Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker Part 10

"Caesar, dear Caesar, look what I've found."

Aymer looked round, saw the scattered photographs, and held out his hand.

"Is it you really? May I have it for myself?"

Caesar took the card and as he gave it up, Christopher knew he had made a mistake, and got scarlet.

"Where did you find it?" demanded Aymer sharply.

"In the cupboard in the little red room. We were turning it out."

"Yes, it's I. Why shouldn't it be? I wasn't always a cripple, you know."

He tossed the picture back on the rug. The scar stood out white and distinct, and his face was strangely hard and set. A book slipped down on the left side and he tried to catch it with the left hand and failed, and it fell with a bang on the floor.

"May I have it?" asked Christopher meekly from the rug.

"What for? You don't know the horse and you don't know the man. Put it in the fire."

"No, I won't," exclaimed Christopher indignantly. "Caesar, don't be so horrid, it's--it's--exactly like you."

Caesar ignored his own command and asked another question instead.

"Where did you say you found it?"

"In a cupboard in the little red room. It's such a jolly little room.

It isn't used now and there's hardly anything in it, but the cupboards are full of things--lovely things. Patricia and I just explored."

"It used to be my room and the things are all mine. Why haven't they burnt them?" he muttered.

Christopher gathered up the unlucky photographs and put them back in the box. He was dimly conscious he did not want Mr. Aston to come and see them.

"I'm sorry, Caesar, I didn't know we shouldn't have done it."

"You haven't done any harm, I--I had no business to be cross, old fellow. Come and show me the pictures again, I'll tell you about them."

Christopher sat down on the sofa with the box in his hand. He really did want to know about them if Caesar wasn't going to be angry. He took out a photo at random.

"That was my first race-horse," said Caesar. "Her name was Loadstar.

She didn't win much, but I thought a lot of her. And that--oh, that's a mastiff I had: he was magnificent, but such a brute I had to kill him. He went for one of the stable boys and I hardly got him off in time. I've got the marks now of his claws: he never bit me. We used to wrestle together."

"Wrestle with a dog?"

"Yes, I used to be fairly strong, you know, Christopher. It was good training throwing him--sometimes it was the other way. But he had to die, poor old Brutus."

"How did you kill him?"

"I shot him," said Caesar shortly, "don't ask for morbid particulars.

Where is another picture?"

"This?"

This was a photo of a horse standing alone in a field and beneath was written, "Jessica waiting to be tamed." Aymer offered no explanation,--if Christopher had looked he would have seen the scar show up again sharply over a frown.

The next was rather a wicked snap-shot of Aymer cover shooting, with what looked suspiciously like a dead fox curled up at his feet.

"It was a wretched little cub I had tamed," he explained, "the little beast used to follow me everywhere. It's really tied up to a tree, but it always lay out as if dead when it heard a gun. I took it out with me to try and get it used to the sound."

There was a picture of Aymer and Nevil riding and coming over a big water jump side by side.

Aymer told him it was at the Central Horse Show and related the triumphs and honours of the day.

But when the polo photograph turned up again Aymer appeared tired of the amus.e.m.e.nt, and sent Christopher off to meet his father in the brougham at Maidley station, four miles distant. "If someone doesn't go he'll be reading reports and working out figures till he arrives at the door," said Aymer. "It's disgraceful not to know how to take a holiday properly. It's only small boys who ought to work like that,"

he added severely.

"You haven't given me any work to do, Caesar," protested Christopher, but Caesar only laughed.

When the boy had gone, however, Aymer continued to turn over the photographs. It was an extremely unwise proceeding, for each of them called him with irresistible voice back to the past from which he had sworn he would turn his eyes. It was always there with its whispering, mocking echo, but like a good fighter he had learnt to withstand its insidious temptations, and hold fast to the quiet, secure present where all he could know of joy or fulfilment was centred.

But there it was, the great gulf that lay between him and the past, in which were swallowed up the hopes, ambitions, expectations of his vigorous youth, and all the possibilities of a man's life. He had fathomed it to its blackest depth, and seen no hope of escape or rescue. And yet he had escaped, through the devotion and courage of his father. And it was the ever-living recollection of that devotion that helped him to keep his face turned from the other side of the gulf. Only on rare occasions did his strength of purpose fail him, and by some momentary carelessness he found himself caught back into a black hour of bitterness and helpless anger.

There was no one to blame but himself, no power to accuse but his own headlong pa.s.sion, and the imperious impatience that would take no gift from life but that of his own choosing. There had been a woman and a tangle of events, and his pa.s.sion-blinded eyes could see no way of disentangling it, and yet how trivial and easy the unravelling appeared now. The quick--not resolve--but impulse that caught him on the crest of his uncontrolled, wild temper, and prompted the shot that missed its intention by a hairs-breadth: the whole so instantaneous, so brief a hurricane of madness, succeeded by the long pulseless stillness of this life of his now.

To do, and not to be able to undo, to hunger and thirst and ache to take back only a short minute of life, to feel sick and blind before the irretrievableness of his own deed, that was still his punishment in these rare hours of darkness.

He had fought for life at first with all that virile strength of his and won this limited existence which, when he first understood its cruelly narrow horizon, he had as ardently longed and sought to lose again, but the life principle that had been so roughly handled was marvellously tenacious, and refused to be ousted from its tenement.

Slowly and painfully Aymer had groped his way from desolate despair to something higher than mere placid resignation, to a brave tolerance of himself and an open heart to what life might still offer him.

There was, however, little toleration in his heart at this hour as he lay staring at the photograph, and then suddenly looked round the room he had made so beautiful for himself. It was just as usual, every detail complete, satisfactory, balanced, redeemed too from its own beauty by its strange freedom from detail and its emptiness.

It pleased him well as a rule, but this evening that same emptiness seemed to emphasise his own isolation. He was suddenly conscious of a sense of incompleteness, of some detail left out that should be there--a want he could not measure or define. It was a sort of culminating point in his own grey thoughts. In a gust of his old imperious temper he caught up the photograph and tore it in half, and flung it from him: tried to fling into the fire and failed even in that. The box of photographs fell and scattered on the floor. He turned his head sharply and hid his face in the cushions.

It was very quiet in the room, the fire burnt steadily, and outside the dusk had already fallen. There was a very little knock at the door, but he did not hear it; the door opened with a breath of fresh cold air and a faint scent of violets as Renata entered.

She saw she was un.o.bserved, saw his att.i.tude, and her whole being seemed to melt into an expression of longing compa.s.sion. Nevil or his father would have gone away unseen in respect for his known weakness, but Renata for all her shyness had the courage of her instincts.

"May I come and warm myself, Aymer? You always have the best fire in the house."

He did not move for a moment.

Renata knelt by the fire with her back to him and took off her long soft gloves, her bracelets making a little jangling sound. Then she saw the torn picture and picked it up and shook her head disapprovingly. The overturned box lay nearer the sofa. She picked that up too, and began replacing its contents in a matter-of-fact way.

"You can't possibly see things in this light," she remarked. "It is getting quite dark. Do you want a light, Aymer?"

"No," said Aymer abruptly, turning so that he could see her.

She sat down in a big chair the other side of the hearth and began chatting of the very serious At Home she had just attended in Winchester.

The black mood slipped from him, and with it the sense of need and incompleteness. It had melted as snow before a fire the moment he had heard the swish of her dress across the floor, and the breath of violets reached him. He forgot even to be ashamed of his own pa.s.sing weakness as he watched her. She was all in brown with strange beautiful gold work shining here and there. She had flung back her furs and there was a big bunch of violets in her dress. He watched her little white fingers unfasten them as she talked.