“Good Lord! To think that perhaps Raymond will be kissing you next,” he said. “How maddening!”
CHAPTER III
From the first some call of his Italian blood had made itself audible to Colin; even as their train emerged out of the drip and roaring darkness of the Mont Cenis tunnel, there had been a whisper in his ears that this was the land of his birth to which he had come, and that whisper had grown into full-voiced welcome when, at the hot close of day, he and his father had strolled out after dinner along the sea-front of Naples. Though he had never been here yet, sight, scent, and sound alike told him that he was not so much experiencing what was new as recognising what, though dormant, had always been part of him, bred into the very fibre and instinct of him. It was not that he hailed or loved this lure of the South; it would be more apt to say that he nodded to it, as to an old acquaintance—taken for granted rather than embraced.
This claiming and appropriation by Colin of his native place unfroze in his father the reticence that he had always observed with regard to that year he had spent in Italy into which had entered birth and death, and all that his life held of romance. That, till now, had been incapsulated within him, or at the most, like the ichor in some ductless gland, was performing some mysterious function in his psychology. Now this claim of Colin’s on the South, his easy stepping into possession by right of his parentage, unsealed in Philip the silence he had so long preserved.
Colin, as he regarded his surroundings with friendly and familiar eyes, was visibly part of his old romance; the boy’s mother lived again in that sunny hair, those eyes, and the clear olive skin, just as surely as did old Colin of the Holbein portrait. But now Stanier was far away, and the spell of the South as potent as when Philip, flying from the glooms and jibes of that awful old man, his father, first came under its enchantment. And Colin, of all that dead time, alone was a vital and living part of its manifestation. Through the medium of memory he stirred his father’s blood; Philip felt romance bubble in him again as he walked along the familiar ways with the flower that had blossomed from it. He felt, too, that Colin silently (for he asked no question) seemed to claim the right to certain knowledge; he seemed to present himself, to be ready, and, indeed, it would be singular if, having brought him here, his father did not speak of that which, every year, had taken him on his solitary pilgrimage to the South.
They were to spend the greater part of the next day in Naples, leaving by the afternoon boat for Capri, and as they finished their breakfast on a shady veranda, Philip spoke:
“Well, we’ve got all the morning,” he said, “to trundle about in. The museum is very fine; would you like to see it?”
“No, I should hate it,” said Colin.
“But it’s a marvellous collection,” said Philip.
“I daresay; but to see a museum would make me feel like a tourist. At present I don’t, and it’s lovely.”