Looking back across his life to this point of departure, it seemed to Alistair that he had found the clue of his tangled skein, and that he might in time achieve a complete answer to the riddle of his fate. For a moment the longing of his heart returned to that green islet in its grey sea, and he bitterly regretted that he had not been left to live out his life there among the clansmen whom he loved, and by whom he was beloved, who esteemed him as a prince among them, and would have still esteemed and shielded him had he become the outlaw of the Raj. He was an exile—surely it was this, he told himself—he was an outlander adrift amongst a race to which he did not belong; which he never could understand, and by which he never could be understood.
The first great misunderstanding with his captors had come when he was a boy. There was a Velasquez-looking portrait on the walls of Colonsay House of a lad of fifteen, long-legged and slim, with eyes like the night—a night haunted by the slumber of wild beasts that the first footfall will disturb. The dress of this boy was touched with the girlish delicacy that betrays a mother’s darling: the collar was of lace, the jacket was of velvet, the straw hat, thrust back from his forehead, was costlier than lace or velvet. At night he slept in silk, in a tapestried chamber. His days were passed within the stately walls, or in roaming through the glorious demesne, of one of the historic homes of England, watched over with all the care that love and wealth could afford.
He had lived with his mother ever since his father’s death. It was not until she had clasped him in her arms that she had told him of his loss, and she had never suspected the bitterness of the boy’s grief. The father whom he had never known remained a sacred memory still, all the more sacred because his mother never talked to him about the dead. By this time the old Duke was dead as well, and James had succeeded him, so that the days of hardship were over, and the inheritance was being nursed back into something like its former splendour.
A fond yearning to regain some of the lost years of their childhood had caused their mother to keep both her boys beside her, giving them a tutor instead of a school. But she had another motive which she tried to believe was paramount—the desire to bring them early into her own religious fold.
During four years Alistair had had his mind steeped day after day in the emotional atmosphere of primitive Christianity. This was his mother’s native air, and she could not have been brought to believe that it might be drawn with difficulty and pain by any human creature. If the knowledge had been forced upon her that such a training was unwholesome for either of her sons, her universe would have become a maze without a plan; her God would have been shattered like Dagon.
To both the boys this training came as part of the yoke which age imposes on youth. Boyhood is always surrendering its secret convictions at the bidding of authority; the process called education is one long defeat of the barbarians by the legions. Their mother heard them repeat the phrases which she had taught them, and believed in her work.
A cold temper and unimaginative mind enabled the elder boy to take this religion in the formal spirit in which it has been taken by a great part of mankind for two thousand years. As a theory of the universe it received his unquestioning assent; as a life-motive it left him practically untouched. He became the unconscious hypocrite whom the Gospel was written to make us loathe, and who has governed the Church ever since the Gospel was written.
On Alistair his mother’s teaching had another effect. A poet’s sensitiveness on the score of words made him shrink at times from the familiar language of his mother’s creed. But his temperament responded readily to the exciting influence of religious emotion, and the cunning which usually accompanies hysteria taught him to use this faculty for his own protection. When he had been naughty during the day—and Alistair was already marked out as the naughty one of the two brothers—it was his mother’s habit to come into his room after he had gone to bed, and try to soften him. She knelt beside the bed, and talked and prayed with him till the boy melted in a confession of wrongdoing, and the two made it up with kisses and tears.
These scenes had endeared Alistair to his mother, whose tenderness for her younger son aroused the elder’s secret jealousy. They had been ruinous to the boy himself, whom they made an emotional debauchee. He spent his sincerity in spasms of repentance which left him worse than before. There were yet other consequences: the nervous organization is a sensitive instrument, which ignorant fingers do not touch for nothing.