Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

Violet’s heart began to ache for him.

“Let’s see: where have I got to?” she said. “Wonderful vintage, he says, in the lovely hot weather they’re having.... He’s been bathing all the morning, and has had lunch, and is going to sleep....”

“But no message for me?” persisted Dennis.

Violet finished the letter and tore it up. There was a good deal about Dennis, though nothing for him. But it struck her that these uncomplimentary comments were forced. In one Colin had first written ‘the boy,’ but had crossed that out and substituted ‘the brat.’ He had not thought of him as ‘the brat’ originally: ‘the brat’ was the image under which he schooled himself to think of him. The sentences had no spontaneous ring about them; they expressed what he tried to feel. She felt sure that her interpretation was no fanciful one.

Dennis had accepted her silence to his repeated question.

“And what else has he been doing?” he said.

“Dining out in the garden every night,” said Violet, “and looking at them making the wine. The garden is a good deal burned up with the heat. Nothing else. The bathing takes half the day.”

Dennis crossed from the far side of the hearth-rug and made a back for himself against her knees.

“It sounds awfully ripping and lazy,” he said. “Father loves it, doesn’t he? I should have liked to have gone with him for a bit.”

“Perhaps another year he’ll take you,” said Violet. She felt no sense of injury in the fact that Dennis wanted to be out there with him, rather than at home with her. She thanked God that it was so, that all these wretched days, when his father had persecuted him, had left no stain on the luminous brightness of his affection. At all costs she wanted that to retain its shining quality. Even if Dennis suffered, he suffered in the cause of love: if he had not loved his father, he would have thought of him now as merely a very disagreeable person whose absence was a matter for congratulation. But even now Dennis wanted to be with him; he was disappointed that his postponed return would rob him of a glimpse before he went back to Eton.