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!”