He looked at his father as he spoke, and once again, this time compellingly, Philip saw confident expectancy in his eyes. Colin was certainly waiting for something.
“Then will you come with me on a sentimental journey?” he asked.
“Ah, father, won’t I just!” he said. “After all, you and I are on a sentimental journey.”
There seemed to Philip in his devotion to Colin, something exquisitely delicate about this. He had wanted but, instinctively had not asked, waiting for his rights to be offered him.
“Come, then,” he said. “I’ll show you where we lived, your mother and I. I’ll show you our old haunts, such as survive. You belong to that life, Colin.”
Colin paused a moment, sitting quite still, for a span of clear, concentrated thought. He desired to say precisely the right thing, the thing that his father would most value. It was not in the smallest degree affection for his father which prompted that; it was the wish that the door should be thrown open as wide as possible—that all the keys should be put into his hand.
“I know I do,” he said. “I’ve known that for years, but I had to wait for you to want me to share it. It had to be you who took me into it.”
He saw approval gleam in his father’s eyes. This was clearly the right tack.
“And you must remember I know nothing whatever about your life with my mother,” he said. “You’ve got to begin at the beginning. And ... and make it long, father.”
It was not surprising that Colin’s presence gave to this sentimental journey a glow which it had lacked during all those years when Philip made his annual solitary visit here. Already the mere flight of years, and the fact that he had never married again, had tinged that long-past time with something of the opalescence which sunlit mist confers on objects which in themselves hardly rise above the level of the mean and the prosaic; and what now survived for him in memory was Rosina’s gaiety, her beauty, her girlish charm, with forgetfulness for her vapid vanity, her commonness, and the speed with which his senses even had been sated with her. But it was an unsubstantial memory of blurred and far-off days, girt with regrets and the emptiness of desires dead and unrecoverable.