Charles guessed now that the old man was feeling selfish; and that he was called to Winsyatt to be offered either the manor house or the great house. Either would be agreeable. It did not much matter to him which it should be, provided his uncle was out of the way. He felt certain that the old bachelor could now be maneuvered into either house, that he was like a nervous rider who had come to a jump and wanted to be led over it.

Accordingly, at the end of the brief trio in Broad Street, Charles asked for a few words alone with Ernestina; and as soon as Aunt Tranter had retired, he told her what he suspected.

“But why should he have not discussed it sooner?”

“Dearest, I’m afraid that is Uncle Bob to the life. But tell me what I am to say.”

“Which should you prefer?”

“Whichever you choose. Neither, if needs be. Though he would be hurt…”

Ernestina uttered a discreet curse against rich uncles. But a vision of herself, Lady Smithson in a Winsyatt appointed to her taste, did cross her mind, perhaps because she was in Aunt Tranter’s not very spacious back parlor. After all, a title needs a setting. And if the horrid old man were safely from under the same roof… and he was old. And dear Charles. And her parents, to whom she owed…

“This house in the village—is it not the one we passed in the carriage?”

“Yes, you remember, it had all those picturesque old gables—”

“Picturesque to look at from the outside.”

“Of course it would have to be done up.”

“What did you call it?”

“The villagers call it the Little House. But only by comparison. It’s many years since I was in it, but I fancy it is a good deal larger than it looks.”

“I know those old houses. Dozens of wretched little rooms. I think the Elizabethans were all dwarfs.”

He smiled (though he might have done better to correct her curious notion of Tudor architecture), and put his arm round her shoulders. “Then Winsyatt itself?”

She gave him a straight little look under her arched eyebrows.

“Do you wish it?”

“You know what it is to me.”

“I may have my way with new decorations?”

“You may raze it to the ground and erect a second Crystal Palace, for all I care.”

“Charles! Be serious!”

She pulled away. But he soon received a kiss of forgiveness, and went on his way with a light heart. For her part, Ernestina went upstairs and drew out her copious armory of catalogues.

The chaise, its calash down to allow Charles to enjoy the spring sunshine, passed the gatehouse. Young Hawkins stood by the opened gates, old Mrs. Hawkins beamed coyly at the door of the cottage. And Charles called to the under-coachman who had been waiting at Chippenham and now drove with Sam beside him on the box, to stop a moment. A special relationship existed between Charles and the old woman. Without a mother since the age of one, he had had to put up with a series of substitutes as a little boy; in his stays at Winsyatt he had attached himself to this same Mrs. Hawkins, technically in those days the head laundrymaid, but by right of service and popularity second only below stairs to the august housekeeper herself. Perhaps Charles’s affection for Aunt Tranter was an echo of his earlier memories of the simple woman—a perfect casting for Baucis—who now hobbled down the path to the garden gate to greet him.

He had to answer all her eager inquiries about the forthcoming marriage; and to ask in his turn after her children. She seemed more than ordinarily solicitous for him, and he detected in her eye that pitying shadow the kind-hearted poor sometimes reserve for the favored rich. It was a shadow he knew of old, bestowed by the innocent-shrewd country woman on the poor motherless boy with the wicked father—for gross rumors of Charles’s surviving parent’s enjoyment of the pleasures of London life percolated down to Winsyatt. It seemed singularly out of place now, that mute sympathy, but Charles permitted it with an amused tolerance. It came from love of him, as the neat gatehouse garden, and the parkland, beyond, and the clumps of old trees—each with a well-loved name, Carson’s Stand, Ten-pine Mound, Ramillies (planted in celebration of that battle), the Oak-and-Elm, the Muses’ Grove and a dozen others, all as familiar to Charles as the names of the parts of his body—and the great avenue of limes, the iron railings, as all in his view of the domain came that day also, or so he felt, from love of him. At last he smiled down at the old laundrymaid. “I must get on. My uncle expects me.” Mrs. Hawkins looked for a moment as if she would not let herself be so easily dismissed; but the servant overcame the substitute mother. She contented herself with touching his hand as it lay on the chaise door. “Aye, Mr. Charles. He expects you.”

The coachman flicked the rump of the leading horse with his whip and the chaise pulled off up the gentle incline and into the fenestrated shadow of the still-leafless limes. After a while the drive became flat, again the whip licked lazily onto the bay haunch, and the two horses, remembering the manger was now near, broke into a brisk trot. The swift gay crunch of the ironbound wheels, the slight screech of an insufficiently greased axle, the old affection revived by Mrs. Hawkins, his now certainty of being soon in real possession of this landscape, all this evoked in Charles that ineffable feeling of fortunate destiny and right order which his stay in Lyme had vaguely troubled. This piece of England belonged to him, and he belonged to it; its responsibilities were his, and its prestige, and its centuries-old organization.

They passed a group of his uncle’s workers: Ebenezer the smith, beside a portable brazier, hammering straight one of the iron rails that had been bent. Behind him, two woodmen, passing the time of day; and a fourth very old man, who still wore the smock of his youth and an ancient billycock… old Ben, the smith’s father, now one of the dozen or more aged pensioners of the estate allowed to live there, as free in all his outdoor comings and goings as the master himself; a kind of living file, and still often consulted, of the last eighty years or more of Winsyatt history.

These four turned as the chaise went past, and raised arms, and the billycock. Charles waved seigneurially back. He knew all their lives, as they knew his. He even knew how the rail had been bent… the great Jonas, his uncle’s favorite bull, had charged Mrs. Tomkins’s landau. “Her own d—d fault”—his uncle’s letter had said—“for painting her mouth scarlet.” Charles smiled, remembering the dry inquiry in his answer as to why such an attractive widow should be calling at Winsyatt unchaperoned…

But it was the great immutable rural peace that was so delicious to reenter. The miles of spring sward, the background of Wiltshire downland, the distant house now coming into view, cream and gray, with its huge cedars, the famous copper beech (all copper beeches are famous) by the west wing, the almost hidden stable row behind, with its little wooden tower and clock like a white exclamation mark between the intervening branches. It was symbolic, that stable clock; though nothing—despite the telegram—was ever really urgent at Winsyatt, green todays flowed into green tomorrows, the only real hours were the solar hours, and though, except at haymaking and harvest, there were always too many hands for too little work, the sense of order was almost mechanical in its profundity, in one’s feeling that it could not be disturbed, that it would always remain thus: benevolent and divine. Heaven—and Millie—knows there were rural injustices and poverties as vile as those taking place in Sheffield and Manchester; but they shunned the neighborhood of the great houses of England, perhaps for no better reason than that the owners liked well-tended peasants as much as well-tended fields and livestock. Their comparative kindness to their huge staffs may have been no more than a side-product of their pursuit of the pleasant prospect; but the underlings gained thereby. And the motives of “intelligent” modern management are probably no more altruistic. One set of kind exploiters went for the Pleasant Prospect; the others go for Higher Productivity.