Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

For the moment this hypothesis seemed to account for the whole project, and Colin unwillingly accepted it. It was disappointing: it was just another instance of that collapse and cowardice which came over his ancestor, and made his last year on earth such a pitiful surrender. And yet ... why did he not then put his plan into execution, if this was the design of it? For a whole year after the date recorded on this drawing, he practised his belated pieties, and yet never a sod was cut nor a brick laid in the erection of this chapel. Surely he would have hastened on the building of it with the same speed and enthusiasm with which he had built the house for his own glory. Clearly, if this solution was correct, and he had intended to build a chapel here with lodging for a priest, he abandoned it. But why, if his soul was set on pieties and repentance?

Colin got up from the chair in which he had been sitting for the last half-hour since Violet had left him, frowning and puzzling over this riddle. He felt that there was a key, which would fit the facts, and that he was hovering round its discovery. It was close at hand, but some sluggish mist of his own mind obscured it. He paced up and down his room for a minute or two, then went to the window, open behind its tapping blind, which he drew half up. Only the faintest night-wind stirred, the sky was bare, and the full moon rode high in the south among the stars. Just in front the terrace lay grey, and the garden dark, but beyond the square black line of the yew-hedge the lake shone so bright in the moonlight that it seemed a sheet of pale flame, brimming and molten. To right and left rose the swelling uplands of the park, and all this spacious stateliness within and without was the creation of that ancestor of his who had planned a sanctuary. Colin felt no doubt that his spirit survived in some remorseful hell, and what more poignant hell could there be for it, now shorn of its pomp and prosperity, and naked in the immaterial world, than the splendour of its earthly habitation where it no longer had a place? Somehow his spirit seemed close and ready to communicate: could it not give to one who so rapturously claimed kinship and sympathy with it, some hint, some expression of itself that should awake in him the comprehension of its strange desire to build a sanctuary?...

Colin stood quite still, looking out on to the silent tranquillity, not cudgelling his brain with conjecture any more, but letting it lie open and quiet to the midnight, to see if, from outside or from its own subconscious activity, there did not emerge what he was seeking for. It was curious that a satisfactory solution of this point seemed of such immense importance, but, rightly or wrongly, he believed that it held some great significance.... And certainly there was a power abroad to-night, something that tingled and throbbed in his veins. It was hard to keep still under it, not to let his brain busy itself with ingenious surmise, but he had done that already to the utmost of his power, and now, with this stir of force round him, he must let himself stay passive and receptive....

Suddenly the faint stirring of the night-breeze grew stronger, it ruffled his hair, it blew the cracking, flapping blind out horizontal into the room, and the pages of the manuscript on his table whispered and shivered as if they were talking to themselves and giggling together. And then the mist that had obscured his mind was whisked away, and he knew he had the explanation for which he had been seeking. In a couple of steps he was back at his table, and, open in the manuscript he had been reading all day, there lay before his eyes the final words of it which he had read uncomprehendingly before, but now saw to contain the key he looked for.

“How I would rejoice,” he said aloud, “to build some shrine in honour of my Lord, where I would worship him who has wrought so great benefits upon me; some sanctuary where I might worthily adore him——”

There was no need to search further: all was clear. It was indeed a sanctuary he had planned, in honour not of God but of him who had given him all that his soul desired. Clear, too, at last, was the reason why he had never built it, for just then, when it was freshly planned, fear began to darken round him, and the shadows to stalk, and he turned from his Lord and Benefactor, and wrote no more in his praise, but prayed and fasted in impious piety.

One o’clock had already sounded, and Colin replaced the Memoirs in a drawer and turned the key on them. The gust from outside that seemed literally to have blown the mist from him, so that he saw sharp and distinct across the sundering centuries the purpose of this design and the sure reason for its abandonment, died into stillness again, but the night seemed charged and alive with consciousness. All day he had put himself to soak, so to speak, in the spirit that infused these Memoirs with so sympathetic a vitality: now, even when the book was finished, it was friendly round him, stimulating and quickening him, so that reinforced with its vigour the idea of the physical refreshment of sleep seemed ludicrous. To sleep was to abandon your consciousness for the sake of its recuperation: it was the expression of his consciousness that he needed.

He put his hand on the low window-sill, and vaulted out on to the terrace, where he had watched Dennis’s early essays in locomotion. In the stillness, past and present seemed melted into one: the centuries no longer represented the movement of time, they had not been borne away on its stream, but were static as if portrayed in a picture. It might have been on this very night that the original bargain was made, it might have been here and now that his ancestor was devising the sanctuary on the little plateau that lay among the oaks which he had planted. In the moonlight Colin could almost visualize the windowed corridor that had been planned to run from the corner of the room which he had just quitted, till it joined among the trees the west wall of the sanctuary. What a symbol would that shrine have been of old Colin’s life, what a jubilee of the dedication of himself! There without doubt he intended to celebrate those Satanic rites, that worship of evil for evil’s sake in which they, to whom the sacred service of love was a thing abhorred and derided, renewed their allegiance to the enemy of God, and in the blasphemy of the Black Mass drew near to their Lord and Benefactor, who strengthened and refreshed their souls. The shallow, the indifferent, who just made as pleasant a pilgrimage as possible out of life, or who, from vague instincts, tried to be good, or merely fell into evil because they were weak or self-indulgent, could have no part in that: it would be savourless as bran to any who had no living belief both in God and in Satan; for blasphemy signified nothing to souls who did not hate the sublime majesty of love. They who took part in its dark mysteries were they who believed in God, and who, by their deliberate choice, rejected and hated and defied Him. Old Colin would have been a fit worshipper there, had not that senile panic, hoisting the white flag of his surrender, overtaken him before his bond was due. It was a craven, pitiful end: it was not love of his life-long Enemy that drove him to that camp, but fear of him who had so magnificently befriended him.

Colin had wandered in the moonlight past the end of the terrace, and now stood on the plateau, where, according to the plan, the sanctuary was to have been built. Round him rose the tranced forest-trees, the grass, drenched with dew, glimmered like a spread sheet of moonstone. Then, suddenly springing up again, the wind warm and caressing made the branches of the oaks whisper and sway, and through him ran a great exaltation. He raised his hands, spreading his arms out wide.

“O Lord and Benefactor,” he said. “How will I rejoice to build a shrine in honour of thee....”