“Snub him?” he said. “How on earth can I snub Raymond? He’s got everything. I might as well snub God.”
This was a new aspect.
“I can’t do otherwise, father,” said the boy. “I can only just behave decently to Raymond in public and avoid him in private. Don’t bother about Raymond. Raymond hates me, and if I gave him any opportunity, he would merely gloat over me. I can’t behave differently to him; I’m doing the best I can. If you aren’t satisfied with me, I’ll go away again till it’s all over and irrevocable. Perhaps you would allow me to go back to Capri.”
Philip’s heart yearned to him. “I wish I could help you,” he said.
“You do help me. But let’s leave Raymond out of the question. There’s a matter that bothers me much more, and that’s Violet. If I let myself go at all, I don’t know where I should be. What am I to do about her? Am I right, do you think, in the way I’m behaving? We were chums—then she became to me, as I told you, so much more than a chum. I can’t get back on to the old footing with her; it would hurt too much. And she’s hurt that I don’t. I can see that. I think I was wrong to come back here at all, and yet how lovely it was! You all seemed pleased to see me—all but Raymond—and I didn’t guess the bitterness of it.”
It was inevitable that Philip should recall his surprise at Violet’s passivity. Colin, whose heart he knew, had been, in all outward appearance, just as passive, and he could not help wondering whether that passivity of Violet’s cloaked a tumult as profound as Colin’s. The suspicion had blinked at him before, like some flash of distant lightning; now it was a little more vivid. If that were true, if from that quarter a storm were coming up, better a thousand times that it should come now than later. Tragic, indeed, would it be if, after she had married Raymond, it burst upon them all.... But he had nothing approaching evidence on the subject; it might well be that his wish that Violet could have loved Colin set his imagination to work on what had really no existence outside his own brain.
“I hate seeing you suffer, Colin,” he said, “and if you want to go back to Capri, of course you may. But you’ve got to get used to it some time, unless you mean to banish yourself from Stanier altogether. Don’t do that.”
Colin pressed his father’s arm.
“I’ll do better, father,” he said. “I’ll begin at once. Where’s Violet?”
It was in pursuance of this resolve, it must be supposed, that when Lady Yardley’s rubber of whist was over that night, Colin moved across to the open door on to the terrace where Violet was standing. In some spasm of impatience at Raymond’s touch she had just got up from the sofa where he had planted himself close to her, leaving him with an expression, half offended, half merely hungry....