There spoke the Faun, the woodland, the drinker of sweet beverages, who drank with filled cup till the drink was done, and wiped his mouth and smiled and was off again. By a luxury in contrast, Colin envisaged Violet lying cool and white in the room above, sleeping, perhaps, already in answer to the suggestive influence of his wish, while he below breathed so much more freely in this atmosphere of Fauns, where nothing was wicked and nothing was holy, and love was not an affair of swimming eyes and solemn mouth. Love was a laugh.... Nino, the handsome boy, no longer existed for him in any personal manner. Nino was just part of the environment, a product and piece of the joyous paganism with which the night was thick. The pale-blue flower of the plumbago that clothed the southern wall of the house nodded in the open window-frame; the stir of the wind whispered; the star-light, with a moon lately risen, all strove to be realised, and, Nino seemed some kind of bilingual interpreter of them, no more than that, who, being boy, spoke with human voice, and, being Faun, spoke the language of Nature, cruel and kindly Nature, who loved joy and was utterly indifferent to sorrow. She went on her course with largesse for lovers and bankruptcy for the bilious and the puritan. She turned her face away from pain, and, with a thumb reversed, condemned it. She had no use for suffering or for the ugly. The bright-eyed and the joyful were her ministers, on whatever errand they came. Thought and tenderness and any aspiration after the spiritual were her foes, for in such ascetic fashion of living there was sorrow, there was fatigue and striving.
Colin was at home here. Like a fish put back into water, after a panting excursion into a rarefied air, his gills expanded again, and drank in the tide.
“And have you chosen your girl yet, Nino?” he asked.
“Dio! No. I am but twenty. Presently I will look about and find who is fat and has a good dowry. There is Seraphina Costi; she has an elder brother, but the inheritance will be hers. He passes for the son of Costi, but we all know he is no son of Costi. It was like this, Signor Colin....”
“Si, Signor Nino,” said Colin.
“Scusi! But to me you are Signor Colin. No, with loving thanks, no more wine. My father says it is a waste to drink good wine when one is drunk. My father was boatman to your father before you and I were born. That is strange to think on; how the old oaks flourish and bear leaf still. Two stepmothers already have I had, and there may be a third yet. Have you stepmothers, signor? I would put all old women out of the way, and all old men. The world is for the young. Sometimes I think to myself, would it not be very easy to put my hands round my father’s neck, and squeeze and squeeze again, and wait till he was still, and then leave him thus and go to bed. They would find him there in the morning; perhaps I should be the first to find him, and it would be said that he had died in his chair, all cool and comfortable.”
Colin was conscious of some rapturous surprise at himself in his appreciation of the evening as it was, compared with the evening as it might have been. Normally, he would have played a couple of games of piquet with Violet, and thereafter have drowsily rejoined her. There would have been whispers of love and then sleep, all that was already routine to him. Instead, he, through the medium of this wonderful Faun, was finding himself, and that was so much better than finding Violet. Nino, with those swift gesticulations, was shewing him not Nino, but himself. But by now the boy was getting extremely drunk—the vision was clouding over. There was time for just another question or two.
“But aren’t you afraid of Satana?” asked Colin, “if you kill your father?”
“Why should I be afraid? Satana is a good friend to me and I to him. Why should we fall out, he and I?”
Those full eyelids drooped, and as, on this morning, the lashes swept the brown cheek.