lord yardley’s residence at his villa at capri had, as usual, leaked into the diplomatic consciousness, and the english ambassador at rome, an old acquaintance of his, had, as usual, reminded him of a friendly presence in rome, which would be delighted to welcome him if the welcome afforded any convenience. to leave by the very early boat from capri, and thus catch the paris express that evening was a fatiguing performance, would he not, therefore, when the regretted day for his departure came, take the more reasonable midday boat, dine and spend the night at the embassy, and be sent off from there next day in comfort, for the morning express from rome entailed only one night in the train instead of two? the british consul at naples would see to his seclusion in the transit from naples to rome, where he would be met and wafted to the embassy. otherwise an early start from capri, and a hurried train connection in rome, would deprive his excellency of the great pleasure of a renewal of cordiality.
his excellency, it may be remarked, liked an invitation to stanier, and there was method in his thoughtfulness. this proposal arrived a week before lord yardley’s departure; a heat wave had drowned the country, and already he looked with prospective horror on the notion of two nights in the train.... it entailed a night in paris, and, if he was to arrive in england for a debate in the house, a departure from capri by the midday boat on tuesday, instead of the early boat on wednesday. it entailed, in fact, a few hours less of colin.
colin saw the shining of his star. never had anything, for his purpose, been so excellently, opportune. the brit{158}ish consul would be at the station to see his father off, and so, beyond doubt, would he himself, on a visit to uncle salvatore. an acquaintanceship would be made under the most auspicious and authentic circumstances.
“it all fits in divinely, father,” he said. “i shall come across with you, see you off from naples, and then do my duty at uncle salvatore’s. probably, if there was nothing to take me to naples, i should never have gone, but now i shall have to go. do let me kill two birds with one stone. i shall see the last of you—one bird—without having to get up at five in the morning, and i shall have made my visit to uncle salvatore inevitable—two birds. say ‘yes’ and i’ll write to him at once.”
it was in the belief that this arrangement had been made, that lord yardley left naples a week afterwards. mr. cecil, the british consul, had come to the station to secure for him the reserved compartment to rome, and, that being done, had lingered on the platform till the train started. at the last moment, as he and colin stood together there, and while the train was already in motion, colin sprang on to the footboard for a final good-bye, and with a kiss leaped off again. there came a sharp curve and the swaying carriages behind hid the platform from his father.
colin turned to mr. cecil. salvatore was in the background for the present.
“it was delightful of you to come to see my father off,” he said. “he appreciated it immensely.”
colin paused a moment, just the pause that a bather takes before he gets up speed for a running header into the sea.
“he left me a small matter to talk to you about,” he said. “i wonder if i might refer to it now.”
mr. cecil gave a plump, polite little bow.
“pray do, mr. stanier,” he said.
“my father wants a copy of the register of his marriage,” he said, “and he asked me to copy it out for him. the marriage was performed at the british consulate,{159} and if you would be so good as to let me copy it and witness it for me, i should be so grateful. may i call on you in the morning about it? it will save trouble, he thinks, on his death, if among his papers there is an attested copy.”
“a pleasure,” said mr. cecil.
“you are too kind. and you will do me one further kindness? i am going back to capri to-morrow for another fortnight, and it would be so good of you if you would tell me of a decent hotel where i can pass the night. i shall not be able, i am afraid, to catch the early boat, with this business of the copying to do, for it leaves, does it not, at nine, and the consulate will not be open by then.”
colin was at full speed now; his running feet had indeed left the ground, and he was in the air. but he was already stiffened and taut, so to speak, for the plunge; he had made all preparation, and fully anticipated a successful dividing of the waters. for he had already made himself quite charming to mr. cecil, and attributed his lingering on the platform as much to the pleasure of a sociable ten minutes with him as to the honour done to his father.
“but i will not hear of you staying at a hotel,” said mr. cecil, “if i can persuade you to pass the night at my flat. it adjoins the consulate offices, and is close to where the capri boat lies. indeed, if you wish to catch the early boat, we can no doubt manage that little business of yours to-night. it will take only a few minutes.”
colin suffered himself to be persuaded, and they drove back to the consulate. office hours were already over, and presently mr. cecil led the way into the archive-room, where, no doubt, colin’s search would be rewarded. but there had come in for him a couple of telegrams delivered after the clerks had gone, and he went to his desk in the adjoining room to answer these, leaving the boy with the volume containing the year of his father’s marriage. the month, so said colin, was not known to him. his father{160} had told him, but he had forgotten—a few minutes’ search, however, would doubtless remedy that.
so mr. cecil, leaving an official form with him on which to copy the entry, fussed away into the next room, and colin instantly opened the volume. the year was 1893, and the month, as he very well knew, was march.... there it was on march the first, and he ran his eye down to the next entry. marriages at the naples consulate apparently were not frequent, and the next was dated april the fourth.
colin had already his pen in hand to make the copy, and it remained poised there a moment. there was nothing more necessary than to insert one figure before the single numeral, and the thing would be done. it remained after that only to insert a similar “three” in the letter which his mother had written to salvatore announcing her marriage. on this hot evening the ink would dry as soon as it touched the page. and yet he paused, his brain beginning to bubble with some notion better yet, more inspired, more magically apt....
colin gave a little sigh and the smile dawned on his face. he wrote in a “three,” making the date of march 1 into march 31, and then once again he paused, watching with eager eyes for the ink to dry on the page. then, taking up a penknife which lay on the table beside him, he erased, but not quite erased, the “three” he had just written there. he left unerased, as if a hurried hand had been employed on the erasure, the cusp of the figure, and a minute segment of a curve both above and below it.
looking at the entry as he looked at it now, when his work was done, with but casual carefulness, any inspector of it would say that it recorded the marriage of philip lord stanier to rosina viagi on the first of march. but had the inspector’s attention been brought to bear more minutely on it, he must, if directed to hold the page sideways to the light, have agreed that there had been some erasure made in front of the figure denoting the day of the month; for there was visible the scratching of a pen{161}knife or some similar instrument. then, examining it more closely, he would certainly see the cusp of a “three,” the segment of the upper curve, and a dot of ink in the place where the lower segment would have been.
these remnants would scarcely have struck his eye at all, had not he noticed that there were the signs of an erasure there. with them, it was impossible for the veriest tyro in conjecture not to guess what the erasure had been.
the whole thing took but a half-minute, and at the expiration of that, colin was employed on the transcription of the record of the marriage. he knew that he had to curb a certain trembling of his hand, to reduce to a more regular and slower movement the taking of his breath, which came in pants, as if he had been running.
half a minute ago, no notion of what he had already accomplished had entered his head; his imagination had not travelled further than the possibility of changing the date which he knew he should find here into one thirty days later. out of the void, out of the abyss, this refinement in forgery had come to him, and he already recognised without detailed examination how much more astute, how infinitely more cunning, was this emended tampering. just now he could spare but a side glance at that, for he must copy this entry (unaware that pen and pen-knife had been busy there) and take it to plump mr. cecil for his signature, but the sharp, crisp tap of conviction in his mind told him that he had done more magnificently well than his conscious brain had ever suggested to him.
no longer time than was reasonable for this act of copying alone had elapsed before colin laid down his pen and went into the next room.
“well, mr. stanier, have you done your copying?” asked cecil.
“yes. shall i bring it here for your signature?” said colin.
mr. cecil climbed down from the high stool where he was perched like some fat, cheerful little bird.{162}
“no, no,” he said. “we must be more business-like than that. i must compare your copy with the original entry before i give you my signature.”
colin knew that the skill with which he had effected the alteration which yet left the entry unaltered, would now be put to the test, but he felt no qualm whatever as to detection. the idea had been inspired, and he had no doubt that the execution of it was on the same level of felicitous audacity. they passed back into the archive-room together, and the consul sat himself before the volume and the copy.
“yes, march the first, march the first,” he said, comparing the two, “philip lord stanier, philip lord stanier, quite correct ha! you have left out a full stop after his name, mr. stanier. yes, rosina viagi, of 93 via emmanuele....”
he wrote underneath his certificate that this was a true and faithful copy of the entry in the consular archives, signed his name, stamped it with the official seal and date, and handed it to colin.
“that will serve your father’s purpose,” he said, and replacing the volume on its shelf, locked the wire door of its bookcase.
“if you will be so good as to wait five minutes,” he said, “i will just finish answering a telegram that demands my attention, and then i shall be at your service for the evening.”
he gave a discreet little chuckle.
“we will dine en gar?on,” he said, “at a restaurant which i find more than tolerable, and shall no doubt contrive some pleasant way of passing the evening. naples keeps late hours, mr. stanier, and i should not be surprised if you found the first boat to capri inconveniently early. we shall see.”
mr. cecil appeared to put off the cares and dignity of officialdom with singular completeness when the day’s work was over, and colin found he had an agreeably juvenile companion, ready to throw himself with zest into{163} the diversions, whatever they might be, of the evening. he ate with the appetite of a lion-cub, consumed a very special wine in magnificent quantities, and had a perfect battery of smiles and winks for the neapolitans who frequented the restaurant.
“dulce est desipere in loco,” he remarked gaily, “and that’s about the sum of the latin that remains to me, and, after all, it can be expressed equally well in english by saying ‘all work, no play, makes jack a dull boy.’ and when we have finished our wine, all the amusements of this amusing city are at your disposal. there is an admirable cinematograph just across the road, there is a music-hall a few doors away, but if you choose that, you must not hold me responsible for what you hear there. or if you think it too hot a night for indoor entertainment, there is the galleria umberto, which is cool and airy, but again, if you choose that, you must not hold me responsible for what you see there. children of nature: that is what we neapolitans are. we, did i say? well, i feel myself one of them, when the consulate is shut, not when i am on duty, mark that, mr. stanier. but my private life is my own, and then i shed my english skin.”
in spite of the diversions of the city, colin was brisk enough in the morning to catch the early boat, and once more, as he had done a month ago on his initial visit to the island, he sequestered himself from the crowd under the awning, and sought solitude in the dipping bows of the little steamer. to-day, however, there was no chance of his meditations being interrupted by his father with tedious talk of days spent at sorrento; no irksome demonstrations of love were there to be responded to, but he could without hindrance explore not only his future path, but, no less, estimate the significance of what he had done already.
once more, then, the register of his father’s marriage was secure in the keeping of the consulate, mr. cecil had looked at it, compared colin’s copy, which now lay safe in the breast-pocket of his coat, with the original, and had{164} certified it to be correct. colin had run no risk by inserting and then erasing a figure which might prove on scrutiny to be a subsequent addition; mr. cecil himself had been unaware that any change had been wrought on the page. but when the register on lord yardley’s death should be produced in accordance with the plan that was already ripening and maturing in colin’s mind, a close scrutiny would reveal that it had been tampered with. some hand unknown had clearly erased a figure there, altering the date from march 31 to march 1. the object of that would be clear enough, for it legalised the birth of the twins rosina had borne. it was in the interest of any of four people to commit that forgery—of his father, of his mother, of raymond, and of himself. rosina was dead now these many years; his father, when the register was next produced, would be dead also, and from dead lips could come neither denial nor defence. raymond might be left out of the question altogether, for never yet had he visited his mother’s native city, and of those alive when the register was produced, suspicion could only possibly attach to himself. it would have been in his interest to make that alteration, which should establish his legitimacy as well as that of his brother.
colin, as he sat alone in the bows, fairly burst out laughing, before he proceeded to consider the wonderful sequel. he would be suspected, would he?... then how would it come about that it was he, who in the nobility of stainless honour would produce his own mother’s letter, given him by his uncle, in which she announced to her brother that she was married at the british consulate on the 31st of march? had he been responsible for that erasure in the consulate register, to legitimatise his own birth, how, conceivably, could he not only not conceal, but bring forward the very evidence that proved his illegitimacy? had he tampered with the consular book, he must have destroyed the letter which invalidated his forgery. but, instead of destroying it, he would produce it.{165}
there was work ahead of him here and intrigue in which salvatore must play a part. the work, of course, was in itself nothing; the insertion at the top of one of the two letters he owned of just that one figure which he had inserted and erased again in the register was all the manual and material business; a bottle of purple ink and five minutes’ practice would do that. but the intrigue was more difficult. salvatore must be induced to acquiesce in the fact that the date of the letter announcing rosina’s marriage was subsequent to that announcing the birth of the twins. that would require thought and circumspection; there must be no false step there.
and all this was but a preliminary man?uvring for the great action whereby, though at the cost of his own legitimacy, he should topple raymond down from his place, and send him away outcast and penniless, and himself, with violet for wife, now legal owner of all the wealth and honours of the family, become master of stanier. she might for the love of him, which he believed was budding in her heart, throw raymond over and marry him without cognisance of what he had done for her. but he knew, from knowledge of himself, how overmastering the passion for stanier could be, and it might happen that she would choose raymond with all that marriage to him meant, and stifle the cry of her love.
in that case (perhaps, indeed, in any case), colin might find it better to make known to her the whole, namely that on his father’s death she would find herself in a position to contest the succession and claim everything for her own. which of them, raymond or himself, would she choose to have for husband in these changed circumstances? she disliked and proposed to tolerate the one for the sake of the great prize of possession; she was devoted to the other, who, so she would learn, had become possessed of the fact on which her ownership was established.
or should he tell her all? reveal his part in it? on this point he allowed his decision to remain in abeyance; what he should do, whether he should tell violet nothing,{166} or part, or all, must depend on circumstances, and for the present he would waste no more time over that. for the present, too, he would keep the signed and certified copy of his father’s marriage.
the point which demanded immediate consideration was that concerning salvatore. colin puzzled this out, sometimes baffled and frowning, sometimes with a clear course lying serene in front of his smiling eyes, as the steamer, leaving the promontory of the mainland behind, approached the island. he must see salvatore, whom he had quite omitted to see in naples, as soon as possible, and it would be much better to see him here, in the privacy of the villa, than seek him, thought colin, in the publicity of the palazzo viagi, surrounded by those siren dames, vittoria and cecilia.
he would write at once, a pensive and yet hopeful little epistle to uncle salvatore wondering if he would come across to capri yet once again, not for the mere inside of a day only, but for a more hospitable period. his father had left for england, colin was alone, and there were matters to be talked over that weighed on his conscience.... that was a good phrase; uncle salvatore would remember what colin had already done in the matter of the reduplicated cheque, and it would seem that the generous fellow had a debt of conscience yet unliquidated; this conveyed precisely the right impression.
in a postscript he would hint at the french nectar which, still dozing in the cellar.... he hesitated a moment, and then decided not to mention the subject of his mother’s letters, for it was better that since they were the sole concern of his visit, uncle salvatore should have the matter sprung upon him.... a bottle of purple ink ... no, that would not be necessary yet, for the later that you definitely committed yourself to a course of action the better.
colin’s letter produced just the effect that he had calculated on; salvatore read into the conscience-clause a generous impulse and congratulated himself on the de{167}parture of that grim, dry brother-in-law to whom (for he had tried that before) tears and frayed cuffs made no appeal. he had accordingly given that up, and for his last visit here made himself nobly resplendent. but to colin, in the guilelessness of his blue-eyed boyhood, a tale of pinching and penury might be a suitable revelation, and it was a proud but shabby figure which presented itself at the villa a few evenings later, without more luggage than could be conveniently conveyed in a paper parcel. colin, who had been observing the approach from the balcony of his bedroom, ran down, choking with laughter that must be choked, to let his uncle in.
“ah, this is nice,” he said. “you have no idea how welcome you are. it was good of you to take pity on my loneliness. what a jolly evening we shall have. and vittoria and cecilia? how are they?”
a gleam brightened uncle salvatore’s gloom, and he fervently pressed colin’s hand.
“they are well, thank god,” he said. “and while that is so, what matters anything?”
he appeared with a gesture of his hand to pluck some intruding creature from the region of his heart, and throw it into the garden-beds. then he gave a little skip in the air.
“collino mio!” he said. “you charm away my sad thoughts. whatever happens to-morrow, i will be gay to-night. i will not drag your brightness down into my gloom and darknesses. away with them, then!”
colin fathomed the mountebank mind with an undeviating plummet. the depth (or shallowness) of it answered his fairest expectations. he found nothing inconsistent in this aspect of salvatore with that which he had last presented here; the two, in fact, tallied with the utmost exactitude as the expression of one mind. they both chimed true to the inspiring personality. he waited, completely confident, for the advent of the opportunity.
that came towards the end of dinner: without even{168} having been hilarious, salvatore had at least been cheerful, and now, as suddenly as if a tap had been turned off, the flow of his enjoyment ceased. he sighed, he cleared his throat, he supported his head on his hands, and stared at the tablecloth. to colin these signals were unmistakable.
“you’re in trouble, uncle salvatore,” he said softly, “and now for the first time i am glad that my father has gone back to england. if he were here, i should not be able to say what i mean to say, for, after all, he is my father, and he has always been most generous to me. but he is not equally generous to others who have claims on him. i have tried to make him see that, and, as you and i know, i have succeeded to some small extent. but the extent to which i have succeeded does not satisfy me. considering all that i know, i am determined to do better for you than i have been able to make him do. if i am his son, i am equally my mother’s son. and you are her brother.”
colin paused a moment, and, sudden as a highland spate, inspiration flooded his mind. he had not thought out with any precision what he meant to say, for that must depend on salvatore, who might, equally well, have adopted the attitude of a proud and flashy independence. but he had declared for frayed cuffs and a fit of gloom, and colin shaped his course accordingly.
“and i can’t forget,” he said, “that it was you who put me in possession of certain facts when you sent me those two letters of my mother. i learned from them what i had never dreamed of before. i never in the wildest nightmare thought that my father had not married your sister till after my birth. i should have had to know that sometime: on my father’s death it must have come out. and you have shown a wonderful delicacy in breaking the fact to me like that. i thank you for that, uncle salvatore; i owe you a deep debt of gratitude which i hope to repay!”
colin listened to his own voice, which seemed to make{169} itself articulate without any directing will of his own. the summer night was charged with the force of obedience to which his tongue moved against his teeth, and his lips formed letters, and his throat gave the gutturals. literally, he did not know what he was going to say till he heard himself saying it. the breeze whispered in the stone-pine, and he spoke....
the breeze was still now and the stone-pine was silent. but he had said enough to make it necessary that salvatore should reply. presently a bat would flit through the arches of the pergola where they dined, or the wind would stir in the pine, and then he would speak again. there was just that same stir abroad on the night when he had listened from his bedroom to his father’s footfalls on the terrace.
“what do you mean, collino?” said his uncle excitedly. “i cannot understand what you say. my sainted rosina married your father on the first of march, for i glanced at the letters again before i sent them to you. your birth....”
colin interrupted.
“ah, a bat,” he said. “i love bats. if you hold a handkerchief up does not a bat come to it? let us interrupt our conversation for a moment.”
he spread his handkerchief over his head, and next moment salvatore leaped to his feet, for there, beady-eyed and diabolical, with hooked wings as of parchment, spread out on either side of its furry body, one of the great southern bats alighted, making a cap for colin’s golden head. only for a moment it stopped there, and then flitted off into the dusk again.
“soft, furry thing,” said colin. “but you hate them, do you, uncle salvatore? it was stupid of me. let us talk again!”
he hitched his chair a little closer to the table, and looked salvatore straight in the eyes.
“but you have forgotten the dates on those letters you gave me,” he said. “my mother was married to my father{170} not on the first of march, but on the thirty-first. the second letter recording raymond’s birth and mine was written on the seventeenth.”
again he paused.
“raymond and i were born,” he said slowly and distinctly, “before my father’s marriage. the letters which you gave me prove it. if further proof was wanted, you would find it at the consulate where the marriage took place. some one has tampered with the register, and the date has been made to look as if it recorded the first of march. but it does not: it records the thirty-first of march, and the ‘three’ has been erased. but it is still visible. i saw it myself, for i went across to naples to see my father off, and subsequently at the consulate made a copy of the entry. i should have proposed myself to stay with you that night, uncle salvatore, but i had no spirit left in me to see anybody. when you sent me those two letters of my mother, i hoped against hope perhaps, that there was some ghastly mistake. i nearly destroyed them, indeed, in order that from them, at any rate, there should be no conceivable evidence. but when i saw the entry in the book at the consulate, with the mark of the erasure visible to any careful scrutiny, i knew that it was no use to fight against facts. on my father’s death, the evidence of the date of his marriage must be produced, and it will be clear what happened. my mother bore him two boys—i was one. subsequently he married her, hoping, i have no doubt, to beget from her an heir to the name and the property.”
the wind sighed heavily in the pine, and little stirs of it rustled the vine-leaves.
“is it at no cost to me,” said colin, “that i keep my mother’s letter which proves raymond and me to be bastards? oh, it is an ugly word, and if you were me, you would know that it is an ugly thing. without my mother’s letter which you sent me, it would be hard indeed to prove, indeed, any one might copy out the entry at the consulate and fail to see the erasure altogether. ray{171}mond, at my father’s death would succeed, and i, his twin, beloved of him, would take an honourable place in the eyes of the world, for it is not nothing to be born a stanier.”
colin’s voice was soft and steadfast.
“but my mother’s letter to you makes it impossible for me to have honour in the eyes of the world, and to preserve my own,” he said. “ah, why did you send me those two letters, uncle salvatore? it was in all innocence and kindness that you sent them, and you need not remind me that i asked for them. having seen them, what could any one with a shred of honour do but to admit the truth of the whole ghastly business? the only wish that i have is that my father shall not know that i know. all i want is that he, when the hour of his death comes, should hope that the terrible fraud which has been practised, will never be detected. but for that letter of my mother’s, that would undoubtedly have happened. the register at the consulate would have been copied at his death by some clerk, and the consul would have certificated its accuracy. look at me, then, now, and look at yourself in the same light, you of unblemished descent, and me and raymond!”
salvatore had certainly woke out of his dejection.
“but it’s impossible,” he cried, beating the table. “i sent you two letters; the first, dated march the first, announced my sainted rosina’s marriage to your father. where is it? produce it!”
colin was quite prepared for that. he put his sun-browned fingers into his breast-pocket, and drew out a paper.
“i can’t show you the original letters,” he said, “because it was clearly my duty to put them into inviolable custody as soon as possible. i sent them, in fact, as soon as i had seen the register at the consulate, to my bank, with orders that they were to be kept there until i gave further instructions, or until the news of my death reached them. in that case, uncle salvatore, i gave instructions{172} that they were to be sent to my father. but before i despatched them to the bank, i made a copy of them, and here that copy is.”
he passed over to his uncle the copy he had made of the letter that afternoon, before (instead of sending it to the bank) he locked the original safely away upstairs. it was an accurate copy, except that it was dated march 31. salvatore took it and read it; it tallied, but for the date, with his recollection of it.
“but it is impossible!” he said. “for years i have known that letter. when i gave it you it was dated march the first.”
“do you imply that i altered it?” asked colin. “not a living eye has seen that letter but mine. give me any reason for altering it. why should i make myself nameless and illegitimate?”
salvatore looked that in the face. the validity of it stared at him unflinchingly.
“but i can’t believe it; there is some huge mistake,” said salvatore. “often have i read that letter of rosina’s. march the first was the date of her marriage. i will swear to that; nothing shall shake my belief in that.”
colin shook his head in answer.
“what good will that do?” he said. “you gave the letter to me, and no hand but mine has ever touched it. the letter must be produced some day, not for many years, i hope and trust, but on my father’s death it must come to light. how will your recollections stand in the face of that evidence which all can see?”
salvatore glanced round. they were alone with the fitful wind in the pine.
“destroy the letter, collino,” he said. “save your mother’s honour and your own.”
colin gave him one glance, soft and pitiful.
“ah, you must not suggest that to me,” he said. “you must not add force to the temptation i can only just resist. but where would my honour be if i did that?{173} what shred of it would be left me? how could i live a lie like that?”
colin leaned forward and put his hand on salvatore’s arm.
“i have got to accept my illegitimacy,” he said. “and if you are sorry for me, as i think you are, you can shew it best by accepting it too. it would be infinitely painful to me when this revelation is made, as it will have to be made on my father’s death, to have you attempting to save my mother’s honour and my own, as you put it just now, by insisting that this letter bore another date. i should never have a moment’s peace if i thought a scene like that was ahead of me. in fact, i want to be assured against that, and the only way i can think of to make that safe is that when you get back to naples to-morrow you should write me a couple of lines, saying how you feel for me in this discovery that is new to me. and then i want you to name the discovery, which is the date of my mother’s marriage. i want you to accept that date, and give me proof that you accept it.”
colin made a gesture with his hand, as if cutting off that topic, and instantly spoke again.
“with my cousin vittoria growing up,” he said, “you must be put to expenses which it is impossible for you to meet out of the pittance my father gives you. he wronged you and your family most terribly, and i must repair that wrong. when i get that letter of yours, uncle salvatore, i will send you a cheque for ￡500.”
colin gave a glance at his uncle, to make sure that there was no faintest sign of dissent. there was none, and he went on:
“i see you understand me,” he said, “so let us go a step further. if my brother raymond dies before my father, i will make that five hundred pounds an annuity to you, and i will destroy both the letter i ask you to write now, and the letter of my mother’s about which we have been talking. you will never be asked to say anything about either of them. if on the other hand my{174} father dies first, and if i make the marriage which i expect to make, i shall have to use your letter and that letter of my mother’s. you may be asked to swear to the genuineness of the letter which i hope you will write me to-morrow, and to the recollection of my mother’s letter which will tally with it. have another glass of this delicious french wine.”
he had no need to think what he was saying, or frame a specious case. he spoke quite simply and directly as if by some inspiration, as if he was an ?olian harp hung in the wind which whispered through the stone-pine.
“i don’t think there is need for any discussion,” he said, “though, of course, if you like to ask me any question, i will consider whether i shall answer it. but i don’t think there is need for any question, is there? you might tell me, i fancy, straight off, whether you accept or reject my proposal. if you reject it, perhaps i had better tell you that it is exceedingly unlikely that my father will give you any further assistance financially, for, as you know, i have a good deal of influence with him.
“it would not pay you to refuse, would it? and as to threatening me with making this conversation of ours public, with a view to getting money out of me, i know your gentlemanly feelings would revolt against such an idea. besides it would be singularly unremunerative, for no one would possibly believe you. our conversation and my proposal would strike anybody as incredible. and you are not perjuring yourself in any way; you did send me a letter of my mother’s, and you will, i hope, write me another letter to-morrow, saying that the story of my mother’s marriage is very shocking, which is indeed true. so shall it be ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ uncle salvatore?”
salvatore, superstitious, like most southern italians, to the core, found himself making the sign of the cross below the table. apart from the obvious material advantage of accepting colin’s offer, he felt that some fierce compelling agency was backing colin up. that dreadful little in{175}cident of the bat had already upset him, and now in colin’s blue gay glance so earnestly fixed on him, he divined some manifestation of the evil eye, which assuredly it were not wise to provoke into action. and as if, in turn, colin divined his thought, he spoke again:
“better say ‘yes,’ uncle salvatore,” he said. “my friends lead more enjoyable lives than my enemies. but whatever you answer, i want your answer now.”
perhaps through some strange trick of light played by the guttering candles, it suddenly seemed to salvatore that colin’s eyes undeviatingly fixed on his face, seemed in themselves luminous, as if a smouldering light actually burned behind them.
“i accept,” he said quickly, “for vittoria’s sake.”
colin took up his glass.
“i thought i should move your paternal heart, dear uncle salvatore,” he said. “i drink to our pleasant bargain.{176}”
