Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker Part 52

"I told him about it and he seemed surprised he hadn't been told before, and he hadn't really taken in what happened this afternoon at all. I expect he'll write to you."

A faint ghost of a smile touched her white face.

"You are not really telling me what I want to know, Christopher."

"There's nothing else. He hadn't got the real focus of the thing when I left."

"I understand."

She turned away and leant her arm on the mantelpiece, wondering in a half-comprehensive way why the stinging sense of humiliation and helpless shame seemed so much less since Christopher had come. What had been well-nigh unbearable was now but a monotonous burden that wearied but did not crush her: she feared it no longer. He stood looking at her a moment, gathering as it were into himself all he could of the bitterness that he knew she carried at her heart, and then turned away to the window, realising the greatness of her trouble and yearning to do that very thing which unconsciously by mere action of his receptive sympathy he had done already.

Presently she came to him and put her hand on his arm.

"You'll understand, anyhow, Christopher," she said with a little sigh.

"We shall all do that here."

"But Geoffry won't."

"I suppose he can't."

She recognised the hard note in his voice at once, and seating herself on the window-seat set to work to fathom it.

"It will help me if you can tell me exactly how he took it, Christopher. Was he angry, or sorry, or horrified or what?"

He had to consider a moment what, out of fairness to Geoffry, he must withhold, and choose what he considered the most pardonable aspect.

"I think he was frightened, Patricia, not at you, so much as at some silly ideas he's got hold of about heredity. Not his own: just half-digested ideas, and he probably finds it pretty difficult to listen to them at all. He just thinks he ought to, I suppose."

Again the faint little smile in her face.

"You are a dear, Christopher, when you try to whitewash things. Listen to me. Whatever Geoffry said or does or writes, I've decided I will not marry him. I've written to say so and posted it before you came in, so he should know that nothing he had said or done influenced me in the slightest."

Christopher gave a sigh of relief and she went on in the same deliberate way.

"And I shall never marry at all. I can't face it again. I'll tell Renata about Geoffry, and may I also tell her you will explain to the others if she can't satisfy them?"

"I will do anything you wish." Then he suddenly claimed for himself a little lat.i.tude and spoke from his heart.

"Patricia, dear, I'm glad you've done it. It's the best and right thing, however hard, and if I could manage to take all the bother of it for you I would. Honestly, Geoffry wouldn't have been able to help you, I fear. But as to never marrying, you must not say that or make rash vows, and you must never, never let yourself think it isn't safe to marry, or that sort of nonsense. It's in your own hands. We are always strong enough for our own job, so Caesar says. Shall I find Renata and ask her to come to you?"

They stood facing each other, an arm's length separating them, and she looked at him across the little s.p.a.ce with so great grat.i.tude and affection in her eyes that he felt humbled at the little he offered from so great a store at his heart.

"Christopher, how do girls manage who haven't a brother like you? I've been fretting because I was all alone and no one to stand by me--will you forgive me that, dear?"

Her eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears. She laid her hand on his arm again and drew nearer. Her entire ignorance of their true relations.h.i.+p to each other left her a child appealing for some outward sign of the one dear bond she knew between them.

Christopher recognised it and put his arm round her and she kissed him. "I'll never forget again that I've got you," she whispered, "such a dear good brother."

He neither acquiesced nor dissented that point, but very gravely and quietly he kissed her too, and she thought the bond of fraternity between then was sealed.

CHAPTER XXVI

Matters were made as easy for Patricia as the united efforts of those who loved her could compa.s.s. Geoffry, in his grat.i.tude for her decisive action, which lifted the onus of a broken engagement from his shoulders, found a substantial ground for his belief that they had sacrificed themselves on the altar of duty. Mrs. Leverson sighed profoundly with unconscious satisfaction over the highly heroic behaviour of them both and yielded easily to Geoffry's desire to travel. They eventually sold Logan Park, which they had purchased about ten years previously, and pa.s.sed out of the ken of the lives that were so nearly linked with theirs.

Life renewed its wonted routine at Marden except that Christopher was often absent for weeks together. The final experiments hung fire and he had to seek new material and fresh inspiration further afield, but never for long. The end of a set term would see him back by Aymer's side sharing his hopes and disappointments impartially, always declaring that nowhere could he work with better success than at Marden Court. He was five years older than his natural age in development and resource, and the dogged obstinacy that was so direct a heritage from his father, stood him in good stead in his stiff fight with the difficulties that stood between him and his goal. Peter Masters made no sign and no greater success seemed to crown the other workers' endeavours, but there was always the secret pressure of unknown compet.i.tion at work and it told on Christopher. He became more silent and so absorbed in his task as to lose touch of outside matters altogether. It was this absorption in his ambition that made the daily intercourse with Patricia possible at all. Unsuspected by her, his love, lying in abeyance, was but awaiting the growth in her of an answering harmony that must come to completion before he could make his full demand of it.

One day in March, when the land was swept with cold winds and beaten with rain, Christopher came out of the little wooden building, where he worked, and stood bareheaded a moment in the driving rain. First he looked towards the house and then turning sharply towards the left made his way once more to the edge of the last of the experimental tracks that threaded that distant corner of the park like the lines of a spider's web.

He stood looking down at the firm grey surface from which the pouring rain ran off to the side channels as cleanly as from polished marble.

He walked a few yards down its elastic, easy-treading surface, ruminating over the "weight and edge" tests that had been applied, and on the durability trials from the little machine that had run for so many long days and nights over a similar surface within the wooden shanty.

It was morning now. His men, whose numbers had increased each month, had gone to breakfast, and he was alone with his finished work.

The strain and absorption of the long months was over. He had at last conquered the material difficulties that had been ranged against him.

The dream of the boy had become a tangible reality, ready by reason of its material existence to claim its own place in the physical world.

This unnamed substance whose composition had awaited in Nature's laboratory the intelligent mingling of a master hand, would add to the store of the world's riches and the world's ease, and was his gift to his generation.

As he stood looking down at the completed roadway, the Roadmaker suddenly remembered his own slight years and the inconceivable fraction of time he had laboured for so wide a result, and there swept up to him across the level way a new knowledge of his relations.h.i.+p to all the past--that he was but the servant of those who had preceded him and had but brought into the light of day a simple secret matured long ago in the patient earth.

It is in this spirit of true humility and in the recognition of their actual place in the world that all Great Discoverers find their highest joy. It is the joy of service that is theirs, the loftiest ambition that can fire the heart of man, making him accept with thankfulness his part as a tool to the great artifices and filling him with love and reverence for the work he has been used to complete. As Christopher stood bareheaded in the rain that windy March morning, his heart swept clear for the time of all personal pride or self-gratification, he offered himself in unconscious surrender again to the Power that had used him, craving only to be used, divining clearly that achievement is but the starting post to new endeavour.

At last he turned away, locked up the hut and went down towards the house, and at the entrance of the little plantation between park and garden he met Patricia.

They exchanged no greeting but a smile, and as he stood on the slope above her, looking at her, he was aware of a great sense of peace and rest, and on a sudden, her understanding leapt to meet his.

"It is done--you have finished it?" she cried, and her hands went out to him.

"Yes," he said, quietly, freeing himself from the strange inward pressure by the touch of that outward union. "This piece of work is done, Patricia. The thing is there--my Road stuff. It's all right. It will stand whatever it is asked to stand. It is ready to use if anyone will use it."

"Oh, I'm glad--so glad!" she cried. "Christopher, it is just the best thing in the world to know you have succeeded."

Her complete sympathy and generous joy seemed to open his mind to the outward expression of the speaker, which of late, since the breaking of her engagement with Geoffry, he had tried hard not to observe.

It seemed to him her face had lost a little of its childish roundness, that there was something accentuated about her that was nameless and yet expected. Also for the first time in his life he was conscious that her presence by his side was helpful. He had been unaware till she came that he needed any aid in what, to him, was a great moment in his life, but he knew it was restful and good to walk by her, a strange relief to tell her how the last difficulties that had arisen on the heels of each other had finally been met: how strong had been his temptation to give his discovery to the world before the tedious tests had gone to the uttermost limits experimental trials could reach.

"It's so simple really," he said, "just a question of proportions once the material is there. I felt anyone might hit on it any day, and yet it would have been such a sickening thing to have someone else planting an improvement on the top of it within a few months. It may need it now, but at least it would mean the test of years, and not immediate improvement. Do you happen to know if Caesar had a good night or not?"

"You've got to have some breakfast yourself first. I don't believe you remember you never came in to dinner last night at all."

"Didn't I? Breakfast must wait till I've seen Caesar anyhow. He must know before anyone else, and you'll never be able to hold your tongue through breakfast, you know."

"But I'm first, after all." She tilted her chin a little with a complacent nod at him.

He stopped with a puzzled expression.