Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker Part 7

Aymer was fairly caught, and wanted desperately to laugh, only the boy's face was so grave and concerned he did not dare. He thought for a moment to find a way out of the difficulty without upsetting the somewhat vague theories he had just crystallised into words.

"But I owe something to the world, and you are a small atom of the world, Christopher, so I choose to pay a mite of my debt that way.

Besides, it is a part of your education to learn how to spend money, as much a part as Latin grammar."

Christopher thought it a much pleasanter part and looked relieved.

"I am glad you aren't paying me," he said slowly; "of course it's just my good luck that it happened to be me you pay your debts to. Lots of people aren't lucky like that."

Which was a truth that remained very deeply indented in Christopher's mind. Aymer ordered him to bed, but when he said good-night he kept grip of his hand.

"Why wouldn't you like me to pay you?" he demanded, almost roughly.

The boy got red and embarra.s.sed, but Aymer waited remorselessly.

"I can't do anything," he said, "and if I did I'd hate you to pay me like that. Some day I'll have to pay you, won't I?"

"I should hate that worse than you would," returned Aymer shortly.

"There's no question of money between us. I get all I want out of you.

Go to bed."

CHAPTER IV

Marden Court lay bathed in the mellow October suns.h.i.+ne. Late Michaelmas daisies, fuchsias, and milky anemones stood smiling bravely in the borders under the red brick walls, trails of crimson creepers flung a glowing glory round grey stone pillar and coping, and in the neighbouring woods the trees seemed to hold their breath under the weight of the rich robes they wore. Marden looked its best in late autumn. The ripeness of the air, the wealth of colour, and the harmonious dignity of the season seemed a fit setting to the old Tudor mansion, with its reposeful beauty just touched with renaissance grace. The glory of the world pa.s.ses, but it is none the less a glory worth observing.

The Astons regarded Marden as the metropolis of their affections. It was "Home" and any member of the family wanting to go "Home" did so regardless of who might be in immediate possession. Nevil Aston, his wife and two small children and his young sister-in-law lived there permanently, but their position was that of fortunate caretakers, and both the elder Aston and the Wyatts went to and fro at their will.

Nevil Aston was at thirty-two a brilliant essayist and rising historian, and there was a magnificent library at Marden which he professed to find useful in his work. He also was wont to say "Marden was an excellent place in which to work, but a far better place in which to play." He himself did both in turn. A few weeks of furious energy and copious achievement would be followed by weeks of serene idleness from which little Renata, his wife, would arouse him by sheer bullying, as he himself expressed it, driving him by main force of will to the library, setting pen and paper to hand and then placidly consenting to weeks of irregular meals, of absent-minded vagaries, a seeming indifference to her presence, in place of the wholly dependent lovable boyish Nevil of the days of indolence.

It was not till the second autumn after Christopher's introduction to the menage that the senior Astons decided to desert London for a few months and go "Home." Mr. Aston had been to and fro not infrequently and Nevil Aston had made a few brief visits to town, when Constantia Wyatt had made it her business to see that her gifted brother did not hide his light under a bushel, but little Christopher failed to connect either Nevil or his beautiful sister very closely with his own particular Astons. They were a part of an outside existence with which he was unacquainted, and Marden Court was to him but a name, an unreal place that got photographed occasionally and that Mr. Aston seemed to like. The Astons, probably quite unconsciously, pursued their usual course of leaving Christopher to drift into the stream of their existence without any explanation or attempt to make that existence a clear cut and dried affair to him. He was pleased enough with the idea of the change, once he had ascertained his guinea-pigs might accompany him, and was still more pleased when he was told he would at all events for a time have no lessons to do.

"You'll have plenty to learn though," Aymer had remarked drily when he made the announcement. Christopher refrained from asking for an explanation with difficulty.

Towards the middle of October Nevil Aston, just in the midst of a period of blissful laziness, sauntered down the long walks of the south garden in Renata's wake, occasionally stopping to pick up one or other of the two fat babies who struggled along after their mother, interrupting more or less effectually the business on which she was engaged. A pathetic-eyed yard or so of brown dachshund and a tortoise-sh.e.l.l kitten completed the party. Renata Aston was small and dark, gentle and deliberate of movement, and possessing an elf-like trick of shrinking her entrancing personality into comparative invisibility that bereft one of further vision. She moved from border to border choosing her flowers with care, and looking even smaller than she was in the proximity of her lanky husband, and the plump little babies toddling after.

Presently she came to a stop. All her satellites stopped too. She regarded her trophies critically.

"This is very good for the end of October, you know." She remarked to all the a.s.sembled court. "I only want some violets now. Nevil, I wish you'd stop Charlotte picking the heads off the fuchsias: there are no more to come out."

Nevil hoisted his small daughter on his shoulder as the safest way to avoid an altercation and humbly asked if he must pick violets, "they grow so low down."

"You grow so far up," she retorted scornfully. "Max can help me. You can watch with Charlotte. You are very good at watching people work."

"It is not a common virtue," pleaded Nevil, "watchers generally tell the workers how to do it. I never do. Why don't you tell a gardener to pick them, Renata?"

"A gardener! For Aymer?"

"All this trouble for Aymer?"

"It is a pleasure."

"I know just how it will be," he complained mournfully, "the moment Aymer is here you will hound me off to work and I shall see nothing of you at all. You won't even give me new pens. Charlotte, I should look horrid if I had no hair: be merciful."

Renata smiled and shook her head. "I shall get no more work out of you this side of Christmas, sir. I have no such impossible dreams. Perhaps Aymer won't want either of us now he has got Christopher."

"I wonder now," remarked Nevil, depositing Miss Charlotte on a seat while he took out his cigarette case, "I wonder if you are jealous, Renata."

She flushed indignantly and denied the fact with most unnecessary emphasis, so her husband told her in his gentle teasing way. He turned her face up to his and professed to look stern, which he never could do.

"Confess now," he insisted. "Just a little jealous of Christopher?"

"Well," she admitted, laughing and still pink, "Aymer has never stayed away from us for so long before. I don't know what was the use of his having those rooms done up for himself if he never means to use them."

Renata continued to pick violets, and Max to decapitate those he could find. The dachshund and kitten continued to watch with absorbing interest, and Nevil continued to smoke and to let Charlotte investigate his cigarette case till her mother turned round and saw her.

"You dreadful child!" she cried, "Nevil, just look. Charlotte is sucking the ends of your horrid cigarettes! How can you let her?"

Charlotte was rescued from the cigarettes, or the cigarettes from Charlotte, with considerable difficulty and at the cost of many tears.

Indeed her protestations were so loud that nurse appeared and bore her and Max away and silence again reigned in the warm garden between the sunny borders.

The dachshund gave a sigh and flopped down on the path, and the kitten began a toilet for want of better employment. Renata, who had stood aside during the small domestic storm, gazed at her violets gravely as if she were counting them.

Nevil watched her contentedly and did not observe the trouble in her face.

"Nevil," she said at last, "about Charlotte I wonder--do you think----" she stopped and edged a little nearer her husband and slipped her hand in his.

"Well, dear?"

"You don't think, do you, Nevil, that Charlotte is--is getting like Patricia?"

He put his arm round her and drew her down on the seat.

"You dear silly child, no," he said, kissing her.

She seemed only half a.s.sured and leant her head against him, sighing.

"It is quite, quite different," he insisted. "Charlotte's temper is just like anyone else's, yours or mine, or anyone's."

"Yours--you haven't got one," she returned with pretended contempt and then lapsed back into her troubled mien, "but I feel so frightened sometimes."

"My dear, be reasonable. Patricia's temper isn't a temper at all.

It's--it's a possession--a wretched family inheritance. She can't help it, poor child, any more than she could help a squint or a crooked nose, and she doesn't inherit it from _your_ mother but only from your step-father, so why on earth you should imagine it likely to crop up in our family I can't conceive. It's absurd."

He tilted her pretty face up to his again and kissed her. Nevil would like to have killed all his wife's cares with a caress. It is not always a successful method, but it is more efficacious than the world believes.

"Of course I know all that, though Patricia always seems quite like my own sister. I do hope Christopher won't tease her."