Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir

by Vita Sackville-West

  It was pleasant enough to linger here, with silence and shadows all round the pool of candlelight, that lit the polish of the table, the curves of the silver, and the dark wine in the round-bellied decanters; pleasant to dream of that villa which might now be attainable; but he had better go, or the servant would be coming to clear away.

  Rising, he went out into the hall, followed by the dog, who seemed to have adopted him unquestioningly. As Chase didn’t know his name, he bent down to read the inscription on the collar, but found only the address: CHASE, BLACKBOYS. That had been the old lady’s address, of course, but it would do for him too; he needn’t have the collar altered. CHASE, BLACKBOYS. It was simply handed on; no change. It gave him a queer sensation; this coming to Blackboys was certainly a queer experience, interrupting his life. He scarcely knew where he was as yet, or what he was doing; he had to keep reminding himself with an effort.

  In the hall he hesitated, uncertain as to which was the door of the library, afraid that if he opened the wrong door he would find himself in the servants’ quarters, perhaps even open it on them as they sat at supper. The dog stood in front of one door, wagging his tail and looking up at Chase, so he tried the handle; it was the wrong door, but instead of leading to the servants’ quarters it opened straight on to the moonlit garden. The greyhound bounded out and ran about in the moonlight, a wraith of a dog in the ghostly garden. Ghostly . . . Chase wandered out, up the walk to the top of the hill, where he turned to look down upon the house, folded black in the hollow, the moonlight gleaming along the moat and winking on a window. Not a breath ruffled that milky stillness; the great cloths of light lay spread out over the grass, the blocks of shadow were profound; above the low-lying park trailed a faint white mist, and in a vaporous sky the moon rode calm and sovereign. Chase felt that on a scene so perfectly set something ought to happen. A pity that it should all be wasted . . . How many such nights must have been wasted! The prodigal loveliness of summer nights, lying illusory under the moon, shamelessly soliciting romance! But nothing happened; there was nothing but Chase looking down on the silent house, looking for a long time down on the silent house, and thinking that, on that night so set for a lovers’ meeting, no lovers had met.

  IV

  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 166 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 for 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 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; “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 rick-yards, 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 as 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.

  VI

  When Nutley came again, a fortnight after the funeral, to his surprise he met Chase in the park with Thane, the greyhound, at his heels.

  “Good gracious,” he said, “I thought you were in Wolverhampton.”

  “So I was. I thought I’d come back to see how things were going on. I arrived two days ago.”

  “But I saw Fortune last week, and he never mentioned your coming,” pursued Mr. Nutley, mystified.

  “No, I daresay he didn’t; in point of fact, he knew nothing about it until I turned up here.”

  “What, you didn’t let the servants know?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Chase entered suddenly upon a definite dislike of Mr. Nutley. He felt a relief as soon as he had realized it; he felt more settled and definite in his mind, cleared of the cobwebs of a vague uneasiness. Nutley was too inquisitorial, too managing altogether. Blackboys was his own to come to, if he chose. Still his own – for another month.

  “What on earth have you got there?” said Nutley peering at a crumpled bun
ch that Chase carried in his hand.

  “Butcher-boys,” replied Chase.

  “They’re wild orchids,” said Mr. Nutley, after peering a little closer. “Why do you call them butcher-boys?”

  “That’s what the children call them,” mumbled Chase, “I don’t know them by any other name. Ugly things, anyhow,” he added, flinging them away.

  “Soft, soft,” said Nutley to himself, tapping his forehead as he walked on alone.

  He proceeded towards the house. Queer of Chase, to come back like that, without a word to anyone. What about that business of his in Wolverhampton? He seemed to be less anxious about that now. As though he couldn’t leave matters to Nutley and Farebrother, Solicitors and Estate Agents, without slipping back to see to things himself! Spying, no less. Queer, sly, silent fellow, mooning about the park, carrying wild orchids. “Butcher-boys”, he had called them. What children had he been consorting with, to learn that country name? There had been an odd look in his eye, too, when Nutley had come upon him, as though he were vexed at being seen, and would have liked to slink off in the opposite direction. Queer, too, that he should have made no reference to the approaching sale. He might at least have asked whether the estate office had received any private applications. But Nutley had already noticed that he took very little interest in the subject of the sale. An unsatisfactory employer, except in so far as he never interfered; it was unsatisfactory never to know whether one’s employer approved of what was being done or not.

  And under his irritability was another grievance; the suspicion that Chase was a dark horse. The solicitor had always marked down Blackboys as a ripe plum to fall into his hands when old Miss Chase died – obstinate, opinionated, old Phillida Chase. He had never considered the heir at all. It was almost as though he looked upon himself as the heir – the impatient heir, hostile and vindictive towards the coveted inheritance.