Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker Part 58

Mr. Saunderson looked at him critically. "That is an ingenious suggestion Mr. ..." he paused.

"Aston," said Christopher. "It's the name those who have treated me as a son gave me, and I see no obligation to change it."

The lawyer rose.

"Then we are to defer further discussion till Wednesday?"

"Until Wednesday. In town, not here."

He left with Mr. Shakleton in his wake, and Christopher was at last alone and free to weigh if he would the weight of this stupendous burden, which he resolutely decided was not his to bear. He stood looking out of the window at the still driving mist and had to drag his thoughts back from the external aspect of things to the inner matters he must face. But there was no lucidity in his mind, nothing was clear to him but his fierce resentment against the dead man, and a pa.s.sionate pity for a faded woman.

"It was the beauty of grace rather than feature...." He was stung with intolerable shame for the manhood he must share with one who had wrought such havoc in the woman he was most bound to protect from herself, as well as from the world. The risks and chances of those early days flickered before him. He had been abandoned to such for some vague ultimate good to the colossal idea of fortune which neither he nor its late possessor could spend. Was he more bound to take it and its cares to himself than its author was bound to care for his own flesh and blood? Anger clouded his reason and he knew it. Yet if he could not think coherently on the matter, of what use were the three days of grace he had claimed? He could not endure company at present, and the four walls of his room were as a prison. At last he sent a hasty message to the motor house, tossed a few necessaries into a bag and wrote a note to Caesar. "Dear Caesar, I've got to make up my mind about this and I must do it alone, so to come to some decision I'm going off in the car. I'll be back when I've got the thing straight in my mind. Tell St. Michael and Nevil about it, but if you can help it don't let anyone else know.--Christopher Aston."

He drove slowly down the drive, out into the highroad and, turning westward, sped away into the misty distance.

A great stillness fell on Aymer when Christopher left him. He had lived so long under the shadowy fear of the thing that had now happened, that it was hard to credit the fear had pa.s.sed in fulfilment. He had been forced back to face the past, and, behold, the terror of it was gone. He could only measure the full value of the effort he had made by the languor and listlessness that now wrapped him round, as a child who had overtaxed his strength and must needs rest. A hazy doubt crept into his mind as to what it was he had so dreaded--the resuscitation of the past, or Christopher's reception of it. In either case the fear had faded as some phantom form that melted in daylight.

He stumbled on one thought with vague wonder. No barrier had been raised between him and his adopted son: instead he found the only barrier had been erected by his own lack of strength to face that truth until the inexorable hand of G.o.d forced him to the issue.

As to the future he recognised that might be left to Christopher, whose whole life, since Aymer took him, had been a preparation for this situation. His long struggle to keep a grip on life was ebbing fast, it was good to leave decisions in another's hands, to rest, and accept.

When Mr. Aston returned Caesar gave him Christopher's note with a brief remark.

"Saunderson has been."

The note, short as it was, told the rest. Mr. Aston looked anxiously at his son, but Aymer met his eyes with a quiet smile.

"I'm glad you were away, St. Michael. You've had enough to contend with, and there was no need. There is nothing for either of us to do.

It's Christopher's affair."

Mr. Aston looked at the note again and reread the signature, then he gave it back, satisfied.

"What will happen if he won't accept it?" he questioned thoughtfully.

"It is for him to decide." Aymer's tone was earnestly emphatic.

"Father, we've done our part. We can't alter it if we would. Leave him free."

"It is the crown of your success that you can do so, my dear old fellow."

"The coronation has not taken place yet," returned Caesar, with a touch of dry humour that rea.s.sured his father more than any words that all was well with his son.

Meanwhile, hour after hour, Christopher's car raced over the white roads. The twinkling lights in the villages through which he sped grew fewer and at last ceased. A more solid blackness was the only inkling of dwellings on either hand. Once the low, vibrating hum of the car seemed to bring a light to a high window, but it fell back into the dark before he had caught more than a faint glimmer on the blind.

He met nothing: the road for all he knew was utterly empty of life. In the silent, motionless darkness it was like a path into illimitable s.p.a.ce. He knew every mile of it, yet in the night the miles stretched out and raced with him.

It was far from village or town when at last Christopher wrenched his mind from the mechanical power that held it prisoner, and realised that town or no town, bed or no bed, he must stop. He brought the car to a standstill under the lea of a low ridge of downs, at a point where an old chalk pit reared its white face, glimmering faintly in the darkness. He hazarded a fair guess as to his whereabouts.

Whitmansworth must be fifteen or twenty miles ahead. It was nearly midnight now. He would get no lodging even if he went on. He backed the car off the road into the circle of the chalk pit, made as comfortable a resting place as he could with rugs and cus.h.i.+ons between the motor and the white wall, and extinguished the lamps. The cool, still night had him to herself, and cradled him to sleep as a mother her child, under the folds of her dark mantle.

He woke when the first fingers of dawn busied themselves with the hem of that dusky cloak, and sound as faint and tremulous as the light itself whispered across the earth. He watched a while to see the dim shapes reform under the glowing light, and the clouds that still curtained the sky, take on themselves a sombre grey uniform. But directly the line of white road took distinctness Christopher struck camp, and boldly raced to meet the full day. An early shepherd paused to watch him pa.s.s, returning impa.s.sively to work as he disappeared.

Two or three labouring men also stared; one even commented to a fellow worker that "these yere motors take no more heed o' decent hours than o' natural distances. Five in the mornin' weren't part o' the gentry's day when I were a boy," he grumbled, "and five miles were five miles, no more nor less. 'Tisn't more nor a mile now."

At wayside farms life was in full swing. Dumbly impatient cows listened for the clatter of milk-pails, and solemn cart horses trudged to the upland fields. Presently he pa.s.sed through a town where his own Patrimondi made pleasant, easy going. The town servants were cleaning the smooth, elastic surface with big jets of water. Christopher went slowly by with an eye on his handiwork. He fancied he saw a small defect at a turn and stopped to examine it. An indignant worker told him brusquely he needn't try to pick holes in their roads because there weren't any, and Christopher returned meekly he thought they looked good, but fancied the mark he examined was a flaw.

"It ain't any business of yours, anyway," was the angry retort, "the men who laid this knew what they was a-doin'."

Another man had joined him who had worked on the new road when Christopher was to and fro there, and recognised him. He plucked the other by the sleeve.

"Shut up, you fool," he growled, though not so low but Christopher heard him. "It's the Roadmaker himself. Mornin', sir."

Christopher gave him a few words of recognition and went on.

The slate roofs of Whitmansworth came into sight as the church clock struck six. He could see the white Union House high on the hill to the left, but he had no mind to halt there. He stopped the car at the gate of the town cemetery. It was not a beautiful place. Just a little square field with an avenue of young trees and an orderly row of green mounds and haphazard monuments, but in one corner amongst a row of unmarked graves was a white cross. "In remembrance of my mother," was the sole inscription it bore. Christopher stood and looked at it gravely. The thought of another grave amongst the family tombs in the trim churchyard at Stormly crossed his mind. It was better here in the little, plain unpretentious cemetery amongst the very poor whose sorrows she had made her own. She would sleep more quietly so.

But he found no message from her here, nor had he expected it. Her actual presence had not consecrated the spot for him, and he was impatient to gain the road made sacred by reason of the tired, failing footsteps that made their last effort there: the Via Dolorosa of his mother's life.

He pa.s.sed the milestone where he had waited for his fortune fifteen years ago, and saw it in his mind's eye hastening towards him from the east in the person of Charles Aston. That was the _true_ Fortune,--this spurious thing they were trying to harness to his back was evil to the core. Had not that been the very meaning of those painful steps that had struggled away from it along this very road--the meaning of the lonely grave amongst the broken-down poor of Whitmansworth Union?

He stopped the car near a little bridge where a thin brooklet made a noisy chatter, and sat still, his chin on his hand, thinking deeply.

This was the spot for which he had raced all these hours, for here he and she had rested that terrible night to gather strength for the last mile that lay between the woman and rest.

"It's better to be tired and hungry oneself, Jim, than to make other people so. Don't forget that."

"I am not really tired," the child maintained stoutly, "but it's going to rain again. Can't you come on?"

"Presently."

"You think it is the right road?"

"I don't know, Jim. I was sure of it at first, but I'm sure of nothing now."

The words and scene were as clear to him as the day they happened. He saw in it now a deeper significance, a possible meaning that was the last note of tragedy to his mother's story. For that note is reached only when the faith in which we have lived, acted and endured, fails us. That is the bitterness and foretaste of death. Then only can the shadow of it fall on us, and in great mercy gather us into its shade.

The Right Road! There was no doubt or shadow for Christopher yet. He had taken the first step on the Road he had chosen, and he would not look back. He would not stultify his mother's sacrifice. Such faint echoes as he heard calling him back were temptations to which he must turn a deaf ear. He would go forward on his chosen path, and Peter Masters' millions must look after themselves.

That was the final decision. Yet he sat there, still figuring the persons of the woman and the child trudging down the road towards him, and as he gazed, without conscious effort, the forms changed. The boy grew to manhood: the woman took to herself youth, youth with a crown of golden hair and the form of Patricia.

A throb of exultation leapt through him. Here were the real riches and fulness of life within his grasp and he, in blunt stupidity, had not chosen to see, had set material good and vague uncertainties before his own incomparable gain and happiness. Whatever had held him back before, the clouded life or personal ambition, or Caesar's need, it was swept away now like some low-lying mist before the wind, and left the clear vision, the man and the woman together on the long, smooth Road he would lay for her tender feet.

There should be no more delay than the needed time to race from here to her. Twenty-five miles of country that his car was eager to devour.

He slipped away swiftly from the past as he had done before on this very road--to a new future.