Colin

by E. F. Benson

“Oh, that!” he said. “Stupid of me not to have told you. We were married at the British Consulate.”

They passed out into the noonday.

“Mind you remember that, Colin,” said his father. “On my death the marriage will have to be proved; it will save a search. Your birth was registered there, too. And Raymond’s.”

Such was the sum of information that Colin took on board with him that afternoon when they embarked on the steamer for Capri, and though in one sense it took him back a step, in another it confirmed the idea that had grown up in his mind. He felt certain (here was the confirmation) that if he had asked his father when the marriage took place, he would have been told a date which he would not have believed. Lord Yardley would have said that they had been married very soon after his arrival twenty-one years ago. He had waited with obvious anxiety for Colin’s one question, and he had hailed that question with relief, for he had no objection to the boy’s knowing where the contract was made.

And the retrograde step was this: that whereas he had been ready to think that his father’s marriage was an event subsequent to his own birth and Raymond’s, he was now forced to conclude (owing to the fact that his father told and impressed on him to remember, that it had been performed at the British Consulate) that he and Raymond were legitimately born in wedlock. That seemed for the present to be a cul-de-sac in his researches.

The warm, soft air streamed by, and the wind made by the movement of the boat enticed Colin out from under the awning into the breeze-tempered blaze of the sun. He went forward and found in the bows a place where he could be alone and study, like a map, whatever could be charted of his discoveries.

That willingness of his father to tell him where the marriage had taken place was somehow disconcerting; it implied that the ceremony made valid whatever had preceded it. He had himself been born in mid-March, and he did not attempt to believe that his father had been married in the previous June, the month when he had first come to Italy. But he could not help believing that his father had married before his own birth.

Colin was one of those rather rare people who can sit down and think. Everybody can sit down and let his mind pleasantly wander over a hundred topics, but comparatively few can tether it, so to speak, so that it grazes on a small circle only. This accomplishment Colin signally possessed, and though now there could be no practical issue to his meditations, he set himself to carve out in clear, cutting strokes what he would have done in case he had discovered that he and Raymond alike were born out of wedlock. He imagined that situation to himself; he cropped at it, he grazed on it....

The disclosure, clearly, if the fact had been there, would not have come out till his father’s death, and he could see himself looking on the face of the dead without the slightest feeling of reproach. He knew that his father was leaving him all that could be left away from Raymond; he was heir also to Aunt Hester’s money.

But in that case Stanier, and all that went with the title, would not be Raymond’s at all; Raymond would be nameless and penniless. And Colin’s beautiful mouth twitched and smiled. “That would have been great fun,” he said to himself. “Raymond would have been nobody and have had nothing. Ha! Raymond would not have had Stanier, and I should have ceased to hate him. I should have made him some small allowance.”