The Eton term came to an end in the last week of July, and Dennis found
that, by leaving at some timeless hour, he could get down to Stanier by
the middle of the morning. The idea was irresistible, for there would be
time to have an hour or so bathing with his father before lunch, and
keep the afternoon intact, and so, though the original plan had been to
lunch with Aunt Hester, and, tipped and gorged, go on to Stanier
afterwards, he telegraphed to her that he ‘had to’ go straight home, and
sent a second telegram to his father to say that he would arrive at Rye
at half-past eleven. He knew that Colin was there, for his mother had
written to him a day or two before to say they had left London and were
at Stanier.
The heat of the day promised well for the pleasure of diversions such as
bathing, and the addition of excited anticipation made Dennis strip off
his coat, when he had got into his train from London, and turn up his
shirt sleeves to the elbow. These long summer holidays, with an extra
week at the end in honour of a certain Royal visit to the school,
contained an eternity of joys: not only was there Stanier to look
forward to, but that visit to Capri with his father, which had been
promised him. As the train neared Rye he hung out of the window to catch
the first sight of the house glowing among its woods. There was just a
glimpse of it, with its flag flying on the tower, and then the trees hid
it again, and he must bounce across to the other side of the carriage to
see his father standing on the platform, and wave to him. He would be
there to meet him as certainly as Stanier was waiting for him on the
hill.
The platform was rather full, and Dennis was still searching for Colin
when the train drew up. He descended with arms full of agreeable
impedimenta and then the very natural explanation of Colin’s absence
occurred to him: without doubt he had driven down in the little
two-seater, and was waiting for him outside. He went through the gate of
egress, but in the station-yard there was no two-seater, nor any other
conveyance from Stanier. Again an explanation was easy: his telegram had
not yet been delivered. This was not quite the ecstasy of arrival that
he had anticipated, but it was entirely his own fault.
The cab laboured up the long hill and jogged very sedately along the
level up to the lodge-gate. At this rate he could traverse the short cut
on foot more quickly than this deliberate quadruped would make the
detour. Getting out at the lodge he struck across its park, arriving at
the house before the cab came within sight. He ran through the hall and
burst into his father’s room. But the room was empty.
There was his mother, anyhow, in a shady corner of the garden below the
terrace, and he hailed her, and next moment was running down the steps
and leaping the flower-beds. She rose to meet him, and caught him to
her, close and clinging.
“Dennis, darling,” she said. “This is lovely. And, oh, my dear, what a
heat you’re in!”
“I know: I ran across the park and got here before the old cab. And
where’s Father?”
“He started an hour ago to drive up to London.”
“Oh, how rotten! I think that’s beastly of him. And didn’t he get my
telegram to say I was coming this morning?”
Violet hesitated.
“Yes, dear, he did get it,” she said. “He thought that, having said you
would come in the afternoon, you ought to have kept to your first plan.”
Dennis looked impartially at this verdict.
“I suppose I ought,” he said. “But as I found I could get here earlier,
of course I did. And so he scored off me by making me come up in a cab,
and going away himself. When will he be back?”
“Some time to-day. Late perhaps, he thought.”
Dennis’s sun was very certainly clouded, but sufficient brightness
remained to illuminate a pleasant day. There was a bathe before lunch,
and Violet took him to play golf, after a slight demur over the chance
of his father arriving during their absence, and there was tea on the
terrace, and a stroll through the woods with his gun. All these things
had been rapturous in anticipation, and though nothing could quite rob
them of their honey, it was not of that transcendent order.... Well did
Violet understand that, and well she understood why Colin had suddenly
settled to go up to town that day. Then came dinner, where his place was
laid but unoccupied, and old Lady Yardley groping in the twilight which
was darkening round her, now thinking that this was Colin back from
school, now asking where Colin was.
But still he did not come, and about eleven Dennis, visibly perturbed
and depressed, and his mother went up to bed.
“And you’re sure he hasn’t had an accident?” he asked.
“Yes, darling, quite sure. You mustn’t think of that.”
A bright idea struck Dennis.
“Oh, Mother, somebody must sit up for him to let him in,” he said.
“Mayn’t I?”
“No, dear. I know he wouldn’t wish you to. Go to bed, darling, and get a
long night. You were up early enough to-day.”
Dennis sighed.
“Well, I’ve had a ripping day with you, anyhow,” he said.
* * * * *
Dennis’s room looked out on to the front of the house, and before he got
into bed he set his door ajar, and the window wide, so that by no chance
could he miss the sound of his father’s arrival, and, without turning
off his light, sat propped up in bed, prepared for any length of vigil,
for, in spite of the day-long disappointments, he was sure that Colin
would look in on him when he came, and it would never do to miss that
conference. There were millions of things to tell and be told, but
better than any would be the fact of his father’s presence sitting here
on his bed, and after ever so long a talk wishing him good night and
leaving him to fall asleep with the sense of him still lingering in the
room.
It was not long before he heard the crunch of the gravel beneath the
wheels of the motor, and he jumped out of bed to look out of the window
and call to him. But they had been equally quick in letting him in, and
Dennis had no more than a glimpse of him standing in the oblong of light
from the open door, before it closed again behind him. But that was of
no consequence: he would be here immediately, and Dennis leaped back
into bed.
The minutes passed, but very likely Colin would want something to eat
after his drive from London, before he came upstairs. Soon there came
along the passage a step that Dennis knew, and his eyes, sparkling with
the imminent joy, were fixed on his door, to see it swing open. But the
steps stopped short before they reached it, and another door a little
way down the passage was opened and closed.
“I suppose he thought it was very late, and that I should be asleep,”
said Dennis to himself as he put out his light.
He slept late next morning and hurried downstairs to breakfast. His
father, dressed in flannels with his hair still wet from his bathe, was
standing by the window, opening his letters.
“Oh, there you are at last,” said Dennis, springing to him. Colin gave
him a rather absent hand.
“Hullo, Dennis,” he said.
“Hullo, Father. I say, how late you were last night, and you never came
to see me.”
“No. I managed to curb my impatience till this morning,” said Colin.
“O-oh! Sarcasm! And have you been bathing? Why didn’t you fetch me?”
“I didn’t imagine you had forgotten your way down to the lake, if you
wanted to bathe.”
Dennis gave him one quick anxious glance. There was something wrong:
perhaps the business in London yesterday had worried him, or perhaps his
father was vexed with him, though it seemed very inexplicable, about
that matter of the train yesterday.
“I’m sorry about my coming in the morning yesterday,” he said, “after I
had told you the afternoon. But I thought it would be so ripping to get
here before lunch.”
“Oh yes: that’s all right,” said Colin absently.
At this moment Violet came in, and Colin’s manner instantly changed.
“Ah, Vi, darling,” he said. “There you are! I got back very late last
night, for I thought I would dine with Aunt Hester. She was quite
delightful: also quite astounding. About eleven she went off to a dance
in a short pink dress and a wreath of flowers. She promised to come down
here to-day, and stop till I go to Capri.”
Dennis pricked an ear at this.
“Oh, when will that be, Father?” he said.
“One of these days.... And then, if she likes, and you don’t mind,
darling, she can stop on here, though I really believe she would like
best to come to Capri, and disport herself like a small, imperishable,
highly-coloured sea-nymph. How she would astonish the islanders!”
Dennis gave a cackle of laughter at this picture. Best of all was the
gay good humour in his father’s voice. Colin turned to him.
“Dennis, she told me that you had promised to lunch with her yesterday,”
he said, “and that you sent a telegram saying you had to get down here.
There was no compulsion on you to get down here that I’m aware of.”
“Oh, but I wanted to get down here so frightfully,” said Dennis.
“I see: anything you want frightfully has to happen,” said Colin, “and I
suppose anything you want not to happen, isn’t allowed to. But in spite
of that, next time you say you’ll go to see Aunt Hester and then throw
her over at the last minute, it’s just conceivable that something may
happen which you don’t like. Go and put your mother’s plate down for
her.”
This was all bewildering, but Dennis did as he was told, and having
finished his breakfast came and stood by his father’s chair.
“Well, what do you want?” asked Colin sharply.
Dennis flushed.
“Oh, nothing,” he said.
“Don’t hang about then. You can go if you’ve finished your breakfast.”
Dennis had a spirit of his own, and one thing was perfectly clear to him
as he left the room, namely, that if his father did not want to be
bothered with him, he was not going to make any importunate requests for
his companionship. It was a horrid state of things, but no doubt
temporary: he could parallel it by the bleakness which sometimes fell
upon his house-master at school, for no apparent reason. This paternal
bleakness, unknown in those last glorious Easter holidays, was of course
far more depressing, for it took all the colour out of life. He was
absolutely ignorant what cause of offence he had given; throwing over
Aunt Hester and coming by another train were clearly inadequate as the
reason for it, and all he could do, while it lasted, was to be prompt
and obedient, and above everything to spring to him, whenever his sun
should shine out again, without any shadow of resentment or reserve.
This treatment was wounding and inexplicable, but he must keep his hurt
to himself, and most certainly he must not go to his mother with
querulous wonder as to what it was about. It concerned his father and
himself, and nobody else: it would be disloyal to his unshaken
allegiance to make moan.
Dennis had ample opportunity for loyalty in the next few days, for he
could do nothing right in his father’s eyes. He scarcely saw him or had
speech with him except at meals, and then, if he talked he was told not
to jabber, if he was silent he was asked why he was so sulky. It was a
heart-rending and inexplicable affair, and all the more puzzling because
except with him Colin was in his gayest and most entrancing mood. Aunt
Hester, who apparently had not in the least minded Dennis’s conduct,
received the most delightful welcome for an indefinite period, and Colin
chaffed her and made much of her, till she beamed again. With Violet he
was the same; only Dennis had the power to check his geniality and cause
him to rap out a reprimand of some kind. In the evening the four of
them, with old Lady Yardley, played their whist, and he was left to
amuse himself as he best could. Even then he could not escape censure.
If he watched them; a dreary enough occupation, he was asked why he
didn’t get a book and read a bit after his day of enjoyment: if he read
it was supposed that whist was too old-fashioned for the young
generation to interest themselves in. Once Aunt Hester intervened.
“Let him read or look on as he likes, dear,” she said to Colin. “He can
please himself, surely.”
On that occasion only Colin was sharp with her.
“Dear Aunt Hester,” he said, “perhaps you’d mind your own business.
We’re waiting for you to play.”
And then, after the dismal whist, there was the dismal going up to his
room, with the knowledge that the door would not open, nor his father
look in and sit on his bed, and make delightful plans for the next day.
A darker phase succeeded.
In the following week an Eton friend came to stay, and now at least
there was someone to play with. Jim Airedale was an engaging and
good-looking boy, devoted to Dennis, and even in this eclipse, the two
of them, with all the resources of Stanier to chose from, might
entertain themselves with considerable enjoyment. But all went more
grievously for Dennis than ever. Colin appeared to take a great fancy to
his friend, and at dinner, on the day of his arrival, talked to him
delightfully, with occasional interspersions of snubs for Dennis. No
one--as Dennis was bitterly aware--knew so well the road to a boy’s
heart; he made Jim at ease in a couple of minutes, set him chattering in
a couple more, and it was a hilarious meal that followed. After dinner
he set Dennis down to play that weary whist, and took the other boy off
to play billiards. When the whist was over, Dennis joined them and
marked for them. Then at bedtime Colin took Jim up to his room, to see
that everything was comfortable, and lingered there talking, while next
door Dennis, half-undressed, sat on his bed, waiting for those merry
sounds to cease. When all was quiet, he slipped out of his room to have
a few words with Jim, and perhaps Colin was waiting for that, for as he
passed his door, it opened quietly and there his father stood.
“Hullo, where are you going?” he asked.
Something in Dennis seemed to strain almost to breaking-point at the
cold hostility of his tone.
“I’m just going to see Jim,” he said.
“Well, then, you had better just go back to your room again,” said
Colin.
Next morning he took Jim off in the two-seater to play golf--Dennis
would lend him his clubs--and they came back late for lunch, better
friends than ever. Afterwards there was some rabbit-potting, at which
Jim excelled, and Colin found occasion to say to Dennis, “I wonder if
you’ll ever learn to shoot like that.” And there were dreadful games of
lawn tennis, in which Colin, saying that he was the worst player of the
four, must play with Jim, against Violet and Dennis. He really was the
best, so of course they won. All this was sufficient to turn the boy’s
head, and Jim became slightly condescending to his friend. But when he
said to Dennis:
“I say, you’re father’s pretty rough on you sometimes,” with the
intention of being consolatory and friendly, he found he had strangely
miscalculated. Up went Dennis’s chin.
“Rough on me?” he said. “What on earth do you mean? He’s perfectly
ripping to me.”
Finally, on the last evening of that nightmare week, Colin made it
impossible for Jim, after a decent allowance of champagne at dinner, to
refuse a couple of glasses of port. He became rather tipsy, and when,
with a rolling eye and a menacing sense of rising nausea, he hurried
away to his room, Colin watched him go with a shrug of the shoulders.
“Nice sort of friends you bring to the house, Dennis,” he said. That
seemed to round off the visit very pleasantly.
Colin was sitting up alone that night after the others had gone
upstairs. He had been more brutal than usual with Dennis at dinner, and
for the first time he had seen Dennis bite his lip, obviously to keep
tears back.... But, in spite of all his pitiless persecution, he knew
that he was no nearer to the attainment of his purpose. As far as Dennis
himself was concerned, he had systematically and continuously hurt and
wounded him in that attempt to which he was committed, to kill his love,
but no failure could at present have been more complete. Often when the
whip of his tongue had been cruellest, and his cunning to hurt most
diabolical, he had looked at Dennis saying, “Well, answer me, can’t
you?” and Dennis had raised to him troubled and bewildered eyes in
which no spark of hate smouldered. There was no meekness about Dennis;
he could answer back with his head up, quite unsubdued and unafraid, but
in vain Colin looked for any sign that his love was ailing or like to
die. And occasionally when he relaxed, and gave him a kind word, love
leaped sparkling to his eyes and his beautiful mouth. What confirmed
this impression was the pride of the boy, for he never, as Colin knew,
uttered to his mother a single word of complaint, or went to her for
comfort. Little as Colin knew of love, he knew that here was the noble
pride of love, which would never admit failing or blemish in the object
of its high affection.
* * * * *
Colin opened the door on to the terrace and strolled out into the warm
pregnant night. There was something more indicative of failure than this
impregnable loyalty of Dennis’s, and that was his own unchanged
affection for the boy. In every possible way that could be devised by
his alert perceptive brain, he had wounded and injured Dennis’s heart,
and though there is no such royal road towards hate as to injure, he had
made no headway at all. His devotion to hatred, his vow to himself, so
faithfully kept, to all that was evil, had often made him bubble with
secret glee to see Dennis wince under those barbed attacks, but all the
time there existed that soft aching tenderness for him, so easy to
stifle but so impossible to smother. Like eternity, as he had sneered to
Douglas, it seemed of very durable stuff. All this fortnight’s
persecution had done nothing to break it up. Uninvited, it had entered
his heart, and nothing could stir it. He could act as if he had no other
feeling for the boy than this contemptuous aversion, but something
ached....
The night-breeze drew landward from the sea and sometimes it fell
altogether, and there was dead calm, and again he heard its whispered
approach in the trees by the lake, and presently it flowed over the
garden and streamed on to the terrace. He tried, as he so often had
done, to lay himself open to the spell that had woven the prosperity of
Stanier; he thought of Dennis heir to all its glories and possessor of
them when he had gone from this world, and at that the flicker of
jealousy, a strange offspring of love and hate, shot up in his heart.
But supposing Dennis died before he did.... Would he sooner see him
lying dead, and know that he, at any rate, would never succeed to
Stanier and its magnificence, or when death drew near to himself, see
Dennis by his bedside, and picture him assuming what was his to enjoy no
longer? On his deathbed surely he would entirely hate Dennis, and wish
that he lay there in his stead.
At the end of the long façade there stood the chapel unused since
Douglas’s departure, and Colin going back into his room let himself into
the corridor which led to it, turning up the lights as he went. He had
not been there since the night of Vincenzo’s death, and now it seemed to
him that if he sat and meditated there, where so often he had made the
consecration of himself to evil, he could arrive at some clearer and
conscious realization of it. He told himself that he hated love, and
delighted in hate, but no fervour warmed his creed. In that sanctuary of
Satan the truth of that might shine more vividly on him, and he might
get rid of that fancy that Dennis’s eyes, eager and ready to kindle; or
sad but without reproach, were watching him. Surely they would not
follow him where Dennis had never been.
Colin sat quiet in his place looking at the altar. The faint odour of
incense still hung about, but emotionally the place was dead. He thought
of Vincenzo twitching and grinning as he knelt: he thought of Douglas,
lifting high the consecrated elements, so soon to be a mockery and a
derision, but his mind gave no welcome or greeting to the
remembrance....
Well, his deeds must atone for his lack of fervour, and presently he
rose and went back through the silent house, and upstairs along the
dim-lit passage.
Suddenly the desire came to him just to look at Dennis. The boy would
certainly be asleep by now, for he must have learned that it was not
much good to keep awake, on the chance of his father coming in to say
good night. He would just open the door, turn on the light for a second
and look at him and leave him. He told himself he wanted to remind
himself that the boy would inherit all that he now loved and enjoyed;
what he concealed from himself, stuffing it away out of sight, was that
some human craving hungered for the sight of him. Dennis would be
asleep; he would get no pleasure from what he did not know.
Colin opened the door quietly, and saw the room was light, and there was
Dennis sitting up in bed. His face was bright with the unexpected
surprise: and he stretched out his arms. There was something appealing
and timid in the gesture.
“Oh, Father, how ripping!” he said.
Colin was helpless in the grip of that welcome. He tried to frame his
tongue to some chilling reprimand, but none came.
“Dennis! Not asleep yet? And your light on? What does it mean?” he
asked.
The boy broke out into a little bubble of a laugh.
“Why, I always keep it on till I hear you go to your room,” he said.
“Why?” asked Colin.
“Of course on the chance that you’d come in, as you always used to do. I
knew you would sometime. Jolly glad I kept it on. Oh, come and sit
down.”
Against his will and his purpose Colin came up to the bed. Dennis
wriggled aside to make room for him, and put up his knees for him to
lean against.
“I can’t stop,” said Colin, sitting down. “It’s fearfully late and
you’re a villain for being awake.”
“All right: I’m a villain,” said Dennis.
“And you wait for me every night?” asked Colin.
Dennis nodded. Just then he could not trust himself to speak, but his
shining eyes spoke for him.
“What shall we talk about,” asked Colin, “just for a minute?”
“Oh anything: it doesn’t matter a bit, as long as it’s you.”
At that moment Colin was happy. But he had hardly realized that, before,
just as he had heard the night-wind coming up and whispering in the
trees by the lake, he knew that there was approaching the blast of hate
and evil which he had tried to conjure up in the chapel. He leant
towards Dennis, put his arm round his neck and kissed him.
“Good night, old boy,” he said. “I won’t stop now. Sleep well.”
“Ever so well,” said Dennis.
Colin clicked out the light, and went to his room. Already his brain
seethed with images of evil, vivid and alluring, and fierce at this
treason of his. They swarmed like a loyal garrison to that breach in his
defences where Dennis had stood, and drove him off. They urged Colin to
pursue, to go back to the boy’s room, to let loose on him their assault,
to defile and desecrate his innocence, to show him the ecstasy of evil,
the charm of cruelty. What matter if panic or horror made nightmare
round him? He would wake from them with new currents coursing in his
veins, new desires stinging him to their fulfilment. Where was the good
of his being heir to the legend if he did not enter into his birthright?
Fierce was the stress of that possession. Colin withstood it, feeling
that if he yielded the very bonds of sanity would be loosed. If he went
back to Dennis’s room now, he would go as a devil unchained, ready and
eager to perpetrate any spiritual outrage and desecration, and who knew
whether the very balance and poise of Dennis’s being, whom he had just
left with all his serenity restored and the lamp of love bravely
burning, might not be upset altogether? Already he was scarcely in his
own control, and, maddened to an invincible lust of evil by the sight of
that tender victim, he might let himself cross the boundary which
separates the territories of human life from the untamed welter and
chaos of prodigious forces which both threaten and maintain it. He had
served Satan all his life alike in spirit and in works, and would serve
him still, but while this stress, which seemed like some dervish
possession, was on him, he could not trust himself with Dennis.
Something of irremediable violence might happen, some fatal laceration
of the fibres of the boy’s soul.
The crisis passed, leaving him conscious only of immense fatigue. There
had been a struggle, not between himself alone and this Satanic power,
but between it and something in himself, but not of himself, which
opposed it. He was too tired to think any more, and, throwing off his
clothes, sank into the dark of dreamless sleep.
He slept late, and waking brought with it a certain incredulousness at
his memory of the night before; what had happened seemed buried, at any
rate, under deep layers of consciousness, so that he could not handle
and examine it. Much more accessible was the memory of his weakness in
going in to Dennis at all. Whatever fruits might have ripened from this
fortnight’s harshness to the boy, were certainly frost-bitten now, for
Dennis knew, and hugged himself to know, that below these bleak
cruelties the father he loved existed still. It was a foolish thing to
have done, not only for that reason, but because he had weakened himself
in allowing that spasm of affection to assert itself. But it is never
too late, he thought, to mend foolishness by wise courses.
Dennis had finished breakfast when he got down, and he heard from Violet
that he had gone for a morning in the water, leaving an urgent message
for his father to follow.
“And the boy’s radiant this morning,” she said. “He told me you came
into his room last night and were ‘ripping,’ so he said.”
Colin was busy at the side table.
“Oh! What else did he say?” he asked.
“Just that. I am glad you did it. That couple of minutes made him forget
all the woes of these holidays.”
“Ah! He’s forgotten about them, has he?” said Colin.
“Absolutely; they’ve vanished. Oh yes, he wondered if I knew when you
and he were going; to Capri. I said you hadn’t told me.”
“I shall go to-morrow. But how it concerns Dennis, I don’t know, unless,
as is highly probable, he’s glad to get rid of me.”
“But aren’t you taking him?” asked Violet. “You promised to take him.”
“Did I? Well, now I promise you not to. Entirely for your sake, of
course, darling. You’ll love having him here to yourself. You’ll be able
to make up lost ground. Now I don’t want to hear anything more about
Capri. I’ll tell Dennis myself. Why should I drag a brat like that about
with me?”
Before long Colin strolled down to the lake. There was Dennis’s yellow
head far out on the water, and his browned arms, glistening with wet,
lifting themselves alternately as he surged back to the shed. By the
time Colin had come to the smooth turf that margined the lake, he had
got to land, and stood knee-deep in the shallow water, slim and shining
with an April-face of happiness. He gave a great whoop of welcome when
he saw his father.
“Hurrah, Father!” he said. “You have been quick. The water’s lovely;
let’s bathe and lie about all morning. Oh, I say, I was diving just now,
and found an awfully funny thing in the mud at the bottom. Looks as if
it was lace of sorts. Catch!”
Dennis picked up a sodden grey ball which he had put on the bank and
threw it at his father. At the moment Colin’s attention was attracted by
some water-fowl swimming at the far end of the lake, and Dennis’s
missile, wet and muddy, hit him full in the face.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dennis. “I thought you were looking.”
The missile had fallen at Colin’s feet, and he saw at once that it must
be the lace cotta which had been torn off Vincenzo’s body.
At the sight a horde of recollections drove in upon him; once more
Vincenzo twitched and grinned, and the incense smoked. Those instincts
of hate and cruelty which had dozed last night in the chapel, leaped up,
bright-eyed and snarling. Then, too, this recovered relic had splashed
him, the mud slimy and evil-smelling had dropped on to his white coat.
“Dennis, you’re a damned nuisance,” he said. “I’ll teach you to behave.
What the devil do you mean by doing that?”
He plucked two lithe shoots of willow from a tree that grew by the
water’s edge and stripped off the leaves.
“Come out,” he said, “and stand here with your back to me.”
Dennis looked at his father, and saw blind rage and fury in his face, as
he peeled the willow wands.
“I’m awfully sorry, Father,” he said.
“You’ll be sorrier in a minute. Come here. I’m going to give you six of
the smartest cuts you’ve ever had. It hurts more when you’re wet.”
Dennis stepped out of the water, and stood where his father pointed, and
four strokes, savagely delivered, fell across his shoulders. He stood
perfectly steady, gasping a little at the burning sting of them. As
Colin slashed at him, he felt an exultant glee that at last he was
hurting him to some purpose. He had spoiled the effect of his
fortnight’s cruelty by that concession last night: this should start him
afresh, with no apostasy to follow. He saw the red criss-cross of the
strokes and the weals rising on the boy’s skin with some such ecstasy of
satisfaction as he had seen Pamela standing in his room one night at
Capri. And then in the middle of this chastisement he knew he could not
strike Dennis again.
“That will do,” he said. “Turn round.”
Dennis turned and looked him straight in the eyes. In spite of the
sharpness of the pain his face was in perfect control, his mouth was
just a little compressed. And once more Colin knew that he had failed,
for he saw there pain and bewilderment, mute reproach, but of fear not a
trace nor yet of hate. With regard to himself he had failed also, for he
had been literally unable to finish the punishment he had promised, and
now he wanted to put his arm round Dennis’s neck, and kiss him, and tell
him that he knew what a devil he was, and beg the boy’s forgiveness....
The very consciousness of that failure made him rage again.
“Well, did you like that?” he said. “It hurt, I expect.”
“Yes,” said Dennis.
“Why don’t you cry then?” asked Colin.
“I don’t choose to.”
Colin sat down on the grass and lit a cigarette.
“Well, there’s another pleasure in store for you,” he said. “I’m going
to Capri to-morrow, and your mother says you think you’re coming with
me. That’s an error on your part--that’s all.”
“Yes,” said Dennis again. He walked to where his clothes lay on a bench
and began dressing.
“Aren’t you going on with your bathe?” asked Colin. “It will take the
sting out.”
“No, Father, I’ve finished,” said Dennis.
Colin began taking his clothes off.
“Going to sulk, I suppose,” he said. “But please yourself.”
Smarting of skin, but far sorer at heart, Dennis walked quietly off when
he had dressed, and skirting the lake went up along the bracken-covered
slopes of the park that looked out over the marsh. He longed to confide
in his mother, and ask if she could account in any way for this
Pentecost of trouble which the holidays had brought, and which had
culminated in this thrashing, but in spite of the comfort she might have
brought from the mere knowledge of her sympathy, he could not tell her
of that, not because it was a humiliation to him, but because it was a
disgrace to his father, and that must never be known to her. The offence
which provoked it was no cause at all; in the Easter holidays he might
have done that until seventy times seven, and his father would only have
laughed, and called him a little devil, and thrown the missile back at
him. And the same policy of repression must be preserved about his other
woes. In whatever manner his father treated him, that was an affair that
concerned themselves alone: mere manliness forbade him to go whimpering
to anybody, and more stringent yet was the prohibition that his own love
for his father enjoined on him. It was impossible to complain: he had
got to shoulder his own burden whatever injustice and harshness had laid
it on him.
He waded through the waist-high bracken with the scuttle of rabbits
about him. There were patches of bare turf between the clumps of fern;
it was great sport to walk through the bracken with a gun, and get a
pot-shot at a rabbit that bolted across these clearings. Often had he
done that with his father, but to-day he had not the least inclination
to fetch his gun. He wanted only, since speaking to his mother was out
of the question, to be alone, and stare this intolerable state of
affairs in the face, and he sat down in one of these open spaces, with
the aromatic smell of the woodland round him, and tried to focus it. He
smarted with the blows he had received and with the utter injustice of
them, but most of all his heart cried out against the virulent glee in
his father’s face, when he told him to turn round again and asked him
how he enjoyed it. If only he was like some other fellows at school who
either disliked or just put up with their fathers, he would merely have
been angry at this abominable treatment, and delighted that the beastly
man was taking himself off to-morrow. But Dennis felt none of these
natural sentiments; in spite of these harshnesses he would rapturously
have gone with his father to Capri, if that had been allowed, unshaken
in the faith (which for a minute or two last night had been so joyfully
justified) that to-day or to-morrow his father would turn to him again,
and be ‘ripping’ as no-one else in the world could be. But his
father--and what had he himself done to evoke this desolating
displeasure?--had altogether changed to him, he disliked him, and he
wanted to hurt him, and finely he succeeded. As the sense of this bitter
tragedy grew on him, Dennis could bear it no longer, but rolled over on
his face, and, for the first time in this awful fortnight, sobbed with
the pain of his wounded affection.
After a while he sat up again: there was no earthly use in indulging in
such sloppy tricks, and, pulling himself together, he walked back to the
house. It was close on lunch-time, and he made himself neat, for fear of
provoking sarcastic comments, and sat in the gallery over a picture
paper. Presently his mother and Colin came in together.
“Well, dear, nice bathe?” she said to him.
“Yes, mother, jolly and warm,” he said.
She came over to his chair, and leaned over him, putting her hands on
his shoulders. Dennis could not help wincing at that.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she said.
“Nothing. I scratched my back against a snag as I was bathing,” he said.
“Rather sore.”
Colin heard that, and instantly he thought to himself, “Now I’ll tell
her: that will humiliate him.” But on the heels of that came some sudden
glow of pride at the staunchness of the boy. He guessed that he said
that, not to spare himself, but to spare him, and, as last night, the
yearning for him, the affection he had not yet succeeded in killing,
pulled at his heart.
It was an unutterable relief to Violet when, next morning, with charming
farewells to her and Aunt Hester, and with a nod to Dennis, Colin drove
off to catch his boat at Folkestone. She had ached and mourned over her
boy’s misery, but at the same time she had rejoiced in that reticence he
had observed to her, for there indeed was the banner of love flying
bravely. If he had struck that, and come to her for comfort and with
complaint, indeed there would have been no matter for wonder, but she
delighted in the fact that he flew it still. But it was good that Colin
was gone: poor Dennis had had a rotten time, and she longed to give him
pleasanter days. Naturally, he had no inkling of the meaning of his
tribulations, of the significance that underlay them, and she had no
notion of telling him that, in her belief, a battle was going on that
somehow centred round him, in which he, boyishly unheeding, was standing
his ground in the face of black and bitter assaults. She knew well that
it was not yet over, nor yet nearly over; he had but held his own, and
fresh assaults, fiercer yet perhaps, would come. But just for the next
few weeks there was truce, and she was thankful for that.
The summer days passed on: another school-friend came to stay with
Dennis, and after him another, and Dennis seemed happy, though no one
could kindle in him that abandoned radiance which Colin so easily lit.
Colin had been away a month now, and, according to his plans, would be
back for Dennis’s last week at home. But one evening there came a letter
to Violet saying that he was intending to stop on in the island for
another fortnight.
She read this to Dennis as they sat together that night for a bed-time
talk after old Lady Yardley’s whist was finished, and Aunt Hester had
hurried away in horror of the lateness of the hour and the fear of
missing her beauty sleep. One piece of the letter was not for his ears:
Colin asked if she was making up lost ground with Dennis, and supposed
they had hatched plenty of conspiracies against him: he also sent a
message to Dennis to say that he need not trouble to ink his fingers
over writing to him, as his letters were quite illegible. Violet thought
it unnecessary to deliver that message, but, reading out the
postponement of his father’s return, she saw Dennis’s face fall.
“Then I shan’t see Father before I go back to Eton,” he observed.
Violet considered the dates.
“No, dear, you’ll have gone back several days before he comes,” she
said.
The cloud deepened on Dennis’s face.
“Did Father say anything about the letters I’ve written him?” he asked.
She laughed.
“Yes, dear, he did say something,” she said, “about their not being
particularly easy to read.”
“No other message for me?” asked the boy.
Violet’s heart began to ache for him.
“Let’s see: where have I got to?” she said. “Wonderful vintage, he says,
in the lovely hot weather they’re having.... He’s been bathing all the
morning, and has had lunch, and is going to sleep....”
“But no message for me?” persisted Dennis.
Violet finished the letter and tore it up. There was a good deal about
Dennis, though nothing for him. But it struck her that these
uncomplimentary comments were forced. In one Colin had first written
‘the boy,’ but had crossed that out and substituted ‘the brat.’ He had
not thought of him as ‘the brat’ originally: ‘the brat’ was the image
under which he schooled himself to think of him. The sentences had no
spontaneous ring about them; they expressed what he tried to feel. She
felt sure that her interpretation was no fanciful one.
Dennis had accepted her silence to his repeated question.
“And what else has he been doing?” he said.
“Dining out in the garden every night,” said Violet, “and looking at
them making the wine. The garden is a good deal burned up with the heat.
Nothing else. The bathing takes half the day.”
Dennis crossed from the far side of the hearth-rug and made a back for
himself against her knees.
“It sounds awfully ripping and lazy,” he said. “Father loves it, doesn’t
he? I should have liked to have gone with him for a bit.”
“Perhaps another year he’ll take you,” said Violet. She felt no sense of
injury in the fact that Dennis wanted to be out there with him, rather
than at home with her. She thanked God that it was so, that all these
wretched days, when his father had persecuted him, had left no stain on
the luminous brightness of his affection. At all costs she wanted that
to retain its shining quality. Even if Dennis suffered, he suffered in
the cause of love: if he had not loved his father, he would have thought
of him now as merely a very disagreeable person whose absence was a
matter for congratulation. But even now Dennis wanted to be with him; he
was disappointed that his postponed return would rob him of a glimpse
before he went back to Eton.
“I wonder if he will,” said Dennis. “I wonder----”
Violet felt that the boy was on the verge of speech. She drew him back
against her knees, encompassing his shoulders.
“Yes, darling, what do you wonder?” she said.
Dennis drew a long breath.
“I wonder what made Father so beastly to me when I came home this time,”
he said. “I can’t think of anything that I had done. I didn’t mean to
speak of it, but ... but had I done anything, Mother?”
“No, darling,” she said gently.
“Then it’s not my fault, anyhow,” he said. “That’s something. Oh Lord, I
have thought about it so much. So if it’s not me, it’s something that
has just got hold of Father.... I wish it would let go. He came up to my
room one night, you know, and was just as he used to be. I believe.... I
believe he’s fond of me all the time, really. What am I to do?”
She wondered how near the truth he had come. The words, “something has
got hold of Father.... I wish it would let go,” were extraordinarily
apt. But she could not tell him that his father loved hate, and hated
love, and that in her belief love was beginning to assert itself against
that black dominion. To tell him that, to speak of the legend and of the
choice which Colin had renewed for himself, might spoil the instinctive
simplicity with which Dennis faced it all. She could not tell him that
his father had tried to corrupt him, and, failing there, was trying to
kill his love. The truth, baldly stated, might easily produce in him, if
he understood it, just that atmosphere of horror in which love gasped
for breath.
“Dennis darling,” she said. “You can help your father in a way that
nobody else can.”
“How?” said Dennis quickly. “And what’s it all about?”
“It doesn’t matter what it’s all about,” she said. “But you can help him
by doing just what you are doing. Go on loving him, dear. Never let
yourself cease loving him.”
“As if I could help doing that!” said Dennis.
He was busy next morning. He scribbled a long letter to his father, and
copied it out with extreme care. No one could possibly say it was
illegible....