It Is Called The Old
House Because The Requirements Of Modern Days Have Rendered It Unsuitable
For An Establishment.
A much larger mansion has been erected in another
part of the park nearer the village, with a facade visible from the
highway.
The old manor-house is occupied by the land-steward, or, as he
prefers to be called, the deputy-forester, who is also the oldest and
largest tenant on the estate. It is he who rules the park. The labourers
and keepers call him the 'squire.'
Now the old squire's favourite resort is the window-seat in the gun-room,
because thence he can see a section of the highway, which, where it
crosses the streamlet, comes within half a mile of the house. There the
hollow and the lower wall permit any one at this window to obtain a view
of the road on one of the sides of the valley. At this declivity it
almost faces the house, and whether the passers-by are going to the
market town, or returning to the village, they cannot escape observation.
If they come from the town, the steep descent compels them to walk their
horses down it; if from the village, they have a hard pull up. So the
oaken window-seat in the gun-room is as polished and smooth as an old
saddle; for if the squire is indoors, he is certain to be there. He often
rests there after half an hour's work on one or other of the guns in the
rack; for, though he seldom uses but one, he likes to take the locks to
pieces upon a little bench which he has fitted up, and where he has a
vice, tools, a cartridge-loading apparatus, and so forth, from which the
room acquired its name. With the naked eye, however, as the road is half
a mile distant, it is not possible to distinguish persons, except in
cases of very pronounced individuality. Nevertheless old 'Ettles,' the
keeper, always declared that he could see a hare run up the down from the
park, say a mile and a half. This may be true; but in the gun-room there
is a field-glass, said to have been used at the siege of Seringapatam,
which the squire can bring to bear upon the road in an instant, for from
constant use at the same focus there is a rim round the tarnished brass.
No time, therefore, need be lost in trials; it can be drawn out to the
well-known mark at once. The window itself is large, but there is a
casement in it, - a lesser window, - which can be thrown open with a mere
twist of the thumb on the button, and as it swings open it catches itself
on a hasp. Then the field-glass examines the distant wayfarer.
When people have dwelt for generations in one place they come to know the
history of their immediate world. There was not a waggon that went by
without a meaning to the squire. One perhaps brought a load of wool from
the downs: it was old Hobbes's, whose affairs he had known these forty
years. Another, with wheat, was Lambourne's team: he lost heavily in
1879, the wet year. The family and business concerns of every man of any
substance were as well known to the squire as if they had been written in
a chronicle. So, too, he knew the family tendency, as it were, of the
cottagers. So and So's lads were always tall, another's girls always
tidy. If you employed a member of this family, you were sure to be well
served; if of another, you were sure to be cheated in some way. Men vary
like trees: an ash sapling is always straight, the bough of an oak
crooked, a fir full of knots. A man, said the squire, should be straight
like a gun. This section of the highway gave him the daily news of the
village as the daily papers give us the news of the world. About two
hundred yards from the window the row of limes began, each tree as tall
and large as an elm, having grown to its full natural size. The last of
the row came very near obstructing the squire's line of sight, and it
once chanced that some projecting branches by degrees stretched out
across his field of view. This circumstance caused him much mental
trouble; for, having all his life consistently opposed any thinning out
or trimming of trees, he did not care to issue an order which would
almost confess a mistake. Besides which, why only these particular
branches? - the object would be so apparent. The squire, while conversing
with Ettles, twice, as if unconsciously, directed his steps beneath these
limes, and, striking the offending boughs with his stick, remarked that
they grew extremely fast. But the keeper, usually so keen to take a hint,
only answered that the lime was the quickest wood to grow of which he
knew. In his heart he enjoyed the squire's difficulty. Finally the
squire, legalising his foible by recognising it, fetched a ladder and a
hatchet, and chopped off the boughs with his own hands.
It was from the gun-room window that the squire observed the change of
the seasons and the flow of time. The larger view he often had on
horseback of miles of country did not bring it home to him. The old
familiar trees, the sward, the birds, these told him of the advancing or
receding sun. As he reclined in the corner of the broad window-seat, his
feet up, and drowsy, of a summer afternoon, he heard the languid cawing
of an occasional rook, for rooks are idle in the heated hours of the day.
He was aware, without conscious observation, of the swift, straight line
drawn across the sky by a wood-pigeon. The pigeons were continually to
and fro the cornfields outside the wall to the south and the woods to the
north, and their shortcut route passed directly over the limes.
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