“Yes, terribly urgent. And private. Bath.”
The whole table revived a little, as when the gardener waters a drooping bed of flowers.
“But you had only just bathed,” said Violet.
“That’s just why I wanted a bath. Nothing makes you so messy and sticky as a bathe. And there were bits of grass between my toes, and a small fragment of worm.”
“And how did they get there, dear?” asked Aunt Hester, violently interested.
“Because I walked up in bare feet over the grass, Aunt Hester,” said Colin. “It’s good for the nerves. Come and do it after dinner.”
Lord Yardley supposed that Colin had not previously seen his brother, and that seeing him now did not care to notice his presence. So, with the same chill desire to be fair in all ways to Raymond, he said:
“Raymond has come, Colin.”
“Yes, father, we’ve already embraced,” said he. “Golly, I don’t call that soup. It’s muck. Hullo, granny dear, I haven’t seen you all day. Good morning.”
Lady Yardley’s face relaxed; there came on her lips some wraith of a smile. Colin’s grace and charm of trivial prattle was the only ray that had power at all to thaw the ancient frost that had so long congealed her. Ever since her husband’s death, twenty years ago, she had lived some half of the year here, and now she seldom stirred from Stanier, waiting for the end. Her life had really ceased within a few years of her marriage; she had become then the dignified lay-figure, emotionless and impersonal, typical of the wives of Staniers, and that was all that her children knew of her. For them the frost had never thawed, nor had she, even for a moment, lost its cold composure, even when on the night that the news of Raymond’s and Colin’s birth had come to Stanier, there came with it the summons that caused her husband to crash among the glasses on the table. Nothing and nobody except Colin had ever given brightness to her orbit, where, like some dead moon, she revolved in the cold inter-stellar space.