After My Fashion (8 page)

Nelly replied as freely as she could to all her friend's questions. One thing, however, instinct told her to keep unrevealed; and that was the fact of Mr Richard Storm being so much older than herself.
Let her
, she thought,
find
that
out after she sees how nice and young
and unspoilt he is in his mind
!

It was a little later in the afternoon, while they were looking at Mrs Shotover's fine roses, that Nelly ventured upon the topic of the writer's desire to secure some quiet lodging in that neighbourhood so as to work undisturbed at some new enterprise.

The old lady laughed uproariously. ‘My dear girl you
have
indeed got on! Lodgings in the neighbourhood? What next? Why in my time they used to be satisfied if they came down from town for very short weekends. You're surely not such a dear stupid as to think he'd land himself out here for the summer if there wasn't someone he was after. Of course it
may
not be you. He may have an
inamorata
in Selshurst – though that's not likely. Much more possible he's got some little French friend down at Fogmore. But don't you fool your innocent little heart into believing that bosh about his having to write some great work. They all have to write great works when they want to enjoy themselves!'

Nelly made no reply for some minutes to this tirade. Then, with her hand on the stem of a great cluster of red roses into which she was prepared to plunge her face if what she said became too embarrassing, she uttered a faint protest.

‘But Granny, I can't quite understand you. You don't mean that if a man were really immoral, and really had – people – like you speak of – dependent upon him – whether in Fogmore or anywhere else – that it would be right for him to marry?'

The old lady promptly defeated the girl's intention of burying her face in the rosebush after this outbreak, by pulling her back into the path. ‘Little goose!' she cried with severe emphasis. ‘Get this into your pretty head. There are no such things as moral men in these days – except such dear stick-in-the-muds as neither you nor I could stand for a fortnight! Well! perhaps that's going a little far, considering that my dear old George was faithful to me for forty years. But you would probably have been bored with George. What you girls have to do is to draw the line between honest naughtiness and sheer ill-bred blackguardism. If you're looking for a Sir Galahad, my dear baby, you'd better give up the thought of marrying anybody. What you have to do is to choose some well-bred gentleman who knows the world and make him fall in love with you.
He'll deal with his past life for himself. That'll be
his
affair –
your
affair will be to keep him interested and to bear him children. Men with any sensitiveness are faithful to their children, even if they're not faithful to their wives. The sooner you get over this Sir Galahad business the sooner you'll be a sensible little girl.

‘It's a choice between boredom, my sweet, and uncertainty. If the fellow's a gentleman and not a fool, you'll never have anything worse than uncertainty. And the woman who can't live with uncertainty had better go into a nunnery or die an old maid. The wives who go about looking, as they say, “unhappy” are either selfish creatures who're as bad as the men they condemn, in their fussiness over their, precious little selves, or they are unlucky innocents who've never had any Granny to tell them what this world is like. Don't look so wild and scared, child. Things aren't as bad as all that. If your Stormy Petrel has had his little pleasures, as no doubt he has, it's quite likely that he'll make a most quiet companion. The worst ones often do. For my part I'd sooner see you married to a man of the world – that's to say if he were a gentleman – than to some hot-headed boy who'd clear off bag and baggage directly he got tired of you and found some other scatter-brain.'

It was at this point that Nelly was encouraged to reveal what she had hitherto held back. ‘He
is
a lot older than me, Granny. His hair is just a little tiny bit grey, at the sides!'

The old woman patted her on the back and chuckled mischievously. ‘It'll soon be grey at the top as well,' she threw out, ‘if you're as naïve with him as you've been sometimes with me.'

She escorted her visitor as far as the end of the drive, between the old beeches.

‘Old Nancy there,' she said, pointing to a little cottage that stood just at the corner where the drive left the road, ‘takes lodgers sometimes. But no hurry, my dear, no hurry. Bring him up to see me as soon as you like. And don't let your thoughts run too quickly ahead!' This final word seemed to her advisable, considering the radiant expression that came into Nelly's face when she mentioned the possibility of Nancy's cottage.

‘Oh youth! youth!' sighed the old lady as she returned alone to her house, ‘but I always knew she was never properly in love with that ruffian Canyot. I wonder if number two does care at all? Oh youth! Oh youth!'

At the very moment when, in the house of his enemy, his betrothed was drinking tea, the ‘ruffian Canyot', as that same enemy had styled him, was seated with his sketchbook on the bank of an old moat-like pond only five or six miles away.

This pond fronted a ruined priory now converted into a farmhouse and was a place of rare imaginative possibilities.

By his side stood a child of about eleven, ugly and untidy, but with large intelligent eyes, eyes that surveyed the young man's face with intent concentrated sympathy.

‘We're friends, eh?' said Robert Canyot.

The little girl nodded furiously and frowned a little.

‘And you can't tease me and order me about, as most friends do, because you can't speak, eh, Sally-Maria?' Once more the child nodded.

‘Because, you know, I found out last night that a grown-up person who I thought loved me best of all didn't really and truly love me; not in her deep-down heart; not as you will love, I hope, someone some day, Sally-Maria.'

The child made a quick sudden movement with her hands as if in protest. Then she stooped down and kissed his sleeve. Canyot patted her gently on the head. ‘Yes, when they're grown up they're not faithful and true like you kiddy. Better let them go. Don't you think so, Sally-Maria? No use trying to hold them when they want to go.' He continued for a while sketching in silence, the child watching every movement of his pencil in fascinated absorption. ‘How many times have I been here, Sally-Maria?'

The little girl smiled at him at last and held up four fingers. ‘As many as that? You've watched with me four times – four long afternoons; and you're not tired of me yet!. You can't be a real girl, Sally-Maria. You must be a bird or a cat or a squirrel. Perhaps you're a goblin. But you can't be a girl. If you were I should be looking about for you everywhere today. I should be saying to myself, “Where's Sally-Maria gone?” And you'd be off with some nice new friend! And then if you did come back, just out of pity, you'd look at me sideways, wondering to yourself how you ever
could
have cared for such a stupid fellow. Wouldn't you, Sally-Maria?'

The dumb child shook her head violently at this and even made a strange inarticulate sound with her mouth – a sound that resembled the whistling rattle of a missel thrush.

‘I tell you what I must do. I must come up here tomorrow if it's a fine day, and bring my painting things and try and paint all this. I've sketched it often enough so I ought to make a good thing out of it, don't you think so, little water rat? Ah! that's what you are, a faithful little water rat.' The scene before him was certainly one of remarkable, if somewhat melancholy, significance. Dark laurel bushes were reflected in sombre greenish-black water, and a group of scotch-firs, looking strange and exotic in that Sussex landscape, stood out against the mossy buttressed wall of the farm building. Where the buildings ended there arose another wall, composed not of masonry but of clipped ilex, solid and impenetrable, a living fortress of perennial darkness, at this time of the year lightened just a little by the sprouting of new evergreen leaves.

Between both these walls, the animate one and the inanimate one, and the edge of the pond, there grew in rank profusion a mass of succulent
umbelliferae
, their transparent stalks and greenish-white flowers looking as if they were plants of darkness and moonlight enduring for a while the unnatural rays of the sun, while they waited for the diurnal return of their native obscurity.

‘That's what you are, a faithful little water rat!' repeated the painter, looking jeeringly into the great eyes of the ugly dumb child. ‘And what's more, I'm afraid you won't have a very happy life unless you learn to betray and change and flatter and tell huge howling lies.'

The child made ghastly movements with its throat and palate and emitted a sound like the noise made by the corn-crake.

‘What's that, Sally-Maria; what's that you're saying? You don't
want
to live a happy life unless you can be faithful and keep promises and not deceive? Go and eat hemlock roots then, little water rat, like the great Socrates, and leave this world of human beings to lie and lie and lie and be pretty and happy! Socrates wasn't a beauty, Sally-Maria. He was very very ugly. He was the ugliest person ever born. But he couldn't bear to deceive people. He spoke right out what he thought. Perhaps that's why they turned him into an owl. You hear owls at night, don't you Sally-Maria? Do you remember when we saw that great white one over there? I told you
what it was then; I told you not to be afraid. Whenever you hear that old fellow now, when you lie in bed, you must say to yourself:
he's a kind one, he's an honest one, he never eats little faithful water
rats. He just hoots and hoots and hoots because human beings are
so false!
'

Two men came round the hedge corner at that moment and stopped by their side. ‘You'm talking to our little Sal, mister, I see, same's usual,' said one of them, the simple-headed foreman of the place. ‘Yes, sure enough. I most always sees ‘un talkin' wi' the maidy when 'ee comes hereabouts,' remarked the other, a frail wraith of a man but heavily bearded, as though a human beard should grow upon a ghost-face and be more palpable and real than the countenance to which it belonged.

‘Making a picture there I see, mister?' continued the foreman – ‘I'd had the old place cleaned a bit for 'ee and polished up like if I'd a' known you was goin' to do it. 'Tis a queer old place like to live in, day in, day out. But, lord alive, we've got to live as well as we may somewheres, so's to die comfortable and as late as us may. That's what I sez to Passon Moreton, I sez.'

‘Ho! Ho! Ho!' laughed the wraith-like carter, while his goat-beard wagged and shook. ‘That's what a' sez – nothing short o' that. A terrible old hole, a' sez, and his Reverence had to take it from ‘un.'

‘Live as well, day in, day out, as the belly allows for, in these up-down times, so's to die as late as the Lord be willing,' repeated the foreman, planting his feet wide apart and leering at the universe through little screwed-up eyes. Once more the carter's frail form shook with merriment, at this daring piece of wit. That's just what ‘ee sez and Passon Moreton 'eed a got to take it from 'un, 'ee 'ad, meek as a lamb.'

The young artist made as though he would resume his work, but the two men seemed disinclined for some reason to leave his side, Behind his back, as he sat hunched up upon a fallen log, they were now making mute signs to each other, while the little dumb girl stared in amazement at them.

‘Tell 'im plain out,' whispered the bearded shadow to the burly confounder of parsons, ‘it mayn't be as us thinks it is, anyway knowing is knowing and the written word's the written word.'

The burly man fumbled in his pocket and produced a dirty scrap of newspaper.

The preoccupied painter, glancing up at the child in front of him, caught such a look of alarm upon her face that he turned his head sharply. ‘Anything the matter?' he inquired.

The foreman walked slowly round and stood in front of him, while the carter, shuffling uneasily after his superior, peered round at the hedge, the bushes, the pond and the hemlocks, as if expecting a sudden onrush of interested spectators hurrying to witness this dramatic occurrence.

‘Us seed 'ee from the yard, us did, mister,' murmured the second man, giving his stammering companion a little dig in the side, ‘an us thought the sooner we'd 'a told 'ee what 'twas 'as been and got itself brought to light in them newspapers, the sooner 'ee'd be acquainted with the injured party, like.'

‘'Tweren't I and'twern't Charley as read about this terrible thing,' murmured the lusty foreman in a tone of profound apology, evidently fearing, as some ancient slave of the house of Oedipus might once have feared, lest the bearer of evil news should himself meet with disaster.

‘No! 'tweren't Mr Priddle and 'tweren't I what discovered that your mother had been runned over by a railway train.' Twas old Miss Stone what lives over the hill ‘as told us.'

Robert Canyot leapt to his feet and snatched the bit of paper out of the man's hand. It was a brief statement that a lady who gave a London address had been knocked down by a shunted track at Selshurst Station and had been carried to the hospital. Her name was given as Mrs Canyot of Maida Vale. A horrible cold shiver ran down the spine of the young man and for a moment he felt dizzy. His poor sweet darling mother! She must have wanted to pay him a surprise visit. But why? It was hardly credible that she should do such a thing at her age and with her methodical habits. It couldn't be true! He looked at the notice again, holding it with a hand that trembled. Maida Vale? There could hardly be another Mrs Canyot who lived in that district. It
must
be his mother. And yet – to come like that – without telling him. It was utterly and entirely unlike her. He stood gazing helplessly at the paper in his hand calculating remote chances.

Robert Canyot was an only son. His father had been a wine
merchant, a man of the same type as John Ruskin's father, combining shrewdness, puritanism, and a certain queer turn or twist for what he regarded as ‘art'.

The little lady of Maida Vale had done all she could to give her boy everything in this mad world that youth could desire. She had let him run wild. She had sent him to school and removed him from school; sent him to Oxford and removed him from Oxford. Finally she had made over to him half of her income and let him follow the delight of his eyes and the fancies of his heart unrestrained by any responsibility. The result was that the sharp contrast, between his mother's unbounded infatuation and the rough shocks of the world that cared nothing what became of him, made out of quite sound material a sort of cynical misanthropic queer one.

It was not however a very cynical Robert who gazed now, agitated and startled, into the narrow eyes of Silas Priddle and the great watery eyes of Charley Budge.

‘Hoping there's no offence, mister, in us having taken the liberty of showing 'ee that there bit 'o news. It
may
be as it's your poor dear Mother what's runned into a railway train, and it may be as 'tisn't. If 'tis, 'tis God's will. If 'tisn't I reckons 'tis somebody else's mother; but seeing how it's upset 'ee like I be afeerd it is as 'tis there writ' down.'

Saying these words the foreman of Toat Farm planted his feet firmly in the long grass, screwed up his eyes, scratched his head, and whistled a few notes of the particular call with which he was accustomed to summon his wife's ducks at the hour of sunset.

‘Charley,' he remarked after a long pause, during which the young man read and re-read the bit of newspaper, ‘us must be getting on with the beasts, us must.'

‘Aye, aye, Mr Priddle,' agreed the other. ‘Beasts must be served funeral days same as wedding days, as old Farmer Patchem used to tell us every time 'is missus 'ad a still-born. “Life is as 'tis, Charley,” 'ee used to say, “and them as takes it quiet'll last longest and their children's children'll call 'em blessed.”'

Having uttered these words of wisdom the two sages moved away. ‘The poor lad be dazed-like,' said the foreman. ‘Did 'ee mark, Charley, how 'ee squinnied with the eyes o'n, when 'ee got tellin of funerals? A reckon ‘ee might o' bashed it out, 'ee did, too point, Charley, than 'ee was. Sort o' bashed it out, 'ee did, too
plumb and positive. Maybe the old woman isn't broken up complete. Some of them elderly females is wonderful hard to kill; same as cats I reckon.'

Well! no use standing here
, thought Canyot.
I must off to Sets-hurst.
If it is the poor darling, I shall stay the night there. It may be
nothing more than a nervous shock, after all. These papers exaggerate
so. And it may not be her at all. But if it isn't, it's certainly an
odd coincidence
.

He felt a small hand softly and timidly pulling at the sleeve that hung empty. Robert had lost his arm in Flanders and possessed two medals for courage in the field. He looked down and patted the child's head, ashamed of having forgotten her. The little dumb girl was making pitiful sounds with her poor mouth.

‘Poor little water rat!' he murmured. ‘Poor little Sally-Maria! This is a bad day for us, isn't it? But never mind! Say your prayers for your friend's Mummy. Let's hope that when we meet again all will be well.'

The child put her arms around him holding his sleeve tightly and hiding her face.

‘There – there – my little one,' he said, extricating himself from her clinging arms. ‘Don't worry any more about it. Run home to Auntie and be a good little kind faithful water rat. We'll see each other again. Goodbye and God bless you!' And he broke from her and started off at a run in the direction of Littlegate.
I'll just tell
them where I'm going
, he said to himself,
so if I'm away for the
night they won't be scared
. Even to his own heart he used the pronoun ‘they', but his thoughts circled round Nelly and the sad walk he had had with her the night before.
I've go to face it
, he said to himself as he followed the pack-horse track along the lower slopes of the Downs.
If she has never really cared for me as she
thought she did, I suppose I can't blame her. But if she's simply
fickle, and just flattered by that cunning old Frenchy's blarney –
well then, to the devil with her! She's no better than a flirtatious
little cat
!

The path Canyot followed through the late afternoon sunshine lay through the open country. Its height above the valley gave him a clear view of many outstretched white roads and lanes. As he approached the widespread park-like slopes that rose up from West
Horthing to the crest of the hills he obtained an unimpeded survey over the whole winding length of the narrow chalk track which led from Furze Lodge to Littlegate.