PART II

THE PRIDE OF EVE

By

WARWICK DEEPING

_Author of “Sorrell and Son,” etc._

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD

London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney

First published _September 1914_

Popular Edition _September 1926_

3s. 6d. Edition _June 1928_

_Printed in Great Britain_

CONTENTS—PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

1. THE COMING OF GUINEVERE 1

2. LYNETTE FEEDS THE FAIRIES 11

3. GUINEVERE HAS HER PORTRAIT PAINTED 25

4. THE IMPORTUNATE BEGGAR 32

5. EVE ENTERS THE WILDERNESS 40

6. WOMEN OF VIRTUE 48

7. CANTERTON PURSUES MRS. BROCKLEBANK 56

8. LYNETTE TAKES TO PAINTING 65

9. LIFE AT FERNHILL 71

10. TEA IN THE WILDERNESS 80

11. LATIMER 86

12. A WEEK’S DISCOVERY 95

13. A MAN IN THE MOONLIGHT 104

14. MRS. CARFAX FINISHES HER KNITTING 111

15. LYNETTE PUTS ON BLACK 119

16. JAMES CANTERTON AWAKES 127

17. LYNETTE INTERPOSES 134

18. EVE SPEAKS OUT 138

19. AN HOUR IN THE FIR WOODS 143

20. NIGHT AND A CHILD 146

21. THE WOMAN’S EYES IN THE EYES OF A CHILD 152

CONTENTS—PART II

22. BOSNIA ROAD 159

23. LIFE AND LETTERS 165

24. EVE’S SENSE OF THE LIMITATIONS OF LIFE 173

25. HUGH MASSINGER, ESQ. 180

26. KATE DUVEEN GOES ABROAD 190

27. THE BOURGEOIS OF CLARENDON ROAD 195

28. CANTERTON’S COTTAGE AND MISS CHAMPION’S MORALITY 203

29. EARNING A LIVING 211

30. MORE EXPERIENCES 221

31. THE BOURGEOIS PLAYS THE GENTLEMAN 227

32. EVE DETERMINES TO LEAVE BOSNIA ROAD 233

33. WOMAN’S WAR 240

34. EVE PURSUES EXPERIENCE 247

35. THE SUFFRAGETTE 257

36. PALLAS 269

37. ADVENTURES 281

38. THE MAN WITH THE MOTOR 291

39. LYNETTE 303

40. WHAT THEY SAID TO EACH OTHER 308

41. CAMPING IN THE FIR WOODS 316

42. NATURE SMILES 326

43. EVE COMES TO HERSELF 333

44. THE NIGHT DRIVE 339

45. GERTRUDE CANTERTON CAUSES AN ANTI-CLIMAX 345

46. LYNETTE APPROVES 350

THE PRIDE OF EVE

PART I

CHAPTER I

THE COMING OF GUINEVERE

James Canterton was camping out in the rosery under the shade of a white

tent umbrella.

It was a June day, and beyond the fir woods that broke the bluster of

the south-west winds, a few white clouds floated in a deep blue sky. As

for the rosery at Fernhill, no Persian poet could have found a more

delectable spot in which to dream through the hours of a scented day,

with a jar of purple wine beside him. An old yew hedge, clipped square,

closed it in like a wall, with an opening cut at each corner where paths

paved with rough stones disappeared into the world without. These four

broad, grey paths, the crevices between the stones planted with purple

aubretia and star-flowered rock plants, met in the centre of the rosery,

where a sundial stood on a Gothic pillar. Next the yew hedge were

rambling roses trained upon the trunks of dead fir trees. Numberless

little grey paths branched off from the main ones, dividing up the great

square court into some two score rose beds. And this June day this

secret, yew-walled garden flamed with a thousand tongues of fire.

Crimson, old rose, coral pink, blush white, damask, saffron, blood red,

snow, cerise, salmon, white, orange, copper, gold, all the colours

seemed alive with light, the rich green of the young foliage giving a

setting of softness to the splendour of the flowers.

James Canterton was the big, placid, meditative creature needed for such

a rose garden. He had a table beside him, and on it a litter of

things—notebooks, a tobacco tin, an empty wine glass, a book on the

flora of China, two briarwood pipes, and a lens set in a silver frame.

He was sitting with his feet within a foot of a rose bush planted in a

corner of one of the many beds, a mere slip of a tree that was about to

unfold its first flower.

This rose, Canterton’s latest creation, had four buds on it, three

tightly closed, the fourth on the eve of opening. He had christened the

new rose “Guinevere,” and there was a subtle and virginal thrill about

Guinevere’s first flowering, the outer petals, shaded from coral to

amber, beginning to disclose a faint inwardness of fiery gold. Canterton

had sat there since eight in the morning, for he wanted to watch the

whole unfolding of the flower, and his vigil might continue through most

of the morrow. He would be down in the rosery when the dew glistened on

the petals, nor would he leave it till the yellow rays of the horizontal

sun poured over the yew hedge, and made every flower glow with a

miraculous brilliance.

Canterton’s catalogues were to be found in most well-to-do country

houses, and his art had disclosed itself in many opulent gardens. A rich

amateur in the beginning, he had chosen to assume the broader

professional career, perhaps because his big, quiet, and creative brain

loved the sending forth of rich merchandise, and the creation of beauty.

As a searcher after new plants he had travelled half over the

globe—explored China, the Himalayas, California, and South Africa. He

was famous for his hybridisation of orchids, an authority on all trees

and flowering shrubs, an expert whose opinions were valued at Kew. It

was beauty that fired him, colour and perfumes, and at Fernhill, in this

Surrey landscape, he had created a great nursery where beautiful things

were born. As a trader, trading the gorgeous tints of azaleas and

rhododendrons, or the glaucous stateliness of young cedars, he had

succeeded as remarkably as he had succeeded as an artist. South, east,

and west his work might be studied in many a garden; architects who

conceived for the wealthy advised their patrons to persuade Canterton to

create a setting.

His success was the more astonishing, seeing that those who set out to

persuade their fellow men not only to see beauty, but to buy it, have to

deal with a legion of gross fools. Nor would anyone have expected the

world to have paid anything to a man who could sit through a whole day

watching the opening bud of a new rose. Canterton was one of the family

of the big, patient people, the men of the microscope and the

laboratory, who discover great things quietly, and remain undiscovered

by the apes who sit and gibber at a clown on a stage.

Canterton had picked up one of his pipes, when a maidservant appeared in

one of the arches cut in the yew hedge. She sighted the man under the

white umbrella and made her way towards him along one of the stone

paths.

“The mistress sent me to find you, sir.”

“Well, Mary?”

“She wants to speak to you, sir.”

“I am busy for the moment.”

The maid hid an amused sympathy behind a sedate manner.

“I’ll tell Mrs. Canterton you are engaged, sir.”

And she showed the practical good sense of her sympathy by leaving him

alone.

Canterton stretched out his legs, and stared at Guinevere over the bowl

of his empty pipe. His massive head, with its steady, deep-set,

meditative eyes, looked the colour of bronze under the shade of the

umbrella. It was a “peasant’s” head, calm, sun-tanned, kind, with a

simple profundity in its expression, and a quiet imaginativeness about

the mouth. His brown hair, grizzled at the temples, had a slight curl to

it; his teeth were perfect; his hands big, brown, yet finely formed. He

was the very antithesis of the city worker, having much of the large

purposefulness of Nature in him, never moving jerkily, or chattering, or

letting his eyes snap restlessly at motes in the sunlight. A John Ridd

of a man, yet much less of a simpleton, he had a dry, kind sparkle of

humour in him that delighted children and made loud talkers feel uneasy.

Sentimental people said that his eyes were sad, though they would have

been nearer the truth if they had said that he was lonely.

Canterton filled his pipe, keeping a humorously expectant eye fixed on

one particular opening in the yew hedge. There are people and things

whose arrival may be counted on as inevitable, and Canterton was in the

act of striking a match when he saw his wife enter the rosery. She came

through the yew hedge with that characteristic scurry of hers suggesting

the indefatigable woman of affairs in a hurry, her chin poking forward,

the curve of her neck exaggerating the intrusive stoop of her shoulders.

Gertrude Canterton was dressed for some big function, and she had chosen

primrose, the very colour that she should not have worn. Her large black

hat with its sable feather sat just at the wrong angle; wisps of hair

straggled at the back of her neck, and one of her gloves was split

between the fingers. Her dress hinted at a certain fussy earnestness, an

impatience of patience before mirrors, or perhaps an unconscious

contempt for such reflectors of trifles. She was tall, narrow across the

shoulders, and distinguished by a pallid strenuousness that was

absolutely lacking in any spirit of repose. Her face was too big, and

colourless, and the nose too broad and inquisitive about the nostrils.

It was a face that seemed to grow larger and larger when she had talked

anyone into a corner, looming up, white, and earnest and egotistical

through a fog of words, the chin poking forward, the pale eyes set in a

stare. She had a queer habit of wriggling her shoulders when she entered

a room full of people, a trick that seemed strange in a woman of so much

self-conceit.

“James! Oh, there you are! You must know how busy I am!”

Canterton lit his pipe.

“You are the busiest woman I know.”

“It’s a quarter to three, and I have to open the fête at three. And the

men are not up at the house. I told Lavender——”

“Yes, no doubt. But we happen to be very busy here.”

His wife elevated her eyebrows.

“James, do you mean to say——”

“The men are not going.”

“But I told Lavender——”

He looked at her with an imperturbable good humour that knew perfectly

well how to hold its own.

“Lavender comes to me for instructions. There are some things, Gertrude,

that you don’t quite understand. It is now just ten minutes to three.”

The wife shrugged her shoulders over the hopelessness of this eccentric

male. For the moment she was intensely irritated, being a woman with a

craze for managing everybody and everything, and for striking the

dominant note in the community in which she happened to live.

“Well, I think it is abominable——”

“What?”

“Making me look foolish, and keeping these men at work, when I had

arranged for them to go to the fête. The whole neighbourhood will be

represented. We have made a particular effort to get all the working

people——”

Canterton remained genial and undisturbed.

“I think I told you that more than half the men are Radicals.”

“All the more reason for getting into touch with them.”

“Voluntarily, perhaps. The men were needed here.”

“But I had seen Lavender——”

“I don’t want to hurry you, but if you are to be there at three——”

She jerked her head, twitching her black hat farther off her forehead.

“Sometimes you are impossible. You won’t interest yourself in life, and

you won’t let others be interested.”

“I’m not quite so bad as that, Gertrude. I am no good at social affairs.

You have the genius for all that.”

“Exactly. But even in the matter of helping things on. Well, it is no

use talking to you. I promised Lady Marchendale that I would be on the

platform by three.”

“You haven’t much time.”

“No, I haven’t.”

She let him see that she despaired of his personality, and walked off

towards the house, a long, thin, yellow figure, like a vibrating wire

that was always a blurr of egotistical energy. She was angry, with the

pinched and cold anger of a thin-natured woman. James was impossible,

only fit to be left like a great bear among his trees and shrubs.

Besides he had made her look a fool. These sixty men were to have

followed her carriage, an impressive body of retainers tramping after

her into Lady Marchendale’s grounds.

Neither Guinevere the rose, nor the purpose of Canterton’s day had been

so much as noticed. He was always busy watching something, studying the

life cycle of some pest, scanning the world of growth in the great

nursery, and Gertrude Canterton was not interested in flowers, which

meant that she was outside the world of her husband’s life. These two

people, though living in the same house, were absolute strangers to each

other. The book of their companionship had been closed long ago, and had

never been reopened. The great offence had arisen when James Canterton

had chosen to become the professional artist and trader. His wife had

never forgiven him that step. It had seemed so unnecessary, so vulgar,

so exasperatingly irrational to a woman who was essentially a snob. From

that time Gertrude Canterton had begun to excuse her husband to the

world, to shrug her shoulders at him as an eccentric creature, to let

her friends understand that Canterton was one of those abnormal people

who are best left alone in their own peculiar corner. She never

understood him, and never attempted to understand him, being too busy

with her multifarious publicities to grasp the bigness and the beauty of

this quiet man’s mind.

Gertrude Canterton had a restless passion for managing things and

people, and for filling her life with a conviction that she was

indispensable. Her maternal instinct seemed to have become a perverted

passion for administration. She was a Guardian of the Poor, Dame

President of the local Primrose League Habitation, Secretary of the

Basingford Coal and Clothing Club, Treasurer of the District Nurses

Fund, an enthusiastic National Service Leaguer, on the committee of a

convalescent home for London children that had been built within three

miles of Basingford, a lecturer on Eugenics, a strenuous advocate of the

Red Cross campaign, also a violent anti-Suffragist. She had caught a

whole collection of the age’s catch-cries, and used them perpetually

with eager emphasis. “The woman’s place is the home.” “We must begin

with the children.” “Help, but not pauperisation.” “The Ideal of the

Empire.” “The segregation of the unfit.” She wanted to manage everybody,

and was tacitly disliked by everybody, save by a select few, who

considered her to be a remarkable and a very useful woman.

At three minutes past three Gertrude Canterton was on the platform in

the marquee in Lady Marchendale’s grounds, and making the short speech

with which she was to open the Primrose League fête. Short speeches did

not accord with Gertrude Canterton’s methods of persuasion. She always

had a very great deal to say, enjoyed saying it, and never paused to

wonder whether people wanted to listen to her opinions. She spoke for

twenty minutes in her thin and metallic voice, eagerly and earnestly,

and keeping up that queer, sinuous wriggling of the trunk and shoulders

that had made some wag christen her “The Earnest Eel.”

The country crowd was bored after the first five minutes. Lord Parallax

was to speak later, and the people had grown too accustomed to listening

to Mrs. Canterton. There were a number of children sandwiched in among

their elders, children who became either vacantly depressed or

assertively restless. The real fun of the day was waiting, the

roundabout, the races, the mugs of tea, and the buns.

Two men in flannel suits and Panama hats stood just outside the marquee

doorway.

“Where’s Parallax?”

“Up at the house, playing croquet with Grace Abercorn. I promised to

fetch him, when the star turn was due. They’ll think he has just rushed

down from town by motor.”

“Listen to the indefatigable woman.”

“You know, she might be doing some sort of ultra-subtle Maud Allan

business, if you put her in beads.”

“My dear chap!”

“Fifteen minutes already, and we expected three. It is no use trying to

stop her. She’s like a soda water bottle with the cork out. You can’t do

anything till all the gas has escaped.”

“I’ll just go down and see how the Sports Committee are getting along.

Oh, by the way, I’ve booked you and Ethel for our houseboat at Henley.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember.”

On the lawn below Lady Marchendale’s terrace garden Lord Parallax was

flirting with a clever and audacious little woman in grey and silver.

Ostensibly they were playing croquet, while old Percival Kex, Esq., sat

in a French cane chair under the lime tree, and quizzed Parallax when he

came within range.

“Well, will you take my bet, or not?”

“Don’t talk at the critical moment, sir. This game turns on the Suffrage

question.”

“Here, Gracie, do you hear him trying to shirk my challenge?”

Miss Abercorn trailed her mallet towards the lime tree. Percival Kex was

a character, with his tin-plate face, bold head, and eyes like

blackberries. His tongue fished in many waters, and his genial cynicism

was infinitely refreshing.

“I have wagered Parallax six sevenpenny insurance stamps that he won’t

escape the Wriggling Lady.”

“My dear sir, how can I, when——”

“Wait a moment. One handshake, six smiles, and three minutes’

conversation will be allowed. After that you have got to keep clear, and

I bet you you won’t.”

“Kex, I always lay myself out to be bored at these functions. That is

why I am playing croquet, and attempting to get some compensation.”

“Who’s to snatch at that feather, Gracie, you or I? I suppose it is

yours.”

“Hallo, here’s Meryon! I’m due on the boards.”

“Miss Abercorn, I desire you to come and act as time-keeper, and to hold

the stakes.”

Percival Kex won his six insurance stamps without much difficulty.

Parallax made his oration, and when the audience had dispersed, he

became the immediate victim of Mrs. Canterton’s enthusiasms. They

paraded the grounds together, Parallax polite, stiff, and full of a

disastrous disgust; Gertrude Canterton earnestly vivadous, poking her

chin at him, and exerting all her public charm. Parallax was considered

to be a great personality, and she insisted upon his being interesting

and serious, giving him every opportunity to be brilliant upon such

subjects as Welsh Disestablishment, the inadequacy of the Navy, and the

importation of pork from China. She kept him for more than an hour,

introduced him to numberless honest souls who were content with a shake

of the hand, insinuated in every way that she knew that he was a very

great man, but never suspected that he wanted to play croquet.

Parallax detached himself at last, and found Kex and Miss Abercorn

having tea under the lime tree in that secluded corner where none of the

Leaguers penetrated.

“By George, Kex, I’ve never been taken so seriously in my life! Let me

see—where am I? I think I got bogged in Tariff Reform.”

“We thought we would come and have tea, Parallax. We saw you were too

occupied.”

“Kex, you are an old scoundrel. Why didn’t you rescue me when you had

won your bet?”

“Sir, I am not a hero.”

“Is there a whisky and soda to be had? Oh, here’s a servant. Bring me a

whisky and soda, will you?”

He sat down and looked reproachfully at Miss Abercorn.

“I suppose it would never occur to such a woman that a man might want to

play croquet?”

“Croquet, Parallax! My dear fellow, think of the Empire, and——”

“Hang the Empire. Here’s my whisky.”

“Don’t you think you had better make sure of it by going and drinking it

in the shrubbery? She may follow you up to see what you’ve got to say on

Eugenics.”

“Miss Abercorn, will you protect me? Really, I have had too much

Minerva.”

“That apple! I always had a lot of sympathy with Paris. I think he was a

particularly bright young man.”

“One word, Kex: has the lady a husband?”

“She has.”

“Thank God, and Heaven help him!”

* * * * *

CHAPTER II

LYNETTE FEEDS THE FAIRIES

About six o’clock James Canterton took leave of Guinevere, and passing

out through the yew hedge, made his way down the rhododendron walk to

the wicket gate that opened on the side of a hill. On this hill-side was

the “heath garden” that tumbled when in full bloom like a cataract of

purple and white wine till it broke against the shadowy edge of a larch

wood. The spires of the larches descended in glimmering confusion

towards the stream that ran among poplars and willows in the bottom of

the valley.

Canterton followed a path that led into the larch wood where the

thousands of grey black poles were packed so close together that the eye

could not see for more than thirty yards. There was a faint and

mysterious murmuring in the tree tops, a sound as of breathing that was

only to be heard when one stood still. The ground was covered with thin,

wiry grass of a peculiarly vivid green. The path curled this way and

that among the larch trunks, with a ribbon of blue sky mimicking it

overhead. The wood was called the wilderness, and even when a gale was

blowing, it was calm and sheltered in the deeps among the trees.

Canterton paused now and again to examine some of the larches. He had

been working at the spruce gall aphis disease, trying to discover a new

method of combating it, or of lighting upon some other creature that by

preying upon the pest might be encouraged to extirpate the disease. The

winding path led him at last to the lip of a large dell or sunken

clearing. It was a pool of yellow sunlight in the midst of the green

glooms, palisaded round with larch trunks, its banks a tangle of broom,

heather, bracken, whortleberry, and furze. There was a boggy spot in one

corner where gorgeous mosses made a carpet of green and gold, and bog

asphodel grew, and the sundew fed upon insects. All about the clearing

the woods were a blue mist when the wild hyacinth bloomed in May.

Down below him in a grassy hollow a child with brilliant auburn hair was

feeding a fire with dry sticks. She knelt intent and busy, serenely

alone with herself, tending the fire that she had made. Beside her she

had a tin full of water, an old saucepan, two or three potatoes, some

tea and sugar twisted up together in the corner of a newspaper, and a

medicine bottle half full of milk.

“Hallo—hallo!”

The auburn hair flashed in the sunlight, and the child turned the face

of a beautiful and wayward elf.

“Daddy!”

She sprang up and raced towards him.

“Daddy, come along. I’ve got to cook the supper for the fairies.”

Canterton had never evolved a more beautiful flower than this child of

his, Lynette. She was his in every way, without a shred of her mother’s

nature, for even her glowing little head was as different from Gertrude

Canterton’s as fire from clay.

“Hallo, come along.”

He caught her up with his big hands, and set her on his shoulder.

“Now then, what about Princess Puck? You don’t mean to say the greedy

little beggars have eaten up all that pudding we cooked them last

night?”

“Every little bit.”

“It must have been good. And it means that we shall have to put on our

aprons.”

On the short grass at the bottom of the clearing was a fairy ring, and

to Lynette the whole wilderness was full of the little people. The dell

was her playing ground, and she fled to it on those happy occasions when

Miss Vance, her governess, had her hours of freedom. As for Canterton,

he was just the child that she was, entering into all her fancies,

applauding them, and taking a delight in her gay, elf-like enthusiasm.

“Have you seen Brer Rabbit to-night?”

“No.”

“He just said ‘How de do’ to me as I came through the wood. And I saw

old Sergeant Hedgehog taking a nap under a tuft of grass.”

“I don’t like old Hedgehog. I don’t like prickly people, do you, daddy?”

“Not much.”

“Like Miss Nickleton. She might be a pin-cushion. She’s always taking

out pins, and putting you all tidy.”

“Now then, we’ve got to be very serious. What’s the supper to be

to-night?”

“Baked potatoes and tea.”

“By Jove, they’ll get fat.”

Canterton set her down and threw himself into the business with an

immense seriousness that made him the most convincing of playfellows. He

took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and looked critically at

the fire.

“We want some more wood, daddy.”

“Just so.”

He went among the larches, gathered an armful of dead wood, and returned

to the fire. Lynette was kneeling and poking it with a stick, her hair

shining in the sunlight, her pale face with its hazel eyes full of a

happy seriousness. Canterton knelt down beside her, and they began to

feed the fire.

“Rather sulky.”

“Blow, daddy.”

He bent down and played Æolus, getting red in the face.

“I say, what a lot of work these fairies give us!”

“But won’t they be pleased! I like to think of them coming out in the

moonlight, and feasting, and then having their dance round the ring.”

“And singing, ‘Long live Lynette.’”

They heated up the water in the saucepan, and made tea—of a kind—and

baked the potatoes in the embers of the fire. Lynette always spread the

feast on the bottom of a bank near the fairy ring. Sergeant Hedgehog,

black-eyed field mice, and an occasional rat, disposed of the food, but

that did not matter so long as Lynette found that it had gone. Canterton

himself would come down early, and empty the tea away to keep up the

illusion.

“I think I’ll be a fairy some night, Lynette.”

Her eyes laughed up at him.

“Fancy you being a fairy, daddy! Why, you’d eat up all the food, and

there wouldn’t be room to dance.”

“Come, now, I’m hurt.”

She stroked his face.

“You’re so much better than a fairy, daddy.”

The sun slanted lower, and shadows began to cover the clearing.

Canterton smothered the fire, picked up Lynette, and set her on his

shoulders, one black leg hanging down on either side of his cerise tie,

for Canterton always wore Irish tweeds, and ties that showed some

colour.

“Off we go.”

They romped through the larch wood, up the hill-side, and into the

garden, Lynette’s two hands clasped over her father’s forehead. Fernhill

House showed up against the evening sky, a warm, old, red-brick building

with white window frames, roses and creepers covering it, and little

dormer windows peeping out of the tiled roof. Stretches of fine turf

were unfurled before it, set with beds of violas, and bounded by great

herbaceous borders. A cedar of Lebanon grew to the east, a noble sequoia

to the west, throwing sharp black shadows on the gold-green grass.

“Gallop, daddy.”

Canterton galloped, and her brilliant hair danced, and her red mouth

laughed. They came across the grass to the house in fine uproarious

style, and were greeted by the sound of voices drifting through the open

windows of the drawing-room.

Their irresponsible fun was at end. Canterton set the child down just as

the thin primrose-coloured figure came to one of the open French

windows.

“James, Mrs. Brocklebank has come back with me. Where is Miss Vance?”

Lynette replied for Miss Vance.

“She had a headache, mother.”

“I might have inferred something of the kind. Look at the front of your

dress, Lynette.”

“Yes, mother.”

“What have you been doing? And you have got a great hole in your left

stocking, over the knee.”

“Yes, mother, so I have.”

“Lynette, how often have I told you——”

Mrs. Brocklebank or no Mrs. Brocklebank, Canterton interposed quietly in

Lynette’s defence.

“If it’s anybody’s fault it’s mine, Gertrude. Let the child be a child

sometimes.”

She turned on him impatiently, being only too conscious of the fact that

Lynette was his child, and not hers.

“How can you expect me to have any authority? And in the end the

responsibility always rests with the woman.”

“Perhaps—perhaps not. Run along, old lady. I’ll come and say good night

presently.”

Lynette walked off to the south door, having no desire to be kissed by

Mrs. Brocklebank in the drawing-room. She turned and looked back once at

her father with a demure yet inimitable twinkle of the eyes. Canterton

was very much part of Lynette’s life. Her mother only dashed into it

with spasmodic earnestness, and with eyes that were fussily critical.

For though Gertrude Canterton always spoke of woman’s place being the

home, she was so much busied with reforming other people’s homes, and

setting all their social machinery in order, that she had very little

leisure left for her own. A housekeeper managed the house by letting

Mrs. Canterton think that she herself managed it. Miss Vance was almost

wholly responsible for Lynette, and Gertrude Canterton’s periodic

plunges into the domestic routine at Fernhill were like the surprise

visits of an inspector of schools.

“Mrs. Brocklebank is staying the night. We have some business to discuss

with regard to the Children’s Home.”

Canterton detested Mrs. Brocklebank, but he went in and shook hands with

her. She was a large woman, with the look of a very serious-minded white

cow. Her great point was her gravity. It was a massive and imposing

edifice which you could walk round and inspect, without being able to

get inside it. This building was fitted with a big clock that boomed

solemnly at regular intervals, always making the same sound, and making

it as though it were uttering some new and striking note.

“I see you are one of those, Mr. Canterton, who like to let children run

wild.”

“I suppose I am. I’d rather my child had fine legs and a good appetite

to begin with.”

His wife joined in.

“Lynette could not read when she was six.”

“That was a gross crime, Gertrude, to be sure.”

“It might be called symptomatic.”

“Mrs. Brocklebank, my wife is too conscientious for some of us.”

“Can one be too conscientious, Mr. Canterton?”

“Well, I can never imagine Gertrude with holes in her stockings, or

playing at honey-pots. I believe you wrote a prize essay when you were

eleven, Gertrude, and the subject was, ‘How to teach children to play in

earnest.’ If you’ll excuse me, I have to see Lavender about one of the

hothouses before I dress for dinner.”

He left them together, sitting like two solemn china figures nodding

their heads over his irresponsible love of _laissez-faire_. Mrs.

Brocklebank had no children, but she was a great authority upon them, in

a kind of pathological way.

“I think you ought to make a stand, Gertrude.”

“The trouble is, my husband’s ideas run the same way as the child’s

inclinations. I think I must get rid of Miss Vance. She is too

easygoing.”

“The child ought soon to be old enough to go to school. Let me see, how

old is she?”

“Seven.”

“Send her away next year. There is that very excellent school at

Cheltenham managed by Miss Sandys. She was a wrangler, you know, and is

an LL.D. Her ideas are absolutely sound. Psychological discipline is one

of her great points.”

“I must speak to James about it. He is such a difficult man to deal

with. So immovable, and always turning things into a kind of quiet

laughter.”

“I know. Most difficult—most baffling.”

Though three people sat down at the dinner table, it was a _diner à

deux_ so far as the conversation was concerned. The women discussed the

Primrose League Fête, and Lord Parallax, whom Gertrude Canterton had

found rather disappointing. From mere local topics they travelled into

the wilderness of eugenics, Mrs. Brocklebank treating of Mendelism, and

talking as though Canterton had never heard of Mendel. It amused him to

listen to her, especially since the work of such master men as Mendel

and De Vries formed part of the intimate inspiration of his own study of

the strange beauty of growth. Mrs. Brocklebank appeared to have muddled

up Mendelism with Galton’s theory of averages. She talked sententiously

of pure dominants and recessives, got her figures badly mixed, and

uttered some really astonishing things that would have thrilled a

scientific audience.

Yet it was dreary stuff when devitalised by Mrs. Brocklebank’s pompous

inexactitudes, especially when accompanied by an interminable cracking

of nuts. She always ended lunch and dinner with nuts, munching them

slowly and solemnly, exaggerating her own resemblance to a white cow

chewing the cud.

Canterton escaped upstairs, passed Miss Vance on the landing, a motherly

young woman with rich brown hair, and made his way to the nursery. The

room was full of the twilight, and through the open window came the last

notes of a thrush. Lynette was lying in a white bed with a green

coverlet. Her mother had ordered a pink bedspread, but Miss Vance had

thought of Lynette’s hair.

Canterton sat on the edge of the bed.

“Well, Princess, are you a pure dominant?”

“I’ve said my prayers, daddy.”

“Oh, that’s good—very good! I wonder how the feast is getting on in the

Wilderness?”

“They won’t come out yet, not till the moon shines.”

“Think of their little silver slippers twinkling like dewdrops on the

grass.”

“I wish I could see them, daddy. Have you ever seen a fairy?”

“I think I’ve caught a glimpse of one, now and again. But you have to be

ever so good to see fairies.”

“You ought to have seen lots, then, daddy.”

He laughed, the quiet, meditative laugh of the man wise in his own

humility.

“There are more wonderful things than fairies, Lynette. I’ll tell you

about them some day.”

“Yes, do.”

She sat up in bed, her hair a dark flowing mass about her slim face and

throat, and Canterton was reminded of some exquisite white bud that

promised to be an exquisite flower.

“Let’s have some rhymes, daddy.”

“What, more Bed Ballads?”

“Yes.”

“What shall we start with?”

“Begin with cat.”

“All right, let’s see what turns up:

“Outside the door there lay a cat,

Aunt Emma thought it was a mat,

And though poor Puss was rather fat,

Aunt Emma left her, simply—flat.”

“Oh, poor Pussy!”

“Rather too realistic for you, and too hard on the cat!”

“Make up something about Mister Bruin.”

“Bruin. That’s a stiff thing to rhyme to. Let’s see:

“Now, Mister Bruin

Went a-wooin’,

The lady said ‘What are you doin’!’

“I’m stumped. I can’t get any farther.”

“Oh, yes you can, daddy!”

“Very well.”

“Let’s call him Mr. Bear instead,

And say his mouth was very red.

Miss Bruin had a Paris gown on,

She was a sweet phenomenownon.

The gloves she wore were just nineteens,

Of course you know what that size means!

Mr. Bear wore thirty-ones,

But then he was so fond of buns.

He asked Miss B. to be his wife,

And said, ‘I will lay down my life.’

She answered him, ‘Now, how much money

Can you afford, and how much honey?’

Poor B. looked rather brown at that,

For he was not a plutocrat.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘it makes me sore,

That I should be so very poor.

I’ll start a bun shop, if you like,

And buy you a new motor-bike.’

She said, ‘I know where all the buns would go,

And motor biking’s much too low.’

Poor Teddy flew off in disgust,

Saying, ‘Marry a Marquis if you must.’”

Lynette clapped her hands.

“What a horrid Miss Bruin! I hope she died an old maid!”

“No, she married Lord Grizzley. And he gave her twopence a week to dress

on, and made her give him her fur to stuff his bath-chair cushions

with.”

“How splendid! That’s just what ought to have happened, daddy.”

When he had kissed her “good night,” and seen her snuggle down with her

hair spread out over the pillow, Canterton went down to the library and,

in passing the door of the drawing-room, heard Mrs. Brocklebank’s voice

sending out its slow, complacent notes. This woman always had a curious

psychical effect on him. She smeared all the fine outlines of life, and

brought an unpleasant odour into the house that penetrated everywhere.

What was more, she had the effect of making him look at his wife with

that merciless candour that discovers every crudity, and every trifle

that is unlovely. Gertrude was a most excellent woman. He saw her high

forehead, her hat tilted at the wrong angle, her hair straggling in

wisps, her finnicking vivacity, her thin, wriggling shoulders, the way

she mouthed her words and poked her chin forward when she talked. The

clarity of his vision often shocked him, especially when he tried to

remember her as a slim and rather over-enthusiastic girl. Had they both

changed so vastly, and why? He knew that his wife had become subtly

repulsive to him, not in the mere gross physical sense alone, but in her

mental odour. They ate together, but slept apart. He never entered her

room. The idea of touching her provoked some fastidious instinct within

him, and made him shrink from the imagined contact.

Sometimes he wondered whether Gertrude was aware of this strong and

incipient repulsion. He imagined that she felt nothing. He had not lived

with her for fifteen years without discovering how thick was the skin of

her restless egotism. Canterton had never known anyone who was so

completely and actively self-satisfied. He never remembered having seen

her in tears. As for their estrangement, it had come about gradually

when he had chosen to change the life of the amateur for the life of the

trader. Then there was the child, another gulf between them. A tacit yet

silent antagonism had grown up round Lynette.

On Canterton’s desk in the library lay the manuscript of his “Book of

the English Garden.” He had been at work on it for two years, trying to

get all the mystery and colour and beauty of growth into the words he

used.

He sat down at the desk, and turned over the pages written in that

strong, regular, and unhurried hand of his. The manuscript smelt of

lavender, for he always kept a few sprigs between the leaves. But

to-night something seemed lacking in the book. It was too much a thing

of black and white. The words did not strike upon his brain and evoke a

glow of living colour. Roses were not red enough, and the torch lily had

not a sufficient flame.

“Colour, yes, colour!”

He sat back and lit his pipe.

“I must get someone to start the plates. I know just what I want, but I

don’t quite know the person to do it.”

He talked to himself—within himself.

“Rogers? No, too flamboyant, not true. I want truth. There’s Peterson.

No, I don’t like Peterson’s style—too niggling. Loses the charm in

trying to be too correct.”

He was disturbed by the opening of a door, and a sudden swelling of

voices towards him. He half turned in his chair with the momentary

impatience of a thinker disturbed.

“Let us look it up under ‘hygiene.’”

The library door opened, and the invasion displayed itself.

“We want to look at the encyclopædia, James.”

“It’s there!”

“I always feel so stimulated when I am in a library, Mr. Canterton. I

hope you don’t mind our——”

“Oh, not in the least!”

“I think we might make our notes here, Gertrude.”

Gertrude Canterton was standing by a revolving book-stand looking out

the volume they needed.

“Yes. James, you might get us the other light, and put it on the table.”

He got up, fetched the portable red-shaded lamp from a book-stand, set

it on the oak table in the centre of the room, and turned on the switch.

“Oh, and the ink, and a pen. Not one of your nibs. I can’t bear J’s.”

“Something thinner?”

“Please. Oh, and some paper. Some of that manuscript paper will do.”

They established themselves at the table, Mrs. Brocklebank with the

volume, Gertrude with the pen and paper. Mrs. Brocklebank brought out

her pince-nez, adjusted them half down her nose, and began to turn over

the pages. Canterton took a book on moths from a shelf, and sat down in

an easy chair.

“Hum—Hygiene. I find it here—public health, sanitary by-laws;

hum—hum—sewage systems. I think we shall discover what we want. Ah,

here it is!”

“The matron told me——”

“Yes, exactly. They had to burn pastilles. Hum—hum—septic tank. My

dear, what is a septic tank?”

“Something not quite as it should be.”

“Ah, exactly! I understand. Hum—let me see. Their tank must be very

septic. That accounts for—hum—for the odour.”

Canterton watched them over the top of his book. He could see his wife’s

face plainly. She was frowning and biting the end of the pen, and

fidgeting with the paper. He noticed the yellow tinge of the skin, and

the eager and almost hungry shadow lines that ran from her nose to the

corners of her mouth. It was a passionless face, angular and restless,

utterly lacking in any inward imaginative glow. Gertrude Canterton

rushed at life, fiddled at the notes with her thin fingers, but had no

subtle understanding of the meaning of the sounds that were produced.

Mrs. Brocklebank read like a grave cleric at a lectern, head tilted

slightly back, her eyes looking down through her pince-nez.

“The bacterial action should produce an effluent that is perfectly clear

and odourless. My dear, I think—hum—that there is a misconception

somewhere.”

Neither of them noticed that Canterton had left them, and had

disappeared through the French window into the garden.

A full moon had risen, and in one of the shrubberies a nightingale was

singing. The cedar of Lebanon and the great sequoia were black and

mysterious and very still, the lawns a soft silver dusted ever so

lightly with dew. Not a leaf was stirring, and the pale night stood like

a sweet sad ghost looking down on the world with eyes of wisdom and of

wonder.

Canterton strolled across the grass, and down through the Japanese

garden where lilies floated in the still pools that reflected the

moonlight. All the shadows were very sharp and black, the cypresses

standing like obelisks, the yew hedge of the rosery a wall of obsidian.

Canterton wandered up and down the stone paths of the rosery, and

knocked his pipe out in order to smell the faint perfumes that lingered

in the still air. He had lived so much among flowers that his sense of

smell had become extraordinarily sensitive, and he could distinguish

many a rose in the dark by means of its perfume. The full moon stared at

him over the yew hedge, huge and yellow in a cloudless sky, and

Canterton thought of Lynette’s fairies down in the Wilderness tripping

round the fairy ring on the dewy grass.

The sense of an increasing loneliness forced itself upon him as he

walked up and down the paths of the rosery. For of late he had come to

know that he was lonely, in spite of Lynette, in spite of all his

fascinating problems, in spite of his love of life and of growth. That

was just it. He loved the colours, the scents, and the miraculous

complexities of life so strongly that he wanted someone to share this

love, someone who understood, someone who possessed both awe and

curiosity. Lynette was very dear to him, dearer than anything else on

earth, but she was the child, and doubtless he would lose her when she

became the woman.

He supposed that some day she would marry, and the thought of it almost

shocked him. Good God, what a lottery it was! He might have to hand her

over to some raw boy—and if life proved unkind to her! Well, after all,

it was Nature. And how did marriages come about? How had his own come

about? What on earth had made him marry Gertrude? What on earth made

most men marry most women? He had been shy, rather diffident, a big

fellow in earnest, and he remembered how Gertrude had made a little hero

of him because of his travels. Yes, he supposed it had been suggestion.

Every woman, the lure of the feminine thing, a dim notion that they

would be fellow enthusiasts, and that the woman was what he had imagined

woman to be.

Canterton smiled to himself, but the pathetic humour of life did not

make him feel any less lonely. He wanted someone who would walk with him

on such a night as this, someone to whom it was not necessary to say

trite things, someone to whom a touch of the hand would be eloquent,

someone who had his patient, watchful, wonder-obsessed soul. He was not

spending half of himself, because he could not pour out one half of all

that was in him. It seemed a monstrous thing that a man should have

taught himself to see so much, and that he should have no one to see

life with him as he saw it.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III

GUINEVERE HAS HER PORTRAIT PAINTED

The second day of Guinevere’s dawning found Canterton in the rosery,

under the white tent umbrella. It was just such a day as yesterday, with

perhaps a few more white galleons sailing the sky and making the blue

seem even bluer.

Guinevere’s first bud was opening to the sun, the coral pink outer

petals with their edging of saffron unfolding to show a heart of fire.

About eleven o’clock Lavender, the foreman, appeared in the rosery, an

alert, wiry figure in sun hat, rich brown trousers, and a blue check

shirt. Lavender was swarthy and reticent, with a pronounced chin, and a

hooked nose that was like the inquiring beak of a bird. He had

extraordinarily deep-set eyes, and these eyes of his were the man. He

rarely missed seeing anything, from the first tinge of rust on a rose,

to the beginnings of American blight on a fruit tree. As for his work,

Lavender was something of a fanatic and a Frenchman. Go-as-you-please

dullards did not like him. He was too ubiquitous, too shrewd, too

enthusiastic, too quick in picking out a piece of scamped work, too

sarcastic when he found a thing done badly. Lavender could label

everything, and his technical knowledge was superb. Canterton paid him

five hundred a year, knowing that the man was worth it.

Lavender came with a message, but he forgot it the moment he looked at

the rose. His swarthy face lost all its reticence, and his eyes seemed

to take fire under their overhanging eyebrows. He had a way of standing

with his body bent slightly forward, his hands spread on the seat of his

trousers, and when he was particularly interested or puzzled he rubbed

his hands up and down with varying degrees of energy.

“She’s out, sir!”

“What do you think of her, Lavender?”

The foreman bent over the rose, and seemed to inhale something that he

found intoxicatingly pleasant.

“You’ve got it, sir. She’s up above anything that has been brought out

yet. Look at the way she’s opening! You can almost see the fire pouring

out. It’s alive—the colour’s alive.”

Canterton smiled.

“Just like a little furnace all aglow.”

“That flower ought to make the real people rave! It’s almost too good

for the blessed public. Any pinky thing does for the public.”

“I am going to send the second flower to Mr. Woolridge.”

“He’ll go down on his knees and pray to it.”

“So much the better for us. If anyone’s praise is worth hearing his is.”

“He’s a wonder, sir, for a clergyman!”

Lavender rubbed his trousers, and then suddenly remembered what he had

come for.

“There’s a lady, sir, in the office. Wants to know whether she may come

into the nursery and do some painting.”

“Who is she?”

“Miss Carfax from Orchards Corner. I said I’d come and see you about

it.”

“Miss Carfax? I don’t remember.”

“They’ve been there about a year. The mother’s an invalid. Quiet sort of

woman.”

“Oh, well, I’ll see her, Lavender.”

“Shall I bring her here?”

“Yes. I don’t want to leave the rose till I have seen the whole cycle.

And Mrs. Canterton said she was sending one of the maids down to cut

some roses.”

Lavender went off, and returned in about five minutes with a girl in a

straw hat and a plain white linen dress. He stood in one of the openings

through the yew hedge and pointed out Canterton to her with a practical

forefinger.

“That’s Mr. Canterton over there.”

She thanked him and walked on.

Canterton was bending forward over the rose, and remained unaware of her

presence till he heard footsteps close to him on the paved path.

“Mr. Canterton?”

“Yes.”

He stood up, and lifted his hat. She was shy of him, and shy of asking

for what she had come to ask. Her blue eyes, with their large pupils

looked almost black—sensitive eyes that clouded quickly.

“I am afraid I am disturbing you.”

He liked her from the first moment, because of her voice, a voice that

spoke softly in a minor key, and did not seem in a hurry.

“No, not a bit.”

“I’m Miss Carfax, and I paint a little. I wondered whether you would let

me come and make some studies in your gardens.”

“Won’t you sit down?”

He turned the chair towards her, but she remained standing, her shyness

lifting a little under the spell of his tranquil bigness. She became

aware suddenly of the rosery. Her eyes swept it, glimmered, and

something seemed to rise in her throat.

“Nothing but roses!”

Canterton found himself studying her profile, with its straight, low

forehead, short nose, and sensitive mouth and chin. Her hair was a

dense, lustrous black, waved back from the forehead, without hiding the

shapeliness of her head. She wore a blouse that was cut low at the

throat, so that the whole neck showed, slim but perfect, curving forward

very slightly, so that her head was poised like the head of one who was

listening. There was something flower-like in her figure, with its lithe

fragility clothed in the simple white spathe of her dress.

Canterton saw her nostrils quivering. Her throat and bosom seemed to

dilate.

“How perfect it is!”

“Almost at its best just now.”

“They make one feel very humble, these flowers. A paint brush seems so

superfluous.”

For the moment her consciousness had become merged and lost in the

colours around her. She spoke to Canterton as though he were some

impersonal spirit, the genius of the place, a mind and not a man.

“There must be hundreds of roses here.”

“Yes, some hundreds.”

“And the dark wall of that yew hedge shows up the colours.”

Canterton felt a curious piquing of his curiosity. The girl was a new

creation to him, and she was strangely familiar, a plant brought from a

new country—like and yet unlike something that he already knew.

He showed her Guinevere.

“How do you like this rose—here?”

Her consciousness returned from its voyage of wonder, and became aware

of him as a man.

“Which one?”

“Here. It is the latest thing I have raised.”

It was an imaginative whim on his part, but as she bent over the rose he

fancied that the flower glowed with a more miraculous fire, and that its

radiance spread to the girl’s face.

“This is wonderful. The shading is so perfect. You know, it is a most

extraordinary mixing and blending of colours.”

“That was just the problem. Whether the flower would turn out a mere

garish, gaudy thing.”

“But it is exquisite.”

“I have been sitting here for two whole days watching the bud open.”

She turned to him with an impulsive flash of the eye.

“Have you? I like the idea of that. Just watching the dawn.”

Her shyness had gone, and Canterton felt that an extraordinary thing had

happened. She no longer seemed a stranger among his roses, although she

had not been more than ten minutes in the rosery.

“Nature opens her secret doors only to those who are patient.”

“And what a fascinating life! Like becoming very tiny, just a fairy, and

letting oneself down into the heart of a rose.”

He had it, the thing that had puzzled him. She was just such a child as

Lynette, save that she was the woman. There was the same wonder, the

same delightful half-earnest playfulness, the same seeing look in the

eyes, the same sensitive quiver about the mouth.

She was gazing at Guinevere.

“Oh, that piques me, challenges me!”

“What, the flower?”

“It makes me think of the conquest of colours that I want to try.”

He understood.

“Come and paint it.”

“May I?”

“Certainly.”

“If I might come and try.”

“You had better come soon.”

“This afternoon?”

“Why not?”

“It is very good of you, Mr. Canterton.”

“Not a bit.”

“Then I’ll come.”

She kept to her word, and reappeared about two o’clock with her paint

box, a camp stool, and a drawing-block. Canterton had lunched in the

rosery. He surrendered his place under the white umbrella, made her sit

in the shade, and went to fetch a jug of water for her brushes. He

rejoined her, bringing another garden chair with him, and so it happened

that they spent the afternoon together.

Canterton smoked and read, while Eve Carfax was busy with her brushes.

She seemed absorbed in her work, and Canterton, looking up from his book

from time to time, watched her without being noticed. The intent poise

of her head reminded him vaguely of some picture he had seen. Her mouth

had a meditative tenderness, and her eyes were full of a quiet delight.

Presently she sat back in her chair, and held the sketch at arm’s

length. Her eyes became more critical, questioning, and there was a

quiver of indecision about her mouth.

“Have you finished it?”

She glanced at him as though startled.

“In a way. But I can’t quite make up my mind.”

“May I see?”

She passed him the block and watched his face as he examined the work.

Once or twice he glanced at Guinevere. Then he stood up, and putting the

painting on the chair, looked at it from a little distance.

“Excellent.”

She flushed.

“Do you think so?”

“I have never seen a better flower picture.”

“It is such a subtle study in colours that I could not be sure.”

“You must be very self-critical.”

“Oh, I am!”

He turned and looked at her with a new expression, the respect of the

expert for an expert’s abilities.

“You have made a study of flowers?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you must have done. I ought to know that.”

Her colour grew richer.

“Mr. Canterton, I don’t think I have ever had such praise. I mean,

praise that I valued. I love flowers so much, and you know them so

intimately.”

“That we understand them together.”

He almost added, “and each other.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV

THE IMPORTUNATE BEGGAR

As Lavender had said, the Carfaxes lived at Orchards Corner.

Approaching the place you saw a line of scattered oaks and Scots firs,

with straggling thorns and hollies between them along the line of a

chestnut fence that had turned green with mould. Beyond the hollies and

thorns rose the branches of an orchard, and beyond the orchard a

plantation of yews, hollies, and black spruces. The house or cottage was

hardly distinguishable till you turned down into the lane from the high

road. It betrayed itself merely by the corner of a white window frame,

the top of a red-brick chimney, and a patch of lichened tiling visible

through the tangle of foliage.

The Carfaxes had been here a year, the mother having been ordered

country air and a dry soil. They had sublet the orchard to a farmer who

grazed sheep there, but had kept the vegetable garden with its old black

loam, and the plot in front with its two squares of grass, filling

nearly all the space between the house and the white palings. The grass

was rather coarse and long, the Carfaxes paying a man to scythe it two

or three times during the summer. There were flower-beds under the

fence, and on every side of the two pieces of grass, and standard roses

flanking the gravel path.

Eve met the man with the scythe in the lane as she walked home after her

second day at Fernhill. She found her mother dozing in her basket-chair

in the front garden where a holly tree threw a patch of shadow on the

grass. Mrs. Carfax had her knitting-needles and a ball of white wool in

her lap. She was wearing a lilac sun-bonnet, and a grey-coloured shawl.

The click of the gate-latch woke her.

“Have you had tea, mother?”

“No, dear; I thought I would wait for you.”

Mrs. Carfax was a pretty old lady with blue eyes and a rather foolish

face. She was remarkable for her sweetness, an obstinate sweetness that

had the consistency of molasses, and refused to be troubled, let Fate

stir ever so viciously. Her passivity could be utterly exasperating. She

had accepted the whole order of the Victorian Age, as she had known it,

declining to see any flaws in the structure, and ascribing any trifling

vexations to the minute and multifarious fussiness of the Deity.

“You ought to have had tea, mother.”

“My dear, I never mind waiting.”

“Would you like it brought out here?”

“Just as you please, dear.”

It was not daughterly, but Eve sometimes wished that her mother had a

temper, and could use words that elderly gentlewomen are not expected to

be acquainted with. There was something so explosively refreshing about

the male creature’s hearty “Oh, damn!”

That cooing, placid voice never lost its sweetness. It was the same when

it rained, when the wind howled for days, when the money was shorter

than usual, when Eve’s drawings were returned by unsympathetic

magazines. Mrs. Carfax underlined the adjectives in her letters, and had

a little proverbial platitude for every catastrophe, were it a broken

soap dish or a railway smash. “Patience is a virtue, my dear.” “Rome was

not built in a day.” “The world is not helped by worry.” Mrs. Carfax had

an annuity of £100 a year, and Eve made occasional small sums by her

paintings. They were poor, poor with that respectable poverty that

admits of no margins and no adventures.

Mrs. Carfax was supremely contented. She prayed nightly that she might

be spared to keep a home for Eve, never dreaming that the daughter

suffered from fits of bitter restlessness when anything seemed better

than this narrow and prospectless tranquillity. Mrs. Carfax had never

been young. She had accepted everything, from her bottle onwards, with

absolute passivity. She had been a passive child, a passive wife, a

passive widow. Life had had no gradients, no gulfs and pinnacles. There

were no injustices and no sorrows, save, of course, those arranged by an

all-wise Providence. No ideals, save those in the Book of Common Prayer;

no passionate strivings; no divine discontents. She just cooed, brought

out a soft platitude, and went on with her knitting.

Eve entered the house to put her things away, and to tell Nellie, the

infant maid, to take tea out into the garden.

“Take tea out, Nellie.”

“Yes, miss. There ain’t no cake.”

“I thought I told you to bake one.”

“Yes, miss. There ain’t no baking powder.”

“Oh, very well. I’ll order some. Put a little jam out.”

“There only be gooseberry, miss.”

“Then we’ll say gooseberry.”

Eve returned to the garden in time to hear the purr of a motor-car in

the main road. The car stopped at the end of the lane. A door banged,

and a figure in black appeared beyond the gate.

It was the Cantertons’ car that had stopped at the end of the lane, and

it was Mrs. Canterton who opened the gate, smiling and nodding at Mrs.

Carfax. Gertrude Canterton had paid a first formal call some months ago,

leaving in Eve’s mind the picture of a very expeditious woman who might

whirl down on you in an aeroplane, make a few remarks on the weather,

and then whirl off again.

“Please don’t get up! Please don’t get up! I mustn’t stay three minutes.

Isn’t the weather exquisite. Ah, how do you do, Miss Carfax?”

She extended a hand with an affected flick of the wrist, smiling all the

while, and wriggling her shoulders.

“Eve, fetch another chair, dear.”

“Oh, please don’t bother!”

“We are just going to have tea, Mrs. Canterton.”

Eve gave her mother a warning look, but Mrs. Carfax never noticed other

people’s faces.

“Tell Nellie, dear.”

Eve walked off to the house, chiefly conscious of the fact that there

was no cake for tea. How utterly absurd it was that one should chafe

over such trifles. But then, with women like Mrs. Canterton, it was

necessary to have one’s pride dressed to the very last button.

Two extra chairs and tea arrived. The conversation was never in danger

of death when Gertrude Canterton was responsible for keeping up a babble

of sound. If the other people were mute and reticent, she talked about

herself and her multifarious activities. These filled all gaps.

“I must say I like having tea in the garden. You are, really, most

sheltered here. Sugar? No, I don’t take sugar in tea—only in coffee,

thank you.”

“It does rather spoil the flavour.”

“We have a very exquisite tea sent straight to us from a friend of my

husband’s in Ceylon. It rather spoils me, and I have got out of the way

of taking sugar. How particular we become, don’t we? It is so easy to

become selfish. That reminds me. I want to interest our neighbourhood in

a society that has been started in London. What a problem London is.”

Mrs. Carfax cooed sympathetically.

“And the terrible lives the people lead. We are very interested in the

poor shop girls, and we have started an organisation which we call ‘The

Shop Girls’ Rest Society.’”

“Eve, perhaps Mrs. Canterton will have some cake.”

Eve was on edge, and full of vague feelings of defiance.

“I’m sorry, there isn’t any cake.”

“Eve, dear!”

“Oh, please, I so rarely take cake. Bread and butter is so much more

hygienic and natural. I was going to tell you that this society we have

started is going to provide shop girls with country holidays.”

“How very nice!”

Mrs. Carfax felt that she had to coo more sweetly because of the absence

of cake.

“I think it is quite an inspiration. We want to get people to take a

girl for a week or a fortnight and give her good food, fresh air, and a

sense of homeliness. How much the home means to women.”

“Everything, Mrs. Canterton. Woman’s place is the home.”

“Exactly. And I was wondering, Mrs. Carfax, whether you would be

prepared to help us. Of course, we shall see to it that the girls are

really nice and proper persons.”

The thought of the absence of cake still lingered, and Mrs. Carfax felt

apologetic.

“I am sure, Mrs. Canterton, I shall be glad——”

Eve had grown stiffer and stiffer, watching the inevitable approach of

the inevitable beggar. Gertrude Canterton had a genius for wriggling her

way everywhere, even into other people’s bedrooms, and would be putting

them down for ten guineas before they were half awake.

“I am sorry, but I’m afraid it is out of the question.”

She spoke rather brusquely, and Gertrude Canterton turned with an

insinuating scoop of the chin.

“Miss Carfax, do let me——”

“Eve, dear, I’m sure——”

Eve was stonily practical.

“It is quite impossible.”

“But, Eve——”

“You know, mother, we haven’t a bed.”

“My dear!”

“And no spare bedclothes. Mrs. Canterton may as well be told the truth.”

There was a short silence. Mrs. Carfax looked as ruffled as it was

possible for her to look, settled her shawl, and glanced inquiringly at

Mrs. Canterton. But even to Gertrude Canterton the absence of bedclothes

seemed final.

“I am sure, Mrs. Carfax, you would have helped us, if you had been

able.”

Eve persisted in being regarded as the responsible authority. She was

quite shameless now that she had shown Mrs. Canterton the empty

cupboard.

“You see, we have only one small maid, and everything is so adjusted,

that we just manage to get along.”

“Exactly so, Miss Carfax. I quite understand. But there is a little

thing you could do for us. I always think that living in a neighbourhood

makes one responsible for one’s poorer neighbours. I am sure, Mrs.

Carfax, that you will give a small subscription to the Coal and Clothing

Club.”

“With pleasure.”

“It doesn’t matter how small it is.”

“Eve, dear, please go and fetch me some silver. I should like to

subscribe five shillings. May I give it to you, Mrs. Canterton?”

“Thank you so very much. I will send you a receipt.”

Eve had risen and walked off resignedly towards the cottage. It was she

who was responsible for all the petty finance of the household, and five

shillings were five shillings when one’s income was one hundred pounds a

year. It could not be spared from the housekeeping purse, for the money

in it was partitioned out to the last penny. Eve went to her own room,

and took a green leather purse from the rosewood box on her

dressing-table. This purse held such sums as she could save from the

sale of occasional small pictures and fashion plates. It contained

seventeen shillings at this particular moment. Five shillings were to

have gone on paints, ten on a new pair of shoes, and two on some cheap

material for a blouse.

She was conscious of making instinctive calculations as she took out two

half-crowns. What a number of necessities these two pieces of silver

would buy, and the ironical part of it was that she could not paint

without paints, or walk without shoes. It struck her as absurd that a

fussy fool like this Canterton woman should be able to cause so much

charitable inconvenience. Why had she not refused point blank, in spite

of her mother’s pleading eyes?

Eve returned to the garden and handed Mrs. Canterton the two half-crowns

without a word. It was blackmail levied by a restless craze for

incessant charitable activities. Eve would not have grudged it had it

gone straight to a fellow-worker in distress, but to give it to this

rich woman who went round wringing shillings out of cottagers!

“Thank you so much. Money is always so badly needed.”

Eve agreed with laconic irony.

“It is, isn’t it? Especially when you have to earn it!”

Gertrude Canterton chatted for another five minutes and then rose to go.

She shook hands cordially with Mrs. Carfax, and was almost as cordial

with Eve. And it was this blind, self-contentment of hers that made her

so universally detested. She never knew when people’s bristles were up,

and having a hide like leather, she wriggled up and rubbed close, never

suspecting that most people were possessed by a savage desire to say

some particularly stinging thing that should bite through all the

thickness of her egotism.

“Thank goodness!”

“Eve, you were quite rude! And you need not have said, dear——”

“Mother, I told the truth only in self-defence. I was expecting some

other deserving charity to arrive at any moment.”

“It is better to give, dear, than to receive.”

“Is it? Of course, we needn’t pay the tradesmen, and we can send the

money to some missionary agency.”

“Eve, dear, please don’t be flippant. A word spoken in jest——”

“I’m not, mother. I’m most desperately serious.”

Gertrude Canterton had a very successful afternoon. She motored about

forty miles, trifled with three successive teas, and bored some seven

householders into promising to consider the claims of the Shop Girls’

Rest Society. She was very talkative at dinner, describing and

criticising the various people from whom she had begged.

Canterton showed sudden annoyance.

“You went to the Carfaxes?”

“Yes.”

“And got something from them?”

“Of course, James.”

“You shouldn’t go to such people.”

Her face was all sallow surprise.

“Why, they are quite respectable, and——”

“Respectable! Do you think I meant that! You know, Gertrude, you

charitable people are desperately hard sometimes on the real poor.”

“What _do_ you mean, James?”

“People like the Carfaxes ought not to be worried. You are so infernally

energetic!”

“James, I protest!”

“Oh, well, let it pass.”

“If you mean——Of course, I can send the money back.”

He looked at her with a curious and wondering severity.

“I shouldn’t do that, Gertrude. Some people are rather sensitive.”

Canterton went into the library after dinner, before going up to say

“good night” to Lynette. Within the last two days some knowledge of the

Carfaxes and their life had come to him, fortuitously, and yet with a

vividness that had roused his sympathy. For though James Canterton had

never lacked for money, he had that intuitive vision that gives a man

understanding and compassion.

His glance fell upon the manuscript of “The Book of the English Garden”

lying open on his desk. An idea struck him. Why should not Eve Carfax

give the colour to this book? To judge by her portrait of Guinevere,

hers was the very art that he needed.

* * * * *

CHAPTER V

EVE ENTERS THE WILDERNESS

Eve Carfax read James Canterton’s letter at breakfast, and her mother,

who like many passive people, was vapidly inquisitive, wanted to know

when the letter had come, why it had been written, what it said, and

what it did not say.

Eve was a little flushed, and ready to fall into a reverie while looking

along a vista of sudden possibilities. This frank and straightforward

letter had brought a flutter of exultation into her life.

“Mr. Canterton wants me to do some flower pictures for him.”

“How nice, dear! And shall you?”

“Of course—if I can.”

“It must have been our subscription to——”

“Mother, is it likely?”

“I am sure Mrs. Canterton was most charming. Is he going to pay you

for——”

“He doesn’t say anything about it.”

“He might not think it quite nice to say anything—just at first.”

“I really don’t know why it shouldn’t be nice to mention a thing that we

all must have. He wants me to go and see him.”

Eve set off for Fernhill with a delightful sense of exhilaration. She

was in a mood to laugh, especially at the incident of yesterday, and at

the loss of those two half-crowns that had seemed so tragic and

depressing. This might be her first big bit of luck, the beginning of a

wider, finer life for which she yearned. She was amused at her mother’s

idea about Mrs. Canterton. Mrs. Canterton indeed! Why—the flow of her

thoughts was sharply arrested, and held back by the uprising of a

situation that suddenly appeared before her as something extraordinarily

incongruous. These two people were married. This fussy, sallow-faced,

fidgeting egotist, and this big, meditative, colour-loving man. What on

earth were they doing living together in the same house. And what on

earth was she herself doing letting her thoughts wander into affairs

that did not concern her.

She suppressed the curious feeling of distaste the subject inspired in

her, took a plunge into a cold bath of self-restraint, and came out

close knit and vigorous. Eve Carfax had a very fastidious pride that

detested anything that could be described as vulgarly curious. She

wanted no one to finger her own intimate self, and she recoiled

instinctively from any tendency on her own part towards taking back-door

views of life. She was essentially clean, with an ideal whiteness that

yet could flush humanly. But the idea of contemplating the soiled petals

of other people’s ideals repelled her.

Eve entered the Fernhill Nurseries by the great oak gates that opened

through a high hedge of arbor vitæ. She found herself in a large

gravelled space, a kind of quadrangle surrounded by offices, storerooms,

stables, and packing sheds, all built in the old English style of oak,

white plaster, and red tiles. The extraordinary neatness of the place

struck her. It was like a big forecourt to the mysteries beyond.

She had her hand on the office bell when Canterton came out, having seen

her through the window. He was in white flannels, and wearing a straw

hat that deepened the colour of his eyes and skin.

“Good morning! We both appear to be punctual people.”

He was smiling, and looking at her attentively.

“It was good of you to come up at once. I left it open. I think it would

be a good idea if I took you over the whole place.”

She answered his smile, losing a momentary shyness.

“I should like to see everything. Do you know, Mr. Canterton, you have

set me up on the high horse, and——”

“Well?”

“I don’t want to fall off. I have been having thrills of delightful

dread.”

“I know; just what a man feels before an exam., when he is pretty sure

of himself.”

“I don’t know that I am sure of myself.”

“If you can paint other things as you painted that rose, I don’t think

there is any need for you to worry.”

The quiet assurance of his praise sent a shiver of exultation through

her. What an encouraging and comforting person he was. He just intimated

that he believed you could do a thing very well, and the thing itself

seemed half done.

“Then I’ll show you the whole place. I’m a bit of an egotist in my way.”

“It’s only showing someone what you have created.”

He took her everywhere, beginning with what he called “the

administrative department.” She saw the great glass-houses, the stacks

of bracken for packing, the piles of ash and chestnut stakes, the shed

where three old men spent their time making big baskets and hampers, the

rows and rows of frames, the packing and dispatch sheds, the seed room,

the little laboratory, with its microscopes and microtome and shelves of

bottles, the office where several clerks were constantly at work.

Canterton was apologetic.

“I have a craze for showing everything.”

“It gives one insight. I like it.”

“It won’t tire you?”

“I think I am a very healthy young woman.”

He looked at the fresh face, and at the lithe though fragile figure, and

felt somehow that the June day had an indefinable perfume.

“I should like to show you some of the young conifers.”

They were wonderful trees with wonderful names, quaint, solemn, and

diminutive, yet with all the dignity of forests patriarchs. They grew in

groves and companies, showing all manner of colours, dense metallic

greens, soft blues, golds, silvers, greys, green blacks, ambers. Each

tree had beauties and characteristics of its own. They were diminutive

models of a future maturity, solemn children that would be cedars,

cypresses, junipers, pines and yews.

They delighted Eve.

“Oh, the little people, ready to grow up! I never knew there were such

trees—and such colours.”

He saw the same look in her eyes as he had seen in the rosery, the same

tenderness about the mouth.

“I walk about here sometimes and wonder where they will all go to.”

“Yes, isn’t it strange.”

“Some day I want to do a book on trees.”

“Do you? What’s the name of that dear Japanese-looking infant there?”

“Retinospora Densa. You know, we nurserymen and some of the botanists

quarrel about names.”

“What does it matter? I tried to study botany, but the jargon——”

“Yes, it is pretty hopeless. I played a joke once on some of our

botanical friends; sent them a queer thing I had had sent from China,

and labelled it Cantertoniana Gloria in Excelsis. They took it quite

seriously.”

“The dears!”

Laughter passed between them, and an intimate flashing of the eyes that

told how the joy of life welled up and met. They wandered on through

acres of glowing maples, golden privets and elders, purple leaved plums,

arbutus, rhododendrons, azaleas, and all manner of flowering shrubs. In

one quiet corner an old gardener with a white beard was budding roses.

Elsewhere men were hoeing the alleys between the straight rows of young

forest trees, poplars, birches, elms, beeches, ilexes, mountain ashes,

chestnuts, and limes. There were acres of fruit trees, acres of roses,

acres of the commoner kind of evergreens, great waves of glooming green

rolling with a glisten of sunlight over the long slopes of the earth.

Eve grew more silent. She was all eyes—all wonder. It seemed futile to

exclaim when there was so much beauty everywhere.

They came at last to a pleasaunce that was the glory of the hour, an

herbaceous garden in full bloom, with brick-paved paths, box edging, and

here and there an old tree stump or a rough arch smothered with

clematis, or honeysuckle. Delphiniums in every shade of blue rose like

the crowded and tapering _flèches_ of a mediæval city. There were white

lilies, gaudy gaillardias blazing like suns, campanulas, violas,

foxgloves, snapdragons, mauve erigeron, monkshood, English iris, and

scores of other plants. It was gorgeous, and yet full of subtle

gradations of colour, like some splendid Persian carpet in which strange

dyes merged and mingled. Bees hummed everywhere. Old red brick walls,

half covered with various kinds of ivy, formed a mellow background. And

away on the horizon floated the blue of the Surrey hills.

Eve stood motionless, lips slightly apart.

“Mr. Canterton!”

“You like it?”

“Am I to paint this?”

“I hope so.”

“Let me pour out my humility.”

He laughed gently.

“Oh, you can do it!”

“Can I? And the old walls! I should not have thought the place was so

old.”

“It isn’t. I bought my bricks. Some old cottages were being pulled

down.”

“Thank God, sometimes, for money!”

She stood a moment, her chin raised, her eyes throwing long, level

glances down the walks.

“Mr. Canterton, let me do two or three trial sketches before you decide

anything.”

“Just as you like.”

“Please tell me exactly what you want.”

“I want you to begin here, and in the rosery. You see this book of mine

is going to be a big thing, a treasure house for the real people who

want to know. I shall need portraits of individual flowers, and studies

of colour effects during the different months. I shall also want

illustrations of many fine gardens that have been put at my service.

That is to say, I may have to ask you to travel about a little, to paint

some of the special things, such as the Ryecroft Dutch garden, and the

Italian gardens at Latimer.”

As he spoke the horizon of her life seemed to broaden before her. It was

like the breaking through of a winter dawn when the grey crevices of the

east fill with sudden fire. Everything looked bigger, more wonderful,

more alluring.

“I had no idea——”

He was watching her face.

“Well?”

“That it was to be such a big thing.”

“It may take me two or three more years. I have allowed myself five

years for the book.”

She drew in her breath.

“Mr. Canterton, I don’t know what to say. And I don’t think you realise

what you are offering me. Just—life, more life. But it almost frightens

me that you should think——”

His eyes smiled at her understandingly.

“Paint me a few trial pieces. Begin with one of the borders here, and a

rose bed in the rosery that I will show you. Also, give me a study of

trees, and another of rocks and plants in the rock garden.”

“I will begin at once.”

He looked beyond her towards the blue hills.

“As to the terms between us, will you let me write you a letter

embodying them?”

“Yes.”

“You can have an agreement if you like.”

She answered at once.

“No. I think, somehow, I would rather not. And please don’t propose

anything till you have seen more of what I can do.”

Canterton led the way towards the rosery to show her the roses he wanted

her to paint, and in passing through one of the tunnels in the yew hedge

they were dashed into by a child who came flying like a blown leaf. It

was Eve who received the rush of the impetuous figure. Her hands held

Lynette to save her from falling.

“Hallo!”

Lynette’s face lifted to hers with surprise and laughter, and a

questioning shyness. Eve kept her hold for the moment. They looked at

each other with an impulse towards friendliness.

“Lynette, old lady!”

“Daddy, Miss Vance has gone off——”

“Pop? Miss Carfax, let me introduce my daughter. Miss Lynette

Canterton—Miss Carfax.”

Eve slid her hands from Lynette’s body, but the child’s hands clung and

held hers.

“I’m so sorry. I hope it didn’t hurt? I don’t think I’ve seen you

before.”

“Well, we rushed at each other when we did meet.”

“Is daddy showing you the garden?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Lynette—not like linnet, you know, but Lyn-net.”

“And my name’s Eve—just Eve.”

“Who was made out of Adam’s rib. Poor Mr. Adam! I wonder whether he

missed it?”

They all laughed. Lynette kept hold of one of Eve’s hands, and held out

her other one to Canterton.

“Daddy, do come down to the Wilderness. I want to build a wagwim.”

“Or wigwam?”

“I like wagwim better. Do come.”

“Miss Canterton, I am most seriously occupied.”

She tossed her hair, and turned on Eve.

“You’ll come too, Miss Eve? Now I’ve invited you, daddy will have to

come. Ask him.”

Eve looked at Canterton, and there was something strange in the eyes of

both.

“Mr. Canterton, I am requested to ask you——”

“I surrender. I may as well tell you, Miss Carfax, that very few people

are invited into the Wilderness. It is fairyland.”

“I appreciate it. Lynette, may I come and build a wagwim with you?”

“Yes, do. What a nice voice you’ve got.”

“Have I?”

Eve blushed queerly, and was intimately conscious of Canterton’s eyes

looking at her with peculiar and half wondering intentness.

“I’m going to have dinner there. Mother is out, and Miss Vance is going

to Guildford by train. And Sarah has given me two jam tarts, and some

cheese straws, and two bananas——”

Canterton tweaked her hair.

“That’s an idea. I’m on good terms with Sarah. We’ll have some lunch and

a bottle of red wine sent down to the Wilderness and picnic in a wagwim,

if the wagwim wams by lunch time.”

“Come along—come along, Miss Eve! I’ll show you the way! I’m so glad

you like wagwims!”

So these three went down to the Wilderness together, into the green

light of the larch wood, and into a world of laughter, mystery and joy.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VI

WOMEN OF VIRTUE

The local committee of a society for the propagation of something or

other had taken possession of Canterton’s library, and Mrs. Brocklebank

was the dominant lady. The amount of business done at these meetings was

infinitesimal, for Mrs. Brocklebank and Gertrude Canterton were like

battleships that kept up a perpetual booming of big guns, hardly

troubling to notice the splutter of suggestions fired by the lesser

vessels. The only person on the committee who had any idea of business

was little Miss Whiffen, the curate’s sister. She was one of those women

who are all profile, a busy, short-sighted, argumentative creature who

did her best to prevent Mrs. Brocklebank and Gertrude Canterton from

claiming the high seas as their own. She fussed about like a torpedo

boat, launching her torpedoes, and scoring hits that should have blown

most battleships out of the water. But Mrs. Brocklebank was unsinkable,

and Gertrude Canterton was protected by the net of her infinite

self-satisfaction. Whatever Miss Whiffen said, they just kept on

booming.

Sometimes they squabbled politely, while old Lady Marchendale, who was

deaf, sat and dozed in her chair. They were squabbling this afternoon

over a problem that, strange to say, had something to do with the matter

in hand. Miss Whiffen had contradicted Mrs. Brocklebank, and so they

proceeded to argue.

“Every thinking person ought to realise that there are a million more

women than men in the country.”

“I wasn’t questioning that.”

“Therefore the female birth rate must be higher than the male.”

Miss Whiffen retorted with figures. She was always attacking Mrs.

Brocklebank with statistics.

“If you look up the records you will find that there are about a hundred

and five boys born to every hundred girls.”

“That does not alter the situation.”

“Oh, of course not.”

“This scheme of helping marriageable young women to emigrate——”

Mrs. Brocklebank paused, and turned the big gun on Miss Whiffen.

“I said marriageable young women! Have you any objection to the term,

Miss Whiffen?”

“Oh, not in the least! But does it follow that, because they marry when

they get to the Colonies——”

“What follows?”

“Why, children.”

“Marriages are more fruitful in a young country.”

“But are they? When my married sister was home from Australia last time,

she told me——”

Gertrude Canterton joined in.

“Yes, it’s just the prevailing selfishness, the decadence of home life.”

“Men are so much more selfish than they used to be.”

“I think the women are as bad. And, of course, the question of

population——”

Old Lady Marchendale, who had dozed off in her arm-chair by the window,

woke up, caught a few fragmental words, and created a digression.

“They ought to be made to have them—by law!”

“But, my dear Lady Marchendale——”

“I see her ladyship’s point.”

“Every girl ought to have her own room.”

“Of course, most certainly! But in the matter of emigration——”

“Emigration? What has emigration to do with the Shop Girls’ Self Help

Society?”

“My dear Lady Marchendale, we are discussing the scheme for sending

young women to the Colonies.”

“Bless me, I must have been asleep. I remember. Look at that lad of

yours, Mrs. Canterton, out there in the garden. I’m sure he has cut his

hand.”

Lady Marchendale might be rather deaf, but she had unusually sharp eyes,

and Gertrude Canterton, rising in her chair, saw one of the lads

employed in the home garden running across the lawn, and wrapping a

piece of sacking round his left hand and wrist.

She hurried to the window.

“What is the matter, Pennyweight?”

“Cut m’ wrist, mum, swappin’ the hedge.”

“How careless! I will come and see what wants doing.”

There had been First Aid classes in the village. In fact, Gertrude

Canterton had started them. Miss Whiffen and several members of the

committee followed her into the garden and surrounded the lad

Pennyweight, who looked white and scared.

“Take that dirty sacking away, Pennyweight! Don’t you know such things

are full of microbes?”

“It’s bleedin’ so bad, mum.”

“Let me see.”

The lad obeyed her, uncovering his wrist gingerly, his face flinching.

The inner swathings of sacking were being soaked with blood from the

steady pumping of a half-severed artery.

Miss Whiffen made a little sibilant sound.

“Sssf, sssf—dear, dear!”

“A nasty cut.”

Pennyweight hesitated between restive fright and awe of all these

gentlewomen.

“Hadn’t I better go t’ Mr. Lavender, mum? It does bleed.”

“Nonsense, Pennyweight! Miss Ronan, would you mind going in and ringing

for the housekeeper? Tell her I want some clean linen, and some hot

water and boracic acid.”

Miss Whiffen was interested but alarmed.

“It’s a cut artery. We ought to compress the brachial artery.”

“Isn’t it the femoral?”

“No, that’s in the leg. You squeeze the arm just——”

“Exactly. Along the inside seam of the sleeve.”

“But he has no coat on.”

This was a poser. Gertrude Canterton looked annoyed.

“Where’s your coat, Pennyweight?”

“Down by t’ hedge, mum.”

“If he had his coat on we should know just where to compress the

artery.”

No one noticed Canterton and Lynette till the man and the child were

within five yards of the group.

“What’s the matter?”

The lad faced round sharply, appeared to disentangle himself from the

women, and to turn instinctively to Canterton.

“Cut m’ wrist, sir, with the swap ’ook.”

“We must stop that bleeding.”

He pulled out a big bandanna handkerchief, passed it round the lad’s

arm, knotted it, and took a folding foot-rule from his pocket.

“Hold that just there, Bob.”

He made another knot over the rule on the inside of the arm, and then

twisted the extemporised tourniquet till the lad winced.

“Hurt?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s stopped it. Gertrude, send one of the maids down to the office

and tell Griggs to ride down on his bicycle for Kearton. Feel funny,

Bob?”

“Just a bit, sir.”

“Lie down flat in the shade there. I’ll get you a glass of grog.”

Lynette, solemn and sympathetic, had stood watching her father,

disassociating herself from her mother and Miss Whiffen, and the members

of the committee.

“Wasn’t it a good thing I found daddy, Bob?”

“It was, miss.”

“The old ladies might have let you bleed to death, mightn’t they?”

Bob looked sheepish, and Gertrude Canterton called Lynette away.

“Go to the nursery, Lynette. It is tea time.”

Lynette chose to enter the house by the library window, and, finding old

Lady Marchendale sitting there in the arm-chair, put up her face to be

kissed. She liked Lady Marchendale because she had pretty white hair,

and eyes that twinkled.

“Did you see Bob’s bloody hand?”

“What, my dear?”

“Did you see Bob’s bloody hand?”

“I can’t quite hear, dear.”

Lynette put her mouth close to Lady Marchendale’s ear, and spoke with

emphasis.

“Did—you—see—Bob’s—bloody—hand?”

“Lynette, you must not use such words!”

Gertrude Canterton stood at the open window, and Lady Marchendale was

laughing.

“What words, mother?”

“Such words as ‘bloody.’”

“But it was bloody, mother.”

“Bless the child, how fresh! Come and give me another kiss, dear.”

Lynette gave it with enthusiasm.

“I do like your white hair.”

“It is not so pretty as yours, my dear. Now, run along. We are very

busy.”

She watched Lynette go, nodding her head at her and smiling.

“I am so sorry, Lady Marchendale. The child is such a little savage.”

“I think she’s a pet. You don’t want to make a little prig of her, do

you?”

“She’s so undisciplined.”

“Oh, fudge! What you call being ‘savage,’ is being healthy and natural.

You don’t want to make the child a woman before she’s been a child.”

The gong rang for tea.

Eve was painting in the rosery when Mrs. Brocklebank persuaded the

members of the committee that she—and therefore they—wanted to see Mr.

Canterton’s roses. It was a purely perfunctory pilgrimage, so far as

Gertrude Canterton was concerned, and her voice struck a note of passive

disapproval.

“I think there is much too much time and money wasted upon flowers.”

“Oh, Mrs. Canterton! But isn’t this just sweet!”

“I don’t know very much about roses, but I believe my husband’s are

supposed to be wonderful.”

She sighted Eve, stared, and diverged towards her down a side path,

smiling with thin graciousness.

“Miss Carfax?”

Eve did not offer to explain her presence. She supposed that Gertrude

Canterton knew all about her husband’s book, and the illustrations that

were needed.

“You are making a study of flowers?”

“Yes.”

“That’s right. I hope you will find plenty of material here.”

“Mr. Canterton was kind enough to let me come in and see what I could

do.”

“Exactly. May I see?”

She minced round behind Eve, and looked over the girl’s shoulder at the

sketch she had on her lap.

“That’s quite nice—quite nice! But what a lot of colour you have put

into it.”

“There is rather a lot of colour in the garden itself.”

“Yes, but I’m afraid I can’t see what you have put on paper——”

Miss Whiffen was clamouring to be told the name of a certain rose.

“Mrs. Canterton—Mrs. Canterton!”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do tell me the name of this rose!”

“I’ll come and look. I can’t burden my memory with the names of flowers.

Perhaps it is labelled. Everything ought to be labelled. It is such a

saving of time.”

Eve smiled, and turning to glance at the rose bed she was painting,

discovered a big woman in black hanging a large white face over the one

particular rose in the garden. Mrs. Brocklebank had discovered

Guinevere, and a cherished flower that was just opening to the sunlight.

Mrs. Brocklebank always carried a black vanity bag, though it did not

contain such things as mirror, _papier poudre_, violet powder, hairpins,

and scent. A notebook, two or three neat twists of string, a pair of

scissors, a mother-of-pearl card-case, pince-nez, and a little bottle of

corn solvent that she had just bought in Basingford—these were the

occupants. Eve saw her open the bag, take out the scissors, and bend

over Guinevere.

Eve dared to intervene.

“Excuse me, but that rose must not be touched.”

Perhaps she put her protest crudely, but Mrs. Brocklebank showed

hauteur.

“Indeed!”

“I believe Mr. Canterton wants that flower.”

“What is it, Philippa?”

Mrs. Canterton had returned, and came wriggling and edging behind Eve.

“There is rather a nice bud here, and I was going to steal it, but this

young lady——”

“Miss Carfax!”

Eve felt her face flushing.

“I believe Mr. Canterton wants that flower.”

“Nonsense. Why, there are hundreds here. Take it, my dear, by all means,

take it.”

“I don’t want to interfere with——”

“I insist. James is absolutely foolish about his flowers. He won’t let

me send a maid down with a basket. And we had such a quarrel once about

the orchid house.”

Eve turned and went back to her stool. Mrs. Brocklebank’s eyes followed

her with solemn disapproval.

“That’s a rather forward young person.”

“Do take the flower, Philippa.”

“I will.”

And the rose was tucked into Mrs. Brocklebank’s belt.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII

CANTERTON PURSUES MRS. BROCKLEBANK

Ten minutes later Eve saw Canterton enter the rosery.

He was walking slowly, his hands in his pockets, pausing from time to

time to examine some particular rose bush for any signs of blight or

rust. Eve’s place was in the very centre of this little secret world of

colour and perfume, and the grey paths led away from her on every side

like the ground plan of a maze. There was some resemblance, too, to a

silver web with strands spread and hung with iridescent dewdrops

flashing like gems. In the midst of it all was the woman, watching,

waiting, a mystery even to herself, while the man approached half

circuitously, taking this path, and now that, drawing nearer and nearer

to that central, feminine thing throned in the thick of June.

Canterton walked along the last path as though he had only just realised

Eve’s presence. She kept on with her work, looking down under lowered

lashes at the sketching-block upon her knees.

“Still working?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had any tea?”

“No.”

“I’ll have some sent out to you.”

“Oh, please don’t bother.”

“You may as well make a habit of it when you are working here.”

She lifted eyes that smiled.

“I am so very human, that sweet cakes and a cup of fine China tea——”

“Remain human. I have a very special blend. You shall have it sent out

daily, and I will issue instructions as to the cakes. Hallo!”

He had discovered the spoiling of Guinevere.

“Someone has taken that rose.”

His profile was turned to her, and she studied it with sympathetic

curiosity.

“Mrs. Canterton and some friends have been here.”

“Have they?”

“And a stout lady in black discovered Guinevere, and produced a pair of

scissors. I put in a word for the rose.”

He faced her, looking down with eyes that claimed her as a partisan.

“Thank you.”

“I think the lady’s name is Mrs. Brocklebank.”

He was half angry, half amused.

“I might have suspected it. I suppose someone over-ruled your protest?”

“Yes.”

She went on with her work, brushing in a soft background of grey stones

and green foliage.

“Was Mrs. Canterton here?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes remained fixed upon the rose in front of her, and the poise of

her head and the aloofness of her eyes answered his question before he

asked it.

“I want that rose most particularly. It has to go to one of the greatest

rose experts in the country.”

“Yes.”

“Which way did they go?”

“Back to the house, I think.”

“I’ll go and have your tea sent out. And I want to catch Mrs.

Brocklebank.”

Canterton started in pursuit of the lady, found that she had only just

left the house, and that he would catch her in the drive. He intended to

be quite frank with her, knowing her to be the most inveterate snatcher

up of trifles, one of those over-enthusiastic people who will sneak a

cutting from some rare plant and take it home wrapped up in a

handkerchief. Lavender had told him one or two tales about Mrs.

Brocklebank, and how he had once surprised her in the rock garden busy

with a trowel that she had brought in an innocent looking work-bag.

Canterton overtook her just before she reached the lodge gates, and

found Guinevere being carried off as a victim in Mrs. Brocklebank’s

belt.

“I am afraid you have taken a rose that should not have been touched.”

“Oh, Mr. Canterton, I’m sure I haven’t!”

He looked whimsically at the rose perched on the top of a very ample

curve.

“Well, there it is! My wife ought to have warned you——”

“She pressed me to take it. My dear Mr. Canterton, how was I to know?”

“Of course not.”

He was amused by her emphatic innocence, especially when, by dragging in

Eve Carfax’s name, he could have suggested to her that he knew she was

lying.

“You see, my wife knows nothing about flowers—what is valuable, and

what isn’t.”

Mrs. Brocklebank began to boom.

“My dear Mr. Canterton, how can you expect it? I think it is very

unreasonable of you. In fact, you ought to mark valuable flowers, so

that other people should know.”

He smiled at her quite charmingly.

“I suppose I ought. I suppose I am really the guilty party. Only, you

see, my garden is really a shop, a big general store. And in a shop it

is not supposed to be necessary to put notices on certain articles,

‘This article is not to be appropriated.’”

“Mr. Canterton!”

She took the rose out of her belt, and in doing so purposely broke the

stalk off close to the calyx.

“I think you are a very horrid man. Fancy suggesting——”

“I am a humorist, you know.”

“I am afraid I have broken the stalk.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can have it wired.”

He went and opened the lodge gates for her, and stood, hat in hand, as

she passed out. He was smiling, but it was an uncomfortable sort of

smile that sent Mrs. Brocklebank away wondering whether he was really

quite a pleasant person or an ironical beast.

Canterton took the rose to Lavender, who was working through some of the

stock lists in the office.

“Nearly lost, but not quite, Lavender.”

The foreman looked cynical, but said nothing.

“Wire it up, and have it packed and sent off to Mr. Woolridge to-night.

And, by the way, I have told Mrs. Brocklebank that if she wants any

flowers in the future, she must apply to you.”

“I shan’t forget that little trowel of hers, sir, and our Alpines.”

“Put up a notice, ‘Trowels not admitted.’ I am writing to Mr. Woolridge.

Oh, and there are those American people coming to-morrow, who want to be

shown roses, and flowering shrubs. Will you take them round? I fancy I

shall be busy.”

Canterton returned to the rosery, and, picking up a stray chair in one

of the main paths, joined Eve Carfax, who had a little green Japanese

tea-tray on her lap. She was pouring out tea from a tiny brown teapot,

her wrist making a white arch, her lashes sweeping her cheek.

“They have brought your tea all right?”

“Yes.”

“What about cakes?”

She bent down and picked up a plate from the path.

“Someone must fancy me a hungry schoolgirl.”

“It looks rather like it. How is the painting going?”

“I am rather pleased with it.”

“Good. On show soon?”

“I have only to put in a few touches.”

He swung his chair round, and sat down as though it were the most

natural thing in the world for him to come and talk to her. Her curious

resemblance to Lynette may have tricked him into a mood that was partly

that of the playmate, partly that of the father. Lynette, the child, had

set him an impetuous example. “Miss Eve feels the fairies in the wood,

daddy. She feels them there, just like me.” That was it. Eve spoke and

understood the same language as he and the child.

“I overtook Mrs. Brocklebank.”

“And rescued Guinevere?”

“Yes, and the good dragon pretended to be very innocent. I did not drag

your name in, though I was reproved for not labelling things properly,

and so inviting innocent old ladies to purloin flowers.”

“But you got the rose back?”

“Yes, and she managed to break the stalk off short in pulling it out of

her belt. I wonder if you can tell me why the average woman is built on

such mean lines?”

She gave him a sudden questioning glance which said, “Do you realise

that you are going beneath the surface—that the real you in you is

calling to the real me in me?”

He was looking at her intently, and there was something in his eyes that

stirred a tremor of compassion in her.

“What I mean is, that the average woman seems a cad when she is compared

to the average man. I mean, the women of the upper middle classes. I

suppose it is because they don’t know what work is, and because they

have always led selfish and protected lives. They haven’t the bigness of

men—the love of fair-play.”

Her eyes brightened to his.

“I know what you mean. If I described a girls’ school to you——”

“I should have the feminine world in miniature.”

“Yes. The snobbery, the cult of convention, the little sneaking

jealousies, all the middle class nastiness. I hated school.”

He was silent for some moments, his eyes looking into the distance. Then

he began to speak in his quiet and deliberate way, like a man gazing at

some landscape and trying to describe all that he saw.

“Life, in a neighbourhood like this, seems so shallow—so full of

conventional fussiness. These women know nothing, and yet they must run

about, like so many fashionable French clowns, doing a great deal, and

nothing. I can’t get the hang of it. I suppose I am always hanging my

head over something that has been born, or is growing. One gets right up

against the wonder and mystery of life, the marvellous complex of growth

and colour. It makes one humble, deliberate, rather like a big child.

Perhaps I lose my sense of social proportion, but I can’t fit myself

into these feminine back yards. And some women never forgive one for

getting into the wrong back yard.”

His eyes finished by smiling, half apologetically.

“It seems to me that most women would rather have their men respectable

hypocrites than thinkers.”

She put the tray aside, and brushed some crumbs from her skirt.

“The older sort of woman, perhaps.”

“You mean——”

“Generations of women have never had a fair chance. They had to dance to

the man’s piping. And I think women are naturally conservative, sexually

mistrustful of change—of new ideas.”

“They carry their sex into social questions?”

“Or try to crush it. There is a sort of cry for equality—for the

interplay of personality with personality—without all that——”

He bent forward, leaning his elbows on his knees.

“Have we men been guilty of making so many of our women fussy,

conventional, pitiless fools? Have you ever run up against the crass

prejudice, the merciless, blind, and arrogant self-assurance of the

ordinary orthodox woman?”

She answered slowly, “Yes.”

He seemed to wait for her.

“Well?”

“There is nothing to say.”

“Absolute finality! Oh, I know! Everything outside the little rigid

fence, ununderstandable, unmentionable! No vision, no real sympathy, no

real knowledge. What can one do? I often wonder whether the child will

grow up like that.”

“Lynette?”

He nodded.

She looked at him with that peculiar brightening of the eyes and tender

tremulousness of the mouth.

“Oh, no! You see, she’s—she’s sensitive, and not a little woman in

miniature. I mean, she won’t have the society shell hardened on her

before her soul has done growing.”

His face warmed and brightened.

“By George, how you put things! That’s the whole truth in a nutshell.

Keep growing. Keep the youngsters growing. Smash away the crust of

convention!”

She began to gather up her belongings, and Canterton watched her

cleaning her brushes and putting them back into their case. A subtle

veil of shyness had fallen upon her. She had realised suddenly that he

was no longer an impersonal figure sitting there and dispassionately

discussing certain superficial aspects of life, but a big man who was

lonely, a man who appealed to her with peculiar emphasis, and who talked

to her as to one who could understand.

“I must be off home. I thought I should finish this to-day, but I will

ask you not to look at it till to-morrow.”

“Just as you please.”

She strapped her things together, rose, and turned a sudden and frank

face to his.

“Good-bye. I think Lynette will be ever so safe.”

“I shall do my best to keep her away from the multitude of women.”

Eve walked back through the pine woods to Orchards Corner, thinking of

Canterton and Lynette, and of the woman who was too busy to know

anything about flowers. How Gertrude Canterton had delivered an epigram

upon herself by uttering those few words. She was just a restless

shuttle in the social loom, flying to and fro, weaving conventional and

unbeautiful patterns. And she was married to a man whose very life was

part of the green sap of the earth, whose humility watched and wondered

at the mystery of growth, whose heart was, in some ways, the heart of a

child.

What a sacramental blunder!

She was a little troubled, yet conscious of a tremor of exultation. Was

it nothing to her that she was able to talk to such a man as this. He

was big, massive, yet full of an exquisite tenderness. She had realised

that when she had seen him with the child. He had talked, and half

betrayed himself, yet she, the woman to whom he had talked, could

forgive him that. He was not a man who betrayed things easily. His mouth

and eyes were not those of a lax and self-conscious egoist.

Eve found her mother sitting in the garden, knitting, and Eve’s

conscience smote her a little. Orchards Corner did not pulsate with

excitements, and youth, with all its ardour, had left age to its

knitting needles and wool.

“Have you been lonely, mother?”

“Lonely, my dear? Why, I really never thought about it.”

Eve was always discovering herself wasting her sentiments upon this

placid old lady. Mrs. Carfax did not react as the daughter reacted. She

was vegetative and quite content to sit and contemplate nothing in

particular, like a cat staring at the fire.

“Bring a chair and a book out, dear. These June evenings are so

pleasant.”

Eve followed her mother’s suggestion, knowing very well that she would

not be permitted to read. Mrs. Carfax did not understand being silent,

her conversation resembling a slowly dripping tap that lets a drop fall

every few seconds. She had never troubled to read any book that did not

permit her to lose her place and to pick it up again without missing

anything of importance. She kept a continuous sparrowish twittering,

clicking her knitting needles and sitting stiffly in her chair.

“Have you had a nice day, dear?”

“Quite nice.”

“Did you see Mr. Canterton?”

“Oh, yes, I saw him!”

“He must be a very interesting man.”

“Yes.”

“I should think his wife is such a help to him.”

“Oh?”

“Looking after all the social duties, and improving his position. I

don’t suppose he would have held quite the same position in the

neighbourhood without her. She was a Miss Jerningham, wasn’t she? And,

of course, that must have made a great deal of difference.”

“I suppose it did, mother.”

“Of course it did, my dear. Marriage makes or mars. Mrs. Canterton must

be very popular—so energetic and public spirited, and, you see, one has

to remember that Mr. Canterton is in trade. That has not kept them from

being county people, and, of course, Mrs. Canterton is responsible for

the social position. He must be very proud of his wife.”

“Possibly. I haven’t asked him, mother. I will, if you like.”

Mrs. Carfax was deaf and blind to humour.

“My dear Eve, I sometimes think you are a little stupid.”

“Am I?”

“You don’t seem to grasp things.”

“Perhaps I don’t.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER VIII

LYNETTE TAKES TO PAINTING

Eve Carfax was painting an easel picture of the walled garden when

Lynette arrived with a camp-stool, a drawing book, a box of paints, and

a little green watering-pot full of water.

“I want to make pictures. You’ll teach me, won’t you, Miss Eve?”

“I’ll try to.”

“I’ve got a lovely box of paints. What a nice music stand you’ve got.”

“Some people call it an easel.”

“I ought to have one, oughtn’t I? I’ll ask Mr. Beeby to make one. Mr.

Beeby’s the carpenter. He’s such a funny man, with a round-the-corner

eye.”

Eve took the apprenticeship as seriously as it was offered, and started

Lynette on a group of blue delphiniums, white lilies, and scarlet

poppies. Lynette began with fine audacity, and red, white and blue

splodges sprang up all over the sheet. But they refused to take on any

suggestion of detail, and the more Lynette strove with them, the

smudgier they became.

“Oh, Miss Eve!”

“How are you getting on?”

“I’m not getting on.”

“The colours seem to have got on your fingers.”

“They’re all sticky. I oughtn’t to lick them, ought I?”

“No. Try a rag.”

“I’ll go and wash in the gold-fish basin. The gold-fish won’t mind.”

She ran off into the Japanese garden, reappeared, borrowed one of Eve’s

clean rags, and stood watching the expert’s brush laying on colours.

“You do do it beautifully.”

“Well, you see, I have done it for years.”

Lynette meditated.

“I shall be awful old, then, before I can paint daddy a picture. Can you

draw fairies and animals?”

“Supposing I try?”

“Yes, do. Draw some in my book.”

The easel picture was covered up and abandoned for the time being. The

two stools were placed side by side, and the two heads, the auburn and

the black, came very close together.

“I’ll draw Mr. Puck.”

“Yes, Mr. Puck.”

“Mr. Puck is all round—round head, round eyes, round mouth.”

“What a funny little round tummy you have given him!”

“You see, he’s rather greedy. Now we’ll draw Mr. Bruin.”

“Daddy made such funny rhymes about Mr. Bruin. Give him a top-hat. Isn’t

that sweet? But what’s he doing—sucking his fingers?”

“He has been stealing honey, and he’s licking his paws.”

“Now—now draw something out of the Bible.”

“The Bible?”

“Yes. Draw God making Eve.”

“That would take rather a long time.”

“Well, draw the Serpent Devil, and God in the garden.”

“I’ll draw the serpent.”

“What a lovely Snake Devil! Now, if I’d been God, I’d have got a big

stick and hit the Snake Devil on the head. Wouldn’t it have saved lots

and lots of trouble?”

“It would.”

“Then why didn’t God do it?”

Eve was rescued by Canterton from justifying such theological

incongruities. He found them with their heads together, auburn and black

bent over Lynette’s drawing-book. He stood for a moment or two watching

them, and listening to their intimate prattle. This girl who loved the

colour and the mystery of life as he loved them could be as a child with

Lynette.

“You seem very busy.”

Lynette jumped up.

“Daddy, come and look! Isn’t Miss Eve clever?”

For some reason Eve blushed, and did not turn to look at Canterton.

“Here’s Mr. Puck, and old Bruin, and Titania, and Orson, and the Devil

Serpent. Miss Eve is just splendid at devils.”

“Is she? That’s rather a reflection.”

He stood behind Eve and looked down over her shoulder.

“You have given the serpent a woman’s head.”

She turned her chin but not her eyes.

“Yes.”

“Symbolism?”

“I may have been thinking of something you said the other day.”

A full-throated and good-humoured voice was heard calling,

“Lynette—Lynette!”

“Oh, there’s Miss Vance! It’s the music lesson. I’ll show her the

Serpent Devil. I’ll come back, Miss Eve, presently.”

“Yes, come back, little Beech Leaf.”

They were silent for a few moments after she had gone.

“I like that name—‘Little Beech Leaf.’ Just the colour—in autumn, and

racing about in the wind.”

He came and stood in front of Eve.

“You seem to be getting on famously, you two.”

Her eyes lifted to his.

“She’s delightful! No self-consciousness, no showing off, and such

vitality. And that hair and those elf’s eyes of hers thrill one.”

“And she likes you too, not a little.”

Eve coloured.

“Well, if she does, it’s like a bit of real life flying in through the

narrow window of little worries, and calling one out to play.”

“Little worries?”

“I don’t want to talk about them—the importunities of the larder, and

the holes in the house-linen, and the weekly bills. I am always trying

to teach myself to laugh. And it is very good for one to be among

flowers.”

He glanced at the easel.

“You have covered up the picture. May I see it?”

“It is not quite finished. In twenty minutes——”

“May I come back in twenty minutes?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I like my own flowers to be just at their best when friends are to see

them.”

“Yes, you understand.”

Canterton left her and spent half an hour walking the winding paths of

the Japanese garden, crossing miniature waterways, and gazing into

little pools. There were dwarf trees, dwarf hedges, and a little wooden

temple half smothered with roses in which sat a solemn, black marble

Buddha. This Buddha had caused a mystery and a scandal in the

neighbourhood, for it had been whispered that Canterton was a Buddhist,

and that he had been found on his knees in this little wooden temple. In

the pools, crimson, white, and yellow lilies basked. The rocks were

splashed with colour. Clumps of Japanese iris spread out their flat tops

of purple and white and rose. Fish swam in the pools with a vague

glimmer of silver and gold.

At the end of half an hour Canterton returned to the walled garden, and

found Eve sitting before the picture, her hands lying in her lap. The

poise of her head reminded him of “Beata Beatrix,” but her face had far

more colour, more passionate aliveness, and there was the sex mystery

upon her mouth and in the blackness of her hair.

“Ready?”

She turned to him and smiled.

“Yes, you may look.”

He stood gazing at her work in silence, yet with a profound delight

welling up into his eyes. She watched his face, sensitively, hardly

conscious of the fact that she wanted to please him more than anyone

else in the world.

“Exquisite! By George, you have eyes!”

She laughed softly in a happy, exultant throat.

“I surprised myself. I think it must be Lynette’s magic, and the fairies

in the Wilderness.”

“If you are going to paint like that, you ought to do big things.”

“Oh, I don’t know! There are not many people who really care.”

“That’s true.”

He gazed again at the picture, and then his eyes suddenly sought hers.

“Yes, you can see things—you can feel the colour.”

“Sometimes it is so vivid that it almost hurts.”

They continued to look into each other’s eyes, questioningly,

wonderingly, with something akin to self-realisation. It was as though

they had discovered each other, and were re-discovering each other every

time they met and talked.

Lynette reappeared where the long walk ended in a little courtyard paved

with red bricks, and surrounded by square-cut box hedges. She had

finished her half-hour’s music lesson with Miss Vance, and was out again

like a bird on the wing. Canterton had insisted on limiting her lessons

to three hours a day, though his ideas on a child’s upbringing had

clashed with those of his wife. There had been a vast deal of talking on

Gertrude’s part, and a few laconic answers on the part of her husband.

Now and again, when the issue was serious, Canterton quietly persisted

in having his own way. He never interfered with her multifarious

schemes. Gertrude could fuss here, there, and everywhere, provided she

did not tamper with Lynette’s childhood, or thrust her activities into

the serious life of the great gardens of Fernhill.

“Let’s go and have tea in the Wilderness.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll come, Miss Eve?”

She snuggled up to Eve, and an arm went round her.

“I’m afraid I can’t, dear, to-day.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I must go home and take care of my mother.”

Lynette seemed to regard this as a very quaint excuse.

“How funny! Fancy anyone wanting to take care of my mother. Why, she’s

always wanting to take care of everybody else, ’cept me! I wonder if

they like it? I shouldn’t.”

“Your mother is very kind to everybody, dear.”

“Is she? Then why don’t Sarah, and Ann, and Edith, and Johnson, like

her? I know they don’t, for I’ve heard them talking. They all love you,

daddy.”

Canterton looked at her gravely.

“You mustn’t listen to what everybody says. And never tell tales of

everybody. Come along, old lady, we’ll go down to the Wilderness.”

“I wish you’d come, Miss Eve.”

“I wish I could, but I mustn’t to-day.”

“I do like you so much, really I do.”

Eve drew Lynette close and kissed her with impulsive tenderness. And

Canterton, who saw the love in the kiss, felt that he was standing at

the gateway of mystery.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IX

LIFE AT FERNHILL

The Fernhill breakfast table was very characteristic of the Canterton

_ménage_.

Gertrude Canterton came down ten minutes after the gong had sounded,

bustling into the room with every sign of starting the day in a rush.

Her hair looked messy, with untidy strands at the back of her neck. She

wore any old dress that happened to come to hand, and as often as not

she had a piece of tape hanging out, or a hook and eye unfastened.

Breakfast time was not her hour. She looked yellow, and thin, and

voracious, and her hands began fidgeting at once with the pile of

letters and circulars beside her plate.

Canterton had half finished breakfast. He and his wife were as detached

from each other at table as they were in all their other relationships.

Gertrude was quite incapable of pouring out his tea, and never

remembered whether the sugar was in or not. She always plunged straight

into her chaotic correspondence, slitting the envelopes and wrappers

with a table knife, and littering the whole of her end of the table with

paper. She complained of the number of letters she received, but her

restless egoism took offence if she was not pestered each morning.

Canterton had something to tell her, something that a curious sense of

the fitness of things made him feel that she ought to know. It did not

concern her in the least, but he always classed Gertrude and formalism

together.

“I have arranged with Miss Carfax to paint the illustrations for my

book.”

Gertrude was reading a hospital report, her bacon half cold upon her

plate.

“One moment, James.”

He smiled tolerantly, and passed her his cup by way of protest.

“Anyhow, I should like some more tea.”

“Tea?”

She took the cup, and proceeded to attempt two things at once.

“You might empty the dregs out.”

She humoured his fussiness.

“I have something supremely interesting here.”

“Meanwhile, the teapot is taking liberties. Inside the cup, my dear

Gertrude!”

He had often seen her try to read a letter and fill a cup at the same

moment. Sometimes she emptied the contents of the milk jug into the

teapot, mistaking it for the hot water.

“Dear, dear!”

“It is rather difficult to concentrate on two things at once.”

She passed him the cup standing in a sloppy saucer.

“I take sugar!”

“Do help yourself, James. I never can remember.”

Gertrude finished glancing through the hospital report, and picked up a

second letter.

“I wanted to tell you that I have engaged Miss Carfax to paint the

pictures for my book.”

“What book, James?”

“The book on English gardens.”

“Oh, yes.”

He saw her preparing to get lost in a long letter.

“Miss Carfax has quite extraordinary ability. I think I may find her

useful in other ways. Each year we have more people coming to us,

wanting us to plan their gardens. She could take some of that work and

save me time.”

“That will be very nice for you, James.”

“I need a second brain here, a brain that has an instinct for colour and

effect.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

He sat and gazed at her with grave and half cynical amusement. Such a

piece of news might have seemed of some importance to the average

married woman, touching as it did, the edge of her own empire, and

Canterton, as he watched her wrinkling up her forehead over those sheets

of paper, realised how utterly unessential he had become to this woman

whom he had married. He was not visible on her horizon. She included him

among the familiar fixtures of Fernhill, and was not sufficiently

interested even to suspect that any other woman might come into his

life.

From that time Eve Carfax came daily to Fernhill, and made pictures of

roses and flowering shrubs, rock walls and lily pools, formal borders

and wild corners where art had abetted Nature. Canterton had given her a

list of the subjects he needed, a kind of floral calendar for her

guidance. And from painting the mere portraits of plants and flowers she

was lured on towards a desire to peer into the intricate inner life of

all this world of growth and colour. Canterton lent her books. She began

to read hard in the evenings, and to spend additional hours in the

Fernhill nurseries, wandering about with a catalogue, learning the names

and habits of plants and trees. She was absorbed into the life of the

place. The spirit of thoroughness that dominated everything appealed to

her very forcibly. She, too, wanted to be thorough, to know the

life-stories of the flowers she painted, to be able to say, “Such and

such flowers will give such and such combinations of colours at a

certain particular time.” The great gardens were full of

individualities, moods, whims, aspirations. She began to understand

Canterton’s immense sympathy with everything that grew, for sympathy was

essential in such a world as this. Plants had to be watched, studied,

encouraged, humoured, protected, understood. And the more she learnt,

the more fascinated she became, understanding how a man or a woman might

love all these growing things as one loves children.

She was very happy. And though absorbed into the life of the place, she

kept enough individuality to be able to stand apart and store personal

impressions. Life moved before her as she sat in some corner painting.

She began to know something of Lavender, something of the men, something

of the skill and foresight needed in the production and marketing of

such vital merchandise.

One of the first things that Eve discovered was the extent of

Canterton’s popularity. He was a big man with big views. He treated his

men generously, but never overlooked either impertinence or slackness.

“Mr. Canterton don’t stand no nonsense,” was a saying that rallied the

men who uttered it. They were proud of him, proud of the great

nurseries, proud of his work. The Fernhill men had their cricket field,

their club house, their own gardens. Canterton financed these concerns,

but left the management to the men’s committee. He never interfered with

them outside their working hours, never preached, never condescended.

The respect they bore him was phenomenal. He was a big figure in all

their lives—a figure that counted.

As for Gertrude Canterton, they detested her wholeheartedly. Her

unpopularity was easily explained, for her whole idea of philanthropy

was of an attitude of restless intrusion into the private lives of the

people. She visited, harangued, scolded, and was mortally disliked for

her multifarious interferences. The mothers were lectured on the feeding

of infants, and the cooking of food. She entered cottages as though she

were some sort of State inspector, and behaved as though she always

remembered the fact that the cottages belonged to her husband.

The men called her “Mother Fussabout,” and by the women she was referred

to as “She.” They had agreed to recognise the fact that Gertrude

Canterton had a very busy bee in her bonnet, and, with all the mordant

shrewdness of their class, suffered her importunities and never gave a

second thought to any of her suggestions.

Visitors came almost daily to the Fernhill nurseries, and were taken

round by Lavender, the foreman, or by Canterton himself. Sometimes they

passed Eve while she was painting, and she could tell by the expression

of Canterton’s eyes whether he was dealing with rich dilettanti or with

people who knew. Humour was to be got out of some of these tours of

inspection, and Canterton would come back smiling over the

“buy-the-whole-place” attitude of some rich and indiscriminate fool.

“I have just had a gentleman who thought the Japanese garden was for

sale.”

“Oh!”

“A Canadian who has made a fortune in land and wood-pulp and has bought

a place over here. When I showed him the Japanese garden, he said, ‘I’ll

take this in the lump, stones, and fish, and trees, and the

summer-house, and the little joss house. See?’”

“Was he very disappointed when you told him?”

“Oh, no. He asked me to name a price for fixing him up with an identical

garden, including a god. ‘Seems sort of original to have a god in your

garden.’ I said we were too busy for the moment, and that gods are

expensive, and are not to be caught every day of the week.”

They laughed, looking into each other’s eyes.

“What queer things humans are!”

“A madman turned up here once whose mania was water lilies. He had an

idea he was a lotus eater, and he stripped and got into the big lily

tank and made a terrible mess of the flowers. It took us an hour to

catch him and get him out, and we had him on our hands for a week, till

his people tracked him down and took him home. He seemed quite sane on

most things, and was a fine botanist, but he had this one mad idea.”

“Perhaps it was some enthusiasm gone wrong. One can sympathise with some

kinds of madmen.”

“When one looks at things dispassionately one might be tempted to swear

that half our civilisation is absolutely mad.”

He stood beside her for a while and watched her painting.

“You are getting quite a lot of technical knowledge.”

“I want to be thorough. And Fernhill has aroused an extraordinary

curiosity in me. I want to know the why and the wherefore.”

He found that it gave him peculiar satisfaction to watch her fingers

moving the brush. She was doing her own work and his at the same moment,

and the suggestion of comradeship delighted him.

“It wouldn’t do you any harm to go through a course of practical

gardening. It all helps. Gives one the real grip on a subject.”

“I should like it.”

“I could arrange it for you with Lavender. It has struck me, too, that

if you care to keep to this sort of work——”

She looked up at him with eyes that asked, “Why not?”

“You may want to do bigger things.”

“But if the present work fills one’s life?”

“I could find you plenty of chances for self-expression. Every year I

have more people coming to me wanting plans for gardens, wild gardens,

rose gardens, formal gardens. I could start a new profession in design

alone. I am pretty sure you could paint people fine, prophetic pictures,

and then turn your pictures into the reality.”

“Could I?”

She flushed, and he noticed it, and the soft red tinge that spread to

her throat.

“Of course you could, with your colour sense and your vision. You only

want the technical knowledge.”

“I am trying to get that.”

“Do you know, it would interest me immensely, as an artist, to see what

you would create.”

“You seem to believe——”

“I believe you would have very fine visions which it would be delightful

for me to plant into life.”

She turned and looked at him with something in her eyes that he had

never seen before.

“I believe I could do it, if you believe I can do it.”

He had a sudden desire to stretch out his hand and to touch her hair,

even as he touched Lynette’s hair, with a certain playful tenderness.

Meanwhile Eve’s friendship with Lynette became a thing of unforeseen

responsibilities. Lynette would come running out into the gardens

directly her lessons were over, search for Eve, and seat herself at her

feet with all the devotedness of childhood that sets up idols. Sometimes

Lynette brought a story-book or her paint-box, but these were mere

superfluities. It was the companionship that mattered.

It appeared that Lynette was getting behind Miss Vance and her Scripture

lessons, and she began to ask Eve a child’s questions—questions that

she found it impossible to answer. Miss Vance, who was a solid and

orthodox young woman, had no difficulty at all in providing Lynette with

a proper explanation of everything. But Lynette had inherited her

father’s intense and sensitive curiosity, and she was beginning to walk

behind Miss Vance’s machine-made figures of finality and to discover

phenomena that Miss Vance’s dogmas did not explain.

“Who made the Bible, Miss Eve?”

“A number of wise and good men, dear.”

“Miss Vance says God made it.”

“Well, He made everything, so I suppose Miss Vance is right.”

“Has Miss Vance ever seen God?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But she seems to know all about Him, just as though she’d met Him at a

party. Have you seen Him?”

“No.”

“Has anyone?”

“No one whom I know.”

“Then how do we know that God is God?”

“Because He must be God. Because everything He has made is so

wonderful.”

“But Miss Vance seems to know all about Him, and when I ask her how she

knows she gets stiff and funny, and says there are things that little

girls can’t understand. Isn’t God very fond of children, Miss Eve,

dear?”

“Very.”

“Doesn’t it seem funny, then, that He shouldn’t come and play with me as

daddy does?”

“God’s ever so busy.”

“Is He busy like mother?”

“No; not quite like that.”

All this was rather a breathless business, and Eve felt as though she

were up before the Inquisition, and likely to be found out. Lynette’s

eyes were always watching her face.

“Oh, Miss Eve, where do all the little children come from?”

“God sends them, dear.”

“Bogey, our cat, had kittens this morning. I found them all snuggling up

in the cupboard under the back stairs. Isn’t it funny! Yesterday there

weren’t any kittens, and this morning there are five.”

“That’s how lots of things happen, dear. Everything is wonderful. You

see a piece of bare ground, and two or three weeks afterwards it is full

of little green plants.”

“Do kittens come like that?”

“In a way.”

“Did they grow out of the cupboard floor? They couldn’t have done, Miss

Eve.”

“They grew out of little eggs, dear, like chickens out of their eggs.”

“But I’ve never seen kittens’ eggs, have you?”

“No, little Beech Leaf, I haven’t.”

Eve felt troubled and perplexed, and she appealed to Canterton.

“What is one to tell her? It’s so difficult. I wouldn’t hurt her for

worlds. I remember I had all the old solemn make-believes given me, and

when I found them out it hurt, rather badly.”

He smiled with his grave eyes—eyes that saw so much.

“Do you believe in anything?”

“You mean——”

“Do you think with the nineteenth-century materialists that life is a

mere piece of mechanism?”

“Oh, no.”

“Something or someone is responsible. We have just as much right to

postulate God as we postulate ether.”

“Yes.”

“Could you conscientiously swear that you don’t believe in some sort of

prime cause?”

“Of course I couldn’t.”

“Well, there you are. We are not so very illogical when we use the word

God.”

She looked into the distance, thinking.

“After all, life’s a marvellous fairy tale.”

“Exactly.”

“And sometimes we get glimmerings of the ‘how,’ if we do not know the

‘why.’”

“Let a child go on believing in fairy tales—let us all keep our wonder

and our humility. All that should happen is that our wonder and our

humility should widen and deepen as we grow older, and fairy tales

become more fascinating. I must ask Miss Vance to put all that Old

Testament stuff of hers on the shelf. When you don’t know, tell the

child so. But tell her there is someone who does know.”

Her eyes lifted to his.

“Thank you, so much.”

“We can only use words, even when we feel that we could get beyond

words. Music goes farther, and colour, and growth. I don’t think you

will ever hurt the child if you are the child with her.”

“Yes, I understand.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER X

TEA IN THE WILDERNESS

Canterton needed pictures of the Italian gardens at Latimer Abbey, and

since he had received permission to show the Latimer gardens in his

book, it devolved upon Eve Carfax to make a pilgrimage to the place.

Latimer, a small country town, lay some seventy miles away, and

Canterton, who knew the place, told Eve to write to the George Hotel and

book a room there. The work might take her a week, or more, if the

weather proved cloudy. Canterton wanted the gardens painted in full

sunlight, with all the shadows sharp, and the colours at their

brightest.

The day before Eve’s journey to Latimer was a “Wilderness day.” Lynette

had made Eve promise to have a camp tea with her in the dell among the

larches.

“Daddy says you like sweet cakes.”

“Daddy’s a tease.”

“I asked Sarah, and she’s made a lot of lovely little cakes, some with

chocolate ice, and some with jam and cream inside.”

“I shan’t come just for the cakes, dear.”

“No!”

“But because of you and your Wilderness.”

“Yes, but you will like the cakes, won’t you? Sarah and me’s taken such

a lot of trouble.”

“You dear fairy godmother! I want to kiss you, hard!”

They started out together about four o’clock, Eve carrying the

tea-basket, and Lynette a red cushion and an old green rug. The heath

garden on the hill-side above the larch wood was one great wave of

purple, rose, and white, deep colours into which vision seemed to sink

with a sense of utter satisfaction. The bracken had grown three or four

feet high along the edge of the larch wood, so that Lynette’s glowing

head disappeared into a narrow green lane. It was very still and solemn

and mysterious in among the trees, with the scattered blue of the sky

showing through and the sunlight stealing in here and there and making

patterns upon the ground.

They were busy boiling the spirit kettle when Canterton appeared at the

end of the path through the larch wood.

“Queen Mab, Queen Mab, may I come down into your grotto?”

Lynette waved to him solemnly with a hazel wand.

“Come along down, Daddy Bruin.”

He climbed down into the dell laughing.

“That is a nice title to give a parent. I might eat you both up.”

“I’m sure you’d find Miss Eve very nice to eat.”

“Dear child!”

“How goes the kettle?”

“We are nearly ready. Here’s the rug to sit on, daddy. Miss Eve’s going

to have the red cushion.”

“The cushion of state. What about the cakes?”

“Sarah’s made such lovely ones.”

Eve’s eyes met Canterton’s.

“It was ungenerous of you to betray me.”

“Not at all. It was sheer tact on my part.”

Tea was a merry meal, with both Lynette and her father dilating on the

particular excellences of the different cakes, and insisting that she

would be pleasing Sarah by allowing herself to be greedy. In the

fullness of time Canterton lit a pipe, and Lynette, sitting next him on

the green rug with her arms about her knees, grew talkative and

problematical.

“Isn’t it funny how God sends people children?”

“Most strange.”

“What did you say, daddy, when God sent you me?”

“‘Here’s another horrible responsibility!’”

“Daddy, you didn’t! But wasn’t it funny that I was sent to mother?”

“Lynette, old lady——”

“Now, why wasn’t I sent to Miss Eve?”

Canterton reached out and lifted her into his lap.

“Bruin tickles little girls who ask too many questions.”

In the midst of her struggles and her laughter his eyes met Eve’s, and

found them steady and unabashed, yet full of a vivid self-consciousness.

They glimmered when they met his, sending a mesmeric thrill through him,

and for the moment he could not look away. It was as though the child

had flashed a mysterious light into the eyes of both, and uttered some

deep nature cry that had startled them in the midst of their

playfulness. Canterton’s eyes seemed to become bluer, and more intent,

and Eve’s mouth had a tremulous tenderness.

Lynette was a young lady of dignity, and Canterton was reproved.

“Look how you’ve rumpled my dress, daddy.”

“I apologise. Supposing we go for a ramble, and call for our baggage on

the way back.”

Both Eve and Canterton rose, and Lynette came between them, holding each

by the hand. They wandered through the Wilderness and down by the

pollard pool, where the swallows skimmed the still water. Lynette was

mute, sharing the half dreamy solemnity of her elders. The playfulness

was out of the day, and even the child felt serious.

It was past six when they returned to the garden, and Lynette, whose

supper hour was due, hugged Eve hard as she said good-bye.

“You will write to me, Miss Eve, dear.”

“Yes, I’ll write.”

She found that Canterton had not come to the point of saying good-bye.

He walked on with her down one of the nursery roads between groups of

rare conifers.

“I am going to walk to Orchards Corner. Do you mind?”

“No.”

“I haven’t met your mother yet. I don’t know whether it is the proper

time for a formal call.”

“Mother will be delighted. She is always delighted.”

“A happy temperament.”

“Very.”

They chose the way through the fir woods, and talked of the Latimer

Abbey gardens, and of the particular atmosphere Canterton wanted her to

produce for him.

“Oh, you’ll get it! You’ll get the very thing.”

“What an optimist you are.”

“Perhaps I am more of a mystic.”

The mystery of the woods seemed to quicken that other mysterious

self-consciousness that had been stirred by the child, Lynette. They

were in tune, strung to vibrate to the same subtle, and plaintive notes.

As they walked, their intimate selves kept touching involuntarily and

starting apart, innocent of foreseeing how rich a thrill would come from

the contact. Their eyes questioned each other behind a veil of

incredulity and wonder.

“You will write to Lynette?”

“Oh, yes!”

There was a naive and half plaintive uplift of her voice towards the

“yes.”

“Little Beech Leaf is a warm-hearted fairy. Do you know, I am very glad

of this comradeship, for her sake.”

“You make me feel very humble.”

“No. You are just the kind of elder sister that she needs.”

He had almost said mother, and the word mother was in Eve’s heart.

“Do you realise that I am learning from Lynette?”

“I don’t doubt it. One ought to learn deep things from a child.”

They reached the lane leading to Orchards Corner, and on coming to the

white fence sighted Mrs. Carfax sitting in the garden, with the

inevitable knitting in her lap. Canterton was taken in and introduced.

“Please don’t get up.”

Mrs. Carfax was coy and a little fluttered.

“Do sit down, Mr. Canterton. I feel that I must thank you for your great

kindness to my daughter. I am sure that both she and I are very

grateful.”

“So am I, Mrs. Carfax.”

“Indeed, Mr. Canterton?”

“For the very fine work your daughter is going to do for me. I was in

doubt as to who to get, when suddenly she appeared.”

Mrs. Carfax bowed in her chair like some elderly queen driving through

London.

“I am so glad you like Eve’s paintings. I think she paints quite nicely.

Of course she studied a great deal at the art schools, and she would

have exhibited, only we could not afford all that we should have liked

to afford. It is really most fortunate for Eve that you should be so

pleased with her painting.”

Her placid sing-song voice, with its underlining of the “sos” the

“quites,” and the “mosts,” made Canterton think of certain maiden aunts

who had tried to spoil him when he was a child. Mother and daughter were

in strange contrast. The one all fire, sensitive aliveness, curiosity,

colour; the other flat, sweetly foolish, toneless, apathetic.

Canterton stayed chatting with Mrs. Carfax for twenty minutes, while Eve

sat by in silence, watching them with an air of dispassionate curiosity.

Mrs. Carfax was just a child, and Canterton was at his best with

children. Eve found herself thinking how much bigger, gentler, and more

patient his nature was than hers. Things that irritated her, made him

smile. He was one of the few masterful men who could bear with amiable

stupidity.

When he had said good-bye to her mother, Eve went with him to the gate.

“Good-bye. Enjoy yourself. And when you write to Lynette, send me a word

or two.”

He held her hand for two or three seconds, and his eyes looked into

hers.

“You will be delighted with Latimer.”

“Yes. And I will try to bring you back what you want.”

“I have no doubts as to that.”

She stood for a moment at the gate, watching his broad figure disappear

between the green hedgerows of the lane. A part of herself seemed to go

with him, an outflowing of something that came from the deeps of her

womanhood.

“Eve, dear, what a nice man Mr. Canterton is.”

“Nice” was the principal adjective in Mrs. Carfax’s vocabulary.

“Yes.”

“So good looking, and such nice manners. You would never have thought

that he——”

“Was in trade?”

“Not quite that, dear, but selling things for money.”

“Of course, he might give them away. I suppose his social position would

be greatly improved!”

“I don’t think that would be quite feasible, dear. Really, sometimes,

you are almost simple.”

Canterton was walking through the woods, head bent, his eyes curiously

solemn.

“What I want! She will bring me back what I want. What is it that I

want?”

He came suddenly from the shadows of the woods into the full splendour

of the evening light upon blue hills and dim green valleys. He stopped

dead, eyes at gaze, a spasm of vague emotion rising in his throat. This

sun-washed landscape appeared like a mysterious projection of something

that lay deep down in his consciousness. What was it he wanted? A vital

atmosphere such as this—comradeship, sympathy, passionate

understanding.

* * * * *

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.

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.”

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 little _dame 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’s _lararium_, 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.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIV

MRS. CARFAX FINISHES HER KNITTING

It was a curious coincidence that Mrs. Carfax should have come to the

end of her white wool that night, put her pins aside and left her work

unfinished.

It was the last time that Eve heard the familiar clicking of the ivory

pins, for Mrs. Carfax died quietly in her sleep, and was found with a

placid smile on her face, her white hair neatly parted into two plaits,

and her hands lying folded on the coverlet. She had died like a child,

dreaming, and smiling in the midst of her dreams.

For the moment Eve was incredulous as she bent over the bed, for her

mother’s face looked so fresh and tranquil. Then the truth came to her,

and she stood there, shocked and inarticulate, trying to realise what

had happened. Sudden and poignant memories rose up and stung her. She

remembered that she had almost despised the little old lady who lay

there so quietly, and now, in death, she saw her as the child, a

pathetic creature who had never escaped from a futile childishness, who

had never known the greater anguish and the greater joys of those whose

souls drink of the deep waters. A great pity swept Eve away, a choking

compassion, an inarticulate remorse. She was conscious of sudden

loneliness. All the memories of long ago, evoked by the dead face, rose

up and wounded her. She knelt down, hid her face against the pillow,

uttering in her heart that most human cry of “Mother.”

Canterton was strangely restless that morning. Up at six, he wandered

about the gardens and nurseries, and Lavender, who came to him about

some special work that had to be done in one of the glasshouses, found

him absent and vague. The life of the day seemed in abeyance, remaining

poised at yesterday, when the moon hung over the black ridge of the fir

woods by Orchards Corner. Daylight had come, but Canterton was still in

the moonlight, sitting in that chair on the dew-wet grass, dreaming, to

be startled again by Eve’s sudden presence. He wondered what she had

thought, whether she had suspected that he had been imagining her his

wife, Orchards Corner their home, and he, the man, sitting there in the

moonlight, while the woman he loved let down her dark hair before the

mirror in their room.

If Lavender could not wake James Canterton, breakfast and Gertrude

Canterton did. There were half a dozen of Gertrude’s friends staying in

the house, serious women who had travelled with batches of pamphlets and

earnest-minded magazines, and who could talk sociology even at

breakfast. Canterton came in early and found Gertrude scribbling letters

at the bureau in the window. None of her friends were down yet, and a

maid was lighting the spirit lamps under the egg-boiler and the chafing

dishes.

“Oh, James!”

“Yes.”

She was sitting in a glare of light, and Canterton was struck by the

thinness of her neck, and the way her chin poked forward. She had done

her hair in a hurry, and it looked streaky and meagre, and the colour of

wet sand. And this sunny morning the physical repulsion she inspired in

him came as a shock to his finer nature. It might be ungenerous, and

even shameful, but he could not help considering her utter lack of

feminine delicacy, and the hard, gaunt outlines of her face and figure.

“I want you to take Mrs. Grigg Batsby round the nurseries this morning.

She is such an enthusiast.”

“I’ll see what time I have.”

“Do try to find time to oblige me sometimes. I don’t think you know how

much work you make for me, especially when you find some eccentric way

of insulting everybody at once.”

“What do you mean, Gertrude?”

The maid had left the room, and Gertrude Canterton half turned in her

chair. Her shoulders were wriggling, and she kept fidgeting with her

pen, rolling it to and fro between her thumb and forefinger.

“Can’t you imagine what people say when you put up wire fences, and have

the gates locked on the day of our garden party?”

“Do you think that Whiteley would hold a party in his business

premises?”

“Oh, don’t be so absurd! I wonder why people come here.”

“I really don’t know. Certainly not to look at the flowers.”

“Then why be so eccentrically offensive?”

“Because there are always a certain number of enthusiastic ladies who

like to get something for nothing. I believe it is a feminine

characteristic.”

Mrs. Grigg Batsby came sailing into the room, gracious as a great

galleon freighted with the riches of Peru. She was an extremely wealthy

person, and her consciousness of wealth shone like a golden lustre, a

holy effulgence that penetrated into every corner. Her money had made

her important, and filled her with a sort of after-dinner

self-satisfaction. She issued commands with playful regality, ordered

the clergy hither and thither, and had a half humorous and half stately

way of referring to any male thing as “It.”

“My dear Mrs. Batsby, I have just asked James to take you round this

morning.”

The lady rustled and beamed.

“And is ‘It’ agreeable? I have always heard that ‘Its’ time is so

precious.”

“James will be delighted.”

“Obliging thing.”

Canterton was reserved and a little stiff.

“I shall be ready at eleven. I can give you an hour, Mrs. Batsby.”

“‘It’ is really a humorist, Mrs. Canterton. That barbed wire! I don’t

think I ever came across anything so delightfully original.”

Gertrude frowned and screwed her shoulders.

“I cannot see the humour.”

“But I think Mrs. Batsby does. I have a good many original plants on my

premises.”

“Oh, you wicked, witty thing! And original sin?”

“Yes, it is still rather prevalent.”

There was no queen’s progress through the Fernhill grounds for Mrs.

Grigg Batsby that morning, for by ten o’clock her very existence had

been forgotten, and she was left reading the _Athenæum_, and wondering,

with hauteur, what had become of the treacherous “It.” Women like Mrs.

Grigg Batsby have a way of exacting as a right what the average man

would not presume to ask as a favour. That they should happen to notice

anything is in itself a sufficient honour conferred upon the recipient,

who becomes a debtor to them in service.

Canterton had drifted in search of Eve, had failed to find her, and was

posing himself with various questions, when one of the under-gardeners

brought him a letter. It had taken the man twenty minutes of hide and

seek to trace Canterton’s restless wanderings.

“Just come from Orchards Corner, sir. The young lady brought it.”

“Miss Carfax?”

“No, sir, the young lady.”

“I see. All right, Gibbs.”

Canterton opened the letter, and stood reading it in the shade of a row

of cypresses.

“Dear Mr. Canterton,—Mother died in the night. She must have

died in her sleep. I always knew it might happen, but I never

suspected that it would happen so suddenly. It has numbed me,

and yet made me think.

“I wanted you to know why I did not come to-day.

“EVE CARFAX.”

Canterton stood stock still, his eyes staring at Eve’s letter. He was

moved, strongly moved, as all big-hearted people must be by the sudden

and capricious presence of Death. The little white-haired, chattering

figure had seemed so much alive the night before, so far from the dark

waters, with her child’s face and busy hands. And Eve had written to

tell him the news, to warn him why she had not come to Fernhill. This

letter of hers—it asked nothing, and yet its very muteness craved more

than any words could ask. To Canterton it was full of many subtle and

intimate messages. She wanted him to know why she had stayed away,

though she did not ask him to come to her. She had let him know that she

was stricken, and that was all.

He put the letter in his pocket, forgot about Mrs. Grigg Batsby, and

started for Orchards Corner.

All the blinds were down, and the little house had a blank and puzzled

look. The chair that he had used the previous night still stood in the

middle of one of the lawns. Canterton opened and closed the gate

noiselessly, and walked up the gravel path.

Eve herself came to the door. He had had a feeling that she had expected

him to come to her, and when he looked into her eyes he knew that he had

not been wrong. She was pale, and quite calm, though her eyes looked

darker and more mysterious.

“Will you come in?”

There was no hesitation, no formalism. Each seemed to be obeying an

inevitable impulse.

Canterton remained silent. Eve opened the door of the drawing-room, and

he followed her. She sat down on one of the green plush chairs, and the

dim light seemed part of the silence.

“I thought you might come.”

“Of course I came.”

He put his hat on the round table. Eve glanced round the room at the

pictures, the furniture and the ornaments.

“I have been sitting here in this room. I came in here because I

realised what a ghastly prig I have been at times. I wanted to be

hurt—and hurt badly. Isn’t it wonderful how death strips off one’s

conceit?”

He leant forward with his elbows on his knees, a listener—one who

understood.

“How I used to hate these things, and to sneer at them. I called them

Victorian, and felt superior. Tell me, what right have we ever to feel

superior?”

“We are all guilty of that.”

“Guilty of despising other colour schemes that don’t tone with ours. I

suppose each generation is more or less colour-blind in its sympathies.

Why, she was just a child—just a child that had never grown up, and

these were her toys. Oh, I understand it now! I understood it when I

looked at her child’s face as she lay dead. The curse of being one of

the clever little people!”

“You are not that.”

She lay back and covered her eyes with her hands. It was a still grief,

the grief of a pride that humbles itself and makes no mere empty outcry.

Canterton watched her, still as a statue. But his eyes and mouth were

alive, and within him the warm blood seemed to mount and tremble in his

throat.

“I think she was quite happy.”

“Did I do very much?”

“She was very proud of you in her way. I could see that.”

“Don’t!”

“You are making things too deep, too difficult. You say, ‘She was just a

child.’”

Her hands dropped from her face.

“Yes.”

“Your moods passed over her and were not noticed. Some people are not

conscious of clouds.”

She mused.

“Yes, but that does not make me feel less guilty.”

“It might make you feel less bitter regret.”

Canterton sat back in his chair, spreading his shoulders and drawing in

a deep breath.

“Have you wired to your relatives?”

“They don’t exist. Father was an only son, and mother had only one

brother. He is a doctor in a colliery town, and one of the unlucky

mortals. It would puzzle him to find the train fare. He married when he

was fifty, and has about seven children.”

“Very well, you will let me do everything.”

He did not speak as a petitioner, but as a man who was calmly claiming a

most natural right.

She glanced at him, and his eyes dominated hers.

“But—I can’t bother you——”

“I can arrange everything. If you will tell me what you wish—what your

mother would have wished.”

“It will have to be very quiet. You see, we——”

“I understand all that. Would you like Lynette to come and see you?”

“Yes, oh, yes! I should like Lynette to come.”

He pondered a moment, staring at the carpet with its crude patterning of

colours, and when again he began to speak he did not raise his head to

look at her.

“Of course, this will make no difference to the future?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me exactly.”

“All mother’s income dies with her. I have the furniture, and a little

money in hand.”

“Would you live on here, or take rooms?”

She hesitated.

“Perhaps.”

His eyes rose to meet hers.

“I want you to stay. We can work together. I’m not inventing work for

you. It’s there. It has been there for the last two or three years.”

He spoke very gently, and yet some raw surface within her was touched

and hurt. Her mouth quivered with sensitive cynicism.

“A woman, when she is alone, must get money—somehow. It is bitter bread

that many of us have to eat.”

“I did not mean to make it taste bitter.”

Her mouth and eyes softened instantly.

“You? No. You are different. And that——”

“Well?”

“And that makes it more difficult, in a way.”

“Why should it?”

“It does.”

She bent her head as though trying to hide her face from him. He did not

seem to be conscious of what was happening, and of what might happen.

His eyes were clear and far sighted, but they missed the foreground and

its complex details.

He left his chair and came and stood by her.

“Eve.”

“Yes?”

“Did I say one word about money? Well, let’s have it out, and the dross

done with. I ask you to be my illustrator, colour expert, garden

artist—call it what you like. The work is there, more work than you can

manage. I offer you five hundred a year.”

She still hid her face from him.

“That is preposterous. But it is like you in its generosity. But I——”

“Think. You and I see things as no two other people see them. It is an

age of gardens, and I am being more and more pestered by people who want

to buy plants and ideas. Why, you and I could create some of the finest

things in colour. Think of it. You only want a little more technical

knowledge. The genius is there.”

She appealed to him with a gesture of the hand.

“Stop, let me think!”

He walked to the window and waited.

Presently Eve spoke, and the strange softness of her voice made him

wonder.

“Yes, it might be possible.”

“Then you accept?”

“Yes, I accept.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER XV

LYNETTE PUTS ON BLACK

Lynette had a little black velvet frock that had been put away in a

drawer, because it was somewhat tarnished and out of fashion. Moreover,

Lynette had grown three or four inches since the black frock had been

made, and even a Queen of the Fairies’ legs will lengthen. Over this

dress rose a contest in which Lynette engaged both her mother and Miss

Vance, and showed some of that tranquil and wise obstinacy that

characterised her father.

Lynette appeared for lessons, clad in this same black frock, and Miss

Vance, being a matter-of-fact and good-naturedly dictatorial adult,

proceeded to raise objections.

“Lynette, what have you been doing?”

“What do you mean, Vancie?”

“Miss Vance, if you please. Who told you to put on that dress?”

“I told myself to do it.”

“Then please tell yourself to go and change it. It is not at all

suitable.”

“But it is.”

“My dear, don’t argue! You are quite two years too old for that frock.”

“Mary can let it out.”

“Go and change it!”

Lynette had her moments of dignity, and this was an occasion for

stateliness.

“Vancie, don’t dare to speak to me like that! I’m in mourning.”

“In mourning! For whom?”

“Miss Eve’s mother, of course! Miss Eve is in mourning, and I know

father puts on a black tie.”

“My dear, don’t be——”

“Vancie, I am going to wear this frock. You’re not a great friend of

Miss Eve’s, like me. She’s the dearest friend in the world.”

The governess felt that the dress was eccentric, and yet that Lynette

had a sentimental conviction that carried her cause through. Miss Vance

happened to be in a tactless mood, and appealed to Gertrude Canterton,

and to Gertrude the idea of Lynette going into mourning because a

certain young woman had lost her mother was whimsical and absurd.

“Lynette, go and change that dress immediately!”

It was then that Canterton came out in his child. She was serenely and

demurely determined.

“I must wear it, mother!”

“You will do nothing of the kind. The skirt is perfectly indecent.”

“Why?”

“Your—your knees are showing.”

“I am not ashamed of my knees.”

“Lynette, don’t argue! Understand that I will be obeyed. Go and change

that dress!”

“I am very sorry, mother, but I can’t. You don’t know what great deep

friends me and Miss Eve are.”

Neither ridicule nor fussy attempts at intimidation had any effect.

There was something in the child’s eyes and manner that forbade physical

coercion. She was sure in her sentiment, standing out for some ideal of

sympathy that was fine and convincing to herself. Lynette appealed to

her father, and to her father the case was carried.

He sided with Lynette, but not in Lynette’s hearing.

“What on earth is there to object to, Gertrude?”

“It is quite absurd, the child wanting to go into mourning because old

Mrs. Carfax is dead.”

“Children have a way of being absurd, and very often the gods are absurd

with them. The child shall have a black frock.”

Gertrude twitched her shoulders, and refused to be responsible for

Canterton’s methods.

“You are spoiling that child. I know it is quite useless for me to

suggest anything.”

“You are not much of a child yourself, Gertrude. I am. That makes a

difference.”

Canterton had his car out that afternoon and drove twenty miles to

Reading, with Lynette on the seat beside him. He knew, better than any

woman, what suited the child, so Lynette had a black frock and a little

Quaker bonnet to wear for that other child, Mrs. Carfax, who was dead.

Within a week Eve was back at Fernhill, painting masses of hollyhocks

and sweet peas, with giant sunflowers and purple-spiked buddlea for a

background. Perhaps nothing had touched her more than Lynette’s black

frock and the impulsive sympathy that had suggested it.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Eve, dear. I do love you ever so much more now.”

And Eve had never been nearer tears, with Lynette snuggling up to her,

one arm round her neck, and her warm breath on Eve’s cheek.

It was holiday time, and Miss Vance’s authority was reduced to the

supervision of country walks, and the giving of a daily piano lesson.

Punch, the terrier, accompanied them on their walks, and Miss Vance

hated the dog, feeling herself responsible for Punch’s improprieties.

Her month’s holiday began in a few days, and Lynette had her eyes on

five weeks of unblemished liberty.

“Vancie goes on Friday. Isn’t it grand!”

“But you ought not to be so glad, dear.”

“But I am glad. Aren’t you? I can paint all day like you, and we’ll have

picnics, and make daddy take us on the river.”

“Of course, I’m glad you’ll be with me.”

“Vancie can’t play. You see she’s so very old and grown up.”

“I don’t think she is much older than I am.”

“Oh, Miss Eve, years and years! Besides, you’re so beautiful.”

“You wicked flatterer.”

“I’m not a flatterer. I’m sure daddy thinks so. I know he does.”

Eve felt herself flushing, and her heart misgave her, for the lips of

the child made her thrill and feel afraid. She had accepted the new life

tentatively yet recklessly, trying to shut her eyes to the possible

complexities, and to carry things forward with a candour that could not

be questioned. She was painting the full opulence of one of the August

borders, with Lynette beside her on a stool, Lynette who pretended to

dabble in colours, but loved to make Eve talk. It was a day without

wind; all sunlight, blue sky, and white clouds, with haze on the hills,

and somnolence everywhere. Yet Eve was haunted by the sound of the

splashing of the water in the Latimer gardens, a seductive but restless

memory that penetrated all her thoughts.

“Wasn’t it funny mother not wanting me to wear a black frock?”

“I don’t know, dear.”

“But why should she mind?”

Why, indeed? Eve found herself visualising Gertrude Canterton’s sallow

face and thin, jerky figure, and she felt chilled and discouraged. What

manner of woman was this Gertrude Canterton, this champion of charities,

this eager egoist, this smiler of empty smiles? Had she the eyes and

ears, the jealous instincts of a woman? Did she so much as realise that

the place she called her home hid the dust and dry bones of something

that should have been sacred? Was she, in truth, so blindly

self-sufficient, so smothered in the little vanities of little public

affairs that she had forgotten she was a wife? If so, what an impossible

woman, and what a menace to herself and others.

“Mother doesn’t care for flowers, Miss Eve.”

“Oh, how do you know?”

“I’ve never seen her pick any. And she can’t arrange a vase. I’ve seen

her try.”

“But she may be fond of them, all the same.”

“Then why doesn’t she come out here with daddy?”

“Perhaps she has too much to do.”

“But I never see her doing anything, like other people. I mean mending

things, and all that. She’s always going out, or writing letters, or

having headaches.”

Eve had a growing horror of letting Lynette discuss her mother. The

child was innocent enough, but it seemed treacherous and unfair to

listen, and made Eve despise herself, and shiver with a sense of

nearness to those sexual problems that are covered with the merest crust

of make-believe.

“Oh, here’s Vancie!”

Eve glanced up and saw the governess approaching along the brick-paved

path. Miss Vance was a matter-of-fact young person, but she was a woman,

with some of the more feminine attributes a little exaggerated. She was

suburban, orthodox as to her beliefs, absolutely without imagination,

yet healthily inquisitive.

“Music, Lynette! What a nice bit of colour to paint, Miss Carfax.”

“Quite Oriental, isn’t it?”

These two women looked at each other, and Eve did not miss the apprizing

and critical interest in Miss Vance’s eyes. She was a little casual

towards Eve, with a casualness that suggested tacit disapproval. The

surface was hard, the poise unsympathetic.

“You ought to have good weather for your holiday. Where are you going?”

“Brighton!”

“Oh, Brighton!”

“We always go to Brighton!”

“A habit?”

“We are a family of habits.”

She held out a large and rather red hand to Lynette, but Lynette was an

individualist. She, too, understood that Miss Vance was a habit, a

time-table, a schedule, anything but a playmate. They went off together,

Miss Vance with a last apprizing glance at Eve.

One woman’s attitude may have a very subtle influence on the mood of

another. Most women understand each other instinctively, perhaps through

some ancient sex-language that existed long before sounds became words.

Eve knew quite well what had been exercising Miss Vance’s mind, that she

had been handling other people’s intimacies, calculating their

significance, and their possible developments. And Eve felt angry,

rebellious, scornful, troubled. As a woman she resented the

suggestiveness of this other woman’s curiosity.

Ten minutes later, when Canterton strolled into the walled garden, he

found Eve sitting idle, her hands lying in her lap. He saw her as a slim

black figure posed in thought, with the border unfurled before her like

some rich tapestry, with threads of purple and gold upon a ground of

green.

She turned to him with a smile.

“Lynette has just gone.”

He did not suspect that her smile was a defence and a screen.

“I hope the child does not interfere with your work.”

“No. She lets me be quiet when something particularly delicate has to be

done.”

Canterton brought up a garden chair.

“Will it bother you if I take Lynette’s place?”

“No.”

“I think I am a little too big for her stool.”

Eve resumed her painting, but she soon discovered that her attention

flowed more strongly towards the man beside her than towards the flowers

in the border. The tapestry kept blurring its outlines and shifting its

colours, and she played with the work, becoming more and more absorbed

in what Canterton was saying. And yet she was striving all the while to

keep a space clear for her own individuality, so that her thoughts could

move without merely following his.

Before very long she realised that she was listening to a thinker

thinking aloud in the presence of the one woman who understood. He was

so confident, so strong, so much above the hedgerows of circumstance,

that she began to be more afraid for his sake than for her own. His

words seemed ready to sweep her away into a rare and intimate future. It

was ideal, innocent, almost boyish. He mapped out plans for her; talked

of what they would create; declared for a yearly show of her pictures at

Fernhill, and that her work must be made known in London. They could

take the Goethe Gallery. Then he wanted pictures of the French and

Italian gardens. She could make a tour, sketch the Riviera, paint

rhododendrons and roses by the Italian lakes, and bring him back studies

of Swiss meadows all blue and green and white in May or June. She had a

future. He talked of it almost with passion, as though it were something

that was very precious to his pride.

Eve’s heart grew heavy. She began to feel a mute pity for Canterton and

for herself. Her vision became so terribly clear and frank that she saw

all that his idealist’s eyes did not see, and felt all that he was too

big and too magnanimous to feel. He did not trouble to understand the

little world about him. Its perspective was not his perspective, and it

had no knowledge of colour.

She became more and more silent, until this silence of hers was like a

pool of water without a ripple, yet its passivity had a positive effect

upon Canterton’s consciousness. His eyes began to watch her face and to

ask questions.

“Don’t you see all this?”

“Oh, yes, I see it all!”

He was puzzled.

“Perhaps it does not strike you as real?”

She turned her face away.

“Don’t you know that sometimes things may seem too real?”

He began to be absorbed into her silence of a minute ago. Eve made an

effort, and picked up a brush. She guessed that something was happening

in the heart of the man beside her, and she wondered whether the cold

and conventional light of a more worldly wisdom would break in and

enable him to understand.

“Eve!”

“Yes!”

She kept on with her work.

“Do you think that I have been talking like a fool?”

“Oh, no, not that.”

“Then——”

She made herself meet his eyes.

“Sometimes the really fine things are so impossible. That’s why life may

be so sad.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVI

JAMES CANTERTON AWAKES

Being an individualist, a man who had always depended upon himself,

Canterton had very little of the social sensitiveness that looks

cautiously to the right and to the left before taking a certain path.

All his grown life, from his University days onwards, he had been

dealing with big problems, birth, growth, decay, the eternal sacrament

of sex, the beauty of earth’s flowering. His vision went deep and far.

His life had been so full of the fascination of his work that he had

never been much of a social animal, as the social animal is understood

in a country community. He observed trifles that were stupendously

significant in the world of growth, but he had no mind for the social

trifles round him. Had he had less brawn, less virility, less humour, it

is possible that he would have been nothing more than an erudite fool,

one of those pathetic figures, respected for its knowledge and pitied

for its sappiness.

Canterton could convince men, and this was because he had long ago

become a conviction to himself. It was not a self-conscious conviction,

and that was why it had such mastery. It never occurred to him to think

about the discretions and the formalities of life. If a thing seemed

good to do, he did it; if it seemed bad, he never gave it a second

thought. His men believed in him with an instinctive faith that would

not suffer contradiction, and had Canterton touched tar, they would have

sworn that the tar was the better for it, and Canterton’s hands clean.

He was so big, so direct, so just, so ready to smile and see the humour

of everything. And he was as clean-minded as his child Lynette, and no

more conscious than she was of the little meannesses and dishonourable

curiosities that make most men and nearly all women hypocrites.

Canterton’s eyes were open; but he saw only that which his long vision

had taught him to see, and not the things that are focused by smaller

people. That an idea seemed fine, and admirable, and good, was

sufficient for him. He had not cultivated the habit of asking himself

what other people might think. That was why such a man as Canterton may

be so dangerous to himself and to others when he starts to do some big

and unusual thing.

He knew now that he loved Eve Carfax. It was like the sudden rising of

some enchanted island out of the sea, magical yet real, nor was he a

gross beast to break down the boughs for the fruit and to crush the

flowers for their perfumes. He had the atmosphere of a fine mind, and

his scheme of values was different from the scheme of values recognised

by more ordinary men. Perfumes, colours, beautiful outlines had

spiritual and mystical meanings. He was not Pagan and not Christian, but

a blend of all that was best in both.

To him this enchanted island had risen out of the sea, and floated,

dew-drenched, in the pure light of the dawn. He saw no reason why he

should bid so beautiful a thing sink back again and be lost under the

waters. He had no desecrating impulses. Why should not two people look

together at life with eyes that smiled and understood? They were harming

no one, and they were transfiguring each other.

Canterton and his wife were dining alone, and for once he deliberately

chose to talk to her of his work, and of his future plans. Gertrude

would listen perfunctorily, but he was determined that she should

listen. The intimate part of his life did not concern her, simply

because she was no longer either in his personality or in his work. So

little sympathy was there between them that they had never succeeded in

rising to a serious quarrel.

“I am taking Miss Carfax into the business. I thought you might like to

know.”

So dead was her personal pride in all that was male in him, that she did

not remember to be jealous.

“That ought to be a great opportunity for the girl.”

“I shall benefit as much as she will. She has a very remarkable gift,

just something I felt the need of and could not find.”

“Then she is quite a discovery?”

Canterton watched his wife’s face and saw no clouding of its

complacency.

“She will be a very great help in many ways.”

“I see. You will make her a kind of fashion-plate artist to produce new

designs.”

“Yes.”

“I had thought of doing something for the girl. I had suggested to her

that she might paint miniatures.”

“I think I shall keep her pretty busy.”

“I have only spoken to her once or twice, and she struck me as rather

reserved, and stiff. I suppose she and Lynette——”

“She and Lynette get on wonderfully.”

“So Miss Vance told me. And, of course, that black frock——I hope she

doesn’t spoil the child.”

“Not a bit. She does her good.”

“Lynette wants someone with plenty of common sense to discipline her. I

think Miss Vance is really excellent.”

“A very reliable young woman.”

“She’s not too sentimental and emotional.”

They had finished dessert, and Gertrude Canterton went straight to her

desk to write some of those innumerable letters that took up such a

large part of her life. Letter-writing was one of her methods of

self-expression, and her busy audacity was never to be repelled. She

wrote to an infinite number of charitable institutions for their

literature; to authors for autograph copies of their books to sell at

bazaars; to actors for their signatures and photographs; to cartoonists

for some sketch or other on which money might be raised for some

charitable purpose; to tradesmen for free goods, offering them her

patronage and a fine advertisement on some stall.

Canterton did not wait for coffee, but lit a pipe and strolled out into

the garden, and walking up and down in a state of wonder, tried to make

himself realise that he and Gertrude were man and wife.

Had the conversation really taken place? Had they exchanged those cold

commonplaces, those absurd phrases that should have meant so much? Had

he known Gertrude less well, he might have been touched by the

appearance of the limitless faith she had in him, by her blind and

serene confidence that was not capable of being disturbed. But he knew

her better than that. He was hardly so much as a shadow in her life, and

when a second shadow appeared beside hers she did not notice it. She

seemed to have no sense of possession, no sexual pride. Her mental poise

was like some people’s idea of heaven, a place of beautiful and

boundless indifference misnamed “sacred love,” a state that was guilty

of no preferences, no passions, no anguish, no divine despair.

And then there leapt in him a sudden and subtle exultation. This

splendid comradeship that life was offering to him, what could be cried

against it, what was there that could be condemned? It touched no one

but their two selves, could hurt no one. The one woman who might have

complained was being robbed of nothing that she desired. As for

marriage, he had tried it, and saw that it served a certain need. For

five years he had lived the life of a celibate, and the god in him was

master of the beast. He thought no such thoughts of Eve. She was

sunlight, perfumes, the green gloom of the woods, water shining in the

moonlight, all the music that was and would be, all the fairy tales that

had been told, all the ardour of words spoken in faith. She was one

whose eyes could quench all the thirsts of his manhood. To be with her,

to be hers, was sufficient.

Canterton was hardly conscious of the physical part of himself, as he

took a path along one of the cypress walks, passed out by a wicket gate,

and crossed the road into the fir woods. Dusk had fallen, but there was

still a faint grey light under the trees, and there was no undergrowth,

so that one would walk along the woodland aisles as along the aisles of

a church. A feeling of exultation possessed him. The very stillness of

the woods, the darkness that began to drown all distances, were personal

and all-enveloping.

A light was shining in one of the lower windows of the little house at

Orchards Corner when Canterton came to the gate at the end of the lane.

He paused there, leaning his arms on the gate. The blind was up and the

curtain undrawn, and he could see Eve sitting at a table, and bending

over a book or writing a letter.

Canterton crossed the lawn and stood looking in at the lighted window.

Eve was sitting at the table with her back towards him, and he saw the

outline of her head, and the glow of the light upon her hair. She was

wearing a blouse cut low at the throat, and he could see the white curve

of her neck as she bent over the table. There were books and papers

before her. She appeared to be reading and making notes.

He spoke her name.

“Eve!”

Her profile came sharply against the lamplight. Then she pushed the

chair back, rose, and walked to the window. The lower sash was up. She

rested her hands on the sill.

“Is it you?”

The light was behind her, and her face vague and shadowy, but he had a

feeling that she was afraid. Her bare white forearms, with the hands

resting on the window-sill, looked hard and rigid.

“Have I frightened you?”

“Perhaps—a little.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

She did not answer him for the moment.

“I am all alone to-night.”

“I thought you had the girl with you.”

“I let her go down to the village.”

He had come to her in a fog of mystical love, and through the haze of

his vision her set and human face became the one real thing in the

world. Her voice had a wounded sound, and she spoke as from a little

distance. There was resistance here, a bleak dread of something, and yet

a desire that what was inevitable should be understood.

“You’ll forgive me?”

“Perhaps.”

“I felt I must talk to you.”

“As you talked yesterday morning?”

“Why not?”

“I—I thought perhaps that you had understood.”

His full consciousness of all that was in his heart would not suffer him

to feel such a thing as shame. But a great tenderness reached out to

her, because he had heard her utter a cry of pain.

“Have I hurt you by coming here?”

She stared beyond him, trying to think.

“We were to live like good comrades, like fellow artists, were we not?”

“I told you how the future offers us beautiful friendship.”

She made a little impatient movement.

“I knew it would be difficult while you were talking. And now you are

making it impossible.”

“I cannot see it.”

“You are blind—with a man’s blindness.”

She leant her weight on her arms, and bending slightly towards him,

spoke with peculiar gentleness.

“You look at the horizon, you miss the little things. Perhaps I am more

selfish and near-sighted, for your sake, if not for my own. Jim, don’t

make me say what is hateful even to be thought.”

It was the first time that she had called him by the familiar name, the

name sacred to his lad’s days, and to the lips of his men friends. He

stood looking up at her, for she was a little above him.

“I like that word—Jim. But am I blind?”

“Hopelessly.”

“Can it hurt either of us, this comradeship? Why, Eve, child, how can I

talk all the boyish stuff to you? It’s bigger, finer, less selfish than

all that. I believe I could think of you as I think of Lynette—married

some day to a good fellow——”

She broke in with sudden passion.

“No, you are wrong there—utterly wrong.”

“Am I wrong—everywhere?”

“Can’t you guess that it hurts terribly, all this? It’s so impossible,

and you won’t see it. Let’s get back—back to yesterday.”

“Eve, is there ever a yesterday?”

She shivered and drew back a little.

“Jim, don’t try to come too near me. You make me say it. You make me say

the mean things.”

“It’s not physical nearness.”

“Ah, you may think that! But you are forgetting all the little people.”

“The little people! Are we to be little because they are shorter than we

are? The neighbourhood knows me well enough.”

She came forward again to the window with a kind of tender and stooping

pity.

“Jim, how very innocent you are. Yes, I know—I know it is precious, and

perilous. Listen! Supposing you were to lose Lynette—oh, why will you

make me say the mean, hideous things?”

“Lose Lynette! Do you mean——”

“Jim, I am going to shut the window.”

He raised an arm.

“Wait! Good God!”

“No, no! Good night!”

She closed the window, and dragged the curtains across it.

Canterton stood at gaze a moment, before walking away across the grass.

Eve was listening, stricken, yet trying not to feel afraid.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVII

LYNETTE INTERPOSES

At such a parting of the ways, Canterton’s elemental grimness showed

itself. He was the peasant, sturdy, obstinate, steady-eyed, ready to

push out into some untamed country, and to take and hold a new domain.

For under all his opulent culture and his rare knowledge lay the patient

yet fanatical soul of the peasant. He was both a mystic and a child of

the soil, not a city dweller, mercurial and flippant, a dog at the heels

of profit and loss.

Eve had talked of the impossible, but when he took Lynette by the hand

and went down with her into the Wilderness, Canterton could not bring

himself to play the cynic. Sitting in the bracken, and watching Lynette

making one of her fairy fires, he felt that it was Eve’s scepticism that

was impossible, and not his belief in a magnanimous future. He was so

very sure of himself that he felt too sure of other people. His name was

not a thing to be made the sport of rumour. Men and women had worked

together before now; and did the world quarrel with a business man

because he kept a secretary or a typist? Moreover, he believed himself

to be different from the average business man, and what might have meant

lust for one spoke of a sacrament to the other.

“Daddy, why didn’t Miss Eve come yesterday?”

“She had work at home, Princess.”

“And to-day too?”

“It seems so.”

“Why don’t we go and see her, then?”

“Why not?”

The mouth of the child had offered an inspiration. Was it possible to

look into Lynette’s eyes and be scared by sinister suggestions? Why, it

was a comradeship of three, not of two. They were three children

together, and perhaps the youngest was the wisest of the three.

“Lynette, come here, old lady! Miss Eve thinks of going away.”

“Miss Eve going away?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, no, daddy, how can she?”

“Well, one has only to get into a train, even if it be a train of

thought.”

Lynette was kneeling between her father’s knees.

“I’ll ask her not to go.”

“You might try it.”

“Oh, yes, let’s! Let’s go down to Orchards Corner now—at once!”

Eve had been suffering, suffering for Canterton, Lynette and herself.

She saw life so clearly now—the lights and shadows, the sunlit spaces,

the sinister glooms, the sharp, conventional horizons. Canterton did not

know how much of the woman there was in her, how very primitive and

strong were the emotions that had risen to the surface of her

consciousness. The compact would be too perilous. She knew in her heart

of hearts that the youth in her desired more than a spiritual dream, and

she was trying to harden herself, to build up barriers, to smother this

splendid thing, this fire of the gods.

She had taken her work out into the garden, and was striving against a

sense of perfunctoriness and the conviction that the life at Fernhill

could not last. She had more than hinted at this to Canterton, bracing

herself against his arguments, and against all the generous

steadfastness of his homage that made the renunciation harder for her to

bear.

And now an impetuous tenderness attacked her at white heat, a thing that

came with glowing hair and glowing mouth, and arms that clung.

Lynette had run up the lane in front of Canterton, and Lynette was to

make Eve Carfax suffer.

“Oh, Miss Eve, it isn’t true, is it?”

“What isn’t true, dear heart?”

“That you are going right away.”

Eve felt a thickness at the throat. All that was best in life seemed

conspiring to tempt and to betray her.

“I may have to go, dear.”

“But why—why, when we love you so much? Aren’t you happy?”

“When I am with you, yes. But there are all sorts of things that you

wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, but I could!”

“Perhaps some day you will.”

“But, Miss Eve, you won’t really go, will you?”

Canterton came in at the white gate, and Eve’s eyes reproached him over

the glowing head of the child. “It is ungenerous of you,” they said, “to

let the child try and persuade me.”

She hugged Lynette with sudden passion.

“I don’t want to go, dear, but some big devil fairy is telling me I

shall have to.”

She was shy of Canterton, and ready to hide behind the child, for there

was a grim purposefulness about his idealism that made her afraid. His

eyes hardly left her, and, though they held her sacred, they would have

betrayed everything to the most disinterested of observers.

“I thought I would work at home on some of these sketches.”

“And Lynette and I have been making a fire in the Wilderness. We missed

you.”

Eve felt stifled. Lynette was looking up into her face, and she was

fingering the white lace collar round the child’s neck. She knew that

she must face Canterton. It was useless to try to shirk the challenge of

such a man.

“Isn’t it close to-day? Lynette, dear, what about some raspberries? I’m

so thirsty.”

“Where are they, Miss Eve? Aren’t they over?”

“No, they are a late kind. You know, round behind the house. Ask Anne

for a dish.”

“I’ll get a rhubarb leaf, and pick the biggest for you.”

“Dear heart, we’ll share them.”

Lynette ran off, and they were left alone together. Canterton had

brought up a deck chair, and was looking over some of Eve’s sketches

that lay in a portfolio on the grass. His silence tantalised her. It was

a force that had to be met and challenged.

“I sent Lynette away because I wanted to speak to you.”

He laid the sketch aside and sat waiting.

“Why did you let her come to tempt me?”

“Because I can see no real reason why you should go.”

Her eyes became appealing.

“Oh, how blind! And you let the child rush at me, let me feel her warm

arms round my neck. It was not fair to me, or to any of us.”

“To me it did not seem unfair, because I do not think that I am such a

criminal.”

“I know; you are so sure of yourself. But if you thought that the child

would persuade me, you were very much deceived. It has made me realise

more than anything else that I cannot go on with the life at Fernhill.”

He bent forward in his chair.

“Eve, I tell you from my heart that you are wrong. I want you to be

something of a mother to Lynette. I can give the man’s touches, but my

fingers are not delicate enough to bring out all the charm. Think, now.”

She sat rigid, staring straight before her.

“I have made up my mind.”

“It is the privilege of wise minds to change, Eve. I want you as well as

Lynette.”

“Don’t make me suffer. Do you think it is easy?”

“Let me show you——”

“No, no! If you try to persuade me, I shall refuse to listen.”

And then silence fell on both of them, for Lynette returned with a large

rhubarb leaf holding a little mountain of red fruit.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVIII

EVE SPEAKS OUT

Eve felt very restless that evening, and with seeming illogicality went

up to her room at the old-time hour of nine.

The day had been close and sultry, and the bedroom still felt hot after

the hours of scorching sunlight on the tiles. Eve drew the curtains

back, and opened the casement to its widest, for the upper windows were

still fitted with the old lead-lights. The sill was deep, nearly a foot

and a half broad, and Eve half lay and half leant upon it while the

night air streamed in.

And what a night! All jet and silver; for the moon was up over the fir

woods, just as on the night when her mother died. The stillness was the

stillness of a dawn where no birds sing. The nightingale had long been

mute, and the nightjar preferred the oak woods in the clayland valleys.

Eve’s ears could not snatch a single sound out of that vast motionless

landscape, with its black woods and mysterious horizons.

The silence made her feel lonely, eerily lonely, like a sensitive child

lost in a wood. She remembered how she had started awake at night

sometimes, terrified by this horror of loneliness, and crying out

“Mother, mother!” It was absurd that the grown woman should feel like

the child, and yet she found herself hungering for that little placid

figure with its boring commonplaces and amiable soft face. What a prig

she had been! She had let that spirit of superiority grow in her,

forgetting that the hands that were always knitting those foolish

woollen superfluities had held and comforted her as a child. Now, in the

white heat of an emotional ordeal, she missed the nearness of that

commonplace affection. What a mistake it was to be too clever; for when

the heart ached, one’s cleverness stood by like a dreary pedagogue,

helpless and dumb.

The stillness! She wished those dim stars would send down astral rain,

and patter on this roof of silence. The sound of dripping water would be

welcome. Yes, and those Latimer fountains, were they still murmuring

under the cypresses, or did not the spirit of sage economy turn off the

water-cocks and shut down the sluices? Life! It, too, was so often a

shutting down of sluices. The deep waters had to be tamed, dammed back,

kept from pouring forth as they desired. Modern conventional life was

like a canal with its system of locks. There were no rapids, no

freshets, no impetuous cataracts. You went up, steadily, respectably,

lock by lock; you came down steadily, and perhaps just as respectably.

In between was the gliding monotony of the long stretches between

artificial banks, with either a religious tow-rope or a puffing

philosopher to draw you.

She suffered on account of the stillness and this atmosphere of

isolation, and yet the nearness of some very human incident was as a

stabbing pain compared to a dull ache. Leaning there over the

window-sill, with the moonlight glimmering on the lozenged glass in the

lattices, she knew that she was looking towards Fernhill and all that it

represented. Lynette, the child; the great gardens, that wide, free

spacious, colour-filled life; Canterton’s comradeship, and even more

than that. The whole future quivered on one sensitive thread. A breeze

could shake it away as a wind shakes a dewdrop from the web of a spider.

She told herself that Canterton must have realised by now the impossible

nature of the position he was asking her to assume. If he only would go

back to the yesterday of a month ago, and let that happy, workaday life

return! But then, would she herself be content with that? She had sipped

the wine of Tristan and Isoult, and the magic of it was in her blood.

Her thoughts had come to this point, when something startled her. She

had heard the latch of the gate click. There was a man’s figure standing

in the shade of a holly that grew close to the fence.

Eve was not conscious of any fear, only of an intense curiosity—a

desire to know whether she was on the brink of some half foreseen

crisis. It might be a tramp, it might be the man who came courting her

girl Anne; but Anne had gone to bed with a headache an hour before Eve

had come to her own room.

In spite of these other possibilities, she felt prophetically convinced

that it was Canterton. She did not move away from the window, knowing

that the man, whoever he was, must have seen the outline of her head and

shoulders against the light within. Her heart was beating faster. She

could feel it as she leant with her bosom pressing upon the window-sill.

She knew Canterton the moment he moved out into the moonlight, and,

crossing the grass, came and stood under her window. He was bareheaded,

and his face, as he looked up at her, gave her an impression of pallid

and passionate obstinacy.

“I had to come!”

She felt a flutter of exultation, but it was the exultation of tragedy.

“Madman!”

“No, I am not mad. It is the sanest moment of my life.”

“Then all the rest of the world is mad. Supposing—supposing the girl is

still awake. Supposing——Oh, there are a hundred such suppositions! You

risk them, and make me risk them.”

“Because I am so sure of myself. I take the risk to promise you a homage

that shall be inviolate. Am I a fool? Do you think that I have no

self-control—that I shall ever cause this most spiritual thing to be

betrayed? I tell you I can live this life. I can make it possible for

you to live it.”

Eve raised herself on her elbows, and seemed to be listening. There was

the same stillness everywhere, the stillness that had been broken by

Canterton’s voice.

She leant out and spoke to him in an undertone.

“I will come down. I suppose I must let you say all that you have to

say.”

She put out the light and felt her way out of the room and down the

stairs into the hall. Her brain felt as clear as the sky out yonder,

though the turmoil in her heart might have been part of the darkness

through which she passed. Unlocking and unbolting the door, she found

Canterton waiting.

“You are making me do this mad thing.”

She had not troubled to put on a hat, and her face was white and clear

and unhidden. Its air of desperate and purposeful frankness struck him.

Her eyes looked straight at his, steadily and unflinchingly, with no

subtle glances, no cunning of the lids.

“Let’s go down to the woods. Come!”

She spoke as though she had taken command of the crisis, snatched it out

of his strong hands. And Canterton obeyed her. They went down the lane

in the high shadow of the hedgerows and across the main road into the

fir woods, neither of them uttering a word.

Eve paused when they had gone some two hundred yards into the woods. The

canopy of boughs was a black vaulting, with here and there a crevice

where the moonlight entered to fall in streaks and splashes upon the

tree trunks and the ground. On every side were the crowding fir boles

that blotted out the distance and obscured each other. The woodland

floor was covered deep with pine needles, and from somewhere came the

smell of bracken.

“Now, let me hear everything.”

He appeared a little in awe of her, and for the moment she was the

stronger.

“I have told you all that there is to tell. I want you to be the bigger

part of my life—the inward life that not another soul knows.”

“Not even Lynette?”

“She is but a child.”

Eve began to walk to and fro, and Canterton kept pace with her.

“Let’s be practical. Let’s be cold, and sure of things. You want me to

be a spiritual wife to you, and a spiritual mother to Lynette?”

“Yes.”

“And you think you can live such a life?”

“I know I can.”

She was smiling, the strange, ironical, half-exultant smile of a love

that is not blind.

“You are sure of yourself. Let me ask you a question. Are you sure of

me?”

He looked at her searchingly in the dim light.

“Eve, I am not vain enough to ask you whether——”

“Whether I care?”

“You have said it.”

She paused, gazing at the ground.

“Is a man so much slower than a woman?”

“Sometimes one does not dare to think——”

“But the woman knows without daring.”

He stood silently before her, full of that devout wonder that had made

him such a watcher in Nature’s world.

“Then, surely, child——”

Her face and eyes flashed up to him, and her hands quivered.

“Don’t call me child! Haven’t you realised that I am a woman?”

“The one woman.”

“There, it is all so impossible! And you don’t understand.”

He spoke gently, almost humbly.

“Why is it impossible? What is it that I don’t understand?”

“Oh, dear man, must I show you everything? This is why it is

impossible.”

Her arms went out and were round his neck. Her mouth was close to his.

In the taking of a breath she had kissed him, and he had returned the

kiss, and his arms were round her.

“Jim, don’t you understand now? I care too much. That is why it is

impossible.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIX

AN HOUR IN THE FIR WOODS

The warm scent of the fir woods was about them, and a darkness that made

their very thoughts seem secret and secure. They were the lovers of some

ancient tale wandering in an old forest of enchantments, seeing each

other’s faces pale and yearning in the dim light under the trees.

Eve rested against Canterton’s outspread arm, her head upon his

shoulder, as they wandered to and fro between the tall trunks of the

firs. They were like ghosts gliding side by side, for the carpet of pine

needles deadened the sound of their footsteps, and they spoke but

little, in voices that were but murmurs.

For a brief hour they were forgetting life and its problems, letting

self sink into self, surrendering everything to an intimate exultation

in their nearness to each other. Sometimes they would pause, swayed by

some common impulse, and stand close together, looking into each other’s

eyes.

They spoke to each other as a man and woman speak but once or twice in

the course of a lifetime.

“Dear heart, is it possible that this is you?”

“Am I not flesh and blood?”

“That you should care!”

“Put your hand here. Can you not feel my heart beating?”

He would slip his hand under her head, draw her face to his, and kiss

her forehead, mouth and eyes. And she would sigh with each kiss, closing

her eyes in a kind of ecstasy.

“Did you ever dream of me?”

“Often.”

“It sounds like a child’s question. Strange—I wonder if our dreams

crossed. Did you ever dream while I was at Latimer?”

“Nearly every night.”

“And I of you. And all through the day you were with me. I felt you

standing beside me. That’s why I painted Latimer as I did.”

Canterton had moments of incredulity and of awe. He would stand

motionless, holding Eve’s hands, and looking down into her face.

“It is very wonderful—very wonderful!”

His man’s awe made her smile.

“What a boy you are!”

“Am I?”

“I love you like that. And yet, really, you are so strong and masterful.

And I could trust you utterly, only——”

“Only?”

“You, and not myself. Oh, if we could never wake again!”

A plaintive note came into her voice. She was beginning to think and to

remember.

“Eve!”

“Ah, that name!”

“Is it so impossible now?”

She reached up and gripped his wrist.

“Don’t spoil this! Oh, don’t spoil it! It will have to last us both for

a lifetime. Take me back, dear; it is time.”

He felt a relaxing of her muscles as though she had suddenly grown faint

and hesitating.

“Not yet.”

“Yes, now. I ask it of you, Jim.”

They began to wander back towards the road, and sometimes a shaft of

moonlight struck across their faces. Their exultation weakened, the

wings of their flight together were fluttering back towards the ground.

“Eve, to-morrow——”

She turned her face to his and spoke with a whispering vehemence.

“There can be no to-morrow.”

“But, dear heart!”

“I could not bear it. Have pity on me, Jim. And remember——”

They saw the white road glimmering beyond the black fir trunks. Eve

paused. They stood for some moments in silence.

“Say good-bye to me here.”

“I will say good night.”

“Oh, my dearest—my dear!”

He held her very close, and she felt the strength of his great arms. The

breath seemed to go out of her body, her eyes were closed.

“Now, let me go.”

He released her, and she stepped back just a little unsteadily, but

trying to smile.

“Good-bye! Go back now.”

She turned, went out of the wood, and crossed the moonlit road. It lay

between them like some dim river of the underworld. And Canterton was

left standing in the gloom of the fir woods.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XX

NIGHT AND A CHILD

Eve relocked the door of the cottage, and stood in the darkness of the

hall, trying to realise all that had happened.

It was like coming back out of a dream, save that the dream remained as

a compelling and fateful reality, a power, a parting of the ways, a

voice that cried “Explicit!” Her clarity of vision returned as she stood

there in the darkness. There was only one thing to be done, whatever

anguish the doing of it might cause her.

Yet for the moment she shrank from this renunciation, this surrender of

the things that made life desirable, this going forth into a world of

little poverties, little struggles, little sordid anxieties. It was

hard, very hard to leave this spacious existence, this corner of the

earth where beauty counted, and where she had been so happy in her work.

Why had he made it so hard for her? And yet, though she was in pain, her

heart could not utter any accusation against him. He had misunderstood

her, and she had had to ruin everything by showing him the truth.

This part of her life was ended, done with; and Eve repeated the words

to herself as she felt her way up the stairs and into her room. She lit

the candle and stood looking about her. How cold and small and

matter-of-fact the place seemed. The whole atmosphere had changed, and

the room no longer felt like hers. The bedclothes were neatly turned

back, but she knew that she would never sleep in that bed again. It was

absurd—the very idea of sleep, when to-morrow——

She sat on the bed awhile, thinking, forcing herself to make those plans

that shape themselves like hot metal poured into a mould. A hunger for

physical activity seized her. She might falter or break down if she did

too much thinking. Feeling under the bed, she dragged out a light

leather valise, and opening it began to tumble out a collection of

tissue paper, odd pieces of dress material, ribbons and scraps of lace.

The very first thing she saw when she went to open the hanging cupboard

was the big straw sun-hat she had worn at Latimer and Fernhill. That

inanimate thing, hanging there, sent a shock of pain through her. She

felt things as a sensitive child feels them, and sorrow was more than a

mere vague regret.

Presently the valise was packed, and her more personal trifles collected

into a handbag. She began to open all the drawers and cupboards, to sort

her clothes and lay them on the bed. Once or twice she went downstairs

to fetch books or something she specially needed, pausing outside the

maid’s door to listen, but the girl was fast asleep. Eve sorted out all

her Fernhill and Latimer studies, tied them up in brown paper, and

addressed them to Canterton. Her portfolios, paint boxes, and a few odd

canvases she packed into a stout parcel, labelled them, and carried them

up to her room.

Then, as to money. Eve kept it locked in a little drawer in a cabinet

that stood in a corner of her bedroom, and though she went to count it,

she knew what was there, almost to the last penny. Seventeen pounds,

thirteen shillings and ninepence. There were a pass and cheque-book

also, for she had a hundred pounds in a bank at Reading, Canterton

having paid her the first instalment of her salary. Eve felt loath to

consent to thinking of the money as her own. Perhaps she would return it

to him, or keep it untouched, a sentimental legacy left her by this

memorable summer.

It was one in the morning when she lit a fresh candle and went down into

the dining-room to write letters. The first was to a local house-agent

and auctioneer, stating that she was leaving Basingford unexpectedly,

and that the maid would deposit the keys of Orchards Corner at his

office, and desiring him to arrange for a sale of all her furniture. The

next letter was to Anne, the maid. Eve enclosed a month’s wages and an

odd sum for current expenses, and asked her to pack two trunks and have

them taken to the station and sent to the luggage office at Waterloo.

Eve drew out a list of the things that were to be packed. Everything

else was to be disposed of at the sale.

Then came the letter to James Canterton.

“I am taking the only course that seems open to me, and believe

me when I say that it is best for us both.

“I am leaving you the Latimer pictures, and all the studies I

made at Fernhill. You will find them here, on the table, wrapped

up and addressed to you.

“I am giving Mr. Hanstead orders to sell all the furniture.

“It is probable that I shall try to make some sort of career for

myself in London.

“Perhaps I will write to you, when my new life is settled. Don’t

try to see me. I ask you, from my heart, not to do that.

“Kiss Lynette, and make her think the best you can.

“I am sealing this and leaving it here for you with the

pictures.

“EVE.”

A great restlessness came upon her when she had completed all these

preparations, and she felt a desire to rush out and end the last

decisive phase of her life at Fernhill. She hunted up a local

time-table, and found that the first train left Basingford at half-past

six in the morning. The earliness of the hour pleased her. The valise

and bag were not very heavy, and she could walk the two miles to the

station before the Basingford people were stirring.

Then a new fear came upon her, the fear that Canterton might still be

near, or that he would return. A book that she picked up could not hold

her attention, and the old bent cane rocking-chair that she had used so

often when she was feeling like a grown child, made her still more

restless. She went over the house, reconsidering everything, the clothes

laid out on the bed, the furniture she was to leave, and whether it

would be worth her while to warehouse the rather ancient walnut-cased

piano, with its fretwork and magenta-coloured satin front. She wrote

labels, even started an inventory, but abandoned it as soon as she

entered her mother’s room.

The watch on her dressing-table told her that it was five-and-twenty

minutes to four. Dawn would be with her before long, and the thought of

the dawn made the little house seem dead and oppressive. She put on a

pair of stout shoes, and, letting herself out into the garden, made her

way to the orchard at the back of the house.

It had grown very dark before the dawn, and the crooked apple trees were

black outlines against an obscure sky. They made her think of bent,

decrepit, sad old men. The grass had been scythed a month ago, and the

young growth was wet with dew. Everything was deathly still. Not a leaf

moved on the trees. It was like a world of the dead.

She walked up and down for a long while before a vague greyness began to

spread along the eastern horizon. A bird twittered. The foliage of the

trees changed from black to an intense greyish blue. The fruit became

visible—touches of gold, and maroon, and green. Eve could see the dew

on the grass, the rust colour of the tiles on the roof, the white frames

of the windows. A rabbit bolted across the orchard, and disappeared

through the farther hedge.

She stood watching, wondering, and her wonder went out to the man who

had caused her to suffer this pain. How had the night gone with him?

What was he doing? Had he slept? Was he suffering? And then the first

flush of rose came into the pearl grey east. Great rays of light

followed, diverging, making the clouds a chaos of purple and white.

Presently Eve saw the sun appear, a glare of gold above the fir woods.

She returned to the house, put on her hat and coat, made sure that she

had her watch and purse, and carried her bag and her valise downstairs.

She would leave Orchards Corner at half-past five, and there was time

for a meal before she went. The girl had left dry wood ready on the

kitchen stove. Eve boiled the kettle, made tea, and ate her breakfast at

the kitchen table, listening all the while for any sound of the girl

moving overhead. But the silence of the night still held. No one was to

see her leave Orchards Corner.

Eve had wondered whether James Canterton was suffering. It is not given

to many of us to feel acutely, or to travel beyond the shallows of an

emotional self-pity, but Canterton had much of the spirit of the

Elizabethans—men built for a big, adventurous, passionate play. He had

slept no more than Eve had done, and had spent most of the night walking

in the woods and lanes and over the wastes of heather and furze. He,

too, was trying to realise that this experience was at an end, that a

burning truth had been shown him—that they had flown too near the sun,

and the heat had scorched their wings.

Yet his mood was one of rebellion. He was asking why and wherefore,

thrusting that masterful creativeness of his against the conventional

barriers that the woman had refused to challenge. For the first time his

vitality was running in complete and tumultuous opposition to the

conventional currents that had hardly been noticed by him till his will

was defied. The scorn of theory was upon him, and he felt the strong

man’s desire to brush the seeming artificiality aside. Had he not made

self-restraint his own law, and was he to herd with men who put their

signatures openly to the sexual compact, and broke their vows in secret?

Eve was afraid, not only for herself, but for him and for Lynette. But,

good God! had he ever intended to force her to sacrifice herself, to

defy society, or to enter into a conspiracy of passion? Was it

everything or nothing with such a woman? If so, she had shown a touching

magnanimity and wisdom, and uttered a cry that was heroic. But he could

not believe it; her pleading that this love of theirs was mad and

impossible. It was too pathetic, her confessing that she could not trust

herself. He was strong enough to be trusted for them both. The night had

made everything more sacred. He would refuse to let her sacrifice their

comradeship.

Canterton, too, saw the dawn come up, and the sun appear as a great

splash of gold. He was standing on the south-east edge of the

Wilderness, with the gloom of the larch wood behind him, and as the sun

rose, its level rays struck on the stream in the valley, and the deep

pool among the willows where the water lay as black and as still as

glass.

A clear head and a clean body. The whim that seized him had logic and

symbolism. He walked down over the wet grass to the pool among the

willows, where a punt lay moored to a landing stage, and a diving board

projected over the water. Canterton stripped and plunged, and went

lashing round and round the pool, feeling a clean vigour in his body, as

his heart and blood answered the cold sting of the water.

It was half-past six when he made his way back up the hill to the

gardens. A glorious day had come, and the dew still sparkled on the

flowers. Wandering across the lawns he saw an auburn head at an open

window, and a small hand waving a towel.

“Daddy, I’m coming—I’m coming!”

He looked up at her like a man who had been praying, and whose eyes saw

a sign in the heavens.

“Hallo! Up with the lark!”

“Let’s go down to the Wilderness.”

“Come along, Queen Mab.”

“I’ve only got to put my frock on.”

“You’re just the very thing I want.”

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXI

THE WOMAN’S EYES IN THE EYES OF A CHILD

Lynette asked her father to tell her a story. They were walking through

the wet bracken on the edge of the larch wood, Canterton holding the

child’s hand.

“Presently, little Beech Leaf. A good fairy is talking to me, and I must

listen.”

“Then I’ll keep ever so quiet till she’s done.”

Canterton had looked into the eyes of the child, and had seen the

woman’s eyes, Eve’s eyes, in the child’s. For Eve’s eyes had been like

the eyes of Lynette, till he, the man, had awakened a more primitive

knowledge in them. He remembered how it had been said that the child is

a finer, purer creation than either the man or the woman, and that the

sex spirit is a sullying influence, blurring the more delicate colours;

and Eve had had much of the child in her till he, in all innocence, had

taught her to suffer.

A great pity overtook him as he looked down at Lynette, and wondered how

he would feel if some blind idealist were ever to make her suffer. His

pity showed him what love had failed to discover. He understood of a

sudden how blind, how obstinate, and over-confident he must have seemed

to Eve. He had killed all the child in her, and aroused the woman, and

then refused to see that she had changed.

“I have been torturing her.”

His compassion was touched with shame.

“You are making it so impossible.”

That cry of hers had a new pathos. It was she who had suffered, because

she had seen things clearly, while he had been too masterful, too sure

of himself, too oblivious of her youth. One could not put the language

of Summer into the mouth of Spring. It was but part of the miracle of

growth that he had been studying all these years. Certain and inevitable

changes had to occur when the sun climbed higher and the sap rose.

Canterton paused while they were in the thick of the larch wood.

“Lynette, old lady!”

“Yes, daddy?”

“The fairy has just said that we ought to go and see Miss Eve.”

“What a sensible fairy. Yes, do let’s go. She may let me see her do her

hair.”

Canterton smiled. He meant to carry Lynette on his shoulders into the

garden of Orchards Corner, to hold her up as a symbol and a sign, to

betray in the child his surrender. Assuredly it was possible for them to

be healed. He would say, “Let’s go back into yesterday. Try and forgive

me for being blind. We will be big children together, you and I, with

Lynette.”

Some warning voice seemed to speak to him as they entered the lane,

questioning this plan of his, throwing out a vague hint of unexpected

happenings. He heard Eve saying good-bye over yonder among the fir

trees. She had refused to say good night.

He set Lynette down under the hedge, and spoke in a whisper.

“We’ll play at hide and seek. I’ll go on and see if I can find her.”

“Yes. I’ll hide, and jump out when you bring her into the lane, daddy.”

“That’s it.”

He wondered what sort of night Eve had spent, and his eyes were

instinctively towards her window as he walked up the path to the house.

His ring was answered almost immediately. The little, bunchy-figured

maid stood there, looking sulky and bewildered.

“Is Miss Carfax in?”

The girl’s eyes stared.

“No, she ain’t. She’s gone to London, and ain’t coming back.”

“When did she go?”

“Must have been this morning before I was up. She’d ’ad ’er breakfast,

and written me a letter. She’s left everything to me, and I don’t know

which way to turn. There’s luggage to be packed and sent off to London,

and the house to be cleaned, and the keys to be taken to Mr. Hanstead’s.

I’m fair bothered, sir. I ain’t going to sleep ’ere alone, and my ’ome’s

at Croydon. Maybe my young man’s mother will take me in.”

“If not some of my people can.”

“Miss Carfax left a letter for you, sir.”

“Let me have it.”

The girl went into the dining-room, and Canterton followed her. The

letter was lying on the parcel that contained the Latimer and Fernhill

pictures. He went to the window, broke the seal, and read Eve’s letter.

The girl watched him, and he was conscious of her inquisitive eyes. But

his face betrayed nothing, and he acted as though there were nothing

wonderful about this sudden flight.

“Miss Carfax did not tell you that she was expecting the offer of work

in London?”

“No, sir.”

“I see. She has been sent for rather hurriedly. A very fine situation I

believe. You had better follow out her orders. This parcel is for me.”

He took it under his arm, went to the front door, and called Lynette.

“No hide and seek this morning.”

He wanted the girl to see Lynette, but he did not want Lynette to hear

the news.

“Isn’t she in?”

Canterton met her as she came up the path.

“Not at home, Princess, and Anne’s as busy as can be, and I’ve got this

parcel to carry back.”

“What’s in it, daddy?”

“Pictures.”

And he felt that he carried all the past in those pictures.

Lynette wondered why he walked so fast, and why his face looked so quiet

and funny. She had to bustle her slim legs to keep up with him, and he

had nothing whatever to say.

“What a hurry you’re in, daddy.”

“I have just remembered I’ve got to go down to the village before

breakfast. And, by George! here’s something I have forgotten to give to

Lavender. Will you take it, old lady, while I go down to the village?”

“Yes, daddy.”

He gave her an envelope he had in his pocket. It contained nothing but

some seeds he had taken from a plant a few days ago, but the ruse

served.

Canterton left the parcel of pictures at one of the lodges. It took him

just twenty minutes to reach Basingford station, for he had to walk

through the village after taking some of the field paths at a run. A

solitary milk cart stood in the station yard, and a clattering of cans

came from the up platform. Canterton entered the booking office, glanced

into the waiting-room, and strolled through to the up platform. There

was no Eve. The place was deserted, save for a porter and the driver of

the milk cart, who were loading empty cans on to a truck.

Canterton remembered that he had a freight bill in his pocket, and that

he owed the railway company three pounds and some odd silver. He called

the porter.

“Gates!”

The man came at once, touching his cap.

“Is the goods office open?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have a bill I owe them. Anyone there to take the money?”

“They’ll be ready for that, Mr. Canterton.”

“Oh, by the way, Gates, did Miss Carfax catch her train all right? I

mean the early one?”

“The lady from Orchards Corner, sir?”

“Yes. You know Miss Carfax.”

“To be sure. She was earlier than me, sir, and down here before I got

the booking office swept out.”

“That’s good. I’m glad she caught it. Good morning, Gates.”

“Good morning, sir.”

As Canterton walked across to the goods office, he found himself

confessing to a bitter and helpless sense of defeat. He had made this

woman suffer, and it seemed out of his power now even to humble himself

before her. She had fled out of his life, and appealed to him not to

follow her—not to try and see her. It was better for them both, she had

said, to try and forget, but he knew in his heart of hearts that it

would never be forgotten.

PART II