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 328 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 passed 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 329 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.”