“Come and have a glass of wine, Nino,” he said. “Come quietly, the signora has gone to bed.”
He led the way into the dining-room, and brought out a bottle of wine.
“There, sit down,” he said softly. “Cigarettes? Wine? Now for another of your histories only fit for boys to hear, not women. So Tiberius had supper with a gilded girl to wait on him, and a gilded boy to give him wine. And what then?”
The atrocious tale shocked nobody; this bright-eyed Nino was just a Faun with the candour of the woodland and the southern night for conscience. In face and limb and speech he was human, but not of the humanity which wrestles with evil and distrusts joy. And just as Colin knew himself to be, except in his northern colouring, another Nino in bodily form, so, in a resemblance more remarkable yet, he recognised his spiritual kinship with this incandescent young pagan. Violet, he thought, had once been like that, but this love had come which in some way had altered her, giving her a mysterious fatiguing depth, a dim, tiresome profundity into which she seemed to want to drag him too. All her charm, her beauty, were hers still, but they had got tinged and stained with this tedious gravity. She had lost the adorable soullessness, which knew no instinct beyond its own desire, and on which no frost of chill morality had ever fallen....
Colin had been hospitable towards Nino’s glass; the boy was becoming Faun and Bacchant in one; he ought to have had a wreath of vine-leaves in his hair. It amused Colin to see how gracefully intoxication gained on him; there would be no sort of vin triste about Nino, only a livelier gesticulation to help out the difficulties of pronunciation.
“And then the melancholy seized Tiberius,” said Nino with a great hiccup, “for all that he had done, and it must be a foolish fellow, signor, who is melancholy for what he has done. I would be more likely to get the melancholy when I was old for the things I might have done and had not. And the signor is like me, I think. Ah, thank you, no more wine. I am already half tipsy. But it is very good wine.”
“Talk yourself sober, then, Nino,” said Colin, filling his glass.
“What, then, shall I tell you? All Capri is in love with the signora and you, some with one and some with the other. It was thought at first that you must be brother and sister, so like you are, and both golden. You were too young, they thought, to be married; it was playtime still with you.”
“Are you going to marry, Nino?” asked Colin.
“There is time yet. Presently perhaps. I do not reap in spring.”