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!’
Chapter 4
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.’