Lord Yardley’s residence at his villa at Capri had, as usual, leaked into the diplomatic consciousness, and the English Ambassador at Rome, an old acquaintance of his, had, as usual, reminded him of a friendly presence in Rome, which would be delighted to welcome him if the welcome afforded any convenience. To leave by the very early boat from Capri, and thus catch the Paris express that evening was a fatiguing performance, would he not, therefore, when the regretted day for his departure came, take the more reasonable midday boat, dine and spend the night at the Embassy, and be sent off from there next day in comfort, for the morning express from Rome entailed only one night in the train instead of two? The British Consul at Naples would see to his seclusion in the transit from Naples to Rome, where he would be met and wafted to the Embassy. Otherwise an early start from Capri, and a hurried train connection in Rome, would deprive His Excellency of the great pleasure of a renewal of cordiality. His Excellency, it may be remarked, liked an invitation to Stanier, and there was method in his thoughtfulness. This proposal arrived a week before Lord Yardley’s departure; a heat wave had drowned the country, and already he looked with prospective horror on the notion of two nights in the train.... It entailed a night in Paris, and, if he was to arrive in England for a debate in the House, a departure from Capri by the midday boat on Tuesday, instead of the early boat on Wednesday. It entailed, in fact, a few hours less of Colin.
Colin saw the shining of his star. Never had anything, for his purpose, been so excellently, opportune. The Brit{158}ish Consul would be at the station to see his father off, and so, beyond doubt, would he himself, on a visit to Uncle Salvatore. An acquaintanceship would be made under the most auspicious and authentic circumstances.
“It all fits in divinely, father,” he said. “I shall come across with you, see you off from Naples, and then do my duty at Uncle Salvatore’s. Probably, if there was nothing to take me to Naples, I should never have gone, but now I shall have to go. Do let me kill two birds with one stone. I shall see the last of you—one bird—without having to get up at five in the morning, and I shall have made my visit to Uncle Salvatore inevitable—two birds. Say ‘yes’ and I’ll write to him at once.”
It was in the belief that this arrangement had been made, that Lord Yardley left Naples a week afterwards. Mr. Cecil, the British Consul, had come to the station to secure for him the reserved compartment to Rome, and, that being done, had lingered on the platform till the train started. At the last moment, as he and Colin stood together there, and while the train was already in motion, Colin sprang on to the footboard for a final good-bye, and with a kiss leaped off again. There came a sharp curve and the swaying carriages behind hid the platform from his father.
Colin turned to Mr. Cecil. Salvatore was in the background for the present.
“It was delightful of you to come to see my father off,” he said. “He appreciated it immensely.”
Colin paused a moment, just the pause that a bather takes before he gets up speed for a running header into the sea.
“He left me a small matter to talk to you about,” he said. “I wonder if I might refer to it now.”
Mr. Cecil gave a plump, polite little bow.
“Pray do, Mr. Stanier,” he said.
“My father wants a copy of the register of his marriage,” he said, “and he asked me to copy it out for him. The marriage was performed at the British Consulate,{159} and if you would be so good as to let me copy it and witness it for me, I should be so grateful. May I call on you in the morning about it? It will save trouble, he thinks, on his death, if among his papers there is an attested copy.”
“A pleasure,” said Mr. Cecil.
“You are too kind. And you will do me one further kindness? I am going back to Capri to-morrow for another fortnight, and it would be so good of you if you would tell me of a decent hotel where I can pass the night. I shall not be able, I am afraid, to catch the early boat, with this business of the copying to do, for it leaves, does it not, at nine, and the Consulate will not be open by then.”
Colin was at full speed now; his running feet had indeed left the ground, and he was in the air. But he was already stiffened and taut, so to speak, for the plunge; he had made all preparation, and fully anticipated a successful dividing of the waters. For he had already made himself quite charming to Mr. Cecil, and attributed his lingering on the platform as much to the pleasure of a sociable ten minutes with him as to the honour done to his father.
“But I will not hear of you staying at a hotel,” said Mr. Cecil, “if I can persuade you to pass the night at my flat. It adjoins the Consulate offices, and is close to where the Capri boat lies. Indeed, if you wish to catch the early boat, we can no doubt manage that little business of yours to-night. It will take only a few minutes.”
Colin suffered himself to be persuaded, and they drove back to the Consulate. Office hours were already over, and presently Mr. Cecil led the way into the archive-room, where, no doubt, Colin’s search would be rewarded. But there had come in for him a couple of telegrams delivered after the clerks had gone, and he went to his desk in the adjoining room to answer these, leaving the boy with the volume containing the year of his father’s marriage. The month, so said Colin, was not known to him. His father{160} had told him, but he had forgotten—a few minutes’ search, however, would doubtless remedy that.
So Mr. Cecil, leaving an official form with him on which to copy the entry, fussed away into the next room, and Colin instantly opened the volume. The year was 1893, and the month, as he very well knew, was March.... There it was on March the first, and he ran his eye down to the next entry. Marriages at the Naples Consulate apparently were not frequent, and the next was dated April the fourth.
Colin had already his pen in hand to make the copy, and it remained poised there a moment. There was nothing more necessary than to insert one figure before the single numeral, and the thing would be done. It remained after that only to insert a similar “three” in the letter which his mother had written to Salvatore announcing her marriage. On this hot evening the ink would dry as soon as it touched the page. And yet he paused, his brain beginning to bubble with some notion better yet, more inspired, more magically apt....
Colin gave a little sigh and the smile dawned on his face. He wrote in a “three,” making the date of March 1 into March 31, and then once again he paused, watching with eager eyes for the ink to dry on the page. Then, taking up a penknife which lay on the table beside him, he erased, but not quite erased, the “three” he had just written there. He left unerased, as if a hurried hand had been employed on the erasure, the cusp of the figure, and a minute segment of a curve both above and below it.
Looking at the entry as he looked at it now, when his work was done, with but casual carefulness, any inspector of it would say that it recorded the marriage of Philip Lord Stanier to Rosina Viagi on the first of March. But had the inspector’s attention been brought to bear more minutely on it, he must, if directed to hold the page sideways to the light, have agreed that there had been some erasure made in front of the figure denoting the day of the month; for there was visible the scratching of a pen{161}knife or some similar instrument. Then, examining it more closely, he would certainly see the cusp of a “three,” the segment of the upper curve, and a dot of ink in the place where the lower segment would have been.
These remnants would scarcely have struck his eye at all, had not he noticed that there were the signs of an erasure there. With them, it was impossible for the veriest tyro in conjecture not to guess what the erasure had been.
The whole thing took but a half-minute, and at the expiration of that, Colin was employed on the transcription of the record of the marriage. He knew that he had to curb a certain trembling of his hand, to reduce to a more regular and slower movement the taking of his breath, which came in pants, as if he had been running.
Half a minute ago, no notion of what he had already accomplished had entered his head; his imagination had not travelled further than the possibility of changing the date which he knew he should find here into one thirty days later. Out of the void, out of the abyss, this refinement in forgery had come to him, and he already recognised without detailed examination how much more astute, how infinitely more cunning, was this emended tampering. Just now he could spare but a side glance at that, for he must copy this entry (unaware that pen and pen-knife had been busy there) and take it to plump Mr. Cecil for his signature, but the sharp, crisp tap of conviction in his mind told him that he had done more magnificently well than his conscious brain had ever suggested to him.
No longer time than was reasonable for this act of copying alone had elapsed before Colin laid down his pen and went into the next room.
“Well, Mr. Stanier, have you done your copying?” asked Cecil.
“Yes. Shall I bring it here for your signature?” said Colin.
Mr. Cecil climbed down from the high stool where he was perched like some fat, cheerful little bird.{162}
“No, no,” he said. “We must be more business-like than that. I must compare your copy with the original entry before I give you my signature.”
Colin knew that the skill with which he had effected the alteration which yet left the entry unaltered, would now be put to the test, but he felt no qualm whatever as to detection. The idea had been inspired, and he had no doubt that the execution of it was on the same level of felicitous audacity. They passed back into the archive-room together, and the Consul sat himself before the volume and the copy.
“Yes, March the first, March the first,” he said, comparing the two, “Philip Lord Stanier, Philip Lord Stanier, quite correct Ha! you have left out a full stop after his name, Mr. Stanier. Yes, Rosina Viagi, of 93 Via Emmanuele....”
He wrote underneath his certificate that this was a true and faithful copy of the entry in the Consular archives, signed his name, stamped it with the official seal and date, and handed it to Colin.
“That will serve your father’s purpose,” he said, and replacing the volume on its shelf, locked the wire door of its bookcase.
“If you will be so good as to wait five minutes,” he said, “I will just finish answering a telegram that demands my attention, and then I shall be at your service for the evening.”
He gave a discreet little chuckle.
“We will dine en gar?on,” he said, “at a restaurant which I find more than tolerable, and shall no doubt contrive some pleasant way of passing the evening. Naples keeps late hours, Mr. Stanier, and I should not be surprised if you found the first boat to Capri inconveniently early. We shall see.”
Mr. Cecil appeared to put off the cares and dignity of officialdom with singular completeness when the day’s work was over, and Colin found he had an agreeably juvenile companion, ready to throw himself with zest into{163} the diversions, whatever they might be, of the evening. He ate with the appetite of a lion-cub, consumed a very special wine in magnificent quantities, and had a perfect battery of smiles and winks for the Neapolitans who frequented the restaurant.
“Dulce est desipere in loco,” he remarked gaily, “and that’s about the sum of the Latin that remains to me, and, after all, it can be expressed equally well in English by saying ‘All work, no play, makes Jack a dull boy.’ And when we have finished our wine, all the amusements of this amusing city are at your disposal. There is an admirable cinematograph just across the road, there is a music-hall a few doors away, but if you choose that, you must not hold me responsible for what you hear there. Or if you think it too hot a night for indoor entertainment, there is the Galleria Umberto, which is cool and airy, but again, if you choose that, you must not hold me responsible for what you see there. Children of nature: that is what we Neapolitans are. We, did I say? Well, I feel myself one of them, when the Consulate is shut, not when I am on duty, mark that, Mr. Stanier. But my private life is my own, and then I shed my English skin.”
In spite of the diversions of the city, Colin was brisk enough in the morning to catch the early boat, and once more, as he had done a month ago on his initial visit to the island, he sequestered himself from the crowd under the awning, and sought solitude in the dipping bows of the little steamer. To-day, however, there was no chance of his meditations being interrupted by his father with tedious talk of days spent at Sorrento; no irksome demonstrations of love were there to be responded to, but he could without hindrance explore not only his future path, but, no less, estimate the significance of what he had done already.
Once more, then, the register of his father’s marriage was secure in the keeping of the Consulate, Mr. Cecil had looked at it, compared Colin’s copy, which now lay safe in the breast-pocket of his coat, with the original, and had{164} certified it to be correct. Colin had run no risk by inserting and then erasing a figure which might prove on scrutiny to be a subsequent addition; Mr. Cecil himself had been unaware that any change had been wrought on the page. But when the register on Lord Yardley’s death should be produced in accordance with the plan that was already ripening and maturing in Colin’s mind, a close scrutiny would reveal that it had been tampered with. Some hand unknown had clearly erased a figure there, altering the date from March 31 to March 1. The object of that would be clear enough, for it legalised the birth of the twins Rosina had borne. It was in the interest of any of four people to commit that forgery—of his father, of his mother, of Raymond, and of himself. Rosina was dead now these many years; his father, when the register was next produced, would be dead also, and from dead lips could come neither denial nor defence. Raymond might be left out of the question altogether, for never yet had he visited his mother’s native city, and of those alive when the register was produced, suspicion could only possibly attach to himself. It would have been in his interest to make that alteration, which should establish his legitimacy as well as that of his brother.
Colin, as he sat alone in the bows, fairly burst out laughing, before he proceeded to consider the wonderful sequel. He would be suspected, would he?... Then how would it come about that it was he, who in the nobility of stainless honour would produce his own mother’s letter, given him by his uncle, in which she announced to her brother that she was married at the British Consulate on the 31st of March? Had he been responsible for that erasure in the Consulate register, to legitimatise his own birth, how, conceivably, could he not only not conceal, but bring forward the very evidence that proved his illegitimacy? Had he tampered with the Consular book, he must have destroyed the letter which invalidated his forgery. But, instead of destroying it, he would produce it.{165}
There was work ahead of him here and intrigue in which Salvatore must play a part. The work, of course, was in itself nothing; the insertion at the top of one of the two letters he owned of just that one figure which he had inserted and erased again in the register was all the manual and material business; a bottle of purple ink and five minutes’ practice would do that. But the intrigue was more difficult. Salvatore must be induced to acquiesce in the fact that the date of the letter announcing Rosina’s marriage was subsequent to that announcing the birth of the twins. That would require thought and circumspection; there must be no false step there.
And all this was but a preliminary man?uvring for the great action whereby, though at the cost of his own legitimacy, he should topple Raymond down from his place, and send him away outcast and penniless, and himself, with Violet for wife, now legal owner of all the wealth and honours of the family, become master of Stanier. She might for the love of him, which he believed was budding in her heart, throw Raymond over and marry him without cognisance of what he had done for her. But he knew, from knowledge of himself, how overmastering the passion for Stanier could be, and it might happen that she would choose Raymond with all that marriage to him meant, and stifle the cry of her love.
In that case (perhaps, indeed, in any case), Colin might find it better to make known to her the whole, namely that on his father’s death she would find herself in a position to contest the succession and claim everything for her own. Which of them, Raymond or himself, would she choose to have for husband in these changed circumstances? She disliked and proposed to tolerate the one for the sake of the great prize of possession; she was devoted to the other, who, so she would learn, had become possessed of the fact on which her ownership was established.
Or should he tell her all? Reveal his part in it? On this point he allowed his decision to remain in abeyance; what he should do, whether he should tell Violet nothing,{166} or part, or all, must depend on circumstances, and for the present he would waste no more time over that. For the present, too, he would keep the signed and certified copy of his father’s marriage.
The point which demanded immediate consideration was that concerning Salvatore. Colin puzzled this out, sometimes baffled and frowning, sometimes with a clear course lying serene in front of his smiling eyes, as the steamer, leaving the promontory of the mainland behind, approached the island. He must see Salvatore, whom he had quite omitted to see in Naples, as soon as possi............