“I reproach myself, Colin, most bitterly,” he had been saying. “It was hard to be kind to poor Raymond, he kept kindness at arm’s length. But I ought to have tried more. I ought to have taken example from you: you never wearied of kindness.”
Colin laid his hand on his father’s arm. All the evening he had been keeping things together by a tact so supreme that it appeared pure naturalness. He had talked quite freely about Raymond; recalled a hundred little incidents in which Raymond was a mild hero; his shooting, his prospect of playing football for Cambridge.... It was clear, too, that the tragedy had made very little impression on his grandmother, and so he had taken it for granted that they would play their rubber of whist. Why not?
“You mustn’t think of it like that, father,” he said. “You did what you could. You made it very jolly for him here. He liked coming home; he was going to stop here the whole of the Christmas vacation, you know. If he had not been enjoying it, he would not have done that.”
Colin revelled in the underlying meaning of his words ... how Raymond had been enjoying it, hadn’t he?
Philip’s servant came into the room; he carried on a tray Raymond’s watch and chain, and a pocket-book.
“They found these on his lordship’s body, my lord,” he said. “I thought it best to bring them you.”
Philip took them, and looked absently at the watch which had stopped at a few minutes to eleven.
“He must have fallen in almost immediately,” he said. “I had better look at what is in his pocket-book. It may contain papers that must be attended to.”
Not until that moment had Colin given another thought to what Raymond had received that morning in the envelope from Bertram’s bank. Now in a flash he conjectured that whatever it was (and he felt no doubt of what it was) it would be found in that pocket-book which his father even then was opening. How lucky it was that he had not told his father about that attempt of Raymond’s! How splendid would appear his own magnanimity, his own unfailing kindness to him! He could emphasise them even more by a reluctance that his father should examine these remains. The water, it is true, might have got in and soaked the paper, if it was there, into illegibility, but the leather of the pocket-book seemed to have resisted well: it might easily prove to contain a legible document.
He got up in an excitement which his father did not understand.