“Why, the fact that she’s done it all,” said Colin frowning. “She has done all she pleased all her life, and she’s just as young as ever. If I wasn’t her nephew, she would put me under her arm, just as she did her husband a thousand years ago, and marry me to-morrow. And then you would marry Raymond, and—and there we would all be. We would play whist together. My dear, those ghastly days before we were born! Grandfather with his Garter over his worsted jacket and a kitten on his knee, and grandmamma and Aunt Janet and your father and mine! They lived here for years like that. How wonderful and awful!”
“They’re just as wonderful now,” said Violet. “And....”
“Not quite so awful; grandfather isn’t here now, and he must have been the ghastliest. Besides, there’s Aunt Hester here to tone them up, and you and I, if it comes to that. Not to mention Raymond. I love seeing my father try to behave nicely to Raymond. Dead failure.”
Colin tucked his towel round him; it kept slipping first from one shoulder, then the other.
“I believe Raymond is falling in love with you,” he said. “He’ll propose to you before long. Your mother will back him up, so will Uncle Ronald. They would love to see you mistress here. And you’d like it yourself.”
“Oh—like it?” said she. She paused a moment. “Colin, you know what I feel about Stanier,” she said. “I don’t think anybody knows as well as you. You’ve got the passion for it. Wouldn’t you give anything for it to be yours? Look at it! There’s nothing like it in the world!”
They had come up the smooth-shaven grass slope from the lake, and stood at the entrance through the long yew-hedge that bordered the line of terraces. There were no ghastly monstrosities in its clipped bastion; no semblance of peacocks and spread tails to crown it: it flowed downwards, a steep, uniform embattlement of stiff green, towards the lake, enclosing the straight terraces and the deep borders of flower-beds. The topmost of these terraces was paved, and straight from it rose the long two-storied façade of mellow brick balustraded with the motto, “Nisi Dominus ædificavit,” in tall letters of lead, and from floor to roof it was the building of that Colin Stanier whose very image and incarnation stood and looked at it now.
So honest and secure had been the workmanship that in the three centuries which had elapsed since first it nobly rose to crown the hill above Rye scarcely a stone of its facings had been repaired, or a mouldering brick withdrawn. It possessed, even in the material of its fashioning, some inexplicable immortality, even as did the fortunes of its owners. Its mellowing had but marked their enrichment and stability; their stability rivalled that of the steadfast house. The sun, in these long days of June, had not yet quite set, and the red level rays made the bricks to glow, and gave a semblance as of internal fire to the attested guarantee of the motto. Whoever had builded, he had builded well, and the labour of the bricklayers was not lost.
A couple of years ago Colin, still at Eton, had concocted a mad freak with Violet. There had been a fancy-dress ball in the house, at which he had been got up to represent his ancestral namesake, as shewn in the famous Holbein. There the first Colin appeared as a young man of twenty-five, but the painter had given him the smooth beauty of boyhood, and his descendant, in those rich embroidered clothes, might have passed for the very original and model for the portrait.
This, then, had been their mad freak: Violet, appearing originally in the costume of old Colin’s bride, had slipped away to her room, when the ball was at its height, and changed clothes with her cousin. She had tucked up her hair under his broad-brimmed jewelled hat, he had be-wigged himself and easily laced his slimness into her stiff brocaded gown, and so indistinguishable were they that the boys, Colin’s friends and contemporaries, had been almost embarrassingly admiring of him, while her friends had found her not less forward. A slip by Colin in the matter of hoarse laughter at an encircling arm and an attempt at a kiss had betrayed him into forgetting his brilliant falsetto and giving the whole thing away.