Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

Colin broke off suddenly.

“Go away,” he said, “while you have time. If you stop here you’ll see something that will curl you up like Vincenzo. It won’t be the face of God, but it will be something you can’t bear. You’re trembling in every limb now. By God, there’ll be two inquests instead of one if you stop here! You’re afraid of me, as you said, and that’s very prudent of you.”

How the power surged and foamed through him: it was like fire and wine in his veins, buoyant and intoxicating.

“I would kill you now,” he said, “except for the fuss and bother that would involve me in. There’s one mysterious death to be investigated already, and you may thank your luck that it is so.”

It was true enough that Douglas had shrunk before him, holding up his arm as if to ward off some impending blow. But now he suddenly straightened himself up, as if new force had nerved him, and in the strength of that he stood steadfast and unafraid before the power that flickered in Colin’s eyes.

“I was afraid of you,” he said, “but it was my blindness that made me afraid. Now, de profundis, I call on God, whom I have mocked at and defied, but in whom you believe just as I do. I daresay you could kill my body, for that is mortal, it is weak with sin and defilement, but against me you are powerless as hate in the presence of love. You know that yourself. And one day you will be conquered and make your submission, too. You will go down into hell, as I have done, and find that God is there also.”

He waited a moment watching, now without dismay, the furious impotence of the other’s face. But no word came from Colin, and presently he moved to the door.

“Good-bye, Lord Yardley,” he said. “And God will have mercy on your soul in spite of you.”

Colin stood where he was, hearing Douglas’s steps pass across the gallery and into the hall. His fingers still twitched with rage, he felt himself charged and crackling with the friendly power, and he had no doubt in his own soul that by the mere exercise of his will he could have brought to bear some disastrous force on the man who had just quitted him, that should exhibit itself in illness or misfortune, or in ways more swift and terrible. And yet though the mere opening of the sluice of pent-up evil would have done it, and though with every conscious fibre of him he hated and wished evil, he did not do it. For what might happen to Douglas was a side issue, not worth pursuing, and as regards the main issue, namely his soul’s abhorrence of the power in Whose name Douglas had withstood him, he knew that he was defeated already. He had come up against something that did not fight him nor strive against him; it merely stood there, patient and pitiful, serenely existing.

He confessed defeat, but he did not acquiesce in it. Rather it stirred in him, as he had said to Douglas, a more determined antagonism, and took him farther than ever from any notion of submission. But Douglas was right in saying that there was a breach in his defences, and that in the breach stood Dennis, boyish and smiling and clad in that armour of love and innocence. Somehow he must be stripped of that, and wounded, and driven away from the crumbling wall of Colin’s defences, else he would never be able to repair it. Of course the boy was not convent-bred, he was no pious barley-sugar little saint, but a high-spirited, vigorous fellow with a good leaven of mischief and boyish naughtiness, but that was nothing. His armoured innocence lay in his utter lack of the love of evil; when it came near him in the abstract, he choked and shuddered at it, instinctively recoiling. Dennis had no notion of hate, of the desire to hurt; the rudiments of cruelty, that bramble full of thorns and red fruit, which when it has taken root in the soul spreads over it quicker than any other lust, and chokes and stabs to death any growth that impedes it, had no existence in him. He liked enjoying himself, and there perhaps lay the seeds of selfishness, but selfishness was a negative quality, compared with the other.