Colin

by E. F. Benson

Raymond could not refuse to do that, and the moment he had stepped over to Philip’s side, she got up.

That passivity was quite out of her reach just now in this tension of waiting. Soon Colin would be here, and she would have to face and accept the situation, but the waiting for it.... If only even something could happen to Colin which would prevent his arrival. Why had she suggested that sending of the motor to Dover? Had she not done that, he could not have got here till to-morrow morning, and she would have had time to harden, to crystallise herself, to render herself impervious to any touch from outside.

She was soon to be a Stanier bride, and there in the tall chair with the ivory cane was the pattern and example for her. It was on old Lady Yardley that she must frame herself, quenching any fire of her own, and content to smoulder her life away as mistress of the family home which she so adored, and of all the countless decorations and riches of her position. Never had the wonder and glory of the place seemed to her so compelling as when now, driven from the terrace by Raymond’s importunity, she walked along its southern front and through the archway in the yew-hedge where she and Colin had stood on his last night here. It dozed in the tranquillity of the July evening, yellow and magnificent, the empress of human habitations. Round it for pillow were spread its woodlands, on its breast for jewel lay the necklace of deep flower-beds; tranquil and stable through its three centuries, it seemed the very symbol and incarnation of the pride of its owners; to be its mistress and the mother of its lords yet unborn was a fate for which she would not have exchanged a queen’s diadem.

Whatever conditions might be attached to it, she would accept them—as indeed she had already pledged herself to do—with the alacrity with which its founder had, in the legend, signed his soul away in that bargain which had so faithfully been kept by the contracting parties.... And it was not as if she disliked Raymond; she was merely utterly indifferent to him, and longing for the time when, in the natural course of things, he would surely grow indifferent to her. How wise and indulgent to his male frailties would she then show herself; how studiously and how prudently blind, with the blindness of those who refuse to see, to any infidelities.

Had there not been in the world a twin-brother of his, or, even if that must be, if she had not stood with him under this serge-arch of yews beneath the midsummer moon and given him that cousinly kiss, she would not now be feeling that his return, or, at any rate, the waiting for it, caused a tension that could scarcely be borne. She had made her choice and had no notion—so her conscious mind told her—of going back on it; it was just this experience of seeing Colin again for the first time after her choice had been made that set her nerves twanging at Raymond’s touch. Could she, by a wish or the wave of a wand, put off Colin’s advent until she had actually become Raymond’s wife, how passionately would she have wished, how eagerly have waved. Or if by some magic, black or white, she could have put Colin out of her life, so that never would she set eyes on him again or hear his voice, his banishment from her would at that moment have been accomplished. She would not admit that she loved him; she doggedly told herself that she did not, and her will was undeviatingly set on the marriage which would give her Stanier.

Surely she did not love Colin; they had passed all their lives in the tranquillity of intimate friendship, unruffled by the faintest breath of desire. And then, in spite of her dogged assertion, she found that she asked herself, incredulously enough, whether on that last evening of Colin’s the seed of fire had not sprouted in her? She disowned the notion, but still it had reached her consciousness, and then fiercely she reversed and denied it, for she abhorred the possibility. It would be better that she should hate Colin than love him.

The evening was stiflingly hot, and in the park, where her straying feet had led her, there was no breath of wind stirring to disperse the heaviness. The air seemed thick with fecundity and decay; there was the smell of rotting wood, of crumbling fungi overripe that mingled with the sharp scent of the bracken and the faint aroma of the oaks, and buzzing swarms of flies gave token of their carrion banquets. The open ground to the north of the house was no better; to her sense of overwrought expectancy, it seemed as if some siege and beleaguerment held her. She wanted to escape, but an impalpable host beset her, not of these buzzing flies only and of the impenetrable oppression of the sultry air, through which she could make no sortie, but, internally and spiritually, of encompassing foes and hostile lines through which her spirit had no power to break.

There on the terrace, from which, as from under some fire she could not face, she had lately escaped, there would be the physical refreshment of the current of sea-wind moving up, as was its wont towards sunset, across the levels of the marsh; but there, to this same overwrought consciousness, would be Raymond, assiduous and loverlike, with odious little touches of his affectionate fingers. But, so she told herself, it was enforced on her to get used to them; he had a right to them, and it was Colin, after all, who was responsible for her shrinking from them, even as she shrank from the evil buzzings of the flies. If only she had not kissed Colin, or if, having done that, he had felt a tithe of what it had come to signify to her.

But no hint of heart-ache, no wish that fate had decreed otherwise, had troubled him. He had asked for a cousinly kiss, and in that light geniality of his he had said, out of mere politeness, and out of hatred for Raymond (no less light and genial) that it was “maddening” to think that his brother would be the next visitor there.

She had waited for his reply to her letter announcing that Raymond had proposed to her and that she was meaning to accept him, with a quivering anxiety which gave way when she received his answer to a sense of revolt which attempted to call itself relief. He seemed, so far from finding the news “maddening,” to welcome and rejoice in it. He congratulated her on achieving her ambition of being mistress of Stanier, and on having fallen in love with Raymond. He could not be “hurt”—as she had feared—at her news; it was altogether charming.