Colin focused his clear brain, as if it had been a lens, on Salvatore. He had been very decorative and melodramatic on the subject of his sister’s honour, but there had been much of cheap strutting, of tinsel, of footlights about that. And Salvatore, so Colin reasoned with a melting and a smoothing out of his frown, was not all strutting and swagger. There was a very real side to that impecunious uncle with his undowered Vittoria. His concern for his sister’s honour was not surely so dominant in him as his desire for coin. A suitable cheque would no doubt induce him to recollect that the first of Rosina’s letters announced the births of the twins, the second, that of March 31, her marriage.
Salvatore, for love of Vittoria (to put it at that), would probably see the sense of allowing his memory of the dates at the head of this letter to be faulty. He would not be obliged to perjure himself in any way; all he had got to do (given that a page had been torn out of the register at the Consulate, or that the date of the marriage as recorded there was March 31) was to swear that his sister’s letters had always been in his possession until he had given them to his attractive nephew.... Yes, Salvatore would surely not prove an insuperable obstacle; he would rate the living, himself and Vittoria, higher than the dead.
For one moment, brief as that in which, according to the legend, the ancestral Colin had considered whether he should close with that strange offer made him in the sheep-fold, his descendant, his living incarnation, hesitated when he thought of his father. His father had always been devoted to him, and such affection as Colin was capable of was his. But, after all, Philip would necessarily be dead when (and if) the discovery was made that Rosina’s letter to her brother gave the date of the marriage as March 31, and when, on search being made in the register of the British Consulate, it was discovered that, owing to a page being missing, there was no record of the marriage at all, or that the date given there corresponded with that of Rosina’s letter.
Colin had no intention of producing this evidence in his father’s lifetime; there might be counter-proofs which his father could produce. If he could only make some dealing with the register and with the date on the letter, he would let the whole matter sleep till his father was dead. Then nothing could hurt him; you cannot hurt the dead. Even if—Colin gave little thought to this—the spirit of the dead survived in consciousness of the living, would not his father’s spirit gladly make this posthumous sacrifice of his earthly honour and rejoice to see Colin, his beloved, master of Stanier? So his hesitation was fleeting as breath on a frosty morning, it appeared but mistily, and dispersed.
His father, out in the garden, was calling him, and with a cheerful response he picked up his towels and went downstairs. For the present there was but one necessary step to be taken; he had to get a day in Naples before he left, and pay a visit to the British Consulate. It was no use making any further plans beyond that, in his ignorance of what he should find there. A visit to his uncle, and a night spent there, might possibly serve as an excuse.
Philip had also heard from his brother-in-law this morning: the communication was not so satisfactory to him, as Colin’s post had been.
“I’ve heard from Salvatore,” he said. “He’s a nauseating fellow, Colin.”
“Oh, no; only a comic, father,” said Colin gaily. “You take him too heavily.”
“Read that,” said Philip.
The letter was certainly characteristic, and as Colin read his smile broadened into a laugh. The writer spoke of the deep humiliation it was for a Viagi to take gifts from any; it had not been so with them once, for the family had been the dispensers of a royal bounty. Indeed, two considerations only made it possible for him to do so, the first his paternal devotion to his two sweet maids, Vittoria and Cecilia, the second his fraternal devotion to his noble and generous relative. That sentiment did honour to them both, and with happy tears of gratitude he acknowledged the safe receipt of the cheque. He wrote with some distraction, for his sweet maids kept interrupting him to know if he had sent their most respectful love to their uncle, and had reminded their dearest Colin that they looked for his advent with prodigious excitement and pleasure. They demanded to know when that hour would dawn for them. One bottle of the nectar of France would be preserved for that day to drink the health of his friend, his relative, his noblest of benefactors. He signed himself “Viagi,” as if the princely honours had been restored.