Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker Part 48

After that he sat on the foot of the bed and talked frankly of his visit, and minute by minute the jealous fire in Aymer's heart died down to extinction.

Presently, however, he said abruptly and rather reproachfully: "You never told me Mr. Masters had married."

For a confused second the room and the occupants were lost in a fiery mist and only Christopher's voice lived in the chaos. Then Aymer found himself struggling to maintain hold of something in the mental turmoil, he did not know what at first: then that it was his own voice. It amazed him to hear it quite; steady and cool.

"Why should she interest you? Did Peter tell you?"

"No. Never mentioned it. One day I found Mrs. Eliot, the housekeeper, in a room, a sort of boudoir, playing about with holland covers, and I helped her. What was she like?"

"Mrs. Eliot?"

"No, you old stupid. Mrs. Peter Masters. I know you knew her, because there's a pen-and-ink sketch of you and Mr. Masters playing cards in the room."

"Oh, is there."

"Is she dead?"

"Yes."

"What was she like--to marry Mr. Masters?"

"Like? Like other women," returned Aymer, shortly.

Christopher looked at him sharply and realised he had committed an indiscretion--that this was a subject that might not be handled even with a velvet glove.

"Explicit," he retorted lightly. "However, that's not important. Now for something of real moment."

He plunged into an account of Peter's final offer to him, and his own refusal.

"Why on earth did you refuse? Wasn't it good enough?" demanded Aymer curtly.

"No, not with P. M. attached. Might as well take lodgings in Wormwood Scrubs--quite as much liberty. But, anyhow, Caesar, you see now what you have got to do."

"Get you apartments in Wormwood Scrubs?"

"No. Do be serious. Give me a laboratory here and some experimental ground. Do, there's a dear good Caesar." In reminiscence of old days he pretended to rub his head against Caesar's arm.

"Ah, you invented Peter's offer to wheedle me into this. I suppose."

"Exactly. Seriously, Caesar, if you would, it would be excellent. I've been thinking it out, I could work here safely. No one to crib my ideas. But I must have trial ground."

"That's Nevil's affair."

"Well, I undertake to manage Nevil if you are afraid," said Christopher, with an air of desperate resolve.

"I thought you didn't like Marden," persisted Caesar, fighting in an unreasoning way, against his own desires, "and this engaged couple will wander round and get in the way."

He looked Christopher straight in the face with scrutinising eyes, but he never flinched.

"I'll put up a notice, 'Trespa.s.sers will be blown up.'"

"Well, you'd better talk to St. Michael, but remember, I can't buy up the other fellows. You'd better have taken Peter's offer."

"I'd much rather bore you than Mr. Masters."

"I'm not complaining."

That was the nearest approach he made to expressing to Christopher his deep, quiet content at the arrangement that astute young man had so skilfully suggested. St. Michael said a little more and Christopher knew without words that he had pleased them both.

CHAPTER XXIV

It took very little time for Christopher to establish himself in the desired manner. Indeed, before another week had pa.s.sed the suggestion was an accomplished fact. After that his actual presence in the house might almost have been forgotten except by Caesar. Mr. Masters' half serious threat was like a spur to a willing steed. He spoke little of what he was doing, but the experimental ground was criss-crossed with strange-coloured roads, and the little band of men who worked for him, with the kindly indulgence of the "young master's whim," began to talk less of the fad and to nurse a bewildered wonder at the said young master's strict rule and elaborate care over little points that slow minds barely saw at all.

As for the engaged couple, Christopher rarely met them. He did not intentionally avoid either Patricia or Geoffry, singly or collectively, but he was not sorry their preoccupation and his separated them. He did not lose his sense of possessorship of Patricia: in his innermost mind she was still his, and Geoffry was but the owner of an outside visible Patricia that was but one expression of the woman who stood crowned and waiting in his heart.

There was no question of the wedding, or if there were between themselves, Geoffry was not allowed to voice it. Patricia was enjoying life and in no hurry to forego or shorten the pleasant days of her engagement.

Towards the end of September Christopher began to relax his long hours of work and the tense look on his face gave way.

"I shall know in about a fortnight if it's coming out all right," he said to Caesar abruptly one day, "and it's a fortnight in which I can do nothing but wait."

"Go and play," said Caesar, watching him anxiously, "you concentrate too much. You'll be getting nervous."

Christopher laughed and gripped Caesar's hand in his firm, steady grasp.

"Never better in my life," he said. "Concentration is an excellent thing. I'm beginning to appreciate Nevil."

He spent the next five days in true Nevil fashion, however, following the whim of the moment, and "lazing" as thoroughly as he had worked.

Geoffry and Patricia claimed his attendance, or Patricia did and Geoffry made no protest. They were supremely happy days. The three talked of nothing in particular, just the easy surface aspect of the world and the moment's sunshine, and Geoffry was secretly surprised to find his pleasure so little diminished by the third presence.

Then one day that wore no different outer aspect to its fellows in their livery of autumn sunshine, the three walked over the wooded ridge to the open downland where the brown windswept turf was inters.p.a.ced with stretches of stubble and blue-green "roots," where a haze of shimmering light hung over copse and field, and beyond the undulating near country a line of hills purple and grey melted into the sky-line.

They had discussed hotly a disputed point as they mounted from the valley and came out on this good land of promise in a sudden silence.

Patricia seated herself on the soft turf at the edge of a little chalk pit and sat in her accustomed att.i.tude with her hands folded, looking straight before her, and the two men sat on either side of her. And over all three a sense of the smallness of the matter over which they had differed drifted in varied manners.

Geoffry realised how little he really cared about it. Christopher was amused at their futile efforts to solve a problem of which they knew nothing, but Patricia was angry, first that she had been betrayed into expressing concern in something of which she was really ignorant, and secondly that neither Christopher nor Geoffry had agreed with her. The matter of the discussion--it arose from the subject of village charities--became of no importance, but the sense of irritation remained with her, and she was unaccountably cross with Christopher.

Geoffry's point of view she could ignore, but Christopher's worried her.

Geoffry dismissed the whole thing most easily; he did not trouble about Christopher's view, and he thought Patricia's a little queer, but then to him Patricia's views were not Patricia herself. He made the common mistake of divorcing that particular aspect of his lady love with which he was best acquainted from the mult.i.tudinous prisms of her womanhood. He would have allowed vaguely that she had "moods,"

that these overshadowed occasionally the sunny, beautiful girl he loved, but no conception of her as a whole had entered his mind. He was in love with one prism of a complex whole, or rather with one colour of the rainbow itself.

This particular truth with regard to Geoffry's estimate of Patricia impressed itself on Christopher with disagreeable persistency during the walk, and renewed that nearly forgotten fear that had come to him during the ride from Milton in the spring.

So presently he found himself watching her inner att.i.tude towards her accepted lover in the forbidden way, without sufficient knowledge of what he was actually doing to stop it. Perhaps some subtle appreciation of this in the subconscious realm, roused a like uneasiness and dissatisfaction in Patricia herself.