“A bare two thousand a year.”
“So you start the year with a deficit, having paid off your income tax and the interest on the mortgage. Disgusting,” said Stanforth. “One thing, at any rate, is clear: the place must go. One could just manage to keep the house, of course, but I don’t see how anyone could afford to live in it, having kept it. The land isn’t worth over much, but luckily we’ve got the house and gardens. What figure, Nutley? Thirty thousand? Forty?”
Mr. Nutley whistled.
“You’re optimistic. The house isn’t so very large, and it’s inconvenient, no bathrooms, no electric light, no garage, no central heating. The buyer would have all that on his hands, and the moat ought to be cleaned out too. It’s insanitary.”
“Still, the house is historical,” said Stanforth; “I think we can safely say thirty thousand for the house. It’s a perfect specimen of Elizabethan, so I’ve always been told, and has the Tudor moat and outbuildings into the bargain. Thirty thousand for the house,” he noted on a piece of paper.
“I wouldn’t care for it myself,” said Mr. Nutley, looking round, “low rooms, dark passages, a stinking moat, and a slippery staircase. If that’s Tudor, you’re welcome to it.” His voice had a peculiarly malignant intonation. “Still, it’s a gentleman’s place, I don’t deny, and ought to make an interesting item under the hammer.” He passed the tip of his tongue over his lips, a gesture horridly voluptuous in one so sharp and meagre.
“Then we have the furniture and the tapestries and the pictures,” Stanforth went on. “I think we might reckon another twenty thousand for them. Americans, you know – or the buyer of the house might care for some of the furniture. The pictures aren’t of much value, so I understand, save as of family interest. Twenty thousand. That clears off the mortgage. What about the farms and the land?”
“You could split some of the park up into building lots,” said Mr. Nutley.
Mr. Farebrother gave a little exclamation.
“The park – it’s a pretty park, Nutley.”
“Very pretty, and any builder who chose to run up half a dozen villas would be a sensible chap,” Mr. Nutley replied, wilfully misunderstanding him. “I should suggest a site at the top of the hill, where you get the view. What do you think, Colonel Stanforth?”
“I think the buyer of the house should be given the option of buying in the whole of the park, that section being reserved at the price of accommodation land, if he chooses to pay for it.”
Mr. Nutley nodded. He approved of Colonel Stanforth as an adequately shrewd business man.
“There remain the farm lands,” he said, referring to his papers. “Two thousand acres, roughly; three good farm houses; and a score of cottages. It’s a little difficult to price. Say, taking one thing in with another, twenty pounds an acre, including the buildings – a good deal of the land is worth less. Forty thousand. We’ve disposed now of all the assets. We shall be lucky if we can clear the death-duties and mortgage out of the proceeds of the sale, and let Mr. Chase go with whatever amount the house itself fetches to bring him in a few hundreds a year for the rest of his life.”
They stared across at Chase, whose concern with the affair they appeared hitherto to have forgotten. Mr. Farebrother alone kept his eyes bent down, as very meticulously he sharpened the point of his pencil.
“It’s an unsatisfactory situation,” said Mr. Nutley; “if I were Chase I should resent being dragged away from my ordinary business on such an unprofitable affair. He’ll be lucky, as you say, if he clears the actual value of the house for himself after everything is settled up. Now, are we to try for auction or private treaty? Personally I think the house at any rate will go by private treaty. The present tenants will probably buy in their own farms. But the house, if it’s reasonably well advertised, ought to attract a number of private buyers. We must have a decent caretaker to show people over the place. I suggest the present butler? He was in Miss Chase’s service for thirty years.” He looked around for approval; Chase and Stanforth both nodded, though Chase felt so much of an outsider that he wondered whether Nutley would consider him justified in nodding. “Ring the bell, Farebrother, will you? It’s just behind you. Look at the bell, gentlemen! What an antiquated arrangement! There’s no doubt, the house is terribly inconvenient.”
Fortune, the butler, came in, a thin grizzled man in decent black.
“Perhaps you had better give your instructions, Nutley,” Chase said from the window-seat as the solicitor glanced at him with conventional hesitation.
“I’m speaking for Mr. Chase, Fortune,” said Mr. Nutley. “Your late mistress’s will unfortunately isn’t very satisfactory, and Blackboys will be in the market before very long. We want you to stay on until then, with such help as you need, and you must tell the other servants they have all a month’s notice. By the way, you inherit five hundred pounds under the will, but it’ll be some time before you get it.”
“Blackboys in the market?” Fortune began.
“Oh, my good man, don’t start lamenting again here,” exclaimed Mr. Nutley hurriedly; “think of those five hundred pounds – a very nice little sum of which we should all be glad, I’m sure.”
“Dear me, dear me,” said Mr. Farebrother, much distressed, and he got up and patted Fortune on the shoulder.
Nutley was collecting the papers again into a neat packet, boxing them together on the table as though they had been a pack of cards. He glanced up to say,
“That settled, Fortune? Then we needn’t keep you any longer; thanks. Well, Mr. Chase, if there’s anything we can do for you to-morrow, you have only to ring me up or Farebrother – oh, I forgot, of course, you aren’t on the telephone here.”
Chase, who had been thinking to himself that Nutley was a splendid man – really efficient, a first-class man, was suddenly aware that he resented the implied criticism.
“I can go to the post-office if I want to telephone,” he said coldly.
Mr. Farebrother noticed the coldness in his tone, and thought regretfully, “Dear me, Nutley has offended him – ignored him completely all the time. I ought to have put that right – very remiss of me.”
He said aloud, “If Mr. Chase would prefer not to sleep in the house, I should be very glad to offer him hospitality . . .”
“Afraid of the old lady’s ghost, Chase?” said Mr. Nutley with a laugh that concealed a sneer.
They all laughed, with exception of Mr. Farebrother, who was pained.
Chase was tired; he wished they would go; he wanted to be alone.
II
He was alone; they had gone, Stanforth striding off across the park in his rather ostentatious suit of large checks and baggy knickerbockers, the two solicitors, with their black leather hand-bags, trundling down the avenue in the station cab. They had gone, they and their talk of mortgages, rents, acreage, tenants, possible buyers, building lots, and sales by auction or private treaty! Chase stood on the bridge above the moat, watching their departure. He was still a little confused in his mind, not having had time to turn round and think since Stanforth’s telegram had summoned him that morning. Arrived at Blackboys, he had been immediately commandeered by Nutley, had had wishes and opinions put into his mouth, and had found a complete set of intentions ready-made for him to assume as his own. That had all saved him a lot of trouble, undoubtedly; but nevertheless he was glad of a breathing-space; there were things he wanted to think over; ideas he wanted to get used to . . .
He was poor; and hard-working in a cheerless fashion; he managed a branch of a small insurance company in Wolverhampton, and expected nothing further of life. Not very robust, his days in an office left him with little energy after he had conscientiously carried out his business. He lived in lodgings in Wolverhampton, smoking rather too much and eating rather too little. He had always known that some day, when his surviving aunt was dead, he would inhe
rit Blackboys, but Blackboys was only a name to him, and he had gauged that the inheritance would mean for him little but trouble and interruption, and that once the whole affair was wound up he would resume his habitual existence just where he had dropped it.
His occupations and outlook might thus be comprehensively summarized.
He turned to look back at the house. Any man brighter-hearted and more optimistic might have rejoiced in this enforced expedition as a holiday, but Chase was neither optimistic nor bright-hearted. He took life with a dreary and rather petulant seriousness, and, full of resentment against this whole unprofitable errand, was dwelling now upon the probable, the almost certain, inefficiencies of his subordinates in Wolverhampton, because he had in him an old-maidish trait that could not endure the thought of other people interfering with his business or his possessions. He worried, in his small anaemic mind that was too restricted to be contemptuous, and too diffident to be really bad-tempered . . . The house looked down at him, grave and mellow. Its façade of old, plum-coloured bricks, the inverted V of the two gables, the rectangles of the windows, and the creamy stucco of the little colonnade that joined the two projecting wings, all reflected unbroken in the green stillness of the moat. It was not a large house; it consisted only of the two wings and the central block, but it was complete and perfect; so perfect, that Chase, who knew and cared nothing about architecture, and whose mind was really absent, worrying, in Wolverhampton, was gradually softened into a comfortable satisfaction. The house was indeed small, sweet, and satisfying. There was no fault to be found with the house. It was lovely in colour and design. It carried off, in its perfect proportions, the grandeur of its manner with an easy dignity. It was quiet, the evening was quiet, the country was quiet; it was part of the evening and the country. The country was almost unknown to Chase, whose life had been spent in towns – factory towns. Here he was on the borders of Kent and Sussex where the nearest town was a village, a jumble of cottages round a green, at his own park-gates. The house seemed to lie at the very heart of peace.
A little wooden gate, moss-grown and slightly dilapidated, cut off the bridge from the gravelled entrance-space; he shut and latched it, and stood on the island that the moat surrounded. Swallows were swooping along the water, for the air was full of insects in the golden haze of the May evening. Faint clouds of haze hung about, blue and gold, deepening the mystery of the park, shrouding the recesses of the garden. The place was veiled. Chase put out his hand as though to push aside a veil . . .
He detected himself in the gesture, and glanced round guiltily to see whether he was observed. But he was alone; even the curtains behind the windows were drawn. He felt a desire to explore the garden, but hesitated, timorous and apologetic. Hitherto in his life he had explored only other people’s gardens on the rare days when they were opened to the public; he remembered with what pained incredulity he had watched the public helping itself to the flowers out of the borders, for he could not help being a great respecter of property. He prided himself, of course, on being a Socialist; that was the fashion amongst the young men he occasionally frequented in Wolverhampton; but unlike them he was a Socialist whose sense of veneration was deeper and more instinctive than his socialism. He had thought at the time that he would be very indignant if he were the owner of the garden. Now that he actually was the owner, he hesitated before entering the garden, with a sense of intrusion. Had he caught sight of a servant he would certainly have turned and strolled off in the opposite direction.
The house lay in the hollow at the bottom of a ridge of wooded hills that sheltered it from the north, but the garden was upon the slope of the hill, in design quite simple: a central walk divided the square garden into halves, eased into very flat, shallow steps, and outlined by a low stone coping. A wall surrounded the whole garden. To reach the garden from the house, you crossed a little footbridge over the moat, at the bottom of the central walk. This simplicity, so obvious, yet, like the house, so satisfying, could not possibly have been otherwise ordered; it was married to the lie of the land. It flattered Chase with the delectable suggestion that he, a simple fellow, could have conceived and carried out the scheme as well as had the architect.
He was bound to admit that a simple fellow would not have thought of the peacocks. They were the royal touch that redeemed the gentle friendliness of the house and garden from all danger of complacency. He paused in amazement now at his first real sight of them. All the way up the low wall on either side of the central walk they sat, thirty or forty of them, their long tails sweeping down almost to the ground, the delicate crowns upon their heads erect in a feathery line of perspective, and the blue of their breasts rich above the grey stone coping. Half way up the walk, the coping was broken by two big stone balls, and upon one of these a peacock stood with his tail fully spread behind him, and uttered his discordant cry as though in the triumph and pride of his beauty.
Chase paused. He was too shy even to disturb those regal birds. He imagined the swirl of colour and the screech of indignation that would accompany his advance, and before their arrogance his timidity was abashed. But he stood there for a very long while, looking at them, until the garden became swathed in the shrouds of the blue evening, very dusky and venerable. He did not pass over the moat, but stood on the little bridge, between the house and the garden, while those shrouds of evening settled with the hush of vespers round him, and as he looked he kept saying to himself “Mine? Mine?” in a puzzled and deprecatory way.
III
When Fortune showed him his room before dinner he was silent and inclined to scoff. He had been shown the other rooms by Nutley when he first arrived, and had gazed at them, accepting them without surprise, much as he would have gazed at rooms in some show-place or princely palace that he had paid a shilling to visit. The hall, the dining-room, the library, the long gallery – he had looked at them all, and had nodded in reply to the solicitor’s comments, but not for a moment had it entered his head to regard the rooms as his own. To be left, however, in this room that resembled all the others, and to be told that it was his bedroom; to realize that he was to sleep inside that brocaded four-poster with the ostrich plumes nodding on the top; to envisage the trivial and vulgar functions of his daily dressing and undressing as taking place within this room that although so small was yet so stately – this was a shock that made him draw in his breath. Left alone, his hand raised to give a tug at his tie, he stared round and emitted a soft whistle. The walls were hung with tapestry, a grey-green landscape of tapestry, the borders formed by two fat twisted columns, looped across with garlands of flowers and fruits, and cherubs with distended cheeks blew zephyrs across this woven Arcady. High-backed Stuart chairs of black and gold . . . Chase wanted to take off his boots, but did not venture to sit down on the tawny cane-work. He moved about gingerly, afraid of spoiling something. Then he remembered that everything was his to spoil if he so chose. Everything waited on his good pleasure; the whole house, all those rooms, the garden; all those unknown farms and acres that Nutley and Stanforth had discussed. The thought produced no exhilaration in him, but, rather, an extreme embarrassment and alarm. He was more than ever dismayed to think that someone, sooner or later, was certain to come to him for orders . . .
He hesitated for an appreciable time before making up his mind to go down to dinner; in fact, even after he had resolutely pushed open his bedroom door, he still wavered upon its threshold. The landing, lit by the yellow flame of a solitary candle stuck into a silver sconce, was full of shadows: and across the great window red velvet curtains had been drawn, and now hung from floor to ceiling. Down the passage, behind one of those mysterious closed doors, lay the old woman dead in her pompous bed. So the house must have drowsed, evening after evening, before Chase ever came near it, with the only difference that from one of those doors had emerged an old lady dressed in black silk, leaning on a stick, an arbitrary old lady, who had slowly descended the polished stairs, caref
ully placing the rubber ferule of her stick from step to step, and helping herself on the banisters with the other hand, instead of the alien clerk from Wolverhampton, who hesitated to go downstairs to dinner because he feared there would be a servant in the room to wait upon him.
There was. Chase dined miserably, and was relieved only when he was left alone, port and madeira set before him, and the four candles reflected in the shining oak table. A greyhound which had joined him at the foot of the stairs, now sat gravely beside him, and he gave him bits of biscuit as he had not dared to do in the presence of the servant. More at his ease at last, he sat thinking what he would do with the few hundreds a year Nutley predicted for him. Not such an unprofitable business after all, perhaps! He would be able to move from his lodgings in Wolverhampton; perhaps he could take a small villa with a little bit of garden in front. His imagination did not extend beyond Wolverhampton. Perhaps he could keep back one or two pieces of plate from the sale; he would like to have something to remind him of his connexion with Blackboys and with his family. He cautiously picked up a porringer that was the only ornament on the table, and examined it. It gave him a little shock of familiarity to see that the coat-of-arms engraved on it was the same as the coat on his own signet ring, inherited from his father, and the motto was the same too: Intabescantque relictâ, and the tiny peregrine falcon as the crest. Absurd to be surprised! He ought to remember that he wasn’t a stranger here; he was Chase, no less than the old lady had been Chase, no less than all the portraits upstairs were Chase. He had already seen that coat-of-arms to-day, in the heraldic window, but without taking in its meaning. It gave him a new sense of confidence now, reassuring him that he wasn’t the interloper he felt himself to be.
Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir Page 7