Colin put his head on one side and looked at his brother with an air of pondering wonder. “Oh, that cock won’t fight,” he said. “You know as well as I do that when you are master here, I would sooner go to hell than come here, and you would sooner go to hell than let me come. Perhaps I’ve got a dull imagination, but it’s no use my trying to imagine that. Do be sensible. If you could do anything to injure me at this moment when you are proposing a truce, you know that you would do it. But you can’t. You can’t hurt me in any way whatever. But what you do know is that I can hurt you in all sorts of ways. I can poison my father’s mind about you--it’s pretty sick already. I can poison Violet’s mind, and that’s none too healthy. You see, they both like me most tremendously, and they don’t very much like you. It’s just the same at Cambridge. I’ve got fifty friends: you haven’t got one. I dare say it’s not your fault: anyhow, we’ll call it your misfortune. But you want me to do something for you in return for nothing you can do for me, or, perhaps, nothing that you will do for me.”
Raymond frowned; when he was thinking he usually frowned. When Colin was thinking he usually smiled.
“If in the future there is anything I can do for you, Colin,” he said, “I will do it. I want to be friends with you. Good Lord, isn’t that reasonable? We’re brothers.”
Colin leaned forward in his chair. He was aware of the prodigious nature of what he was meaning to say. “Give me Stanier, Raymond,” he said. “With what father is leaving me, and with what Aunt Hester is leaving me, I can easily afford to keep it up. I don’t ask you for any money. I just want Stanier. Of course, it needn’t actually be mine. But I want to live here, while you live somewhere else. There’s the Derbyshire house, for instance. I’ve got Stanier in my blood. If, on father’s death, you’ll do that, there’s nothing I won’t do for you.”
“I can do a good deal, you know,” he said. “And I can refrain from doing a good deal.”
The proposal was so preposterous that Raymond fairly laughed. Instantly Colin got up.
“That sounds pleasant,” he said. “Good night, Raymond. I wouldn’t have any more whisky, if I were you. Father seemed to think you’d had enough drink before the end of dinner.”