It took very little time for Christopher to establish himself in the
desired manner. Indeed, before another week had passed the suggestion
was an accomplished fact. After that his actual presence in the house
might almost have been forgotten except by Cæsar. 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 Cæsar abruptly one day, "and it's a fortnight in which I can
do nothing but wait."
"Go and play," said Cæsar, watching him anxiously, "you concentrate
too much. You'll be getting nervous."
Christopher laughed and gripped Cæsar'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
interspaced 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 attitude 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 multitudinous 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 attitude 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.
At all events Christopher soon found grounds for no immediate fear and
left the future to itself.
"Shall we go on?" he suggested, marking how her hands grew white as
she pressed them together.
She negatived the proposal, imperiously saying they had only just got
there and she wanted to rest.
"You are getting lazy, Patricia," said her lover gravely. "I warn you,
it's the one unpardonable sin in my eyes."
"You mistake restlessness for energy," she retorted quickly. "I'm
never lazy. Ask Christopher."
Geoffry did no such thing. He continued to fling stones at a mark on
the lower lip of the chalk pit.
"It's fairly hard to distinguish, anyhow," said Christopher,
thoughtfully. "There are people who call Nevil lazy, whereas he isn't.
He only takes all his leisure in one draught."
"Oh, I don't know. It's simple enough, isn't it? I never feel lazy so
long as I'm doing something--moving about."
Geoffry jumped down into the little white pit as he spoke, as if to
demonstrate his remark. Patricia looked scornful.
"So long as your are restless, you mean," she said.
"Well, you must teach me better if you can. I say, Patricia, do you
always turn reproof on the reprover's head?"
He leant against the bank looking up at her, smiling in his easy,
good-tempered way. He wished vaguely the line of frown on her pretty
forehead would go. He wondered if she had a headache.
He ventured to put his hand over hers when he was sure Christopher was
not looking. She neither answered the caress nor resented it.
Presently he began to explore the hollow, poking into all the
rabbit-holes with his stick.
Christopher sat silent, which was a mistake, for it left her
irritation but one object on which to expend itself, and after all it
was Geoffry who should have tried to please her by sitting still.
Suddenly a frightened rabbit burst out of a disturbed hole, and
Geoffry, with a shout of delight, in pure instinct flung a stone. By a
strange, unhappy fluke, expected least of all by himself, the stone
hit the poor little terrified thing and it rolled over dead. He picked
it up by its ears and called to them triumphantly to witness his luck,
with boyish delight in the unexpected, though the chances were he
would never have flung the stone at all had he dreamt of destroying
it.
A second flint whizzed through the air, grazing the side of his head.
He dropped the rabbit and stood staring blankly at the two on the
bank.
Patricia's white, furious face blazed on him. Christopher was grasping
her hands, his face hardly less white.
"Are you hurt?" he called over his shoulder.
"No," the other stammered out, unaware of the blood streaming down the
side of his head, and then dabbed his handkerchief on it. "It's only a
scratch. What's happened?"
"Patricia mistook you for a rabbit, I think," returned Christopher
grimly and added to her in a low voice, "Do you know you struck him,
Patricia?"
She gave a shiver and put her hands to her face. Even then he did not
leave go of her wrists.
"A happy fluke you didn't aim so well as I did," called Geoffry,
unsteadily coming towards them.
"Don't come," said Christopher sharply. "Wait a moment. Patricia," he
tried to pull her hands from her face: her golden head dropped against
his shoulder and he put his arms round her.
"What is the matter with Patricia. Is she ill?" asked Geoffry at his
shoulder, his voice altered and strained.
"It's all right now. Sorry I wasn't quicker, Geoffry. Don't touch her
yet."
But Geoffry was hard pressed already not to thrust the other aside,
and he laid his hand on the girl's arm. Christopher never offered to
move.
"Patricia, what's the matter. You haven't really hurt me, you know.
What on earth were you doing?"
But she gave no sign she heard him. Only her hands clung close to
Christopher and she trembled a little.
"She is ill," cried Geoffry quickly. "Put her down, Christopher, she's
faint."
"No, she is not," returned the other through clenched teeth, "she will
be all right directly, if you'll give her time. For heaven's sake go
away, man. Don't let her see you like that. Don't you know your head
is cut."
Geoffry put up his hand mechanically, and found plentiful evidence of
this truth, but he was still bewildered as to what had actually
happened, and he was aching with desire to take her from Christopher's
hold.
"It was just an accident," he protested. "She didn't mean to hit me,
of course. Let her lie down."
"She did mean to hit you, just at the moment," returned the other,
very quietly, "haven't you been told. Oh, do go away, there's a good
fellow. I'll explain presently."
He was sick with dread lest Patricia should give way to one of her
terrible paroxysms of sorrow before them both. She was trembling all
over and he did not know how much self-control she had gained. Then
suddenly he understood what was the real trouble with poor Geoffry.
"Don't mind my holding her, Geoffry," he went on swiftly, "I've seen
her like this before and understand, and I can always stop her, but
she mustn't see you like that first."
Geoffry stood biting his lip and then turned abruptly on his heel and
left them--and for all his relief at his departure, Christopher felt a
faint glow of contempt at his obedience.
"Is he gone?" Patricia lifted her white face and black-rimmed eyes to
his.
"Yes, dear."
"Did I hurt him?"
"Not seriously. Sorry I was not quicker, Patricia."
"I did not even know myself," she answered, wearily. "Christopher, why
was I born? Why didn't someone let me die?"
He gave her a little shake. "Don't talk like a baby. But, Patricia,
how is it Geoffry doesn't know?"
She looked round with languid interest.
"Why did he go?"
"I sent him away."
"He went?"
"What else could he do?"
She made no further remark, but sat clasping and unclasping her
nervous hands, as powerless against the desperate languor assailing
her as she had been against the gust of passion.
Across the wide, smiling land westward a closed shadow, sharp of
outline and rapid of flight, drove across the stubble field, sank in
an intervening valley, and skimmed again over the close green turf to
their feet as it touched the edge of the chalk pit. She shivered a
little.
"Take me home, Christopher."
He helped her up and with steady hands assisted her to smooth her hair
and put on her hat, and then they turned and walked back along the
path they had come. Christopher was greatly troubled. It seemed to
him incredible that Geoffry had been left in ignorance of this cruel
inheritance. He tried to gauge the effect of it on his apparently
unsuspecting mind and was uneasy and dissatisfied over the result.
"Someone must explain to Geoffry," he said presently; "will you like
him to come over to-night and tell him yourself, Patricia?"
"I don't want to see him." There was a deep note of fatigue in her
voice, also a new accent of indifference. Her mind was in no way
occupied with her lover's attitude towards the unhappy episode.
"Someone's got to see him and explain. It's only fair," persisted
Christopher resolutely.
"What is there to explain. What does it matter?"
"He thinks it was an accident."
She walked on a little quicker.
"Patricia, you must tell him."
Then she turned and faced him, and her pallor was burnt out with red.
"Christopher, I will not see him. I can't. What's the use? What can he
do?"
"He must learn how to help you, learn how to stop it," he said
doggedly.
She gave a curious, choking laugh. "Geoffry stop it? Don't be absurd,
Christopher. You know he'd make me ten times worse if he tried.
Anyhow, I'm not going to marry him."
"Patricia!"
"Don't, don't. I can't bear anything now. But I won't marry him, or
anyone. It's not safe."
She went on down the path swiftly, without looking back, hardly
conscious of the tears falling from her brimming eyes. Christopher
followed her silently, furious with himself because of some
unreasoning exultation in his heart, some clamorous sense of kinship
with the golden land and laden earth that had been absent as they
came, but it died when, presently emerging from the wood on to the
park land facing Marden, she turned to him again regardless of her
tears.
"He won't want to marry me now, anyhow," she said wistfully, with a
child's appealing look of distress.
A great pity welled up in his heart and drowned the last thought of
self, carrying visions of the cruel isolation this grim inheritage
might entail on her, and he had hard work to refrain from taking her
in his arms then and there to hold for ever shielded from the
relentless pressure of her life. The temptation was more subtle and
harder to withstand than on the sunny, gorse-covered cliff at Milton,
for it was her need and her pain that cried for help and love, and she
who suffered because he withstood. He could in no wise see what course
he was to take beyond the minute, but he knew quite clearly what
course he must not take, and such surety was the reward he won from
that other fight.
He answered her appeal now with quite other words than those she
perhaps sought, and it was the hardest pang of all to know it and
recognise the vague discomfort in her eyes.
"You mustn't be unfair to Geoffry, Patricia. You haven't any right to
say that. He will want to do his best for you when he understands."
"He went away."
"I sent him. I--I was afraid you were going to cry."
Had he done wrong? He cast his thoughts back rapidly. He knew he could
not have borne that they two should witness one of her wild fits of
repentance and misery. It would have been unbearably unfit. He could
not have left her to Geoffry, and yet it had been Geoffry's right. He
walked on by her side wondering where he had blundered.
"You would not have gone, Christopher, no matter who said so." Her
directness was dangerous. She was then going to allow herself no
illusions of any kind, not even concerning the man she loved, and
Christopher became suddenly aware he was very young: that they were
all three very young, and had no previous experience to guide them in
this difficult pass, but must gain it for themselves, gain it perhaps
at greater cost than he could willingly contemplate.
"It is no question of me, whatever," he said slowly. "I've been used
to you and I understand. I don't know how it would be if I had not
known, neither do you, but it's clear, you or Nevil must explain the
matter to Geoffry at once."
"You can do it."
"It's not my place."
"You were there."
"That was mere chance."
She slipped her arm through his in the old way.
"Dear Christopher, I love Nevil, and he's awfully good, but you are
like my own brother. Please pretend you are really. If I had a
brother, he would see Geoffry for me."
"But Nevil might not like it."
It was a difficult pass, for how could he explain to her it was of
Geoffry he was thinking, not of Nevil. His evasion at least raised a
little smile.
"Nevil! An explanation taken off his hands!" She spread her own abroad
in mock amazement.
"Tell him yourself, Patricia."
"Christopher!"
He looked straight ahead, a certain rigidness in the outline of his
face betokening a decision at variance with his will.
"What am I to tell him?"
"What you like."
"I shall not tell him the silly thing you said just now, you know."
"What thing?"
"About not marrying."
"It doesn't matter," she said indifferently, "he won't marry me if he
thinks I tried to hit him."
Christopher closed his mind and reason to so illogical a conclusion,
but he disputed the point no more, and it was not till he left her and
turned to face instantly the task she had laid upon him, that he
realised how overwhelmingly difficult it was.