“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.