“You brute, Colin,” she said, “you brown, bare brute.”
“Shall I dress again,” said he, “if a bare arm shocks you?”
“No, I don’t mind that. It’s the brute I object to. By the way, Raymond comes to-morrow—to-day rather. How on earth can I behave to him with decency? Don’t you wish he wasn’t coming?”
Colin picked up a long tress of her hair and wound it round his arm.
“No, I’m looking forward to his coming,” he said, smiling. “I’m going to make Raymond wish that he had never been born. I’m going to be wonderfully agreeable to him, and everything I say shall have a double meaning. Raymond wanted to kill me; well, I shall shew him that there are other ways of scoring off people. My father isn’t very fond of Raymond as it is, but when he sees how pleasant I am to him, and how black and sulky Raymond is to me, he won’t become any fonder of him. I must think it all out.... And then all the time Raymond will be consoling himself with the thought that when father dies his day will come, and he’ll reign in his stead. There’s the cream of it, Vi! He’ll be longing for my father to die, you know, and when he does Raymond will be worse off than ever. And you, you once said, ‘Poor Raymond!’ to me. Raymond’s got to pay for that. I won’t have Raymond pitied.”
Never had Colin worn a more radiant face than when, walking in and out of his dressing-room, brown and lithe, as he divested himself of his gorgeous dress and put on his night clothes, his beautiful mouth framed itself to this rhapsody of hatred. There was nothing passionate about it, except its sincerity; he did not rage and foam on the surface of his nature, he but gleamed with the fire that seemed so strangely to have lit up those wonderful rays in the sapphire that he had been wearing. He still held it in his hand when, after having turned out the lights in his dressing-room, he closed the door and sprang to her side.
“I don’t like to leave it alone,” he said. “I must pin it to the pillows. It will watch over us. With you and it by me, I shall lie in enchantment between waking and sleeping, floating on the golden sea of your hair. Raymond, let’s make plans for Raymond....”
She lay in the warm tide of his tingling vitality, and soon fell asleep. But presently she tore herself out of the clutch of some hideous vision, which faded from vagueness into non-existence as she woke and heard his breathing, and felt his cheek resting on her shoulder.
The next night, instead of the long cloth which, evening after evening, had stretched from the window of the great dining-room to the Elizabethan sideboard at the other end, there was spread near the fire, for the night was cold, a small round table that just held the five of them—Philip and his mother, Violet, Raymond, and Colin—and instead of the rows of silver sconces in the dark panels, four red-shaded candlesticks, sufficient for purposes of knife and fork, left the rest of the room in a velvety dimness. Raymond had arrived only just in time to dress for dinner, coming into the gallery but half a minute before his father, while Colin, who all this week had been a model of punctuality, had not appeared yet. Philip gave his arm to his mother, and behind, unlinked, came Violet and Raymond. He had advanced to her with elbow formally crooked, but she, busy with a sleeve-lace that had caught in her bracelet, moved on apart from him. She had shaken hands with him, and given him a cool cordial word, but she felt incapable of more than that.