“I am not really tired,” the child maintained stoutly, “but it’s going to rain again. Can’t you come on?”
“Presently.”
“You think it is the right road?”
“I don’t know, Jim. I was sure of it at first, but I’m sure of nothing now.”
The words and scene were as clear to him as the day they happened. He saw in it now a deeper significance, a possible meaning that was the last note of tragedy to his mother’s story. For that note is reached only when the faith in which we have lived, acted and endured, fails us. That is the bitterness and foretaste of death. Then only can the shadow of it fall on us, and in great mercy gather us into its shade.
The Right Road! There was no doubt or shadow for Christopher yet. He had taken the first step on the Road he had chosen, and he would not look back. He would not stultify his mother’s sacrifice. Such faint echoes as he heard calling him back were temptations to which he must turn a deaf ear. He would go forward on his chosen path, and Peter Masters’ millions must look after themselves.
That was the final decision. Yet he sat there, still figuring the persons of the woman and the child trudging 330 down the road towards him, and as he gazed, without conscious effort, the forms changed. The boy grew to manhood: the woman took to herself youth, youth with a crown of golden hair and the form of Patricia.
A throb of exultation leapt through him. Here were the real riches and fulness of life within his grasp and he, in blunt stupidity, had not chosen to see, had set material good and vague uncertainties before his own incomparable gain and happiness. Whatever had held him back before, the clouded life or personal ambition, or Cæsar’s need, it was swept away now like some low-lying mist before the wind, and left the clear vision, the man and the woman together on the long, smooth Road he would lay for her tender feet.
There should be no more delay than the needed time to race from here to her. Twenty-five miles of country that his car was eager to devour. He slipped away swiftly from the past as he had done before on this very road—to a new future.