“Very good. He was already engaged to her when he told me I had got everything. You don’t understand Colin. He hates more than he loves. He has hated me all my life. ‘By Jove, Raymond will be happy!’ I’ll be even with Colin some day. Now I’m going to see him. Or shall I say: ‘By Jove, Colin will be happy?’ Then you’ll consider me a generous fellow.”
Once again Philip tried to put himself in Raymond’s place, and made allowance for his bitter blackness. His hand went on to the boy’s shoulder again, with less of authority and more of attempted affection.
“Raymond, you must do better than this,” he said. “You would be very unwise to see Colin and Violet just now, but if you insist on doing so, you shall see them in my presence. I can’t trust you, in the mood you’re in, not to be violent, not to say or do something which you would bitterly repent, and which they would find it hard to forgive. And if, which I deny, Colin has always hated you, what about yourself?”
Both of them now were on bed-rock. By implication, by admission, by denial even, they had got down to the hatred that, like a vein of murderous gold, ran through the very foundation of the brothers’ existence. Who knew what struggle might have taken place, what prenatal wrestling in the very womb of life, of which the present antagonism was but a sequel, logical and inevitable!
Even as Philip spoke, he half-realised the futility of bringing argument to bear on Raymond’s nature, for this hatred sprang from some ineradicable instinct, an iron law on which intelligence and reason could but perch like a settling fly. He could deny that Colin hated his brother, he could urge Raymond to show himself as generous as he believed Colin to have been, but nothing that he could say, no persuasion, no authority could mitigate this fraternal hostility. And even while he denied Colin’s animosity, with the evidence he had already brought forward to back it, he found himself wondering if at heart Colin could feel the generosity he had expressed, or whether it was not a mere superficial good-nature, mingled with contempt perhaps, that had given voice to it.
Raymond had ceased from the clutching and squeezing of his hands.
“You don’t know what Colin is,” he said, “and I know it is no use trying to convince you. I shan’t try. You judge by what you see of him and me, and you put me down for a black-hearted, sullen fellow, and he’s your heart’s darling.”
“You’ve got no right to say that,” said Philip.
“But can I help knowing it, father?” asked he.
Philip felt that his very will-power was in abeyance; he could not even want to readjust the places which his two sons held in his heart, or, rather, to find place in his heart for the son who had never been installed there yet. And there would be no use in “wanting,” even if he could accomplish that. Colin held every door of his heart, and with a grudging sense of justice towards Raymond, he was aware that Colin would grant no admittance to his brother. Or was that conviction only the echo of his own instinct that he wanted no one but Colin there? He had no love to spare for Raymond. Such spring of it as bubbled in him must fall into Colin’s cup, the cup that never could be filled.