“I should like them.” He rubbed his cheek caressingly on Aymer’s hand. “May I, Cæsar?”
“Not to keep in your bedroom as you did the bantam.”
“But in the garden—or yard. Please, dear Cæsar.”
“You ridiculous baby, yes. If you make a house for them yourself.”
Christopher flew off in a transport of joy to consult with Vespasian, who, from mere tolerance of his beloved master’s last “fad,” had become the most ardent if unemotional partisan of the same “fad.”
It was Vespasian who had provided Christopher with more clothes than he deemed it possible for one 36 mortal boy to wear, who taught him how to put them on, and struggled with him figuratively and literally over the collar question. Vespasian’s taste running to a wide margin of immaculate white closely fastened, while Christopher had a predilection for a free and open expanse of neck.
“Look at Mr. Aymer,” pointed out the great general’s successor sternly. “You never see him with even a turn-down collar, and he lying on his back all the time, when most gentlemen would consider their own comfort.”
Christopher, hot, angry and uncomfortable, wondered if Vespasian had insisted on the wearing of those instruments of torture, or if Cæsar really preferred it.
But in spite of small differences of opinion, Vespasian and he were good friends, and he received much instruction from the mouth of that inestimable man. It was he who drilled him in Mr. Aymer’s little ways, warned him how he hated to be reminded of his helplessness, and could not endure anyone but Vespasian himself to move him from sofa to chair, and that only in the strictest privacy. How he disliked meeting anyone when wheeled from his own room to the dining-room for dinner, which was the only meal he took in public, and that only in company with his father or very intimate friends. How he avoided asking anyone to hand him things though he did not object to unsolicited help, which Christopher soon learnt to render as unostentatiously as Vespasian himself. Also it was Vespasian who explained to him woodenly, in answer to his direct question, that the scar on Mr. Aymer’s forehead was the result of a shooting accident. His revolver had gone off as he was cleaning it, said Vespasian, had nearly killed him, had left him paralysed on one side, so he’d never be better. He added, Mr. Aymer didn’t like it talked 37 about. All this and more did the boy learn from this discreet man, but never did Vespasian hint at those dark years when to serve poor Aymer Aston was a work for which no money could pay, when the patient father and much-tried man had secretly wondered whether that fight for mere life that had followed on the ghastly accident had indeed been worth the winning. There was no word of this in Vespasian’s revelations. He only impressed on Christopher the necessity of avoiding any expression of pity or commiseration with the paralysed man, and a warning that a somewhat casual manner towards the world, and his entirely undemonstrative way, was no true index of Mr. Aymer’s real feelings.
Christopher was himself warm-hearted and given to expressing his joyous feelings with engaging frankness. It could hardly have been otherwise, brought up as he had been by a woman of ardent nature and passionate love for him, but in contradiction to this he had learnt to be very silent over the disagreeables of life and to keep his own small troubles to himself, so that he readily entered into Aymer’s attitude towards his own misfortune, and the relationship between the two passed from admiration on Christopher’s part to passionate devotion, and from the region of experimental interest on Aymer’s part to personal uncalculated affection, and to an easing of a sharp heartache he had tried valiantly to hide from his father. Aymer never questioned him on the past, never even alluded to it. Partly because he hoped the memory of it would dwindle from the boy’s mind, and partly for his own sake. But Christopher did not forget. There were few days when he did not contrast the old times with the new, and gaze for a moment across the big gulf that separated Christopher Aston from little Jim Hibbault and the quiet woman absorbed in a struggle for existence in an unfriendly world. He occasionally 38 spoke of his mother to Mr. Aston when they were out together, but he kept his implied promise faithfully with regard to Aymer and made no mention of his former experiences, or of his mother, until one day an event occurred which recalled the black terror under whose shadow they had left London, and necessitated an elucidation of knotty points.