So honest and secure had been the workmanship that in the three centuries which had elapsed since first it nobly rose to crown the hill above Rye scarcely a stone of its facings had been repaired, or a mouldering brick withdrawn. It possessed, even in the material of its fashioning, some inexplicable immortality, even as did the fortunes of its owners. Its mellowing had but marked their enrichment and stability; their stability rivalled that of the steadfast house. The sun, in these long days of June, had not yet quite set, and the red level rays made the bricks to glow, and gave a semblance as of internal fire to the attested guarantee of the motto. Whoever had builded, he had builded well, and the labour of the bricklayers was not lost.
A couple of years ago Colin, still at Eton, had concocted a mad freak with Violet. There had been a fancy-dress ball in the house, at which he had been got up to represent his ancestral namesake, as shewn in the famous Holbein. There the first Colin appeared as a young man of twenty-five, but the painter had given him the smooth beauty of boyhood, and his descendant, in those rich embroidered clothes, might have passed for the very original and model for the portrait.
This, then, had been their mad freak: Violet, appearing originally in the costume of old Colin’s bride, had slipped away to her room, when the ball was at its height, and changed clothes with her cousin. She had tucked up her hair under his broad-brimmed jewelled hat, he had be-wigged himself and easily laced his slimness into her stiff brocaded gown, and so indistinguishable were they that the boys, Colin’s friends and contemporaries, had been almost embarrassingly admiring of him, while her friends had found her not less forward. A slip by Colin in the matter of hoarse laughter at an encircling arm and an attempt at a kiss had betrayed him into forgetting his brilliant falsetto and giving the whole thing away.
Not less like to each other now than then, they stood at the entrance of the terraces. He had gained, perhaps, a couple of inches on her in height, but the piled gold of her hair, and his bare feet equalised that. No growth of manhood sheathed the smoothness of his cheeks; they looked like replicas of one type, still almost sexless in the glow of mere youth. Theirs was the full dower of their race, health and prosperity, glee and beauty, and the entire absence of any moral standard.