Colin listened to his own voice, which seemed to make itself articulate without any directing will of his own. The summer night was charged with the force of obedience to which his tongue moved against his teeth, and his lips formed letters, and his throat gave the gutturals. Literally, he did not know what he was going to say till he heard himself saying it. The breeze whispered in the stone-pine, and he spoke....
The breeze was still now and the stone-pine was silent. But he had said enough to make it necessary that Salvatore should reply. Presently a bat would flit through the arches of the pergola where they dined, or the wind would stir in the pine, and then he would speak again. There was just that same stir abroad on the night when he had listened from his bedroom to his father’s footfalls on the terrace.
“What do you mean, Collino?” said his uncle excitedly. “I cannot understand what you say. My sainted Rosina married your father on the first of March, for I glanced at the letters again before I sent them to you. Your birth....”
Colin interrupted.
“Ah, a bat,” he said. “I love bats. If you hold a handkerchief up does not a bat come to it? Let us interrupt our conversation for a moment.”
He spread his handkerchief over his head, and next moment Salvatore leaped to his feet, for there, beady-eyed and diabolical, with hooked wings as of parchment, spread out on either side of its furry body, one of the great southern bats alighted, making a cap for Colin’s golden head. Only for a moment it stopped there, and then flitted off into the dusk again.
“Soft, furry thing,” said Colin. “But you hate them, do you, Uncle Salvatore? It was stupid of me. Let us talk again!”
He hitched his chair a little closer to the table, and looked Salvatore straight in the eyes.
“But you have forgotten the dates on those letters you gave me,” he said. “My mother was married to my father not on the first of March, but on the thirty-first. The second letter recording Raymond’s birth and mine was written on the seventeenth.”
Again he paused.