“I’m fond of those babies. To begin with they are Nevil’s and they are the only youngsters I am likely to know well. But I’m a greedy person. I had Nevil, Renata, the kiddies—and that delightfully odd Patricia, and it wasn’t enough for me. They were all as good as could be to me, but I wanted to be more than an extra in someone’s life, so I must needs encumber myself with a troublesome little boy who’s even more greedy than myself, apparently.”
Christopher sat with his curly head on his hands trying not to give in to the smile that was struggling to express some undefined sense of content which had sprung to life.
“You are a bad, silly boy to be jealous,” said Aymer, watching him, half laughing, half affectionately, “you ought to have known for yourself, if they had been enough for me, you wouldn’t be here at all.”
CHAPTER V
Two events wrote themselves indelibly on Christopher’s memory in connection with this first visit to Marden, while the one great matter that began there and influenced his whole after life merged itself into a general hazy sense of happiness and companionship. For it is given to few of us even when we have reached years of discretion to recognise those moments in our lives which are of real, supreme, and eternal importance: moments when the great doors of experience open slowly on silent hinges and we pass in, unconscious even that we have crossed the threshold. But all that happens to our familiar selves, that touches our well-known emotions, and rubs or eases the worn grooves of existence, is heavily underscored in our recollection, and not infrequently we take for mile-stones on the way what were but pebbles on the road.
The two events which Christopher carried in his memory were, however, not unimportant, for both bore on his relationship with the man who was moulding his life. The one episode turned Vespasian’s bald statements into real emotional facts, and the other was the first serious collision between the far-off disastrous tutelage of Marley Sartin and the new laws of existence as propounded by Aymer Aston.
Christopher’s education made vast strides during that winter. The season proved an unusually mild one. He was out the greater part of each day with Patricia, enduring with remarkable fortitude her alternate contempt and despair over his ignorance of such everyday matters as horses, guns, dogs, desert island games, and such like. When she laughed at him for not being able to ride he shut his teeth hard not to remind her he’d never possessed a shetland pony from 60 birth as she had, also he rose at an unconscionable early hour and rode in the cold winter’s dawn round and round the exercising yard with the young grooms, while Patricia was warm and fast asleep in bed. But he had his reward when Mr. Aston, who had heard of his doings from the stud-groom, took him out with him on one of his rounds of inspection to outlying farms.
“The boy’s got a good seat, and pluck, Aymer,” reported Mr. Aston. “It’s more creditable to him because he has had to learn. It’s not second nature to him.”