They spoke later of the tragedies which had thus brought the inheritance out of the direct line, and hereat came the conventional sighs from Mr. Beadle, as forced as his laughter. Jim was told how his cousin, Mark, had died in India of pneumonia, and how his uncle and the remaining son, James, having gone to the Lakes that the old gentleman might recover his equanimity, were both drowned in a sudden squall while sailing at a considerable distance from the shore. The bodies were recovered and brought to Eversfield for burial; and very solemnly the solicitor produced a photograph of the memorial tablet which had been set up in the church.
“Some day, I trust a very long time hence, your own mural tablet will be set up there,” he said, after Jim had handed back the photograph in silence. “‘Nihil enim semper floret; ætas succedit ætati,’ as the good Cicero says.”
“Quite so,” said Jim.
“It has all been a terrible blow to me,” sighed Mr. Beadle. “The late Mr. Tundering-West treated me quite as a personal friend.”
“Did he really?” Jim was going to be rude, but checked himself. He felt an extraordinary hostility to this well-meaning but servile little personage. “I shall go down there to-morrow,” he remarked, as he rose to take his departure, “and I’ll probably have the house thoroughly renovated before I go into it.”
“I don’t think you will find much that requires alteration,” Mr. Beadle assured him, his hand raised in a gesture of deprecation. “Hasty changes are always undesirable; and, when you have grown into the spirit of the place I think you will find that you have a duty to the past.” He checked himself, and bowed. “I trust you will not mind an old man giving you that advice,” he murmured, as they shook hands. He bowed so low that it appeared to be a complete physical collapse.
On the following day Jim motored to Eversfield in a hired open car. He could with greater ease have gone by train to Oxford, and could have driven over in a fly; but he wanted to have the pleasure of spending some of his new money, and, moreover, a fifty-mile drive through the fair lands of Berkshire and Oxfordshire in the radiance of a summer’s day appealed to his imagination. Nor was he disappointed. He acknowledged the beauties of the land of his birth with whole-hearted pleasure; and his eyes, weary with long gazing upon leaden skies and burning sands, were soothed in a manner beyond scope of words by the green fields, the soft foliage of the trees, and grey skies of a hot, hazy morning. It is true that the roads were extremely dusty, and that his face and clothes were soon thickly powdered; but, as the chauffeur had provided him with a pair of motoring glasses, he was not troubled in this respect.
The little hamlet of Eversfield lay seemingly asleep in its hollow amidst the richly timbered hills, as, at midday, he drove up to the grey stone gates of his future home. Here was the narrow village green just as he had last seen it when he was a boy: on one side of the lane which opened on to it were these imposing gates; on the other side were the little church and moss-covered gravestones leaning at all angles, as though the dead were whispering together deferentially at the entrance of the manor. Upon the green were the old stocks, and the stump and worn steps of the ancient cross; and behind them stood the thatched cottages backed by the stately elms.