CHAPTER XI
Despite his honest intention never to stand between Christopher and any fate that might serve to draw him into connection with his father, Aymer had a hard fight to master his keen desire to put Peter’s letter in the fire and say nothing about it. Surely, after all, he had the best right to say what his adopted charge’s future should be. It was he who had rescued him from obscurity, who had lavished on him the love and care his selfish, erratic father, for his own ambitious ends, denied him. Aymer believed, moreover, that a career under Peter’s influence would mean either the blunting if not the utter destruction of every generous and admirable quality in the boy, or a rapid unbalanced development of those socialistic tendencies, the seeds of which were sown by his mother and nurtured in the hard experience of his early days. Besides this, Peter’s interest in the boy was probably a mere freak, or at the best, sprang from a desire to serve his cousin, unless by any remote chance he had stumbled on a clue to Christopher’s identity.
This last suspicion wove itself like a black thread into the grey woof of Aymer’s existence. His whole being by now had become concentrated in the boy’s life. It was a renewal of youth, hopes, ambitions, again possible in the person of this child, and for the second time a fierce, restless jealousy of his cousin began to stir in the inner depths of Aymer’s being, as fire which may yet break into life beneath the grey, piled-up ashes which conceal it.
He sought help and advice from none and fought hard alone for his own salvation through the long 138 watches of a black night—fought against the jealousy that prompted him to hedge Christopher about with precautions and restrictions which, however desirable they might seem to his finite wisdom, yet were, he knew, only the outcome of his smouldering jealousy, and might well grow to formidable barriers for Christopher to climb in later years. Aymer fought, too, for that sense of larger faith that in the midst of careful action yet leaves room for the hand of God and does not confound the little ideas of the builder with the vast plan of the Great Architect.
So the letter—the little fact which stood for such great possibilities—was shown to Christopher, to whom it was a mere nothing, to be tossed aside with scorn.
“I don’t want to be under him,” he commented indignantly, “I don’t care about his old axles,” and then because Cæsar was silent and he felt himself in the wrong, he apologised.
“All the same, I don’t want to go to him unless you particularly wish it, Cæsar,” he insisted.
But Cæsar did not answer directly.
“You are certain you want to be an engineer?” he asked at length.
“Certain,—only—” Christopher stopped, went over to the window and looked out.