“There!” he said. “That expresses what I feel in my mind. It has been cramped all day, and now I’ve stretched it, and am not going to have cramp any more. What shall we do? Stroll down to the piazza, or sit here and play piquet? I vote for the piazza. Diversion, you know.”
Colin pleaded sleepiness on their return from the piazza as an excuse for early retirement, but the sleepiness was not of the sort that led to sleep, and he lay long awake, blissfully content and wondering at himself with an intense and conscious interest. Never before had it so forcibly struck him that deception was a thing that was dear to him through some inherent attraction of its own, irrespective of what material advantages it might bring him; it was lovely in itself, irrespective of the fruit it bore. Never yet, too, had it struck him at all that he disliked love, and this was a discovery worth thinking over.
Often, especially during these last weeks, he had known that his father’s love for him bored him, as considered as an abstract quality, though he welcomed it as a means to an end. That end invariably had been not only the material advantages it brought him, but the gratification of his own hatred of Raymond. For, so he unerringly observed, his own endearing of himself to his father served to displace Raymond more and more, and to-day’s manœuvres were a brilliant counter-attack to the improved position Raymond had made for himself in those last weeks at Stanier. But, apart from these ends, he had no use for any love that was given him, nor any desire to give in return. To hate and to get, he found, when he looked into himself, was the mainspring which moved thought, word, and action.
Outside, the evening breeze had quite died down, but the silent tranquillity of the summer night was broken by the sound of a footfall on the garden terrace below the window, which he knew must be that of his father strolling up and down there. For a moment that rather vexed him; it seemed to disturb his own isolation, for he wanted to be entirely encompassed in himself. It was inconsiderate of his father to go quarter-decking out there, intruding into his own consciousness; besides, Colin had told him that he was sleepy, and he should have kept quiet.