Temporarily, that would look bitterly like a victory for Colin; with his father to back him, it would seem as if Colin had reduced his brother to decent behaviour. But that could not be helped; he must for many weeks yet cultivate an assiduous civility and appear to have seen the error of his sulky ways in order to lull suspicion fast asleep. At present Colin was always watchful for hostile manœuvres; it would be a work of time and patience before he would credit that Raymond had plucked his hostility from him.
Then there was Violet. Not only had his intemperate churlishness damaged him with his father, but not less with her. That had to be repaired, for though to know that Stanier was to her, even as to Colin, an enchantment, an obsession, she might find that the involved condition of marrying him in order to become its mistress was one that she could not face. She did not love him, she did not even like him, but he divined that her obsession about Stanier, coupled with the aloofness and independence that characterised her, might make her accept a companionship that was not positively distasteful to her.
It was not the Stanier habit to love; love did not form part of the beauty with which nature had dowered them. The men of the family sought a healthy mate; for the women of the family, so few had there ever been, no rule could be deduced. But Violet, so far as he could tell, followed the men in this, and for witness to her inability to love, in the sense of poets and romanticists, was her attitude to Colin.
Had he been the younger, Raymond would have laughed at himself for entertaining any notion of successful rivalry. Colin, with the lordship of Stanier, would have been no more vulnerable than was the moon to a yokel with a pocket-pistol. But he felt very sure that love, as a relentless and compelling factor in this matter, had no part in her strong liking for Colin. Neither her feeling for him nor his for her was ever so slightly dipped in any infinite quality; it was ponderable, and he himself had in his pocket for weight in the other scale, her passion for Stanier.
Colin strolled gracefully into the smoking-room that evening when the whist and bridge were over, marvelling at the changed Raymond who had been so courteous at dinner and so obligingly ready to play whist at poor granny’s table. He himself had kept up that policy of solicitous attention to his brother, which had made Raymond grind his teeth at lunch that day, but the effect this evening was precisely the opposite. Raymond had replied with, it must be supposed, the utmost cordiality of which he was capable. It was a grim, heavy demeanour at the best, but such as it was....
No doubt, however, Raymond was saving up for such time as they should be alone, the full power of his antagonism, and Colin, pausing outside the smoking-room, considered whether he should not go to bed at once and deprive his brother of the relief of unloading himself. But the desire to bait him was too strong, and he turned the door-handle and entered.
“So you got a wigging after lunch to-day,” he remarked. “It seems to have brought you to heel a bit. But you can let go now, Raymond. You haven’t amused me all evening with your tantrums.”
Raymond looked up from his illustrated paper. He knew as precisely what “seeing red” meant as did the bull in the arena. He had to wait a moment till that cleared.
“Hullo, Colin,” he said. “Have you come for a drink?”
“Incidentally. My real object was to see you and to have one of our jolly chats. Did father pitch it in pretty hot? I stuck up for you this morning when we talked you over.”