CHAPTER XI
LATIMER
When Eve had left for Latimer, the routine of Canterton’s working day ran with the same purposefulness, like a familiar path in a garden, yet though the scene was the same, the atmosphere seemed different, even as a well-known landscape may be glorified and rendered more mysterious by the light poured out from under the edge of a thunder cloud. A peculiar tenderness, a glamour of sensitiveness, covered everything. He was more alive to the beauty of the world about him, and the blue hills seemed to hang like an enchantment on the edge of the horizon. He felt both strangely boyish and richly mature. Something had been renewed in him. He was an Elizabethan, a man of a wonderful new youth, seeing strange lands rising out of the ocean, his head full of a new splendour of words and a new majesty of emotions. The old self in him seemed as young and fresh as the grass in spring. His vitality was up with the birds at dawn.
The first two days were days of dreams. The day’s work was the same, yet it passed with a peculiar pleasureableness as though there were soft music somewhere keeping a slow rhythm. He was conscious of an added wonder, of the immanence of something that had not taken material shape. A richer light played upon the colours of the world about him. He was conscious of the light, but he did not realise its nature, nor whence it came.
On the third day the weather changed, and an absurd restlessness took possession of him. Rain came in rushes out of a hurrying grey sky, and the light and the warmth seemed to have gone out of the world. Mysterious outlines took on a sharp distinctness. Figures were no longer the glimmering shapes of an Arthurian dream. Canterton became more conscious of the physical part of himself, of appetites, needs, inclinations, tendencies. Something was hardening and taking shape.
He began to think more definitely of Eve at Latimer, and she was no longer a mere radiance spreading itself over the routine of the day’s work. Was she comfortable at the old red-faced “George”? Was the weather interfering with her work? Would she write to Lynette, and would the letter have a word for him? What a wonderful colour sense she had, and what cunning in those fingers of hers. He liked to remember that peculiar radiant look, that tenderness in the eyes that came whenever she was stirred by something that was unusually beautiful. It was like the look in the eyes of a mother, or the light in the eyes of a woman who loved. He had seen it when she was looking at Lynette.
Then, quite suddenly, he became conscious of a sense of loss. He was unable to fix his attention on his work, and his thoughts went drifting. He felt lonely. It was as though he had been asleep and dreaming, and had wakened up suddenly, hungry and restless, and vaguely discontented.
Even Lynette’s chatter was a spell cast about his thoughts. Having created a heroine, the child babbled of her and her fascinations, and Canterton discovered a secret delight in hearing Lynette talk of Eve Carfax. He could not utter the things that the child uttered, and yet they seemed so inevitable and so true, so charmingly and innocently intimate. It brought Eve nearer, showed her to him as a more radiant, gracious, laughing figure. Lynette was an enchantress, a siren, and knew it not, and Canterton’s ears were open to her voice.
“I wonder if my letter will come to-day, daddy?”
“Perhaps!”
“It’s over two—three days. It ought to be a big letter.”
“A big letter for a little woman.”
“I wonder if she writes as beautifully as she paints?”
“Very likely.”
“And, oh, daddy, will she be back for our garden party?”
“I think so.”
“Mother says I can’t behave nicely at parties. I shall go about with Miss Eve, and I’ll do just what she does. Then I ought to behave very nicely, oughtn’t I?”
“Perfectly.”
“I do love Miss Eve, daddy, don’t you?”
“We always agree, Miss Pixie.”
On the fourth day Lynette had her letter. It came by the morning’s post, with a little devil in red and black ink dancing on the flap of the envelope. Lynette had not received more than three letters in her life, and the very address gave her a beautiful new thrill.
Miss Lynette Canterton,Fernhill,Basingford,Surrey.
Miss Lynette Canterton,Fernhill,Basingford,Surrey.
Miss Lynette Canterton,
Fernhill,
Basingford,
Surrey.
Lessons over, she went rushing out in search of her father, and, after canvassing various under-gardeners, discovered him in a corner of the rose nursery.
“Miss Eve’s written, daddy! I knew she would. Would you like to read it? Here’s a message for you.”
He sat down on a wooden bench, and drawing Lynette into the hollow of one arm, took the letter in a big hand. It was written on plain cream paper of a roughish texture, with a little picture of the “George Hotel” penned in the right upper corner. Eve’s writing was the writing of the younger generation, so different from the regular, sloping, characterless style of the feminine Victorians. It was rather upright, rather square, picturesque in its originality, and with a certain decorative distinctness that covered the sheet of paper with personal and intimate values.
“Dear Lynette,—I am writing to you at a funny little table in a funny little window that looks out on Latimer Green. It has been raining all day—oh, such rain!—like thousands of silver wires falling down straight out of the sky. If you were here we would sit at the window and make pictures of the queer people—all legs and umbrellas—walking up and down the streets. Here is the portrait of an umbrella going out for a walk on a nice pair of legs in brown gaiters.“There is an old raven in the garden here. I tried to make friends with him, but he pecked my ankles. And they say he uses dreadful language. Wicked old bird! Here is a picture of him pretending to be asleep, with one eye open, waiting for some poor Puss Cat to come into the garden.“There is a nice old gardener who makes me tea in the afternoon, but I don’t like it so much as tea in the Wilderness.“I want to be back to see you in your new party frock next Friday. I feel quite lonely without the Queen of the Fairies. If you were here I would buy you such cakes at the little shop across the road.“Please tell Mr. Canterton that the weather was very good to me the first two days, and that I hope he will like the pictures that I have painted.“Good-bye, Lynette, dear,Much—much love to you, from“Miss Eve.”
“Dear Lynette,—I am writing to you at a funny little table in a funny little window that looks out on Latimer Green. It has been raining all day—oh, such rain!—like thousands of silver wires falling down straight out of the sky. If you were here we would sit at the window and make pictures of the queer people—all legs and umbrellas—walking up and down the streets. Here is the portrait of an umbrella going out for a walk on a nice pair of legs in brown gaiters.
“There is an old raven in the garden here. I tried to make friends with him, but he pecked my ankles. And they say he uses dreadful language. Wicked old bird! Here is a picture of him pretending to be asleep, with one eye open, waiting for some poor Puss Cat to come into the garden.
“There is a nice old gardener who makes me tea in the afternoon, but I don’t like it so much as tea in the Wilderness.
“I want to be back to see you in your new party frock next Friday. I feel quite lonely without the Queen of the Fairies. If you were here I would buy you such cakes at the little shop across the road.
“Please tell Mr. Canterton that the weather was very good to me the first two days, and that I hope he will like the pictures that I have painted.
“Good-bye, Lynette, dear,
Much—much love to you, from
“Miss Eve.”
Lynette was ecstatic.
“Isn’t it a lovely letter, daddy? And doesn’t she write beautifully? And it’s all spelt just as if it were out of a book.”
Canterton folded the letter with meditative leisureliness.
“Quite a lovely letter.”
“I’m going to put it away in my jewel case.”
“Jewel case? We are getting proud!”
“It’s only a work-box, really, but I call it a jewel case.”
“I see. Things are just what we choose to call them.”
Canterton went about for the rest of the day with a picture of a dark-haired woman with a sensitive face sitting at a white framed Georgian window, and looking out upon Latimer Green where all the red-tiled roofs were dull and wet, and the rain rustled upon the foliage of the Latimer elms. He could imagine Eve drawing those pen-and-ink sketches for Lynette, with a glimmer of fun in her eyes, and her lips smiling. She was seventy miles away, and yet——He found himself wondering whether her thoughts had reached out to him while she was writing that letter to Lynette.
At Latimer the rain was the mere whim of a day, a silver veil let down on the impulse and tossed aside again with equal capriciousness. Eve was deep in the Latimer gardens, painting from nine in the morning till six at night, taking her lunch and tea with her, and playing the gipsy under a blue sky.
Save for that one wet day the weather was perfect for studies of vivid sunlight and dense shadow. Latimer Abbey set upon its hill-side, with the dense woods shutting out the north, seemed to float in the very blue of the summer sky. There was no one in residence, and, save for the gardeners, Eve had the place to herself, and was made to feel like a child in a fairy story, who discovers some enchanted palace all silent and deserted, yet kept beautiful by invisible hands. As she sat painting in the upper Italian garden with its flagged walks, statues, brilliant parterres, and fountains, she could not escape from a sense of enchantment. It was all so quiet, and still, and empty. The old clock with its gilded face in the turret kept smiting the hours with a quaint, muffled cry, and with each striking of the hour she had a feeling that all the doors and windows of the great house would open, and that gay ladies in flowered gowns, and gentlemen in rich brocades would come gliding out on to the terrace. Gay ghosts in panniers and coloured coats, powdered, patched, fluttering fans, and cocking swords, quaint in their stilted stateliness. The magic of the place seemed to flow into her work, and perhaps there was too much mystery in the classic things she painted. Some strange northern god had breathed upon the little sensuous pictures that should have suggested the gem-like gardens of Pompeii. Clipped yews and box trees, glowing masses of mesembryanthemum and pelargonium, orange trees in stone vases, busts, statues, masks, fountains and white basins, all the brilliancy thereof refused to be merely sensuous and delightful. There was something over it, a spirituality, a slight mistiness that softened the materialism. Eve knew what she desired to paint, and yet something bewitched her hands, puzzled her, made her dissatisified. The Gothic spirit refused to be conjured, refused to suffer this piece of brilliant formalism to remain untouched under the thinner blue of the northern sky.
Eve was puzzled. She made sketch after sketch, and yet was not satisfied. Was it mediævalism creeping in, the ghosts of old monks moving round her, and throwing the shadows of their frocks over a pagan mosaic? Or was the confusing magic in her own brain, or some underflow of feeling that welled up and disturbed her purpose?
Moreover, she discovered that another personality had followed her to Latimer. She felt as though Canterton were present, standing behind her, looking over her shoulder, and watching her work. She seemed to see things with his eyes, that the work was his work, and that it was not her personality alone that mattered.
The impression grew and became so vivid that it forced her from the mere contemplation of the colours and the outlines of the things before her to a subtle consciousness of the world within herself. Why should she feel that he was always there at her elbow? And yet the impression was so strong that she fancied that she had but to turn her head to see him, to talk to him, and to look into his eyes for sympathy and understanding. She tried to shake the feeling off, to shrug her shoulders at it, and failed. James Canterton was with her all the while she worked.
There was a second Italian garden at Latimer, a recreation, in the spirit, of the garden of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, a hill garden, a world of terraces, stone stairways, shaded walks, box hedges, cypresses and cedars, fountains, cascades, great water cisterns. Here was more mystery, deeper shadows, a sadder note. Eve was painting in the lower garden on the day following the rain, when the lights were softer, the foliage fresher, the perfumes more pungent. There was the noise of water everywhere. The sunlight was more partial and more vague, splashing into the open spaces, hanging caught in the cypresses and cedars, touching some marble shape, or glittering upon the water in some pool. Try as she would, Eve felt less impersonal here than in the full sunlight of the upper garden. That other spirit that had sent her to Latimer seemed to follow her up and down the moss-grown stairways, to walk with her through the shadows under the trees. She was more conscious of Canterton than ever. He was the great, grave lord of the place, watching her work with steady eyes, compelling her to paint with a touch that was not all her own.
Sometimes the head gardener, who had tea made for her in his cottage, came and watched her painting and angled for a gossip. He was a superior sort of ancient, with a passion for unearthing the history of plants that had been introduced from distant countries. Canterton’s name came up, and the old man found something to talk about.
“I don’t say as I’m an envious chap, but that’s the sort of life as would have suited me.”
Eve paused at her work.
“Whose?”
“Why, Mr. Canterton’s, Miss.”
“You know Mr. Canterton by name?”
“Know him by name! I reckon I do! Didn’t he raise Eileen Purcell and Jem Gaunt, and bring all those Chinese and Indian plants into the country, and hybridise Mephistopheles? Canterton! It’s a name to conjure with.”
Eve felt an indefinable pleasure in listening to the fame of the man whose work she was learning to share, for it was fame to be spoken of with delight by this old Latimer gardener.
“Mr. Canterton’s writing a book, is he?”
“Yes, and I am painting some of the pictures for it.”
“Are you now? I have a notion I should like that book. Aye, it should be a book!”
“The work of years.”
“Sure! None of your cheap popular sixpenny amateur stuff. It’ll be what you call ‘de lucks,’ won’t it? Such things cost money.”
Eve was silent a moment. The old man was genuine enough, and not touting.
“Perhaps Mr. Canterton would send you a copy. You would appreciate it. I’ll give him your name.”
“No, no, though I thank you, miss. A good tool is worth its money. I’m not a man to get a good thing for nothing. I reckon I’ll buy that there book.”
“It won’t be published for two or three years.”
“Oh, I’m in no hurry! I’m used to waiting for things to grow solid. Sapwood ain’t no use to anybody.”
Eve had a desire to see the hill garden by moonlight, and the head gardener was sympathetic.
“We lock the big gate at dusk when his lordship’s away. But you come round at nine o’clock to the postern by the dovecot, and I’ll let you in.”
The hill garden’s mood was suited to the full moon. Eve had dreamt of such enchantments, but had never seen them till that summer night. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the cypresses and cedars were like the black spires of a city. The alleys and walks were tunnels of gloom. Here and there a statue or a fountain glimmered, and the great water cisterns were pools of ink reflecting the huge white disc of the moon.
Eve wandered to and fro along the moonlit walks and up and down the dim stairways. The stillness was broken only by the splash of water, and by the turret clock striking the quarters.
It was the night of her last day at Latimer. She would be sorry to leave it, and yet, to-morrow she would be at Fernhill. Lynette’s glowing head flashed into her thoughts, and a rush of tenderness overtook her. If life could be like the joyous eyes of the child, if passion went no further, if all problems remained at the age of seven!
How would Canterton like the pictures she had painted? A thrill went through her, and at the same time she felt that the garden was growing cold. A sense of unrest ruffled the calm of the moonlit night. She felt near to some big, indefinable force, on the edge of the sea, vaguely afraid of she knew not what.
She would see him to-morrow. It was to be the day of the Fernhill garden party, and she had promised Lynette that she would go.
She felt glad, yet troubled, half tempted to shirk the affair, and to stay with her mother at Orchards Corner.
A week had passed, and she could not escape from the knowledge that something had happened to her in that week.
Yet what an absurd drift of dreams was this that she was suffering. The moonlight and the mystery were making her morbid and hypersensitive.
To-morrow she would walk out into the sunlight and meet him face to face in the thick of a casual crowd. All the web of self-consciousness would fall away. She would find herself talking to a big, brown-faced man with steady eyes and a steady head. He was proof against such imaginings, far too strong to let such fancies cloud his consciousness.
Moreover they were becoming real good friends, and she imagined that she understood him. She had been too much alone this week. His magnificent and kindly sanity would make her laugh a little over the impressions that had haunted her in the gardens of Latimer.
CHAPTER XII
A WEEK’S DISCOVERY
Those who saw Lynette’s swoop towards her heroine attached no esoteric meaning to its publicity. A sage green frock and a bronze gold head went darting between the figures on the Fernhill lawn.
Mrs. Brocklebank, who could stop most people in full career, as a policeman halts the traffic in the city, discovered that it was possible for her largeness to be ignored.
“Lynette, my dear, come and show me——”
Lynette whisked past her unheedingly. Mrs. Brocklebank tilted her glasses.
“Dear me, how much too impetuous that child is. I am always telling Gertrude that she is far too wild and emotional.”
Mrs. Lankhurst, who was Mrs. Brocklebank’s companion for the moment, threw back an echo.
“A little neurotic, I think.”
Mrs. Lankhurst was a typical hard-faced, raddled, cut-mouthed Englishwoman, a woman who had ceased to trouble about her appearance simply because she had been married for fifteen years and felt herself comfortably and sexually secure. An unimaginative self-complacency seems to be the chief characteristic of this type of Englishwoman. She appears to regard marriage as a release from all attempts at subtilising the charm of dress, lets her complexion go, her figure slacken, her lips grow thin. “George” is serenely and lethargically constant, so why trouble about hats? So the good woman turns to leather, rides, gardens, plays golf, and perhaps reads questionable novels. The sex problem does not exist for her, yet Mrs. Lankhurst’s “George” was notorious and mutable behind her back. She thought him cased up in domestic buckram, and never the lover of some delightful littledame aux Camellias, who kept her neck white, and her sense of humour unimpaired.
Lynette’s white legs flashed across the grass.
“Oh, Miss Eve!”
Eve Carfax had stepped out through the open drawing-room window, a slim and sensitive figure that carried itself rather proudly in the face of a crowd.
“Lynette!”
“I knew you’d come! I knew you’d come!”
She held out hands that had to be taken and held, despite the formal crowd on the lawn.
“I’m so glad you’re back.”
A red mouth waited to be kissed.
“We have missed you—daddy and I.”
“My dear——”
Mrs. Brocklebank was interested. So was her companion.
“Who is that girl?”
Mrs. Lankhurst had a way of screwing up her eyes, and wrinkling her forehead.
“A Miss Carfax. She lives with her mother near here. Retired tradespeople, I imagine. The girl paints. She is doing work for Mr. Canterton—illustrating catalogues, I suppose.”
“The child seems very fond of her.”
“Children have a habit of making extraordinary friendships. It is the dustman, or an engine-driver, or something equally primitive.”
“I suppose one would call the girl pretty?”
“Too French!”
Mrs. Lankhurst nodded emphatically.
“Englishmen are so safe. Now, in any other country it would be impossible——”
“Oh, quite! I imagine such a man as James Canterton——”
“The very idea is indecent. Our men are so reliable. One never bothers one’s head. Yet one has only to cross the Channel——”
“A decadent country. The women make the morals of the men. Any nation that thinks so much about dress uncovers its own nakedness.”
The multi-coloured crowd had spread itself over the whole of the broad lawn in the front of the house, for Gertrude Canterton’s garden parties were very complete affairs, claiming people from half the county. She had one of the best string bands that was to be obtained, ranged in the shade of the big sequoia. The great cedar was a kind of kiosk, and a fashionable London caterer had charge of the tea.
Lynette kept hold of Eve’s hand.
“Where is your mother, dear?”
“Do you want to see mother?”
“Of course.”
They wound in and out in quest of Gertrude Canterton, and found her at last in the very centre of the crowd, smiling and wriggling in the stimulating presence of a rear-admiral. She was wearing a yellow dress and a purple hat, a preposterous and pathetic combination of colours when the man she had married happened to be one of the greatest flower colourists in the kingdom. Eve shook hands and was smiled at.
“How do you do, Miss Garvice?”
“It isn’t Garvice, mother.”
Eve was discreet and passed on, but Lynette was called back.
“Lynette, come and say how do you do to Admiral Mirlees.”
Lynette stretched out a formal hand.
“How do you do, Admiral Mirlees?”
The sailor gave her a big hand, and a sweep of the hat.
“How do you do, Miss Canterton? Charmed to meet you! Supposing you come and show me the garden?”
Lynette eyed him gravely.
“Most of it’s locked up.”
“Locked up?”
“Because people steal daddy’s things.”
“Lynette!”
“I’m very busy, Admiral, but I can give you ten minutes.”
The sailor’s eyes twinkled, but Gertrude Canterton was angry.
“Lynette, go and show Admiral Mirlees all the garden.”
“My dear Mrs. Canterton, I am quite sure that your daughter is telling the truth. She must be in great demand, and I shall be grateful for ten minutes.”
Lynette’s eyes began to brighten to the big playful child in him.
“Lord Admiral, I think you must look so nice in a cocked hat. I’ve left Miss Eve, you see. She’s been away, and she’s my great friend.”
“I won’t stand in Miss Eve’s way.”
“But she’s not a bit selfish, and I think I might spare half an hour.”
“Miss Canterton, let me assure you that I most deeply appreciate this compliment.”
Eve, left alone, wandered here and there, knowing hardly a soul, and feeling rather lost and superfluous. Happiness in such shows consists in being comfortably inconspicuous, a talker among talkers, though there are some who can hold aloof with an air of casual detachment, and outstare the crowd from some pillar of isolation. Eve had a self-conscious fit upon her. Gertrude Canterton’s parties were huge and crowded failures. The subtle atmosphere that pervades such social assemblies was restless, critical, uneasy, at Fernhill. People talked more foolishly than usual, and were either more absurdly stiff or more absurdly genial than was their wont.
The string band had begun to play one of Brahms’ Hungarian melodies. It was a superb band, and the music had an impetuous and barbaric sensuousness, a Bacchic rush of half-naked bodies whirling together through a shower of vine leaves and flowers. The talk on the lawn seemed so much gabble, and Eve wandered out, and round behind the great sequoia where she could listen to the music and be at peace. She wondered what the violinists thought of the crowd over yonder, these men who could make the strings utter wild, desirous cries. What a stiff, preposterous, and complacent crowd it seemed. Incongruous fancies piqued her sense of humour. If Pan could come leaping out of the woods, if ironical satyrs could seize and catch up those twentieth century women, and wild-eyed girls pluck the stiff men by the chins. The music suggested it, but who had come to listen to the music?
“I have been hunting you through the crowd.”
She turned sharply, with all the self-knowledge that she had won at Latimer rushing to the surface. A few words spoken in the midst of the crying of the violins. She felt the surprised nakedness of her emotions, that she was stripped for judgment, and that sanity would be whipped into her by the scourge of a strong man’s common sense.
“I have not been here very long.”
She met his eyes and held her breath.
“I saw you with Lynette, but I could not make much headway.”
Canterton had taken her hand and held it a moment, but his eyes never left her face. She was mute, full of a wonder that was half exultant, half afraid. All those subtle fancies that had haunted her at Latimer were becoming realities, instead of melting away into the reasonable sunlight. What had happened to both of them in a week? He was the same big, brown, quiet man of the world, magnanimous, reliable, a little reticent and proud, yet from the moment that he had spoken and she had turned to meet his eyes she had known that he had changed.
“I promised Lynette that I would come.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Tired? No. I left Latimer early, and after all, it is only seventy miles. I got home about twelve and found mother knitting just as though she had been knitting ever since I left her. Lynette looks lovely.”
She felt the wild necessity of chattering, of covering things up with sound, of giving her thoughts time to steady themselves. His eyes overwhelmed her. It was not that they were too audacious or too intimate. On the contrary they looked at her with a new softness, a new awe, a kind of vigilant tenderness that missed nothing.
“I think you are looking very well.”
“I am very well.”
She caught quick flitting glances going over her, noticing her simple little black hat shaped like an almond, her virginal white dress and long black gloves. The black and white pleased him. Her feminine instinct told her that.
“I came round here to listen to the music.”
“Music is expected at these shows, and not listened to. I always call this ‘Padlock Day.’”
She laughed, glad of a chance to let emotions relax for a moment.
“Padlock Day! Do you mean——”
“There are too many Mrs. Brocklebanks about.”
“But surely——”
“You would be surprised if I were to tell you how some of my choice things used to be pilfered on these party days. Now I shut up my business premises on these state occasions, for fear the Mrs. Brocklebanks should bring trowels in their sunshades.”
“And instead, you give them good music?”
“Which they don’t listen to, and they could not appreciate it if they did.”
“You are severe!”
“Am I? Supposing these men gave us the Second Hungarian Rhapsody, how could you expect the people to understand it? In fact, it is not a thing to be understood, but to be felt. Our good friends would be shocked if they felt as Liszt probably meant people to feel it. Blood and wine and garlands and fire in the eyes. Well, how did you like Latimer?”
The blood rose again to her face, and she knew that the same light was in his eyes.
“Perfect. I was tempted to dream all my time away instead of painting. I hope you will like the pictures. There was something in the atmosphere of the place that bothered me.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, just as though ghosts were trying to play tricks with my hands. The gardens are classic, renaissance, or what you please. It should have been all sunny, delightful formalism, but then——”
“Something Gothic crept in.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have been to Latimer.”
Her eyes met his with a flash of understanding.
“Of course. But I——Well, you must judge.”
The music had stopped, and an eddy of the crowd came lapping round behind the sequoia. Canterton was captured by an impetuous amateur gardener in petticoats who had written a book about something or other, and who always cast her net broadly at an interesting man.
“Oh, Mr. Canterton, can you tell me about those Chinese primulas?”
To Eve Carfax it appeared part of the whimsical and senseless spirit of such a gathering that she should be carried up against Gertrude Canterton, whose great joy was to exercise the power of patronage.
“Miss Carfax, Mr. Canterton seems so pleased with your paintings. I am sure you are being of great use to him.”
As a matter of fact, Canterton had hardly so much as mentioned Eve’s art to his wife, and Eve herself felt that she had nothing to say to Gertrude Canterton. Her pride hardened in her and refused to be cajoled.
“I am glad Mr. Canterton likes my work.”
“I am sure he does. Have you studied much in town?”
“For two or three years. And I spent a year in Paris.”
“Indeed!”
Gertrude Canterton’s air of surprise was unconsciously offensive.
“Do you ever paint portraits?”
“I have tried.”
“I hear it is the most lucrative part of the profession. Now, miniatures, for instance—there has been quite a craze for miniatures. Have you tried them?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Really? We must see what you can do. You might show me a—a sample, and I can mention it to my friends.”
Eve had become ice.
“Thank you, but I am afraid I shall not have the time.”
“Indeed.”
“I want to give all my energy to flower painting.”
“I see—I see. Oh, Mrs. Dempster, how are you? How good of you to come. Have you had tea? No? Oh, do come and let me get you some!”
Eve was alone again, and conscious of a sense of strife within her. Gertrude Canterton’s voice had raised an echo, an echo that brought back suggestions of antipathy and scorn. Those few minutes spent with her had covered the world of Eve’s impressions with a cold, grey light. She felt herself a hard young woman, quite determined against patronage, and quite incapable of letting herself be made a fool of by any emotions whatever.
Glancing aside she saw Canterton talking to a parson. He was talking with his lips, but his eyes were on her. He had the hovering and impatient air of a man held back against his inclinations, and trying to cover with courtesy his desire to break away.
He was coming back to her, for there was something inevitable and magnetic about those eyes of his. A little spasm of shame and exultation glowed out from the midst of the half cynical mood that had fallen on her. She turned and moved away, wondering what had become of Lynette.
“I want to show you something.”
She felt herself thrill. The hardness seemed to melt at the sound of his voice.
“Oh?”
“Let’s get away from the crowd. It is really preposterous. What fools we all are in a crowd.”
“Too much self-consciousness.”
“Are you, too, self-conscious?”
“Sometimes.”
“Not when you are interested.”
“Perhaps not.”
They passed several of Canterton’s men parading the walks leading to the nurseries. Temporary wire fences and gates had been put up here and there. Canterton smiled.
“Doesn’t it strike you as almost too pointed?”
“What, that barbed wire?”
“Yes. I believe I have made myself an offence to the neighbourhood. But the few people I care about understand. Besides, we give to our friends.”
“I think you must have been a brave man.”
“No, an obstinate one. I did not see why the Mrs. Brocklebanks should have pieces of my rare plants. I have even had my men bribed once or twice. You should hear Lavender on the subject. Look at that!”
He had brought her down to see the heath garden, and her verdict was an awed silence. They stood side by side, looking at the magnificent masses of colour glowing in the afternoon light.
“Oh, how exquisite!”
“It is rather like drinking when one is thirsty.”
“Yes.”
He half turned to her.
“I want to see the Latimer paintings. May I come down after dinner, and have a chat with your mother?”
She felt something rise in her throat, a faint spasm of resistance that lasted only for a moment.
“But—the artificial light?”
“I want to see them.”
It was not so much a surrender on her part as a tacit acceptance of his enthusiasm.
“Yes, come.”
“Thank you.”
CHAPTER XIII
A MAN IN THE MOONLIGHT
It was no unusual thing for Canterton to spend hours in the gardens and nurseries after dark. He was something of a star-gazer and amateur astronomer, but it was the life of the earth by night that drew him out with lantern, collecting-box and hand lens. Often he went moth hunting, for the history of many a moth is also the history of some pestilence that cankers and blights the green growth of some tree or shrub. No one who has not gone out by night with a lantern to search and to observe has any idea of the strange, creeping life that wakes with the darkness. It is like the life of another world, thousand-legged, slimy, grotesque, repulsive, and yet full of significance to the Nature student who goes out to use his eyes.
Canterton had some of Darwin’s thoroughness and patience. He had spent hours watching centipedes or the spore changes of myxomycetes on a piece of dead fir bough. He experimented with various compounds for the extinction of slugs, and studied the ways of wood-lice and earth worms. All very ridiculous, no doubt, in a man whose income ran into thousands a year. Sometimes he had been able to watch a shrew at work, or perhaps a queer snuffling sound warned him of the nearness of a hedgehog. This was the utilitarian side of his vigils. He was greatly interested, æsthetically and scientifically, in the sleep of plants and flowers, and in the ways of those particular plants whose loves are consummated at night, shy white virgins with perfumed bodies who leave the day to their bolder and gaudier fellows. Some moth played Eros. He studied plants in their sleep, the change of posture some of them adopted, the drooping of the leaves, the closing of the petals. All sorts of things happened of which the ordinary gardener had not the slightest knowledge. There were atmospheric changes to be recorded, frosts, dew falls and the like. Very often Canterton would be up before sunrise, watching which birds were stirring first, and who was the first singer to send a twitter of song through the grey gate of the dawn.
But as he walked through the fir woods towards Orchards Corner, his eyes were not upon the ground or turned to the things that were near him. Wisps of a red sunset still drifted about the west, and the trunks of the trees were barred in black against a yellow afterglow. Soon a full moon would be coming up. Heavy dew was distilling out of the quiet air and drawing moist perfumes out of the thirsty summer earth.
Blue dusk covered the heathlands beyond Orchards Corner, and the little tree-smothered house was invisible. A light shone out from a window as Canterton walked up the lane. Something white was moving in the dusk, drifting to and fro across the garden like a moth from flower to flower.
Canterton’s hand was on the gate. Never before had night fallen for him with such a hush of listening enchantment. The scents seemed more subtle, the freshness of the falling dew indescribably delicious. He passed an empty chair standing on the lawn, and found a white figure waiting.
“I wondered whether you would come.”
“I did not wonder. What a wash of dew, and what scents.”
“And the stillness. I wanted to see the moon hanging in the fir woods.”
“The rim will just be topping the horizon.”
“You know the time by all the timepieces in Arcady.”
“I suppose I was born to see and to remember.”
They went into the little drawing-room that was Eve’s despair when she felt depressed. This room was Mrs. Carfax’slararium, containing all the ugly trifles that she treasured, and some of the ugliest furniture that ever was manufactured. John Carfax had been something of an amateur artist, and a very crude one at that. He had specialised in genre work, and on the walls were studies of a butcher’s shop, a fruit stall, a fish stall, a collection of brass instruments on a table covered with a red cloth, and a row of lean, stucco-fronted houses, each with a euonymus hedge and an iron gate in front of it. The carpet was a Kidderminster, red and yellow flowers on a black ground, and the chairs were upholstered in green plush. Every available shelf and ledge seemed to be crowded with knick-knacks, and a stuffed pug reclined under a glass case in the centre of a walnut chiffonier.
Eve understood her mother’s affection for all this bric-à-brac, but to-night, when she came in out of the dew-washed dusk, the room made her shudder. She wondered what effect it would have on Canterton, though she knew he was far too big a man to sneer.
Mrs. Carfax, in black dress and white lace cap, sat in one of the green plush arm-chairs. She was always pleased to see people, and to chatter with amiable facility. And Canterton could be at his best on such occasions. The little old lady thought him “so very nice.”
“It is so good of you to come down and see Eve’s paintings. Eve, dear, fetch your portfolio. I am so sorry I could not come to Mrs. Canterton’s garden party, but I have to be so very careful, because of my heart. I get all out of breath and in a flutter so easily. Do sit down. I think that is a comfortable chair.”
Canterton sat down, and Eve went for her portfolio.
“My husband was quite an artist, Mr. Canterton, though an amateur. These are some of his pictures.”
“So the gift is inherited!”
“I don’t think Eve draws so well as her father did. You can see——”
Canterton got up and went round looking at John Carfax’s pictures. They were rather extraordinary productions, and the red meat in the butcher’s shop was the colour of red sealing wax.
“Mr. Carfax liked ‘still life.’”
“Yes, he was a very quiet man. So fond of a littlelararium fishing—when he could get it. That is why he painted fish so wonderfully. Don’t you think so, Mr. Canterton?”
“Very probably.”
Eve returned and found Canterton studying the row of stucco houses with their iron gates and euonymus hedges. She coloured.
“Will the lamp be right, Eve, dear?”
“Yes, mother.”
She opened her portfolio on a chair, and after arranging the lamp-shade, proceeded to turn over sketch after sketch. Canterton had drawn his chair to a spot where he could see the work at its best. He said nothing, but nodded his head from time to time, while Eve acted as show-woman.
Mrs. Carfax excelled herself.
“My dear, how queerly you must see things. I am sure I have never seen anything like that.”
“Which, mother?”
“That queer, splodgy picture. I don’t understand the drawing. Now, if you look at one of your father’s pictures, the butcher’s shop, for instance——”
Eve smiled, almost tenderly.
“That is not a picture, mother. I mean, mine. It is just a whim.”
“My dear, how can you paint a whim?”
Eve glanced at Canterton and saw that he was absorbed in studying the last picture she had turned up from the portfolio. His eyes looked more deeply set and more intent, and he sat absolutely motionless, his head bowed slightly.
“That is the best classic thing I managed to do.”
He looked at her, nodded, and turned his eyes again to the picture.
“But even there——”
“There is a film of mystery?”
“Yes.”
“It was provoking. I’m afraid I have failed.”
“No. That is Latimer. It was just what I saw and felt myself, though I could not have put it into colour. Show me the others again.”
Mrs. Carfax knitted, and Eve put up sketch after sketch, watching Canterton’s face.
“Now, I like that one, dear.”
“Do you, mother?”
“Yes, but why have you made all the poplar trees black?”
“They are not poplars, mother, but cypresses.”
“Oh, I see, cypresses, the trees they grow in cemeteries.”
Canterton began to talk to Eve.
“It is very strange that you should have seen just what I saw.”
“Is it? But you are not disappointed?”
His eyes met hers.
“I don’t know anybody else who could have brought back Latimer like that. Quite wonderful.”
“You mean it?”
“Of course.”
He saw her colour deepen, and her eyes soften.
Mrs. Carfax was never long out of a conversation.
“Are they clever pictures, Mr. Canterton?”
“Very clever.”
“I don’t think I understand clever pictures. My husband could paint a row of houses, and there they were.”
“Yes, that is a distinct gift. Some of us see more, others less.”
“Do you think that if Eve perseveres she will paint as well as her father?”
Canterton remained perfectly grave.
“She sees things in a different way, and it is a very wonderful way.”
“I am so glad you think so. Eve, dear, is it not nice to hear Mr. Canterton say that?”
Mrs. Carfax chattered on till Eve grew restless, and Canterton, who felt her restlessness, rose to go. He had come to be personal, so far as Eve’s pictures were concerned, but he had been compelled to be impersonal for the sake of the old lady, whose happy vacuity emptied the room of all ideas.
“It was so good of you to come, Mr. Canterton.”
“I assure you I have enjoyed it.”
“I do wish we could persuade Mrs. Canterton to spend an evening with us. But then, of course, she is such a busy, clever woman, and we are such quiet, stay-at-home people. And I have to go to bed at ten. My doctor is such a tyrant.”
“I hope I haven’t tired you.”
“Oh, dear, no! And please give my kind remembrance to Mrs. Canterton.”
“Thank you. Good night!”
Canterton found himself in the garden with his hand on the gate leading into the lane. The moon had swung clear of the fir woods, and a pale, silvery horizon glimmered above the black tops of the trees. Canterton wandered on down the lane, paused where it joined the high road, and stood for a while under the dense canopy of a yew.
He felt himself in a different atmosphere, breathing a new air, and he let himself contemplate life as it might have appeared, had there been no obvious barriers and limitations. For the moment he had no desire to go back to Fernhill, to break the dream, and pick up the associations that Fernhill suggested. The house was overrun by his wife’s friends who had come to stay for the garden party. Lynette would be asleep, and she alone, at Fernhill, entered into the drama of his dreams.
Mrs. Carfax and the little maid had gone to bed, and Eve, left to herself, was turning over her Latimer pictures and staring at them with peculiar intensity. They suggested much more to her than the Latimer gardens, being part of her own consciousness, and part of another’s consciousness. Her face had a glowing pallor as she sat there, musing, wondering, staring into impossible distances with a mingling of exultation and unrest. Did he know what had happened to them both? Had he realised all that had overtaken them in the course of one short week?
The room felt close and hot, and turning down the lamp, Eve went into the narrow hall, opened the door noiselessly, and stepped out into the garden. Moonlight flooded it, and the dew glistened on the grass. She wandered down the path, looking at the moon and the mountainous black outlines of the fir woods. And suddenly she stopped.
A man was sitting in the chair that had been left out on the lawn. He started up, and stood bareheaded, looking at her half guiltily.
“Is it you?”
“I am sorry. I was just dreaming.”
He hesitated, one hand on the back of the chair.
“I wanted to think——”
“Yes.”
“Good night!”
“Good night!”
She watched him pass through the gate and down the lane. And everything seemed very strange and still.