Читать книгу This Little World - Francis Brett Young - Страница 6

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It was over. The Ombersley vault, having yawned for an hour, was closed. All the lowered blinds in the street had been raised, except Miss Loach’s. Miss Loach herself, exhausted by the spectacle, had returned to her bed, where she sat writing a letter to her widowed sister at Bournemouth, in a thin, peaked hand and ink that looked faded before it was dry. I feel, she wrote, that our beloved Chaddesbourne will never again be quite the same.... She had written these identical words (and believed them to be true) after the deaths of Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria and King Edward the Seventh, though it is doubtful if any one of these had ever heard the village’s name.

In the “smoking-room” at the Hall—its name had survived the days when tobacco offended the nostrils of ladies—Miles Ombersley and Dudley Wilburn had unfolded the will. It was a small chamber, opening out of the hall and the long Adam library, of the kind which Victorian ladies playfully nicknamed a “den,” though, in this case, the description was not inappropriate. It was dark as a den, even now, in the earlier afternoon; for its ceiling and walls, pickled swarthy with ancient smoke, reflected no light (save, here and there, a cold gleam from the glass that obscured a “sporting print”); and that which might naturally have penetrated it from the sky was obstructed by the shadow of a trio of redwood trees, brought from Oregon in 1860, whose untidy pyramids already overtopped and dominated the house. The room smelt like a den; and that was scarcely remarkable, considering the varied fragments of furry carrion—foxes’ masks and brushes, otters’ rudders and pads on the walls, pied badger-skins on the floor—which the grizzled wolf who had possessed it had dragged in from the chase.

It was the room of an aged man, too tired to demand or delight in such surface refinements as order or cleanliness. Dust lay like a grey bloom and stank on the shelves of forgotten ledgers and annuals; on the files of pierced bills, on the accumulation of invoices, circulars, charitable appeals and business letters, which had silted up, like the jetsam of a spring tide, on the Chippendale writing-desk, on the floor, on the pipe-littered mantel-shelf and the window-sills—on every available ledge which could possibly support them. There was not in that room a pen that would write or a pointed pencil; the ink in the wells, evaporating, had passed through the geological stage of black slime into the brittle incrustation of a salt-pan; and the stuffing of the one easy-chair—still draped with the moth-eaten plaid which, in time of frost, the old man had wrapped round his shins—protruded from the rubbed maroon leather like straw from a scarecrow’s elbows.

Miles Ombersley took this disuse and discomfort for granted; the room had been just the same ever since he had known it. “We shan’t be disturbed in here,” he said. “There’s surely no need to read every word of it?”

“It’s quite short and perfectly straightforward,” Wilburn replied. “As a matter of fact, it appears to have been drawn up by my father, so that goes without saying.”

“I know. A sound lawyer. My father liked and respected him.”

“As you know, there is no entail—never has been; but you, naturally, benefit as residuary legatee. There are these two substantial bequests to hospitals—far too big, if I may say so. If he’d consulted us we should certainly have advised him to reduce them in these hard times. But, of course, he didn’t.”

“No.”

“Then bequests to servants: to all such as shall have been in my employment for eighteen calendar months: one year’s wages. That’s pretty generous ...”

“He always was generous.”

“Quite.... And a couple of persons mentioned by name. William Frankley ...”

“The kennel-man. He’s been dead twenty years.”

“So much the better. For us, I mean. Henry Vowles ...”

“He’s still living, I believe.”

“Well, five hundred pounds should cover the lot. Unfortunately it appears he wasn’t insured against death duties.”

“No. He thought he would live for ever. And he did, very nearly. You mentioned a codicil?”

“Yes. I’m coming to that. I’m afraid it may be a shock to you ...”

“Carry on, please. I’m used to them.”

“Have you ever heard of a woman called Clarke—Mrs. Margaret Clarke?”

“No. Never in my life.” (“He lies well,” Wilburn thought.)

“She lives in North Bromwich ...”

Colonel Ombersley flushed slightly. He repeated: “In North Bromwich.... I see.”

“She was a friend of your father’s.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Yes. I’ve never actually seen her; but for more than twenty-five years—ever since I came into the business, in fact—we’ve been paying her, on your father’s behalf, an allowance of seven hundred a year. That allowance is to continue at the same figure in the form of an annuity.”

“An annuity.... Is this ... lady young?”

“Well, she can’t be very young, can she?”

“Seven hundred a year. That’s a tidy sum. Just about as much as my pension’s worth if I retire to-morrow. Rather a grim thought, Wilburn!”

“It might easily be worse. You’re lucky to have that in reserve. The rent-roll has shrunk during recent years; your father was easy with the tenants, and I gather from Healey that some of them took advantage of it. He was able to carry on here as he did because—apart from this lady’s allowance—he spent practically nothing; he lived on the land, so to speak, and never entertained. Of course, a man of your age with a wife and two young people can’t expect to do that. As soon as probate is granted you’ll have to deal with Succession Duties. I know nothing of your private resources.”

“There’s nothing to know: they’re practically negligible. As to the scale of Death Duties—I know nothing about them. Can you guess at the figure?”

“That depends on the valuation. They’re governed by a sliding scale—from three per cent up to fifty. Of course, if you wish, you can meet them by realising capital—in other words, selling some land.”

“Not an acre, if I can help it!”

Dudley Wilburn smiled. “You spoke just like your father then.” (He looked just like his father, too, with a faint, dangerous smile on his lips corrected by an equally faint hardening of the blue eyes.) “I was going to suggest ...”

“Please go on. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all. It was merely this. If you should think of trimming up the estate on the Wychbury side, there’s one outlying property—Uffley Mill, I think it’s called ...”

“I know it quite well. Man named Lydgate. I knew him as a boy.”

“Yes, Lydgate. Precisely. Well, in spite of this shocking slump in agricultural land, I believe I could find you a buyer prepared to pay what, in these times, is a fancy price.”

“You mean somebody’s approached you?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t like to say that ...” (“Of course you wouldn’t,” Miles Ombersley thought. “You damned lawyers are so secretive!”) “I merely hint that a client of mine is interested. I hinted as much to your father some months ago; but he turned it down.”

“Naturally.”

“Alternatively, of course, we can always arrange a mortgage.”

Once more Colonel Ombersley smiled dangerously. “You’re encouraging, Wilburn!”

“Well, facts have to be faced.” Dudley Wilburn was somewhat aggrieved. “After all, I’m paid to advise you, and I want to help if I can.”

“I quite realise that. And please don’t think I’m ungrateful. You know more of the facts of the situation than I do. Please go on.”

“Then may I suggest—since you jib at my other proposals—that you lie low for a year or two and collect your resources? Reculer pour mieux sauter, so to speak.”

“Lie low? Forgive me for being stupid. You mean?”

“Go on soldiering, drawing full pay and allowances till you have to retire. There’s no hurry. Shut up this house. Leave Healey in charge and make him tighten the strings. By the time when you come to retire ...”

“No, no, Wilburn: that wouldn’t suit me!” Colonel Ombersley spoke almost passionately. “Healey’s getting his notice to-morrow. You may think that precipitate”—(Wilburn did)—“but even if I didn’t dislike the fellow ... that’s in confidence, of course ... I should certainly get rid of him. I’m going to retire from the army at once, and I’m going to live here, in this house, because—I’m aware that this may sound odd and romantic—because I belong here and this happens to be my job. I’ve thought of it as my next job for the last fifty years. I’m not as young as I was, but I’m going to tackle it. It’s an all-time job. If there’s one type of man I despise it’s the absentee landlord. My wife’s with me in that.”

“Oh, I quite agree, my dear Ombersley.” (“What a boy he is!” Dudley Wilburn thought. “Do these soldiers never grow up?”) “Don’t misunderstand me,” he went on. “I merely suggested that you should temporize, go easy for a year or two—give things time to adjust themselves.”

Miles Ombersley laughed. “A year or two! In a year or two we may both of us be dead—there may be another war or a revolution. No, Wilburn, I’m taking no risks and I’m wasting no time. I don’t think you quite realize how much Chaddesbourne means to me—how anxious I am to get going. How long will it take to get probate?”

“Oh, not very long. Say a couple of months. It’s a watertight will.”

“So in two months’ time I shall know where I stand?”

“Yes, you’ll know where you stand,” Dudley Wilburn answered grimly. “By the way, Mrs. Clarke will be expecting a hundred and seventy-five pounds on the first of April. You’ld like to pay it as usual?”

“If my credit’s good enough.”

Wilburn laughed. “My dear Ombersley!”

“Well, you never know.”

“What I meant to suggest”—Wilburn paused—“was that, if you felt so inclined, we might contest the codicil.”

“On what grounds?”

“Undue influence. He was eighty-two, and obviously failing.”

“That’s why he made it; and you know, my dear Wilburn, he was as sane as you or I. No, no. Let it rest. This explains a number of things. It gets rather dark in here, doesn’t it?”

“You ought to have those trees down. They shadow the whole house.”

“He remembered seeing them planted seventy years ago. Odd, isn’t it?”

“They were planted too close together. I suppose they had no idea that they’ld grow like that.”

Miles Ombersley stared out of the window gloomily. “I hate cutting down trees. However ...”

There were many matters waiting to be dealt with more urgent than the felling of trees. More urgent, and far more complicated: the command of a regiment of cavalry in war-time seemed child’s-play compared with them. To begin with, Miles Ombersley had never before, since his days as a subaltern, been embarrassed by lack of money. In the earlier years of his service, his pay and his father’s allowance, together with the modest income his wife inherited, had sufficed to free his mind from financial anxiety. Now, the pay, which fell, unperceived, like manna, had been replaced by a pension that didn’t amount to half of it; his wife’s income, small though it was, showed signs of shrinkage, and, instead of an allowance, he found himself faced with a mass of everyday liabilities, quite apart from the Treasury’s immediate and staggering demands in respect of death-duties.

If he had been willing or able to accept his father’s standard of life which, for the last fifteen lonely years, had been hardly higher than that of his labourers, Miles Ombersley might possibly have been able to deal with the situation. But, of course, he was neither willing nor able to accept it. He had been accustomed to live the precise kind of life imposed by his social station, without meanness, yet equally without extravagance, demanding, quite reasonably, the same comfortable, modest existence for his wife and children. He was accustomed to “do himself well”; to travel first-class (at the nation’s expense); to hunt when he pleased (there were always chargers available); to shoot two or three days a week in the autumn, and rent a rod in summer on a South Country chalk-stream; to go up to Town in the season and put up at Brown’s with his family; to frequent his club and attend a few social functions, with visits to Epsom and Ascot and Goodwood thrown in. All this part of his life had been conducted without ostentation; it consisted of things which he had always enjoyed as a matter of course and expected to go on enjoying until he was too old to find zest in them.

Yet no sooner had he retired than many of these modest habits, which seemed as natural and necessary a part of his life as his morning bath and shave, became questionable, and some impossible. He found himself suddenly enrolled in the order which had begun to be called “the new poor.” It was a proud distinction, no doubt, but the pride was tempered by grave disadvantages. Up till now he had always regarded the Chaddesbourne estate and the Hall as assets. He soon learnt they were nothing of the sort; they were liabilities, though the State, whose faithful servant he had been, declined to agree with him, exacting a toll of death-duties out of all proportion to the actual value of his inheritance: a levy, in the form of hard cash, on capital that was not, at the moment, negotiable. In addition to this it demanded land-tax on land that, without a further infusion of capital, could produce no income, and heavy rates on a house that, by modern standards, was uninhabitable—rates which, if he made it inhabitable, would become heavier still. By the end of the year his fluid resources must be exhausted. And always, like a prisoner dragging an iron chain, he was aware of the galling weight of Mrs. Clarke’s annuity. Without that accursed handicap he might have made fairish running. As things were, this crowning injustice was more than he could be expected to carry. Again and again he felt bitterly towards his father: not so much because the burden was unjust to himself, as because it was unjust to Chaddesbourne.

The old man had been unjust to the property in other ways, more forgivable because of his age, but hardly less embarrassing. The confusion of the “smoking-room” in which the business of the estate had been conducted was symbolical of an equal confusion in its affairs. On the night of his arrival at Chaddesbourne, Miles Ombersley had decided, with a soldier’s characteristic ruthlessness, to get rid of Healey, the agent. He was a mean type, Ombersley thought, disliking his spindly, gaitered shanks, unsuccessfully apeing the style of a country gentleman, his pale eyes, his thin foxy hair and moustache, his too-ingratiating manner, the suspicion of alcohol never absent from his breath—above all, the air of a specialist handling a mere amateur in which, with a knowing wink, he waved searching questions aside: “Don’t you worry about that, Colonel. I haven’t the details on me, but I’ll soon put that straight. Just you leave the matter to me.”

The devil of it was that Miles Ombersley was forced to do so. The fellow was as slippery as an eel—you never knew when you’d got him—but equally, in the present condition of things, he was indispensable: the only guide, trustworthy or false, who could point a way, tortuous or otherwise, through this morass of neglected business. He had given himself fifteen years of life in which to enjoy the possession of Chaddesbourne: it seemed doubtful if that would be enough for him to put the place straight.

Alone in the evening, snowed under by monstrous drifts of disordered documents—bills, leases, contracts, cheque counterfoils, passbooks, receipts, assessments, demand-notes—Miles Ombersley lamented the fact that soldiering was no fit preparation for the rôle of a modern landlord. The army was a good business-show and adequately run; as commanding-officer he had been ultimately responsible for the regiment’s complicated finances; he had signed the returns, congratulating himself that the accounts were balanced to a halfpenny; but the work for which he took credit so easily had actually been done by the senior staff-sergeant (what wouldn’t he give for him now!), whose documents (being a judge of men, if nothing else) he could sign without a moment’s disquietude.

What had soldiering taught him, he sometimes asked himself, that was of any conceivable use in his present life? A man couldn’t adopt a new and complicated profession at the age of sixty, and there wouldn’t be any more wars, in his time at any rate. Jack had shown more sense than he’d given him credit for in declining to try for Sandhurst. When Jack came down from Oxford—let the boy have all the fun he could get for another year!—he would suggest his going to one of those schools that taught “business methods,” or, perhaps, putting in a short spell at an agricultural college. He regretted, occasionally, that Helen had persuaded him to send Jack to Eton. All the D’Abitots went to Eton as a matter of course; but he himself was a Wykehamist.

Meanwhile ... deeply as he disliked him ... Mr. Healey at least “knew the ropes.”

Mr. Healey, in point of fact, knew far too much for his liking of the whole cat’s cradle. He knew, Colonel Ombersley guessed, though the subject was naturally avoided, about Mrs. Clarke; he must know—or, at least, suspect, the tight corner into which his new employer had been thrust. These were two further excellent reasons for his early dismissal; but, as long as he was useful, Miles Ombersley determined to use him. Accustomed to command, he gave Healey, who was actually devious rather than dishonest, an extremely thin time. Not only amid the muddle of papers in the smoking-room, which already began to look orderly, but also in the open fields, where he walked the poor agent’s spindly legs off his feet, Colonel Ombersley’s curiosity riddled him with questions, rapped out like the staccato of a machine-gun, till Mr. Healey’s too-narrow forehead grew so wrinkled with perplexity that it almost disappeared. At the end of these tramps and sessions, observed by Miss Loach, he retired to the consolations of the “Ombersley Arms,” where the welcome due to so valuable a customer awaited him.

“Why, Mr. Healey, you look like a corpse,” Mrs. Hadley would say.

“Then I look what I B well feel like,” Mr. Healey grunted.

“Well, I call it a shame: there’s no other word for it!”

After two double whiskies Mr. Healey, revived, claimed her sympathy.

“It’s not what he asks you,” he said, “it’s the way he keeps on and nails you to every single word that you say. ‘Taken down and used in evidence’—just like a police-court! And if you made the least slip he’ld come down like a ton of bricks. I’m a truthful man, Mrs. Hadley, but I don’t mind saying that beggar just puts the wind up me. This, that and the other! You never know where the next question’s coming from. Things you’ld never dream of! And the deuce of it is, half the time I’ll be damned if I’ve the foggiest idea what he’s driving at or feeling or thinking. If I hadn’t my living to earn, I’ld tell him to go to hell double-quick, and stay there! It’s a hard life, Mrs. Hadley.”

That, in fact, was precisely what Ombersley intended it should be. Healey’s answers to the questions he fired from such various angles resembled those directional waves of wireless by which in fog a navigator contrives to plot his position. By this means, though his course was still too densely beclouded for him to dare to drop this doubtful pilot, to take over the wheel and signal Full Speed Ahead, he was beginning, at last, to guess where he was and to grasp the lie of the soundings and reefs which surrounded him; till, finally, from those voyages of exploration in which his splendid physical fitness and clarity of mind extracted the last ounce of virtue from poor Healey’s tired limbs and fuddled brain, there emerged a meticulous survey, thickly peppered with soundings, psychological and physical, of his new sphere of activity.

By the end of a month of driving energy and concentration, there was not an acre of pasture or arable over which his feet had not plodded; not a spinney or covert or wood that they had not penetrated; not a farm or cottage or barn that he had not examined; not a single tenant or sub-tenant with whom he had not conversed and whose worth and character he had not assayed. He began, in fact, to see the estate as a whole, assembling, out of multiple details, a unity corresponding to the shape outlined on the finger-smudged sheet of the six-inch ordnance-survey that hung on the smoking-room wall; a lop-sided triangle, roughly based on a line that ran from the woodland belt which encircled the Hall to the bridge on the road to Wychbury, its blunt apex bisected by the brook flowing out of the tangles of Foxhall Wood past Uffley Mill.