After My Fashion by John Cowper Powys Page A

’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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜â€™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.
    â€˜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 winemerchant, 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