These weeks had given her a hint, a foretaste, of what would be hers, and once more, as in her maidenhood, she felt that she would have made any marriage in order to robe herself thus. The splendour of what she was lent had set light to her old ambitions again, and this was all to be hers, not lent, but her own. She would enter into the fabled inheritance of the legend, that legend to which, for its very remoteness, she had never given two serious thoughts. But now, though it still wore, like a cloak over its head, its unconvincing mediævalism, the shape of it vaguely outlined and indifferently regarded, had something sinister about it. It did not matter; it was only an ugly shadow in the background, but now she averted her eyes from it, instead of merely not noticing it.
Here, then, was the second undercurrent, which, sluggish and veiled, yet steadily moved within her. For though with the passing of the inheritance to her, it would be she who came within the scope and focus of the legend, which, frankly, when looked in the face, presented that meaningless, age-worn countenance, she felt that she was in the grip of it not directly but, somehow, through Colin. She told herself that by no combination of diabolical circumstance could that be; for, with the knowledge that was hers about the date of Colin’s birth and his mother’s marriage, it was he, he and Raymond, who had passed out of reach of the parchment with its promises and its penalty. Yet instinct, unconvinced by reason, told her that it was through Colin that she and the children she would bear him, would be swept into the mysterious incredible eddy. Was it the persistent luck that attended him which induced so wildly superstitious a presage? Like some supernaturally protected being, he passed along his way. Raymond’s attempt to kill him had, by the merest most fortuitous circumstance of a punctured tyre, led to Raymond’s utter helplessness in his hands.... Colin moved on a charmed pilgrimage, idolised and adored by herself, by his father, by all who came in contact with him and, she was beginning to see, he had no spark of love in him that was kindled by these fires. Analyse him and you would find no faintest trace of it. Perhaps, in spite of his twenty-one years now so nearly complete, he had remained a child still in respect of the heart’s emotions. Yet who could hate like Colin? Who, so she shuddered to think, could have shewn, though but for a second, so white-hot a mask of fury as he had once turned on herself?
She could not succeed in forgetting that, and all Colin’s warmth and eagerness of affection to her ever since, could not wash that out. All day, perhaps, in the hospitable discharge of their duties, they would scarcely have a word together, but when at length for a few hours of rest the house grew silent, he sought her side, relaxed and sleepy, yet tingling, so she felt, with some quality of vitality that no one else had a spark of. Youth and high spirits, the zest of life and the endless power of enjoyment filled the house, but Colin alone, unwearied and eminent as the sun, lit up all others. It was not the exuberance of his health and energy that was the source of his burning; something inspired them.
The last night had come. To-morrow morning their guests would depart, and during the day Raymond would arrive. That night there had been the fancy dress ball, and she, wearing the crown and necklace and girdle made by Cellini, had impersonated the ill-fated Duchess of Milan for whom they were made, and who, while wearing them, had drunk the poisoned draught which she had herself prepared for her lover. Colin adored that story; the lover, a mere groom of the chambers, he averred, was a sort of old Colin Stanier—all prospered with him, even to the removal of his mistress in this manner, for she was growing old and wearied him with her insatiable desire. Colin himself had appeared as his ancestor wearing the great sapphire.
Violet had undressed and got into bed, while he remained downstairs with two or three men who still lingered. The Cellini jewels lay on her dressing-table, and feeling too sleepy to plait her hair, she had just let it down, and it lay in a spread web of gold over her pillow. Then the door from his dressing-room softly opened, and he looked in.
“Not asleep?” he asked.
“No, but nearly. Oh, Colin, stand under the light a moment. There! The sapphire is alive to-night. It’s like a blue furnace of flame. Now shield it from the light.”
Violet sat up in bed. “But it’s the most extraordinary thing!” she said. “Not a ray from the lamp touches it, yet it’s burning as brightly as ever. Where does the light come from? It comes from below it. I believe it comes from you. I’m frightened of you. Are you a fire?”
It seemed to him no less than her that some conflagration not lit from without burnt in the heart of the stone. Blue rays, generated within, shot from it; it shone with some underlying brilliance, as if, as she had said, it was he who kindled it.
“Watch it, then,” he said, unbuckling his cloak. Even as he detached it from him, the fire in it grew dim; only the reflection from outside fed it. Incredulous at what she thought she saw, willing to attribute it to some queer effect of faceted surfaces, she laughed.