COLIN went back to his room after the invariable rubber of whist that evening, with the intention of studying this plan more minutely, but, though the others had gone upstairs, he was not surprised to hear his door open, and Violet asking if she could speak to him. Indeed, he almost expected that interruption, and he smiled to himself when she entered....
There had been a horrid little scene at the close of dinner, a dovecote-fluttering in the menagerie, arising from Colin’s having instructed Nino to dispense the wine, and to be lavish in his ministrations to Uncle Ronald’s glass. The wine in question was Dagonet 1880, to which he was incapable of putting up the smallest resistance, and Nino did his duty so thoroughly that Uncle Ronald had got on very quickly, and had told a story which might possibly have passed with a snigger in a smoking-room of broad-minded men. Even Aunt Hester, who was as broad-minded as most people, had said “Better hold your tongue, Ronald: you’re disgracing yourself,” while that perfect piece of Patience, Aunt Margaret, bridled and folded her napkin, and diligently perused the menu-card which she had so neatly written out, though at that period of dinner its information was obsolete.... And then, when the women had adjourned, Uncle Ronald, having been told that there was not much 1860 port left, had partaken so freely of what there was, that he had become wonderfully voluble about the old days when he and his father used to sit here together. Colin had taken Nino’s place as dispenser of wine, and so sedulous was he that Uncle Ronald presently lost the power of coherent speech altogether, and, when he tried to rise, leaned lamentably against the table, and was assisted upstairs by the butler and Nino, which again was quite in accordance with the tradition of the house. Colin had joined the ladies alone, and said that his uncle had gone to bed with a nasty cough, such a troublesome cough, which made him feel a little giddy, and clogged the free functioning of the vocal chords.
All this, of course, was directed against Violet, who must be taught that if Colin expressed a wish that she should undertake some little mission, like telling her father and mother that they must no longer consider Stanier their house, she must be a good wife and obey....
Colin was just unlocking the drawer where he kept the Memoirs when she entered, and he hailed her with a smile and a word of welcome.
“That you, Vi?” he said. “Have you come for a little talk? That is nice. Sit down.”
She looked at him in silence as he brought the book out, continuing to stand.
“I thought I told you to sit down,” he said.
“No, I’ll stand,” she said.
He glanced at her still smiling.
“You had better do what I tell you,” he said. “That’s right. How simple, isn’t it? Now what have you come about? It’s something tedious, I suppose. About your father, eh? Wasn’t he horrid at dinner? He made me blush for his dyed hair. Such a story! Awful for you and Aunt Margaret. Granny, too, at her age! And the servants.”
She looked at him again in silence, then dropped her eyes.
“I suppose it is your plan to make him tipsy every night,” she said, “until I tell him that he and my mother are not to come back here after their visit to Aix.”
Colin nodded at her with that sunny smile of his.
“Absolutely correct,” he said. “How well we understand each other, dear! And you’ve come here to tell me you’re going to be good, and do as you’re told. Is that it?”
“Yes. I can’t sit by and see my father as I saw him to-night. What do you want me to say to him?”
“Oh, just that. Say that you understand that he’ll be settling down in London for the autumn, or for ever and ever.... Just a little tact and pleasantness.”
“Colin, it’s awfully hard on him,” she said. “He and mother have practically lived here since their marriage.”
“Yes, darling: a nice long visit, as I said yesterday. He must put his name in the visitors’ book, Saturday, 1890, or whenever it was, till Monday, 1913. And though I don’t often criticize you, I must remind you that you shouldn’t always think of yourself.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked she.
“I’ll explain. You’ve got no real filial feeling for either your father or mother, and that pricks your conscience. So, to mollify that smart, you take their side and want them to have a comfortable home here. That doesn’t cost you anything, and it gives you an atoning feeling inside. It is your cheap manner of making amends to them.”
There was just that grain of truth in this which made it impossible for Violet to deny it completely. She had not consciously thought of that, but, when he pointed it out, she knew it was so. There were plenty of other reasons, kindliness, affection, compassion, which prompted her, but he with his amazing subtlety had put his finger on the smallest and meanest of them all.
“You are an adept at seeing the worst side of everybody,” she said.
“Would it be rude if I suggested that the reason for that is that the worst side of people is so much more to the front than their best?” asked Colin. “We all put our worst foot foremost.... And then think of Dennis, Vi. Would you like him to have among the early recollections of his boyhood the memory of his grandfather telling bawdy stories and reeling up to bed after dinner in a squall of hiccups? And then, last and least, there’s myself. Your father bores and disgusts me. I hinted to him that he was not perhaps such a fixture here as he seemed to imagine, and now, please, you’re going to repeat that timid conviction, so that he may see that on this, as on every point, we’re at one. Mind, the suggestion has got to come from yourself not from me: otherwise he will think that I have asked you to make it. Now we’ve spent too much time and speech already over a trivial matter. You think I’m a brute, but then you often do that. I’m used to that: getting almost callous about it.”
He held up the sheaf of typed pages which had occupied him all the morning.
“I’ve had a delicious day,” he said, “for I’ve been reading the Memoirs of old Colin. I had them type-written, and they’re entrancing. He realized himself so wonderfully. There was neither false shame nor conceit about him. He was neither proud nor the reverse of being such a devil. I thought of letting some learned Antiquarian Society publish them. Odd, isn’t it, how all the puritanical, pure-minded people, chiefly women, who shiver and are shocked at what they call a bad man, and won’t visit him or have him to dinner, and heave any sort of brick at him, greedily devour any indecent memoir, and simply roll in it, like dogs when they’ve found some putrescent muck.... You’d have thought that, if they shudder at wickedness, they wouldn’t care to read about it. But they say it’s the historical interest that makes them devour it, which isn’t true. It’s the insatiable fascination that wickedness has for prudes. However, the Memoirs are enchanting: they ring so absolutely true: you feel you are looking at the very man himself. I even found myself believing in the literal truth of the legend. Sit down and dip into them, darling; you won’t find a dull page anywhere. Meantime I’m puzzling out a curious plan of some projected addition to the house, which he never executed.”
“I won’t read them to-night,” she said. “It is rather late.”
“Very good. I won’t insist on that as you’ve been a good girl otherwise. But you must read them some day. I want to know if a certain thing strikes you as it struck me.”
“What is that?” she asked.
“Why, that old Colin was a sort of prophet. I felt all the time as if he was writing not about himself but about me. How types repeat themselves: there is another character he mentions which so closely resembles someone we both know. Old Colin’s father in fact, Ronald Stanier, whom he describes as a drunken old sot. Good night, darling. Not a kiss? I suppose I don’t deserve one. You’re punishing me for being such a brute.”
She paused at the door. There he stood, looking gaily and yet wistfully at her, with his mouth a little open, and the soft fire of his youth burning in his eyes, and she yearned for him. Surely it was not only his beauty that she adored, that physical perfection of him. There was somebody, surely, imprisoned there, who called to her through the bars of his nature and its love of evil and its hate of love. As often as she had tried to reach that prisoner it was as if the guardians of his soul, monstrous and terrifying, pushed her panic-stricken away. She hated and feared them, and their ruthless wickedness, but in spite of them she knew that she would never cease from trying to get past them, and rescuing him who lay there in iron bondage.
She turned back into the room, her eyes troubled and eager, full of love, full of fear. Some gust of inspiration came to her.
“Colin, you hate love,” she said, “and I can’t help giving it you. I pity you so, you know; all my heart pours itself out round you in pity. You’ve tried to kill my love, but you can’t. It’s so much stronger than either you or me——”
He whipped round on her.
“Good Lord, you must have misheard me,” he said. “I asked you for a kiss, not a sermon. But I don’t want either. Go to bed.”
The door closed behind her, and he stood there a moment, simmering with anger and contempt at her undesired homily, with its puerile message. He could have laughed at the idea of love being strong: love was the most helpless and defenceless of all the pieces on the savage chessboard. It was vulnerable at every point, you could wound it wherever you thrust at it. Any clumsy stroke penetrated and made it bleed. Or you could rope it down to the rack, and quite without effort pull the lever that wrenched and distorted it, and made it white with silent agony.... But how strange that just now Violet should give vent to gabble like this, when a moment before she had shrunk from him and his brutality in his dealings with her and her father! In her small way she was like the martyrs praising and blessing God, as their limbs writhed with anguish, that they were accounted worthy to suffer for His sake. She was like that comely smoothed-limbed S. Sebastian in the gallery, for which Nino might have been the model, who seraphically smiled while he was being made a pin-cushion for arrows. Certainly Colin had tried, as she said, to kill her love, and often he had wounded it, though none of those thrusts, it would seem, had proved mortal.... He shrugged his shoulders; there were plenty more weapons in his armoury. Above all, there was one which as yet was not ready for use, for its blade was still soft and unannealed. But he wondered if her love would survive the thrust when Dennis was a sword of wickedness in his hand.
He brought out again the sketch-plan that had puzzled him, and examined it through a magnifying glass. Certainly the word which he had conjectured to be ‘Solarium’ did not stand this closer scrutiny, and now when he looked again at the plan itself, this oblong room, thus conjecturally labelled, could not be a solarium, for on the south, where you would expect it to be open, or to present a row of big windows to admit the sun, there were but two very narrow apertures marked there. At the east end, however, there was indicated a very big window, which took up nearly the whole length of the wall.
Colin turned his attention to the written word again. ‘Solarium’ it certainly was not, for the second letter was a ‘c’ surely, not an ‘o,’ and there was a faint cross-stroke over the ‘l’ which made a ‘t’ of it, and another letter, quite illegible, preceded the final ‘arium.’ “S,c,t,” thought Colin ... and suddenly a new solution dawned on him. It must be ‘S’ctuarium,’ abbreviated from ‘sanctuarium,’ a chapel, a shrine. As he scrutinized it, he was more than ever certain that he had hit on the true decipherment, but this only complicated the puzzle instead of solving it. For how was it possible to account for the author of these Memoirs planning to build a sanctuary? Sanctuary, however, it certainly was, and this identification explained the narrow lancets on the south wall, and the big east window.
He considered the history of his ancestor’s last year on earth, how, as the time approached for his death, he turned to God, not from love of Him but from fear of hell’s damnation. He broke off the chronicle of his iniquities, he built almshouses and indulged in fastings and charities with a view to avert the destiny that he had chosen and rejoiced in. That all fell in with the notion of his building a chapel, which communicated with his own room in the house, so that he could go there by day or night, for cowardly prayer and search for forgiveness of his trespasses. Then, too, on this assumption, the little dwelling-place that adjoined it could be explained: no doubt he intended that a priest should reside there, as domestic physician of his soul.
For the moment this hypothesis seemed to account for the whole project, and Colin unwillingly accepted it. It was disappointing: it was just another instance of that collapse and cowardice which came over his ancestor, and made his last year on earth such a pitiful surrender. And yet ... why did he not then put his plan into execution, if this was the design of it? For a whole year after the date recorded on this drawing, he practised his belated pieties, and yet never a sod was cut nor a brick laid in the erection of this chapel. Surely he would have hastened on the building of it with the same speed and enthusiasm with which he had built the house for his own glory. Clearly, if this solution was correct, and he had intended to build a chapel here with lodging for a priest, he abandoned it. But why, if his soul was set on pieties and repentance?
Colin got up from the chair in which he had been sitting for the last half-hour since Violet had left him, frowning and puzzling over this riddle. He felt that there was a key, which would fit the facts, and that he was hovering round its discovery. It was close at hand, but some sluggish mist of his own mind obscured it. He paced up and down his room for a minute or two, then went to the window, open behind its tapping blind, which he drew half up. Only the faintest night-wind stirred, the sky was bare, and the full moon rode high in the south among the stars. Just in front the terrace lay grey, and the garden dark, but beyond the square black line of the yew-hedge the lake shone so bright in the moonlight that it seemed a sheet of pale flame, brimming and molten. To right and left rose the swelling uplands of the park, and all this spacious stateliness within and without was the creation of that ancestor of his who had planned a sanctuary. Colin felt no doubt that his spirit survived in some remorseful hell, and what more poignant hell could there be for it, now shorn of its pomp and prosperity, and naked in the immaterial world, than the splendour of its earthly habitation where it no longer had a place? Somehow his spirit seemed close and ready to communicate: could it not give to one who so rapturously claimed kinship and sympathy with it, some hint, some expression of itself that should awake in him the comprehension of its strange desire to build a sanctuary?…
Colin stood quite still, looking out on to the silent tranquillity, not cudgelling his brain with conjecture any more, but letting it lie open and quiet to the midnight, to see if, from outside or from its own subconscious activity, there did not emerge what he was seeking for. It was curious that a satisfactory solution of this point seemed of such immense importance, but, rightly or wrongly, he believed that it held some great significance.... And certainly there was a power abroad to-night, something that tingled and throbbed in his veins. It was hard to keep still under it, not to let his brain busy itself with ingenious surmise, but he had done that already to the utmost of his power, and now, with this stir of force round him, he must let himself stay passive and receptive....
Suddenly the faint stirring of the night-breeze grew stronger, it ruffled his hair, it blew the cracking, flapping blind out horizontal into the room, and the pages of the manuscript on his table whispered and shivered as if they were talking to themselves and giggling together. And then the mist that had obscured his mind was whisked away, and he knew he had the explanation for which he had been seeking. In a couple of steps he was back at his table, and, open in the manuscript he had been reading all day, there lay before his eyes the final words of it which he had read uncomprehendingly before, but now saw to contain the key he looked for.
“How I would rejoice,” he said aloud, “to build some shrine in honour of my Lord, where I would worship him who has wrought so great benefits upon me; some sanctuary where I might worthily adore him——”
There was no need to search further: all was clear. It was indeed a sanctuary he had planned, in honour not of God but of him who had given him all that his soul desired. Clear, too, at last, was the reason why he had never built it, for just then, when it was freshly planned, fear began to darken round him, and the shadows to stalk, and he turned from his Lord and Benefactor, and wrote no more in his praise, but prayed and fasted in impious piety.
One o’clock had already sounded, and Colin replaced the Memoirs in a drawer and turned the key on them. The gust from outside that seemed literally to have blown the mist from him, so that he saw sharp and distinct across the sundering centuries the purpose of this design and the sure reason for its abandonment, died into stillness again, but the night seemed charged and alive with consciousness. All day he had put himself to soak, so to speak, in the spirit that infused these Memoirs with so sympathetic a vitality: now, even when the book was finished, it was friendly round him, stimulating and quickening him, so that reinforced with its vigour the idea of the physical refreshment of sleep seemed ludicrous. To sleep was to abandon your consciousness for the sake of its recuperation: it was the expression of his consciousness that he needed.
He put his hand on the low window-sill, and vaulted out on to the terrace, where he had watched Dennis’s early essays in locomotion. In the stillness, past and present seemed melted into one: the centuries no longer represented the movement of time, they had not been borne away on its stream, but were static as if portrayed in a picture. It might have been on this very night that the original bargain was made, it might have been here and now that his ancestor was devising the sanctuary on the little plateau that lay among the oaks which he had planted. In the moonlight Colin could almost visualize the windowed corridor that had been planned to run from the corner of the room which he had just quitted, till it joined among the trees the west wall of the sanctuary. What a symbol would that shrine have been of old Colin’s life, what a jubilee of the dedication of himself! There without doubt he intended to celebrate those Satanic rites, that worship of evil for evil’s sake in which they, to whom the sacred service of love was a thing abhorred and derided, renewed their allegiance to the enemy of God, and in the blasphemy of the Black Mass drew near to their Lord and Benefactor, who strengthened and refreshed their souls. The shallow, the indifferent, who just made as pleasant a pilgrimage as possible out of life, or who, from vague instincts, tried to be good, or merely fell into evil because they were weak or self-indulgent, could have no part in that: it would be savourless as bran to any who had no living belief both in God and in Satan; for blasphemy signified nothing to souls who did not hate the sublime majesty of love. They who took part in its dark mysteries were they who believed in God, and who, by their deliberate choice, rejected and hated and defied Him. Old Colin would have been a fit worshipper there, had not that senile panic, hoisting the white flag of his surrender, overtaken him before his bond was due. It was a craven, pitiful end: it was not love of his life-long Enemy that drove him to that camp, but fear of him who had so magnificently befriended him.
Colin had wandered in the moonlight past the end of the terrace, and now stood on the plateau, where, according to the plan, the sanctuary was to have been built. Round him rose the tranced forest-trees, the grass, drenched with dew, glimmered like a spread sheet of moonstone. Then, suddenly springing up again, the wind warm and caressing made the branches of the oaks whisper and sway, and through him ran a great exaltation. He raised his hands, spreading his arms out wide.
“O Lord and Benefactor,” he said. “How will I rejoice to build a shrine in honour of thee....”
Colin woke from his dreamless sleep next morning, to find Nino’s hand on his bare shoulder, gently stirring him. His clothes were in a heap on the floor by his bedside, for when he came in he had but stripped himself and wrapped a sheet round him in which, cocoon-like, he had lain unstirring. He was conscious of a strong glow of happiness as he was thus recalled, and his lazy strength came soaking into him.
“Oh, Nino, what a nuisance you are,” he said. “You spend your beastly life in waking me.”
“Will you sleep again, then?” asked Nino.
“No, the mischief is done now. What’s the morning like? What’s the news?”
“A telephone message from Mrs. Hunt,” said Nino. “She would know if she may come down to-day for Sunday.”
Colin grinned. The moment Nino had said “telephone message” he had guessed from whom it came.
“Well then, she mayn’t,” he said. “Damned cheek! It would never do, would it, Nino?”
“She will be very happy, she said, if she may come,” observed Nino.
Colin raised himself a little, and drew his hand down his arm. The fact that he had decided that Pamela Hunt should not come, made him see causes for re-consideration.
“Just rub my arm,” he said, “I’ve been sleeping on it, and it isn’t awake. Of course, if it would make her happy, that’s a different thing. We ought always to make people happy, Nino, except when we’re making them miserable. Tell her she can come then. What’s the morning like?”
“Splendore,” said Nino.
“I shall bathe. I wish you’d carry me straight down to the lake and drop me into it.”
“Sicuro,” said Nino.
Colin looked at him, yawning.
“Get on then,” he said, wondering what he would do.
Nino bent down, and putting one arm below his neck, and the other under his knees, lifted him up.
“Right about turn,” said Colin. “March.”
Nino carried him as far as the door, and was evidently perfectly ready to bear him, with the sheet folded round him, down to the lake. He held him as easily as a child, and his face was all wreathed with merriment.
“I am your nurse,” he said. “You are my bambino, signor.”
Colin laughed.
“Oh, but this won’t do,” he said. “Put me down, Nino. People would think it so odd. There are enough oddities in the house without our adding to them. And go and telephone. Don’t keep a lady waiting.”
“But I was busy attending to my signor,” said Nino.
“I know. You’re a good boy. You shall come off to Capri with me before long. Follow me down when you’ve telephoned. I know there’s something I want to ask you about, and I shall remember it when the water has awakened me.”
As Colin ran downstairs, he was in two minds again as to whether he should allow Pamela Hunt to be happy or not. Their friendship, quite a recent one, had been founded on laughter and good looks and high spirits, but, since then, he had become aware that she was searching for more from him than that, was digging below those flimsy foundations of liking and laughter for something more profound. He did not really care about her in the least, but she was eminently ornamental, and he liked the bland unscrupulousness with which she pursued her way. Her suggestion, indeed, that she should come down to Stanier for the Sunday, where she knew he was in retreat in the bosom of his family, had a daring innocence about it which was rather attractive. Their friendship had already been a matter of extensive public comment in London, and it showed a charming disregard of the usual conventions that she should propose to share his domestic tranquillity. It was no secret from him that she was in love with him, and he was guilty of no fatuous gratification about that. In fact it seemed to him a pity, for he had nothing whatever for her, and beyond doubt she was getting serious and eager. However, she had proposed herself, and he had permitted it, and, after all, there might be some amusement out of it, some chilling disappointment for her, some ludicrous dénouement derived from his own indifference or, possibly, exasperation if she became tedious. He had not given her the smallest encouragement but that of laughter and chatter, and, if she chose to attempt to hunt him down, any consequences were of her own seeking. Then, too, how would Violet take it, in case some kind friend had whispered warnings to her? It might be an amusing Sunday.
He stepped out on to the terrace, already grilling in the sunshine, but it looked less real now than a few hours ago under the moon. The stage then had been alive with dark forces brewing drama, whereas now, in this sane freshness of day, it was mere paint and pasteboard, like that same stage seen next morning, when the actors had left it, and no drama vivified the splendid setting. But as he walked along the terrace to the yew-hedge it gained reality again. Just there would be the windowed corridor, and there close at hand was the plateau among the oaks. Yes, it was growing real again.
And at that he remembered what he had wanted to ask Nino. A couple of years ago when he was staying for the night with the very lively little English Consul at Naples, who had shewn him such curious Neapolitan diversions, he remembered his having said something about a cabaret, in a room behind which were held certain Satanic rites.... Possibly Nino might know, Nino had much gay native knowledge of an unexpected kind, and had many local stories to tell of the doings of the monstrous Emperor Tiberius, who took such wonderful holidays from the cares of State in Capri. These Satanic rites were as old as religion itself: in fact they were the earliest form in which religion, the belief in the supernatural, appeared, for originally the supernatural was an evil power to be propitiated. It was later that mankind had conceived of it as beneficent and loving....
Colin was out of the water when Nino came down.
“Well, have you made her happy?” he asked. “What an age you’ve been, Nino!”
Nino’s mouth twitched, and broke into a smile.
“Sis-signor,” he said. “She is very happy.”
“And what are you grinning at?” asked Colin.
“She thought it was you at the telephone,” he said. “She thought I had gone to fetch you.”
“And what did she say?” asked Colin.
Nino schooled his mouth into gravity.
“She said—scusi—but she said ‘Colin, darling, how perfectly sweet of you!’ So I said ‘Signora,’ and I think she understood for she—she rang away.”
“Rang off,” said Colin, “you’re thinking of ‘ran away.’”
“She is running away here,” said Nino.
Colin lay back on the grass.
“Why do men get in such a fuss about women?” he asked.
“Chi sa? There are plenty for all,” said Nino.
“Yes. Tell me more tales such as you told me at Capri about Tiberio.”
“Why does the signor love to hear of Tiberio? He was a fat old man.”
“Yes, but full of ideas. He liked wickedness: the sort of man who would worship the devil.”
“Sicuro!”
“Italy’s a very wicked country,” said Colin. “I believe they worship the devil still in Naples.”
Nino crossed himself.
“So it is said.”
“Why do you do that?” asked Colin. “I don’t believe you really think it protects you. It’s only a habit. Tell me about the worship of the devil in Naples.”
“I know little,” said Nino, “and though others find it diverting, I would not find diversion in it. Why do they want to behave like street boys, and make faces at holy things? And it is not prudent. May not lightning strike them, or madness come on them? There are many things which the priests say offend Il Padre, which are diverting. But this is not one of them.”
Colin gathered up his knees in his arms, his skin still shining with his bathe. What nonsense, as he often thought, were the English ideas of ‘class.’ Here was he, talking to his own valet on terms of perfect equality, and Nino accepting that as perfectly natural, though had Colin next moment said “Get me my shoes,” Nino would have jumped to his feet, his most obedient and respectful servant. These Southerners had fine breeding in their bones, whereas so many Englishmen of his own class had only got it on the skin. His brother Raymond, for instance, what a howling cad compared to Nino! Or Uncle Ronald last night, telling a smoking-room story, so that one really sickened at his grossness. Nino talking about the much more awful deeds of Tiberius was not gross at all. He was only gay.
“Nino, why do we talk theology before breakfast?” he said. “We did yesterday, and here we are at it again to-day. I was very theological last night: I suppose that’s it, and this is an overflow.... But don’t you see that it’s diverting to defy Il Padre, and be rude?”
“No, that is not diverting,” said Nino.
“Well, everyone must go to the devil in his own way. So if I wanted you to do something wicked, which didn’t divert you, I suppose you would refuse?”
“I shall always wish to please you,” said Nino.
“Well, you can please me now. I want to hear about the Black Mass. I think it might make me happy. Have they a book? Have they a missal?”
“Yes,” said Nino.
“Nino, you’re rather annoying. You’re becoming serious.”
Nino shook his head.
“I have no use for it,” he said, “and indeed I know little of it. The