Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

Next morning he took Jim off in the two-seater to play golf—Dennis would lend him his clubs—and they came back late for lunch, better friends than ever. Afterwards there was some rabbit-potting, at which Jim excelled, and Colin found occasion to say to Dennis, “I wonder if you’ll ever learn to shoot like that.” And there were dreadful games of lawn tennis, in which Colin, saying that he was the worst player of the four, must play with Jim, against Violet and Dennis. He really was the best, so of course they won. All this was sufficient to turn the boy’s head, and Jim became slightly condescending to his friend. But when he said to Dennis:

“I say, you’re father’s pretty rough on you sometimes,” with the intention of being consolatory and friendly, he found he had strangely miscalculated. Up went Dennis’s chin.

“Rough on me?” he said. “What on earth do you mean? He’s perfectly ripping to me.”

Finally, on the last evening of that nightmare week, Colin made it impossible for Jim, after a decent allowance of champagne at dinner, to refuse a couple of glasses of port. He became rather tipsy, and when, with a rolling eye and a menacing sense of rising nausea, he hurried away to his room, Colin watched him go with a shrug of the shoulders. “Nice sort of friends you bring to the house, Dennis,” he said. That seemed to round off the visit very pleasantly.

Colin was sitting up alone that night after the others had gone upstairs. He had been more brutal than usual with Dennis at dinner, and for the first time he had seen Dennis bite his lip, obviously to keep tears back.... But, in spite of all his pitiless persecution, he knew that he was no nearer to the attainment of his purpose. As far as Dennis himself was concerned, he had systematically and continuously hurt and wounded him in that attempt to which he was committed, to kill his love, but no failure could at present have been more complete. Often when the whip of his tongue had been cruellest, and his cunning to hurt most diabolical, he had looked at Dennis saying, “Well, answer me, can’t you?” and Dennis had raised to him troubled and bewildered eyes in which no spark of hate smouldered. There was no meekness about Dennis; he could answer back with his head up, quite unsubdued and unafraid, but in vain Colin looked for any sign that his love was ailing or like to die. And occasionally when he relaxed, and gave him a kind word, love leaped sparkling to his eyes and his beautiful mouth. What confirmed this impression was the pride of the boy, for he never, as Colin knew, uttered to his mother a single word of complaint, or went to her for comfort. Little as Colin knew of love, he knew that here was the noble pride of love, which would never admit failing or blemish in the object of its high affection.

Colin opened the door on to the terrace and strolled out into the warm pregnant night. There was something more indicative of failure than this impregnable loyalty of Dennis’s, and that was his own unchanged affection for the boy. In every possible way that could be devised by his alert perceptive brain, he had wounded and injured Dennis’s heart, and though there is no such royal road towards hate as to injure, he had made no headway at all. His devotion to hatred, his vow to himself, so faithfully kept, to all that was evil, had often made him bubble with secret glee to see Dennis wince under those barbed attacks, but all the time there existed that soft aching tenderness for him, so easy to stifle but so impossible to smother. Like eternity, as he had sneered to Douglas, it seemed of very durable stuff. All this fortnight’s persecution had done nothing to break it up. Uninvited, it had entered his heart, and nothing could stir it. He could act as if he had no other feeling for the boy than this contemptuous aversion, but something ached....

The night-breeze drew landward from the sea and sometimes it fell altogether, and there was dead calm, and again he heard its whispered approach in the trees by the lake, and presently it flowed over the garden and streamed on to the terrace. He tried, as he so often had done, to lay himself open to the spell that had woven the prosperity of Stanier; he thought of Dennis heir to all its glories and possessor of them when he had gone from this world, and at that the flicker of jealousy, a strange offspring of love and hate, shot up in his heart. But supposing Dennis died before he did.... Would he sooner see him lying dead, and know that he, at any rate, would never succeed to Stanier and its magnificence, or when death drew near to himself, see Dennis by his bedside, and picture him assuming what was his to enjoy no longer? On his deathbed surely he would entirely hate Dennis, and wish that he lay there in his stead.

At the end of the long façade there stood the chapel unused since Douglas’s departure, and Colin going back into his room let himself into the corridor which led to it, turning up the lights as he went. He had not been there since the night of Vincenzo’s death, and now it seemed to him that if he sat and meditated there, where so often he had made the consecration of himself to evil, he could arrive at some clearer and conscious realization of it. He told himself that he hated love, and delighted in hate, but no fervour warmed his creed. In that sanctuary of Satan the truth of that might shine more vividly on him, and he might get rid of that fancy that Dennis’s eyes, eager and ready to kindle; or sad but without reproach, were watching him. Surely they would not follow him where Dennis had never been.

Colin sat quiet in his place looking at the altar. The faint odour of incense still hung about, but emotionally the place was dead. He thought of Vincenzo twitching and grinning as he knelt: he thought of Douglas, lifting high the consecrated elements, so soon to be a mockery and a derision, but his mind gave no welcome or greeting to the remembrance....

Well, his deeds must atone for his lack of fervour, and presently he rose and went back through the silent house, and upstairs along the dim-lit passage.