Just a fortnight later Colin was lying in one of the window seats of the long gallery at Stanier reading through some papers which required his signature. They had come by the post which Nino had just given him, for he had brought the boy with him from Capri, with a view to making him his valet. His own, he said, always looked as if he were listening to a reading of the ten commandments, and Colin had no use for such a person. Nino, at any rate, would bring cheerfulness and some touch of southern gaiety with his shaving-water; besides, no servant approached the Italian in dexterity and willingness. And now that the pause of death was over, adjustments, businesses, the taking up of life again had to begin, and his lawyer was getting things in shape for his supervision. These particular papers were tedious and hard to follow and were expressed in that curious legal shibboleth which makes the unprofessional mind to wander. He tried to attend, but the effort was like clinging to some slippery edge of ice; he could get no firm hold of it, and the deep waters kept closing over him. There, below the terrace, lay the lake where he had seen one such incident happen.
By that he had become heir to all that this fair, shining spring day shewed him; his father’s death put him in possession, and now this morning, wherever he turned his eyes, whether on lake or woodland, or within on picture and carved ceiling, all were his. This stately home, the light and desire of his eye, with all that it meant in wealth and position, had passed again into the hands of Colin Stanier, handed down from generation to generation, ever more prosperous, from his namesake who had built its enduring walls and founded its splendours.
Of his father’s death there was but little to tell him,{317} when, coming straight back again from Capri, he had arrived here at the set of a stormy day. Philip had reeled as he crossed the hall one morning, and fallen on the hearthrug in front of the Holbein. For half an hour he had lived, quite unconscious and suffering nothing, then his breathing had ceased. Until the moment of his stroke, that bursting of some large blood-vessel on the brain, he had been quite well and cheerful, rejoicing in the fact that Colin by now had found the sun again, and already longing for his return.
Violet had been Colin’s informant, and she told him these things with that air of detachment from him which had characterised her intercourse with him since Raymond had come home for that last Christmas vacation. She had watched then with some secret horror dawning in her eyes, Colin’s incessant torture of his brother. That dismay and darkness which had spread its shadow on her in the month of their honeymoon, when first she really began to know Colin, interrupted for a time by their return home and the high festivals of the autumn, had returned to her then with a fresh infusion of blackness. Never once had she spoken to him about his treatment of Raymond, but he was conscious that she watched and shuddered. It did not seem that her love for him was extinguished; that horror of hers existed side by side with it; she yearned for his love even while she shrank from his pitilessness. She feared him, too, not only for the ruthless iron of him, but for the very charm which had a power over her more potent yet.
Then came the weeks after Raymond’s death, and Colin thought he saw in her a waning of her fear of him; that, he reflected, was natural. Some time, so he read her mind, she knew she would be mistress here in her own right; it seemed very reasonable that she should gain confidence.
For the last few days, when the wheels of life were now beginning to turn again, he saw with a comprehending sense of entertainment that there was something in{318} Violet’s mind: she was trying to bring herself up to a certain point, and it was not hard to guess what that was. She was silent and preoccupied, and a dozen times a day she seemed on the verge of speaking of that which he knew was the subject of her thought. Till to-day her father and mother and Aunt Hester in becoming mourning had been with them, now they had gone, and Violet’s restlessness had become quite ludicrous. She had been in and out of the room half a dozen times; she had sat down to read the paper, and next moment it had dropped from her lap and she was staring at the fire again lost in frowning thought.
Knowing what her communication when it came must be, Colin, from the very nature of the case could not help her out with it, but he wished that she would wrestle with and vanquish her hesitation. If it had been he who in this present juncture had had to speak to Raymond on this identical subject, how blithely would he have undertaken it. Then, finally, Violet seemed to make up her mind to take the plunge, and sat down on the edge of the seat where he lounged. He extended his arm and put it round her.
“Well, Vi,” he said, “are you finding it hard to settle down? I am, too, but we’ve got to do it. My dear, Aunt Hester’s little black bonnet! Did you ever see anything so chic? Roguish; she gets sprightlier every day!”
Violet looked at him gravely.
“There’s something we have to talk about, Colin,” she said, “and we both know what it is. Will you let me speak for a minute or two without interrupting me?”
He put his finger on the line to which he had come in this tiresome document, which his solicitor assured him required his immediate attention.
“An hour or two, darling; the longer the better,” he said. “What is it? Are you sure I know? Something nice I hope. Ah, is it about my birthday perhaps? The last affair that dear father was busy over were plans for my birthday. Of course I have counter-ordered every{319}thing and we must keep it next year. Well, what is it? I won’t interrupt any more.”
Colin leaned back with his hand still under Violet’s arm, as if to draw her with him. She bent with him a little way and then disengaged herself.
“I hate what lies before me,” she said, “and I ask you to believe that I have struggled with myself. I have tried, Colin, to give the whole thing up, to let it be yours. But I can’t. I long to be Lady Yardley in my own right, as you told me I should be on Uncle Philip’s death. All that it means! I fancy you understand that. But I think I might have given that up, if it was only myself of whom I had to think. I don’t know; I can’t be sure.”
She paused, not looking at him. She did not want to know till all was done how he was taking it. Of course he anticipated it: he knew it must be, and here was the plain point of it....
“But I haven’t got only myself to think about,” she said. “Before many months I shall bear you a child; I shall bear you other children after that, perhaps. I am thinking of them and of you. Since we married I have learned things about you. You are hard in a way that I did not know was possible. You have neither love nor compassion. I must defend my children against you; the only way I can do it is to be supreme myself. I must hold the reins, not you. I will be good to you, and shall never cease loving you, I think, but I can’t put myself in your hands, which I should do, if I did not now use the knowledge which you yourself conveyed to me. You did that with your eyes open; you asked for and accepted what your position here will be, and you did it chiefly out of hatred to Raymond. That was your motive, and it tells on my decision. You hate more than you love, and I am frightened for my children.
“It is true that when I accepted Raymond, I did it because I should get Stanier—be mistress here anyhow. But I think—I was wavering—that I should have thrown him over before I married him and have accepted you,{320} though I knew that marriage with you forfeited the other. Then you told me it was otherwise, that in forfeiting Stanier, I found it even more completely.”
Colin—he had promised not to interrupt—gave no sign of any sort. His finger still marked the place in this legal document.
“I have sent for my father’s solicitor,” she said, “and they have told me he is here. But before I see him I wanted to tell you that I shall instruct him to contest your succession. I shall tell him about the register in the Consulate at Naples and about your mother’s letters to your uncle. You said you would let me have them on your father’s death. Would you mind giving me them now, therefore? He may wish to see them.”
Colin moved ever so slightly, and she for the first time looked at him. There he lay, with those wide, child-like eyes, and the mouth that sometimes seemed to her to have kissed her very soul away. He had a smile for her grave glance; just so had he smiled when torturingly he tried to remember exactly what had happened in the Old Park on the day that Raymond shot pigeons. But even while she thought of his relentless, pursuing glee, the charm of him, the sweet supple youth of him, all fire and softness, smote on her heart.
“Won’t you go away, till it is all over?” she said. “It will be horrible for you, Colin, and I don’t want you to suffer. The letters are all I want of you; I will tell Mr. Markham about the register and he will do whatever is necessary. Go back to your beloved island; you were robbed of your stay there. Wait there until all this business, which will be horrible for you, is done. You can see your dear Mr. Cecil again ...” she added, trying to smile back at him.
“Yes, I might do that,” said Colin thoughtfully. “In fact, I probably shall. But I must try to take in what you have been saying. I can’t understand it: you must explain. You referred, for instance, to my mother’s letters. What letters? I don’t know of any letters of my{321} mother as being in existence. Still less have I got any. How could I have? She died when I was but a few weeks old. Do mothers write letters to the babies at their breasts?”
“The two letters to your uncle,” said she.
Colin planted a levering elbow by his side, and sat up.
“I suppose it is I who am mad,” he said, “because you talk quite quietly and coherently, and yet I don’t understand a single word of what you say. Letters from my mother to my uncle? Ah....”
He took her hand again, amending his plan in accordance with his talk with Salvatore.
“You’re right,” he said. “Uncle Salvatore did once give me two letters from my mother to him. Little faint things. I destroyed them not so long ago: one should never keep letters. But you’re right, Vi. Uncle Salvatore did give me a couple of letters once, but when on earth did I mention them to you? What a memory you have got! It’s quite true; one announced my mother’s marriage, the other spoke of the birth of poor Raymond and me. But what of them? And what—oh, I must be mad—what in heaven’s name do you mean, when you talk, if I understand you correctly, about sending somebody out to Naples? The register in the Consulate there? And my succession? Are they connected? Isn’t it usual for a son to succeed his father? I’m all at sea—or am I asleep and dreaming? Pinch me, darling. I want to wake up. What register?”
Some nightmare sense of slipping, slipping, slipping took hold of Violet.
“The erasure in the register,” she said. “All that you told me.”
Colin swung his legs off the window-seat and got up. There was an electric bell close at hand and he rang it.
“There’s some plot,” he said, “and I have no idea what it is. I want a witness with regard to anything further that you wish to say to me. What’s his name? Your{322} father’s solicitor, I mean. Oh, yes, Markham. Don’t speak another word to me.”
He turned his back on her and waited till a servant came in.
“Her ladyship wishes to see Mr. Markham,” he said. “Ask Mr. Markham to come here at once.”
“Colin ...” she began.
It was just such a face that he turned on her now as he had given to her one evening at Capri.
“Not a word,” he said. “Hold your tongue, Violet. You’ll speak presently.”
Mr. Markham appeared, precise and florid. Colin shook hands with him.
“My wife has a statement to make to you,” he said. “I don’t know what it is: she has not yet made it. But it concerns me and the succession to my father’s title and estates. It had therefore better be made to you in my presence. Please tell Mr. Markham what you were about to tell me, Violet.”
In dead silence, briefly and clearly, Violet repeated what Colin had told her on the night that they were engaged. All the time he looked at her, Mr. Markham would have said, with tenderness and anxiety, and when she had finished he spoke:
“I hope you will go into this matter without any delay, Mr. Markham,” he said. “My wife, as I have already told her, is perfectly right in saying that my uncle—you will need his address—gave me two letters from my mother to him. She is right also about the subject of those letters. But she is under a complete delusion about the dates of them. I destroyed them not so long ago, I am afraid, so the only person who can possibly settle this is my uncle, to whom I hope you will apply without delay. No doubt he will have some recollection of them; indeed, he cherished them for years, and if the dates were as my wife says that I told her they were, he must have known that my brother and I were illegitimate. So much for the letters.{323}”
Colin found Violet’s eyes fixed on him; her face, deadly pale, wore the stillness of stone.
“With regard to my wife’s allegation about the register,” he said. “I deny that I ever told her any such story. I have this to add: when my father and I were in Naples last summer, I made, at his request, a copy of the record of his marriage from the consular register. He thought, I fancy, that in the event of his death, a certified copy of it, here in England, might be convenient for the purpose of proving the marriage. I made that copy myself, and Mr. Cecil, our Consul in Naples, certified it to be correct. I gave it my lawyer a few days ago, when he was down here, and it is, of course, open to your inspection.”
Colin paused and let his eyes rest wistfully on Violet.
“My wife, of course, Mr. Markham,” he said, “is under a delusion. But she has made the allegation, and in justice to me, I think you will agree that it must be investigated. She supposes—don’t you, darling?—that there is an erasure in the register at the Consulate showing that it has been tampered with, and that erasure points to an attempt on some one’s part, presumably my father’s or my own, to legitimatise his children. In answer to that I am content for the present to say that when I made the copy I saw no such erasure, nor did Mr. Cecil who certified the correctness of it. Mr. Cecil, to whom I will give you an introduction, no doubt will remember the incident. I am glad I have got that copy, for if the register proves to have been tampered with, it may be valuable. My belief is that no such erasure exists. May I suggest, Mr. Markham, that you or some trustworthy person should start for Naples at once? You will take the affidavits—is it not—of my uncle with regard to the letters, and of Mr. Cecil with regard to the genuineness of the copy of my father’s marriage. You will also inspect the register. The matter is of the utmost and immediate importance.”
He turned to Violet. “Vi, darling,” he said, “let us agree not to speak of this again until Mr. Markham has{324} obtained full information about it all. Now, perhaps, you would like to consult him in private. I will leave you.”
 
Mr. Markham shared Colin’s view as to the urgency and importance of setting this matter at rest, and left for Naples that evening with due introductions to Salvatore and the Consul. Colin had a word with him before he left, and with tenderness and infinite delicacy, spoke of Violet’s condition. Women had these strange delusions, he believed, at such times, and the best way of settling them was to prove that they had no foundation. Mr. Markham, he was afraid, would find that he had made a fruitless journey, as far as the ostensible reason for it went, but he had seen for himself how strongly the delusion had taken hold on his wife, and in that regard he hoped for the best results. In any case the thing must be settled....
 
Never had the sparkle and sunlight of Colin’s nature been so gay as during these two days when they waited for the news that Mr. Markham would send from Naples. It had been agreed that the issues of his errand should not be spoken of until they declared themselves, and here, to all appearance, was a young couple, adorably adorned with all the gifts of Nature and inheritance, with the expectation of the splendour of half a century’s unclouded days spread in front of them. They had lately passed through the dark valley of intimate bereavement, but swiftly they were emerging into the unshadowed light, where, in a few months now, the glory of motherhood, the pride of fatherhood, awaited them. In two days from now, as both knew, a disclosure would reach them which must be, one way or the other, of tremendous import, but for the present, pending that revelation, presage and conjecture, memory even of that interview with Mr. Markham, which had sent him across the breadth of Europe, were banished; they were as children in the last hour of{325} holidays, as lovers between whom must soon a sword be unsheathed.
They wandered in the woods where in the hot, early spring the daffodils were punctual, and, “coming before the swallow dares,” took the winds of March with beauty, and Colin picked her the pale cuckoo-pint which, intoxicated with nonsense, he told her comes before the cuckoo dares.... They spoke of the friendship of their childhood which had so swiftly blossomed into love, and of the blosso............