IT was not until the first of the autumn shooting parties at Stanier was nearly due that Colin came back from his island, and from then till early in December a succession of guests passed through. Sometimes he went up to town with the party that was leaving, returning a few days afterwards with the new relay, and then again he was busy with his duties as host. Sometimes he stopped here in the emptied house, but even then Violet was never once alone with him for any private talk. He pointedly avoided all chance of this, and on the only occasion when she had attempted to break this ring of his seclusion from her, he had flamed into devilish anger.
“Oh, for God’s sake clear out!” he said, “if you’ve come for a heart-to-heart talk. You’ll know fast enough if I’ve got anything to say to you.”
“But I want to talk to you,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since you left here in August.”
He gave her one furious glance.
“You’d better go,” he said.
Dennis, she knew, wrote to him, for sometimes she would see that laborious and legible script on one of his letters, so different from the cursive scrawl which he gave her. Colin certainly read these, but he never wrote to the boy, and one day there came to Violet, at the end of one of Dennis’s letters, a postscript without comment. “Father has told me not to write to him any more.” There was no reply to be made to that: Dennis had stated it without comment, and without comment it had better remain, for they understood each other on the subject which it concerned. And yet, for some reason which she could not justify and could scarcely even define, Violet felt that, underneath the harshness of that injunction, there lay not so much the desire to wound as the deliberate intention of so doing. Colin had sat down and thought of that: it had not sprung from the open garden of his mind, but had been reared with deliberate care. It had not been derived from instinct, but from craft; that waspish little prohibition was no spontaneous product. She might even regard it as a missile discharged not in offence but in defence.... And then he never spoke of Dennis: not once did the boy’s name pass his lips. To her who knew him so well, and had so often shuddered at what he was, this carried the same interpretation. He wanted no suggestion or reminder of Dennis to come near him, not even to her did he mention him, though it was just here that she was most vulnerable to the taunts and gibes that wounded. It was not like him to spare the most sensitive spot for fear of hurting her; it was much more probable that, somehow or other, he was sensitive there himself, and forbore from a contact at which he would have himself winced.
They were alone for a few minutes together, one evening early in December. Old Lady Yardley’s whist, at which her nurse had made the fourth, was just over. These sepulchral games were now, in the dimness that was falling ever duskier over her mind, no more than the mere approximate symbol of a game; she held her cards and played them quite fortuitously, and smiled as she gathered the random tricks. But after a few hands of this phantom game had been dealt and disposed of, she was quite content when told that her two rubbers were over, and that she had won them both, though she would whimper in some vague distress if she thought she was not going to get her whist. Even Colin had become now to her a shadow among shadows; just occasionally some faint ray from her mind illuminated him, but for the most part he was but a piece of that grey background, ever receding, of the visible world. To-night, however, some thought of him quickened her, just as she was being wheeled out of the room, though all evening she had seemed unconscious of his presence, for she turned in her chair and said, “My Colin is coming back from Eton before long, and it will be well with Stanier again.”
Colin had got up and was half way along the gallery on his passage to his own room, leaving Violet there. But at this he came back, and stood in front of the fire.
“When does ‘her Colin’—I suppose she means that brat of yours and mine—come home?” he asked.
Violet gave him the date, some five days before Christmas.
“I suppose you’ve made a calendar, as one used to do at school,” he sneered, “and tear the days off as they pass.”
“Oh, no: I can remember without that,” said she. “There are eight days more.”
“And what happens at Christmas?” he asked. “The usual intoxicating family gathering?”
“Aunt Hester’s coming,” said Violet, “and my mother.”
“Very exhilarating,” observed Colin.
“Then why don’t you go to some friend for Christmas, if you feel like that?” said she. “There’s no reason why you should be here, with a handful of women.”
“There is, if you’ll excuse my contradicting you,” he said. “I must make Dennis’s Christmas happy and joyful. And after all I have a certain right to be at Stanier if I like. Or have you planned to give Dennis a taste of what it will be like to be master here, when I’m out of the way, just as my father gave you and me a taste of it one year, after your discarded Raymond was out of the way? How well I remember that somehow! Raymond was still at Cambridge, and my father made you and me hostess and host at a big party, before Raymond came down. Perhaps you’ve counted on my absence at Christmas, knowing how exhilarating I find the company of my aunts, and are asking a large party with Dennis to play host. Sure you haven’t?”
The question was too preposterous to need an answer, and he continued:
“I shall be here for Christmas with your permission,” he said, “just to give Dennis a treat. You may have him alone a bit first and—and tonic him up for so much pleasure. He kept writing to me when I was in Capri, saying he wished I was here, and that he was sorry I should not be back before he went to Eton. There was a sarcastic touch about that which made me laugh.”
Violet shook her head.
“No, you’re wrong there,” she said. “There was nothing sarcastic about it.”
He looked at her with a sort of malignant pity.
“You make me feel sick sometimes,” he said, “with that sort of remark. I suppose Dennis thought it a positive joy to be thrashed by me.”
“You thrashed him?” said she.
“Do you really expect me to believe he hasn’t told you that?” sneered Colin, “and that you haven’t wept over me for it?”
“It doesn’t matter to me whether you believe it or not,” said she. “Dennis never said a word about it. What had he done?”
Colin smiled. “Nothing very particular——”
“And so you thrashed him! That was brutal of you.”
“Thank you for that kind word,” said he. “But I wish you wouldn’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence. I didn’t thrash him for what he did, but for what he was.”
It was just on occasions like these, when Colin, as now, was in his most fiendish mood, that she felt this sudden pang of compassion for him.
“Oh, my poor Colin!” she said. “That’s what is the matter with you. It isn’t what you do; it’s what you are.”
“The noble art of tu quoque,” remarked Colin. “But it’s a rather meaningless art. Don’t my actions express me pretty well? I fancied I shewed myself fairly frankly to Dennis in the summer.”
“No, you only shewed him what you’re trying to be,” said Violet.
“You shall explain that in a minute,” he said. “I was saying that I gave a sincere exposition of myself. I hate Dennis, you see: I hate the fact of his existence. Stanier will be his when I’ve gone to hell; probably the knowledge of that will be what constitutes hell for me, and I allow it will be damnable. But until then I can make it pretty damnable for him.”
“But there’s more than that,” he said. “I hate love and, if you’re right—thanks for the hint—Dennis loves me. I’m going to kill that, not only because I abominate it, but because it will help to wither Dennis’s soul. I want to make him like me: I should delight in him then. I might even be pleased to know that Stanier would be his. Is that all clear? If so, you might explain what you meant when you said I only shewed him what I’m trying to be.”
She looked at him as she might have looked at some sick child.
“It’s very simple,” she said. “You’re trying to hate Dennis, and you’re trying to make him hate you. You’re acting as if you hated him. But you’re not succeeding.”
She felt that she had never known him till then, so nakedly his soul leaped into his eyes. She had no physical fear of him, it did not seem to matter if he struck her or if he killed her, but at that moment she looked into the nethermost pit, and her spirit cried out for the horror of it. That reacted on her physically, she knew she turned as white as paper, and that her heart fluttered in her throat like a bird ready to take wing, but all that was a secondary effect. She knew that she had spoken truly and she knew also that he recognized that, for otherwise he would not have flamed into that icy fire of anger.
He took a step towards her, and she saw him clench his fists, so that the knuckles shewed white on his brown hands.
“Stand up,” he said. “Are you mad that you speak to me like that?”
With a violent effort she controlled the shaking of her knees, and stood in front of him with her hands hanging defencelessly by her side.
“No, Colin, I’m not mad at all,” she said.
He drew back his arm as if to strike her.
“I’ll give you one chance,” he said. “Are you sorry?”
“No. If you’re going to knock me down, do so. I shan’t tell Dennis.”
She looked him perfectly straight in the face, waiting for the blow. And then suddenly she perceived that her defencelessness had beaten him.
“You’d better go,” he said. “You haven’t made things easier for Dennis, I may tell you.”
Instantly all her courage which had sufficed for herself surrendered.
“Colin, it’s nothing to do with him,” she said. “Do what you like to me, but don’t strike me through him.”
“I think that will hurt you most,” he said.
There was no use in saying anything further, and she moved towards the door.
“I am going back to London to-morrow,” he said.
Violet heard nothing more from him during the days which intervened before Dennis’s arrival. As he knew the date of that, she expected him to come back that day, but there was still no sign from him, and she and the boy had to themselves these few days, before her mother and Aunt Hester came. Out of doors there was windless and sunny wintry weather: every night there was a frost, and the bare trees were decked with the whiteness of it, which lay thick over the lawns and grassy slopes till the sun resolved it. Below on the marsh there was spread a mantle of dense mist through which the rays could not penetrate, and when, on the third day, a breeze from the east folded it up, the whole plain from edge to edge was dazzling with the glistening fall of the hoar frost. On the lake, the lids of ice shooting out from the shallow water had already roofed the whole surface, with a promise of skating imminent, but this wind, with a veiled sun, though chillier by sensation than the briskness of the still, clear frost, melted the frozen floor, and brought up flocks of grey clouds, and that evening the snowfall began. For two days and nights, beneath a bitter wind, it fell without intermission, lying in thick drifts in hollow places, and giving the yew-hedge an unbroken coat of white: then, as the wind dropped, and the snow ceased, the sky cleared again, and a great frost, black and of exceeding sharpness, set in. Once more, and this time very swiftly, the chilled waters of the lake were congealed and the surface was dark like steel, and transparent as the water over which it lay. Two days before Christmas it already bore at the shallow end, and Dennis frenziedly began hunting for skates.
“There must be some, Mother,” he said, “if one only looks in the right place. You find them with broken golf-clubs and old croquet-mallets....” and he ran off to explore suitable regions.
There had been no further talk between them about his relations with his father. Every morning he asked if there was any news of his coming, but there had been none. Violet had suggested his getting some Eton friend to stay with him, and then only distantly, Dennis had answered with, it seemed to her, a recollection of last holidays. “Oh, I think I won’t, thanks,” he had said. “Father may come any day, mayn’t he?”.... Apart from that he had said nothing whatever, and to Violet every day of Colin’s absence was so much remission. Old Lady Yardley seemed to accept the boy as being Colin back from school again.... And all these days seemed to Violet like hours of calm, lit with a pale cold sunshine, which preceded some inconjecturable tempest.
Aunt Hester and her mother arrived that afternoon, and Aunt Hester instantly had her snow-boots unpacked, and went for a walk, while the light still lingered.
“I hate seeing the windows shuttered and the lamps lit, my dear,” she said. “It makes me feel that I am being put in a box, and I’m too near my latter end to waste my time now over boxes. But if you get a bit of a walk while they’re shutting up, the box seems pleasant enough when you get back to it. And I’ll be ready for my tea, too.”
Such Esquimaux practices, of course, made no appeal to Violet’s mother. She brought down from her room her Patience cards, and an altar-frontal which she was embroidering for Winchester Cathedral, and hoped to have ready by Easter. Of the two, for immediate employment, she settled on the altar-frontal, as she had a vague idea that she and Violet must have a great deal to say to each other, and it was impossible to talk while you were playing Patience, or, rather, it was impossible to play Patience if you talked. She had grown a shade greyer, a shade more ladylike, a shade more inaccessible. But she always did everything slowly.
“Dennis will be quite a big boy,” she observed. “I have not seen him since last year at this time.”
“Yes, he’s grown a great deal,” said Violet.... Could it be possible that Colin was not coming for Christmas?
“And Colin is well?” asked Mrs. Stanier.
“I hope so. He has been away for the last fortnight, and the wretch has never even said when he will be coming back.”
“It is a pity that he should miss Dennis’s holidays,” said Mrs. Stanier.
Violet had no sympathetic contribution to give to this sentiment, and her mother moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. They got dry and a little cracked in this very cold weather.
“I have brought a wreath for your father’s grave,” she said. “I made it entirely from flowers in my greenhouse. My gardener is very clever at getting me plenty of flowers throughout the winter.”
Violet rummaged her mind for some ardent rejoinder.
“That is always nice,” she said. “Flowers are a guarantee that spring will come. But the poor things will wither very quickly when you put them out in this icy air.”
“Yes, dear. But I should feel very remiss and hard if I did not always put a wreath on your father’s grave whenever I come to Stanier. I daresay it will not be for many more years that I shall do so.”
Violet laughed.
“Dear Mother, what nonsense,” she said. “Why, there’s my grandmother who was married before you were born: she plays her whist still, and walks in to dinner.”
“Her mind I suppose is now completely gone?” said Mrs. Stanier. “She did not recognize me at all last time I was here. And occasionally she mentioned your father as if he was with me still.”
The arrival of tea interrupted this lugubrious interchange of thought, followed by Dennis, triumphantly clashing a pair of skates, which were screwed on to boots, the leather of which was perished and wrinkled like withered funguses.
“They’re old enough,” he said, “but they’re all right. I’m going to put them on to my boots, so that they’ll be ready in the morning. I found them in a cupboard upstairs.”
Instantly it occurred to Violet whose those skates had been. For more than a dozen years now there had been no skating at Stanier, probably the last person who had skated on the lake was Raymond.... Almost certainly the skates were his, for they were workmanlike blades, screwed on to the boots, whereas the rest of them used to shoe themselves with strange antiquated wooden concerns, or skates with keys and catches which invariably came undone. But Raymond had spent a winter’s vacation once at Davos, and Violet remembered his laughing at her, when one of her skates unclasped itself and slithered across the ice.... Somehow, with fantastic disquiet, she hated the idea of Dennis using Raymond’s skates.
“Aren’t they too big for you?” she asked.
“Lord, yes,” said Dennis, “but they’re better than nothing. Hefty skates, too. I wonder whose they were?”
Mrs. Stanier put a small saccharine lozenge into her tea.
“The lake has not borne for many years,” she said. “I think we used to have harder winters once than we have now. The last year it bore ... ah, dear me, yes.”
The return of Aunt Hester from her tramp in the snow was a welcome advent. She professed herself vastly refreshed, and had a very pretty colour in her checks.
“Nothing like a frosty air for giving you an appetite,” she said, “and they say that the microbes all get killed in it, though for my part I never believed much in microbes. Everything’s microbes nowadays: if you’ve got a pain in your stomach from eating what you shouldn’t it’s a microbe, if you covet your neighbour’s wife they’ll make it out to be a microbe soon. Give me a good strong cup of tea, Violet dear: I hope it’s been standing. What’s that you’re working at, Margaret? A shawl for cold evenings?”
Mrs. Stanier drew in her breath with a sound of shocked sipping.
“No, Hester, it’s an altar-cloth for Winchester Cathedral,” she said.
“Well, I couldn’t see the pattern, and it looked to me like a shawl. And when’s that wretch Colin coming back? I thought I should find him here.”
“I’ve not heard a word from him,” said Violet. “I’ve been expecting him for some days.”
“Well, I shall have to flirt with Dennis till he comes,” said Aunt Hester.
“Rather,” said Dennis. “There’s the telephone ringing, Mother. Shall I go and see what it is?”
Dennis ran into the hall, leaving the skates which he was transferring to his own boots on the floor.
“Yes, who is it?” he asked.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Hullo, is that Dennis?” asked his father’s voice.
“Yes, Father.”
“Well, tell them to send down to the station to meet the 7.30 train. I’m coming by it.”
“Oh, ripping,” said Dennis. “I’ll tell them.”
Colin rang off again without another word.
Colin’s train was very late: he did not get up to the house till they were half way through dinner, and came in as he was. He was clearly in the best of spirits.
“Don’t get up, anybody,” he said. “Violet darling, how goes it? And Aunt Hester and Aunt Margaret. And Granny. An awful journey; they always cut off the heating apparatus when it’s more than usually cold.”
Dennis waited for a greeting, but there was none for him: Colin ignored him altogether, as if he had not been present; to all the others, no doubt in intentional contrast, he was extraordinarily cordial. But as he spoke now to one and now to another, with affection for Violet, with extravagant compliments for Aunt Hester, and sympathetic enquiries about the Girls’ Friendly Society for Aunt Margaret, who was a pillar of that admirable institution, Violet saw his eyes, as they flitted by Dennis, pause on the boy’s face from time to time with a look that peeped out like a lizard from a crevice and whisked in again. And then for the first time he spoke to him.
“Any tipsy school-friends coming this Christmas, Dennis?” he said. “My word, that was a beauty you treated us to in the summer.”
Dennis raised his eyes to his father’s, and even as they met, Violet saw that look pop out again, instantly sheathing itself in the iron of Colin’s voice.
“No, Father, I haven’t asked anybody these holidays,” he said quietly.
Colin paid no more attention to him, till the women got up to leave the table. Then he watched him to see what Dennis would do.
Dennis stood by the door he had opened, not knowing whether his father expected him to go with the others or stay. But his hesitation was enough.
“Perhaps you’d kindly shut that door,” he said. “You can leave yourself on whichever side of it you like.”
Dennis shut it, and came back to the table.
“Looking out for a drink, I suppose?” said Colin, rising. “Ring the bell when you’ve finished, I’m going into the other room.”
Dennis went to the door again to open it for his father and followed him.
Colin sat up late that night, thinking of Dennis and of little else. He thought of him, as he always did now, as his survivor and supplanter, who, in all probability, would rule at Stanier for twenty years after he was dead, unless he himself lingered on like his own grandmother till all the fires of life had grown cold. Then possibly he might out-live his son, and possibly there might be enough heat in his grey embers to chuckle at that, for he would sooner be the last of his race than be succeeded by Dennis. Who would come after him, he wondered, in that case. He knew there was a small homestead in the marsh, just outside his property, where there lived a farmer called Stanier, with a brood of scarecrow children. Perhaps they would establish their claim, and there would be a romantic sequel to these centuries of direct line and ever-increasing prosperity. But he would sooner have them reigning here than Dennis.
Of course there was another chance: the leaven of evil might yet work in the boy—for he was young still—and turn sour that sweet milk of love with which he dripped. But he meant to make no more experiments with regard to that. Dennis must come to it because he loved evil: he would only struggle against it and abhor it if he was forced to it. Besides, Colin knew he could not do it: he could bully and ill-treat him, striving to kill love in him, but the ultimate direct initiative was beyond him. He could wish him dead, he could wish him corrupted, but he could not take on himself the actual sacrifice. It was his own fault, he had allowed Dennis to enter his heart, where no-one else had ever been, and now, with all the vigour of his evil soul, it was as much as he could do to stop his advance. But never would he allow that love was stronger than he: he would fight it till it lay bleeding and helpless at his feet.
It had grown cold in his room: he fancied there was a draught from the door which led into the corridor to the now disused chapel. But, as he tried the door and found it shut, the notion came to him to visit the chapel where he had not been since last Easter, and he fetched the key and turned up the lights. It would be Christmas Eve to-morrow, he remembered; last year they had held a midnight mass there, and the sacring bell had rung simultaneously with the peal from the church near by. It was bitter to-night in the chapel, and he shivered as he stood there. In the air there still hung the faint stale odour of incense, and faint, too, and hardly to be recalled, was the thrill of satisfied evil with which once he had knelt there. There was the step off which Vincenzo had rolled when the slavering ecstasy in his face was struck from it by that mortal terror. How horrible to think that perhaps he had seen God at that moment! Poor Vincenzo!
Colin had a sneering smile at the thought of that. God did not come to you unless you permitted it, for otherwise there was no such thing as free-will. Vincenzo must have had a weak spot somewhere: he must have loved somebody for his own sake, and that perhaps gave God a permit. He must be careful then....
He went back into the silent house, and upstairs. He saw that Dennis’s door was ajar, and that there was a light within.
Morning brought no such deplorable disaster as a thaw, and soon after breakfast Dennis came into the gallery with his skates in his hand. Colin was by the fire, looking at the paper, and glanced up at him.
“Skating?” he said.
“Yes, the lake bears,” said Dennis.
Colin looked at the rusty skates on the boots he was carrying.
“Where did you get those?” he asked.
“I found them in a cupboard,” said Dennis. “They were on a pair of very old boots, so I took them off and put them on mine.”
It flashed through Colin’s mind that they were Raymond’s. He had meant to stop Dennis skating just for the mere sake of spoiling his enjoyment: now he rather liked the idea of his doing so.
“Well, don’t go out through here,” he said, “and let in the cold air. Go round by the hall. Perhaps I’ll come presently.”
Colin put the paper down. On just such a morning as this, clear and sunny after a night’s hard frost, had Raymond gone down alone to the lake, and he himself had strolled after him, in time to see the white face already blue-lipped rise out of a hole in the broken ice, where the lake lay deepest, and sink again before his eyes, as he leaned on the parapet by the sluice and asked him if it was not rather cold. The ice was always treacherous near where the stream came out of the lake.... Some inward certainty took possession of him. Preposterous though such a coincidence would be, he found himself believing that Dennis was now gaily tramping over the hard frozen snow to his death, and that he would be there to see it. Out of the window he saw the boy running down the white slopes beyond the yew-hedge, with his great coat on that reached nearly to his heels, and his breath smoking in the bitter air.... Three minutes later he was walking down over those same slopes.
Dennis had gone into the bathing-shed to put on his skates; presently when he got warm he would divest himself of his great-coat, but it was too cold for that yet: besides it would make a fall the softer. He tried the edge of the lake, and found it firm as a floor beneath him, and soon he extended the field of his manœuvres.
Colin heard the ring of his skates as he came down to the lake; he did not go to the bathing-shed, but kept straight on along the retaining bank, hidden from Dennis’s view by the rhododendrons. He felt it was all going to happen as he expected: the chain of coincidence was already strong, for was not Dennis alone on the virgin ice, just as Raymond had been, and was he not (marvellous that!) wearing the skates which Raymond had worn? There would be no more struggles to hate the boy, no more looking on him as his survivor and supplanter. Things did not go well with those who crossed Colin, and who shuddered with nightmare at the approach of his protector.
There came a sudden crack, sharp as a rifle-shot, from the lake, and he heard a splash. The open gap in the rhododendron bushes, where the sluice-gate stood, was now only a few yards in front of him, and he ran there. Ten or twelve yards from the bank, where the water was deepest, there was a jagged hole in the ice, and Dennis’s cap floated on the bubbling water. Next moment he rose: only just his face thrown back appeared above the water, for his coat heavily weighted him. His eyes were staring with fright, his mouth already blue with cold. He saw Colin.
“Father!” he called.
And now in a moment Colin would be rid of his supplanter. It had happened without plan or effort of his, and he had only got to stop still for a few seconds and fill his mind with images of hate. He hated Dennis, and smiled to himself as he repeated that, while he met the boy’s eyes.
Dennis still looked at him: he had clutched a rim of the broken ice in one hand, but it broke as he tried to raise himself, and, still struggling, his head sank a little lower in the water that now covered his chin and mouth. And then with a flood that bore all opposition way, the knowledge burst on Colin that he loved him, and already perhaps it was too late.... He knew well, too, that it was risking his own life to jump into that deep water, paralyzingly cold, and swim out to him, and he knew that life was sweet, and he believed that death would be to him the open door through which he must go into the outer darkness of damnation. But swiftly he tore off his coat, for his arms would have to be strong for the two of them.
“Hold on, old boy,” he shouted. “We’ll have you out in a jiffy. Don’t be frightened.”
And those were sweet words to Dennis, and sweeter yet to him who spoke them.
Colin vaulted over the parapet of the sluice breaking another hole in the ice, and before he had come to the surface was striking out for the boy. He did not know whether the water was hot or cold; all that he was conscious of was the stark necessity of reaching Dennis. Before he got to him the boy’s head had disappeared, and plunging downwards he dived after him. There he was, still struggling but slowly sinking, and Colin caught hold first of his hair, then got an arm round him, and looking upwards saw the glint of the sun on the open water. Furiously kicking downwards he rose to the surface, pulling Dennis with him. But the boy’s thick coat was a terrible drag and got heavier every moment as the water soaked into it, and, few yards as they had to go, he thought for a moment that they would never reach the shore.
“Kick out for all you’re worth,” he panted. “We’ve got to get there. It’s just a few yards, Dennis.”
At last a rhododendron branch growing out over the water came within reach, and he caught hold of it. This brought him to the edge of the unbroken ice again, and, letting go of Dennis for a moment, he brought his elbow down full on to it, and broke