Colin smiled.
“Yes, very pretty and Madonna-like,” he said. “But that wasn’t what I asked you. I asked you if you were sorry Dennis had gone. That’s a direct question enough: can’t you answer it directly?”
She rose with all her nerves on edge. But that would never do. If she was to reach Colin at all, with the love that was the only efficient power she had, she must eradicate her fear of him, brushing aside all that she shuddered at, for that, cramped and clogged her movement towards him.
“The question is direct enough,” she said, “but I can’t give you a direct answer. You’ve made the boy devoted to you, that’s beyond question, and sometimes I’ve been afraid, and wished he was not here. But then I’ve wondered whether I haven’t misjudged you altogether. Dennis is just as sweet and innocent as he has always been. And then I’ve asked myself whether you haven’t begun to love him.... Oh, Colin, if that’s only so! You know I would give my life for that.”
Colin jumped to his feet.
“If you think I’m going to listen to your damned sentimental maunderings,” he said, “you’re awfully mistaken. Dennis is devoted to me, that is perfectly true. I effected that for two reasons. One, which concerns you, was in order to cut you out, dear Violet. I’ve done that, and I’ve seen how you’ve writhed with jealousy once or twice under the knowledge. The second reason was more important. I made Dennis love me, in order that I might have unbounded influence over him, for, as you’ve often told me, love is infinite in power. No wonder you were afraid; but, as a matter of fact, I haven’t used that influence over him, in the way that you expected. And now (perhaps this will be a relief to you) I’m going to change my tactics. I don’t like love you know; I’m going to make Dennis sorry he loved me. He hasn’t yet seen me with any—shall we call it with any clarity of vision? So important for a boy to form habits of accurate observation! He must get to dislike love, too, because it wounds him and makes him bleed.”
There spoke the very spirit and essence of wickedness, and yet Violet felt that it struggled for utterance, fighting its way to his lips. His purpose was plain, but there was something which contested it, an impediment that threatened its free exercise. He, so she guessed, was aware of it too, for though he had never been in more deadly and bitter a mood, never swifter with those characteristic gibes that pierced and stung, she felt that there was an effort about them, as if the bow that shot them had to be strung again and again instead of being always ready. In superficial and trivial ways also, in the days that followed, that struggle, whatever it was, seemed to manifest itself in strange little indecisions which irritated him and made him unlike himself. One day, for instance, he would tell her that connubial solitude, with an immortal grandmother thrown in, was too delicate a form of happiness, and that he would go up to London that afternoon, and an hour later he would have changed his mind, and told her to ask down a party for the week-end. Then, before she had done that, he would change his mind again, and say that he wanted nobody, and spent the day rambling about the park, or, in this hot spell of May weather, bathing and basking by the lake. Another day he started off to drive to Eton and see Dennis, to whom he had promised an early visit, but when that evening she asked him how Dennis was, he told her he had not been there.
They were at dinner, just the three of them, when he rapped this out at her, and it roused in old Lady Yardley some dim, disordered train of thought, for she began to speak in that level monotone which came out of her twilight mists.
“Yes, much wiser, much wiser,” she said. “Let there be no force, not even persuasion. Let him come to it naturally: it is bred in the bone. Do not make him drink of the spring: he will be thirsty someday, and then he will go to it.”
Colin turned sharply round.