Colin

by E. F. Benson

“Fancy father saying that I didn’t care for sport,” he said. “I adore the thought of the sport I’m going to have with you. You used to be rude to me when we were alone, now you have got to be polite. I can always send for that paper which you signed and father witnessed. Now don’t be tedious and say that the condition on which you signed was that I would not tell him. What does that matter to me? You wanted to kill me; all that I do now is in self-defence. Otherwise you might plan to kill me again.”

He yawned. “I’m rather sleepy to-night, Raymond,” he said. “I thought the satisfaction of seeing you again would make me wakeful. I shall go upstairs. Violet will be pleased that I have not sat up late after all. I shall sit on her bed and talk to her. Last night her hair made a golden mat on the pillow. There is a marvellous fragrance in her hair. Do you remember that from the days—not many of them—when you used to kiss her? How she winced! Now it’s your turn to wince. We shall talk about you, no doubt. And remember about the tea and the coffee to-morrow.”

Day after day Colin amused himself thus; morning after morning Raymond had to guess whether Violet had been told, until one evening, wearying of this particular game, Colin casually mentioned that all his guessings had been superfluous, for Violet had known ever since one day on their honeymoon, when she had provoked him by saying, “Poor Raymond.” Even as a cat with a mouse, so Colin played with him, taking no notice of him except in ordinary intercourse, for nearly a whole day, and letting him seem forgotten; then, with quivering shoulders, he would spring on him again, tap him with sheathed claws and a velvet paw, or with more forcible reminder, nip him with needle-like teeth. It was useless and worse than useless for Violet to plead for him; her advocacy, her appeal to the most elementary feeling of compassion only exasperated Colin.

“Darling, as if my brain wasn’t busy enough with Raymond, you must go and add to my work like that!” he said. “I’ve got to cure you of being sorry for Raymond as well. I thought you were cured when I told you he tried to murder me. Just let your mind dwell on that. He planned to shoot me from behind that wall. I’ll take you there to-morrow and show you the place, to make it more vivid to you. One’s brother must not make such plans and fail without suffering for it afterwards. Perhaps you would prefer that he had succeeded? Ah! I made you shudder then. You trembled deliciously.... I’ve got such a delightful Christmas present for him, a little green jade pigeon with ruby eyes. It cost a lot of money. The green—I shall explain to him—is his jealousy of me, for he’s devoted to you still, and the red eyes are the colour of my blood, and the whole will remind him of that amusing morning.”

The new year came in with three nights of sharp frost, and the ice on the bathing lake grew thick enough to bear. The lake was artificial, lying in a small natural valley through which a stream ran. A dam some twelve feet high had been built across the lower end of it, in which was the sluice gate; thus the stream, confined by the rising ground at the sides, and the dam at the end, had spread itself into a considerable sheet of water, shallow where the stream entered it, but some nine feet deep at the lower end, where was the bathing-place and the header boards and pavilions for bathers. The dam was planted with rhododendron bushes, whose roots strengthened the barrier, and in summer the great bank of blossom overhung the deep water. A path ran behind them crossing the sluice by a stone bridge with balustrade.

Raymond had gone down there directly after breakfast, and came back with the news that he had walked this way and that across the ice, and that it seemed safe enough. For some reason which Colin failed to fathom, he seemed in very cheerful spirits to-day; it might be that the end of the Christmas vacation was approaching, when he would return to Cambridge; it might be that he, like Colin, himself had seen the rapidity with which old age was gaining on his father. There was humour in that. Raymond looked forward, and little wonder, to his own succession here, not knowing, poor shorn lamb, that he would be worse off than ever when that unpropitious event occurred. As for the remission of subtle torture which his return to Cambridge would give him, there were several days yet, thought Colin; opportunity for much pleasant pigeon-conversation.

So Raymond got his skates, while Colin and Violet, sitting cosy in the long gallery, wondered whether it was worth while going out, and he went down by the long yew hedge to the lake, with brisk foot and brightened eye. After all, other people besides Colin could make plans, and one of his had matured this morning into a luscious ripeness. Sleepless nights had been his, with hands squeezing for Colin’s throat and dawn breaking in on the fierce disorder of his thoughts, before he had distilled his brain down to the clear broth. Wild and vagrant fancies got hold of him, goaded as he was to the verge of desperation by this inhuman persecution; red madnesses had flashed before him, like the cloaks that the matadors wave before the bull, and, whether he charged or not, another ribanded dart pierced him. He had bitten his lip till the blood flowed in order to recall himself to self-control, and to use those hours of the night, when Colin was with Violet, to hew out some defence to the fluttered red and the ribanded dart. There had been his handicap: hate of Colin had made him violent, whereas Colin’s hate of him had made Colin calm and self-possessed; he must cease to rage if he hoped to arrive at any plan. So night after night he had curbed himself, making his wits reduce their mad galloping to an orderly pace, and pull steadily in harness.

The grass was encrusted with the jewels of frost; every step crunched a miracle of design into powder, and now for the first time since he had come to Stanier, Raymond fed with the braced joy of a frosty morning on the banquet which the season spread. He was hungry for it, all these days he had been starved and tortured, sick with apprehension, and shuddering at the appearance of Colin with rack and pincers. But now he was hungry again for the good things of life, and the long draught of cold air was one of them, and the treading of the earth with muscles alternately strong and relaxed was another, and the sense of the great woodlands that would in no distant future be his, was a third, for how old, how rapidly ageing, was his father; and the congé he would soon give to Colin and Violet was a fourth, sweeter than any. How sour had turned his love of Violet, if indeed there had ever been any sweetness in it. He lusted after her: that he knew, but just because she knew the events of that morning, when all had gone so awry, he thought of her as no more than a desirable mistress. Ha! there was a woodcock. In the frost of the morning it had lain so close that he approached within twenty yards of it before it got up. He was near enough to see how it pulled itself forward, grasping a blade of grass in its reed-like bill, before it could get those long wings free of the ground where it squatted. With a flip flap, it skidded and swerved through the rhododendron bushes; even if he had had a gun with him he could scarcely have got a shot.

“Flip—flap”; it was just so that he had escaped from Colin’s barrels. Those nights of thought, when he had bandaged the eyes of rage, had given him simplicity at last, such simplicity as Colin had so carelessly arrived at when he came through the oaks of the Old Park. He had trusted to the extraordinary similarity of his own handwriting to that of Colin, and had written a letter in Colin’s name to Colin’s bankers, requesting them to send the letter which he had deposited there last August, with the note on the outside of it about its eventual delivery in case of his death, to his brother, Lord Stanier, whose receipt would be forwarded.... Raymond knew it to be a desperate measure, but, after all, nothing could be more desperate than his position here, bound hand and foot to Colin, as long as that sealed envelope remained at Messrs. Bertram’s. The bank might possibly make a further inquiry; telegraph to Colin for confirmation, but even if that happened, Colin was doing his worst already. No such disaster had followed. This morning Raymond had received from the bank a registered letter, containing the unopened envelope, forwarded to him by direction of Hon. Colin Stanier.

So now, as he went briskly towards the frozen lake, the confession which he had signed was safe in the letter-case he carried in the inside pocket of his coat, and for very luxury of living over again a mad moment which now was neutralised, he drew it out and read it. There it was ... in that crisis of guilt, covered by Colin’s pistol, he had consented to any terms. But now, let Colin see what would be his response when next he talked in flashes of that veiled lightning concerning a shooting of pigeons, concerning a morning when there was a lunatic at large....