CHAPTER IV

Colin woke from his siesta very gradually. He had not the slightest idea when the first faint glimmerings of consciousness began to return, where he was. He scarcely knew who he was, and with a deliberate quiescence of mind he tried to prolong this vague sense that what lay here was alive and happy, without orientating it or attaching it to any fixed point. Nirvana, he thought, must be like this, mere awareness of existence and content.

But this Nirvana began spontaneously to break up: from outside his window a whisper of wind and a stir of sun-winnowed air spiced with indefinable Southern odour flowed across to the bed where he lay in shirt and trousers, and at the end of his bed, very curiously, he saw two bare feet. It was still unconjecturable, to his drowsiness, to whom they belonged and what they were doing there, but now a fly settled on one of them, and he made the great discovery that it was his own foot which twitched to dislodge it. This snapped the chain of his identity round his neck and he knew he was Colin. Then the hot Southern scent and the whisper of wind in the pine outside localized him, for nowhere else, but in that beloved villa on Capri, did a pine whisper like that. Yes, he was in Capri: of course he was, for he had arrived late last night, and had spent the morning in the sea.

When once the sluices of sleep were raised, memories began to pour through, and he let them flow as they would without direction. He had come here first only two years ago with his father, and instantly his Italian blood had initiated him into the magic of the South; the lizards basking on the walls, the grey olives, the stone pines, the steep cobbled ways were as home-like, even when he saw them for the first time, as the thrushes that scudded across the lawn at Stanier, and the yew-hedge and the lake. Of course his father’s presence, and his father’s devotion to him, had been tedious at times, but he had borne that very indulgently. Then he had come here with Violet on his honeymoon, and here she had begun to learn something of his real nature, and that cold terror she had of him, which so inexplicably existed side by side with her love, had first laid a finger on her. Strange, to think how that hand of ice had never frozen her love, nor squeezed it out of her heart.... And then he had come here a third time, after Raymond had been drowned, but had stayed here only one night, for waiting him--welcoming him?--was the telegram to say his father was dead. He had not wanted his father to die exactly: he was quite content to wait a few years yet, but how his heart had leaped to know that already, while he was not yet of age, his great inheritance had come to him. Surely Capri was a lucky spot for him: yet was there, where he was concerned, such a thing as luck? Luck, as it was generally understood, was a fitful visitor, with rare capricious advents, and long absences. But with him it abided always.

Colin yawned, till the whole half-circle of his milk-white teeth was disclosed, with his tongue lying like a curved rose-leaf between them, and when his mouth closed again, it closed into a smile. He slewed himself off his bed, and barefooted stepped across the cool tiled floor to the next room where tea was waiting for him. This siesta through the hot hours of the afternoon, when it was impossible to go out, made two days out of each twenty-four hours; you awoke as to another morning, with body refreshed and brain alert. Already the sea breeze was stirring, and the westering sun was off the front of the house, and presently, cup in hand, he strolled across to the window, and pushed back the closed green-slatted shutters, which had kept the room cool during the heat. In came the flooding freshness, spiced with sea, and chasing before it the stagnant air of the house which had been darkened against the tropic blaze of the noon. It heralded the approach of the caressing Italian evening and the star-sown night.

Nino entered to clear away the tea-things. The house was entirely run by him and his family in true Italian fashion, for his sister was housemaid and his stepmother, the second that his father had provided him with, was cook, and she was abhorred by the boy with a genial intensity, for there would be no patrimony left when his father had finished with this brisk succession of wives, each of whom feathered her own nest before she died.

“Well, Nino, and how’s Mamma?” said Colin.

Nino, who had been audibly exchanging compliments with his stepmother in the kitchen, drew his eyebrows inward and down, and muttered something which with certain prudent expurgations indicated a pious wish about desiccated and barren stoats.

Colin laughed.

“Well, you wouldn’t like her to be a fruitful stoat,” he observed.

“Scusi, but I would,” said Nino, “for surely she would die in childbirth, and there would be one coffin for the two.”

“I thought I heard you kissing in the kitchen,” observed Colin.

“I would sooner kiss the gridiron,” said Nino.

“Well, go and kiss the gridiron then if you prefer it. And take the tea-things away, Nino. And when you’ve finished kissing the gridiron come back. I want you.”

The Southern smile broke through. Colin could always make Nino smile, even when the stepmother was in the picture.

“Sis-signor,” said Nino. “I will kiss the stoat and the gridiron.”

“We shoot stoats in England,” said Colin, “and hang their corpses upon trees.”

“Eh, she’d look nice on the pine there,” said Nino. “But, Dio, the stink, when the scirocco blew!”

Nino departed with the tea-things to kiss his stepmother or the gridiron or anything he chose. That was the true spirit in which to live here; you never bothered your head as to what you were proposing to do; you just did exactly as you liked whenever an amusing opportunity suggested itself. And yet it was a wonderful place in which to make plans, thought Colin. You lay on the beach after your bathe, and without effort your brain seethed with ideas. The sun seemed to liquefy the contents of its cells, and the secret juices, scarcely known to yourself, oozed out in the clear broth of thought. And fruitful too, was the night, when the wind whispered in the pine, and the great furry-bodied bats with wings of stretched black parchment wove silent circles in the air....

There was a power abroad then, Colin knew well, and if you were in tune with it, you caught, like some wireless receiver, strange messages from the midnight. Not less surely did he know that there was power abroad for those who sought it, whenever above the altar the lamp burned before the tabernacle that held the sacramental food, which is the Bread of Angels. But unless your heart lay open in faith and loving adoration, the power which in itself was infinite was no more than a fragment of wafer, or a sip of wine: faith set that vast engine of love and redemption at work, and across the sky, from horizon to zenith, the worshipper beheld how Christ’s blood ‘streamed in the firmament,’ and adored the divine miracle. So too with the power that whispered in the pine and poured itself out on the midnight: unless you believed in it and by faith laid hold on it, there was for you nothing there but the night wind and the wheeling bats.

There was the truth of the legend, a truth eternal and irrevocable, a matter of choice, not for him alone but for the whole world. He could not so passionately have loved evil, if he had not known there was a definite choice to be made. He might have drifted into any sort of sin and self-indulgence from the mere fact that they were pleasant, but the only thing that could have given him his furious zest for evil in itself, was the terrible conviction of the existence of God. If evil had been the dominant power in the world, he would, without the sense of choice, have lain and soaked indolently in it, but he chose it because he loved it, and because in its service he defied love.

Colin made no pretence of doubting the existence of good and evil and the original living causes of them. They were principles perhaps, but since they certainly lived, and daily and hourly manifested themselves, he could not conceive of them otherwise than as Persons. With the same faith that he believed in the power that inspired evil, he believed in the power that inspired good, which had once been incarnate in man, and in some mysterious way suffered for the redemption of those who desired it. For those who believed (and Colin was among them), He was Love, infinite in power, but choice was given to every man, and His Sacrament of Love, to those who abhorred Love, became the Sacrament of Hate and the adoration of evil. Those who had chosen thus could receive it in mockery of love, and to them their derision was an act of faith, through which they dedicated their powers and their will to the service of evil, and drew therefrom the strength that inspired them.

These thoughts were no more than the steam which ascended from the bubbling liquor of his mind, and he did no more than just watch, for this idle moment as he waited for Nino’s return, the familiar wreath. And here was Nino’s step on the stairs, and it was time to put these general principles into practical shape. He had come to Capri, no doubt, primarily, for a month of that basking amphibious life, which always put him into harmony with himself, but there were other projects as well which now, in strict accordance with these principles, presented themselves for execution, projects no less dedicatory than diverting.

“Nino, we’re going to have two visitors here,” he said, “and we must arrange about them. Mr. Cecil is coming from Naples to-morrow for two nights and next week there comes the pretty lady, who’ll bring a maid. Let’s go round and inspect.”

The villa was deficient in accommodation for more than a very small number of persons, for Colin, during this last year, intending it to be no more than his own Hermitage, had thrown rooms together, and had converted a spare bedroom into a bathroom. Downstairs, therefore, nowadays there was only the kitchen, and the long vaulted dining-room, originally two rooms. Upstairs there was a large studio running the length of the house, the bathroom, Nino’s bedroom, with Colin’s next door, and, _en suite_, the sitting-room with the balcony where Colin had been having tea, and a slip of a room beyond, opening out of the sitting-room. This latter would do for Pamela’s maid, but where was Pamela to go? Nino’s stepmother and sister always went home in the evening after dinner, returning again early next morning.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to turn out, Nino,” said Colin, “while pretty lady is here, and go home in the evening with your dear gridiron. Then you can make love to her on the way.”

“Grazie,” said Nino.

“Or scrag her in the dark,” said Colin. “No, you mustn’t do that, or how should we get breakfast next day? But what room can pretty lady have except yours? I’d sooner have you in the house, though.”

The fell prospect of walking home every evening and coming back every morning with his stepmother sharpened Nino’s wits.

“The signor does not really want that sitting-room next his bedroom as well as the studio,” said he. “Could not that be the signora’s bedroom while she is here? Then she will have her maid next door.”

“Good boy,” said Colin. “We’ll do that. There’ll be the maid at the end of the passage, then pretty lady’s bedroom, then me, then you. And you won’t be able to flirt with the maid without passing through the signora’s room. Very good for your morals, Nino.”

Nino laughed.

“If it is the maid the signora brought to Stanier, she is like a broomstick,” he said.

“Then don’t fly away on the broomstick,” said Colin. “Well, that’s settled. But when you’re married, Nino, I shan’t turn out of my sitting-room for your wife....”

* * * * *

Colin was always charming to those who were in a position to serve him, and Mr. Cecil found a most cordial welcome when he arrived next day. He was a convivial little cad (so Colin would have described him), gratified that Lord Yardley should have asked him to spend a week-end at his villa, and delighted to get out of that frying-pan of a town for a couple of days. In person he was a round red bachelor, with a taste for wine and obscenity. Colin supplied the one, and Mr. Cecil had as his contribution a considerable fund of local lore not quite suitable for children. Usually dinner was served under the pergola in the garden, but to-night the weather was uneasy with hot puffs of scirocco, and instead they ate indoors. In this heat it was impossible to shut the windows, but the Venetian shutters were closed and little blasts of hot moist air, entering through the slats, hovered and fluttered bat-like about the room.

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Cecil, mopping his flushed forehead after the relation of one of these curious episodes, “a bad piece of work. But picturesque, undeniably picturesque. My belief is that the girl was possessed. That sounds a queer thing to say in the twentieth century, when physiologists have proved that every disorder of mind or body alike is due to some microbe, but what microbe covers the facts, eh? Shew me the microbe, that’s all, and let it produce that effect again on a guinea-pig.”

Colin pushed the decanter towards his guest.

“Awfully curious,” he said. “And it would be even more curious to see a guinea-pig behave like that girl. Lord! Wouldn’t it look funny? Besides, aren’t there diseases and disorders of the spirit, as well as those of the mind and body?”

“Of course there are. What makes one fellow a saint and another a devil? Is that a microbe?”

Colin laughed.

“The microbe that makes a man a saint is a devilish rare beast,” he said. “I never saw a case of sanctified possession, did you? But possession, yes. The devil was in the girl: give the devil his due. Anyhow, they believe in him in Italy, don’t they? Evil eye, all that sort of thing.”

Colin spoke in the lightest possible manner, flicking the ash off the end of his cigar.

“Yes, and it goes much deeper than that,” said Mr. Cecil.

“How interesting! You mean they take the devil really seriously, as a force to be reckoned with, to be fought, or sided with?”

“Quite, quite,” said Mr. Cecil. “Fought, of course, in general: the Church has a very strong hold.”

“And, by exception, sided with,” said Colin. “The direct worship of Satan really goes on still, doesn’t it, in--in holes and corners?”

Mr. Cecil evidently did not like the subject more than Nino. By now the puffing wind had increased into a roar, which rattled the shutters, and screamed round the corners of the house.

“One does hear of such things,” he said.

The hot wind strangely exhilarated Colin: he felt it tingling in him; he vibrated to its friendly violence. On Nino, who entered the room now to see if the signori were not disposed to quit the table, so that he might clear away, it seemed to have an opposite effect. Like all natives he detested scirocco, and looked jaded and washed-out.

“Black Mass, for instance,” said Colin to Mr. Cecil.

Nino, at Colin’s elbow, clicked his tongue against his teeth. Colin turned round.

“Oh, don’t hang about, Nino,” he said. “Go to bed: you look cross and tired. You can leave the things here till the morning. Good night.”

Nino had no answer for him, but sullenly withdrew.

“Your servant doesn’t seem to like the subject,” remarked Mr. Cecil. “He looked as stuffy as a thundercloud when you mentioned the Black Mass.”

“I know. Nino twitters with superstition. He’s a son of the Church: he fears the devil without believing in him. The Black Mass now. Do tell me what you know about it. I don’t believe there’s anything you don’t know about these wonderful Southerners.”

Mr. Cecil certainly prided himself with reason on his extensive knowledge of subterranean Italian life, and it was hard to resist justifying his conviction.

“Well, as a matter of fact I have some little knowledge of it,” he said. “Indeed I possess a copy of the missal. An extremely rare book.”

“Ah, that’s interesting,” said Colin. “What language? Latin? Italian?”

“No, strangely enough it is in English. In fact the book is probably unique. It was printed in London in the early seventeenth century. How it got into a bookstall in the Via Maurizio I haven’t any idea, but there I found it.”

Colin leaned forward over the table, his face all alight with eagerness. Such exactly might have been the missal in use in that sanctuarium at Stanier, had not his ancestor turned his back on his Lord and Benefactor, and striven by craven acts of loveless piety to shuffle out of his contract before it became due.... Now, three centuries later, it looked as if it was given to him to atone for that lamentable surrender, and here was an opportunity for the furnishing of the chapel that was already being built. Sitting there, with his face vivid and eager, in the matchless charm of his youth and beauty, he looked, in contrast with the flushed little Silenus opposite him, like some young god in whom was incarnate the spirit of physical perfection. Surely no such gracious creature had ever been fashioned in the image of God.

“Mr. Cecil, you’re the most wonderful person,” he said. “You know everything. Take some whisky: what’s that damned boy of mine done with it? Ah, there it is.”

Colin got up to fetch the bottle. As he rose the catch of the shutters gave way under the press of the wind; they swung wide, and with a triumphant whoop the scirocco burst into the room, like some vivid invisible presence. Colin laughed aloud with exultation, and ran to the window, where he wrestled with the shutters. Then, just as suddenly, there came a complete lull, and he fastened them back into place and closed the windows.

“The wind has been wanting to come in all evening to join us,” he said. “Now it has had its way, and it will be content. There’s your whisky: now tell me all about the missal. You will have to let me see it, too.”

Mr. Cecil helped himself.

“Well, certainly it’s a curious book,” he said, “and I take an antiquarian’s interest in it. But naturally that’s all. To you and me, of course, it appears a mere farrago of ridiculous blasphemy, because, though we’re delighted to amuse ourselves, eh? and perhaps are not always as moral and monkish as we might be, we don’t want to be wicked for the sake of wickedness.”

“Just so,” said Colin.

“In order to appreciate what the missal and the mass mean to the worshippers,” continued Mr. Cecil, “we must try to imagine ourselves--if it were possible--delighting in evil for its own sake. We must realize that to such ruffians as these, evil is the Mecca of their every thought and deed. They worship it, and, in consequence, detest and mock at all that you and I hold sacred, though we may not live up to our beliefs. Still we hold them.”

Colin was bubbling with amusement and impatience. He wanted Mr. Cecil to get on, but, on the other hand, it was wonderfully diverting to hear him talk like this. He took a hand in it.

“I think I can see what you mean,” he said. “These ruffians, as you so rightly call them, are fanatics in the cause of evil. But do such people really exist?”

“Yes, and all the time they believe in God,” said Mr. Cecil. “Their creed is of defiance, as well as worship.”

Colin liked knowing that his theories of yesterday were so wonderfully confirmed, but it was all stale stuff to him: Mr. Cecil was instructing a master in the rudiments of his art.

“And now for the contents of the missal,” he said.

“As I say, it will seem to you only a farrago of blasphemy,” repeated Mr. Cecil, “but interesting as a human, or rather a devilish, document. It follows the English use, it is a parody in fact of the English use. The exhortation, I remember, begins, ‘Ye that do truly and earnestly delight you in your sins, and intend to lead a vile life’ and so forth. Then follows the Confession, addressed, of course, to Satan ‘We acknowledge and bewail’ so it runs ‘our manifold good deeds and loving actions, which we from time to time have most grievously committed against thy Divine Majesty, provoking, most justly, thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent’ ... it follows the words of the Confession in our prayer-books.”

“But what of the priest?” asked Colin. “Is he really a priest?”

“Certainly; he must, as is stated in the preface, be a duly-ordained priest, on whom the Church has bestowed the power of Absolution and of Consecration. If the celebrant was not a real priest, the blasphemy of the Black Mass would be meaningless.”

“I see,” said Colin. “Horrible....”

“Then follows the Absolution, and a Satanistic rendering of the Sanctus. And then we come to what the Romans call the Canon of the Mass, and the Consecration. And that really is so shocking that I can’t tell you about it. But the point is this, that when the priest has consecrated the elements, he desecrates them in a manner laid down in the Rubric. That is the crowning and awful infamy. I don’t say I’m a very religious man myself, but when I came to that, I really felt the sweat come out on me.”

All the time that Colin’s eager face had been raised to his, the brightness and beauty of it was something amazing. Never had he felt himself so truly in harmony with the spirit that inspired his life. Here, under the symbolism of this rite, was his own spirit revealed to him, his hatred of love, his love of hate. Here was the strengthening and refreshing of his soul: the renewal, mystically, of the bargain made in Elizabethan days....

He recalled himself from that flash of perception: there was Mr. Cecil, looking really shocked, and he lowered his dancing eyes.

“How absolutely awful,” he said, “you make me shudder, Mr. Cecil. And how well and vividly you are telling it. But, horrible as it all is, I think you must let me see that missal. I’ve got gruesome tastes, you know. I like to be horrified. When will you let me see it?”

“You shall see it whenever you like. You will be passing through Naples on your way home, and I should be delighted to shew it you. We could have another bachelor evening together, as we had before. Dear me, I quite forgot that you were married now, Lord Yardley: I should never have said that. But if you will persist in looking like a boy of eighteen----”

Colin was on fire with impatience to see this missal, but he did not in the least want to spend another evening, such as he had done before, with this sprightly elderly sensualist in the cafés of Naples. Passionately evil though he was, there was not a grain of coarseness in him: he had no objection to others wallowing in mere animalism, poking and giggling and prying, but he had no mind for it himself: that was not his brand. What was imperative was that he should get hold of this wonderful book without delay: literally he thirsted for it, and his thirst must be assuaged. He would want to make a copy of it, unless, as he determined to try to do, he could secure the original. He could not wait....

“Ah, yes, bachelor-evenings are not for me any more,” he said gaily. “I’m a father, a heavy father, Mr. Cecil, and I read the lessons in church on Sunday mornings. Imagine if some respectable neighbour from Stanier saw me razzle-dazzling in shady places in Neapolitan slums! I should be thought such a hypocrite. But this missal: couldn’t I send Nino across to Naples to-morrow, with a note from you to your housekeeper, telling her to look on a certain shelf, and let him have a certain book?”

Mr. Cecil gave a complacent little giggle.

“I’m afraid that would hardly do,” he said. “That book is locked away in a cupboard, and there are some other things there I should hardly like my housekeeper to see. One or two of those terra-cottas from Pompeii; not quite in my housekeeper’s style. You remember her? Comes from Aberdeen; Aberdeen granite I call her.”

Colin had to continue propitiating this dreadful little man till he had got what he wanted.

“Excellent!” he said. “What a knack you have of hitting a person off, Mr. Cecil. I remember her perfectly. Aberdeen granite! Awfully good!... But I’ve got to go to Naples soon. Would it bore you too much if I came across with you on Monday?”

“By all means do that, and I’ll shew you the missal. But it’s queer to me that you are so anxious to see it. What was my phrase for it just now? A mere farrago of blasphemy. That’s all it is.”

“Somehow, you’ve interested me in it,” said Colin. “Well, what do you say about bed? I’ve got no amusing little night-haunts to shew you in Capri. We’re innocent Arcadians here, Mr. Cecil, who eat lotuses and go to bed at ten.”

Colin shewed his guest to his room, and went to his own. The scirocco, which an hour ago had been raging, had quite died down, and he threw open his closed shutters, and looked out on to the ‘darkness thick and hot.’ That furious wind which had clamoured round the house, until it had burst open the Venetian shutters, and then, as if its purpose had been fulfilled, had ceased altogether, seemed to have charged the night with power; it tingled round him in bubbling eddies.... He could hear the sea, maddened by that fierce tempest, buffeting along the rocky coast to the south, and surely not far away the wind still yelled. But just here there was calm as at the centre of some cyclone....

* * * * *

Colin accompanied Mr. Cecil to Naples on Monday morning, and they went straight to his house. Presently the cupboard containing the objects which were not fit for the stony eyes of Aberdeen granite was open, and Mr. Cecil drew out a very thin quarto volume, finely bound in tooled morocco, but much worn.

“There’s your book for you,” he said. “It’s quite a long time since I set eyes on it: a fine binding, and I see, what I had forgotten, that there’s a coronet and a coat of arms on the back.”

Colin, before opening it, looked at the cover. There was an earl’s coronet, and below---- He jumped out of his chair, his eyes wide with wonder.

“But, Mr. Cecil!” he cried. “This is the most amazing thing, the thing’s a miracle. Those are my arms. And there’s the date, 1640, the book must have belonged to the founder of the family; the Elizabethan Colin, who made the bargain with Satan.... No one could have put the coronet and his arms on a book in 1640, except him. He died in 1643.”

Then, in a flash, the whole history of the book dawned on him; the theory was as incontestable as a mathematical proof.

“I’ve got it!” he cried. “As you know, he built Stanier, he collected pictures and bronzes, and, as I read the other day only, in the Memoirs he himself wrote, he collected a quantity of magical and occult books, and mentions among them a missal of ‘wondrous blasphemies.’ They don’t exist at Stanier nowadays: probably he disposed of them.”

“Dear me, dear me!” said Mr. Cecil, reaching out his hand for the book. “Your arms, are they? And the date, and the coronet.... Yes, I see. Go on, please, my dear fellow.”

“Well, he lived an awful life,” said Colin. “I will show you the Memoirs when you come to England and stay with us, as you must promise to do. He enjoyed the benefits of his bargain to the full. And he certainly contemplated--this is rather private family history--he contemplated building a sanctuary for Satanic worship. Then, the year before he died, he got into a state of terror about the future. He wrote no more about his awful deeds in his Memoirs, and he did not build the chapel, of which he left the plan, with a priest’s lodging adjoining.... Now doesn’t that fit in completely with the disappearance of the collection of magical lore, and the book of wondrous blasphemies? He fired them out of his library, and read lives of the saints, and that sort of truck: those books are there, yards of them. And now the missal of wondrous blasphemies has turned up again. There it is in your hand.”

Mr. Cecil looked at the device on the cover.

“Well, upon my word, that does seem a very sound hypothesis,” he said. “Really, if I had known----”

Colin laughed.

“You needn’t finish that sentence,” he said. “What is in your head is that you would never have shewn it me, if you had known that it came from Stanier.”

He sat down again, and, laying his hand on Mr. Cecil’s arm, summoned all the charm and persuasion of which he was master.

“I must have that book you know,” he said. “I should have tried to get you to let me buy it from you, anyhow, but now, I really have the right to acquire it, haven’t I?”

Now this reconstruction, so ably sketched by Colin, had considerably increased the pride of possession in Mr. Cecil. It gave an immense interest to the missal to know that it had once belonged to so historical a Faust as the first Earl of Yardley.

“I don’t see that there’s any question of right about it,” he said.

Colin bridled his impatience. Once the book was in his possession, he wanted no more of Mr. Cecil, who, for all he cared, could burrow in underground Naples to his heart’s content, until somebody knifed him.

“Perhaps ‘right’ is too strong a word,” he said. “Let’s say suitability. Surely it’s very suitable that the book should go back to Stanier. As for price, if you’ll tell me what you paid for it, I’ll give you five times what it cost you.”

Mr. Cecil laughed.

“I fancy I bought it for five liras, say four shillings,” he said. “I don’t know that twenty-five liras would tempt me very irresistibly.”

“Five liras!” said Colin. “My goodness, I wish I had been shopping with you that day! Of course, that makes my offer ludicrous. But how about getting it valued by Quaritch or somebody who knows? I would then be delighted to pay you twice its estimated value.”

Mr. Cecil shook his head.

“I don’t really want to part with it,” he said. “Charmed to let you read it----”

“But I want to own it,” said Colin quietly. “In fact I must. After all, it is only a question of terms. Please name your terms.”

Mr. Cecil, for answer, merely put the book in the cupboard from which he had taken it, and turned the key on it. Colin’s insistence had increased his determination to keep the book; as a strong sub-current in his mind there was the notion that here was this enormously wealthy young man, who, for some reason of his own, intensely wanted the book. There was no harm in running up the price....

“Ah, my dear boy, you don’t understand the collector’s spirit,” he said. “He is as obstinate as a mule when he has got hold of something he values. The book is not for sale.”

Colin felt one spasm of furious rage. It was for the honour of his Lord and Benefactor that he was engaged, and at that moment he would have stuck at nothing to get his desire. From the depth of his heart he let some voiceless intense petition issue.

As that silent prayer welled out of his inmost soul, his anger fell off him like dead autumn leaves, and through him there spread the clear consciousness of the presence of the power which two nights ago had infused the riot of the wind, and brooded in the calm that followed. What had made him angry was the sense of his own impotence to get what he wanted; what gave him now this sense of perfect confidence, was the knowledge that an all-encompassing power possessed him. He spoke as it was given him to speak, without thought or reflection, but with the irresponsibility of inspiration. His smile came back to his lips, and to his eyes that boyish charm and brightness.

“Ah, we mustn’t quarrel, Mr. Cecil,” he said. “Surely you are wise enough to see that. People who quarrel with me have no luck ever afterwards, and, believe me, I should hate to be the cause, the unwitting cause, I may say, for it is none of my doing, of what might befall you. Don’t force me to break you to atoms--yes, you may stare, but I mean just that, and at the bottom of your heart you know I mean it, and you’re afraid already. Well you may be, for you are beginning to guess what stands by me.”

Indeed, Mr. Cecil was staring at him, and indeed he knew that he was afraid. As he looked, some nameless inexplicable terror began to stir in him.

Colin paused: the power that gripped him grew in intensity as he yielded himself to it, and it now completely possessed him, so that he had no volition of his own, and no consciousness of himself apart from it. Once more he spoke, and though with his outward ears he could hear the words he uttered, he did not grasp their import. He was a mouthpiece only of the power that used his lips. He had no idea what he was saying: all he knew was that his voice uttered the syllables, which, as they were spoken, he heard, but which, once said, passed from his mind altogether. But as he spoke he saw Mr. Cecil’s face change, the ruddiness of it blanched to a deadly glistening whiteness, and suddenly, with a cry, he started to his feet, and fumbled for his keys, and opened the cupboard door.

“Stop, stop! that’s enough,” he said. “For God’s sake, for God’s sake!... Here; here’s the accursed thing. Take it and begone.”

The power that possessed Colin ebbed and sank, and he felt his own individuality restored to him. He did not know what he had been saying; but, whatever it was, it had been sufficient, for this gross little man was as white as paper, and, shaking, he thrust the missal into his hand.

“That’s delightful of you, Mr. Cecil,” he said. “I thought, I was sure, in fact, that when I put the case to you, quite simply like that, you would agree with me. Now I will take this to Quaritch’s, or wherever you choose, and send you their estimate of what it would fetch at a good auction, and with that I will send you a cheque for double the amount. Its value to me, as perhaps I told you, is quite inestimable.”

Mr. Cecil mopped his face.

“I will not receive a penny for it,” he said hoarsely. “It is for me to thank you for taking it off my hands.”

“Oh, I can’t accept such generosity,” said Colin.

“I must ask you to. And in your turn you can do me a favour.”

“Willingly: it is yours,” said Colin.

“Then never let me set eyes on you again,” said Mr. Cecil.

Colin rose and picked up his hat.

“Delighted,” he said. “Why on earth should I want to see you again? You didn’t think I liked you, did you?”

* * * * *

He found a letter from Pamela waiting for him on his return to the villa with his treasure that evening, in which she announced her arrival in a couple of days. This letter, to his mind, was thoroughly typical of her type, reeking with sub-conscious falsity, cloaking the obvious with the transparent, and pretending that it did not shew through. Was it worth while, for instance, to ask whether Violet was with him, when she knew so well that her visit was based on the fact of Violet’s absence? And was it worth while to say that she wondered whether she had not better stay at an hotel? She knew perfectly well that she had not the smallest intention of staying at an hotel, she would not have come to Capri for that. Colin could imagine the blankness of her face if, when he met her, he told her that he had taken a nice room for her at the Bella Vista, or that Violet was with him at the villa.... Or should he telegraph and put her off altogether?

He carried this question still undecided down with him to the beach next morning, and, as he swam, turned it coolly over in his mind, and, as he basked on the hot shingle, let his decision liquefy and declare itself. For himself, he did not in the least want her here, neither as comrade nor as lover had he any use for her. Her beauty made no spell for his senses, and the very fact that it was his for the asking discounted it to a zero. If she had been difficult of access, he might have found pleasure in the chase; as it was, it was only himself who was being chased.... On the other hand, as he had already sketched it out, the prospect of some ludicrous and humiliating dénouement for her attracted him: it would be amusing also to play the part of the outraged moralist, the unsuspecting and devoted husband. How his face would pass from amazement to indignation, when she made her meaning clear! Or perhaps some intolerable humiliation....

He turned over on to his back, and threw an arm across his eyes, to shield them from this resplendent glare of the noonday, and let his body and limbs drink in the light and the heat. These were the allurements of the South: the hot basking and the plunge into that liquid crystal, the mouldering fragments of Roman masonry, with lizards basking on them, and tufts of fragile campanula springing from the crevices, dusty roads with walled-in paths leading through the ripening vineyards, stories of Tiberio, wine decanted from perettas into bottles stoppered with green folded leaves, ripe figs, and the warm dusk of evening, saunterings on the piazza among dark-eyed boys and smiling girls, gay and friendly ... all these made up the Italian spell of exquisite conditions and effortless existence. To his loveless nature mere physical passion was an affair of kisses and laughter and light caresses, to be enjoyed and forgotten and renewed. If you adored a woman’s personality, you would need her, body, soul and spirit, but without love to inspire passion she provided no more than a pastime. And love was his enemy; whether it was such love as Violet’s or such as Pamela’s, its only office was to give quarry for his sport. He liked laying traps and ambushes for it, he liked hurting and humiliating it.... Sometimes, of course, the claims of the body were insistent, you desired satisfaction, if only to rid you of its unease. Just so, if you had a corn, you would go to a corn-cutter, who would make you comfortable....

“Yes, Pamela shall come,” he said to himself, “and God knows in what plight Pamela shall go.” That would all be settled for him, he thought, some inspiration would come, not out of his own contrivance and ingenuity, but, like those words which he had spoken to Mr. Cecil yesterday, out of a subtler wisdom than his. Never had he been able to recollect them: they were spoken in some ecstasy, and how well they had done their work! He had seen how the man’s face changed to damp ash as he listened; would Pamela’s suffer some such change?

He raised himself on his elbow: the air over the hot white beach was tremulous with the heat; a few yards away the sea, still as a lake, sent no tiniest ripple to its liquid rims. Within it, like the fire in some precious stone, a network of light played over the pebbles that lay below, and, more than ever this morning, Colin was conscious of the fire within himself, which, like that radiance within the sea, made a dancing light deep in his soul. He had read and re-read that missal of wondrous blasphemies, and like Faust it fed his soul. In the devotion of worship was the true expression of the spirit, and with what knowledge of its needs had the compiler framed the ritual of mockery and defiance! The vestments of the priest and his acolyte, the gestures and genuflexions with which he accompanied his acts, the atrocious symbolism ordained for the decking of the altar, all stirred the imagination to the lust of evil. Those impious orisons! How they prepared the soul for the culminating act described in the rubric the very reading of which had made Mr. Cecil sweat with horror! To Colin it had given a gasp and spasm of delight: it expressed in visible symbol the core and spirit of his being.... Here was the fire and the dancing radiance that worked within him: presently, when the building which his ancestor had planned at Stanier was erected, it would blaze up, a beacon of self-dedication.

Well, it was time for a final swim, for he was roasted through and through, and already Nino with the boat that should take him back to the Marina was approaching, and, running over the hot pebbles, he fell forward into the sea, and lay floating with arms and legs spread wide, and face submerged. His own shadow hovered below him on the bottom with flickering outline, and the water clear as air seemed to hold the sunshine in solution. For the moment the cool tingling touch made him forget the missal and the traps to be laid for love; the sheer exquisitness of bodily sensation contented all his needs. If only that sensation could be preserved in all its first sharpness, he could imagine himself happy, without his burning love of hate and his hate of love, in this Nirvana of liquidness and sun.