"I suppose no one realised you did not know all about it as you'd
known them all so long."
Christopher concluded his simple and direct account with these words,
and waited vainly for a reply from his hearer, who stood by the window
with his back to him.
"It's so nearly a thing of the past, too, that it hardly seemed worth
mentioning," he went on presently, an uneasy wonder at the silence
growing on him.
At length Geoffry spoke, in a thick, slow way, like a man groping in
darkness.
"You mean she did throw that stone deliberately, meaning to hit me?"
He had no sight at present for the wider issues that beset them or for
Patricia's story: his attention was concentrated on the incident
immediately affecting him and he could see it in no light but that of
dull horror.
"Deliberately tried to do it?" he repeated, turning to Christopher.
"There wasn't anything deliberate about it. She just flung the stone
at you precisely as you flung one at the rabbit. Sort of blind
instinct. She does not know now she really hurt you."
He glanced at the crossing strips of plaster with which the other's
head was adorned on the right side.
"It's horrible," muttered Geoffry, "I can't understand it."
"It's simple enough." There was growing impatience in Christopher's
voice. "She inherits this ghastly temper as I've told you. It's like a
sudden gust of wind if she's not warned. It takes her off her feet,
as it were, but she's nearly learnt to stand firm. She has a wretched
time after."
"It's madness."
"It's nothing of the kind. She wasn't taught to control it as a child.
They just treated it as something she couldn't help."
"By heavens, are you going to make out she can help it, and that that
makes it better?"
Christopher faced him with amazed indignation. Geoffry's whole
attitude and reception of his story seemed to him incredibly
one-sided.
"Of course it's better. A hundred times better. Do you mean you'd
rather have her the victim of a real madness she could not control?
Think what you are saying, man."
"To me, it's fairly unbearable if it's something she can help and
doesn't."
Exasperation nearly choked the other. To have to defend Patricia at
all was almost a desecration in his eyes, but he was her ambassador
and he stuck to his orders.
"She does help it. She's nearly mastered it now."
Geoffry put his hand to his injured head and gave a short laugh.
Christopher got up abruptly.
"What am I to tell her, then?" he demanded shortly.
The real tenor of the discussion seemed to break suddenly upon Geoffry
and he was cruelly alive to his own inability to meet it. He spoke
hurriedly and almost pleadingly.
"Don't go yet. I've got to think this out. Can't you help me?"
"What's there to think about? I've told you. I can tell you how to
help her if you like."
"I've got to think of a jolly sight more than you seem to imagine,"
returned the sorely beset young man irritably, but unable to keep a
touch of conscious superiority out of his voice, "a jolly sight more,
if I marry her."
"If you marry her?" Christopher turned on him with blazing eyes.
"I'm not saying I shan't--but it's a pretty bad pass for us both. I
know how she feels. Marriage isn't just a question of pleasing
oneself, you see. I must think it out for both of us."
Christopher began to speak and desisted. The other went on in an
aggrieved tone.
"I ought to have been told. Heredity of that sort isn't a thing to be
played with, you know. Anything might happen. Why wasn't I told?" He
walked to and fro, and stopped by Christopher again.
"I wouldn't mind a bit," he burst out, "if it were just a bad joke, if
she flung at me in fun and didn't expect to hit."
"She has a good aim as a rule," put in Christopher, too blind with
fury now to realise the other's unhinged condition, but Geoffry went
on unheeding.
"But to do it in a rage, and for nothing. Just a cold-blooded attack
and no warning. I can't get over it. Anything might happen."
His first indignant pang that Christopher had been sent on this
awkward errand had died out in the stress of the moment: he was ready
to appeal for sympathy, for help, or even bare comprehension in the
impossible situation in which he found himself, but Christopher had
nothing to bestow on him but blind, furious resentment. He longed to
be quit of his service and free to give way to his own wrath.
"There was plenty of warning for anyone with eyes and sense to use
them, and there was nothing cold-blooded about it whatever, as I've
told you fifty times. If you choose to make a mountain out of a
molehill you must, but I'll not help you. I would have done my best
for both of you if you'd taken it decently."
"You? What concern is it of yours?" retorted the other, stung back to
his original jealousy.
"It's my concern so far as Patricia chooses it to be," he answered
curtly. "I'm going now. You'd better write to her yourself, when
you've decided if the risk is worth taking or not."
"It's my risk at least, not yours--yet awhile," was the unguarded
reply.
The young men faced each other for a moment with passions at the point
of explosion. It was Christopher who recollected his position of
ambassador first and turned abruptly to the door. In the hall he
narrowly escaped encounter with Mrs. Leverson, Geoffry's large and
ample mother, but slipped out of a garden door on hearing the rustle
of her dress. In the open air he breathed freely again and hastened to
regain his motor, which he had left near the gates. Once outside Logan
Park he turned the car northward along a fairly deserted high-road and
drove at full pressure, until the hot passion of his heart cooled and
his pulse fell into beat with the throb of the engine, and he found
himself near Basingstoke. Then he turned homeward, driving with
greater caution and was able to face matters in a logically sane
manner.
"They won't marry and it's a blessed thing for both of them," was the
burden of his thoughts, though it mitigated not one bit his indignant
attitude towards Geoffry. Presently he turned to his own interest in
the matter.
His first idea was that he was free to claim her who was his own at
once, without loss of time, but that impulse died down before a better
appreciation of facts. Patricia must be left free in mind to regain
possession of every faculty, that was but common fairness: also he was
by no means certain at this time what response she would make to his
claim, and if it should be a negative his position at Marden would be
difficult, and there was Aymer to consider. Quite slowly, and with no
appreciable connection with the chief subject a recollection of that
first journey with Peter Masters from London came to the surface of
his mind, and written large across, in Peter's own handwriting, were
the words, "Aymer's son."
He had put that idea deliberately behind his back, hidden it in the
deepest recess of his mind, with a strange content and a germ of pride
unconfessed and unacknowledged to himself. It remained a secret
feeling that touched at no point his steady faith and devotion to his
dead mother.
But Peter's suggestion had utterly quenched his original intention of
asking Mr. Aston or Cæsar of his own origin, as he had intended to do
at the time of his return from Belgium. The actual possibility or
impossibility of the idea counted nothing so long as the faintest
shadow of it lurked there in the background. If it were a fact, it was
their secret, deliberately withheld; if it were not, he must be the
last to give it life.
The incalculable power of suggestion had done its work and the
suggested lie, taking root, had grown at the pace of all ill weeds and
obscured his usually clear visions of essentials. The more he
questioned the possible fact the denser seemed the screen between him
and Patricia, until he called himself a fool to have dreamed she was
ever his to claim at all.
It was in this wholly unsatisfactory mood he was called upon, on his
return, to face Patricia and give his own account of the interview.
Patricia was lying in wait for him at the door of her own sanctum,
which he had to pass on his way to his room. He would have gladly
deferred the interview, but she summoned him imperiously.
"There's a good hour till dinner, Christopher, and I must know what he
said. How long you've been!"
He followed her in and closed the door behind him. The little
white-panelled room was so perfect an expression of its owner that at
all times Christopher felt a still wonder fall on him to find himself
within its confines. It was singularly uncrowded and free, and the
monotonous note of light colour was broken by splashes of brightness
that were as an embroidery to the plain setting.
Patricia turned to him with questioning eyes and no words, and the
difficulty of his task made him a little curt and direct in speech,
for otherwise how could he avoid voicing the tenderness that flowed to
her.
"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 latitude 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 Cæsar 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 space with so great gratitude 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 brimming with tears. She laid her hand on his arm again
and drew nearer. Her entire ignorance of their true relationship 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.