He was very glad when the funeral was over, and he was rid of all the
strange neighbours who had wrung his hand and uttered commiserating
phrases. He was also glad that the house should be relieved of the
presence of his aunt, for he could tread henceforth unrestrained by the
idea that the corpse might rise up and with a pointing finger denounce
his few and timorous orders. He stood now on the threshold of the
library downstairs, looking at a bowl of coral-coloured tulips whose
transparent delicacy detached itself brightly in the sober panelled
room. He was grateful to the quietness that slumbered always over the
house, abolishing fret as by a calm rebuke.
His recollections of the funeral were, he found to his dismay,
principally absurd. Mr. Farebrother had sidled up to him, when he
thought Nutley was preoccupied elsewhere, as they returned on foot up
the avenue after the ceremony. “A great pity the place should have to
go,” Mr. Farebrother had said, trotting along beside him, “such a very
great pity.” Chase had agreed in a perfunctory way. “Perhaps it won’t
come to that,” said Mr. Farebrother with a vague hopefulness. Chase
again murmured something in the nature of agreement. “I like to think
things will come right until the moment they actually go wrong,” Mr.
Farebrother said with a smile. “Very sad, too, the death of your aunt,”
he added. “Yes,” said Chase. “Well, well, perhaps it isn’t so bad as we
think,” said Mr. Farebrother, causing Chase to stare at him, thoroughly
startled this time by the extent of the rosy old man’s optimism.
But he was not now dwelling upon the funeral. To-morrow he must leave
Blackboys. No doubt he would find his affairs in Wolverhampton in a
terrible way. He said to himself, “Tut-tut,” his mind absent, though his
eyes were still upon the tulips; but his annoyance over the office in
Wolverhampton was largely superficial. Business had a claim on him,
certainly; the business of his employers; but his own private business
had a claim too, that, moreover, would take up but a month or two out of
his life; after that Blackboys would be sold, and would engage no more
of his time away from Wolverhampton. Blackboys would pass to other
hands, making no further demands upon Peregrine Chase. It would be a
queer little incident to look back upon; his few acquaintances in
Wolverhampton, with whom he sometimes played billiards of an evening, or
joined in a whist drive, would stare, derisive and incredulous, if the
story ever leaked out, at the idea of Chase as a landed proprietor. As a
squire! As the descendant of twenty generations! Why, no one in
Wolverhampton knew so much as his Christian name; he had been careful
always to sign his letters with a discreet initial, so that if they
thought of it at all they probably thought him Percy. A friend would
have nosed it out. There was a safeguard in friendlessness. Chase was a
reticent little man, as his solicitors had had occasion to remark.
Nutley found this very convenient: Chase, making no comment, left him
free to manage everything according to his own ideas. Indeed, Nutley
frequently forgot his very existence. It was most convenient.
As for Chase, he wondered sometimes absently which he disliked least:
Farebrother with his weak sentimentality, or Nutley, who was so astute,
so bent upon getting Blackboys brilliantly into the market, and whose
grudging respect for old Miss Chase, beneath his impatience of the
tyranny she had imposed upon him, was so readily divined.
Chase stood looking at the bowl of tulips; it seemed to him that he
spent his days for ever looking at something, and deriving from it that
new, quiet satisfaction. He was revolving in his mind a phrase of Mr.
Farebrother’s, to the effect that he ought to go the rounds and call
upon his tenants. “They’ll expect it, you know,” Farebrother had said,
examining Chase over the top of his spectacles. Chase had gone through a
moment of panic, until he remembered that his departure on the morrow
would postpone this ordeal. But it remained uncomfortably with him. He
had seen his tenants at the funeral, and had eyed them surreptitiously
when he thought they were not noticing him. They were all farmers, big,
heavy, kindly men, whose manner had adopted little Chase into the
shelter of an interested benevolence. He had liked them; distinctly he
had liked them. But to call upon them in their homes, to intrude upon
their privacy—he who of all men had a wilting horror of intrusion, that
was another matter.
He enjoyed being alone himself; he had a real taste for solitude, and
luxuriated now in his days and particularly his evenings at Blackboys,
when he sat over the fire, stirring the great heap of soft grey ashes
with the poker, the ashes that were never cleared away; he liked the
woolly thud when the poker dropped among them. Those evenings were
pleasant to him; pleasant and new, though sometimes he felt that in
spite of their novelty they had been always a part of his life. Moreover
he had a companion, for Thane, the greyhound, slim and fawn-coloured,
lay by the fire asleep, with his nose along his paws.
There existed in his mind a curious confusion in regard to his tenants,
a confusion quite childish, but which carried with it a sort of terror.
It dated from the day when, for want of something better to do, he had
turned over some legal papers left behind by Nutley, and the dignity of
his manor had disclosed itself to him in all the brocaded stiffness of
its ancient ritual and phraseology. He had laughed; he could not help
laughing; but he had been impressed and even a little awed. The weight
of legend seemed to lie suddenly heavy upon his shoulders, and he had
gazed at his own hands, as though he expected to see them mysteriously
loaded with rough hierarchical rings. Vested in him, all this antiquity
and surviving ceremonial! He read again the almost incomprehensible
words that had first caught his eye, scraps here and there as he turned
the pages. “There are three teams in demesne, 31 villains, with 14
bordars, i.e., the class who should not pay live heriot. The furrow-long
measures 40 roods, i.e., 40 lengths of the Ox-goad of 16½ feet, a rod
just long enough to lie along the yokes of the first three pair of Oxen,
and let the ploughman thrust with the point at either flank of either
the sod ox or the sward ox. Such a strip four rods in width gives an
acre.” “There is wood of 75 Hogs. The Hogs must be panage Hogs, one in
seven, paid each year for the right to feed the herd in the Lord of the
Manor’s wooded wastes.”
What on earth were panage hogs, to which apparently he was entitled?
He read again, “The quantum of liberty of person and alienation
originally enjoyed by those now represented by the Free Tenants of the
Manor is a matter of argument for the theorists. The free tenants were
_liberi homines_ within the statute _Quia Emptores Terrarum_, and as
such from 1289 could sell their holdings to whomsoever they would,
without the Lord’s licence, still less without surrender or admittance,
saving always the condition that the feoffee do hold of the same Lord as
feoffor. And the feoffee must hold, i.e., must acknowledge that he hold.
There must be a tenure in fact and the Lord must know his new tenant as
such. Some privity must be established. The new tenant must do fealty
and say ‘I hold of you, the Lord.’ An alienation without such
acknowledgement is not good against the Lord.”
He laid down the papers. Could such things be actualities? This must be
the copy of some old record he had got hold of. But no; he turned back
to the first page and found the date of the previous year. It appalled
him to think that since such things had happened to his aunt, they were
also liable to happen to him. What would he do with a panage hog,
supposing one were driven up to the front door? Still less would he know
what to do if one of those farmers he had seen at the funeral were to
say to him, “I hold of you, the Lord.”
Then he remembered that he had not found the people in the village
alarming. He remembered a conversation he had had the day before, with a
man and his wife, as he leaned over the gate that led into their little
garden. On either side of the tiled path running up to the cottage door
were broad beds filled with a jumble of flowers—pansies, lupins, tulips,
honesty, sweet-rocket, and bright fragile poppies.
“Lovely show of flowers you have there,” he had said tentatively to a
woman in an apron, who stood inside the gate knitting.
“It’s like that all the summer,” she replied, “my husband’s very proud
of his garden, he is. But we’re under notice to quit.” She spoke with an
unfamiliar broad accent and a burr, that had prompted Chase to say,
“You’re not from these parts?”
“No, sir, I’m from Sussex. It’s not a wonderful great matter of
distance. I’m wanting my man to come back with me, and settle near my
old home, but he says he was born in Kent and in Kent he’ll die.”
“That’s right,” approved the man who had come up. “I don’t hold with
folk leaving their own county. It’s like sheep—take sheep away from
their own parts, and they don’t do near so well. Oxfordshire don’t do on
Romney Marsh, and Romney Marsh don’t do in Oxfordshire.” He was ramming
tobacco into his pipe, but broke off to pull a seedling of groundsel out
from among his pinks. He crushed it together and put it carefully into
his pocket. “I made this garden,” he resumed, “carried the mould home on
my back evening after evening, and sent the kids out with bodges for
road-scrapings, till you couldn’t beat my soil, sir, not in this
village, nor my flowers either. But I’m under notice, and sooner than
let them pass to a stranger I’ll put my bagginhook through the roots of
every plant amongst them,” he said, and spat.
“Twenty-five years we’ve lived in this cottage, and brought up ten
children,” said the woman.
“The cottage is to come down, and make room for a building site, so Mr.
Nutley told us,” the man continued.
“We’d papered and whitewashed it ourselves,” said the woman.
“I laid them tiles, sir, me and my eldest boy,” said the man, pointing
with the stem of his pipe down at the path; “a rare job it was. There
wasn’t no garden, not when I came here.”
“Twenty-five years ago,” said the woman.
They both stared mournfully at Chase.
“I’m under notice to quit, too, you know,” said Chase, rather
embarrassed, as though they had brought a gentle reproof against him,
trying to excuse himself by this joke.
“I know that, sir; we’re sorry,” the man had said instantly.
(Sorry. They had never seen him before, yet they were sorry.)
“Miss Chase, your aunt, sir, liked my garden properly,” said the man.
“She’d stop here always, in her pony-chaise, and have a look at my
flowers. She’d say to me, chaffing-like, ‘You’ve a better show than me,
Jakes.’ But she didn’t like peonies. I had a fine clump of peonies and
she made me dig it up. Lord, she was a tartar—saving your presence, sir.
But a good heart, so nobody took no notice. But peonies—no, she wouldn’t
have peonies at any price.”
“There’s few folks in this village ever thought to see Blackboys in
other hands than Chase’s,” said the woman. “’Tis the peacocks will be
grieved—dear! dear!”
“The peacocks?” Chase had repeated.
“Folks about here do say, the peacocks’ll die off when Blackboys goes
from Chase’s hands,” said the man. “They be terrible hard on a garden,
though, do be peacocks,” he had said further, meticulously removing
another weed from among his pinks.
V
That had been an experience to Chase, a milestone on his road. He was to
experience much the same sensation when his lands received him. It was a
new world to him—new because it was so old—ancient and sober according
to the laws of nature. There was here a rhythm which no flurry could
disturb. The seasons ordained, and men lived close up against the
rulings so prescribed, close up against the austere laws, at once the
masters and the subjects of the land that served them and that they as
loyally served. Chase perceived his mistake; he perceived it with
surprise and a certain reverence. Because the laws were unalterable they
were not necessarily stagnant. They were of a solemn order, not
arbitrarily framed or admitting of variation according to the caprice of
mankind. In the place of stagnation, he recognized stability. And as his
vision widened he saw that the house fused very graciously with the
trees, the meadows, and the hills, grown there in place no less than
they, a part of the secular tradition. He reconsidered even the
pictures, not as the representation of meaningless ghosts, but as men
and women whose blood had gone to the making of that now in his own
veins. It was the land, the farms, the rickyards, the sown, the fallow,
that taught him this wisdom. He learnt it slowly, and without knowing
that he learnt. He absorbed it in the company of men such he had never
previously known, and who treated him as he had never before been
treated—not with deference only, which would have confused him, but with
a paternal kindliness, a quiet familiarity, an acquaintance immediately
linked by virtue of tradition. To them he, the clerk of Wolverhampton,
was, quite simply, Chase of Blackboys. He came to value the smile in
their eyes, when they looked at him, as a caress.