“Raymond and I were born,” he said slowly and distinctly, “before my father’s marriage. The letters which you gave me prove it. If further proof was wanted, you would find it at the Consulate where the marriage took place. Some one has tampered with the register, and the date has been made to look as if it recorded the first of March. But it does not: it records the thirty-first of March, and the ‘three’ has been erased. But it is still visible. I saw it myself, for I went across to Naples to see my father off, and subsequently at the Consulate made a copy of the entry. I should have proposed myself to stay with you that night, Uncle Salvatore, but I had no spirit left in me to see anybody. When you sent me those two letters of my mother, I hoped against hope perhaps, that there was some ghastly mistake. I nearly destroyed them, indeed, in order that from them, at any rate, there should be no conceivable evidence. But when I saw the entry in the book at the Consulate, with the mark of the erasure visible to any careful scrutiny, I knew that it was no use to fight against facts. On my father’s death, the evidence of the date of his marriage must be produced, and it will be clear what happened. My mother bore him two boys—I was one. Subsequently he married her, hoping, I have no doubt, to beget from her an heir to the name and the property.”
The wind sighed heavily in the pine, and little stirs of it rustled the vine-leaves.
“Is it at no cost to me,” said Colin, “that I keep my mother’s letter which proves Raymond and me to be bastards? Oh, it is an ugly word, and if you were me, you would know that it is an ugly thing. Without my mother’s letter which you sent me, it would be hard indeed to prove, indeed, any one might copy out the entry at the Consulate and fail to see the erasure altogether. Raymond, at my father’s death would succeed, and I, his twin, beloved of him, would take an honourable place in the eyes of the world, for it is not nothing to be born a Stanier.”
Colin’s voice was soft and steadfast.
“But my mother’s letter to you makes it impossible for me to have honour in the eyes of the world, and to preserve my own,” he said. “Ah, why did you send me those two letters, Uncle Salvatore? It was in all innocence and kindness that you sent them, and you need not remind me that I asked for them. Having seen them, what could any one with a shred of honour do but to admit the truth of the whole ghastly business? The only wish that I have is that my father shall not know that I know. All I want is that he, when the hour of his death comes, should hope that the terrible fraud which has been practised, will never be detected. But for that letter of my mother’s, that would undoubtedly have happened. The register at the Consulate would have been copied at his death by some clerk, and the Consul would have certificated its accuracy. Look at me, then, now, and look at yourself in the same light, you of unblemished descent, and me and Raymond!”
Salvatore had certainly woke out of his dejection.
“But it’s impossible,” he cried, beating the table. “I sent you two letters; the first, dated March the first, announced my sainted Rosina’s marriage to your father. Where is it? Produce it!”
Colin was quite prepared for that. He put his sun-browned fingers into his breast-pocket, and drew out a paper.
“I can’t show you the original letters,” he said, “because it was clearly my duty to put them into inviolable custody as soon as possible. I sent them, in fact, as soon as I had seen the register at the Consulate, to my bank, with orders that they were to be kept there until I gave further instructions, or until the news of my death reached them. In that case, Uncle Salvatore, I gave instructions that they were to be sent to my father. But before I despatched them to the bank, I made a copy of them, and here that copy is.”
He passed over to his uncle the copy he had made of the letter that afternoon, before (instead of sending it to the bank) he locked the original safely away upstairs. It was an accurate copy, except that it was dated March 31. Salvatore took it and read it; it tallied, but for the date, with his recollection of it.