§ 6
Peter found a refreshing solitude in the early hours of the next day. His mother and Doris breakfasted upstairs, his father had characteristically kept his promise to “be about tomorrow,” and had actually ridden out before Peter appeared in the morning room at nine. Jenny, who was a lazy young woman, did not come down till he had finished, and Gervase, in one of those spasms of eccentricity which made Peter sometimes a little ashamed of him, had gone without breakfast altogether, and driven off in the Ford lorry to fetch his luggage, sustained by an apple.
The morning room was full of early sunlight—dim as yet, for the mists were still rising from the Tillingham valley and shredding slowly into the sky. The woods and farms beyond the river were hidden in the same soft cloud. Peter opened the window, and felt the December rasp in the air. Oh, it was good to be back in this place, and one with it now, the heir.... No longer the second son who must live away from home and make his money in business.... He stifled the disloyalty to his dead brother. Poor old Hugh, who was so solemn and so solid and so upright.... But Hugh had never loved the place as he did—he had never been both transported and abased by his honour of inheritance.
As soon as he had eaten his breakfast Peter went out, at his heels a small brown spaniel, who for some reason had not gone with the other dogs after Sir John. They went down the garden, over the half melted frost of the sloping lawns, through the untidy shrubbery of fir, larch and laurel, to the wooden fence that shut off Conster from the marshes of the Tillingham. The river here had none of the pretensions with which it circled Rye, but was little more than a meadow-stream, rather full and angry with winter. Beyond it, just before the woods began, lay Beckley Furnace with its idle mill.
And away against the woods lay Starvecrow ... just as he had dreamed of it so many times in France, among the blasted fields. “Starvecrow”—he found himself repeating the name aloud, but not as it was written on the map, rather as it was written on the lips of the people to whom its spirit belong—“Starvycrow ... Starvycrow.”
It was a stone house built about the same time as Conster, but without the compliment to Gloriana implied in three gables. It lacked the grace of Conster—the grace both of its building and of its planting. It stood foursquare and forthright upon the slope, with a great descent of wavy, red-brown roof towards the mouth of the valley, a shelter from the winds that came up the Tillingham from the sea. It seemed preeminently a home, sheltered, secure, with a multitude of chimneys standing out against the background of the woods. From one of them rose a straight column of blue smoke, unwavering in the still, frost-thickened air.
Peter crossed the stream by the bridge, then turned up Starvecrow’s ancient drive. There was no garden, merely an orchard with a planting of flowers under the windows. Peter did not ring, but walked straight in at the side door. The estate office had for long years been at Starvecrow, a low farmhouse room in which the office furniture looked incongruous and upstart.
“I’ll change all this,” thought Peter to himself—I’ll have a gate-legged table and Jacobean chairs.
The room was empty, but the agents wife had heard him come in.
“That you, Mr. Alard? I thought you’d be over. Mr. Greening’s gone to Winterland this morning. They were complaining about their roof. He said he’d be back before lunch.”
Peter shook hands with Mrs. Greening and received rather abstractedly her congratulations on his return. He was wondering if she knew he was to supplant them at Starvecrow.
She did, for she referred to it the next minute, and to his relief did not seem to resent the change.
“We’re getting old people, and for some time I’ve been wanting to move into the town. It’ll be a good thing to have you here, Mr. Alard—bring all the tenants more in touch with the family. Not that Sir John doesn’t do a really amazing amount of work....”
She rambled on, then suddenly apologised for having to leave him—a grandchild staying in the house was ill.
“Shall you wait for Mr. Greening? I’m afraid he won’t be in for an hour at least.”
“I’ll wait for a bit anyway. I’ve some letters to write.”
He went into the office and sat down. The big ugly rolltop desk was littered with papers—memoranda, bills, estimates, plans of farms, lists of stock-prices. He cleared a space, seized a couple of sheets of the estate note-paper, and began to write.
“My loveliest Stella,” he wrote.