little plateau that lay among the oaks which he had planted. In the

moonlight Colin could almost visualize the windowed corridor that had

been planned to run from the corner of the room which he had just

quitted, till it joined among the trees the west wall of the sanctuary.

What a symbol would that shrine have been of old Colin’s life, what a

jubilee of the dedication of himself! There without doubt he intended to

celebrate those Satanic rites, that worship of evil for evil’s sake in

which they, to whom the sacred service of love was a thing abhorred and

derided, renewed their allegiance to the enemy of God, and in the

blasphemy of the Black Mass drew near to their Lord and Benefactor, who

strengthened and refreshed their souls. The shallow, the indifferent,

who just made as pleasant a pilgrimage as possible out of life, or who,

from vague instincts, tried to be good, or merely fell into evil because

they were weak or self-indulgent, could have no part in that: it would

be savourless as bran to any who had no living belief both in God and in

Satan; for blasphemy signified nothing to souls who did not hate the

sublime majesty of love. They who took part in its dark mysteries were

they who believed in God, and who, by their deliberate choice, rejected

and hated and defied Him. Old Colin would have been a fit worshipper

there, had not that senile panic, hoisting the white flag of his

surrender, overtaken him before his bond was due. It was a craven,

pitiful end: it was not love of his life-long Enemy that drove him to

that camp, but fear of him who had so magnificently befriended him.

Colin had wandered in the moonlight past the end of the terrace, and now

stood on the plateau, where, according to the plan, the sanctuary was to

have been built. Round him rose the tranced forest-trees, the grass,

drenched with dew, glimmered like a spread sheet of moonstone. Then,

suddenly springing up again, the wind warm and caressing made the

branches of the oaks whisper and sway, and through him ran a great

exaltation. He raised his hands, spreading his arms out wide.

“O Lord and Benefactor,” he said. “How will I rejoice to build a shrine

in honour of thee....”

* * * * *

Colin woke from his dreamless sleep next morning, to find Nino’s hand on

his bare shoulder, gently stirring him. His clothes were in a heap on

the floor by his bedside, for when he came in he had but stripped

himself and wrapped a sheet round him in which, cocoon-like, he had lain

unstirring. He was conscious of a strong glow of happiness as he was

thus recalled, and his lazy strength came soaking into him.

“Oh, Nino, what a nuisance you are,” he said. “You spend your beastly

life in waking me.”

“Will you sleep again, then?” asked Nino.

“No, the mischief is done now. What’s the morning like? What’s the

news?”

“A telephone message from Mrs. Hunt,” said Nino. “She would know if she

may come down to-day for Sunday.”

Colin grinned. The moment Nino had said “telephone message” he had

guessed from whom it came.

“Well then, she mayn’t,” he said. “Damned cheek! It would never do,

would it, Nino?”

“She will be very happy, she said, if she may come,” observed Nino.

Colin raised himself a little, and drew his hand down his arm. The fact

that he had decided that Pamela Hunt should not come, made him see

causes for re-consideration.

“Just rub my arm,” he said, “I’ve been sleeping on it, and it isn’t

awake. Of course, if it would make her happy, that’s a different thing.

We ought always to make people happy, Nino, except when we’re making

them miserable. Tell her she can come then. What’s the morning like?”

“_Splendore_,” said Nino.

“I shall bathe. I wish you’d carry me straight down to the lake and drop

me into it.”

“Sicuro,” said Nino.

Colin looked at him, yawning.

“Get on then,” he said, wondering what he would do.

Nino bent down, and putting one arm below his neck, and the other under

his knees, lifted him up.

“Right about turn,” said Colin. “March.”

Nino carried him as far as the door, and was evidently perfectly ready

to bear him, with the sheet folded round him, down to the lake. He held

him as easily as a child, and his face was all wreathed with merriment.

“I am your nurse,” he said. “You are my bambino, signor.”

Colin laughed.

“Oh, but this won’t do,” he said. “Put me down, Nino. People would think

it so odd. There are enough oddities in the house without our adding to

them. And go and telephone. Don’t keep a lady waiting.”

“But I was busy attending to my signor,” said Nino.

“I know. You’re a good boy. You shall come off to Capri with me before

long. Follow me down when you’ve telephoned. I know there’s something I

want to ask you about, and I shall remember it when the water has

awakened me.”

As Colin ran downstairs, he was in two minds again as to whether he

should allow Pamela Hunt to be happy or not. Their friendship, quite a

recent one, had been founded on laughter and good looks and high

spirits, but, since then, he had become aware that she was searching for

more from him than that, was digging below those flimsy foundations of

liking and laughter for something more profound. He did not really care

about her in the least, but she was eminently ornamental, and he liked

the bland unscrupulousness with which she pursued her way. Her

suggestion, indeed, that she should come down to Stanier for the Sunday,

where she knew he was in retreat in the bosom of his family, had a

daring innocence about it which was rather attractive. Their friendship

had already been a matter of extensive public comment in London, and it

showed a charming disregard of the usual conventions that she should

propose to share his domestic tranquillity. It was no secret from him

that she was in love with him, and he was guilty of no fatuous

gratification about that. In fact it seemed to him a pity, for he had

nothing whatever for her, and beyond doubt she was getting serious and

eager. However, she had proposed herself, and he had permitted it, and,

after all, there might be some amusement out of it, some chilling

disappointment for her, some ludicrous dénouement derived from his own

indifference or, possibly, exasperation if she became tedious. He had

not given her the smallest encouragement but that of laughter and

chatter, and, if she chose to attempt to hunt him down, any consequences

were of her own seeking. Then, too, how would Violet take it, in case

some kind friend had whispered warnings to her? It might be an amusing

Sunday.

He stepped out on to the terrace, already grilling in the sunshine, but

it looked less real now than a few hours ago under the moon. The stage

then had been alive with dark forces brewing drama, whereas now, in this

sane freshness of day, it was mere paint and pasteboard, like that same

stage seen next morning, when the actors had left it, and no drama

vivified the splendid setting. But as he walked along the terrace to the

yew-hedge it gained reality again. Just there would be the windowed

corridor, and there close at hand was the plateau among the oaks. Yes,

it was growing real again.

And at that he remembered what he had wanted to ask Nino. A couple of

years ago when he was staying for the night with the very lively little

English Consul at Naples, who had shewn him such curious Neapolitan

diversions, he remembered his having said something about a cabaret, in

a room behind which were held certain Satanic rites.... Possibly Nino

might know, Nino had much gay native knowledge of an unexpected kind,

and had many local stories to tell of the doings of the monstrous

Emperor Tiberius, who took such wonderful holidays from the cares of

State in Capri. These Satanic rites were as old as religion itself: in

fact they were the earliest form in which religion, the belief in the

supernatural, appeared, for originally the supernatural was an evil

power to be propitiated. It was later that mankind had conceived of it

as beneficent and loving....

Colin was out of the water when Nino came down.

“Well, have you made her happy?” he asked. “What an age you’ve been,

Nino!”

Nino’s mouth twitched, and broke into a smile.

“Sis-signor,” he said. “She is very happy.”

“And what are you grinning at?” asked Colin.

“She thought it was you at the telephone,” he said. “She thought I had

gone to fetch you.”

“And what did she say?” asked Colin.

Nino schooled his mouth into gravity.

“She said--scusi--but she said ‘Colin, darling, how perfectly sweet of

you!’ So I said ‘Signora,’ and I think she understood for she--she rang

away.”

“Rang off,” said Colin, “you’re thinking of ‘ran away.’”

“She is running away here,” said Nino.

Colin lay back on the grass.

“Why do men get in such a fuss about women?” he asked.

“Chi sa? There are plenty for all,” said Nino.

“Yes. Tell me more tales such as you told me at Capri about Tiberio.”

Nino laughed.

“Why does the signor love to hear of Tiberio? He was a fat old man.”

“Yes, but full of ideas. He liked wickedness: the sort of man who would

worship the devil.”

“Sicuro!”

“Italy’s a very wicked country,” said Colin. “I believe they worship the

devil still in Naples.”

Nino crossed himself.

“So it is said.”

“Why do you do that?” asked Colin. “I don’t believe you really think it

protects you. It’s only a habit. Tell me about the worship of the devil

in Naples.”

“I know little,” said Nino, “and though others find it diverting, I

would not find diversion in it. Why do they want to behave like street

boys, and make faces at holy things? And it is not prudent. May not

lightning strike them, or madness come on them? There are many things

which the priests say offend Il Padre, which are diverting. But this is

not one of them.”

Colin gathered up his knees in his arms, his skin still shining with his

bathe. What nonsense, as he often thought, were the English ideas of

‘class.’ Here was he, talking to his own valet on terms of perfect

equality, and Nino accepting that as perfectly natural, though had Colin

next moment said “Get me my shoes,” Nino would have jumped to his feet,

his most obedient and respectful servant. These Southerners had fine

breeding in their bones, whereas so many Englishmen of his own class had

only got it on the skin. His brother Raymond, for instance, what a

howling cad compared to Nino! Or Uncle Ronald last night, telling a

smoking-room story, so that one really sickened at his grossness. Nino

talking about the much more awful deeds of Tiberius was not gross at

all. He was only gay.

“Nino, why do we talk theology before breakfast?” he said. “We did

yesterday, and here we are at it again to-day. I was very theological

last night: I suppose that’s it, and this is an overflow.... But don’t

you see that it’s diverting to defy Il Padre, and be rude?”

“No, that is not diverting,” said Nino.

“Well, everyone must go to the devil in his own way. So if I wanted you

to do something wicked, which didn’t divert you, I suppose you would

refuse?”

“I shall always wish to please you,” said Nino.

“Well, you can please me now. I want to hear about the Black Mass. I

think it might make me happy. Have they a book? Have they a missal?”

“Yes,” said Nino.

“Nino, you’re rather annoying. You’re becoming serious.”

Nino shook his head.

“I have no use for it,” he said, “and indeed I know little of it. They

have a book, there is a priest, but he must be one who has been turned

out of his office. But where is the good of it all? It is enough for me

to do what is diverting, and wipe my mouth after, till I want to be

diverted again.”

Colin reached out for a towel. The mere fact that Nino found something

revolting in the idea of the Black Mass was naturally a reason for

causing him to interest himself in it, but if he did not feel the

fascination of defiance, he could be no true worshipper.... And somehow

Nino was so perfectly delightful as he was: it might spoil the gaiety of

his Paganism to tamper with his instincts. He only cared for diversion,

there was no devotion about him....

“Nino, we’re wonderfully alike in some ways, as I’ve told you,” he said,

“but we’re wonderfully different in this. I don’t believe you like

hurting people, for instance. That’s where the difference lies.”

“Not if I am fond of them; only when I hate them,” said Nino.

“Oh, you’re no good,” said Colin. “Give me my shirt.”

Nino scrambled to his feet, and held it up for him.

“Have I displeased you?” he said.

“No. You’re a nice boy, but I believe you want to go to heaven when you

die.”

“Sicuro,” said Nino.

* * * * *

Colin mentioned casually at breakfast that Pamela Hunt was arriving that

afternoon.

“She telephoned this morning,” he said. “So of course I said we should

be delighted. I forget if you know her, Vi.”

He, Violet and Aunt Hester were the only three down yet. The latter

looked up from her well-furnished plate, for Aunt Hester always had a

fine appetite for breakfast, and couldn’t bear the silly rubbish of

those who said they were better without. Whether Violet knew her or not,

it was evident that Aunt Hester knew something about her....

“Pamela Hunt coming here!” she said. “Well, I never!”

Colin turned to her with his most radiant smile.

“What is it that you ‘don’t ever,’ Aunt Hester?” he said.

Lady Hester returned to her plate. She had no desire to make mischief,

but really, the way Pamela Hunt had run after Colin, and his perfect

readiness to be caught!... They were always together: the whole world

noticed it.

“Well, I hope we shall have a fine Sunday,” she said.

Colin, shooting a glance at Violet, saw that her attention had been

aroused. Probably it could not fail to be aroused when Pamela arrived,

but what on earth had that to do with this old Victorian creature, whose

morals, as everybody knew, had been of the most indulgent order in her

own affairs? Her old age and her wit had begun to whitewash her now, but

it was a little too much that she should wish to change her name to Mrs.

Grundy. It wasn’t nearly such a pretty name as Hester Brayton, nor did

she look the part. However, he would deal with that soon.

“I hope so, too,” he said. “We’ll go to church together, Aunt Hester,

and sing ‘A few more years shall roll.’ That’s so encouraging, isn’t it?

Good morning, Uncle Ronald. Your cough’s better, I trust.”

Uncle Ronald presented a rueful appearance. People ought not, thought

Colin, to be allowed to spoil the appearance of a room like this.

Presently Aunt Margaret joined them: all the menagerie was here now

except Grandmamma.... He turned to Aunt Hester again, with all his

sunniest good humour.

“Aunt Hester, you’re got up to kill,” he said. “I never saw anything so

saucy as your hat. Should I look as nice if I wore a hat at breakfast? I

think I shall have breakfast in a bowler. Have you been out already?”

Aunt Hester felt encouraged.... It had been a mistake to make that

ejaculation on the subject of Pamela Hunt, but it had ‘popped out.’ But

Colin bore her no grudge, bless him: such a good-natured boy, he was,

and she felt it would be quite easy to speak to him after breakfast, and

beg him to reconsider the propriety of letting that baggage come down

here. Of course Staniers weren’t saints, and she herself wasn’t a prude,

thank God, but to bring that wench down here with Violet in the house

was a ‘bit thick’ as they said nowadays....

She had finished her breakfast, and got up. Colin immediately followed

her, and they strolled along to the shady end of the terrace.

“And now, my dear, I’m going to talk to you like a mother,” she said.

Colin took her arm.

“Ah, do,” he said. “That’ll be lovely.”

“Well, my dear, you’re doing what you shouldn’t,” she said. “All the

world and his wife have been talking of the way that Pamela of yours is

running after you. Don’t think I blame her for that, for that’s her

business and yours and nobody else’s. But everyone’s been saying that

you and she--well, with that snuffy old husband of hers, no wonder she’s

wanting to make the most of her youth.”

They sat down in an encampment of chairs under the trees. Colin had

wanted an excuse for getting rid of Aunt Hester, and she was evidently

going to give him one.... It was so pleasant of people to dig their own

graves. His eyes were soft and gay as he spoke.

“Dear Aunt Hester!” he said. “Go on.”

“My dear, you’re charming to me. I was afraid you looked vexed for a

moment when that silly speech of mine popped out. So there it is--and it

ain’t quite decent of you, my dear, to bring her down with Violet in the

house. I don’t know what your relations with the woman are, though of

course you’d tell me there are none, but whether there are or not

doesn’t affect it. You oughtn’t to have her down here, for, even if

Violet knows nothing about it now, there’ll be a host of kind friends to

tell her, when they know that Pamela’s been to stay at Stanier, and it

makes a fool of her. Don’t you ever make a fool of anybody, my dear,

for they’ll heave it back at you sooner or later. That’s my experience.”

Colin felt a sudden inexplicable impulse of affection for this damaged

old butterfly, which ought to have been hybernating. She was such a

pagan, and she had enjoyed herself so in her time, and she had shrewd

wicked little eyes like an elephant. But that softening towards her only

made him impatient of himself, and he rallied against this insidious

intrusion. Just a little more from her first.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said.

“Yes, my dear, I am, but it’s nice of you to listen like this to an old

woman like me. You ring her up, or get that young Italian ruffian of

yours to ring her up, and say you’ve got the influenza. I’ve not

forgotten what it’s like to be young and kick over the traces a bit, but

down here you know....”

Colin sighed. He had got rid of the intrusive affection. She was just

like an improper little doll.

“There’s one thing I want to know, Aunt Hester,” he said.

She looked at him a moment. Really he was the handsomest and most

attractive boy she had ever seen. Anyone so endowed ought to have carte

blanche to do as he pleased.

“Tell me, my dear,” she said.

“I will, as we’re talking so pleasantly and confidentially. I’ve been

wondering what the deuce you’ve got to do with it. I believe I’m master

here: I fancy I can invite anyone I choose. Perhaps I’m wrong: perhaps

I’m only a dummy stuck at the head of the table, and the place is run by

a syndicate of aged relatives. Certainly it seems to be, for there’s

Uncle Ronald drinking the cellar up, and telling me he couldn’t dream of

leaving Granny, and there’s Aunt Margaret, as adhesive here as a postage

stamp, and now there’s you dictating to me about my morals and my

guests. As for what you tell me the world and his wife say, how can you

expect me to be interested in the gabble of a pack of your foul-minded

old friends? You always liked gossiping in the gutter.”

Colin jumped up from his chair, and shook off Aunt Hester’s hand which

lay on his arm. Cruelty is a whet to itself: it grows sharper with use.

“Do you know, I’m not going to stand it any more,” he said. “I’ve

already told Violet to get it into Uncle Ronald’s head that he mustn’t

expect to be here all the rest of his life, and now I tell you the same.

You’ve got houses of your own and you can all go and live in them. As

for telephoning, if there is any telephoning to be done, it’ll be you to

telephone to your housekeeper to say you’ve got influenza and are coming

home. I don’t want you to do that; I hate rushing things. But if you

stop here a day or two longer--I shall be quite pleased if you do--you

must first apologize for your damnable interference in things that don’t

concern you. Really, Aunt Hester, for you to set yourself up as a guide

to the young, is just a shade too grotesque.”

Aunt Hester sat still, her hands tight on the arms of her chair, and her

mouth holding itself in. Into her eyes there came the small difficult

tears of the old. She wiped them away with a little pink-bordered

handkerchief, and got up.

“I’ll be telling my maid to pack,” she said.

“Just as you please,” said Colin.

“That’s what I please,” said she.

Colin felt a spasm of impotent fury with her. He could not have been

more invincibly brutal, but he had not won. She went down with her flag

flying, she was sinking unsubdued.

“Goodbye, my dear,” she said, “I was always devoted to you, and I

thought you liked me. But you hate me, else you couldn’t have spoken to

me like that. I’m sorry I was wrong about you. And I thank you for my

visit.”

“So good of you to have come. Aunt Hester,” he said.

Violet had come out of the dining-room and was now close to them.

“I’ve got to go up to town, my dear,” said Aunt Hester, turning her back

on Colin. “I must see to my togs.”

Violet cast one glance at Colin, who stood there all debonair and

smiling.

“But you’ll be back this evening?” she said.

“No, my dear, not so soon as that,” said Aunt Hester, and tripped off to

the house.

Violet turned to Colin.

“Has anything happened?” she said. “Why is Aunt Hester going?”

Colin followed the retreat of the sprightly little figure for a moment

in silence. Then with a sigh he looked at Violet, shaking his head.

“It’s all wretched,” he said. “Yes, Aunt Hester’s quarrelled with me.

She took it on herself to tell me I had no business to ask Pamela here.

She said everyone believed I was having an affair with her, and that it

was an insult to you to ask her here. Now that doesn’t happen to be

true. Do you believe that, darling?”

Violet looked at him with that direct limpid gaze, so like his own.

“If you tell me so, of course I do,” she said.

“I do tell you so,” he said. “Even if it wasn’t true, what on earth has

it to do with Aunt Hester? But her talking to me like that--she called

it talking like a mother--gave me the opportunity I wanted, so I told

her I was tired of being ruled by aged and parasitic relatives. I said I

wasn’t in a hurry for her to go, but that, if she wanted to stop a bit

longer, she must apologize. So she went to pack. That’s all.”

“Oh, Colin, poor old thing!” said Violet.

“Me, or Aunt Hester?” he asked.

“Aunt Hester. She didn’t mean to insult you.”

“I suppose then she did it by accident,” said he. “If so, she ought to

have said she was sorry. How about the others, by the way? Have you

spoken a seasonable word to Uncle Ronald?”

“Yes. He understands. He and my mother are thinking of going to-day.

They would be off on Monday anyhow.”

“Golly: the animals are going out three by three,” observed Colin. “You

and Pamela and I will be _à trois_. A quiet peaceful Sunday. I hope it

will be fine, as Aunt Hester said.”

Violet turned towards the house.

“I must go and see Aunt Hester,” she said.

“What for? To commiserate with her for having a brutal nephew?” asked

Colin.

“No, Colin. To say I am sorry she is going, but that, if she can’t see

her way to apologize to you, there’s nothing else to be done. I believe

what you tell me, and, that being so, she has wronged you.”

Colin paused.

“And supposing now I told you I was in love with Pamela?” he said.

Violet’s eyes wandered away from him a moment, and mused alone.

“I believe that at the bottom of my heart I should rejoice that you were

in love with anybody,” she said.

Colin’s beautiful mouth curled with derision.

“God! That’s the last word in wifely devotion,” he said.

“But it’s true,” said she.

* * * * *

Ronald and his wife had decided not to alter their plans, but to stay

till Monday, and thus Pamela’s arrival left the party numerically as

they were. But her presence brought into it some sort of emotional

intensity; flippant as was her speech, Violet divined a certain force

behind the flippancy, below her wit there was will. Certainly she was

extremely good-looking, black of eye and hair, olive in skin, a

wonderful contrast to the fairness of Staniers. And flippancy and force

alike, wit and will, were all shooting at one target....

“London is getting addled,” she was saying. “It always does half-way

through July. The hens, that is the hostesses, sit and sit and sit, but

nothing comes out, except a few engagements of their sons and their

daughters, or rather of their fathers and their mothers. That would be

nearer the truth. There was a summary of the ages of newly-married

people in _The Times_ the other day. There were six over seventy, three

over eighty, and one of ninety-two.”

“Deaths, surely, deaths,” said Ronald. Pamela had been making him feel

young: he was glad he had settled to stop till Monday.

“No, dear Mr. Stanier, marriages,” she said. “The people who died were

much younger, I noticed it particularly. How do you explain that,

Colin?”

“That marriage keeps you young is the only explanation,” said he.

“No, my dear, you don’t grasp it. They were already wonderfully old when

they married. Being old keeps you young is the only explanation I can

think of. We must get old: otherwise we shall die instead of marrying.”

“And what was the age of the babies who were born on this remarkable

day?” asked Colin.

“How can you ask? Babies are the oldest things in the world. You can’t

compute their age, it is infinite: they are age itself. But by degrees,

through experience, they get young. We come into the world all red and

wrinkled, and we go out all white and wrinkled. We’ve been bled, that’s

all.”

All the time, Violet felt, she was talking at Colin. These sprightly

trifles, unreal as stage-dialogue, were but the steam that rose over

what lay below. Whether she addressed Ronald or his wife or Violet

herself, the steam blew always towards Colin. She talked impartially to

one or another, just as she looked impartially at one or another, so

that out of that very impartiality she might look at Colin, too. But on

him her hovering glance settled for a moment. A woman always did that if

she was in love with a man. She talked here and there, she glanced here

and there, in order to make it natural that she should glance

everywhere. But when she came to the face that she sought, she hovered

no longer, but, just for a moment, she settled.

As certainly Violet knew that Colin was not in the least in love with

her: he had never spoken a truer word than when he had told her that. He

was amused with her, he looked long and very openly at her: he did not

disguise his admiration. But he had no secret message for her, as she

for him.... Lady Yardley’s voice broke in: she had been perfectly silent

throughout dinner.

“Why is Hester not here, Colin?” she said. “Has this lady who has been

amusing us all come to live here instead of Hester?”

Colin nodded to Violet, who rose.

“No, Granny darling,” he said. “This lady has only come to live with us

till Monday, unless you can persuade her to stop. Now it’ll be time for

your whist in ten minutes. Go on with Violet.”

Colin took a delicate pleasure that night in not allowing Uncle Ronald

to drink more than one glass of port. He had told Violet that he would

make him tipsy every night till she did as she was told and informed her

father that he was not to regard Stanier as his home any longer; now,

since she had been obedient, he would see that Uncle Ronald was

lamentably sober. He could play whist to-night in fact, and Violet and

her mother must make up the table for old Lady Yardley. This left him

and Pamela free, and presently he strolled out with her on the terrace.

“It was delightful of you to propose yourself,” he said, “though, upon

my word, I felt it was very selfish of me to let you come. How can I

prevent your having a fearfully dull Sunday with nobody here? You’ve

missed Aunt Hester: she adds a little spice sometimes to the plain

family pudding.”

Pamela glanced up at the noble façade of the house. “And to the suburban

villa,” she said. “No wonder you adore it. Be it ever so humble, Colin,

there’s no place like home.”

Colin had been reflecting what he should do with Pamela. He had seen all

that Violet saw, but his opportunity did not allure him. She was

magnificently handsome, but she conveyed nothing to his senses. She was

all very well as a unit, in the general crowd; she talked nonsense, she

made him laugh, but he had no earthly use for her beyond that. He knew

very well what she was after: what she was after walked by her side now,

and his own entire indifference to her made that appear an unwarranted

liberty. In his summary of her, she wanted--that was so characteristic

of some women’s love--she wanted to possess him, by making herself

indispensable to him. That was the way a woman worked. She put it that

she gave herself to a man, whereas in reality she aimed at just the

opposite, for she meant the man to give himself to her. She wanted

always to undermine a man’s independence, and subject him to herself.

She used her beauty, her wit, her short skirts, her powder-puff all for

the same end, to enslave him to his desire for her. That sapped his

strength, it sheared him of his manhood, even as Delilah cut Samson’s

mane, so that he was helpless in her hands. A woman’s avowed abandonment

of herself, her yielding, her weakness were all fetters of steel with

which she cramped and enchained the man: her weakness, indeed, was

precisely her strength. And she called this rapacity tenderness! It was

the tenderness of a leech which softly fastens itself and softly clings

till it is satiated with the blood of its victim. Then full-fed it drops

off.

Thus at any rate he judged her quality, a quality greedy and common,

that called itself self-surrendering. She was out for what she could

get, and Colin had a certain sympathy with that, for it was sensible and

intelligible. It had not, at any rate, anything in common with Violet’s

love for him, which sought to give and not to get. That was wholly alien

to him: its manifestations bored him, its spirit, just because it was so

unintelligible to him, he hated and defied.... Pamela was not like that,

nor again was she light, she did not think of this physical desire,

which she called love, as a diversion. Had she offered him a part in a

comedy, he might have accepted it: comedy was a pleasant pastime. But it

was not that which she wanted: she was engaged, so he construed her, on

nefarious designs against his liberty: and these must be met with

counterplots, which would lead her on to some final debâcle.

They paused a moment as she looked up at the house. The moon to-night

had only just risen, tawny and large on the horizon.

“Yes, I adore it,” he said. “It casts a spell on us all, you know. I

would sooner be here than anywhere on this earth, but, as you know now,

there are certain drawbacks to it.”

“Drawbacks? Shew me some,” she said.

“Ah, you’re too polite. Polite Pamela.... But imagine what dinner would

have been like if it hadn’t been for you! Granny, Uncle Ronald, Aunt

Margaret----”

“My dear, you’ve left out Violet,” she said. “I think she’s too

fascinating.”

Colin saw that his counter-plot was positively opened by her. He put his

arm through hers.

“I feel sure you have seen,” he said, “and I’m sure you’re sympathetic.

Give me a drop of pity, Pamela. That’ll be rather healing, and then

we’ll be gay again.”

“But pity? Why pity?” said she.

Colin stopped.

“Violet detests me,” he said. “Yes, I know you saw that, and naturally

you couldn’t say it. But it’s said now. It’s sad, isn’t it? Just a

little sad? It’s not her fault: any more than it’s my fault that I love

her. And I suppose I shall get used to it. They say one gets used to

anything. Wounds heal if you give them time. But, oh, how easily they’re

torn open again! Look, here where we stand in the shadow of the

yew-hedge is the very spot where Violet first kissed me: it was here she

said she would marry me. Come away. I bleed.”

He saw her eyes sparkle and soften. They sparkled first: that was the

genuine symptom. Then they softened: that was womanly sympathy. Her arm

just pressed his encircled hand, and that perhaps was both. All this he

read so easily, with that adeptness derived from the birthright of his

inheritance. No saint of God could find good in people with such

dexterity as he could find evil.

“My dear, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hadn’t seen, more shame on my

blindness. And really it never occurred to me that sorrow could come

near you, for you always seem so robed in joy.”

“I’m glad. I mustn’t lose hold on joy,” said he quickly. “But what

atrocious manners I’ve got! There’s nothing so thoroughly rude and

middle-class as to tell your friends of your troubles.”

“There’s no greater compliment that you can pay, than to do just that,”

she said. “But I should never have guessed, Colin, you’re a wonderful

dissembler.”

He laughed.

“I’m a wonderful grouser,” he said. “Grouse too, Pamela. Be sociable:

tell me the secret sorrows of your domestic life.”

“You know quite well I haven’t any. My husband and I are the greatest

friends. Whenever we meet, which is about once a year, we have the most

delightful talk, and always hope we shall meet again soon. In the

intervals we hear of each other occasionally. I hear about his little

affairs, and I suppose he would about mine if I had any. But I can’t

behave as so many women seem to.”

Colin gave a little shudder.

“I should hate you if you did,” he said. “Don’t make me do that.”

That certainly was not part of Pamela’s plan.

“I promise that you shan’t for that reason,” she said. “But we won’t

talk about me.... Oh, Colin, I hate your being unhappy. What can be

done, my dear? You’ve got so much, too: you’ve got so many people who

are devoted to you.”

He looked at her with eyes brilliant and wistful.

“Have I?” he said. “I don’t feel as if I had. People are friendly, I

know, but I am only one in a crowd to them. They come down here in

shoals in the autumn--next time you come, you shall really have some

more amusing people to meet.”

She interrupted him.

“No, don’t do that,” she said. “The shoals of amusing people aren’t

anything to me.”

“Ah, that’s nice of you,” said Colin.

They stood there a moment in silence: then he turned quickly to the

house.

“We must go in,” he said. “Granny will have finished her whist, and then

my uncle likes a chat in the smoking-room. You never knew I was such a

domestic character, did you, Pamela?”

“I always knew you were a dear,” she said. “And you do like me a little,

don’t you?”

* * * * *

Colin, when he found himself alone--Uncle Ronald was gloomily consuming

whisky to make up for the dearth of port--was as pleased with his

terrace-talk as his companion had been. There was the little side-show

(gratis) of representing himself as yearning for Violet, but that was

only an antechamber, so to speak, which he and Pamela were passing

through, and there she saw him, the gay trappings of his brilliance

stripped off him, hungry for love. And already Pamela--how well he read

her--was at his side. Closer and closer must she get till she could not

exist without him. All the time she would be posing as the consoling

friend, the healer of wounds, and all the time to the truer vision she

would be the hunting leopard hungry for the hot blood of its prey. And

just as she thought she had got it, it would be the prey somehow that

turned on her with derision and mockery. With the exact manner of that

furious turning of the tables, Colin did not trouble himself: it could

not be settled now, for it must depend on developments. Before long he

would be going out to Capri: he might ask her there perhaps, for at

Capri everything always turned out well. How often had he made plans,

lying there on the beach between the bathes, and how surely had their

accomplishment justified the design! The fruit was not ripe yet, though

the moonshine on the terrace had brought it on towards maturity.

To-morrow ought to be a nice growing day, too....

What a high morality he would then exhibit, and how delightful would be

the mockery of it! His plan, thus vaguely outlined to himself, was a

derisive parody of morality, in which a decent married man would be seen

resisting the improper seductress: what could be nicer? It would be a

veritable tract about a Messalina and a Galahad. And then you looked

closer, and saw that hate and the desire to hurt twitched in every

gesture of Galahad. There was the cream and felicity of it, for it would

all be a defiance of love, a campaign of hostility and rebellion.

Colin stood up, stretching himself slowly and luxuriously. He had taken

out again from its locked drawer, the plan of that annex which his

ancestor had never erected, to study it further, but there was really no

need of that. He had sent for his architect to come here on Monday

morning, who must get to work on this outlined sketch-plan, and devise

something in the style of the house, using old brick and weathered stone

and timber. That would all be talked out on Monday, and the building of

it begun at once. For to-morrow’s employment there was church in the

morning, where he always read the lessons if he was at home, and after

that there were fruits to be ripened, and very soon after that,

certainly during this week, he would go off with Nino to Capri, for a

month of basking and bathing and, he made no doubt, a moral interlude,

for he meant to ask Pamela to visit him there. And researches must be

made in underground Naples: that red ridiculous Consul, Mr. Cecil, would

have to lend his friendly offices. He would get him to come over for a

night to the island.

Colin looked round his room. Just there the door would be pierced that

led into the corridor communicating with the sanctuary.

CHAPTER IV

Colin woke from his siesta very gradually. He had not the slightest idea

when the first faint glimmerings of consciousness began to return, where

he was. He scarcely knew who he was, and with a deliberate quiescence of

mind he tried to prolong this vague sense that what lay here was alive

and happy, without orientating it or attaching it to any fixed point.

Nirvana, he thought, must be like this, mere awareness of existence and

content.

But this Nirvana began spontaneously to break up: from outside his

window a whisper of wind and a stir of sun-winnowed air spiced with

indefinable Southern odour flowed across to the bed where he lay in

shirt and trousers, and at the end of his bed, very curiously, he saw

two bare feet. It was still unconjecturable, to his drowsiness, to whom

they belonged and what they were doing there, but now a fly settled on

one of them, and he made the great discovery that it was his own foot

which twitched to dislodge it. This snapped the chain of his identity

round his neck and he knew he was Colin. Then the hot Southern scent and

the whisper of wind in the pine outside localized him, for nowhere else,

but in that beloved villa on Capri, did a pine whisper like that. Yes,

he was in Capri: of course he was, for he had arrived late last night,

and had spent the morning in the sea.

When once the sluices of sleep were raised, memories began to pour

through, and he let them flow as they would without direction. He had

come here first only two years ago with his father, and instantly his

Italian blood had initiated him into the magic of the South; the lizards

basking on the walls, the grey olives, the stone pines, the steep

cobbled ways were as home-like, even when he saw them for the first

time, as the thrushes that scudded across the lawn at Stanier, and the

yew-hedge and the lake. Of course his father’s presence, and his

father’s devotion to him, had been tedious at times, but he had borne

that very indulgently. Then he had come here with Violet on his

honeymoon, and here she had begun to learn something of his real nature,

and that cold terror she had of him, which so inexplicably existed side

by side with her love, had first laid a finger on her. Strange, to think

how that hand of ice had never frozen her love, nor squeezed it out of

her heart.... And then he had come here a third time, after Raymond had

been drowned, but had stayed here only one night, for waiting

him--welcoming him?--was the telegram to say his father was dead. He had

not wanted his father to die exactly: he was quite content to wait a few

years yet, but how his heart had leaped to know that already, while he

was not yet of age, his great inheritance had come to him. Surely Capri

was a lucky spot for him: yet was there, where he was concerned, such a

thing as luck? Luck, as it was generally understood, was a fitful

visitor, with rare capricious advents, and long absences. But with him

it abided always.

Colin yawned, till the whole half-circle of his milk-white teeth was

disclosed, with his tongue lying like a curved rose-leaf between them,

and when his mouth closed again, it closed into a smile. He slewed

himself off his bed, and barefooted stepped across the cool tiled floor

to the next room where tea was waiting for him. This siesta through the

hot hours of the afternoon, when it was impossible to go out, made two

days out of each twenty-four hours; you awoke as to another morning,

with body refreshed and brain alert. Already the sea breeze was

stirring, and the westering sun was off the front of the house, and

presently, cup in hand, he strolled across to the window, and pushed

back the closed green-slatted shutters, which had kept the room cool

during the heat. In came the flooding freshness, spiced with sea, and

chasing before it the stagnant air of the house which had been darkened

against the tropic blaze of the noon. It heralded the approach of the

caressing Italian evening and the star-sown night.

Nino entered to clear away the tea-things. The house was entirely run

by him and his family in true Italian fashion, for his sister was

housemaid and his stepmother, the second that his father had provided

him with, was cook, and she was abhorred by the boy with a genial

intensity, for there would be no patrimony left when his father had

finished with this brisk succession of wives, each of whom feathered her

own nest before she died.

“Well, Nino, and how’s Mamma?” said Colin.

Nino, who had been audibly exchanging compliments with his stepmother in

the kitchen, drew his eyebrows inward and down, and muttered something

which with certain prudent expurgations indicated a pious wish about

desiccated and barren stoats.

Colin laughed.

“Well, you wouldn’t like her to be a fruitful stoat,” he observed.

“Scusi, but I would,” said Nino, “for surely she would die in

childbirth, and there would be one coffin for the two.”

“I thought I heard you kissing in the kitchen,” observed Colin.

“I would sooner kiss the gridiron,” said Nino.

“Well, go and kiss the gridiron then if you prefer it. And take the

tea-things away, Nino. And when you’ve finished kissing the gridiron

come back. I want you.”

The Southern smile broke through. Colin could always make Nino smile,

even when the stepmother was in the picture.

“Sis-signor,” said Nino. “I will kiss the stoat and the gridiron.”

“We shoot stoats in England,” said Colin, “and hang their corpses upon

trees.”

“Eh, she’d look nice on the pine there,” said Nino. “But, Dio, the

stink, when the scirocco blew!”

Nino departed with the tea-things to kiss his stepmother or the gridiron

or anything he chose. That was the true spirit in which to live here;

you never bothered your head as to what you were proposing to do; you

just did exactly as you liked whenever an amusing opportunity suggested

itself. And yet it was a wonderful place in which to make plans, thought

Colin. You lay on the beach after your bathe, and without effort your

brain seethed with ideas. The sun seemed to liquefy the contents of its

cells, and the secret juices, scarcely known to yourself, oozed out in

the clear broth of thought. And fruitful too, was the night, when the

wind whispered in the pine, and the great furry-bodied bats with wings

of stretched black parchment wove silent circles in the air....

There was a power abroad then, Colin knew well, and if you were in tune

with it, you caught, like some wireless receiver, strange messages from

the midnight. Not less surely did he know that there was power abroad

for those who sought it, whenever above the altar the lamp burned before

the tabernacle that held the sacramental food, which is the Bread of

Angels. But unless your heart lay open in faith and loving adoration,

the power which in itself was infinite was no more than a fragment of

wafer, or a sip of wine: faith set that vast engine of love and

redemption at work, and across the sky, from horizon to zenith, the

worshipper beheld how Christ’s blood ‘streamed in the firmament,’ and

adored the divine miracle. So too with the power that whispered in the

pine and poured itself out on the midnight: unless you believed in it

and by faith laid hold on it, there was for you nothing there but the

night wind and the wheeling bats.

There was the truth of the legend, a truth eternal and irrevocable, a

matter of choice, not for him alone but for the whole world. He could

not so passionately have loved evil, if he had not known there was a

definite choice to be made. He might have drifted into any sort of sin

and self-indulgence from the mere fact that they were pleasant, but the

only thing that could have given him his furious zest for evil in

itself, was the terrible conviction of the existence of God. If evil had

been the dominant power in the world, he would, without the sense of

choice, have lain and soaked indolently in it, but he chose it because

he loved it, and because in its service he defied love.

Colin made no pretence of doubting the existence of good and evil and

the original living causes of them. They were principles perhaps, but

since they certainly lived, and daily and hourly manifested themselves,

he could not conceive of them otherwise than as Persons. With the same

faith that he believed in the power that inspired evil, he believed in

the power that inspired good, which had once been incarnate in man, and

in some mysterious way suffered for the redemption of those who desired

it. For those who believed (and Colin was among them), He was Love,

infinite in power, but choice was given to every man, and His Sacrament

of Love, to those who abhorred Love, became the Sacrament of Hate and

the adoration of evil. Those who had chosen thus could receive it in

mockery of love, and to them their derision was an act of faith, through

which they dedicated their powers and their will to the service of evil,

and drew therefrom the strength that inspired them.

These thoughts were no more than the steam which ascended from the

bubbling liquor of his mind, and he did no more than just watch, for

this idle moment as he waited for Nino’s return, the familiar wreath.

And here was Nino’s step on the stairs, and it was time to put these

general principles into practical shape. He had come to Capri, no doubt,

primarily, for a month of that basking amphibious life, which always put

him into harmony with himself, but there were other projects as well

which now, in strict accordance with these principles, presented

themselves for execution, projects no less dedicatory than diverting.

“Nino, we’re going to have two visitors here,” he said, “and we must

arrange about them. Mr. Cecil is coming from Naples to-morrow for two

nights and next week there comes the pretty lady, who’ll bring a maid.

Let’s go round and inspect.”

The villa was deficient in accommodation for more than a very small

number of persons, for Colin, during this last year, intending it to be

no more than his own Hermitage, had thrown rooms together, and had

converted a spare bedroom into a bathroom. Downstairs, therefore,

nowadays there was only the kitchen, and the long vaulted dining-room,

originally two rooms. Upstairs there was a large studio running the

length of the house, the bathroom, Nino’s bedroom, with Colin’s next

door, and, _en suite_, the sitting-room with the balcony where Colin had

been having tea, and a slip of a room beyond, opening out of the

sitting-room. This latter would do for Pamela’s maid, but where was

Pamela to go? Nino’s stepmother and sister always went home in the

evening after dinner, returning again early next morning.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to turn out, Nino,” said Colin, “while pretty

lady is here, and go home in the evening with your dear gridiron. Then

you can make love to her on the way.”

“Grazie,” said Nino.

“Or scrag her in the dark,” said Colin. “No, you mustn’t do that, or how

should we get breakfast next day? But what room can pretty lady have

except yours? I’d sooner have you in the house, though.”

The fell prospect of walking home every evening and coming back every

morning with his stepmother sharpened Nino’s wits.

“The signor does not really want that sitting-room next his bedroom as

well as the studio,” said he. “Could not that be the signora’s bedroom

while she is here? Then she will have her maid next door.”

“Good boy,” said Colin. “We’ll do that. There’ll be the maid at the end

of the passage, then pretty lady’s bedroom, then me, then you. And you

won’t be able to flirt with the maid without passing through the

signora’s room. Very good for your morals, Nino.”

Nino laughed.

“If it is the maid the signora brought to Stanier, she is like a

broomstick,” he said.

“Then don’t fly away on the broomstick,” said Colin. “Well, that’s

settled. But when you’re married, Nino, I shan’t turn out of my

sitting-room for your wife....”

* * * * *

Colin was always charming to those who were in a position to serve him,

and Mr. Cecil found a most cordial welcome when he arrived next day. He

was a convivial little cad (so Colin would have described him),

gratified that Lord Yardley should have asked him to spend a week-end at

his villa, and delighted to get out of that frying-pan of a town for a

couple of days. In person he was a round red bachelor, with a taste for

wine and obscenity. Colin supplied the one, and Mr. Cecil had as his

contribution a considerable fund of local lore not quite suitable for

children. Usually dinner was served under the pergola in the garden, but

to-night the weather was uneasy with hot puffs of scirocco, and instead

they ate indoors. In this heat it was impossible to shut the windows,

but the Venetian shutters were closed and little blasts of hot moist

air, entering through the slats, hovered and fluttered bat-like about

the room.

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Cecil, mopping his flushed forehead after the

relation of one of these curious episodes, “a bad piece of work. But

picturesque, undeniably picturesque. My belief is that the girl was

possessed. That sounds a queer thing to say in the twentieth century,

when physiologists have proved that every disorder of mind or body alike

is due to some microbe, but what microbe covers the facts, eh? Shew me

the microbe, that’s all, and let it produce that effect again on a

guinea-pig.”

Colin pushed the decanter towards his guest.

“Awfully curious,” he said. “And it would be even more curious to see a

guinea-pig behave like that girl. Lord! Wouldn’t it look funny? Besides,

aren’t there diseases and disorders of the spirit, as well as those of

the mind and body?”

“Of course there are. What makes one fellow a saint and another a devil?

Is that a microbe?”

Colin laughed.

“The microbe that makes a man a saint is a devilish rare beast,” he

said. “I never saw a case of sanctified possession, did you? But

possession, yes. The devil was in the girl: give the devil his due.

Anyhow, they believe in him in Italy, don’t they? Evil eye, all that

sort of thing.”

Colin spoke in the lightest possible manner, flicking the ash off the

end of his cigar.

“Yes, and it goes much deeper than that,” said Mr. Cecil.

“How interesting! You mean they take the devil really seriously, as a

force to be reckoned with, to be fought, or sided with?”

“Quite, quite,” said Mr. Cecil. “Fought, of course, in general: the

Church has a very strong hold.”

“And, by exception, sided with,” said Colin. “The direct worship of

Satan really goes on still, doesn’t it, in--in holes and corners?”

Mr. Cecil evidently did not like the subject more than Nino. By now the

puffing wind had increased into a roar, which rattled the shutters, and

screamed round the corners of the house.

“One does hear of such things,” he said.

The hot wind strangely exhilarated Colin: he felt it tingling in him; he

vibrated to its friendly violence. On Nino, who entered the room now to

see if the signori were not disposed to quit the table, so that he might

clear away, it seemed to have an opposite effect. Like all natives he

detested scirocco, and looked jaded and washed-out.

“Black Mass, for instance,” said Colin to Mr. Cecil.

Nino, at Colin’s elbow, clicked his tongue against his teeth. Colin

turned round.

“Oh, don’t hang about, Nino,” he said. “Go to bed: you look cross and

tired. You can leave the things here till the morning. Good night.”

Nino had no answer for him, but sullenly withdrew.

“Your servant doesn’t seem to like the subject,” remarked Mr. Cecil. “He

looked as stuffy as a thundercloud when you mentioned the Black Mass.”

“I know. Nino twitters with superstition. He’s a son of the Church: he

fears the devil without believing in him. The Black Mass now. Do tell me

what you know about it. I don’t believe there’s anything you don’t know

about these wonderful Southerners.”

Mr. Cecil certainly prided himself with reason on his extensive

knowledge of subterranean Italian life, and it was hard to resist

justifying his conviction.

“Well, as a matter of fact I have some little knowledge of it,” he said.

“Indeed I possess a copy of the missal. An extremely rare book.”

“Ah, that’s interesting,” said Colin. “What language? Latin? Italian?”

“No, strangely enough it is in English. In fact the book is probably

unique. It was printed in London in the early seventeenth century. How

it got into a bookstall in the Via Maurizio I haven’t any idea, but

there I found it.”

Colin leaned forward over the table, his face all alight with eagerness.

Such exactly might have been the missal in use in that sanctuarium at

Stanier, had not his ancestor turned his back on his Lord and

Benefactor, and striven by craven acts of loveless piety to shuffle out

of his contract before it became due.... Now, three centuries later, it

looked as if it was given to him to atone for that lamentable surrender,

and here was an opportunity for the furnishing of the chapel that was

already being built. Sitting there, with his face vivid and eager, in

the matchless charm of his youth and beauty, he looked, in contrast with

the flushed little Silenus opposite him, like some young god in whom was

incarnate the spirit of physical perfection. Surely no such gracious

creature had ever been fashioned in the image of God.

“Mr. Cecil, you’re the most wonderful person,” he said. “You know

everything. Take some whisky: what’s that damned boy of mine done with

it? Ah, there it is.”

Colin got up to fetch the bottle. As he rose the catch of the shutters

gave way under the press of the wind; they swung wide, and with a

triumphant whoop the scirocco burst into the room, like some vivid

invisible presence. Colin laughed aloud with exultation, and ran to the

window, where he wrestled with the shutters. Then, just as suddenly,

there came a complete lull, and he fastened them back into place and

closed the windows.

“The wind has been wanting to come in all evening to join us,” he said.

“Now it has had its way, and it will be content. There’s your whisky:

now tell me all about the missal. You will have to let me see it, too.”

Mr. Cecil helped himself.

“Well, certainly it’s a curious book,” he said, “and I take an

antiquarian’s interest in it. But naturally that’s all. To you and me,

of course, it appears a mere farrago of ridiculous blasphemy, because,

though we’re delighted to amuse ourselves, eh? and perhaps are not

always as moral and monkish as we might be, we don’t want to be wicked

for the sake of wickedness.”

“Just so,” said Colin.

“In order to appreciate what the missal and the mass mean to the

worshippers,” continued Mr. Cecil, “we must try to imagine ourselves--if

it were possible--delighting in evil for its own sake. We must realize

that to such ruffians as these, evil is the Mecca of their every thought

and deed. They worship it, and, in consequence, detest and mock at all

that you and I hold sacred, though we may not live up to our beliefs.

Still we hold them.”

Colin was bubbling with amusement and impatience. He wanted Mr. Cecil to

get on, but, on the other hand, it was wonderfully diverting to hear him

talk like this. He took a hand in it.

“I think I can see what you mean,” he said. “These ruffians, as you so

rightly call them, are fanatics in the cause of evil. But do such people

really exist?”

“Yes, and all the time they believe in God,” said Mr. Cecil. “Their

creed is of defiance, as well as worship.”

Colin liked knowing that his theories of yesterday were so wonderfully

confirmed, but it was all stale stuff to him: Mr. Cecil was instructing

a master in the rudiments of his art.

“And now for the contents of the missal,” he said.

“As I say, it will seem to you only a farrago of blasphemy,” repeated

Mr. Cecil, “but interesting as a human, or rather a devilish, document.

It follows the English use, it is a parody in fact of the English use.

The exhortation, I remember, begins, ‘Ye that do truly and earnestly

delight you in your sins, and intend to lead a vile life’ and so forth.

Then follows the Confession, addressed, of course, to Satan ‘We

acknowledge and bewail’ so it runs ‘our manifold good deeds and loving

actions, which we from time to time have most grievously committed

against thy Divine Majesty, provoking, most justly, thy wrath and

indignation against us. We do earnestly repent’ ... it follows the words

of the Confession in our prayer-books.”

“But what of the priest?” asked Colin. “Is he really a priest?”

“Certainly; he must, as is stated in the preface, be a duly-ordained

priest, on whom the Church has bestowed the power of Absolution and of

Consecration. If the celebrant was not a real priest, the blasphemy of

the Black Mass would be meaningless.”

“I see,” said Colin. “Horrible....”

“Then follows the Absolution, and a Satanistic rendering of the Sanctus.

And then we come to what the Romans call the Canon of the Mass, and the

Consecration. And that really is so shocking that I can’t tell you about

it. But the point is this, that when the priest has consecrated the

elements, he desecrates them in a manner laid down in the Rubric. That

is the crowning and awful infamy. I don’t say I’m a very religious man

myself, but when I came to that, I really felt the sweat come out on

me.”

All the time that Colin’s eager face had been raised to his, the

brightness and beauty of it was something amazing. Never had he felt

himself so truly in harmony with the spirit that inspired his life.

Here, under the symbolism of this rite, was his own spirit revealed to

him, his hatred of love, his love of hate. Here was the strengthening

and refreshing of his soul: the renewal, mystically, of the bargain made

in Elizabethan days....

He recalled himself from that flash of perception: there was Mr. Cecil,

looking really shocked, and he lowered his dancing eyes.

“How absolutely awful,” he said, “you make me shudder, Mr. Cecil. And

how well and vividly you are telling it. But, horrible as it all is, I

think you must let me see that missal. I’ve got gruesome tastes, you

know. I like to be horrified. When will you let me see it?”

“You shall see it whenever you like. You will be passing through Naples

on your way home, and I should be delighted to shew it you. We could

have another bachelor evening together, as we had before. Dear me, I

quite forgot that you were married now, Lord Yardley: I should never

have said that. But if you will persist in looking like a boy of

eighteen----”

Colin was on fire with impatience to see this missal, but he did not in

the least want to spend another evening, such as he had done before,

with this sprightly elderly sensualist in the cafés of Naples.

Passionately evil though he was, there was not a grain of coarseness in

him: he had no objection to others wallowing in mere animalism, poking

and giggling and prying, but he had no mind for it himself: that was not

his brand. What was imperative was that he should get hold of this

wonderful book without delay: literally he thirsted for it, and his

thirst must be assuaged. He would want to make a copy of it, unless, as

he determined to try to do, he could secure the original. He could not

wait....

“Ah, yes, bachelor-evenings are not for me any more,” he said gaily.

“I’m a father, a heavy father, Mr. Cecil, and I read the lessons in

church on Sunday mornings. Imagine if some respectable neighbour from

Stanier saw me razzle-dazzling in shady places in Neapolitan slums! I

should be thought such a hypocrite. But this missal: couldn’t I send

Nino across to Naples to-morrow, with a note from you to your

housekeeper, telling her to look on a certain shelf, and let him have a

certain book?”

Mr. Cecil gave a complacent little giggle.

“I’m afraid that would hardly do,” he said. “That book is locked away in

a cupboard, and there are some other things there I should hardly like

my housekeeper to see. One or two of those terra-cottas from Pompeii;

not quite in my housekeeper’s style. You remember her? Comes from

Aberdeen; Aberdeen granite I call her.”

Colin had to continue propitiating this dreadful little man till he had

got what he wanted.

“Excellent!” he said. “What a knack you have of hitting a person off,

Mr. Cecil. I remember her perfectly. Aberdeen granite! Awfully good!...

But I’ve got to go to Naples soon. Would it bore you too much if I came

across with you on Monday?”

“By all means do that, and I’ll shew you the missal. But it’s queer to

me that you are so anxious to see it. What was my phrase for it just

now? A mere farrago of blasphemy. That’s all it is.”

“Somehow, you’ve interested me in it,” said Colin. “Well, what do you

say about bed? I’ve got no amusing little night-haunts to shew you in

Capri. We’re innocent Arcadians here, Mr. Cecil, who eat lotuses and go

to bed at ten.”

Colin shewed his guest to his room, and went to his own. The scirocco,

which an hour ago had been raging, had quite died down, and he threw

open his closed shutters, and looked out on to the ‘darkness thick and

hot.’ That furious wind which had clamoured round the house, until it

had burst open the Venetian shutters, and then, as if its purpose had

been fulfilled, had ceased altogether, seemed to have charged the night

with power; it tingled round him in bubbling eddies.... He could hear

the sea, maddened by that fierce tempest, buffeting along the rocky

coast to the south, and surely not far away the wind still yelled. But

just here there was calm as at the centre of some cyclone....

* * * * *

Colin accompanied Mr. Cecil to Naples on Monday morning, and they went

straight to his house. Presently the cupboard containing the objects

which were not fit for the stony eyes of Aberdeen granite was open, and

Mr. Cecil drew out a very thin quarto volume, finely bound in tooled

morocco, but much worn.

“There’s your book for you,” he said. “It’s quite a long time since I

set eyes on it: a fine binding, and I see, what I had forgotten, that

there’s a coronet and a coat of arms on the back.”

Colin, before opening it, looked at the cover. There was an earl’s

coronet, and below---- He jumped out of his chair, his eyes wide with

wonder.

“But, Mr. Cecil!” he cried. “This is the most amazing thing, the thing’s

a miracle. Those are my arms. And there’s the date, 1640, the book must

have belonged to the founder of the family; the Elizabethan Colin, who

made the bargain with Satan.... No one could have put the coronet and

his arms on a book in 1640, except him. He died in 1643.”

Then, in a flash, the whole history of the book dawned on him; the

theory was as incontestable as a mathematical proof.

“I’ve got it!” he cried. “As you know, he built Stanier, he collected

pictures and bronzes, and, as I read the other day only, in the Memoirs

he himself wrote, he collected a quantity of magical and occult books,

and mentions among them a missal of ‘wondrous blasphemies.’ They don’t

exist at Stanier nowadays: probably he disposed of them.”

“Dear me, dear me!” said Mr. Cecil, reaching out his hand for the book.

“Your arms, are they? And the date, and the coronet.... Yes, I see. Go

on, please, my dear fellow.”

“Well, he lived an awful life,” said Colin. “I will show you the Memoirs

when you come to England and stay with us, as you must promise to do. He

enjoyed the benefits of his bargain to the full. And he certainly

contemplated--this is rather private family history--he contemplated

building a sanctuary for Satanic worship. Then, the year before he died,

he got into a state of terror about the future. He wrote no more about

his awful deeds in his Memoirs, and he did not build the chapel, of

which he left the plan, with a priest’s lodging adjoining.... Now

doesn’t that fit in completely with the disappearance of the collection

of magical lore, and the book of wondrous blasphemies? He fired them out

of his library, and read lives of the saints, and that sort of truck:

those books are there, yards of them. And now the missal of wondrous

blasphemies has turned up again. There it is in your hand.”

Mr. Cecil looked at the device on the cover.

“Well, upon my word, that does seem a very sound hypothesis,” he said.

“Really, if I had known----”

Colin laughed.

“You needn’t finish that sentence,” he said. “What is in your head is

that you would never have shewn it me, if you had known that it came

from Stanier.”

He sat down again, and, laying his hand on Mr. Cecil’s arm, summoned all

the charm and persuasion of which he was master.

“I must have that book you know,” he said. “I should have tried to get

you to let me buy it from you, anyhow, but now, I really have the right

to acquire it, haven’t I?”

Now this reconstruction, so ably sketched by Colin, had considerably

increased the pride of possession in Mr. Cecil. It gave an immense

interest to the missal to know that it had once belonged to so

historical a Faust as the first Earl of Yardley.

“I don’t see that there’s any question of right about it,” he said.

Colin bridled his impatience. Once the book was in his possession, he

wanted no more of Mr. Cecil, who, for all he cared, could burrow in

underground Naples to his heart’s content, until somebody knifed him.

“Perhaps ‘right’ is too strong a word,” he said. “Let’s say suitability.

Surely it’s very suitable that the book should go back to Stanier. As

for price, if you’ll tell me what you paid for it, I’ll give you five

times what it cost you.”

Mr. Cecil laughed.

“I fancy I bought it for five liras, say four shillings,” he said. “I

don’t know that twenty-five liras would tempt me very irresistibly.”

“Five liras!” said Colin. “My goodness, I wish I had been shopping with

you that day! Of course, that makes my offer ludicrous. But how about

getting it valued by Quaritch or somebody who knows? I would then be

delighted to pay you twice its estimated value.”

Mr. Cecil shook his head.

“I don’t really want to part with it,” he said. “Charmed to let you read

it----”

“But I want to own it,” said Colin quietly. “In fact I must. After all,

it is only a question of terms. Please name your terms.”

Mr. Cecil, for answer, merely put the book in the cupboard from which he

had taken it, and turned the key on it. Colin’s insistence had increased

his determination to keep the book; as a strong sub-current in his mind

there was the notion that here was this enormously wealthy young man,

who, for some reason of his own, intensely wanted the book. There was no

harm in running up the price....

“Ah, my dear boy, you don’t understand the collector’s spirit,” he said.

“He is as obstinate as a mule when he has got hold of something he

values. The book is not for sale.”

Colin felt one spasm of furious rage. It was for the honour of his Lord

and Benefactor that he was engaged, and at that moment he would have

stuck at nothing to get his desire. From the depth of his heart he let

some voiceless intense petition issue.

As that silent prayer welled out of his inmost soul, his anger fell off

him like dead autumn leaves, and through him there spread the clear

consciousness of the presence of the power which two nights ago had

infused the riot of the wind, and brooded in the calm that followed.

What had made him angry was the sense of his own impotence to get what

he wanted; what gave him now this sense of perfect confidence, was the

knowledge that an all-encompassing power possessed him. He spoke as it

was given him to speak, without thought or reflection, but with the

irresponsibility of inspiration. His smile came back to his lips, and

to his eyes that boyish charm and brightness.

“Ah, we mustn’t quarrel, Mr. Cecil,” he said. “Surely you are wise

enough to see that. People who quarrel with me have no luck ever

afterwards, and, believe me, I should hate to be the cause, the

unwitting cause, I may say, for it is none of my doing, of what might

befall you. Don’t force me to break you to atoms--yes, you may stare,

but I mean just that, and at the bottom of your heart you know I mean

it, and you’re afraid already. Well you may be, for you are beginning to

guess what stands by me.”

Indeed, Mr. Cecil was staring at him, and indeed he knew that he was

afraid. As he looked, some nameless inexplicable terror began to stir in

him.

Colin paused: the power that gripped him grew in intensity as he yielded

himself to it, and it now completely possessed him, so that he had no

volition of his own, and no consciousness of himself apart from it. Once

more he spoke, and though with his outward ears he could hear the words

he uttered, he did not grasp their import. He was a mouthpiece only of

the power that used his lips. He had no idea what he was saying: all he

knew was that his voice uttered the syllables, which, as they were

spoken, he heard, but which, once said, passed from his mind altogether.

But as he spoke he saw Mr. Cecil’s face change, the ruddiness of it

blanched to a deadly glistening whiteness, and suddenly, with a cry, he

started to his feet, and fumbled for his keys, and opened the cupboard

door.

“Stop, stop! that’s enough,” he said. “For God’s sake, for God’s

sake!... Here; here’s the accursed thing. Take it and begone.”

The power that possessed Colin ebbed and sank, and he felt his own

individuality restored to him. He did not know what he had been saying;

but, whatever it was, it had been sufficient, for this gross little man

was as white as paper, and, shaking, he thrust the missal into his hand.

“That’s delightful of you, Mr. Cecil,” he said. “I thought, I was sure,

in fact, that when I put the case to you, quite simply like that, you

would agree with me. Now I will take this to Quaritch’s, or wherever you

choose, and send you their estimate of what it would fetch at a good

auction, and with that I will send you a cheque for double the amount.

Its value to me, as perhaps I told you, is quite inestimable.”

Mr. Cecil mopped his face.

“I will not receive a penny for it,” he said hoarsely. “It is for me to

thank you for taking it off my hands.”

“Oh, I can’t accept such generosity,” said Colin.

“I must ask you to. And in your turn you can do me a favour.”

“Willingly: it is yours,” said Colin.

“Then never let me set eyes on you again,” said Mr. Cecil.

Colin rose and picked up his hat.

“Delighted,” he said. “Why on earth should I want to see you again? You

didn’t think I liked you, did you?”

* * * * *

He found a letter from Pamela waiting for him on his return to the villa

with his treasure that evening, in which she announced her arrival in a

couple of days. This letter, to his mind, was thoroughly typical of her

type, reeking with sub-conscious falsity, cloaking the obvious with the

transparent, and pretending that it did not shew through. Was it worth

while, for instance, to ask whether Violet was with him, when she knew

so well that her visit was based on the fact of Violet’s absence? And

was it worth while to say that she wondered whether she had not better

stay at an hotel? She knew perfectly well that she had not the smallest

intention of staying at an hotel, she would not have come to Capri for

that. Colin could imagine the blankness of her face if, when he met her,

he told her that he had taken a nice room for her at the Bella Vista, or

that Violet was with him at the villa.... Or should he telegraph and put

her off altogether?

He carried this question still undecided down with him to the beach next

morning, and, as he swam, turned it coolly over in his mind, and, as he

basked on the hot shingle, let his decision liquefy and declare itself.

For himself, he did not in the least want her here, neither as comrade

nor as lover had he any use for her. Her beauty made no spell for his

senses, and the very fact that it was his for the asking discounted it

to a zero. If she had been difficult of access, he might have found

pleasure in the chase; as it was, it was only himself who was being

chased.... On the other hand, as he had already sketched it out, the

prospect of some ludicrous and humiliating dénouement for her attracted

him: it would be amusing also to play the part of the outraged moralist,

the unsuspecting and devoted husband. How his face would pass from

amazement to indignation, when she made her meaning clear! Or perhaps

some intolerable humiliation....

He turned over on to his back, and threw an arm across his eyes, to

shield them from this resplendent glare of the noonday, and let his body

and limbs drink in the light and the heat. These were the allurements of

the South: the hot basking and the plunge into that liquid crystal, the

mouldering fragments of Roman masonry, with lizards basking on them, and

tufts of fragile campanula springing from the crevices, dusty roads with

walled-in paths leading through the ripening vineyards, stories of

Tiberio, wine decanted from perettas into bottles stoppered with green

folded leaves, ripe figs, and the warm dusk of evening, saunterings on

the piazza among dark-eyed boys and smiling girls, gay and friendly ...

all these made up the Italian spell of exquisite conditions and

effortless existence. To his loveless nature mere physical passion was

an affair of kisses and laughter and light caresses, to be enjoyed and

forgotten and renewed. If you adored a woman’s personality, you would

need her, body, soul and spirit, but without love to inspire passion she

provided no more than a pastime. And love was his enemy; whether it was

such love as Violet’s or such as Pamela’s, its only office was to give

quarry for his sport. He liked laying traps and ambushes for it, he

liked hurting and humiliating it.... Sometimes, of course, the claims of

the body were insistent, you desired satisfaction, if only to rid you of

its unease. Just so, if you had a corn, you would go to a corn-cutter,

who would make you comfortable....

“Yes, Pamela shall come,” he said to himself, “and God knows in what

plight Pamela shall go.” That would all be settled for him, he thought,

some inspiration would come, not out of his own contrivance and

ingenuity, but, like those words which he had spoken to Mr. Cecil

yesterday, out of a subtler wisdom than his. Never had he been able to

recollect them: they were spoken in some ecstasy, and how well they had

done their work! He had seen how the man’s face changed to damp ash as

he listened; would Pamela’s suffer some such change?

He raised himself on his elbow: the air over the hot white beach was

tremulous with the heat; a few yards away the sea, still as a lake, sent

no tiniest ripple to its liquid rims. Within it, like the fire in some

precious stone, a network of light played over the pebbles that lay

below, and, more than ever this morning, Colin was conscious of the fire

within himself, which, like that radiance within the sea, made a dancing

light deep in his soul. He had read and re-read that missal of wondrous

blasphemies, and like Faust it fed his soul. In the devotion of worship

was the true expression of the spirit, and with what knowledge of its

needs had the compiler framed the ritual of mockery and defiance! The

vestments of the priest and his acolyte, the gestures and genuflexions

with which he accompanied his acts, the atrocious symbolism ordained for

the decking of the altar, all stirred the imagination to the lust of

evil. Those impious orisons! How they prepared the soul for the

culminating act described in the rubric the very reading of which had

made Mr. Cecil sweat with horror! To Colin it had given a gasp and spasm

of delight: it expressed in visible symbol the core and spirit of his

being.... Here was the fire and the dancing radiance that worked within

him: presently, when the building which his ancestor had planned at

Stanier was erected, it would blaze up, a beacon of self-dedication.

Well, it was time for a final swim, for he was roasted through and

through, and already Nino with the boat that should take him back to the

Marina was approaching, and, running over the hot pebbles, he fell

forward into the sea, and lay floating with arms and legs spread wide,

and face submerged. His own shadow hovered below him on the bottom with

flickering outline, and the water clear as air seemed to hold the

sunshine in solution. For the moment the cool tingling touch made him

forget the missal and the traps to be laid for love; the sheer

exquisitness of bodily sensation contented all his needs. If only that

sensation could be preserved in all its first sharpness, he could

imagine himself happy, without his burning love of hate and his hate of

love, in this Nirvana of liquidness and sun.

CHAPTER V

Colin was lying full length in the shadow of the ruined walls and

tumbled masonries that crowned the cliff at the east end of the island.

A few yards away was the wind-bitten edge from which the huge rock

plunged sheer into the sea. Pamela sat by him leaning on her elbow: at

the moment her hand was foraging in his breast-pocket for his

cigarette-case. She would find it for herself, she said; he need not

disturb himself. His shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, and the raising

of his left arm, to make a pillow for his head, delved a cupped hollow

of suntanned skin above his collar bone.

He had just told her that this ruin of walls was one of the palaces of

Tiberius.

“He had seven palaces on the island,” said Colin lazily. “Wasn’t that

imperial? One for each day of the week, perhaps--oh, they didn’t have

weeks, but it doesn’t matter--and this was the Sunday one!”

Her fingers found the cigarette-case: it lay against his chest, and as

she withdrew it her finger-tips perceived the steady beat of his heart.

Presently, when she put it back, they would dwell there again for a

moment.

“Why his Sunday palace?” she asked.

“Oh, just the best and biggest, the one he enjoyed most. The better the

day the better the palace. He was awfully Tiberian here: Nino told me

all about it: such goings-on! It was a sort of Sunday school. He used to

send for some samples of nice young things to stay with him from

Saturday till Monday, and if he got tired of the girl he chose, he had

her brought out and chucked over the edge. Just as you throw away a

paper bag when you’ve eaten your sponge-cake.”

“Colin, what a horrible story,” she said. “I think I had better move

further from the edge, in case you feel you’re tired of me.”

“Now that’s unkind of you,” said he. “I’ve been doing my best as host,

not only to amuse you but to enjoy myself, which is the first duty of a

host----”

“I wonder if you have enjoyed my being here,” she said in interruption.

“Don’t stop me in the middle of a sentence,” said he. “As I was saying,

I’ve been trying to do my duty as a host, and the impression I’ve left

on my guest appears to be that I am tired of her!”

She put the cigarette-case back. Even if his pocket had been full of

red-hot pebbles she could not have prevented her fingers from lingering

there to feel that slow steady pulsation below. But it did not quicken

under her touch, and how she longed for that!

“No, I don’t believe you’re really tired of me,” she said. “I was

fishing for a compliment. But I don’t seem to have used the right bait.”

“But, my dear, why should you fish for compliments from me?” he asked.

“Great friends, like us, don’t pay compliments to each other.”

“Sometimes I wonder if we are great friends,” said she.... Colin waited

for this train of thought to develop itself: if he took no notice of

what she had said, it was certain that she would carry it a step

farther, or at any rate repeat it....

She had been here a couple of days, during which she had never let go of

herself at all. She had been quite cool and comrade-like. Violet might

have listened to all that they had to say to each other. But to-day

there had been signs that her self-control was becoming difficult to

her. She had sulked--no less--at luncheon, and that was a sure sign: it

always meant that a woman wanted to be asked, ever so delicately and

affectionately, what was the matter. He knew quite well what was the

matter, and so had not asked, but remained good-natured and maddeningly

unconscious of her mood till she gave that up, and apologized for being

so silent. Then to make amends (as if he cared!) she had been effusive

with protestations of how much she was enjoying herself, of how good it

was of him to ask her here.... And now again this wondering if they were

great friends indicated a certain perturbation....

“Tell me, are we great friends?” she asked.

He knew she would ask that again: women are such damned fools, and he

leaned lazily towards her.

“And tell me!” he said. “Don’t you know it?”

His face must have reassured her, for she let her eyes dwell on it, and

broke into a smile.

“I suppose I do,” she said. “You wouldn’t have asked me to stay with you

otherwise. What a bore we women must be! We always want to be reassured

about the things a man takes for granted!”

Colin turned over on to his side.

“I never take anything for granted,” he said. “It’s really much wiser

not to expect anything, and not to count on anything till it’s given

you.”

He knew she would attach a certain meaning to that. She did.

“Colin, what nonsense!” she said. “Why, you’re the one person in the

world who always gets what he wants.”

He sat up, plucked two long stems of grass, and threaded them together,

with that rapt intentness which must mean to her that he was thinking of

something else than this task of his fingers.

“Not a bit,” he said. “I have so often expected to get what doesn’t come

to me, and then what comes instead is a disappointment. Moral: never

ask, never expect! Take what is given you and be thankful, and if

nothing is given you, do without it. But, my dear, I didn’t bring you up

here to bore you with mild philosophical homilies.”

He threw away his threaded grass stems, and appeared to throw away with

them his unspoken preoccupation.

“To get back to our topic,” he said, “I was telling you that Tiberius

pitched the favourite of the night over the edge of the cliff. I always

make pictures in my mind of Nino’s stories of Tiberius: he tells them so

vividly. It was just here it happened at dawn, when the rising sun came

over the top of the hills there above Sorrento so that it shone on this

palace on the peak, but below it was still clear dusk. And Tiberius came

out of the palace, rather bored and rather sleepy, followed by two black

slaves who dragged his--his discard along. Then he made a sign to them,

and they picked her up by the wrists and ankles and swung her once or

twice and then let go. Out she went, a glimmer of white limbs, like a

starfish, clutching at the empty air, and turning slowly over as she

fell. She passed out of the sunlight into the shadow below, and then

there was a little splash, just a little white feather on the sea, and

that was all. Or, perhaps, if they did not swing her far enough, she

would fall on the beach, and there would be no splash. Tiberius peered

over the edge, and then went in to have his early morning tea, or

whatever they took then, and probably dozed for a little. Perhaps the

chill of the dawn had made him sneeze.... I shall write a picturesque

guide-book to Capri some day, and send you a copy from the author.”

Pamela hastened to fit herself to his mood. He did not want to talk

about the only thing that interested her, which was their personal

relations to each other, and she was wise enough not to bore him by an

insistent return to them. Men were like that; even if they were

tremendously in love with a woman, they did not want to discuss it all

day. They kept their other interests alive and intact: they played golf

just the same, or talked politics, or ate their dinner. Whereas a woman

when she was in love thought about nothing whatever else. But she did

not make a man any fonder of her by limiting her conversation to that.

And if he was not in love with her, she ruined her chance if she

irritated him by bleating. She had to be sympathetic and interested in

what occupied him, if she was to get her way with him. But how

increasingly hard it was to be intelligent and companionable when only

one thing mattered, and it was the part of wisdom not to mention that.

“Do write a guide-book to Capri,” she said. “You’re quite horrible about

Tiberius and his Sunday palace, but you make it tremendously

picturesque. You’re frightfully pitiless, you know. You haven’t a grain

of sympathy for that poor white starfish. What had she done to be

chucked over the edge?”

“Why, she had bored him!” said Colin lucidly. “After all, what more

horrible outrage can we commit on each other?”

Pamela’s mind switched back to personal matters. She mustn’t bore

Colin....

“Well, it was his own fault for having chosen her,” she said. “He ought

to have seen she would have bored him!”

“Quite so. Of course he became more savage just because it was his

fault.”

What a nuisance she was, he thought. Whatever he said to Pamela, she

wanted to be bright and discuss it, and argue and interest him.... It

was his fault also that he had allowed her to come here, and that had

the same effect on him as on Tiberius.

“Yes, that’s quite true. We always are angry with others when we’ve been

mistaken in them or have injured them,” she said.

Colin suddenly registered the fact that he hated her. The knowledge

seemed to spring from no particular source; it was blown to him perhaps

on this evening breeze. In consequence he exerted himself to charm and

attract her, for that was the path that led to the completest outrage

and humiliation for her. He hated her passion for him, and therefore

inflamed it, so that she would pay the more for it.

“I don’t believe you ever wanted to injure anybody,” he said. “You’ve

got the most adorable nature, do you know?”

“My dear, how about compliments?” she asked. “Great friends don’t pay

each other compliments, you told me.”

“Well, I wanted to let you know that I had noticed it. Leave it at

that.... Ah, look; the loveliest light of all is beginning. Just before

sunset sea and sky and land all get inside an opal. The hard wearisome

brilliance of the afternoon fades, and you have ten minutes of pure

fairyland. Everything is unreal and exquisite: you can hardly believe in

the beauty of it. I could almost jump over the cliff myself for the

sheer joy of falling, free and unfettered, through the air. One is too

much anchored when one is on land. Swimming you get some feeling of

being unattached to anything, but think if one was falling, falling

through the air. And what does it matter if there’s death at the end?

One would have had a perfect moment. Fancy being happy, though only for

a few seconds!”

He sat with knees drawn up to his chin, looking outwards over the bright

gulf of air, below which the sea lay blue and unflecked, and he heard

her take a quick breath as she looked at him. Then, turning, he saw the

fire in her eyes so nearly breaking into flame.

“Fairyland!” he said. “And you look a real native of it, Pamela.... My

dear, ‘real native’! It sounds as if I were calling you a Whitstable

oyster. And then, as one fairyland fades--look, it’s going

quickly--another, the fairyland of night, begins. I could sit here, at

least so I believe this moment, all night with you, watching the stars

wheel, and fancying I could hear the rustle of the world as it span

through space, until it came out of the tunnel of the night into morning

again. But you would have to be close by me. I couldn’t do it alone; I

should get self-conscious, and that’s the ruin of magic. My dear, how

bored you would get before sunrise.”

He saw the fire begin to leap in her eyes, and he did not want it to

burst out yet. There must be some greater abasement for her than his

mere solitary derision, if he let her now say what was trembling on her

lips, or if under the impulse she could barely resist she clasped and

clung to him. That fire must be damped down for the present: the core of

it would only grow the hotter for that.... He laughed and went on

without pause.

“What dreadful positions I put you in,” he said. “You are almost bound

to say that you would be delighted to stay here all night with me, and

your tongue would be blistered for that thumping lie. How bored you

would be before morning! I shall get Nino to come instead: poor Nino, he

would have to do as he was told, and I shouldn’t care how bored he was.

Or your maid, perhaps she would come, or Nino’s stepmother. But a

companion would be necessary: just somebody, just anybody.”

She got up, stung to the quick, but Colin was quite undismayed. The fire

burned all right, that blast of cold air only made the core of it turn

white-hot, as the surface of it for the moment ceased to glow. Perhaps

she was going to sulk again.... But apparently she had not found that of

any use: instead, after that one moment of averted face, she laughed.

“You’re a savage,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust myself up here for a

night with you. You would get tired of me, and push me over the edge.”

He sprang up: this was how to treat her, with romance and sweetness one

moment, and the next with this callous indifference, and then with gay

affection again and encouragement and nonsense till she was dizzy with

desire and bewilderment and pique.

He could play on her like a lute, which presently he would dash down and

trample on. The manner of that was beginning to form itself in his mind.

It would serve her right for coming to Capri in this compromising way.

“Ah, you’re really unkind,” he said. “That’s the second time you’ve told

me you were afraid I should commit a murderous assault on you. I’m a

savage: there it is. How you bully me! But I forgive you. You’re one of

those blessed people who will always be forgiven whatever they do.

Sunbeams of life: you melt whatever you shine on! Blessed ray from that

celestial luminary!...”

Colin’s sudden pomposity was irresistibly funny. He spoke with a throaty

pious intonation.

“Oh, what nonsense you talk,” she said. “Are you ever the same for two

minutes together? Just now you were in fairyland, and then you snubbed

me, and now you’re a dreadful sort of parson. When are you Colin?”

Colin continued to be the dreadful parson.

“Dear friends,” he said, “let us ask ourselves in all humility of heart

how often we are our own true selves. I would fain we were our true

selves oftener. What is it that the Swan of Avon says, ‘To thine own

self be true, and then you will be true to everybody else.’ Truth and

lies! How wholly unlike they are, the one to the other. Let us sing the

hymn ‘The sun is sinking fast’.... Golly, so it is, Pamela and the

antiquarian lecture I meant to give you hasn’t been begun yet. Let’s go

home. And my hair is full of grass-seeds with lying down.”

“Stand still, and I’ll pick them out,” she said. She perceived in his

sun-warmed hair the faint fragrance of the sea, and longed to bury her

face in it.

“No, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps they’ll sprout. I should like to have a

hay-field on my head. I would sit in the hay.... Then, to skip a few

centuries, when the Christians came to the island, they built a little

shrine up here, and erected that bloated statue of the Virgin. I suppose

they thought her image would disinfect the place from its Tiberian

memories. But it doesn’t; it’s Pagan in spite of all their statues.

You’re a Pagan, too, Pamela. That’s why you fit in so well up here.”

“Yes, I’ve never believed in anything,” said she. “How can one believe

in anything one doesn’t know of? I believe in what I see, and hear, and

touch and feel. I know of nothing else but these things. I’m a flame

that throws a little light round itself, so that it perceives. And then

it’s blown out. All the more reason for making the most of it, while

it’s alight.”

They had begun the downward descent of the steep path, too narrow for

two to walk abreast. Colin, just behind her, found his muscles twitching

with intolerance of her shallowness.

“Then you don’t fear death?” he asked.

“Of course not. As long as things are pleasant, and I don’t have

toothache or cancer, I don’t want to die. But if I was fearfully unhappy

I shouldn’t think twice about dying. Or if----”

She paused a moment: the path had broadened out, and there was room for

them both.

“Or if----” said he, stepping to her side.

“Or if I was terribly happy,” she said softly. “It would be dull to go

back to ordinary pleasantness after that. To flare up, and go out. Not a

bad fate, Colin. Who wants to gutter away into old age?”

He laughed.

“Then all your friends must keep you gently simmering,” he said. “You

mustn’t be allowed to be terribly happy or terribly unhappy. Or you’d

blow yourself out like a candle. But I don’t agree at all: I shall like

being old; I shan’t then have desires and expectations which I fear to

put to the test. I shall be a gentle old man with a beard, and a

bath-chair, and some grandchildren, and some gout, and no memory, and

no desires. But, enough of that. Let’s observe the features of the

landscape. There’s the town beginning to twinkle with lights, and

there’s the Marina with the evening boat just coming in. And there’s

that wonderful Monte Solaro, where we’ll go to-morrow if you like a long

walk. At the top you can see fifty thousand miles in every direction,

and there are tawny lilies in the grass, also quantities of insects with

quantities of legs. And here’s the villa. Blessed place but rather sad.

Yet I have been awfully happy here sometimes. You know I spent my

honeymoon here with Violet.”

That was designed to prick her, and excellently well it did so, for

Pamela had not forgotten that little tragedy of Violet’s dislike of him,

which he had talked of on the terrace at Stanier. And now he clearly

conveyed to her that Violet’s coldness had infused the villa with the

bitterness of sweet memories. As they entered together in the cool dusk,

there was lying on the table just inside the door a letter for him, and

she heard him mutter to himself rather than say to her, “Ah, that’s from

Violet,” and, opening it, he instantly became absorbed in it. To Pamela

that was the definite challenge: it was as if Violet’s glove had been

thrown on the floor between them, and all aflame she went on up the

stairs, and into her room, which stood at the head of them.

So it was Violet for whom he still ached and thirsted, and the knowledge

was a spur to her passion. The cause of his cool friendliness to

herself, vague and indefinite before, was firmly outlined now; she knew

what stood in her way, and what must be demolished. After all, he had

asked her here alone; that argued strongly in favour of her success, and

it was up to her to make good the footing he had given her. It was still

the thought of Violet which occupied him.... Now that she knew that, she

could act on her knowledge: she must use her utmost seduction, not alone

for her own enhancement but to point the contrast between Violet’s

lovelessness and herself. And without doubt she held an advantage: he

and she were alone together in this spell-struck island with all the

setting for passion; they were both young, and she was a beautiful

woman.... His preoccupation with Violet had blinded him: he had not seen

with what intensity she wanted him. He had said that he never counted

on anything until it was given him: what could that mean except that he

was not certain about her? There should be no further doubt about

that....

Colin read his letter through twice. As a matter of fact it was not from

Violet at all, but how well he played on that poor lute with his

muttered information! He knew just what effect his absorption in a

letter from Violet would have on his companion. But there was nothing

false about his absorption in his letter, for it was from his architect,

and told him of the progress of what was in building at Stanier. The

walls were rising apace: he had plenty of old weathered bricks for the

facing of it, and assuredly the addition would be quite in keeping with

the south front of the house.

So that was good, and in the meantime there was plenty to occupy him. He

went up to his room, where Nino was waiting for him to come and dress,

and his tactics for the evening were all settled now, though he had

scarcely given a conscious thought to them. The plan, whatever its

success might be, had ripened of its own accord like a fruit hanging on

a sunny wall, and he longed to set his teeth in it. Surely his project

would be successful: what came to him like this always succeeded.

As he dressed he looked round the room. The door from the passage was

opposite the window; in the wall to the right was the door into Pamela’s

room, converted from its usual habit of sitting-room; in the wall to the

left the door that led to Nino’s room. There was but little furniture;

there would be plenty of space for Nino’s bed along the wall of Pamela’s

room. His own was on the other side, in the corner by the window, head

to the wall. Beside it were two switches that turned on the light above

his bed and that in the middle of the room, suspended by a cord from the

arch of the vaulted ceiling. That would do nicely....

“Well, Nino,” he said, “I haven’t seen you all day. I don’t have so much

time to bully you now I’ve got a visitor to attend to. Don’t you hope

she’ll stop till we go back to England?”

Nino grinned. He did not want any visitors: he much preferred being

bullied by Colin to not seeing him, and it had entered his curly head

that his master was just as happy alone with him as with his guest.

“I can do without visitors,” he said.

“Well, I expect you will very soon have to,” said Colin. He pulled his

shirt over his head, and went softly to the door into Pamela’s room. It

was shut.

“Nino, you don’t say your prayers before you get into bed, do you?” he

asked, “or snore when you’re asleep, or have any monkey tricks of that

kind?”

“No, neither prayers nor snoring,” said Nino. “You have never heard me

pray or snore.”

“I don’t think I have, and don’t let me.”

He came close to the boy.

“I want you to sleep in my room to-night, Nino,” he said. “Isn’t that

odd? But I do, and I’ll promise not to pray or snore either. Bring in

your bed when your sister has done the room, and put it alongside that

wall there. Be in bed when I come up. Can you keep awake?”

“If you wish me to,” said Nino.

“I do. And when I’ve got into bed and put out the light, I want you to

lie quite still whatever happens. I don’t suppose it will be for long.

And if by chance afterwards I turn on the light again, I want you to sit

up in bed and look cheerfully round, and laugh or do anything you like.

Do you understand?”

“I understand what the signor says, but I do not understand what he

means,” said Nino.

“Well, perhaps you will ... and then after that you can go to sleep.

Poor Nino, how I bully and sweat you. Aren’t I a queer creature? You’re

sure you quite understand what I say? Say it over to me! And then run

downstairs, and see if dinner’s ready.”

Colin finished dressing and, when Nino returned, tapped on the door that

communicated with Pamela’s room.

“Dinner’s ready,” he called out, “and if you are, come in here a minute.

You’ve never seen my room, have you?”

Pamela entered. For the last two evenings she had only put on a tea-gown

for their garden-dinner, but to-night she was resplendent in a blue

silver-shot magnificence, cut very low and clinging close to her

beautiful girlish figure. Over her arm she carried a cloak of pale pink

feathers.

Colin stood open-mouthed.

“You perfectly glorious vision!” he said. “You’re superb: you’re

dazzling!”

“Do you like it?” she said. “I was tired of being so dowdy.”

“Like it? I adore it,” said he. “It’s really almost worthy of you.”

She looked round the room.

“Oh, Colin, what a nice room!” she said. “Just a rug and a bed and a

washing-stand and a couple of chairs. Tremendously like you, somehow.”

He laughed.

“I’m a penny, plain,” said he, “and you’re quite twopence, coloured. I

bet you that gown didn’t cost less than twopence. Come to dinner. I

shall walk backwards in front of you and stare at you.”

“You won’t. You’ll give me your arm.”

* * * * *

The table was set at the end of the pergola, lit by electric lights half

screened in the vine-leaves, among which the bunches were beginning to

ripen. Curtains of brown sailcloth were hung between the pillars, and

Nino had drawn all these but one, so that their table was screened from

the house, and the road below. This one square opening looked westwards

where the last crimson of sunset was fading, and across it rose the

black stem of the stone pine, and, though the night was windless here,

some murmur as of the distant sea stirred drowsily in its branches.

Nino, serving them, slipped noiselessly to and fro, and presently he

brought them their coffee.

“Shall I draw the other curtain, signor?” he asked.

Colin glanced at Pamela, and there was no need to ask her what she

preferred.

“Yes, Nino,” he said. “And clear away now. Just leave the cloth.”

All through dinner they had been gay on trivial topics, and again and

again she had known that battery of swift glances like signals that he

had cast on her, as if unable to take his eyes off her for long. Now

she pushed back the cloak that she had thrown over her shoulders.

“Ah, that’s right,” he said, more to himself than her.

* * * * *

Though he laughed at himself for doing so, he often listened to the

sound of the breeze, as if to a wordless and friendly counsellor.

“What a delightful evening you’re giving me, Pamela,” he said. “You wean

me from myself with your splendour and your gaiety. I declare that since

you came into my room before dinner I haven’t once thought of that

letter I found waiting for me.”

“From Violet?” she said.

His eyebrows contracted as if with a twinge of pain.

“Yes. Oh, no bad news. Excellent news: she’s getting on wonderfully well

without me. Hopes I am enjoying myself very much----”

“I join her in that wish,” said Pamela.

“I know you do, bless you, and it would be black and ungrateful of me if

I didn’t recognize that. My dear, you’ve been such a godsend, coming

here to sit on the perch with the moping owl.”

“You mustn’t mope,” she said. “You’re an owl for moping, Colin.”

“I don’t mope except with you,” said he. “It’s shocking bad manners, I

know, and yet it’s one of those involuntary compliments. Ooh, the relief

of getting somebody who understands.”

His eyes left her face, dwelt hovering over her breast, and came back

again.

“Help me, Pamela,” he said.

She leaned forward over the table. She loved this weakness and this

appeal.

“Violet has used you abominably,” she said.

“No, no: you mustn’t say that,” he interrupted.

“But I must say that. I want to help you, my dear, and ah, how lovely it

is that you ask me to try--and you must lay hold on that. She gets on

wonderfully well without you, you told me. Let that rouse your pride.

Don’t let your happiness suffer shipwreck over that. Heavens, if I found

that anyone I was fond of got on wonderfully well without me, that

would make me determined to get on just as well without him. I saw how

charming and gentle you were with her at Stanier, and she gives you a

stone----”

“She gives me nothing,” said he, in a voice suddenly harsh and bitter.

She put her hand on his as it lay on the table, and he felt her pulses

leap at the contact.

“I like to hear you say that,” she said. “Say it again and again till

the truth of it stings you. Realize it, make it part of yourself instead

of looking at it from outside and mourning over it. Oh, my dear, have

some pride! You aren’t going to let all your power of love and of

happiness pour itself away into the sand of a desert! You’ve got enough

power of happiness to light up the midnight. Don’t waste it.”

(“She’s going it rather well,” thought Colin, “and I’m not doing it

badly.”)

“I know you’re right,” he said.

He raised his eyes to hers.

“Of course I’m right,” said she. “Oh, youth passes so quickly, and with

it all power of real happiness, though you may tell me that you will

like to be old.... Ah, what nonsense!... Colin, you’re so different to

what I thought you at first. When first we met and made friends, you

were all laughter and enjoyment. Who could have guessed that you knew

sorrow or unrequited love?”

She paused a moment: in that gaze of his there was a light she had never

seen there yet. So suffocatingly sweet to her was it, that she panted

for breath.

“Don’t fence yourself in,” she said, “and mourn over ruins. Build with

them: use ... use the stones you spoke of, to make a pleasure-house.

Laugh to see them serve your end.”

He looked at her in amazement. There was enchantment and force in her,

and her beauty was enough to make a man’s senses reel. Was this the

strength of which Violet had spoken which was more potent than all else

in the world?

Pamela leaned back her head, pushing the heavy black hair from her

forehead.

“Open the curtains, Colin,” she said. “Let’s have some air; I’m

stifling.”

Was she going to faint, he thought, or adopt some mean feminine device

of her weakness to escape from the situation that was closing round her,

and which she had done her best to provoke? That would be tragic.... He

pulled back the curtain with a rattle of rings, and the still tide of

the night swept in.

“Ah, that’s delicious!” she said.

“Not faint?” he asked. “Not overtired?”

“Not a bit. It was just a breath of air I wanted: our lovely little tent

was concentrated, overcharged....”

“Are you sure?” he said. “Hadn’t you better go quietly to bed? It would

be wretched if in return for the help and strength you bring me--ah,

such help, such strength....”

If all the kingdoms of the world had been his, he would have staked them

against a penny-piece on her answer. It was her hour, she was winning,

so she thought, all down the line. This was not the moment for the

victor to ask for a truce.

She rose from her chair and stood by him. The flame burst out from her,

enveloping her in fire.

“It’s all yours,” she whispered. “All ... all.”

She swayed towards him, and he caught her close; her face was against

his, and she sought his lips. No word, no whisper even came from her:

dumbly she clung to him, and, exultant, he betrayed her with a kiss. The

best and the worst of her, love, trust, and all that was merely sensual

as well, were his.

For one second he wavered, and reconsidered. Partly it was the mere

beauty and physical intensity of her that gave him pause, partly also

something akin to what he had felt when he saw Dennis staggering on the

terrace at Stanier. Then back, stronger than ever from the gathered

force of that check, came his hatred of love.

“We must go in,” he said.... “Pamela, you adorable thing. Your pity

first, and then your love.”

They paused at the head of the stairs. Not a word had passed since they

left the table.

“But your maid next door ...?” he queried, and her smile told him she

understood.

Colin went softly into his room. There was Nino’s bed along the wall,

and Nino there already, awake and silent, and eager for any adventure of

Colin’s contriving. He tore off his clothes, and, as he undressed, once

or twice his eyes caught Nino’s, and he had to check himself from

laughing aloud. He slid into bed, and clicked off the light.

There was no long waiting: there came a faint rattle from the door into

Pamela’s room, but in the darkness nothing was visible there, and Colin

heard the door close again, and the key turned. He could just hear her

feet on the bare tiles of the floor, and then from close at hand a

little bubbling laugh and his name softly called. The sheer happiness of

love sounded in that whisper: it might have been Violet’s voice speaking

to him on one of the nights of their honeymoon here, and he hated the

inimitable thrill of it....

He reached his hand to the switches and turned them both on.

She was standing in the middle of the room just under the light from the

ceiling. In that strong illumination the thin silk nightdress, which was

all that covered her, was transparent as a veil of sun-pierced mist; her

figure crowned by that bright flame of her face was clearly visible, and

her apparelled magnificence was pale beside this luminous revealed

perfection. Colin almost regretted that he had prepared this hellish

surprise for her to-night. To-morrow would have done as well ... and

yet, what thrill of physical love could rival this gorgeous humiliation?

How superbly moral it was! The woman had tempted him, coming to him at

solitary midnight in the blaze of her beauty, and for once the man,

master of his soul, derided her seduction. But the infamy of the

brothels of Sodom was nearer salvation than his chastity.

She heard a stir behind her and half-turned. There was Nino sitting

upright in bed. Simultaneously Colin spoke.

“Hullo, here’s a pretty lady!” he said. “Has she come to visit you or

me, Nino? I’ll pretend to be asleep, if you like.”

She turned back towards Colin as he spoke, and there came over her face

just such a blanching, just such a stark terror as had struck the colour

from Mr. Cecil’s. Colin’s laughing mouth, his dancing blue eyes, were

close to her; in his hurry to be ready for her he had not put on his

nightclothes, and over his slim suntanned body, as he sat up in bed, the

skin-sheathed muscles rippled as he breathed, and at the sight, as if

the horror of the Gorgon’s head had been shewn her, she turned to stone.

Her arms made one stiff movement, as if drawing a cloak round her to

hide her, and she went back to the door through which she had come. A

violent trembling seized her; she could scarcely grasp the key in her

fingers.

“The lock’s a little stiff,” said Colin. “Ah, that’s right. What a short

visit! Good night, dear Pamela.”

Colin jumped out of bed the moment she had gone, and briskly turned the

key.

“We’ll have no more visitors to-night, Nino,” he said. “The bold slut!

There’s a lesson for her. What’s the matter, Nino?”

Nino’s face was buried in his pillow. He had given that one glance at

her as she stood under the light, and then, for very pity, had hidden

his eyes from her intolerable shame. Now at Colin’s voice he looked up.

“Ah, the poor lady!” he said. “You were terrible to her, signor.”

Some ecstasy of wickedness possessed Colin. Naked as a young Greek god,

and as fair, he capered round the room in an abandonment of glee.

“Oh, the poor pretty lady!” he cried. “What a pleasant hour she had

planned, and what a disappointment! But how naughty of her! She shocked

me. What will she plan next, do you think? I would bet on a slight

headache in the morning, and breakfast in her room. Or will she make an

effort and catch the early boat? _Chi sa?_ Good night, Nino.”

He jumped into bed; Nino could hear it shaking under the gusts of his

smothered laughter.

* * * * *

Colin, according to his wont, slept dreamlessly, and woke to find Nino’s

hand on his shoulder, rousing him.

“Wake, signor,” he said.

Colin yawned and stretched himself.

“I’ll raise your wages, Nino, if you’ll go away,” he said.

“The signora----” began Nino.

Colin broke off his yawn and began to laugh.

“Good Lord, yes,” he said. “Well, what about the signora? I hope she had

as good a night as I.”

“She did not sleep in her bed,” said Nino, “and she is not in the

house.”

“Well, what then? She’s gone by the early boat; I thought she very

likely would. So cool in the early morning. Probably she has left a note

for her maid to say so. Look and find it. I’ll have breakfast out of

doors.”

He got out of bed, and while he dressed basked in the wonderful memories

of the night before. Just here had she stood for that short moment ...

and then with that odd gesture of folding something round her had

turned.... What a horrid humiliated night she must have passed, too

badly stung to sleep, and only eager for the morning, and the boat that

left at six o’clock, which would carry her away from the island. He

wondered whether, if he had received a slap like that, he would have

turned tail. Certainly it would have been an embarrassing breakfast next

morning; they would have had to talk with great perseverance and

animation. He rather thought that he would have stopped and brazened it

out to show he didn’t care....

Nino entered again.

“I’ve found a note, signor,” he said, “but it is addressed to you not to

her maid. It was on the breakfast table in the pergola.”

Colin held out his hand for it and opened it. It was quite short.

“I was terribly happy here,” it ran, “and I have been terribly unhappy.

So it is good-bye, Colin.”

He knitted his brows. Surely he had heard something very like this only

a few hours before.... Then he remembered.

“No-one knows of this but you, Nino?” he asked.

“No, signor, I found it and brought it to you.”

Colin stood crumpling the note in his hand. A contingency had presented

itself with the reading of that note, which he wished to be prepared

for. If the implication there hinted at was true, he did not want to

stew in that ebullition of scandal and gossip which would boil up if

last night’s adventure were known. Three people knew of it, possibly

only two now, himself and Nino.... For a few seconds he thought

intently, then his face cleared.

“Now, listen to me, Nino,” he said. “You have found no note for me, you

have brought me no note. The last you saw of the signora was when you

brought us coffee last night after dinner in the garden. That’s all you

know.... Ah, wait a moment: your bed. Move it back to your room, where

of course you slept last night as usual. I’ll help you. Now----”

Colin laid his hands on the boy’s shoulders and looked him in the face.

“When did you see the signora last?” he said.

Nino’s eyes were wide with some unspoken terror.

“Last night,” he said, “when I brought your coffee after dinner.”

“And you found nothing on the table when you went to lay my breakfast

this morning?”

“No, signor.”

“Good boy. Now be quick with my coffee. I long to be in the sea this

morning.”

Colin swam and basked and swam again, spending the whole morning on the

beach. He was convinced that when Pamela wrote that note to him she had

intended, at any rate, to take her own life, for the wording of it

reproduced too closely for any explanation of fortuitous resemblance

what she had said to him the evening before as they came home. Very

likely she had not done so, for there was a big gulf between such an

intention and its execution. It was one thing to feel that you were

terribly unhappy, and quite another to put an end to your unhappiness.

Most people preferred any amount of unhappiness to forcing an entry

through the door that led no man knew whither. Even if it led into

nothingness, anything that could happen to you was better than

nothingness.

Colin came up out of the water, and, after brushing the wetness off him,

sat down on the hot shingle. Supposing Pamela had done what her

melodramatic little note implied, what would he think of her, or what

(which concerned him more) would he think of himself?

Of course he had never dreamed of such a possibility, but if she had

done it what a swift and surprising drama? Yet how abominably stupid,

and how, if you looked at it clearly how self-conscious! There was

revenge in it, too: she meant, at fatal cost to herself, to overwhelm

him with remorse at this great final gesture. Was it a sign of love, to

do that which might be calculated however mistakenly to bring misery on

the adored? Yet, after all, it was not love of him that might have

driven her to the desperate act, it was no more than self-love and

self-pity for that unexpected exposure. He remembered just how she had

looked when he turned up the light, and she heard Nino stir. If he had

supplied a determining motive at all, it was fear.

Misery ... remorse.... What had he done to be miserable or remorseful

for? The woman was a slut and she had come to stay with a respectable

married man, who had assured her that his heart’s devotion was

consecrated to his wife, and, knowing that, she had deliberately tried

to seduce him, coming into his room at midnight and offering herself.

There was a fine story to tell the world, if so he chose, and Nino, with

a wink from him, would testify to the veracity of the crucial episode.

And the stern morality of his own attitude, his scorn of her intrusion!

That was the cream of it! The missal of wonderful blasphemies itself

contained no mockery so distilled.

And then supposing she had done nothing desperate at all, but simply

gone for a nice walk to think things over and console her wounded

vanity? It was easy to realize what he would feel then. Mockery, sheer

mockery and contempt at the fiasco. She had written that note to

indicate what she meant to do, and when it came to the doing of it she

had squealed and shied off at the idea of going out alone into the dark

of nothingness or whatever she imagined was the next scene. Probably she

thought that nothingness came next: that was the usual conclusion of

such shallow folk. He knew better than that....

The dense stupidity, the blindness of those who did not believe in the

hereafter of heaven and hell! He knew his hereafter well enough, the

eternal hate, or, if love was too strong, the eternal spectacle of love,

and to have no share in it, to sit in a cave of ice, and in an

everlasting numbness of cold to behold the sun.... But the very thought

of that, the certainty that in the end God would somehow beat him, gave

the spice to defiance. Safe in the protection of evil, as long as life

lasted he would enjoy and deride without remorse or fear. He chose evil

because he loved it, and because he hated love, even when it was such

love as Pamela had tried to enchain him with, for it partook in its

narrow greedy sphere of the true essence, in that she wanted somebody

not herself, and if she longed to get, she also longed to give.

Through the windless calm there came the sound of some rhythmical

movement, and sitting up he saw a boat approaching with swiftly-dipping

oars. The sun was bright on the water, and it was only a vague black

speck, but soon he saw who was rowing in such a hurry.... He had said he

would come back for lunch, so why had Nino come down to the

bathing-place? News of some kind, perhaps.

Nino beached the boat, and jumped out.

“The signora,” he said.

“So she’s come back,” said Colin. “I knew she would.”

Nino looked at him with wide eyes of horror.

“They brought her back,” he said. “Two fishermen found her in the water

below the high cliff where Tiberio’s palace is, the palace you call the

Sunday palace....”

PART II

CHAPTER I

Colin got out of his motor when it stopped at the lodge-gates at

Stanier, and struck into the woods through which a short cut led to the

house. He had been in London for the last month, and had driven down

after lunch on this April afternoon through glints of sunshine and scuds

of windy rain. But now with the fall of day the sky had cleared, and,

after the pavements and fogs of the town, he longed to immerse himself

in the sense of Stanier and spring woods and bird-song.

All round him were the melodies and the enchantments of the spring. The

turf underneath the foot was elastic with the thick growth of the young

grass, and vivid with little round cushions of greenest moss, and the

smell of the damp earth was fresh and fragrant. Neither oak nor ash were

yet more than budding, but the great hawthorns that studded the slopes

up from the lodge to the high ground were covered with the varnished

clusters of young leaf, the hazels and alders by the stream that ran

into the lake were gay with pendulous catkins and mole-skin buttons, and

the copses of birch and hornbeam were full-fledged. Clumps of primroses

and sheets of anemonies were in flower in plantations where the young

trees had been felled last year, and outside on the turf the wild

daffodils bloomed among the curled heads of the young bracken. Once and

again a copper-coloured cock pheasant scurried away from beside the path

with head low and stealthy stride; in the covers thrushes were vocal

with evensong, and in some remote tree-top the chiff-chaff was

metallically chirping. From the firs pigeons started out with clapping

wings, and a heron, disturbed at his fishing, flapped ponderously away.

The path rose steeply, and presently he came to the top of the ridge,

and passed through the deer-fence into the Old Park. Here the trees,

planted by Elizabeth’s Colin, on what was once bare down, were of

statelier growth, and more widely spaced, so that between their trunks

broad stretches of the reclaimed marsh-land below could be seen, and

beyond, the faint melted rim of the sea. A warm spring air out of the

south-west flowed up from the plain, seasoned with saltness, and he drew

in long breaths of its refreshment. Ten minutes more brisk walking along

the height brought him to the end of the ridge, and below, he saw the

roof of Stanier and its red walls smouldering in the clear dusk. The

thrill of home vibrated in him; he could never look on Stanier, after an

absence, without a smile of pleasure and welcome on his lips.

There came into his mind, vaguely and distantly, the memory of someone

looking at Stanier with him, and ironically saying to him “Be it ever so

humble, there’s no place like home.” That had happened on the terrace

one night in an after-dinner stroll, and almost immediately he recalled

the incident wondering at the tenacity of the memory. It was Pamela Hunt

who had said that, when she came down here, at her own suggestion, for a

domestic Sunday in the country. How infinitely remote and meaningless

was the recollection of Pamela! He did not suppose he had thought of her

half-a-dozen times in the last half-dozen years. After all there was no

reason why he should have thought of her, for it must be close on twelve

years since he had seen her. Yes, when August came it would be twelve

years since she had paid him that visit in Capri.... That had been an

affair of ludicrous tragedy: long ago it had lost all personal

connection with him, and had become no more than a sensational episode,

which, though no doubt it had happened to him, might equally well have

been something he had been told or something he had read in a book of

short stories, a book of sketches and episodes....

He sat down on a fallen tree-trunk--several of old Colin’s oaks had

blown down in the fierce gales of March--and as his eyes wandered over

the wide plain and distant sea below, his mind dwelt idly on that remote

month in Capri. What had affected him far more intimately than Pamela’s

death was the sequel that Nino had refused to stay in his service. Nino

had been utterly devoted to him, but something strange had come over the

fellow from the hour that he learned of Pamela’s melodramatic suicide.

He had simply frozen up: his gaiety and devotion had been replaced by

some sort of abject terror of Colin; he had become like one of those

women on whom the frost and blight of Stanier had fallen. He started and

stammered if he was spoken to: he looked at him with eyes behind which

lurked some deadly fear.... He had no answer to give when he was asked

what ailed him: he said “Nieute, signor,” and quaked. Finally, within a

week, he had said he could stop with him no longer. Colin had used his

utmost persuasions, but without avail, and from persuasion he passed to

warning and to threats, reminding him that it did not go well with those

who crossed him, as Nino had seen not so long ago. But there was no

keeping him, and Colin naturally resented Nino’s desertion, for his

companionship, his gay paganism thoroughly suited him. Yet he seemed to

himself to have done no more than let this resentment flow where it

willed without conscious direction. Certainly he did not concentrate and

aim it at Nino: he but shrugged his shoulders, and said to himself

“Well, it’s Nino’s fault if anything happens”. And sure enough Nino

sickened of that ill-defined fever which was rife in the island and in

Naples that summer, and not long afterwards Colin had to give his cook

and his housemaid a half-day’s holiday to attend his funeral....

It had served Nino right, thought Colin; for if he had remained up at

the villa he would not have gone back to live in that insanitary hovel

by the Marina, where the fever was so prevalent, and he wondered

whether, in a sense, it had served him right too, for there was no

denying that he had been really fond of him, and that was an offence to

his Lord and Benefactor. To-day the memory of Nino was far more vivid

than that of Pamela, who was a tiresome woman, greedy and graceless, and

often even now, when he lazily awoke in the morning, he found himself

sleepily imagining that it was Nino who was moving about the room.... It

had been very stupid of him to behave like that: Colin had always been

kind to him: he need never have feared for himself. It was Nino’s fear

that had driven him into danger: if he had only stopped where he was,

and remained gay and companionable, he would have run no risks. But his

fright, his mad attempt at escape, had been his undoing; he had run

underneath the very wheels like a startled fowl on the high-road.

That month, in fact, had been full of incidents, tragic for others, but

strangely prosperous for himself: episodes had taken place then

far-reaching in consequence, that fitted into each other with more than

casual coincidence. At Stanier, before he left, for instance, there had

been the discovery and certain solution of that pencil plan in his

ancestor’s diary, followed, when he got to Capri, by the finding of what

beyond doubt was old Colin’s book of wondrous blasphemies, of which he

had so easily possessed himself. And the chain of odd occurrences had

not been broken there, for within a week of his having obtained that he

saw for the first time Hugh Douglas, now librarian at Stanier.

The memory of that was very vivid, and had none of the episodic

insignificance of his recollections about Pamela or indeed about

Nino.... He had gone down to the Marina one evening to meet Violet, from

whom he had received a telegram immediately after the catastrophe saying

that she was starting at once for Capri. That had been both wise and

kind of her; she had not previously known that Pamela was there, and had

seen one day in the daily Press the notice of Pamela’s death when

staying with Lord Yardley at his villa at Capri. With quite admirable

wisdom, she had thereupon sent notices to half a dozen papers that she

was _returning_ from Capri in a fortnight’s time, and had instantly

started. Colin had no taste for the foolish scandal of wagging tongues,

and Violet’s prompt action, making it appear for the benefit of the

world at large that she had been with him all the time, was a most

effectual silencer. Even those who knew that she had not been there when

the catastrophe occurred would look on it with quite different eyes when

they knew that she had gone there at once, and Colin had unreservedly

applauded her intuition. No doubt, by now, any scandal that might then

have arisen would have been as episodic and obsolete as the cause of it,

but Colin in this lazy retrospect of that marvellous month permitted

himself to stand aside a moment and say “Well done, Violet.”

He took up the thread of the far more significant happenings and let his

mind dwell on each, recalling details, fingering them like a rosary....

He had gone down, as he had recalled, to meet her, and waited on the

quay for the disembarkation in small boats of the passengers from the

steamer. There she was, and as she stepped out of the boat, at the quay

side, he saw a young man put out to her an assisting hand. She did not

avail herself of it, and Colin’s eye met that of the man who would have

helped her. Instantly he knew that the glance had some significance for

him. The face he saw was alert and clean-shaven, and it had stamped on

it that unmistakable quality of a priest’s face, a quality impossible to

define and impossible to miss. He was not in clerical dress, but that

detracted nothing from the certainty. If the man had worn spangles and

pink tights, he would have been a priest....

Day by day, as Colin had seen him, always alone, at the café, or

lounging in the piazza, or at the bathing-place, the conviction of his

calling and of his significance (whatever that should prove to be) in

his own life, grew stronger. He entered into casual conversation with

him, introducing himself, and saw at once there was reserve and

suspicion to be overcome. But the young man gave him his name, Hugh

Douglas; he was out for a holiday, he said, and expected to be here some

weeks. As they idly talked, sitting at a café in the street, it so

happened that a priest came by. At the sight of him Douglas rose to his

feet and deliberately spat on the ground, and in his eyes was a smoking

blaze of hatred.

“So you are a priest,” thought Colin, “with no love for priesthood.”

Then Colin asked him up to dine one evening after Violet’s departure,

and set a wonderful example of frankness and unreserve. He told him

about the legend, and saw his interest kindle: he felt he was somehow on

the right track, though still he did not guess where it led.

“But the old fellow was craven at the last,” he said, “and tried to

escape from his Lord and Benefactor. He abandoned the building of the

shrine he had planned, where, beyond doubt, he meant to celebrate some

Satanic rite----”

He paused a moment with intention. The other turned quickly to him.

“That is most interesting, Lord Yardley,” he said. “You have no notion,

I suppose, of what he contemplated?”

Colin laughed.

“Indeed I have,” he said. “In fact there has lately come into my hands a

book, which beyond doubt was actually his, for it bears his coronet and

arms of the correct date, and I feel sure he intended to use it in his

chapel. A missal in fact, though following the English use. He refers to

it in his memoirs.”

Douglas’s face was alight with eagerness.

“Indeed!” he said. “Have you it here? I should enormously like to see

it.”

Colin leaned forward to him across the table.

“Yes, I have it here,” he said, “and perhaps I’ll show it you, for I

feel that I’m meant to show it you. But first, doesn’t it strike you

that I’m telling you a good deal, and that you’re telling me nothing?”

Instantly the man shrank back into himself.

“There is nothing that could interest you,” he said. “I have no

profession----”

Colin felt on absolutely sure ground.

“Yes, you’re a priest,” he said quietly.

“I am nothing of the kind,” said Douglas.

“Oh, once a priest, always a priest,” said Colin. “No man nor any body

of men can take from you the power that has been given you of doing the

great miracle at the altar.... You were a priest, Mr. Douglas: and you

know that perfectly well. I’m not the least inquisitive, and I don’t

want to hear why you no longer wear priest’s dress, unless you care to

tell me. You hate the priesthood now, I saw that for myself the other

day, and perhaps you hate that which makes a priest a priest....”

Colin summoned all that gave him his charm, and all that gave him his

force.

“Aren’t you wrong not to trust me?” he said. “Hasn’t our meeting, and

what I hope will be our friendship been wonderfully contrived for us?...

How can I make you trust me? I am building, I may tell you, what my

ancestor left undone.”

At that he saw the man’s soul leap in fire to his face, and not only

without shame, but with pride, as to one who would appreciate, he told

his story. Ever since he was a boy, he had been conscious of his secret

love of evil just for its own sake. His own profanities horrified him,

and yet below his horror there was love. Under the whip of his horror he

had striven to mortify that lust for evil within his soul, and yet all

the time that he tried to suppress it he looked on himself not as a

sinner but as a martyr. He had taken orders in the Catholic Church, had

joined an English community with vows of obedience and chastity, and the

joy of sins, secret and abominable, became all the sweeter because, in

the name of all that was holy, he had renounced them. He found himself

like a spy in the camp of the enemy, talking their language, practising

their manœuvres, and making war on the powers to which his heart’s

allegiance was given. Only a few weeks ago, exposure had come, and he

left England for fear of a criminal prosecution....

All this came out in gasps and jerks of speech. Sometimes there was a

pause, and the pause would be succeeded by the pent, exultant torrent of

what had never been told yet. At the end, Colin got up.

“I see we shall be friends,” he said. “I will show you the book I spoke

to you of....”

All these things were welded together like links in a chain, the

discovery of the plan of the Sanctuarium, and then of the missal, and

then of the priest. Each linked on to the next. Indeed it would be an

imbecile who saw in these events a mere grouping of fortuitous

circumstances. And there was more, too, a chiselling and chasing of

these links, decorative detail you might say....

* * * * *

Nino, in spite of persuasions and threats, had gone, so soon to sicken

of the fever, and Colin had let it be known that he wanted a servant to

take his place. There were many applicants, for it had been seen how

Nino, just a barefooted boatman’s son, had become almost a signor

himself with fine clothes to wear and money to spend, and the friend and

companion as much as the servant of the marvellous youth rich and noble

and beautiful as a god, for the sake of whom, Capri made no doubt, the

English lady had popped herself over the high cliff. Among them was a

young Neapolitan, employed during the summer season as waiter at one of

the hotels, shrewd and monkey-like in face, some incarnation of pure

animalism. Hugh Douglas was with Colin when he came up to be

interviewed, and the boy made his obeisance as to a priest.

“Why do you do that?” asked Colin. “Why do you behave as if this

gentleman was a priest?”

The fellow looked at him once more and smiled. When he smiled his ears

moved, and Colin noticed how pointed they were.

“But I am not wrong, am I?” he said. “When I was a boy, I was an

acolyte.”

Douglas rose.

“I’ll leave you,” he said, and he nodded at Colin as he went out.

The boy had spoken in perfect English, and when the door had closed

Colin came up to him, put his hands on his shoulders and smiled into his

eyes. What he was going to say was derived from no process of reasoning

in his own mind, scarcely even from observation....

“Let me see, your name’s Vincenzo, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, Vincenzo,

I like your face: it’s the face of a devil. Did no-one ever tell you

that? You must have been a queer sort of acolyte. Did they choose you

for your sanctified face? And when you crossed yourself did you cross

yourself like this?”

Colin made the sign backwards.

“Like that was it?” he said. “I have never been to a mass where they did

like that.... I should like to see you serve mass, for I shall have a

chapel at my house in England, and maybe I shall wish you to serve

again. And you were right about that gentleman. He is a priest; so go to

him now and tell him I have sent you to say you will serve him....”

* * * * *

How vivid it all was to him still, and most vivid of all that which took

place that very evening.... He had been hitherto like someone receiving

instruction merely, now he was received into the church of his religion.

The room where Pamela had slept, and to which her body had been

brought, was decked as a chapel, and in symbols and desecrated rites he

set the seal on his faith. He had bought not long before in Naples a

cope of fifteenth century needlework, in which the celebrant was vested,

and Douglas read from the missal of wondrous blasphemies. He threw his

cope wide when Vincenzo censed him.... As the supreme moment approached

some ecstasy stirred in the very centre and shrine of Colin’s being, and

from there spread to his mind and his physical frame. Would God permit

the approaching defiance and blasphemy? He did not doubt that He could

by some swift judgment assert the infinity and the omnipotence of Love,

and it was just that belief which spiced the defiance. Or was Love

itself powerless against this supreme act of Hate and Mockery?

* * * * *

Colin rose from his seat on the fallen oak, and began the descent of the

long smooth slope towards the house. Never before that evening at Capri

or ever since had he attained to so clear a realization of the spirit of

evil: his initiation had also contained the ultimate revelation. Often

in the years that followed he had, here at Stanier, attended the Black

Mass, but, his allegiance once definitely and symbolically made, the

repetition of it had progressively failed in fervour. It was not so with

those whose souls worshipped Love: the more they mystically joined

themselves, in acts of faith and worship, to their Lord, the more

closely, if you judged from the chronicles of the Saints, were they knit

to Him. Had Love, then, some quality which Hate lacked? Hate had often

seemed to him as infinite as Love, but now he wondered if you could

attain to the absolute in Hate, to the realization of pitch darkness

than which nothing could be darker, whereas you could never attain to

absolute Light; for some fresh sun from all the millions which Love lit

and moved would add its spark to the illumination. Or was there, on the

other hand, no such thing as absolute darkness of the spirit, just as

scientists assured you that there was no such thing as absolute physical

darkness? Did some ray always penetrate it? Was there no place utterly

devoid of God? In either case you arrived at the utmost possible in

Hate, and could go no further.

Colin let the question go unanswered; the abstract never much concerned

him compared with the concrete and the practical.... How purely

episodic his life had been, and how full of prosperous conclusions.

Episodes of his boyhood, episodes in Capri, episodes here and in London,

strung like beads on the thread of his own personality, but each

distinct from the other, accounted for the whole of it. He desired

nothing for long; he got it, whatever it was, so quickly, sucked it dry

and threw the rind away. All that wealth and position could bring him,

all that health could bestow were his; no desire of his went

unfulfilled: all he had to do was to find something he wanted, and if it

was the gift of his Lord and Benefactor--and wide was his bounty--it was

his as soon as he cared to put out a firm hand to take it. And yet in

spite of this perfect freedom, which he had used to the uttermost to do

exactly what his desire or fancy prompted, to eat any fruit on the tree

of evil without fear of scruples interfering, like a seed or a stone,

with its lusciousness, he knew that this liberty was somehow built on

the foundation of a slavery which enchained him. He was in pawn and in

bondage to evil, and these episodes were links of his fetters.... As

fast as one was hammered and welded, there would be another one, an

appetite gratified, or perhaps an account revengefully squared, as in

the case of Raymond his brother, and of Pamela. Often, as in the case of

Raymond, the catastrophe fell without his active intervention at all: it

just followed on his wish: or again the victim might bring it on

himself, as that wretched Nino had done.... Episodes, just episodes. To

find things to wish for, to find experiences and expressions that

excited and absorbed him! He had already begun to recognize that this

was not so easy as it had been. Life was full of amusements, his vigour,

now that he was in his thirty-fifth year, still retained all the

elasticity of youth, but it was hard to find for it experiences that

were not staled by custom. He had to find those, it appeared, for

himself. His Lord and Benefactor did no more (as if that was not

enough!) than give him what he wanted. Well, there were a dozen people

coming to-morrow, and for the Easter vacation the house would be crammed

from cellar to garret with a huge party and diversions would spring up

like mushrooms.... And then he remembered that Dennis was at home for

his holidays, now his fourteenth in year and at school at Eton.

Colin had come to the east end of the building which he had erected in

execution of the plan he had found in his ancestor’s memoirs. He had

stopped long in Capri the year that was built, and when he came back the

fabric was complete. Before he left he had shewn the plan to Violet,

telling her that this was an addition to the house, planned in

Elizabethan times, and never executed. There was a little apartment, he

said, for a priest, and a sanctuary adjoining. It was this which was now

to be built....

“A sanctuary?” she had said.

“Yes, darling, a little chapel. Old Colin was a very fervent sort of

man. It was for his private devotions, no doubt, that he planned it.”

He thought she had understood, and this impression had been born out by

the fact that never had she alluded to the ‘little chapel’ again. She

knew that it was approached by a corridor from his room; she knew that

this librarian, Mr. Douglas, whom he had brought back with him from

Capri, lived in the apartment there, but she had never asked Colin

anything about it, nor had he volunteered any information. But that she

guessed the general purpose of it, he had no doubt: ‘old Colin’s private

devotions’ was sufficiently explicit, and she had understood.

“Violet takes no interest in what means so much to me,” he thought now.

“Shall I try to make her a little more sympathetic?” She had had a very

easy time lately, with him away so much, and perhaps it would be a good

thing to wake her up to her wifehood.

As he passed he saw that the chapel was lit within. The east window was

of plain ruby-coloured glass, frosted on the outside so that none could

see in, and he lingered there a moment, and thought he caught the sound

of a voice within. Douglas, his chaplain and librarian, was there, and

perhaps Vincenzo, who had driven down from London with his master, was

there also in his more ecclesiastical capacity. The shrewd, monkey-faced

boy of twelve years ago, had grown into a dark-faced silent man,

wonderfully efficient as a servant. But as a server.... Colin had never

seen anything so like possession: the ape-like gestures twitching and

vehement, the rapt surrender, the tearing animal passion of devotion.

And when the rite was over, he lay sometimes on the altar step, panting

with gleaming eyes of a surfeited ecstasy. Then the mask of humanity

covered him again, and he became the impassive watchful valet,

anticipating Colin’s wants almost before he was conscious of them

himself. But these seizures (for they were really nothing less than

that) were terrible. Colin wondered sometimes if he himself would ever

know such physical frenzy, such mingling apparently of torture and

exaltation.

He passed on round the corner of the yew-hedge: he was late for whatever

was going on, and indeed he had no particular mind to be present. But he

felt as if some force like that of a great engine that beat in

pulsations momently increasing in power was at work there. Then the bell

in the turret sounded three strokes, and, in the pause that followed

before those strokes were repeated, he felt himself thrilled and charged

with the mysterious dynamic energy that spread through the still air in

invisible waves of inspiration, and into his mind there came the vision

of himself kneeling there at some such moment as this with Dennis by

him. That, of course, would not be yet: the boy was at present far too

young to understand even the nature of the moral choice on which the

rites were based. Not yet did he know the force of love and hate; he

only liked and disliked. He had to feel the power of love, before he

could loathe it or comprehend the infinite seduction of evil. The

essential qualities of love had to be apprehended before they could be

rejected and mocked at. He must know them first, he must know too what

hate meant, before he could realize the presence of its inspirer. That,

and the things which some day Dennis would see with his father in the

chapel there, would be inexplicable and indeed meaningless to him until

in his blood there was developed the perception that gave them life.

Certain of these rites would seem to him merely grotesque or disgusting

till he was hot with the passions of which they were a symbol. He would

be puzzled: he might even be amused at these grimaces and contortions of

Vincenzo. He would want explanations, and even then would not

understand....

All this was not so much a train of thought in Colin’s mind, as a flash

of perception that vibrated through it at the sound of the bell in the

turret of the chapel, and, dismissing principles, he let himself into

the door on the garden front that opened into the long gallery.

Principles would take care of themselves provided your practice was in

accordance with them, and, with the thrill of home-coming to this

beloved Stanier, he stepped out of the glimmering dusk into the lit

house.

He got one comprehensive glance at the two who were there before his

entrance was perceived. Violet was sitting in a low chair by the

fireplace at the far end of the gallery, her face all alight with love,

and on the floor, full length in front of the fire, was Dennis lying.

His head was bent back and he looked up into his mother’s face, as he

told her something in his boyish voice, high treble one moment, and

suddenly cracking into a man’s tones. Whatever it was that he said, it

made her suddenly burst into laughter, and she threw herself back in her

chair.

“Oh, Dennis, how wicked of you,” she said. “Go on, darling. What did the

master do?”

Colin stood very still. Was it really Violet who could laugh like that,

with that pure abandonment to amusement? Was it she who shone with that

serene and radiant love?...

She sat up again after that burst of laughter, and saw him. In an

instant her face changed to the face he knew. It changed from the face

of a mother, girlish still, though that big boy sprawled there, to the

frozen beauty which she presented to the world. No faintest glint of

laughter lingered on her mouth or in her eyes. And yet, amazingly, they

were still alight with love. Something that had beamed there for Dennis

still beamed there for him, though it was shrouded, like a gleam of fire

through smoke, by the blight and the frost.

“Ah, Colin,” she said. “There you are! Get up, Dennis: here’s your

father.”

For a moment, sharp as a stabbed nerve, and coming from some ice-bound

cave of consciousness, a pang of regret shot through Colin that it was

not in his nature, nor in theirs, that he could join the group of mother

and son, and partake of their mood, their laughter and their ease, and

all that it implied. They looked so jolly, and his hunger for pleasure

always envied those who were enjoying themselves, for all enjoyment

ought to belong to him. But the instantaneousness with which Violet’s

care-free laughter had withered from her face, shewed that she

instinctively recognized the inconceivableness of that. It was not to be

wondered at, after all: she always froze in his presence.

And then he looked at the boy who had jumped to his feet, and pride at

having begotten anyone so beautiful supplanted for the moment every

other consideration. He was very tall for his age, already his head was

nearly on a level with his mother’s, and, bred as he was on both sides

from Stanier blood, he seemed the very flower of his race. Loose-limbed

and lithe he stood there, with shoulders low and broad, and neck rising

square from them, and there was the small head, yellow-haired and

blue-eyed, the straight short nose, and the mouth as perfect as Violet’s

own. Colin had not seen him since the Christmas holidays, in the

interval he had greatly grown, and his boyhood had emerged from the

sheath of its childish sexlessness: now the father saw in his son his

own magnificent youth carried to a stage finer yet; physical perfection

could go no further.... And, on the heels of that exultant pride in his

son’s beauty, there came the vision again of going with Dennis up the

corridor from his room and into the chapel. What a peerless offering to

bring his Lord and Benefactor!

The boy had always been much fonder of his mother than of him, and here

at once was a thing to be taken in hand. Dennis must learn to be at ease

with him, to open his heart to him, and eagerly to receive what was good

for him to learn. That was the first requisite: hitherto Dennis had been

rather shy with him, and apt to be on his good behaviour. He must be

charmed out of that and learn to be comfortable with him and lie on the

floor and tell him stories about school.

He put his arm round Dennis’s neck and kissed him.

“Why, you dear boy,” he said. “This is nice. Dennis, you’ve grown in a

perfectly indecent manner. Stand up there with your back to your

mother----”

Suddenly he remembered that he had not yet said a word to Violet. Violet

had Dennis’s heart at present, therefore Dennis must see how dear she

was to his father, for that would predispose him favourably.

“Violet darling,” he said, kissing her. “How are you? I needn’t ask,

though. You’re always well, thank God. And such shrieks of laughter, as

I heard, when I came in! What was it all about? Dennis, I believe you’ve

been telling your mother something quite unfit for a parent’s ears. So

you must tell me too, and let me judge. My word, it is nice to be home

again!”

“Have you had tea, Colin?” she asked.

“Now have I, or have I not? I don’t believe I have, but I don’t want

any. I shall sit on the floor, if Dennis can make room for me. Lie down

again, Dennis, exactly as you were before, and we’ll all be fearfully

comfortable. Now what’s the story?”

“Oh, it’s only a rotten yarn, Father,” he said. “The master I’m up to

doesn’t like mice. So--so someone bought a clockwork mouse and wound it

up, and set it running in small circles--you know how they go--just

under his chair. You never saw anything so funny. He thought it was real

till he heard it buzz.”

Dennis had sat down again on the floor: Colin, with a shout of laughter,

put his fingers in the back of his collar, and pulled him down across

his knees.

“I think I’ve got hold of that ‘someone’ by the short hairs,” he said.

“What brutes you boys are! What shall we do with this brute? How long

are the holidays, Dennis?”

“Three weeks and a bit.”

“And where do you want to spend them?”

“Oh here, of course.”

“You’re just like me. I never want to go away from here, unless it’s to

Capri. Now let’s talk in a whisper, so that your mother can’t hear. She

doesn’t like Capri, Dennis. She’s not been there for twelve years. That

summer, don’t you remember, when you were one year old?”

“Of course I don’t remember,” said Dennis.

“That’s because you didn’t attend. You must be more attentive next time

you’re one year old. But there it is: she’ll never come with me--we’re

still talking in a whisper--so next summer, if you’ll promise not to

put mice in my bed, perhaps I’ll take you.”

“Oh, I say, how ripping!” said Dennis. “You bathe all day, Mr. Douglas

told me.”

“Except when you’re basking in the sun. How is Mr. Douglas, by the way?

I haven’t seen him. May I ask him to dine to-night, Vi? I know you don’t

like him, darling, but he has a pretty lonely time when we’re away. I

think we ought to have him in as often as we can when we’re here. He

shall sit next Granny; he shan’t sit by you. And how is Granny?”

Dennis was finding a father that he had never known before, and he felt

himself expanding to him. Colin had released his hand from the boy’s

collar, but Dennis’s head still lay contentedly on his knees.

“Granny’s dotty, I think,” he observed. “I mean your granny, Father.”

“Dennis, dear!” said Violet.

She turned to Colin.

“Granny’s been expecting you all day,” she said. “She always knows when

you’re coming. She was out on the terrace this afternoon in her

bath-chair, and when she saw Dennis, she thought it was you----”

“Yes, Mother, that’s what I mean by dotty. It is dotty,” said Dennis.

Colin tucked his hand under the boy’s head.

“You shouldn’t call your aged relatives dotty, Dennis,” he said. “Your

mother’s quite right. When I’m as old as your great-grandmamma, which

will be in a week or two for time goes so fast, I shall be exceedingly

vexed with you if you say I’m dotty. So there, old boy. She probably

thought you were dotty when you told her you weren’t me----”

“And then she thought I was Uncle Raymond,” continued Dennis. “That just

shews----”

“It just shews that you’re an ugly little devil,” observed Colin. “When

you come down to dinner to-night----”

“But I don’t,” said Dennis. “I have supper upstairs----”

“Well, I ask you to come and have dinner with me to-night. Don’t drink

too much port like your grandfathers and great-grandfathers.... What

was I going to say? Oh, I know. Nip round, like a good boy, to Mr.

Douglas’s rooms, and ask him to come to dinner to-night. Say it’s to

have the honour of meeting you.”

“He’s probably in the library, isn’t he?” asked Dennis.

“No, he’s probably not. And then come back here, and I’ll have a game of

billiards with you.”

Colin waited till Dennis had gone, then turned to Violet.

“How the boy is growing up!” he said. “Was I as big as that at fourteen,

darling? He’s a splendid fellow, we ought to congratulate ourselves.

He’ll develop swiftly now. How interesting to watch that, eh, dear

Violet, and to train and influence him?... You’ve kept him all to

yourself hitherto. It’s time that a father’s care----”

She had long feared this moment, and, now that it had come, it roused in

her not her womanly motherhood alone but something of the

tigress-motherhood that will fight for its young, with any who threatens

them, even if he is her own mate.... But it was the woman who spoke

first.

“Oh, Colin, leave me Dennis,” she said.

He laughed.

“How funnily you said that,” he remarked. “You speak as if I were

meaning to take him away from you. You speak as if he was a piece of

private property of yours. Mayn’t a father take an interest in his own

son? And, as I say, he’s growing up. He knows nothing of his inheritance

at present, or of his family history. He must learn. Yes, yes, he must

learn.”

Colin shifted his position, and leaned his back against the chair in

which Violet was sitting.

“I feel awfully remiss,” he said. “I feel as if I had neglected Dennis

shamefully. But surely he’s grown suddenly, not in inches only, but in

sex and temperament. I seemed to feel that. He’s entrancing: my heart

goes out to him. But he must be moulded and educated, mustn’t he? What a

wonderful fruit of our love, Vi! What joy for us to see it ripen! And

physically, what a young Apollo. You and I were rather a pretty pair at

his age, but Dennis beats us hollow.”

He leaned his head back to see Violet’s face. Well he knew what he

would find there, for he had felt his words go home. But he was not

prepared for the fierceness of it.

“You shan’t have him,” she said. “And you know what I mean when I say

that. He’s a manly, sweet-hearted boy. Oh, as naughty as you please, but

he’s a good boy. That’s the part you shall never have.”

She got up, stepping sideways away from him.

“Colin, we’ve been strangers for many years now,” she said. “You’ve

frozen me with horror at what you are. But you’ve never frozen my power

of love. It’s there, and it’s always melting the ice. And by that I know

that you won’t get Dennis, for it’s stronger than you.”

Colin raised his eyebrows.

“Well then there’s no more to be said about it,” he remarked. “I hate

arguing, anyhow. If one wants to prove a thing, the simplest plan is to

go and do it, and then it proves itself without any palaver. Ah, there

was something else I wanted to talk to you about, but here’s Dennis back

again.... Well, Dennis, will Mr. Douglas have the honour of meeting

you?”

Dennis was looking excited.

“Oh, yes, that’s all right,” he said. “And Vincenzo was there. He was

lying on Mr. Douglas’s sofa, looking--looking like nothing at all.

Looking awfully queer. But Mr. Douglas said he would be all right soon.”

“I expect he knows,” said Colin. “Vincenzo’s devoted to Mr. Douglas....

Dennis, I’ve been catching it hot since you left me. Your mother’s been

scolding me. Whose side do you take? Hers or mine?”

Dennis looked from one to the other. But he moved towards Violet.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But aren’t we going to have a game of

billiards?”

* * * * *

The Dowager’s wing at Stanier, of which Colin had made so summary a

clearance twelve years before, had never become repopulated again. Aunt

Hester was still alive, very much alive, indeed, but never, since the

morning when she had ‘interfered’ about Pamela, had she set foot in

Stanier. “Colin behaved like a devil to me, my dear,” she had said to

Violet of that occasion. “He meant to turn me out and made that his

excuse. Well, you don’t catch me going where I’m not wanted. I hope I’ve

got too much spirit for that.” Violet, however, often took Dennis to see

her when they were in town, and he had lunched with her and been

handsomely tipped by her to-day on his way from Eton. Aunt Hester adored

Dennis; she saw in him the Colin she had loved, and Dennis, for his

part, thought her one of the most enterprizing old ladies he had ever

come across. Why she did not come to see them at Stanier, he did not

know, and she was remarkably brisk at changing the subject when it came

up, but he meant to ask his father about it.

Of the others, Ronald Stanier and his wife, though deprived of their

permanent domicile, had been occasional guests here, till when, a year

or two ago, on one of their visits, he had had a stroke one night, as he

sat over his wine after dinner, quite in the traditional Stanier style,

and had gone down with the decanter flying. His widow, strongly

reacting, had gone to live at Winchester where she drove out daily in a

brougham, gave small sad little dinner-parties, from which everyone went

away at half-past ten, and was similarly entertained by her elderly

guests. Once or twice a year she came to Stanier for a few nights, and

played patience, and put some flowers on her husband’s grave, but she

had no real existence. Stanier, as it had so often done to those who

married into the house, had frozen her or perhaps rather burned up all

such inflammable material as she had once possessed, and she lay now, so

to speak, in the fender, clinking a little from time to time as she

cooled, and disintegrating into ash....

But the fourth occupant of the Dowager’s wing was still there, and still

every night old Lady Yardley was wheeled down to the long gallery five

minutes before dinner-time, and sat by the fireplace near the

dining-room till the others had assembled, and then with the aid of her

two sticks went in to dinner, and afterwards played her phantom game of

whist. She was now over ninety years of age, she ate and she slept, she

had her sight and her hearing, but she lived in some withdrawn twilight,

peopled it would seem by shadowy figures of her century of memories.

Certain rays could still illuminate that crepuscular kingdom: Colin’s

presence was a sure lamp there, and Dennis was beginning to be another,

perhaps from his likeness to Colin twenty years ago, perhaps because she

realized that in him lay the perpetuation of the house, for the dim

archives of her mind contained only the records that concerned

Stanier.... Strangely enough, Hugh Douglas was the third who could

lighten that black darkness; probably she did not know his name, and he

belonged to the later years of which she had normally no memory, but it

was clear that she regarded him as somehow significant, and often, if he

dined with them, she would sit looking at him with that unwinking gaze

that saw no-one knew what, and begin speaking of days of fifty and sixty

and seventy years ago. Others, her nurses, for instance, and Violet,

made no reaction on her mind: she was no more directly conscious of them

than she was of the chair where she sat, or the carpet she walked on,

and they cast no shining glimmer on the memories that reached back and

back, to years when not only were none of those present born, but not

even her own children of the generation before, Colin’s father, and

Violet’s, and Aunt Hester, and when she herself was newly come as a

bride to Stanier. Physically, by some miracle of vitality, she was

upright still: and her skin, instead of hanging in parchment-like laps

and folds over her face, was one with it: she looked as if she was made

of bloodless, imperishable alabaster. When she sat motionless and

without speech she seemed scarcely alive, and then her wrinkled eyelids

would lift and she spoke in that quiet uninflected voice of those who

had been dead sixty years and more, as if they were still here. To her,

they probably were.

Colin felt a sort of fascinated pride in her--“She’s clearly immortal,”

he said, “in fact she’s a sort of totem--isn’t that what they call

it?--a tribal god. She belongs to myth and legend, especially legend. I

wonder if she signed a bond too....”

To-night she was in her place when Violet came in. As usual she took no

notice of her, and Violet sat down with the evening paper and did not

see Douglas’s entrance, till suddenly old Lady Yardley began to talk.

“My grandson Colin came home from school to-day,” she said. “He has

grown----”

Violet looked up.

“Ah, good evening, Mr. Douglas,” she said. “Colin and Dennis have been

playing billiards, but they’ll be here in a moment. You saw Dennis, I

think?”

Douglas shook hands with her. More markedly than ever was his face that

of a priest. He knew very well that Violet disliked him: dislike perhaps

was too superficial a word. He had seen just that same horror in her

eyes when she looked at her husband. He wondered sometimes what she

knew....

“Yes, Dennis came up to my flat,” he said. “How he has grown. Developed,

too, I thought, as well.”

Dennis and Colin came in together.

“Dennis’s fault that we’re late,” he said. “He took so long to beat his

poor old father. Well, Granny, how are you? I believe you grow younger

every day. Dennis and I are going to take you in to dinner, one on each

side.”

She got out of her chair, and stood erect.

“Ah, I knew Colin was coming,” she said. “I told them Colin was coming.

Now all will be well at Stanier.”

She pointed at Douglas.

“I want him,” she said. “He must sit by me, because he and Colin know,

and I know. Those who know must sit close and talk in whispers.”

Colin laughed.

“So we will, Granny,” he said. “Dennis dear, you take in your mother;

Granny’s got no use for you.”

Dennis put Violet’s arm within his own.

“Lord, what pomp!” he said. “Shall I always come down to dinner now,

Mother? Oh, and I beat Father at billiards!”

“Well, don’t trample on me, now I’m down,” said Colin. “You’ve no

feeling of chivalry for the aged, Dennis.”

Old Lady Yardley looked from one to the other. They dined at a small

round table; Colin and Douglas were on each side of her, Dennis and

Violet between them. Her eyes travelled past Violet as if there was no

one there, but at Dennis she looked long. To-night the stimulus of these

three was strong; and she began to say things she had never said before.

“The boy there,” she said. “That’s my Colin before he grew to be a man.

He’s come back to us as a boy. He doesn’t know the legend yet.”

“Oh, but I do, Granny,” said Dennis. “It was when the devil----”

“No, dear, you don’t know it yet,” said she. “You’ve only heard it,

that’s a very different thing. My son Philip never knew: he only

heard----”

Colin intervened.

“Now, Granny, eat your soup,” he said, “or we shall never get through

dinner. Tell us about it afterwards.”

He looked up at Dennis, just one passing glance, and saw that the boy’s

attention was violently arrested.

“And does Mr. Douglas know?” asked Dennis, “Is that what you wanted to

whisper about? Father, what is it that you know and I’ve only heard?”

It was odd how the atmosphere was suddenly charged with impalpable

tension. Lady Yardley alone, whatever she said, could not have produced

it; it required Dennis and his innocent boyish inquisitiveness at the

other end.

Violet interrupted. Dennis mustn’t ask, Dennis mustn’t know.

“Dennis dear, you saw Aunt Hester to-day, didn’t you?” she said. “Didn’t

she send any message to me?”

Dennis’s whole mind was fixed on this other puzzling matter. But at his

mother’s voice he seemed to detach himself.

“Yes: her love,” he said. “And I’m going to write to her to-morrow--so’s

Father: two letters, and a motor’s going up to London to take them to

her. And it’ll bring her down here, we think.”

Colin turned to Violet.

“Darling, you’ll be nice to her, won’t you?” he said. “It’s so long ago,

all that misunderstanding.... And she loves Stanier. I was going to tell

you, of course.”

Violet felt there was no need for explanation; she knew Colin. He had

represented to Dennis evidently that Aunt Hester never came to Stanier,

because of some bygone quarrel between herself and her. Dennis had asked

why she never came--it must be like that--and that had been the answer.

Then Colin had concocted just such a plot as a boy loves, to ask her in

spite of it and bring Mother and her together.... Colin was the

peacemaker, she was the person to be propitiated....

The wonderful falsity of it all! There was nothing too small nor too

great for Colin in the accomplishment of his ends. Here there was no

question of what his ends were: they were the wooing of Dennis by him,

the detachment of Dennis from herself.

She could not sit down under this.

“But it was you who turned her out, Colin,” she said. “You quarrelled

with her; you sent her away. What have you been telling Dennis?”

Colin was seated next her. He laid his hand on hers.

“Darling, before the servants....” he said gently. “Besides, it’s all

over, years ago.”

Old Lady Yardley was looking fixedly at Dennis again.

“He’s growing up,” she said. “Soon he must make his choice. Staniers

will never fail as long as they choose wisely and well. I am an autumn

leaf now on the old tree, but the sap hasn’t left me yet, and though the

leaves fall, fresh leaves come. This is a beautiful young leaf: it is

spring-time with the tree again, and the birds are singing in its

branches. It will always be spring at Stanier, if they take care of the

young leaves.”

Colin turned from Violet to her.

“Granny dear, the spirit of prophecy is upon you, but you really mustn’t

prophesy at dinner. Everyone finds it so disconcerting, darling. Now

there are some friends of mine coming to-morrow, and you must promise me

not to prophesy at dinner. Otherwise you shall have dinner upstairs and

no whist at all.”

For once she paid no attention to him.

“I watched them building twelve years ago,” she said. “They made a

chapel for the prosperity of Stanier. Aha! That makes the legend

thrive----”

Colin saw Dennis’s wide-eyed gaze, fascinated and puzzled. He had

settled that he did not want the boy to know anything about that at

present.... And yet surely you sowed in winter the seed that did not

germinate till the spring. How marvellously dramatic, too, that Dennis,

still hardly free from the soft enveloping sheath of childhood, should

learn the beginning of wisdom from this aged Sibyl. It was like taking a

child to learn about Druids from Stonehenge.... But Dennis was too young

yet: it would never do to initiate him into the final revelation, till

he had learned the rudiments and the alphabet of the creed.

Simultaneously Violet spoke to him.

“Oh, Colin, stop her,” she whispered. “She mustn’t go on. She mustn’t

tell him about the chapel.”

....So Violet knew: he always guessed she had known. He turned to old

Lady Yardley again.

“Granny, you’re being very naughty,” he said. “I promise you you shan’t

come down to dinner again unless you’re quiet. I won’t have it: do you

understand? Now go away with Violet. If you say a word more, you shan’t

have any whist at all. Take her away. Violet.”

Violet got up.

“Come along, Granny,” she said. “And you too, Dennis.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Colin sharply. “Dennis is going to stay with

us.”

He waited till Violet and the old lady had gone.

“Dennis, old boy,” he said. “You were quite right when you said your

great-grandmother was dotty. She was talking gibberish. There wasn’t a

word of sense in what she was saying.”

Dennis looked unconvinced.

“But she must have meant something, Father,” he said. “Did she mean the

chapel by Mr. Douglas’s rooms?”

Colin was always swift in invention.

“Very likely. But you know all about that. I built it, as I’ve told you

before, to complete the original plan of the house. Very likely old

Colin intended to be buried there. Memorial chapel, you know. Just think

of the old lady as dotty. She’s got the legend on her mind. She always

had. Why, I really believe that if Satan came to her now, and said

‘Sign, please,’ as they do in shops, she’d find one drop of blood in her

body still and use it up. Give Mr. Douglas some port, and take half a

glass yourself. Not more, Dennis: we can’t have you like your

grandfather Ronald before you grow up.”

Dennis gave that delicious half-treble croak of laughter.

“Good Lord, I shouldn’t like to be like Grandfather Ronald,” he said.

“He was a rum ’un.... Father, did he know about the legend, in the way

Granny meant?”

“No, Dennis, I should say he didn’t. But we’ve finished with the legend

for to-night. Someday I’ll tell you more about it.”

“Hurrah! When?”

“When I think that you will be able to understand it. Mr. Douglas and I

will set you an examination paper.”

“Oh, not in the holidays,” said the boy.

“You won’t know it’s being set you,” said his father.

“That’s an improvement on the Eton plan,” remarked Dennis.

* * * * *

Dennis was sent up to bed when old Lady Yardley had had her two rubbers

of whist, and presently Mr. Douglas went too.

“And now we’re alone, Vi,” said Colin, “and I haven’t seen you for a

month. Mayn’t we have a little talk? In fact, I’ve got several things to

say. About Aunt Hester now.”

“Yes, I think you owe me an explanation of that,” said she.

“Darling, don’t talk about ‘owing explanations,’ in that way. You speak

as if I had run up a bill with you, and wouldn’t pay it. Probably that’s

just what you do think.”

Colin moved across to the fire where the traditional log smouldered.

“I hate explaining,” he said, “and really you can understand for

yourself. But if you insist on it, it’s this. Dennis asked me

point-blank why Aunt Hester never came to Stanier. Well, I couldn’t tell

him about her impertinence with regard to poor Pamela, her imagining

that I had an intrigue with her.... Good Lord, didn’t the sequel

exculpate me? An edifying incident, wasn’t it?”

“You know what I think about that,” said she.

“Yes: I remember your saying you wished I was in love with Pamela. And I

kept telling Pamela that I was in love with you. But she rushed on

disaster. Odd--I was thinking only this afternoon how long it was since

I had given a thought to Pamela, and now she comes up in connection

with Aunt Hester. Well, I couldn’t tell Dennis about that. You would

have been very much shocked with me if I had. I couldn’t tell him that

the woman was in love with me, and his mother wished I was in love with

her. Such a dreadful thing to tell a young boy at the most

impressionable age! You agree?”

“You distort it all,” she said. “But I agree.”

“Oh, distortion!” he said. “Everyone else’s point of view is distorted

when viewed from one’s own. We all have our own individual perspective,

which shews everybody else’s out of drawing. But, as you agree, I had to

give some other reason. I gave one that naturally occurred to me,

namely, that you resented and found unforgivable something poor Aunt

Hester had done. I was pleased when I thought of that.”

“You always think of everything,” she said.

“Yes, darling, I am pretty thorough. And you see why I was pleased,

don’t you?”

“Perfectly well. You wanted to give Dennis a new impression of me, as

being hard and unforgiving, and of yourself as kind.”

Colin softly clapped his hands.

“Ah! I knew you really understood,” he said. “I knew you didn’t need any

explanations. But why not have said so at first? You shewed you knew at

dinner.”

She moved the screen that stood by her. That might have been to shut out

of her eyes the flame that had broken out from the smouldering log, or

it might have been to shut out his face....

“I didn’t mean that when I asked for explanations,” she said. “The

explanation I wanted, if there was one, was any justification for what

you did.”

Colin stretched out his hand to the blaze; the shapely smooth fingers

looked redly luminous as the fire shone through them.

“The justification is that it was part of my policy,” he said. “Dennis

is devoted to you at present. I must detach him. He must be devoted to

me: he must love what I love, and hate what I hate. No man can serve two

masters.”

She slid from her chair on to her knees, holding up her hands to him.

The face of the future, now that it was coming close, was terrible.

“Ah, Colin, no, no!” she cried. “Your soul’s your own, and you’ve chosen

for yourself. But Dennis’s soul is his: his and God’s. You daren’t

tamper with it.”

Colin laughed.

“Oh, but you’re inconsistent,” he said. “You’ve told me that love is

stronger than me, and that I’m powerless. Now you seem to be afraid that

there is something pretty powerful to back me. Have faith, darling.”

She had no personal fear of him now that Dennis was in question: the

instinct of protection swallowed it up.

“I know you’ve got something powerful to back you,” she said. “You’ve

got the power of Hell to back you. No one who believes in God dares

despise that; he hates and fears it.”

Colin drove the poker into the blazing log, and a squib of sparks shot

up. His face in that brightness seemed to shine from some inward

illumination.

“Very wise,” he said. “Now another thing. It’s clear to me that you know

about the sanctuary. Clever of you, darling, because I’ve only once

mentioned it to you, when I settled to build it, telling you old Colin

had planned it for his private devotions. Did you guess then I wonder?

Did you imagine for what purpose he had planned it, and for what purpose

I carried out his plans?”

“It wasn’t a guess,” she said. “I knew. In whose honour must he have

planned it, and in whose honour must you have executed it?”

“That’s logical, certainly,” he said. “But how about Grandmamma? I never

said a word to her, and I don’t suppose you have. But yet she knows. Has

she got some sort of second sight, do you imagine? Is she a sort of

incarnated genius of Stanier, so that by instinct she knows all that

concerns the welfare of the house? Sometimes I scarcely believe that

she’s human at all. Will she go on living for hundreds of years, a sort

of priestess? My word, we’re an amazing institution, you know.”

Colin turned round away from the fire, and yet it seemed to her that his

face glowed.

“I wish my family were more with me in my convictions,” he said.

“Dennis doesn’t know, and you don’t sympathize. Supposing Dennis was to

die before he had come to the full knowledge? Once he had chosen, he

would be protected----”

Violet felt her mouth go dry.

“Colin, you’re not meaning to take Dennis there, are you?” she

whispered.

“Aha, now we come to the root of it,” he said. “Of course I mean to take

Dennis there as soon as he’s learnt, well, the rudiments of the faith. I

see he’s not fit for it yet, but he soon will be. He’s got high spirits,

and the lust of life is beginning to bubble in him. That just has to be

directed. Then the moment he is ripe, and a boy like that ripens

quickly----”

Violet’s face whitened and hardened.

“You daren’t,” she said. “That would be the sin for which there’s no

pardon. Don’t you understand?”

Marvellously Colin’s eyes glittered. It was as if they were faceted and

caught a hundred points of light.

“And don’t you understand,” he said, “that that’s the very reason for my

doing it? I pine for unpardonable sin!”

From outside there came the sudden stir of wind. It rattled at the

window, and then blew with a great gust. He paused, holding up his hand

and listening, and within him, swift as inspiration, the fire kindled.

“Just so it used to blow in the stone-pine in the garden at Capri,” he

said. “It was there I heard it first. That’s no common wind. Violet!

It’s a message: it’s a herald. The power is abroad and I hail it.

Listen, isn’t that, even to your ears, something more than the common

wind! You know it is. Fear it and loathe it, or worship it and adore it.

But don’t deny it. Ah, the thrill of it! The splendid Pentecost.”

Never had she seen him like this, and whether it was that his exaltation

communicated itself to her, or whether there was something present there

inherent in that sonorous sudden gale, she felt her very spirit shudder

and flicker like the blown flame of a candle.

He sprang to his feet, and took hold of her arm.

“Come with me now to the chapel,” he said. “We’ll get Father Douglas.

Yes, of course you know he’s Father Douglas. Join with me, Violet,

throw scruple and struggle away. Who has the best time after all, you

with your agonizings and fears, or I, who don’t know what pain of soul

or body means, whose every whim is gratified? Come and see: see if I

haven’t chosen well, see if you don’t exult and glory in the power that

I serve and that serves me! A midnight mass: you’ll see me as an

acolyte--I make a damned handsome one--and the book Father Douglas will

use is the very book, the missal of wondrous blasphemies, that old Colin

speaks of in his memoirs. I’ve got tepid about worship, but with you

there it will be new again to me. It’s in your blood, you’re a Stanier

just as I am. It will boil up in your blood.”

She stood quite still, letting his hand still rest on her arm but

sundering from herself the distraction of all the flood of desires and

yearnings, of fears and of terrors, that had been streaming from her.

She did not articulately pray, she did not implore and agonize for

protection, she simply spread out her soul with an act of unreserved

surrender to the spirit of God, and, in this turmoil within and without,

let the peace that passed understanding seek her of its own accord and

encompassingly hold her. Her only effort was to make no effort, to make

herself utterly helpless....

The timeless moment passed, and she knew that the stress of some

spiritual crisis was over. The wind outside, which seemed to have been

raging round the very fortress of her soul, died down and ceased.

Colin spoke again. But the ecstasy of direct inspiration had died out of

his voice. For a little while he had been like one possessed; now he was

himself again, terrible indeed but not terror itself, Satanic but not

Satan.

“Violet, if you don’t come,” he said, “I shall go and get Dennis. I said

I would go up and say good night to him, and he shall dress and come

with me to the chapel. Rather like Abraham taking Isaac to sacrifice

him: rather Biblical. It’s you or he. I mean precisely what I say. He

will obey me.”

Violet’s choice made itself without any question. But it was made under

the compulsion of Love, and under Love’s protection.

“Then of course I will come,” she said. “You’ve given me my choice and

there it is. But you won’t like it if I come, Colin. I should only

despise and scoff at what you believe in. And the power on which you

lean is failing, and you know it. Where’s the ecstasy that filled you

just now? It has all evaporated: it has leaked away.”

Rage and rebel as he might, he knew the truth of what she said, reading

it in her quiet eyes, and her pitiful mouth. Definitely, and for the

first time to his full consciousness, he had failed. Something stronger

than the wind of the powers of the air had interposed between him and

its inspiration.

He looked at her with quiet hellish eyes.

“I think you will be sorry for this, Vi,” he said.

Some inner plane on which this scene had been transacted seemed to her

to slide away again. She had been on it: it had sustained her. Now she

was back again on normal levels, conscious only of a supreme fatigue.

But the memory of that uplifting still held her. One power had englobed

her, another him, and somehow, inscrutably, the two had come into direct

contact, and at the touch his had been shattered like a film of glass.

“I do not think so,” she said. “I think I shall be glad of it, thankful

for it, as long as I live.”

He turned on her, but his eyes were no longer bright with that quality

with which he had heard the wind rise and roar.

“Do you suppose you’ve beaten me?” he said. “Are you really such a fool

as that?”

She moved a step nearer to him, and pointed to the curtained door out on

to the terrace.

“Colin,” she said, “do you remember coming in at that door this evening

and finding Dennis and me talking by the fire? You were jealous of him

then and jealous of me, because you knew why we were so happy together.

You wanted, in spite of yourself, to have a share in it.”