Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

Smarting of skin, but far sorer at heart, Dennis walked quietly off when he had dressed, and skirting the lake went up along the bracken-covered slopes of the park that looked out over the marsh. He longed to confide in his mother, and ask if she could account in any way for this Pentecost of trouble which the holidays had brought, and which had culminated in this thrashing, but in spite of the comfort she might have brought from the mere knowledge of her sympathy, he could not tell her of that, not because it was a humiliation to him, but because it was a disgrace to his father, and that must never be known to her. The offence which provoked it was no cause at all; in the Easter holidays he might have done that until seventy times seven, and his father would only have laughed, and called him a little devil, and thrown the missile back at him. And the same policy of repression must be preserved about his other woes. In whatever manner his father treated him, that was an affair that concerned themselves alone: mere manliness forbade him to go whimpering to anybody, and more stringent yet was the prohibition that his own love for his father enjoined on him. It was impossible to complain: he had got to shoulder his own burden whatever injustice and harshness had laid it on him.

He waded through the waist-high bracken with the scuttle of rabbits about him. There were patches of bare turf between the clumps of fern; it was great sport to walk through the bracken with a gun, and get a pot-shot at a rabbit that bolted across these clearings. Often had he done that with his father, but to-day he had not the least inclination to fetch his gun. He wanted only, since speaking to his mother was out of the question, to be alone, and stare this intolerable state of affairs in the face, and he sat down in one of these open spaces, with the aromatic smell of the woodland round him, and tried to focus it. He smarted with the blows he had received and with the utter injustice of them, but most of all his heart cried out against the virulent glee in his father’s face, when he told him to turn round again and asked him how he enjoyed it. If only he was like some other fellows at school who either disliked or just put up with their fathers, he would merely have been angry at this abominable treatment, and delighted that the beastly man was taking himself off to-morrow. But Dennis felt none of these natural sentiments; in spite of these harshnesses he would rapturously have gone with his father to Capri, if that had been allowed, unshaken in the faith (which for a minute or two last night had been so joyfully justified) that to-day or to-morrow his father would turn to him again, and be ‘ripping’ as no-one else in the world could be. But his father—and what had he himself done to evoke this desolating displeasure?—had altogether changed to him, he disliked him, and he wanted to hurt him, and finely he succeeded. As the sense of this bitter tragedy grew on him, Dennis could bear it no longer, but rolled over on his face, and, for the first time in this awful fortnight, sobbed with the pain of his wounded affection.

After a while he sat up again: there was no earthly use in indulging in such sloppy tricks, and, pulling himself together, he walked back to the house. It was close on lunch-time, and he made himself neat, for fear of provoking sarcastic comments, and sat in the gallery over a picture paper. Presently his mother and Colin came in together.

“Well, dear, nice bathe?” she said to him.

“Yes, mother, jolly and warm,” he said.

She came over to his chair, and leaned over him, putting her hands on his shoulders. Dennis could not help wincing at that.

“What’s the matter, darling?” she said.

“Nothing. I scratched my back against a snag as I was bathing,” he said. “Rather sore.”

Colin heard that, and instantly he thought to himself, “Now I’ll tell her: that will humiliate him.” But on the heels of that came some sudden glow of pride at the staunchness of the boy. He guessed that he said that, not to spare himself, but to spare him, and, as last night, the yearning for him, the affection he had not yet succeeded in killing, pulled at his heart.

It was an unutterable relief to Violet when, next morning, with charming farewells to her and Aunt Hester, and with a nod to Dennis, Colin drove off to catch his boat at Folkestone. She had ached and mourned over her boy’s misery, but at the same time she had rejoiced in that reticence he had observed to her, for there indeed was the banner of love flying bravely. If he had struck that, and come to her for comfort and with complaint, indeed there would have been no matter for wonder, but she delighted in the fact that he flew it still. But it was good that Colin was gone: poor Dennis had had a rotten time, and she longed to give him pleasanter days. Naturally, he had no inkling of the meaning of his tribulations, of the significance that underlay them, and she had no notion of telling him that, in her belief, a battle was going on that somehow centred round him, in which he, boyishly unheeding, was standing his ground in the face of black and bitter assaults. She knew well that it was not yet over, nor yet nearly over; he had but held his own, and fresh assaults, fiercer yet perhaps, would come. But just for the next few weeks there was truce, and she was thankful for that.