Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker Part 63

"It meant he had his own way and left me indebted to him when I had refused his help."

"Good heavens, what a mercy you two were not flung together earlier in life!"

Christopher faced him abruptly.

"Am I so like him then?"

"Absurdly so. Your own way and no one else to interfere."

Christopher was silent for a while, but presently he said in a low voice, "That's not quite true, Caesar, is it? You can interfere as much as you like."

"I'd be sorry to try."

Again Christopher was silent, but his face softened. He thought of how the personality and jealous love of this man to whom he owed so much had stood between him and Patricia and how he felt no shadow of resentment at it.

"I think I shall adopt Max when he leaves school," remarked Caesar languidly, "he'll let me manage him in my own way till he is an octogenarian."

"Caesar, you have no discrimination at all. Once you wanted to adopt Sam, now Max. Both as pliable as elastic, and as unmalleable."

"I've a great affection for Max."

"So have I. Is Nevil going to give him to Patrimondi?"

"No, to me."

"Honestly?"

Aymer nodded. "He'll have to manage the estate some day, not so far off, either."

Christopher patted the sofa rug absently.

"When he's at Cambridge he'll have to spend the Long Vacation learning from his ancient uncle."

Christopher gave an involuntary sigh.

"Jealous again?" demanded Aymer quizzically, but he put his hand on Christopher's and they both smiled.

Patricia and Christopher were married at Christmas, Charlotte having given her consent with the remark, it was better than having a horrid stranger in the family anyway.

They established themselves in a house on the verge of the sea, within easy motor or train distance of Marden and the Patrimondi works. It was a relief to all to find how easily Caesar appeared to take the new separation, but the quiet peace and unspoken happiness of the united lives seemed to include him in its all-embracing results. There could be no room for jealousy in a love that usurped no rights, but only filled its own place.

The days of doubt which Patricia had feared came and pa.s.sed in the autumn weeks preceding the marriage, and Christopher had kept his word and held her firmly against the weak terrors that a.s.sailed her. Once they were married, however, she seemed to pa.s.s out of the shadow of the fear, and to break from the bondage of her race. In some wonderful way her husband's clear, perpetual vision of her as separate from the tyranny of heredity, did actually free her. She too saw herself free, and in so seeing, the fetters were loosed. If it were a miracle, as little Renata sometimes thought, it was only one in so far as the Love which can inspire such faith and vision is yet but a strange unknown power with us, to which nature seldom rises, and can rarely hold when grasped.

But these two held it, rising with each other's efforts, sinking with each other's daily failures; their lives so intricately woven together that they needed no outward semblance of interests or visible companionship to bring the knowledge of their Love to their hearts.

Christopher continued his work, journeying far and wide. Sometimes she accompanied him actually, sometimes she remained in their home on the cliff edge, alone but not solitary, looking with joy for his return, but free from aching need. Quite slowly the Woman learnt to recognise her unseen, unreckoned sway over the Man, to discover how he could only rise to the full height of his manhood by strength of the inspiring love she brought him. She was pressed by an uncomprehending world to fill her leisure hours with many occupations, useful and useless, but she resisted steadily. She took life as it came to her, day by day, wasting no strength, but refusing no task, shirking no responsibility, drinking in every joy, and holding always faithfully in her heart his true image as he had held hers, knowing that when perchance the outward man blurred that image for a moment it was but the outward casing; the inner soul remained true to the likeness in which it was created.

As the months slipped by Christopher saw that his work continued to grow, that the good roads of which he had dreamed stretched far and wide across the country, and he knew he had won for himself a place in the history of men. Moreover, he loved his work.

It was a never-ceasing pleasure, and when it ended came the greater, deeper joy of his undivided love. If the aim of man is happiness, he had achieved that end as far as any human being might do so.

Yet all the while a black thread wove itself into the warp of his existence. He tried not to see it, for recognition of it would cancel that white web of life that grew daily beneath his hand. Still it was there, and the white web became uneven and knotted. He was restless, even irritable, the white turned to grey, yet still he resisted the unknown forces that pressed him onward to the dissolution of this present beautiful life. And Patricia herself, with her unbroken faith in his readiness to follow the highest when he saw it, fought with the silent Powers till at length that silence was broken by a cry so imperious that even his dogged will could refuse sight and hearing no longer.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

As Christopher was preparing to leave the works one Sat.u.r.day afternoon he was told that a man had just arrived from Birmingham who refused to give his name, but who asked for him. Christopher hung for a moment on the step of his car and then descending again went straight to the room where his unknown visitor was waiting. He proved to be a spare, stooping man, with lips so thin and white as to be almost invisible.

His eyes, which he hardly raised from the floor, were bright with the fire of fever, and his shaking hands, one of which held a cap, concealing the other, were narrow, and the knuckles stood out with cruel prominence.

"What do you want with me?" Christopher demanded shortly.

The man looked at him sideways and did not move, but he spoke in an uncertain, quavering voice.

"You are Masters' son, ar'n't you?"

Christopher turned on him with fierce amazement, and checked himself.

"Answer my question, if you have anything to say to me, and leave my private affairs alone," he said sternly.

"There you are," grinned the man, the thin mouth widening to a distorted semblance of a smile, "seems to me, seems to my mates 'tain't such a private affair, neither, leastways we pay for it."

Christopher's instinct to turn the man out struggled with his curiosity to know what it all meant. He stood still, therefore, with his eyes fixed on the weirdly displeasing face and neglected to look at the twitching hands.

"It were bad enough when Masters were alive, curse him, with his 'system' and his 'single chance,' and his sticking to his word, but we knew where we was then. Now, none of us knows. Here's one turned off cos he broke some rule he'd never heard of; another for telling a foreman what he thought of him; my mate's chucked out for fighting--_outside the Mill Gate_, look you--What concern be it of yours what we do outside? It's a blessed show you do for us outside, isn't it? I tell you it don't concern you anyhow, you lazy bloodsucker--and look at me--I've worked for your father fifteen year, and you turn me off--you and your precious heads of departments,--because I was a day behind with my job. Well, what if I was? Hadn't I a wife what was dying with her sixth baby, and not a decent soul to come to her? We've been respectable people, we have, till we came to live in the blooming gaudy houses at Carson."

"That's the Steel Axle Company's works, isn't it?" put in Christopher quietly. He had not moved; he was intent on picking up the clue to the mad indictment that lay in the seething flow of words.

"Yah. Don't know your own purse-strings," spluttered the denouncer, growing incoherent with rising fury; "sit at home with your little play-box of a works down here, with fancy hutches for your rabbits of workmen, clubs, toys, kitchen ranges, hot and cold laid on. Oh, I've seen it all. Who pays for it, that's what I want to know? who pays for your blooming model works and houses?"

"I pay for it," said Christopher still quietly, "or rather the company does. It comes out of working expenses."

The man gave an angry snarl of disbelief. "You pays, does you? I tell you it's we who pays. You take our money and spend it on this toy of yours here. I'll----"

Christopher put up his hand. "You are utterly mistaken," he said, "I have no more to do with the late Peter Masters' works or his money than the men in the yards out there."

The black ignorance, the fierce words interlarded with unwritable terms, the mad personal attack, filled him with a shame and pity that drowned all indignation. There had been injustice and wrong somewhere that had whipped this poor mind to frenzy, to an incoherent claim to rights he could not define.

"Why do you come to me?"

The man gave almost a scream of rage.

"Come to you? Ain't you his son? Don't it all belong to you, whether you takes it or whether you don't? Are you going to skulk behind them heads in Birmingham and leave us at their mercy, let 'em grind us to powder for their own profit and no one to say them yea or nay? There was a rumour of that got about, how you was going to shunt us on to them, you skulking blackguard. I wouldn't believe it. I told 'em as how Masters' son, if he had one, wouldn't be a d.a.m.ned scoundrel like that. He'd see to his own rights."

What was that in the shaking hands beneath the cap? Christopher's eyes, still on the tragically foul face, never dropped to catch the metallic gleam; his whole mind lay in dragging out the truth entangled in the wild words. The voice quivered more and more as if under spur of some mental effort that urged the speaker to a climax he could not reach but on the current of the crazy syllables.