Yes, Stanier would have passed from Raymond, and it and all that it meant would have gone to Violet ... and at that the whole picture started into life and colour. If only now, at this moment, he was possessed of the knowledge that he and Raymond alike were illegitimate, with what ardour, with what endless subtlety, would he have impelled Violet to marry him! How would he have called upon the legendary benefactor who for so long had prospered and befriended the Staniers, to lend him all the arts and attractions of the lover! With such wiles to aid him, he would somehow have forced Violet to give up the idea of marrying Raymond in order to get Stanier, and instead, renouncing Stanier, take him, and by her renunciation for love’s sake, find in the end that she had gained (bread upon the waters) all that she had imagined was lost.
And he, Colin, in that case, would be her husband, master of Stanier to all intents and purposes. Willingly would he have accepted, eagerly would he have welcomed that. He wanted what he would never get unless Raymond died, except at some such price as that. But it was no use thinking about it; his father’s insistence on the place where he and Rosina were married made it certain that no such fortunate catastrophe could be revealed at his death.
Presently Lord Yardley joined him as they passed along the headland on which Sorrento stands, and there were stories of the visit that he and Rosina made here during the summer. Colin listened to these with suppressed irritation; what did he care whether they had spent a week at Sorrento or not? Of all that his father had to tell him, he had mastered everything that mattered, and he began to find in these recollections a rather ridiculous sentimentality. He knew, of course, that he himself was responsible for this; it was he, Rosina’s son, and his father’s love for him, that conjured up these tendernesses. He was responsible, too, in that all the morning he had listened with so apt a sympathy to similar reminiscences. But then he hoped that he was about to learn something really worth knowing, whereas now he was convinced that there was nothing of that sort to know. Fond as his father had always been of him, he easily detected something new in his voice, his gestures, the soft eagerness of his eyes; it was as if in him his father was falling in love with Rosina.
Sunset burned behind Capri as their steamer drew near to it, and the eastern side lay in clear shadow though the sea flared with the reflected fires of the sky, and that, too, seemed to produce more memories.
“You are so like her, Colin,” said his father, laying his arm round the boy’s neck, “and I can imagine that twenty-one years have rolled back, and that I am bringing her across to Capri for the first time. It was just such an evening as this, sunset and a crescent moon. I had already bought the villa; we were going back to it together.”
“Straight from the Consulate?” asked Colin quietly.
“What?” asked Philip.
“From the Consulate, father,” he repeated.
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Philip quickly, and his voice seemed to ring utterly untrue. “Straight from the Consulate. Ha! there’s Giacomo, my boatman. He sees us.”
“Does he remember my mother?” asked Colin.