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.