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 garden, 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 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.”