CHAPTER VII
At the end of February the elder Astons returned to town and Marden Court was no longer mere vague locality to Christopher, but the “home” of those he loved, the centre piece of their lives, and he had a share in it himself.
Still he was very happy to find himself back at Aston House. Its many deserted rooms, the long, silent corridors and its strange spacious emptiness lent themselves to his robust imagination more easily than the living friendly warmth of the old house, brimful of actualities. He re-explored every corner of house and garden in the first days of return, interviewed the staff collectively and individually, from Warren the butler, to the new scullery boy. He rearranged his books and hunted up half-forgotten treasures, slid down the shiny banisters fifty times a day and dispelled the silent lurking shadows with a merry whistle and a laugh that woke an echo in quiet rooms. But he regretted Patricia. It would have been very pleasant to take his turn at showing her round—Patricia had only been in London once,—and there would have been plenty to show her. Lessons, however, recommenced almost at once and Christopher was left with little time for regrets. Life fell back into its old grooves with the solitary difference that those grooves seemed deeper worn and more familiar than he had imagined. The months no longer only presented possible problems; he could consult his memory as to what had previously been at such a time or in like conditions.
He was also given much greater liberty now and encouraged to go out by himself, and to do errands for Mr. Aston or Aymer. It was a proud day for 91 him when Aymer first sent him to The House with a letter for Mr. Aston, who was acting secretary on a Committee at the time. Christopher had had to wait and had sat outside a Committee room door and watched men go to and fro, men whose faces were dimly familiar to a student of illustrated papers, and men who were strange, but all men doing something in return for the good things the world had given them. Such at least was Christopher’s innocent belief. Aymer did not disillusion him.
He used to recount his small adventures to Cæsar in the evenings and was encouraged to form his own conclusions from what he had noticed and to confirm existing ideas from actual life. Such conclusions and ideas were naturally often childish and illogical, but Cæsar never appeared to find them laughable and would give careful and illuminating consideration to the most chaotic theories.
The everlasting problem of riches and poverty, happiness and misery often came uppermost, and on this point Christopher was assuredly, but quite unconsciously, as illuminating to Aymer as Aymer was to him. There were certain points of view, certain lines of thought with regard to the attitude of these “under-world” people, which Christopher knew without knowing how, and which, flashing out unexpectedly, would dissolve philanthropic theories wholesale. Aymer would retell them to his father afterwards, who in turn would bring them out in his quiet, unexpected way in one of those wonderfully eloquent speeches of his that made the whole list of “Societies” court him as a dinner guest and speaker, and political coteries sigh with pained surprise at his refusal to stand for Parliament.
Christopher, indeed, possessed to a full degree the power of absorbing the mental atmosphere in which he lived and of becoming a sort of visible incarnation of 92 it. Places and people who had thus once found expression in him could always bring to the surface again that particular phase of existence they had originally stamped on his mind. The Christopher who wandered amongst the wharfs and warehouses in that vague region across the river, remembered and was concerned over quite different matters to the happy boy who rode every morning in the Row with Mr. Aston.
There were many people to and fro to Aston House: Men who were a power in the world; men who would be so, and men who had been, as well as many of no note at all. They came to consult Charles Aston on every conceivable thing under the sun, from questions of high politics to the management of a refractory son. They did not always take his advice, nor did he always offer it, but they invariably came away with a more definite sense of their own meaning and aims, and somehow such aims were generally a little more just, a shade more honest, or a little higher than they had imagined when they started out. Charles Aston was still alluded to by men of high repute as “the man who might have been,” yet many there were who, had they considered it carefully, might have said to themselves that “might have been” was less well than “has been.” Very occasionally he entertained and Constantia came to play hostess for him. On these occasions Aymer rarely appeared at dinner, but a few privileged guests visited him afterwards and kept alive the tradition that Charles Aston’s son, that poor fellow Aymer, was an even more brilliant conversationalist and keener wit than his father. But as a rule very few from the outside penetrated as far as the Garden Wing of Aston House, and Aymer and Christopher continued to lead a peaceful and uninterrupted existence there.
Christopher continued to occupy his leisure with a 93 prodigious number of pets and the construction of mechanical contrivances for their convenience, in which he showed no little ingenuity. There were occasionally tragedies in connection with the pets which were turned to good account by the master of their fate even at the expense of his own feelings—and fingers—as on the occasion when he cremated a puppy-dog who had come to an untimely end. Cæsar objected to this experiment, and when the next catastrophe occurred, which was to a guinea-pig, a more commonplace funeral had to be organised.
But this tragedy became curiously enough linked with a new memory in Christopher’s mind, of more lasting importance than the demise of “Sir Joshua Reynolds” of the brown spots.