It was a pity to have devoted all that ingenuity, to have saddled himself with considerable expense as regards that troublesome Salvatore, when fate all the time was busier and wiser than he.... Yet it had been necessary, and it was no use wasting regret over it.
What stood in his way now was the letter and the register. With regard to the former it was easy to destroy it, and to indicate to Salvatore that all required of him was to hold his tongue, or, if necessary, to tell a mere simple truth that he had given Colin two letters, one—he seemed to recollect—dated March 1, in which his sister announced her marriage, the other a fortnight later, giving news of the birth of the twins. Uncle Salvatore, with his Viagi pride, so Colin smilingly reflected, would be glad that the stain on the family honour could be expunged; Rosina was married when she brought forth. For him, too, it was pleasant to have the bar sinister lifted from him. It would not, he allowed, have weighed heavily on him; in any case it would have been amply compensated for by the enjoyment of Stanier and the expulsion of Raymond, but now there was no need for that ounce of bitter.... So much, then, for the letters; they could be destroyed. Violet would ask in vain for their production to prove her possession.
“What letters do you mean, darling?” he would answer. Yes, those letters should perish at once.
He turned his thoughts to the register. There at this moment it reposed in that archive-room, bearing the erasure so easily overlooked, so convincing when pointed out. You had but to look carefully, and, so to speak, you could see nothing but the erased numeral: it stared at you. He had, it was true, in his keeping a copy of that entry, certified to be correct by Mr. Cecil, which bore the earlier date, but, now that Violet had been informed of that erasure, she would, when Stanier changed hands, insist on the production of the register, and, knowing where to look and what to see, her lawyer would draw the conclusion, which even in the absence of confirming letters, might easily satisfy a jury. The register had been tampered with, and in whose interests but Colin’s? And by what hand? Without doubt by his father’s (not that that would hurt him then) or his own. There was danger, remote perhaps but alive and smouldering, on that page; it must be quenched.
Colin recalled his meditations on the Capri beach which foresaw this contingency with a vividness as clear as was the October air on that morning. All the circumstances of it were equally sharp-edged in his memory, the sense of the hot pebbles of the beach on which he lay, the sea and its crystal embrace awaiting him when he got baked and pining for its coolness, Nino, the joyous pagan boy asleep in the shade, Vesuvius across the bay with the thin streamer of smoke. That was the milieu where thought came clean and clear to you, and clear and clean that morning had his thoughts been, providing for this very situation. The pieces of it lay in his brain like the last few fragments of a puzzle; he had no need even to fit them together, for he could see how curve corresponded with curve and angle with angle. All was in order, ready to be joined up, now that Raymond no longer blocked his way, and the key-piece round which the others fitted was undoubtedly that visit of Violet to Mr. Cecil.
Then came quick steps up the passage, and Violet burst in.
“Oh, Colin,” she said, “a terrible thing has happened! Uncle Philip and I walked down to the lake. Raymond was not there; his boots were on the bank, there was a hole where the ice had given way at the deep end. Uncle Philip is getting men and ropes....”
CHAPTER X
It was not till well on in the afternoon that the body was recovered. All day the cold had been intense, and the ropes with the tackle for this terrible fishing got stiff and frozen. But at sunset they found it; the stream had carried it along below the ice towards the sluice.
Philip sat up with Colin in the long gallery when Violet and Lady Yardley had gone to bed. He felt no sorrow, for he had not liked Raymond, he had not even loved him with his fatherhood, for all that had been given to Colin.... Often and often he had longed that Colin had been the eldest, now there was none other than Colin; he would have all that his father coveted for him. But though he felt no sorrow, he felt remorse and pity; remorse that he had not liked this dead son of his, pity that he had died young.