Hidden by the bushes, he had nearly come to the bridge over the sluice when from close at hand there came a noise of loud crackings and splintering across the lake and a great splash. For one moment Colin stood quite still, his heart beating high and fast; then, with quickened pace, he walked on to the bridge over the sluice. Some ten yards out was a large hole in the surface with jagged edges; a cap and fragments of broken ice floated on it, and bubbles rose from below.
“He has been carried under the ice,” thought Colin. “How cold it must be! The water is deep there.”
What was to be done? Nothing it seemed. He could run up to the house and get help, a rope, a plank, something to put out across that gaping hole on which the sunlight glittered, but before he could return all hope (all chance rather) of saving Raymond must have passed. Was there no other plan? His mind, usually so ingenious and resourceful, seemed utterly blank, save for an overwhelming curiosity as to whether Raymond would come to the surface again, just once, just for a second.... As he looked, leaning on the balustrade of the bridge, Raymond’s head appeared; his face was white and wide-eyed, the lips of his open mouth blue with the cold. Across those ten yards which separated them their eyes met, Colin’s bright and sparkling with exuberant life, the other’s stricken with the ultimate and desperate terror.
Colin waved his hand.
“So you’ve fallen in,” he said. “I’ll go and see what can be done. If I’m too late, well, good-bye! Rather cold, isn’t it?”
The last words were spoken to emptiness. There was the cap still floating and the stream of bubbles breaking on the surface of the sparkling water.
Colin gave one leap in the air like some young colt whose limbs tingle with the joy of life, and rubbed his hands which were chilled with leaning on the bridge. Of course it was no use going to the house; the shock and cold and the soft, smothering water would have done their work long before he could bring help, and the resources of Stanier, so powerful for the living had no succour or consolation for the dead. Indeed, it would be better not to go to the house at all, for he could not imagine himself, in this ecstatic moment, simulating haste and horror and all that would be appropriate to the occasion. So making a circuit through the woods, he strolled ten minutes later into the stable yard to see about his bicycle. He had a pleasant word for the groom and a joke for the motor-mechanic. Just then his brain could only be occupied with trivial things; a great glittering curtain seemed to be let down across it, behind which were stored treasures and splendours. Presently, when he came to himself, he would inspect these.
He showed himself to Violet and his father, who were in the long gallery, when he got back to the house, said a word about his motor-bicycle, hoped that Raymond was having a good time, and went into the smoking-room. Now was the time to pull up that glittering curtain.
Till then the fact of Raymond’s death, just the removal, the extinction of him had hidden all that might lie behind it; now Colin saw with an amazed gasp of interest how all the activity of his brain was needed to cope with the situation. Raymond was finished with, while his father still lived. The remote, the unexpected, the unlooked-for had occurred. Yet not quite unlooked-for ... one morning dreaming on the Capri beach, Colin had taken this possibility into account, had let it simmer and mature in his brain, and as outcome had made Violet spend a night at the house of the British Consul in Naples. How wise that had proved; he would have been grinding his teeth if he had not done that.
Swiftly he ran over the whole process from the beginning, and though there were problems ahead of him, so far his course had been flawless. First had come the erasure in the Consulate register and the insertion of that single numeral in his mother’s letter to Salvatore.... He would have to see dear Uncle Salvatore again.... That had smoothed the way for his marriage with Violet; that had ensured, even if Raymond lived to be a hundred, his own mastership and that of his children after him at Stanier. It was not mastership in name, for he would but be husband to its mistress, but he knew that name alone would be lacking to the completeness of possession. He could not have provided better for the eventuality of his father’s death, which, according to all human probability, would occur before Raymond’s. But fate, that blind incalculable chance, had decreed otherwise, and Colin gave a frown and a muttered exclamation to the recognition of the fact that had he left the register alone, and torn up, instead of emending his mother’s letter, he would now be heir to Stanier as he indeed truly was, in his own right.