“I often thought of telling you something about Raymond,” he said, “which perhaps you never guessed. Do you know I actually saw him drown? Only just for a second but such an interesting one. I can see it now, like some scene on the movies. I had gone down to the lake after him, heard the crash of the ice, and there he was in the water. There was nothing to be done. If I had jumped in after him I should only have drowned as well, and you wouldn’t have liked that. Nor would I.”
Violet felt herself shudder, not at what Colin had done or what he had not done but at what he was.... That trembling passed down the bare arm in which Colin had linked his.
“That’s not really news to me,” she said. “I guessed it.”
Colin pressed her arm.
“I wondered if you had,” he said. “Characteristic of me, wasn’t it, to be in at the death. My dear, how horrified you are at me. You’re trembling. I rather like your being horrified at me, and yet I rather resent it. What odd people we are, to be sure.... Are you glad to see me, Vi? Pleased I came down? Rather a difficult question, isn’t it? I make you shudder sometimes; I make you freeze. And yet you love me. That’s what tortures you.... Look, there’s the door in the yew hedge! It was exactly there you stood, when you found out you loved me. And the next morning you threw Raymond over. I adored that morning. However, we’ll leave these romantic reminiscences, and come on to this evening. Cigarette? My God, Violet, what an evening!”
He offered her his case, and then took one himself, nursing the match in his hollowed hands. His face vividly lit, glowed with some elfish glee.
“What a menagerie!” he said. “I don’t suppose if you searched through all England, and goodness knows there are monstrosities enough everywhere, that you’d find such a collection. The whole lot of them ought to go into Barnum’s show. Look at Granny! She would be the ‘World-famous Animated Corpse.’ She’s not alive, she’s been dead for centuries, and I’ve got some uncanny power of animating her. Is she immortal, do you think?—- an immortal corpse? Will she see us all out? I shouldn’t wonder.”
Colin sat down on a bench by the yew hedge drawing Violet gently with him.
“But after all she only comes on for her evening ‘turn,’” he said, “and it rather amuses me to hear her talk about Raymond. She’s almost a museum piece, isn’t she? They’ll send down from the British Museum some day, and say her case is ready for her, and they’ll put her in some room full of Anglo-Saxon remains. Really I’m rather proud of her: she’s a bore, of course, but there are worse things than bores. Aunt Hester, for instance. What an awful old woman! What a grizzly kitten! She’s prinking before the glass now, I’ll bet, because I said all the handsome young men in London were in love with her. There’s an object lesson for you, as to how not to grow old. A cocotte of sixty—I think I shall tell Nino to make love to her. She would marry him, I’m sure, if he asked her.”
Colin paused, and Violet could guess what was coming next.