It was not till well on in the afternoon that the body was recovered. All day the cold had been intense, and the ropes with the tackle for this terrible fishing got stiff and frozen. But at sunset they found it; the stream had carried it along below the ice towards the sluice. Philip sat up with Colin in the long gallery when Violet and Lady Yardley had gone to bed. He felt no sorrow, for he had not liked Raymond, he had not even loved him with his fatherhood, for all that had been given to Colin.... Often and often he had longed that Colin had been the eldest, now there was none other than Colin; he would have all that his father coveted for him. But though he felt no sorrow, he felt remorse and pity; remorse that he had not liked this dead son of his, pity that he had died young.
“I reproach myself, Colin, most bitterly,” he had been saying. “It was hard to be kind to poor Raymond, he kept kindness at arm’s length. But I ought to have tried more. I ought to have taken example from you: you never wearied of kindness.”
Colin laid his hand on his father’s arm. All the evening he had been keeping things together by a tact so supreme that it appeared pure naturalness. He had talked quite freely about Raymond; recalled a hundred little incidents in which Raymond was a mild hero; his shooting, his prospect of playing football for Cambridge.... It was clear, too, that the tragedy had made very little impression on his grandmother, and so he had taken it for granted that they would play their rubber of whist. Why not?
“You mustn’t think of it like that, father,” he said. “You did what you could. You made it very jolly for{291} him here. He liked coming home; he was going to stop here the whole of the Christmas vacation, you know. If he had not been enjoying it, he would not have done that.”
Colin revelled in the underlying meaning of his words ... how Raymond had been enjoying it, hadn’t he?
Philip’s servant came into the room; he carried on a tray Raymond’s watch and chain, and a pocket-book.
“They found these on his lordship’s body, my lord,” he said. “I thought it best to bring them you.”
Philip took them, and looked absently at the watch which had stopped at a few minutes to eleven.
“He must have fallen in almost immediately,” he said. “I had better look at what is in his pocket-book. It may contain papers that must be attended to.”
Not until that moment had Colin given another thought to what Raymond had received that morning in the envelope from Bertram’s bank. Now in a flash he conjectured that whatever it was (and he felt no doubt of what it was) it would be found in that pocket-book which his father even then was opening. How lucky it was that he had not told his father about that attempt of Raymond’s! How splendid would appear his own magnanimity, his own unfailing kindness to him! He could emphasise them even more by a reluctance that his father should examine these remains. The water, it is true, might have got in and soaked the paper, if it was there, into illegibility, but the leather of the pocket-book seemed to have resisted well: it might easily prove to contain a legible document.
He got up in an excitement which his father did not understand.
“Are you wise to do that, do you think?” he asked in a quick, anxious voice. “There may be something there which will pain you.”
“All his papers must be gone through,” said his father. “Have you any reason, Colin?”
“I can’t explain,” said Colin.
Papers were coming out of the pocket-book now, in no{292} way perished by the long immersion; they were damp but they held together, and Colin glanced with a lynx’s eye at them as his father unfolded them. There were a couple of bills, he could see, which Philip laid on one side, and then he came to a half-sheet of foolscap.... He read a line or two, looked at the bottom of it and saw his own name....
“What is this?” he said. “It’s signed by Raymond and witnessed by you and me.”
“Don’t look at it, father,” said Colin, knowing that it was inevitable that his father must read anything that was witnessed by himself. “Let me take it and burn it.”
“No, I can’t do that,” said Philip. “What does this mean? What....”
“Ah! don’t read it, don’t read it!” said Colin in a voice of piteous pleading.
“I must.”
“Then listen to me instead. I will tell you.”
Never had his father looked so old and haggard as then. He had seen enough of what was written there to light horror in his eyes and blanch his face to a deadly whiteness.
“Tell me then,” he said.
Colin sat down on the edge of his father’s chair.
“It’s a terrible story,” he said, “and I hoped you should never know it. But it seems inevitable. And remember, father, as I tell you, that Raymond is dead....”
His voice failed for a moment.
“That means forgiveness, doesn’t it?” he said. “Death is forgiveness; you see what I mean. It’s—it’s you who have to teach me that; you will see.”
He collected himself again.
“It was after I came back from Capri in the summer, and after Vi was engaged to me,” he said, “that what is referred to there took place. He—poor Raymond—always hated me. He thought I had your love, which should have been his as well. And then I had Violet’s love, after she had accepted him for her husband. There was a{293} thought in that which made it so bitter that—that it poisoned him. He got poisoned; you must think of it like that. And the thought, Raymond’s poisoned thought, was this: He knew that Violet had the passion for Stanier which you and I have. Yet when she was face to face with the marriage to him, she gave up Stanier. Father dear, it wasn’t my fault that I loved her, you didn’t think it was when I told you out in Capri? And it wasn’t her fault when she fell in love with me.”
“No, Colin,” he said. “Love is like that. Go on, my dear.”
Colin spoke with difficulty now.
“Then came a day,” he said, “when a lunatic escaped from that asylum at Repstow. You had news of it one night, and told Raymond and me. He was a homicidal fellow, and he got hold of one of your keeper’s guns. Next morning Raymond went to shoot pigeons, and I bicycled on my motor to play golf. And then—then, father, we must suppose that the devil himself came to Raymond. It wasn’t Raymond who planned what Raymond did.... He expected me to come back along the road from the lodge, and he—he hid in the bushes at that sharp corner with his gun resting on the wall, and his plan was to shoot me. It would have been at the distance of a few yards only.”
Lord Yardley interrupted; his voice was hoarse and nearly inaudible.
“Wait a minute, Colin,” he said. “All this reminds me of something I have heard, and yet only half heard.”
Colin nodded. “I know,” he said. “I’ll tell that presently.... There was poor Raymond waiting for me to come round the corner. There was this madman loose in the park somewhere, and if the—the plan had succeeded, it would have been supposed that it was the madman who had killed me. But an accident happened: my bicycle punctured, and I walked back for the trudge along the ridge of the Old Park.”
Colin choked for a moment.{294}
“I caught the glint of sun on a gun-barrel by the wall at that sharp corner,” he said, “and I wondered who or what that could be. It could not be the escaped madman, for they had told me at the lodge that he had been caught; and then I remembered that Raymond was out shooting pigeons, and I remembered that Raymond hated me. It occurred to me definitely then, and I felt sick at the thought, that he was waiting for me. And then, father, the mere instinct of self-preservation awoke. If it was Raymond, if I was terribly right, I could not go on like that in constant fear of my life.... I had to make myself safe.
“I stole down, taking cover behind the oaks, till I got close and then I saw it was Raymond. I was white with rage, and I was sick at heart. I had a revolver with me, for you or Vi—you, I think—had persuaded me to take it out in case I met the wretched madman, and, father, I had met a wretched madman. I covered him with it, and then I spoke to him. I told him that if he moved except as I ordered him, I would kill him. He collapsed; every atom of fight was out of him, and he emptied his gun of its cartridges and laid it down. And all the time there wasn’t a cartridge at all in my revolver: I had taken them out and forgotten to put them back. It was after he had collapsed that I found that out.”
A wan smile, as unlike to Colin’s genial heat of mirth as the moonlight is to the noonday sun, shivered and trembled on his mouth and vanished again, leaving it so serious, so tender.
“He confessed,” he said. “But I had to make myself safe. I told him he must put that confession into writing and sign it, and you and I would witness it. That was done. I told you—do you remember?—that Raymond and I had a secret pact, and we wanted your witness to his signature. That was it; and it is that you hold in your hand now. I sent it to my bank, Bertram’s, again in self-defence, for I knew that he would not dare to make any attempt on me, since, if it were successful, however far{295} from suspicion he seemed to stand, there would come into your hands the confession that he had attempted to kill me. Look at the envelope, father. In case of my death, you will read there, it was to be delivered to you.”
Philip did not need to look.
“Go on, Colin,” he said. “How did it come into Raymond’s possession?”
“I can only conjecture that. But this morning, after poor Ray had gone out to skate, I wanted a light for my cigarette, and I had no matches. I drew out something from the waste-paper basket. It was an envelope directed to Raymond, and on the back was the seal of the bank. His handwriting, as you know, was exactly like mine, a spider scrawl you used to call it. I think he must have written to the bank in my name, asking that what I had deposited there was to be sent to him. He would never be safe till he had got that. And—and, oh, father, I should never have been safe when he had got it.”
There was a long silence; Colin’s head was bent on his father’s shoulder; he lay there quivering, while in Philip’s face the grimness grew. Presently Colin spoke again:
“You said you had heard, or half heard, some of this,” he said. “I will remind you. One night at dinner, the night Ray got back from Cambridge, I made the usual nonsensical fool of myself. I seemed to try to recollect something funny that had happened on the morning when Ray went out to shoot pigeons. ‘A man with a gun,’ I said, and you and Vi voted that I was a bore. But I think Raymond knew why I said it, and went on with it till you were all sick and tired of me. I made a joke of it, you see; I could not talk of it to him. I could not be heavy and say, ‘I forgive you; I wipe it out.’ That would have been horrible for him. The only plan I could think of was to make a joke of it, hoping he would understand. I think he did; I think he saw what I meant. But yet he wanted to be safe. Oh, Lord, how I understand that! How anxious I was to be safe and not to have to tell you. But I have had to. If you had listened{296} to me, father, you would have burned that paper. Then no one would ever have known.” (Of course Colin remembered that Violet knew, but he went on without a pause:)
“I’m all to pieces to-night,” he said. “I have horrible fears and all sorts of dreadful things occur to me. That paper is safe nowhere, father. It wasn’t even safe—poor Ray—at my bank. Supposing Vi, by some appalling mischance, got to see it. It would poison Raymond’s memory for her. He did love her, I am sure of that, and though she didn’t love him, she thinks tenderly and compassionately of him. She is not safe while it exists. Burn it, father. Just look at it once first, if you want to know that I have spoken quiet, sober truth, which I did not want to speak, as you know, and then burn it.”
Philip’s first instinct was to throw it straight into the smouldering logs. He believed every word Colin had said, but there was justice to be done to one who could not plead for himself. He was bound to see that Raymond had acted the story that Colin had told him. Dry-eyed and grim, he read it from first word to last, and then stood up.
“Here it is,” he said. “You have been scrupulously accurate. I should like you to see me burn it.”
The paper was damp, and for a little while it steamed above the logs. Then, with a flap, a flame broke from it. A little black ash clung to the embers and grew red, then a faint, grey ash ascended and pirouetted.... Philip’s stern eyes melted, and he turned to his only son.
“And now I have got to forget,” he said.
That seemed the very word Colin was waiting for.
“That’s easy,” he said. “It’s easy for me, dear father, so it can’t be difficult, for I’m an awful brute. We shall have to make a pact, you and I. We must burn what we know out of our hearts, just as you have burned the evidence of it. It doesn’t exist any more. It was some wretched dream.”
“Oh, Colin!” said his father, and in those words was{297} all the wonder of love which cannot credit the beauty, the splendour, that it contemplates.
 
Colin saw his father to his room, and then walked back down the great corridor, quenching the lights as he went, for he had told the butler that no one need sit up. He drew back the curtains of the window at the head of the stairs as he passed and looked out on to the clearness of the frosty midnight. Moonlight lay over the whiteness of the gardens and terraces, but the yew hedge, black and unfrosted, seemed like some funeral route to be followed to where the ice gleamed with a strange vividness as if it were the skylight to some illuminated place below. Then, letting the curtain fall again, he went softly past the head of the lit passage where his room and Violet’s lay, to put out the light at the far end of this corridor. In the last room to the left he knew Raymond was lying, and he went in.
The last toilet had been finished and the body lay on its bed below a sheet. Candles were burning, as if that which lay there dreaded the darkness, and on the table by the bed was a great bowl of white hothouse flowers. Colin had not seen Raymond since that white face looked at him across the rim of broken ice; there had been disfigurement, he imagined, and, full of curiosity, he turned back the sheet. There were little scars on the nose and ears particularly, but nothing appalling, and he looked long at Raymond’s face. The heavy eyelids were closed, the mouth pouted sullenly; death had not changed him at all; he hardly looked asleep, drowsy at the most. Not a ray of pity softened Colin’s smiling face of triumph.
 
For a month after Raymond’s death, the four of them, representing three generations of Staniers, remained quietly there. His name was mentioned less and less among them, for, after Colin’s disclosure to his father, Philip avoided all speech about him, and, as far as he could, all thought. Horror came with the thought of{298} him. The most his father could do was to try to forget him. But for an accident in that matter of a punctured tyre, Colin would now be lying where Raymond lay, and all sunshine would have passed from his declining years. He was no more than sixty-six, but he was old; Colin used to wonder at the swift advance of old age, like some evening shadow, which lengthened so rapidly. But beyond the shadow Philip’s sky was full of light. His desire had been realised, though by tragic ways, and his death, neither dreaded nor wished-for, would realise it.
There were, however, events in the future which he anticipated with eagerness; the first was Colin’s coming of age next March. For generations that festival had been one of high prestige in the family, and in spite of the recency of Raymond’s death, he meant to celebrate it with due splendour.
The other was even more intimately longed-for; early in July, Violet would, if all were well, become a mother; and to see Colin’s son, to know that the succession would continue, was the dearest hope of his life. And these two expectations brought back some St. Martin’s summer of the spirit to him; he began to look forward, as is the way of youth, instead of dwelling in the past. The lengthening shadow stayed, it even retreated.... But Colin had an important piece of business to effect before his father’s death, and he was waiting, without impatience but watchfully, for an opportunity to set out on it. As usual, he wanted the suggestion which would give him this opportunity to come, not from himself, but from others; he would seem then to do what he desired because it was urged on him.
A week of dark, foggy weather towards the end of February favoured his plans. Influenza was about, and he had a touch of it, in no way serious, indeed possibly useful. After a couple of days in his room he reappeared again, but with all the fire gone out of him. He was silent and depressed, and saw that his father’s eyes watched him with anxiety.{299}
“Still feeling rather down?” asked Philip one morning, when Colin pushed an untasted plate away from him at breakfast.
Colin made a tragic face at the window. Nothing could be seen outside, the fog was opaque and impenetrable.
“That’s not very encouraging, father,” he said. “Not convalescing weather.”
He appeared to pull himself together. “But there’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “I should feel depressed in this damp darkness whether I had had the flue or not.”
“You want the sun,” said Philip.
“Ah, the sun! Is there one? Do show it me.”
Philip walked to the window; thin rain was leaking through the fog. It certainly was not inspiriting.
“Well, why not go and see it for yourself?” he said. “There’s sun somewhere. Go off to the Riviera for a fortnight with Violet.”
“Oh, that would be divine if we only could,” said Colin. “But—I daresay it’s funny of me—I don’t want Vi to go through the sort of journey you have at this time of year. The trains are crammed; a fellow I know had to stand all the way from Paris to Marseilles. I shouldn’t like her to do that. Besides we can’t both leave you.”
“Go alone then. Violet will understand.”
Colin sighed.
“I don’t think I feel much like travelling either,” he said. “I’ll stick it out, father. I can go to bed again. I think that’s the most comfortable place. Besides the Riviera is like a monkey-house just now.”
“Go to the villa at Capri then.”
“Ah, don’t talk of it,” said Colin, getting up. “Can’t I see the stone-pine frying in the sunshine. And the freesias will be out, and the wall-flowers. Nino, your old boatman’s son, wrote to me the other day. He said the spring had come, and the vines were budding, and it{300} was already hot! Hot! I could have cried for envy. Don’t let’s talk of it.”
“But I will talk about it,” said Philip. “I’m master here yet....”
“Father, I don’t like that joke,” said Colin.
“Very well. We’ll leave it out and be serious. I shall talk to Violet, too.”
“No, no, no!” said Colin without conviction. “Hullo, here is Vi. Please don’t mention the name of that beloved island again or I shall cry. Morning, Vi. You’re enough sunshine for anyone.”
Colin strolled out of the room so as to leave the others together, and presently Philip passed through the long gallery, and was certainly engaged in telephoning for a while. It was a trunk-call, apparently, for there was an interval between the ringing up and the subsequent conversation. All that day neither Philip nor Violet made the least allusion to Capri, but there was certainly something in the air.... The last post that night, arriving while they were at cards, brought a packet for Lord Yardley, which he opened.
“There, that’s the way to treat obstinate fellows like you, Colin,” he observed, and tossed over to him the book of tickets to Naples and back.
“Father and Violet, you’re brutes,” he said. “I give up.”
 
Colin was ever so easily persuaded by Mr. Cecil to spend a couple of nights, if not more, in Naples, before he went across to the island, and he had a youthful, pathetic tale to tell. They had had a terrible time in England. No doubt Mr. Cecil had seen the notice of his brother’s death—Mr. Cecil could imagine his father’s grief, and indeed his own and Violet’s. Kind messages, by the way, from them both: they would none of them forgive him, if he came to England this year and did not reserve at least a week for them, either in London or at Stanier.... Then Colin himself had caught influenza,{301} and his father and wife had insisted on his going south for a week or two and letting the sun soak into him. But after that month of secluded mourning at Stanier, it was rather heavenly—Colin looked like a seraph who had strayed into a sad world, as he said this—to pass a couple of days in some sort of city where there were many people, and all gay, some stir of life and distraction from his own sorrowful thoughts.
“One has to buck up again some time,” said Colin, “and often I longed to escape from Stanier and just go up to town and dine with some jolly people, and go to a music-hall, and have supper somewhere, and forget it all for a time. Shocking of me, I suppose.”
“No, no, I understand. I quite comprehend that, Colin,” said Cecil. “I beg your pardon: I should say Lord Stanier.”
“Oh, don’t,” said Colin. “I hate the title. It was dear Raymond’s. You never saw him, I think?”
Mr. Cecil had begun to feel like a family friend. He felt himself a sort of uncle to this brilliant boy, so shadowed by woe, so eager to escape out of the shadow. It was his mission, clearly, to aid in this cure, physical and mental, of sunlight.
“No, never,” said he, “only you and your wife and your father. A privilege!”
Colin drank the hospitable cocktail that stood at his elbow. His definite plans were yet in the making, but he began to suspect that alcohol in various forms would be connected with them. He had the Stanier head as regards drink; it only seemed to collect and clarify his wits, and he remembered that Mr. Cecil, on that night which he had spent alone here, had quickly passed through joviality and perhaps want of dignity, to bland somnolence.... He got up with an air of briskness and mutual understanding.
“I’m not going to be a wet-blanket, Mr. Cecil,” he said. “I’ve told you enough to make you see that I pine for enjoyment again. That little restaurant where you and{302} I went before—may we dine there again? I want to see other people enjoying themselves, and I want the sun. Those are my medicines; be a kind, good doctor to me.”
Mr. Cecil’s treatment, so he congratulated himself, seemed wonderfully efficacious that evening. Colin cast all sad thoughts behind him, and between one thing and another, and specially between one drink and another, it was after twelve o’clock before they returned from their dinner to Mr. Cecil’s flat again. Even then, a story was but half-told, and Mr. Cecil drew his keys from his pocket to unlock a very private drawer where there were photographs about which he now felt sure Colin would be sympathetic.
“You’ll like them,” he giggled, as he produced these prints. “Help yourself, Colin. I see they have put out some whisky for us.”
“Oh, Lord, how funny,” said Colin looking at what Mr. Cecil shewed him. “But I can’t drink unless you do. Say when, Mr. Cecil.”
Mr. Cecil was looking at the next photograph, and Colin took advantage of his preoccupation. The big bunch of keys by which this private, this very private, drawer was opened still dangled from the lock.
“And this one,” said Mr. Cecil, applying himself to the liberal dose.
“But what a glorious creature,” said Colin. “May I help myself?”
Mr. Cecil had a confused idea that Colin had finished his first dr............