Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir

by Vita Sackville-West

  Miss Whitaker came to visit him in prison. She was his wife, however shamefully he had treated her, and had no difficulty in obtaining the necessary permission from compassionate authority. Lomax was pleased to see her. She reminded him of Illyria and the Coati, – though, of course, Illyria and the Coati were things he knew of only by hearsay. But Miss Whitaker herself was a little embarrassed; was almost sorry she had come. Like Lomax, she found reality confusing. “I am afraid you have ruined your life,” she said, looking round Lomax’s neat cell.

  “Not at all,” said Lomax politely, “so long as I haven’t ruined yours. I am only sorry my counsel should have mentioned that about the child. He got it out of me in an unguarded moment. I am glad to have this opportunity of apologising.”

  “Yes, poor little thing,” said Miss Whitaker. “But as my name hasn’t appeared, no harm was done. I was sorry, too, that I had to give evidence against you. Robert insisted, – I always warned you that Robert was very revengeful.”

  “Quite,” said Lomax.

  “I ought to tell you,” said Miss Whitaker, looking down at her shoes, “that he is coming home. He has been among the Indians for the last six months, and it has broken his health. He lands at Southampton, – where we sailed from, do you remember? – just before Christmas.”

  “I am sorry,” said Lomax, “that I shan’t have the pleasure of meeting him.”

  “No,” said Miss Whitaker; and then, seeming to lose her head a little, she again said, “No,” of course you won’t. Perhaps I ought to be going?”

  Anyway, Artivale would have the money. Lomax hugged that to his breast. Science would have the money; and science was a fact, surely, incapable of caricature; absolute, as mathematics were absolute. He had had enough of living in a world where truth was falsehood and falsehood truth. He was about to abandon that world, and his only legacy to it should be to an incorruptible province; let him hold that comfort, where all other comforts had turned to so ingenious a mockery.

  Shortly after Lomax had been hanged, Bellamy’s nearest relations, two maiden ladies who lived at Hampstead and interested themselves in the conversion of the heathen, entered a plea that Bellamy’s will had been composed under the undue influence of Arthur Lomax. The case was easily proved, and it was understood that the bulk of the fortune would be placed by the next-of-kin as conscience money at the disposal of His Majesty’s, Treasury.

  THE END

  THE HEIR

  A Love Story

  To BM

  Foreword

  I wrote this story in 1922, or it might be 1921. There can be no indiscretion now in revealing that it was inspired by Groombridge Place, astride the borders of Kent and Sussex.

  I had always known Groombridge Place and the two old Misses Sant who lived there. After the death of the last Miss Sant, when the property came up for sale, I went there with a rich and florid South American acquaintance of mine, who thought of buying it, and whose attitude towards it shocked me into writing this story. It shocked me also into inventing my Mr. Chase, a purely imaginary character, heir to a tradition he had never envisaged which caught him so unexpectedly into its toils.

  I had not read my story for twenty-seven years, when Mr. Martin Secker asked me to let him reprint it. Then I re-read it, with that obituary feeling one has towards one’s youthful work. Can I let it stand, I wondered? Is it too slight? Is it too mawkishly sentimental? Or is it so sincerely felt that it can still stand on its own legs? Sincerity, as I now know, is not enough; it is not the true touch-stone; it is the delusion which drives many a writer into believing himself a better writer than he is. Yet I came to the conclusion that it reflected a mood I had felt then and have felt with increasing melancholy ever since; so here, for better or worse, it is.

  V.S.-W

  Sissinghurst 1949

  I

  Miss Chase lay on her immense red silk four-poster that reached as high as the ceiling. Her face was covered over by a sheet, but as she had a high, aristocratic nose, it raised the sheet into a ridge, ending in a point. Her hands could also be distinguished beneath the sheet, folded across her chest like the hands of an effigy; and her feet, tight together like the feet of an effigy, raised the sheet into two further points at the bottom of the bed. She was eighty-four years old, and she had been dead for twenty-four hours.

  The room was darkened into a shadowy twilight. Outside, in a pale, golden sunshine, the birds twittered among the very young green of the trees. A thread of this sunshine, alive with golden dust-motes, sundered the curtain, and struck out, horizontally, across the boards of the floor. One of the two men who were moving with all possible discretion about the room, paused to draw the curtains more completely together.

  “Very annoying, this delay about the coffin,” said Mr. Nutley. “However, I got off the telegrams to the papers in time, I hope, to get the funeral arrangements altered. It would be very awkward if people from London turned up for the funeral on Thursday instead of Friday – very awkward indeed. Of course, the local people wouldn’t turn up; they would know the affair had had to be put off; but London people – they’re so scattered. And they would be annoyed to find they had given up a whole day to a country funeral that wasn’t to take place after all.”

  “I should think so, indeed,” said Mr. Chase, peevishly. “I know the value of time well enough to appreciate that.”

  “Ah yes,” Mr. Nutley replied with sympathy, “you’re anxious to be back at Wolverhampton, I know. It’s very annoying to have one’s work cut into. And if you feel like that about it, when the old lady was your aunt, what would comparative strangers from London feel, if they had to waste a day?”

  They both looked resentfully at the stiff figure under the sheet on the bed, but Mr. Chase could not help feeling that the solicitor was a little over-inclined to dot his i’s in the avoidance of any possible hypocrisy. He reflected, however, that it was, in the long run, preferable to the opposite method of Mr. Farebrother, Nutley’s senior partner, who was at times so evasive as to be positively unintelligible.

  “Very tidy, everything. H’m – handkerchiefs, gloves, little bags of lavender in every drawer. Yes, just what I should have expected: she was a rare one for having everything spick and span. She’d go for the servants, tapping her stick sharp on the boards, if anything wasn’t to her liking; and they all scuttled about as though they’d been wound up after she’d done with them. I don’t know what you’ll do with the old lady’s clothes, Mr. Chase. They wouldn’t fetch much, you know, with the exception of the lace. There’s fine, real lace here, that ought to be worth something. It’s all down in the heirloom book, and it’ll have to be unpicked off the clothes. But for the rest say twenty pounds. These silk dresses are made of good stuff, I should say,” observed Mr. Nutley, fingering a row of black dresses that hung inside a cupboard, and that as he stirred them moved with the faint rustle of dried leaves; “take my advice, and give some to the housekeeper; that’ll be of more value to you in the end than the few pounds you might get for them. Always get the servants on your side, is my axiom. However, it’s your affair; you’re the sole heir, and there’s nobody to interfere.” He said this with a sarcastic inflection detected only by himself; a warning note under the ostensible deference of his words as though daring Chase to assert his rights. “And, anyway,” he concluded, “we’re not likely to find any more papers in here, so we’re wasting time now. Shall we go down?”

  “Wait a minute, listen: what’s that noise out in the garden?”

  “Oh, that! One of the peacocks screeching. There are at least fifty of the damned birds. Your aunt wouldn’t have one of them killed, not one. They ruin a garden. Your aunt liked the garden, and she liked the peacocks, but she liked the peacocks better than the garden. Screech, screech – you’ll soon do away with them. At least, I should say you would do away with them if you were going to live here. I can see you’r
e a man of sense.”

  Mr. Chase drew Mr. Nutley and his volubility out on to the landing, closing the door behind him. The solicitor ruffled the sheaf of papers he carried in his hand, trying to peep between the sheets that were fastened together by an elastic band.

  “Well,” he said briskly, “if you’re agreeable I think we might go downstairs and find Farebrother and Colonel Stanforth. You see, we are trying to save you all the time we possibly can. What about the old lady? Do you want anyone sent in to sit with her?”

  “I really don’t know,” said Chase, “what’s usually done? You know more about these things than I do.”

  “Oh, as to that, I should think I ought to!” Nutley replied with a little self-satisfied smirk. “Perhaps you won’t believe me, but most weeks I’m in a house with a corpse. There are usually relatives, of course, but in this case if you wanted anyone sent in to sit with the old lady, we should have to send a servant. Shall I call Fortune?”

  “Perhaps you had better – but I don’t know: Fortune is the butler, isn’t he? Well, the butler told me all the servants were very busy.”

  “Then it might be as well not to disturb them? At any rate, the old lady won’t run away,” said Mr. Nutley jocosely.

  “No, perhaps we needn’t disturb them.” Chase was relieved to escape the necessity of giving an order to a servant.

  They went downstairs together.

  “Hold on to the banisters, Mr. Chase; these polished stairs are very tricky. Fine old oak; solid steps too; but I prefer a drugget myself. Good gracious, how that peacock startled me! Look at it, sitting on the ledge outside the window. It’s pecking at the panes with its beak. Shoo, you great gaudy thing.” The solicitor flapped his arms at it, like a skinny crow beating its wings.

  They stopped to look at the peacock, which, walking the outside ledge with spread tail, seemed to form part, both in colour and pattern, of the great heraldic window on the landing of the staircase. The sunlight streamed through the colours, and the square of sunlight on the boards was chequered with patches of violet, red and indigo.

  “Gaudy?” said Chase. “It’s barbaric. Like jewels. Astonishing.”

  Mr. Nutley glanced at him with a faint contempt. Chase was a sandy, weakly-looking little man, with thin reddish hair, freckles, and washy blue eyes. He wore an old Norfolk jacket and trousers that did not match; Mr. Nutley, in his quick impatient mind, set him aside as reassuringly insignificant.

  “Farebrother and Colonel Stanforth are in the library, I believe,” Nutley suggested.

  “Don’t forget to introduce me to Colonel Stanforth,” said Chase, dismayed at having to meet yet another stranger. “He was an intimate friend of my aunt’s, wasn’t he? Is he the only trustee?”

  “The other one died and was never replaced. As for Colonel Stanforth being an intimate friend of the old lady, he was indeed; about the only friend she ever had; she frightened everybody else away,” said Nutley, opening the library door.

  “Ah, Mr. Chase!” Mr. Farebrother exclaimed in a relieved and propitiatory tone.

  “We’ve been through all the drawers,” Mr. Nutley said, his briskness redoubled in his partner’s presence. “We’ve got all the necessary papers – they weren’t even locked up – so now we can get to business. With any luck Mr. Chase ought to see himself back at Wolverhampton within the week, in spite of the delay over the funeral. I’ve told Mr. Chase that it isn’t strictly correct to open the papers before the funeral is over, but that, having regard to his affairs in Wolverhampton, and in view of the fact that there are no other relatives whose susceptibilities we might offend, we are setting to work at once.” He was bending over the table, sorting out the papers as he talked, but now he looked up and saw Chase still standing in embarrassment near the door. “Dear me, I was forgetting. Mr. Chase, you don’t know Colonel Stanforth, your trustee, I think? Colonel Stanforth has lived outside the park gates all his life, and I wager he knows every acre of your estate better than you ever will yourself, Mr. Chase.”

  Mr. Farebrother, a round little rosy man in large spectacles, smiled benignly as Chase and Stanforth shook hands. He liked bringing the heir and the trustee together, but his pleasure was clouded by Nutley’s last remark, suggesting as it did that Chase would never have the opportunity of learning his estate; he felt this remark to be in poor taste.

  “Oh, come! I hope we shall have Mr. Chase with us for some time,” he said pleasantly, “although,” he added, recollecting himself; “under such melancholy circumstances.” He had never been known to make any more direct allusion to death than that contained in this or similarly consecrated phrases. Mr. Nutley pounced instantly upon the evasion.

  “After all, Farebrother, Chase never knew the old lady, remember. The melancholy part of it, to my mind, is the muddle the estate is in. Mortgaged up to the last shilling, and overrun with peacocks. Won’t you come and sit at the table. Mr. Chase? Here’s a pencil in case you want to make any notes.”

  Colonel Stanforth came up to the table at the same time. Chase shied away, and went to sit on the window-seat. Mr. Farebrother began a little preamble.

  “We sent for you immediately, Mr. Chase; that is to say, Colonel Stanforth, who was on the spot at the moment of the regrettable event, communicated with us and with you simultaneously. We should like to welcome you, with all the sobriety required by the cloud which must hang over this occasion, to the estate which has been in the possession of your family for the past five hundred years. We should like to express our infinite regret at the embarrassments under which the estate will be found to labour. We should like to assure you – I am speaking now for my partner and myself – that our firm has been in no way responsible for the management of the property. Miss Chase, your aunt, whom I immensely revered, was a lady of determined character and charitable impulses . . .”

  “You mean, she was an obstinate old sentimentalist,” said Mr. Nutley, losing his patience.

  Mr. Farebrother looked gently pained.

  “Charitable impulses,” he repeated, “which she was always loth to modify. Colonel Stanforth will tell you that he has had many a discussion . . .” (“I should just think so,” said Colonel Stanforth, “you could argue the hind leg off a donkey, but you couldn’t budge Phillida Chase,”) “there were questions of undesirable tenants and what not – I confess it saddens me to think of Blackboys so much encumbered . . .”

  “Encumbered! My good man, the place will be in the market as soon as I can get it there,” said Mr. Nutley, interrupting again, and tapping his pencil on the table.

  “It would have been so pleasant,” said Mr. Farebrother sighing, “if matters had been in an entirely satisfactory condition, and our duty towards Mr. Chase would have been so joyfully fulfilled. Your family, Mr. Chase, were Lords of the Manor of Blackboys long before any house was built upon this site. The snapping of such a chain of tradition . . .”

  “Out of date, out of date, my good man,” said Nutley, full of contempt and surprisingly spiteful.

  “Let’s get on to the will,” suggested Stanforth.

  Mr. Nutley produced it with alacrity.

  “Dear, dear,” said Mr. Farebrother, wiping his spectacles. The reading of a will was to him always a painful proceeding. It was indeed an unkind fate which had cast one of his amiable and conciliatory nature into the melancholy regions of the law.

  “It’s very short,” said Nutley, and read it aloud.

  After providing for a legacy of five hundred pounds to the butler, John Fortune, in recognition of his long and devoted service, and for a legacy of two hundred and fifty pounds to her friend Edward Stanforth “in anticipation of services to be rendered after my death,” the testator devised the Manor of Blackboys and the whole of the Blackboys Estate and all other messuages tenements hereditaments and premises situate in the counties of Kent and Sussex and elsewhere and all other e
states and effects whatsoever and wheresoever both real and personal to her nephew Peregrine Chase at present of Wolverhampton.

  “Sensible woman – she got a solicitor to draw up her will,” said Mr. Nutley as he ended; “no side-tracks, no ambiguities, no bother. Sensible woman. Now we can get to work.”

  “Ah, dear!” said Mr. Farebrother in wistful reminiscence, “how well I remember the day Miss Chase sent for me to assist her in the making of that will; it was just such a day as this, and after I had been waiting a little while she came into the room, a black lace scarf on her white hair, and her beautiful hands leaning on the top of her stick – she had very beautiful hands, your aunt, Mr. Chase, beautiful cool ivory hands – and I remember she was singularly gracious, singularly gracious; a great lady of the old school, and she was pleased to twit me about my reluctance to admit that some day even she . . . ah, well, will-making is a painful matter; but I remember her, gallant as ever . . .”

  “That’s all rubbish, Farebrother,” said Mr. Nutley rudely, as his partner showed signs of meandering indefinitely on; “gracious, indeed! When you know she terrified you nearly out of your life. You always get mawkish like this about people once they’re dead.”

  Mr. Farebrother blinked mildly, and Nutley continued without taking any further notice of him.

  “You haven’t done so well out of this as John Fortune,” he said to Stanforth, “and you’ll have a deal more trouble.”

  “I take it,” said Stanforth, getting up and striding about the room “that in the matter of this estate there are a great many liabilities and no assets to speak of, except the estate itself? To start with, there’s a twenty-thousand-pound mortgage. What’s the income from the farms?”