CHAPTER II

Colin woke next morning to a serene sense of well-being; while still too drowsy to question himself on the cause of this sunny sleepy happiness, he knew it was there. Then he remembered that he was at Stanier, which alone might account for this content at waking, and one after another fresh interests and anticipated amusements came bubbling into his mind. That talk with Violet in the moonlight last night embodied several of them, but there was another which interested him more.

He drew himself up in bed, and took from the table by it a great pile of typewritten sheets, the perusal of which had caused him so late and absorbed a session last night. There was the transcript, now made for the first time, of the memoirs written by his Elizabethan ancestor, to whom and to whose bargain the fortunes of the house were wondrously due. When last he went to London he had taken the original volume with him for reproduction in more legible form, for the text was written in a strange, crabbed hand, the ink of which was dim with age, and was so difficult to follow, that the mere decipherment of it occupied the mind to the exclusion of the appreciation of the text. But the fragments which he had puzzled out were so sprightly and entertaining that he had determined to procure a less distracted study of the whole.

Colin had read last night with fascinated glee the account of the early life of his ancestral namesake, who analysed his own nature, not in tedious terms of abstract tendencies, but by the far more convincing method of putting down just what he did, and letting his actions analyse for him. He admirably sketched his boyhood in the days when the marsh was still largely undrained, and the white-plumed avocets bred there, when the tall ships came up full-sailed on the tide to Rye, and the smugglers brought in barrels of Hollands, and if caught were summarily hanged. His father, Ronald Stanier, whom he succinctly described as “a drunken sot” (how charmingly did heredity reproduce the type) was a farmer with fat acres and full flocks, who dissolved his substance in drink. He was barbarously harsh to the boy and to his wife, whom he tamed from her shrewish ways into obedience and silence, and used to beat them both till there came a day when Colin had no mind to take any more strappings, and soundly thrashed his own father. “And this I did,” he wrote, “with great pleasure, not only because I served him as he had served me, and with a stronger arm, but because I had always hated him.” He described his own queer power over animals: a savage dog would never bite him, an unruly horse behaved itself when he came near it, “and that was strange, because I had no love for animals, and indeed no love at all. I made good pretence, for so folk were kind to me, and I liked a wench well enough for my own pleasure to which she ministered, but all I loved was my own strength, and my own beauty, which they loved too....”

Colin had got to this point last night, and now, sitting up in bed, ran over the pages again. How amazingly history repeated itself; there more than three centuries ago was Ronald Stanier the drunken sot, and the tamed silent wife, who was the mother of Staniers: and there above all, three centuries ago, was his very self, incarnate surely in the bodily tabernacle of his ancestor, he and his handsome face which the wenches loved, and his heart which hated love and loved hate.

And then came the story of the Legend, told with sober conviction by the beneficiary himself. The boy had gone that day (it was a week before Easter) to see the Queen pass through Rye, and luck attended him, for he had been at hand when Her Grace’s horse stumbled, and she would have had a fall had he not run forward and caught her in his arms.

“And I knelt, after she had released me from her flat bosom,” he recounted, “and gave her just such a look as I would give to a wench at a fair, and I saw this pleased her.” She told him to wait on her at the Manor of Brede next day, and he went back to the lambing, for the ewes were fruitful, and his father was drunk, and all that afternoon and deep into the night he was busy with his midwifery, and finally he threw himself down on a heap of straw in the shepherd’s hut, for a few hours’ sleep before morning. He woke, while it was yet dark, but, dark though it was, he could see that a fine tall fellow dressed in red stood by him, who revealed himself as none other than Satan. He promised him all that his heart could desire, of health and wealth, of beauty and honour and affluence, if in return for these gifts he would sign away his soul. “I cared little for my soul,” so ran the account, “and I cared much for honour and wealth, and further he did promise me that our bargain should hold good for the heirs and descendants of this my body, if they should choose to take advantage of it. So quickly we were at terms, and he gave me pen and parchment and I pricked my arm for ink and signed in my blood the deed he had prepared, which deed he bade me keep as testimony to our pleasant bargain. Then shone there a strong flash of light in my eyes, and I cried out and fell back on the straw, where I had been sleeping, and he was gone from me, and the night was yet black round me. But this was no dream, for the parchment was in my hand, and then came a blink of lightning, and I saw that my signature of blood was still wet.”

Colin gave a gasp of pure pleasure and surprise. What an inimitable touch of veracity was that! No one could have invented that; the experience, fantastic and dipped in mediæval superstition was absolutely and literally real to the writer. He described what he saw. In this first-hand contemporary record, the legend of Faust lived again in unadorned and literal simplicity. Since then it had come into sad disrepute, becoming merged in cooked-up tales and elaborate myths: Marlowe had made a tragedy of it, and Goëthe fishing it up had built a dreary and tedious philosophy on it, and Gounod had made an opera of it. But here was the same story plain and vivid without comment or moralizing. Faust himself was describing just what _happened_....

Colin turned the page. Authentic and eye-witnessed surely as was that touch about the blood being still wet, there were difficulties, insuperable ones, about accepting the story of the Legend in connection with the parchment now let into the frame of old Colin’s portrait. Here was a perfectly ignorant shepherd-boy, who almost certainly could neither read nor write, subscribing his name to a document which was, if the parchment was authentic, written in Latin. The most credulous could hardly swallow that....

He read on. “I had no skill then either to read or write, but there still wet and red was what I had written. After that I slept soundly, and in the morning I got home and hid away the parchment, and went to wait on the Queen’s Grace as she had bade me, at the Manor of Brede. Of that I will tell presently, but here first will I tell of the parchment, and what befell. For presently I was attached to Her Grace’s Court, as her page, and there I learned both to read and write, and Latin I learned too, for she loved to speak in Latin, and show her wisdom and learning which indeed was no great affair. Then could I see that though, on that night in the sheepfold, I had no knowledge of writing, yet I had signed my name, very scholarly and clerk-like, and in the hand that was mine when I had learned to write. Then, too, I could read what therein was promised me, riches and honour all of which came to pass. As for the parchment itself, I kept that secretly, and told no man of it, for they burn at the stake those who have had dealings with my Lord and benefactor, and I had no wish to suffer such a fate. For my soul I have no care; I do not reckon my soul at the worth of a doit, but it would be a grievous thing to be burned, thought I, while my life was yet strong in me and the lusts of the flesh sweet. So I told no man of the matter, except only in after years my two sons, each of them, when he came of age. I had brought them up with both precept and example for their profit, and they knew what manner of man their father was, and how mightily he prospered, and how it went ill with those who crossed him, and so, when their time came to know of the parchment, and to make their choice, it was no wonder that they chose with wisdom and prudence, even as I had done.... Now let me write what so wonderfully befell when next morning I walked to Brede and waited on the Queen....”

Just so far had Colin got in his reading, when Nino, his valet, came in to call him. Usually Colin slept like a child till he was roused; often Nino had to twitch his bedclothes or rattle with cans before he could raise him out of these tranquil deeps.

“Awake, signor?” said Nino in surprise.

“Yes, very much so,” said Colin. “Morning, Nino. I’ve been reading about what I was like rather more than three hundred years ago.”

Nino put his letters and the morning paper by the bedside. There was no one in the world to whom Colin felt more akin than to him. Nino was Southern and gay, and had the morals of a sleek black panther. In the Italian fashion, he had made Colin his chief interest in life: he was devoted to him and was quite without fear of him. In Nino’s eyes whatever Colin did was right.

Nino beamed over this unintelligible remark. All that mattered was that Colin was pleased.

“And used I to call you in the morning then?” he asked.

“No-one called me in the morning as far as I’ve got,” said Colin. “I was a shepherd-boy with bare feet. What sort of a day is it, Nino?”

“I brought it straight from Capri,” said Nino. “Hot, hot, ever so hot.”

“I’ll bathe then,” said Colin, getting out of bed. “Bring some clothes along, Nino. Just flannels. Come and bathe, too. I hate bathing alone. And bring my tea with you. I’ll drink it after my bath.”

The morning as Nino had said was already very hot, but the dew of the night before had been heavy, and in the shadow the grass was still shining with it, and the smell of the wet earth was fragrant with liquid freshness. Colin kicked off his shoes for the pleasure of walking barefooted; and for very lightness of heart ran whistling down the grass slope to the lake. There was a bathing shed on the bank towards the deep end with steps and spring-board, and next moment he had stripped off his pyjamas, and stood poised to cleave the deep water, where the rhododendrons and the white balustrade of the sluice were unwaveringly reflected. Taut as an arrow of sunlit limbs he flicked outwards from the board and disappeared in a fountain of foam.

He rose to the surface and struck out into the lake, swimming with overhead stroke, his shoulders gleaming as they lifted themselves alternately, his golden head now a-wash and now glistening in the sunlight as it emerged. Then when he was half-way across the lake, and opposite the sluice, he turned and swam straight towards it.... There the water was deepest, and there it slept in the shadow of the bushes, and now he dipped his head and dived, scooping with his arms, and pulling himself downwards. Down, down he pressed, till the twilight of the depths closed round him, and the bright surface above was veiled and