Raymond saw his father in the doorway. “May I stop, then, father?” he said.
“By all means. We all wish it,” said he.
Raymond looked back again at his brother. Colin was standing just below the portrait of his ancestor, the very image and incarnation of him.
“I’ve got you to thank, I expect, Colin,” he said.
Their eyes met; Colin’s glittered like a sword unsheathed in the sunlight of his hatred and triumph; Raymond’s smouldered in the blackness of his hatred and defeat.
“I wish there was anything I could do for you, Ray,” said Colin gently.
The entertainment which Colin had anticipated from these alterations in the cast of this domestic drama did not fall short of his expectations. He held Raymond in the hollow of his hand, for Raymond’s devotion to Violet, gross and animal though it had been, gave Colin a thousand opportunities of making him writhe with the shrewd stings of jealousy, and with gay deliberation he planted those darts. The coup de grâce for Raymond would not come yet, his father’s death would give the signal for that; but at present there was some very pretty baiting to be done. Not one of those darts, so becomingly beribboned, failed to hit its mark: a whispered word to Violet which made the colour spring bright and eager to her face, a saunter with her along the terrace in the evening, and, even more than these, Colin’s semblance of sparing Raymond’s feelings, his suggestion that he should join them in any trivial pursuit—all these were missiles that maddingly pierced and stung.
No less adequately did Philip and old Lady Yardley fill their minor parts; he, with the sun of Colin’s content warming him, was genial and thoughtful towards Raymond in a way that betrayed without possibility of mistake the sentiment from which it sprang; while Lady Yardley, braced and invigorated by the same emotion, was strangely rejuvenated, and her eyes, dim with age, seemed to pierce the mists of the encompassing years and grew bright with Colin’s youth.
As regards his own relations with Violet, Colin found he could, for the present anyhow, manage very well; the old habits of familiarity and intimacy appeared to supply response sufficient; for she, shuddering now, as at some nightmare, at her abandoned engagement to Raymond and blinded with the splendour of the dawn of her love, saw him as a god just alighted on the gilded and rosy hills.... Colin shrugged his shoulders at her illusion; she presented to him no such phantasmal apparition, but he could give her liking and friendship, just what she had always had from him. Soon, so he hoped, this vision of himself would fade from her eyes, for even as he had found his father’s paternal devotion to him in Capri a fatiguing and boring business, so he foresaw a much acuter gêne that would spring from a persistence of Violet’s love. No doubt, however, she would presently become more reasonable.
What above all fed Colin’s soul was to stroll into the smoking-room when Violet had gone upstairs, and his father had retired to his library, and to make Raymond drink a cup more highly spiced with gall than that which had refreshed him in public. Raymond had usually got there first, while Colin lingered a moment longer with Violet, and had beside him a liberally mixed drink, and this would serve for Colin’s text: