A FANCY-DRESS ball had been arranged for the last night. There were already some forty guests in the house, who, as Colin said, would form “a sort of nucleus,” and a special train was coming down from town arriving at ten and going back at three in the morning, and invitations had been sent to the neighbourhood for twenty miles round, with the hope that ladies and gentlemen would be Elizabethan, but begging the ladies not to be Elizabeth. Dozens of Elizabeths, he thought, of all shapes and sizes with crumpled ruffs and jewels off crackers were bewildering, and you collided with the Queen with improbable frequency. Instead Violet was to be the sole Elizabeth present, and Dennis was to appear as her young Colin in attendance.
Colin came into the wife’s room in a wonderfully good humour that morning to talk over the manner of their appearance. For several days he had scarcely had a word with her.
“I think we won’t stand by the door as host and hostess,” he said, “and shake hands. One has to say to everyone how wonderful and charming they look, and guess who they are. And then they have to say how wonderful and charming we look and guess who we are and the entrance gets blocked.”
“Oh, isn’t it rather rude not to receive guests?” she said.
“Not a bit. It’s perfectly proper swank. In fact, I don’t want you and Dennis to appear till the special has arrived and everyone is in the ballroom. The Royals will be on their dais at the end of the room, and the rest shall be marshalled round the walls, and you and Dennis and I will march up the whole length of the room. And then we go straight into the Royal Quadrille. I’ve told them.”
“Very well,” said she. “But what about you? I don’t even know who you’re to be yet. You’ve always represented old Colin, at fancy-dress here, but you can’t if Dennis does.”
He laughed.
“Admirably reasoned,” he said. “Too many Colins would spoil the broth, like too many Queens. But I’m going to complete the group just a little way behind Dennis. Merely Mephistopheles: but he had something to do with it. Strictly Elizabethan too, though belonging to other ages as well.”
“Oh, Colin, that’s rather grim,” she said. “Why produce the family skeleton?”
“Well, it’s the skeleton on which the family has grown fat. Of course everybody thinks the legend is mediæval bunkum, but they’ll play up. Dennis will be an adorable Colin: I made him try his things on just now, and if the real one looked as enchanting as he I don’t wonder the Queen lost her aged heart. And as you’ve lost yours to Dennis, we shall have a real parallel. As for you, darling, you’ll be an anachronism but that can’t be helped. Elizabeth was an ugly old woman at the Colin epoch, and we can’t call you that exactly.”
She was silent a moment.
“I wonder if you’ll be vexed at what I want to say,” she said.
“How can I tell?” he said. “I don’t suppose I shall care much.”
“It’s this then. Please don’t get yourself up like Mephistopheles. It’s for Dennis’s sake I ask it. I want him to be among those who think the legend—what did you call it?—mediæval bunkum. Colin, do leave him to think that.”
He sat there looking at her with that brilliant sunny smile, that alertness of perpetual youth.
“Well, a fancy-dress ball is mediæval bunkum, isn’t it?” he said.
“But you aren’t,” said she. “All you do, all you are, has a tremendous reality for Dennis. Everything you do is perfect in his eyes.”
“That’s good. That’s the right filial attitude. Are you as right conjugally, darling? Besides, what do you believe about the legend? Shouldn’t a child learn its faith at its mother’s knee? The legend is fairly real to you, isn’t it?”
There was the spirit that mocked. But when Dennis was concerned she was not afraid of him.
“There are many things I believe which I don’t want Dennis to believe,” she said.
He laughed.
“What an easy riddle!” he said. “You don’t want Dennis to believe that his father is an unmitigated devil. That’s the answer, so don’t trouble to say it isn’t. And as I believe in the legend too, it would be nice to have our only boy one with us. That’s the root of domestic bliss.”
“I can’t argue with you,” she said. “You mock at whatever I say.”
“But who asked you to argue?” said Colin. “I’m sure I didn’t. But as we’re on the subject I may as well say that my whole object in making a black guy of myself is to help Dennis to realize the legend. He has heard it, as everybody else has, but it’s nothing to him. Though a fancy-dress ball is only a sort of play, a play makes a thing more real to you. Dennis will be Colin in the play, and he’ll look round and see his dear Mephistopheles at his elbow.”
Colin paused to light a cigarette, and spoke with gathering impatience.
“He’s got to believe it sometime,” he said. “We all begin, you and I did, by thinking it just a picturesque old story, but somehow it grows into us, or we into it.”
“It’s the curse of the house,” said Violet suddenly. “And it’s believing in it that makes it real. Oh, Colin, let Dennis grow up without it becoming real to him! Then it will stop, it and all the horror and the misery it brings. You’re quite right: it grows into us. Don’t let it grow into him.”
He got up.
“Do you know, I really haven’t got time for an ethical discussion just now,” he said. “And why should I disinherit Dennis? That’s what it comes to. You may call the legend the curse of the house if you like, but it’s been big with blessings. You’ve got no sense of gratitude, darling. No family pride.”
“Yes, I said ‘pride,’ didn’t I? I wish you wouldn’t make yourself into a damned echo, and force me to be cross. We won’t discuss Dennis’s future any more: we’ll confine ourselves to the present. You and Dennis and I will come in as I have indicated. I want you to wear every jewel that you can cram on. Chiefly pearls, I think, but also that sort of large red plaster of rubies. Stomacher, isn’t it? But you mustn’t wear the Stanier sapphire. I want that for Dennis. You might give it me now, if you’ll open your safe.”
“But that’s all wrong,” she said. “The Queen never gave that to Colin till just before her death.”
“My dear, you needn’t tell me that. I suppose I know the history of Colin as well as you. But I want Dennis to wear it. I want it; that’s all.”
Colin had recovered his temper: he was all serenity and sun again.
“There’s something queer about the stone,” he said. “It never looks well on you: it loses half its light, whereas on me it blazes like a blue arc lamp. Everyone round looks blue, as in the Grotto at Capri. And I want to see what effect he has on it....”
Who could be as devilish as Colin, she found herself thinking, but who had such charm? One moment he would sneer and mock, the next he had dropped all that and without intention and certainly without effort he was like a boy again, making plans and having secrets with her. Often during this last week or two that enchanting side of him had popped out unawares. One moment his mouth would be full of veiled insults and scarcely veiled hostilities, the next, as now, he would be eager and pleasant.... More particularly had she observed this when he was with Dennis; though she knew that in his heart he had contemplated the boy’s initiation into all that was evil, she could not believe that it was not from his heart that, every now and then, there came up the impulse that made that soft light in his eye, that tenderness on his mouth. Could it be possible that he was getting to love Dennis? After all there had been that moment’s jealousy (of that she made no doubt) when he had seen Dennis and her together. Was that the grain of mustard-seed? Poor little seed, if it was: it would find poisoned soil and corrosive moisture for its growth.
“I’ll get you the stone,” she said. “It’s in the safe in my bedroom wall.”
Colin perched himself on the arm of the sofa where she sat.
“Oh, there’s no hurry,” he said. “Let’s have five minutes’ chat. I haven’t seen you all this week, and I haven’t told you what an incomparable hostess you’ve been. I always recognize merit, Vi, and you’ve been most meritorious. The sapphire now: there is something queer about that stone. Pearls always shine with you like moons, but the sapphire gets as stale as a piece of mildew. It’s because it was old Colin’s, I believe. His getting it seems to me his most remarkable achievement. He can never have been more hugely inspired than when he made that stingy old woman give it him. All else that she had given him, his Garter, his estates, cost her nothing. But fancy getting her to part with something that was hers, and that was worth a ransom. And you can’t look at it without seeing there’s something in it you don’t understand.”
She laughed.
“You speak as if there was something magical about it,” she said.
“Well, why shouldn’t there be? I’m not such a shallow ass as not to believe in the supernatural. And the whole point of the supernatural is that you can’t understand it. If you could understand it, it wouldn’t be supernatural.”
Suddenly he appeared to forget about the stone altogether.
“I want to ask you something,” he said. “Did Dennis by any chance tell you that about a week ago he had the most awful nightmare?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me exactly what he said.”
Violet thought a moment.
“He had gone up to bed, he told me, and, as he expected you to come and say good night to him, he didn’t put his light out, but propped himself up with pillows to keep awake. He thinks that he must have gone to sleep, though he didn’t know that he had. Then a great blackness, he said, came into the room and tried to force its way into him. He struggled and struggled, and called out to you. And then he found he was awake and you were there, and comforted him. He said you were angelic to him.”
Colin turned quickly to her.
“What do you make of it?” he said.
“I make of it what Dennis made of it. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”
She looked at him, and saw there was something more. The notion somehow branded itself into her mind like the touch of a hot iron. There was the conviction, incredible and terrifying, that Colin had something more to do with that visitation than to bring comfort. But what?
“Tell me your side of it,” she said.
Colin’s face changed: the impatience and mockery came back.
“Good Lord, how can I have a side?” he said. “Wasn’t I right to comfort him? Or should I have scolded him for being frightened by a dream? Has he forgotten about it, do you think? I mean, does he accept it just as a nightmare and me as an angel?”
“I’m not certain. He was most frightfully scared. But it will wear off if he doesn’t have another nightmare. You remain an angel anyhow: that doesn’t wear off.”
Still that irrational conviction of some complicity of his—how insane it appeared when she faced it—beset her.
“Colin, he mustn’t have another nightmare,” she said. “Terror is so frightfully bad for a child.”
She saw Colin’s fingers beginning to twitch. When he was getting angry or impatient they made the strangest little movements as if some electric current was jerking them.
“I’m responsible for Dennis’s dreams then, am I?” he said. “Why else did you tell me he mustn’t have any more nightmares? What’s the meaning of that? Come, out with it; you did mean something.”
She could not state what after all was the most fantastical notion. It would not bear examination: it was just as much a nightmare as Dennis’s.
“I mean that you have the most extraordinary control over Dennis,” she said, “his whole soul is devoted to you. Waking or sleeping he would obey you. You know that as well as I do.”
Surely Colin had never been in so strange a weather-cock of a humour as he was this morning. At one moment he was ready to fly out at her with unbridled irritation, the next he was all sweetness and amiability. He put his arm round her.
“Vi, you and I are like Norns,” he said. “Aren’t they Norns who, in some dreary Wagner opera, sit in the dusk, and toss the shuttles of destiny to and fro? Dennis is flying from hand to hand between you and me. You catch him and weave, and then you toss him back to me, and I weave. There ought to be three Norns, though, oughtn’t there? Who is the third? I don’t believe we shall agree on the third.”
All her unfathomable distrust of him came flooding back on her. His purring content seemed to her like that of some lithe savage beast, basking in the sun, who next minute might deal some shattering lightning-blow with unsheathed claws. Who could trust him? Who had ever trusted him that did not repent (unless already it was too late to repent) of such a madness? And yet she believed that he was getting fond of Dennis, with a quality of affection not proud only and paternal, but personal. She made up her mind to stake on it.
“I don’t think we should disagree,” she said. “We both love him——”
He pulled his arm away from her, and, looking at him, she fancied she saw for a moment behind the brightness of his eye that dull red glow, not human, which you can see in the eye of a dog. One glimpse she got and no more, for he rose.
“I think we’ve bleated long enough on the vox humana stop,” he said. “Or shall we sing a short hymn before you give me the sapphire?”
She went into the bedroom next door and opened the safe that was built into the wall, and returned to him with the shagreen case. He took it from her without a word and left her.
The special train of saloon carriages, that brought the guests from London and ran without a stop into Rye, was on time, and by half-past ten the last of them had passed into the ballroom. The request that they should be as Elizabethan as possible was faithfully carried out; never was there such a one-period galaxy. No house but Stanier could have induced people to pour out into the country for a few hours, but how they flocked to Stanier! For the last fortnight this Easter fête had been the talk of the town; and no-one of the amused and amusing world, who was so fortunate as to be bidden to the final and crowning splendour, could afford to miss it, and no-one who was bidden could afford to fall below the standard of its magnificence. Glittering and bravely attired was the throng, a joy to behold in these dingy days when never were women so garish and slovenly, and when men all wear the same ill-inspired livery. Every great jewel-chest in London that night must have been void of its finest treasures, for here was their gorgeous rendezvous.
No host or hostess was there to receive the guests; they flowed in, jewelled and kaleidoscopic, and wondered where Lady Yardley was and where Colin was, and collected and dispersed again in shimmering groups over the floor. Some of those staying in the house appeared to know something about their absence, but could give no further information beyond that the hosts would be sure to be here presently and, acting as marshals and masters of ceremony, gradually began clearing the centre of the room. Back and back towards the walls they enticed the crowd, and soon it was seen that this was some intentional manœuvre to secure an empty floor. In a gallery above the door into the hall the band was stationed still silent; on a dais at the other end were seated the two Royal guests who had been here all the week, with others who had come down to-night. Then, at some signal given from the far end of the room, a dozen chandeliers, hitherto unlit, blazed out, and the hosts arrived.
Violet advanced some few yards into the room, with her retinue close behind her. She was dressed in a gown of dark blue velvet, thickly embroidered in gold with the Tudor rose. The tall white collar of her ruff was edged with diamonds, and round her neck were the eight full rows of great pearls, the first three close round her throat, and five others, each longer than the last, falling in loops over her bosom, the fifth being clipped to the stomacher of large rubies, and round her waist was a girdle of the same stones. On her head she wore a net of diamonds that pressed closely down on her golden hair, so that it rose in soft resilient cushions through the meshes of it. Just behind her came Dennis, in trunk of white velvet and white silk hose. Over his shoulders, leaving his arms free, was a short cloak of dark red velvet; this was buckled at the neck with the great sapphire, and on his head was a white cap with an aigrette of diamonds. In his low-heeled rosetted shoes he was a shade shorter than his mother, and his face, flushed with excitement, was grave with the desire to acquit himself worthily. A pace behind him came Colin, a foil to the sparkle and splendour of the others, for from head to foot, trunk and hose and cloak, he was in black. Black too was his cap, with one red feather in it. He was a little the taller of the three, and, standing just behind Dennis’s white gleam, he seemed to encompass the boy with the protection of his blackness, and round the room as they stood there ran whispers of “The Legend: The Legend.” But people looked not so much at the jewels and the clothes and the gorgeous colouring, but at those three faces, all cast in one peerless mould, gold haired and blue eyed, the difference of age and sex quite overcome by the amazing likeness between the three of them. Here indeed was Stanier itself: the splendour of its jewels, its wealth, its palaces, its story shrunk into insignificance in the marvel of its incarnations.
They paused there a moment, and then Violet gave three deep curtsies, the first towards the dais in front, and then to right and left, to the rows of guests marshalled by the walls. There was Stanier in the person of its hostess saluting its visitors; Dennis and Colin stood quite still meantime, for they were but in attendance. As she moved forward again, the full blare of the band shattered the silence, and the welcome was over.
With the departure of the special train back to town the ball came to an end, and no attempt was made to carry it on to a dwindling and fatigued conclusion. It ended, as it had begun and continued, in a blaze, and after it there was no flickering of expiring flames and fading of its glow. Last of all Colin and Dennis came upstairs together.
Colin had been watching the boy all night. Dennis had suffered a short experience of high self-consciousness when he entered the crowded expectant room, but after that it had vanished altogether, and he had merely enjoyed himself immensely, without being in the least aware who he was. The radiance of his youth shone round him like a fire, no-one could look at him without a smile of pleasure that the world held such perfection of boyhood. All that Colin saw, and again and again his heart leaped to think that this was the son of his loins: no sculptor could have made so fair an image, no painter have found on his palette such colouring. Four generations of them were there that night, old Lady Yardley sat like some white alabaster statue of deathless age on the dais, then came Aunt Hester with a wreath round her head (Perdita or Ophelia, he supposed), outrageously flirting with every man she could get hold of, and succeeding, to do her justice, in getting hold of an incredible number, then came himself and Violet, and last the flower of them all.... The guests had had no greeting on their arrival, but the three stood at the ballroom door as they passed out, and it was with Dennis that they lingered. Frank and friendly but a little shy again at this multiplicity of smiles and greetings for himself, he stood there, erect and boyish, the bonniest figure in all that assemblage of beauty.
He tucked his hand into his father’s arm as they went up the broad stairs from the empty hall.
“Oh, Father, wasn’t it fun?” he said. “I wish we could have a fancy-dress ball every night. When shall we have another?”
“To-morrow, if we have one every night,” said Colin.
Dennis cackled with laughter.
“It’ll only be you and Mother and great-granny and me, won’t it, to-morrow? I say, are you coming to talk to me while I undress?”
“And after that may I go to bed?” said Colin.
“Oh, if you like I’ll come and talk to you, while you go to bed,” said he. “I’m not an atom tired.”
Colin looked at that radiant face, still fresh as morning, and for the first time he consciously noticed the sapphire that buckled his cloak. That gave the measure of his absorption in Dennis himself, for he had given him the stone to wear with a definite object. And now he saw how stale and unluminous it was. No blaze of light burned within it, its brilliance was dim compared to what it could be: it was splendid still, but no more than a shadow of its real self. He knew his own idea about the stone to be quite fantastic, but he felt a sudden spasm of anger with the boy that that great blue cornflower was so faded. Yet he felt he might have known it....
“No, I’ll see you to bed,” he said. “Here we are; turn up the light.”
The room flashed into brightness and Colin closed the door.
“Undo your cloak, Dennis,” he said, “and give me the sapphire.”
The boy stood in the full light of the lamp above the dressing-table, fumbling with it.
“Rather,” he said. “It’s like a bit of ice on my throat. I almost took it off during the ball, but I supposed it wasn’t a thing to leave about.... Oh, I can’t unfasten it: do it for me, Father.”
He held his head up, smiling into his father’s eyes; and moved by some uncontrollable impulse Colin kissed that smooth cheek. The boy was so splendidly handsome, of so winning a charm. “And after all,” as Colin thought to himself, as if in excuse of the affection of that caress, “he’s my own son....” Then he raised his hands to undo the fastening at which Dennis fumbled, and even as he touched it, light seemed to dawn somewhere deep in the heart of the sapphire.
“There you are,” he said, “there’s the ice-bag removed. It doesn’t look much like ice, does it?”
Dennis shook off his cloak.
“O-oh! It doesn’t look very icy,” he said. “Have I really been wearing that all evening? Why, it’s alive, it’s burning! Or is it only that it looks so bright against your black clothes? You ought to have worn it. Tell me about it: you said you would!”
Colin looked at the rays that danced in that blue furnace that he held. It was scarcely possible to believe that this awakened lustre was purely an imagined effect, and not imagined surely was the counsel that its splendour gave him to tell Dennis a little more about his birthright.
“Well, it was the last thing and the most splendid that the Queen ever gave old Colin,” he said. “He speaks of it in his Memoirs, which I’ll shew you——”
“Oh do; shew me them to-morrow. I should love to see them. The old rip! Sorry, Father: about the sapphire.”
Colin let his eyes rest again on the great stone, and then looked straight at Dennis.
“He says that his Lord and Benefactor caused him so mightily to please the Queen that she gave it him,” he said. “You must learn to love it, Dennis, for he calls it the finest fruit of his bargain.”
Dennis looked puzzled.
“His bargain?” he asked. “Oh, the legend. Then do you think he really believed in the legend?”
“Certainly he did, and wise he was too. You shall read how Satan came to him one night as he slept.”
Dennis had taken off his tunic, and stood there stock-still, his face now more definitely troubled.
“Like some horrible nightmare?” he asked.
Colin came a step nearer, black as the pit and fair of face, with the stone gleaming in his hand.
“A nightmare? Good heavens, no!” he said. “Like some wonderful dream, if you like, but it was no dream. It was gloriously real. You can’t understand yet what the bargain meant, for you’re only a boy, and there’s nothing that you really want which you don’t get. But imagine what it would be, when you grew up, to have every wish gratified.... The bargain holds not for old Colin alone but for all those who come after, you and me for instance, who by their own choice claim their right to share in it. The legend is no fairy tale, Dennis; it is sober, serious truth. It was a miracle, if you like, but the evidence for it is conclusive.”
The trouble deepened in Dennis’s eyes. When Colin first spoke of that visitor coming to his ancestor as he slept, there had started unbidden into his mind the remembrance of that nightmare from which his father had rescued him. And now again he felt that invasion pressing on him, and though it was surely his father who stood there, yet somehow his black robes and his red-feathered cap and that blue-blazing gift of Satan in his hand seemed to obscure him. It was as if some shadow had passed over him, and behind that shadow he was changing.
“Oh, don’t, Father!” he cried. “I hate it! It’s awfully stupid of me, but I do hate it. Please!”
There was no doubt that the boy was vaguely and yet deeply frightened: his voice rose shrilly, his hands were trembling. And once again Colin recoiled from the idea of Dennis’s terror. When he had directed the force towards him before, in the defencelessness of his sleep, it was easily intelligible that the invasion of it should alarm him, but now, speaking to him in his own person, with the authority that Dennis’s love for him gave, he had hoped that the boy would at any rate sip at the cup which he held out to him. But still he was troubled and alarmed, he was not mature enough yet to guess the lure of dreams and of desires. And yet that was not all that made Colin pause: if that had been all, he would have persisted, he would have induced Dennis somehow to taste the sweetness of evil, he would have pricked his arm to let just one drop of blood flow in which, so to speak, he could begin to write his name to the everlasting bond and bargain, to initial it at least. Dennis might be a little frightened, but the beginning would have been made.
What withheld him was not the wickedness of his intention, nor yet the unwisdom of frightening Dennis with it, but his own damnable squirming weakness in minding the boy’s terror. It was cowardly, it was even apostate of him to recoil from that, but he wavered before it, he lacked firmness and indifference. He must get rid of that scruple and the hateful tenderness that prompted it.
There Dennis stood, his bare arms stretched out to him, half-imploring, it seemed, and yet, by that same action, keeping him off. The throat-apple in the soft neck moved up and down in his agitation, as if struggling to keep his panting breath steady, and the red flower of his mouth quivered.
The great sapphire slipped from Colin’s hand and rolled on the floor. He let it lie there, unheeding or unknowing, and came close to Dennis, putting his arm round his neck. “Dennis, my dear,” he said, “what’s the matter? What ails you? Why, you’re having the nightmare again while you’re awake! This will never do.”
The boy’s attitude of defence, of keeping his father away from him, collapsed suddenly. He threw out his arms and caught his father round the shoulders.
“I’m an awful fool,” he said. “I was frightened, and I can’t think why. Just as if you weren’t protection enough against anything. Oh, Father, you’re a brick: I do love you.”
Colin drew the boy down on the edge of the bed, and sat close to him.
“But what was the matter, my darling?” he said. “Tell me about it.”
“It wasn’t anything,” said Dennis. “I’m a bloody fool—sorry.—But, just for a second, it was nightmare again, and I thought somehow it wasn’t you standing there. It was like some awful conjuring-trick.... And I wanted you. And I’ve got you. I won’t be such an ass again.”
“Sure you’re all right?” said Colin. “We can’t have you getting panics, Dennis, and being an ass.”
Dennis laughed.
“You shan’t,” he said. “It’s all gone. I say, I’m keeping you up. I must undress and go to bed, or you’ll never get there.”
Dennis got up, and stood there between his father’s knees, erect and tranquil again. He peeled off his hose and vest, and put on his pyjamas. Just then his eye fell on the great sapphire that lay on the floor.
“Why, you’ve dropped the sapphire, Father,” he said.
“So I see. Never mind that. I’ll pick it up. Now into bed with you.”
“How can I when you’re sitting there? No, don’t get up. I’ll crawl in.”
Dennis inserted one leg between his pillow and where Colin sat and drew himself into bed, curling himself against his father.
“There, that’s all snug,” he said.
“Good night, then,” said Colin.
Dennis raised himself in bed, and kissed him.
“It’s been a lovely evening,” he said. “And it’ll be just as lovely to-morrow with you and mother and me. I wish I wasn’t going back to Eton on Thursday.”
Colin, with the stone in his hand, went out and down the few steps of the corridor to the door of his room. Once again, and this time with a more direct and personal defeat, Dennis had routed him. Before, he had directed the force that governed and protected him on the boy as he slept, and who could tell in what fury of lambent evil it had begun to encompass him? But now, he himself, whom above all Dennis loved and trusted, had approached him with the same initiation, and yet all his love and trust had not given Dennis confidence: the spiritual semaphore of his instinct had hung out the red light of danger. The boy had recoiled from what he brought with a shrinking that was not reassured by the fact that it was his father who brought it. He had detected the nature of it, and all his affection would not suffer him to take it, even