“Ah, this is nice,” he said. “You have no idea how welcome you are. It was good of you to take pity on my loneliness. What a jolly evening we shall have. And Vittoria and Cecilia? How are they?”
A gleam brightened Uncle Salvatore’s gloom, and he fervently pressed Colin’s hand.
“They are well, thank God,” he said. “And while that is so, what matters anything?”
He appeared with a gesture of his hand to pluck some intruding creature from the region of his heart, and throw it into the garden-beds. Then he gave a little skip in the air.
“Collino mio!” he said. “You charm away my sad thoughts. Whatever happens to-morrow, I will be gay to-night. I will not drag your brightness down into my gloom and darknesses. Away with them, then!”
Colin fathomed the mountebank mind with an undeviating plummet. The depth (or shallowness) of it answered his fairest expectations. He found nothing inconsistent in this aspect of Salvatore with that which he had last presented here; the two, in fact, tallied with the utmost exactitude as the expression of one mind. They both chimed true to the inspiring personality. He waited, completely confident, for the advent of the opportunity.
That came towards the end of dinner: without even having been hilarious, Salvatore had at least been cheerful, and now, as suddenly as if a tap had been turned off, the flow of his enjoyment ceased. He sighed, he cleared his throat, he supported his head on his hands, and stared at the tablecloth. To Colin these signals were unmistakable.
“You’re in trouble, Uncle Salvatore,” he said softly, “and now for the first time I am glad that my father has gone back to England. If he were here, I should not be able to say what I mean to say, for, after all, he is my father, and he has always been most generous to me. But he is not equally generous to others who have claims on him. I have tried to make him see that, and, as you and I know, I have succeeded to some small extent. But the extent to which I have succeeded does not satisfy me. Considering all that I know, I am determined to do better for you than I have been able to make him do. If I am his son, I am equally my mother’s son. And you are her brother.”
Colin paused a moment, and, sudden as a highland spate, inspiration flooded his mind. He had not thought out with any precision what he meant to say, for that must depend on Salvatore, who might, equally well, have adopted the attitude of a proud and flashy independence. But he had declared for frayed cuffs and a fit of gloom, and Colin shaped his course accordingly.
“And I can’t forget,” he said, “that it was you who put me in possession of certain facts when you sent me those two letters of my mother. I learned from them what I had never dreamed of before. I never in the wildest nightmare thought that my father had not married your sister till after my birth. I should have had to know that sometime: on my father’s death it must have come out. And you have shown a wonderful delicacy in breaking the fact to me like that. I thank you for that, Uncle Salvatore; I owe you a deep debt of gratitude which I hope to repay!”