His father came across the room to where he still stood by the window, and laid loving hands on his shoulders.
“Colin, old boy,” he said. “Are you fond of Violet—like that?”
Colin nodded without speech.
“I had no idea of it,” said Lord Yardley. “I often watched you and her together, and I thought you were only as brother and sister. Upon my word, Raymond seems to have got everything.”
Colin’s smile was inimitable. It seemed to fight its way to his beautiful mouth.
“I’ve got you, father,” he said, out of sheer exuberance of wickedness.
The subject was renewed that night when they sat under the vine-wreathed pergola where they had dined. The sun, bowling down the steep cliff away westward, had just plunged into the sea, and darkness came swiftly over the sky, without that long-drawn period of fading English twilight in which day is slowly transformed into night. Here night leaped from its lair in the East and with a gulp absorbed the flames of sunset and swiftly the stars sprang from the hiding-places where all day they had lain concealed, and burning large and low made a diffused and penetrating greyness of illumination that dripped like glowing rain from the whole heavens.
Dim and veiled though that luminance was, compared to the faintest of the lights of day, it gave a curious macabre distinctness to everything, and Colin’s face, in a pool of star-shine that filtered between the trailing garlands of the vines, wore to his father some strange, wraith-like aspect. So often had he sat here in such light as this with Rosina opposite him, and all that he loved in Rosina seemed now to have been reincarnated, spectre-like, in the boy he cared more for than he cared for all the rest of the world. All that he had missed in the woman who had satisfied and so soon sated his physical senses, flowered in Colin with his quick intelligence, his sunny affection.... And his father, for all his longing, could do nothing to help him in this darkness which had overshadowed the dawn of love for him.
Instead of Colin, Raymond had got all, that son of his whom he had never liked even, and had always, in some naturally-unnatural manner, been jealous of, in that he would inherit all that his own fingers would one day relax their hold on. Had it been Colin who would grasp the sceptre of the Staniers, Philip would, as he had said, close his eyes for his last sleep in unenvious content. And now Raymond had got the desire of his heart as well, which, too, was the desire of Colin’s heart.
All day, since the arrival of those letters, Colin had been very quiet, yet without any bitterness; grave and sweet, but only a shadow, a ghost of himself for gaiety. Now his face, pale in the starlight, was ghostlike also, and his father divined in it an uncomplaining suffering, infinitely pathetic.