The Square Peg or The Gun Fella

Robert Frampton Mansell, the inventor and manufacturer of the Mansell Gun, stopped his car, and leaned from his driving-seat, to call to the ditcher at the roadside. “Is this the way to Mullples?”

“Yes,” the man called. “You keep on, like you be going to Hicks’s. That’s a farm, Hicks’s. Then you turn at the gate. It’s all wrote up, on the gate.”

“Is it far?”

“No, not to say far. ’Tis a step.”

“Thanks.”

“Very welcome, surely,” the man said.

He set the car moving, and looked at the car mirror, to see the two people behind him; his fiancée, Margaret Holtspur, a woman of over thirty, with a face both grave and merry, and his old father, Bob Mansell, a frail and sweet old man.

“We’re on the track,” he said. “The chap knew it.”

“We’re enjoying ourselves,” Margaret said.

It was a drive to enjoy. They were in a new, fine country, in bright October weather, all the brighter for a little rain the night before. The hips were scarlet in the hedges; the roots intensely green against the plough.

“It’s all wrote up, on the gate,” he called; “so look out for a gate.”

He was driving in a poor country road, which had never been tarred; as he drove, little flights of finches kept wavering out of the hedges in front of him. An old, red-brick farm was on the left. It must once have been a most trim little manor house.

“That’ll be Hicks’s,” he said. “It’s been a good place, once.”

He drove on along the lifeless road; he had seldom been in a more deserted part of England.

“It’s this pale clay,” he explained. “There are seven square miles of it, just here, and nothing will really do on it.”

“How did you know that?” Margaret asked.

“I looked it up on my geological map last night,” he explained, “and then I looked up the technical terms in my Compendium of Soils. This piece is called the ‘Tatshire Waste, a well-known geological curiosity, long the despair of the farmer’.”

“Look out,” Margaret cried. “You said, ‘Look out for a gate.’”

“This is the place,” he said; “and there it is, wrote up.”

There, on their left, were the remains of old brick walls, which had once supported folding iron gates. The gates had long since gone. The entrance was blocked by stakes and old barbed wire, with part of a farm-gate, unhinged and unhasped. On this gate a board bore the word “MULLPLES” in irregular letters of white paint.

Frampton Mansell hopped out of the car to heave and prop this gate open. Margaret watched him, with admiration. He was in some ways a fine figure of a man. He was of about forty-two years of age, active, vigorous, compact and with an air of force. He stood about five feet six inches. All his bearing indicated decision, keeping to the point, and getting his own way. His dress was good and costly, but somewhat loud in cut and colour; he wore a tweed hat, shooting jacket and knickerbockers. When he turned, to look at Margaret, he showed a bright, humorous eye and a high colour. In his youth, he had discovered that he resembled one of the portraits of Sir Francis Drake; this had influenced his life profoundly, as Margaret had recently accidentally discovered. He wore the pointed torpedo beard of Drake, and the full, curving moustachioes; he had also made his eyebrows to arch. He walked with a swagger and stood with an air. Guns and explosives had been his interest since infancy; there was something destructive and explosive about him. He gave the impression that his main occupation was making somebody anxious to be back among his orange trees in St. Mary Port.

It took him some little time to get the gate open, as it was backed up by a bit of an old iron bedstead on the far side.

“There you are, my Peggy,” he called; “now I’ll just drive through and block the gate behind me; there may be stock in the field.”

When he had closed it, he stopped at the side of the car. “Now, my Peggy,” he said, “what are your first impressions of Mullples? It’s not a very prosperous approach.”

“We’ll go on and see,” she said. “It’s a most romantic dip in front there; anything may be there. We shall come in sight of the valley, don’t you think?”

“We’ll soon know,” he said. “This is the ninth house we’ve looked at. Nine’s a lucky number, they say.”

Two hundred yards farther on, they passed a ruin, which looked like a fallen pigsty. A stone spout beside it was spouting clear water which had gouged itself a channel beside the driving track. Almost at once, after passing this, the banks of the lane fell away, so that a delightful valley lay open to them.

“Here you are, my Peggy,” he said, “here’s Mullples Valley, and there’s the house, what is left of it.”

He stopped the car, and got out to look. After half a minute, he came to the car and opened the door for Margaret.

“I don’t think we shall look at a tenth,” he said. “This seems good enough.”

His old father was peering into a map. “I’ll get out here, if you don’t mind, Fram,” he said, “while you and Maggie go down to see the house. I want to have a look at that ruin we’ve just passed, where the water was gushing. It’s marked as St. Martin’s Well, in this map of mine, and I’m interested in St. Martin.”

He climbed out, with the help of Margaret and his son. He was only a few years short of eighty, and had not been very well of late.

“I’ll poke about in the ruins,” he said, “and then, when you’ve looked at the house, you can pick me up there.”

“Won’t you come down to the house?” they asked.

“No, thankee, I’ve seen enough of these houses to let. But it oughtn’t to be called the Priory. My map says the site of the priory was lower down.”

He had with him, as always, a strong gardening-stick, fitted with a spud at the end; with this, he walked up towards the ruin. Margaret and Frampton drove slowly on towards the house, which stretched away from them on the other side of a brook.

“Tudor brick,” Frampton said. “See the twisted chimneys?”

“It has been a lovely place,” she said.

It had been noble, but it was plain to anyone that fire, water, poverty, brutality, avarice and helplessness, had all wreaked harms upon it.

“There’s a dovecote,” Frampton said, “in the orchard beyond. And one blue pigeon.”

“What is the other building, beyond?” Margaret asked.

“Stables, I should think,” he said. He stopped the car, looked and said: “Well, Peggy, what d’ye think about it? It’s there or thereabout, wouldn’t you say?”

She quoted from Hart Leap Well:

“I don’t believe much in curst,” he said. “It’s been let get into a mess. It looks to me more like poverty. Father is right about the priory. Look down the brook to the left, there; those mounds and tumps are the priory. This would have been the guest-house, perhaps.”

“Don’t you think there would have been a gate-house, before a guest-house?”

“I should imagine,” he said, “that the chap who got the grant of the priory buildings, pulled down the gate-house, which would have stood about here, and used the stuff to enlarge the house itself. I think I’m wrong about that far building. It can’t be stables. What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know what to make of that,” she said, “I don’t know what it can be.”

“It’s a noble place,” he said, “and the valley it stands in is a dream. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

“In a way, very,” she said.

She was thinking that Frampton had already decided to buy the place and make it their first home; her life, or a part of it, would be passed here; and from the first, something in the scene had struck her as sinister; perhaps that was too strong a word, but something of the desolation of heart of those who had lived here had impressed the things near it. There was something wrong with the place. Men and women had lived a great, free and splendid life there once, but as for those

It had been a place of fallen pride and misery since then.

“This man, Knares-Yocksir,” he said, “the present owner, will be a lunatic. He may not sell, when it comes to the point. Why hasn’t he sold long ago? Scores of people would have given him a mint for a place like this. I’ll stop the car here. We might have a coup d’œil before we go in.”

They stood together and looked down at the noble old house before them. The Tudor design had been severe and straight. In the reign of James the First, the owner had built on a porch or doorway, in a half round, crowned with pinnacles which must once have been bright, with weathercocks or devices, now gone. Along the front of the house was a terrace, still marked at intervals with mounds, where urns of flowers had collapsed. The grass below this terrace was gone back into the rough. Beyond the grass, farther from the house, was a long, black pond, edged with old brick and almost choked with water-weed. In one little space of water, in the middle of it, a moorhen oared to and fro. Farther away, on a lower level and parallel with the pond, was a second, choked like the other. At its ends were two charming little summer-houses, copied from the designs of Sir Christopher Wren. All the building showed signs of neglect and disorder. Some broken window-panes had been stuffed with rags. Some of the roof had given, and another part of it sagged. The jasmine which had grown up the walls had grown to great thickness. In one place, near the porch, some recent gale had torn a mass of it away. It lay now in a mat across the terrace. As they were standing close to the end of the house, they were conscious of a noise of falling water.

“Hear that?” Frampton said. “The brook’s got into the cellars.”

He opened the warped gate which lay across the bridge over the stream.

“Tudor bridge, too,” he said. “Victorian gate. I’m not sure they haven’t let it go too far.” That end of the house had a very green-mouldy look.

“It looks very rotten and damp here,” she said, “and the wall’s cracked.”

“The Tomfool owner’s been cracked,” he said, “to let that sycamore grow there, and drip all down the wing; let alone the brook in the cellar.”

They walked along the soft grass of the terrace in front of the house, stepping over fallen jasmine, and passing windows broken or boarded up. At the Jacobean porch, Frampton stopped and stared with kindling eyes. Margaret watched him, knowing that he was excited by the house, and determined to have it. She was impressed by it; she had not seen anything like it; and the well-watered valley delighted her; but yet, within her an instinct rose, that there was something wrong with the place, and that she would not like to live there.

At the porch, they paused for a moment, to look at some children’s scratchings done on the brick with sharp nails. They had been done there in the seventeenth century, and represented a man on horseback, and a windmill.

“Well done, too,” Frampton said. “No boy in this county could do them half as well now.”

He took the old iron bell-pull which hung beside the inner door, and rang. It was stiff in its bearings, but his tug upon it did waken a kind of tinkle inside the house. No one had come in or out of that door for a long time; the spiders had spun across and across. Margaret pointed this out to him.

“This door is not in use, now,” she said. “Look at the spiders’ webs. Don’t you think we’d better go to the back, somewhere?”

“I’ll ring again,” he said, and did so. “We’ve come the wrong way, of course; we ought to have come from Stubbington. That’s good old iron on the door; done at the local forge, no doubt. I’ll try again.”

He took the bell-pull once more and gave it a tug.

“Someone’s coming,” Margaret said.

They heard footsteps inside the house, and then a fumbling at bolts and lock within. Then a female voice said;

“Who is there, please?”

“We’ve come to see the house,” Frampton said.

“Are you from Mr. Piggott, please?”

“Yes, with an order to view.”

“Will you come round to the back, please?” the voice asked. “The key is too stiff for me to turn.”

“Which is the way to the back?” Frampton asked.

“Not the way you came in,” the voice answered. “Keep on to your left, across the grass, then through the gap; you’ll see the path then.”

“So we’ve been watched,” Frampton said, as they moved off. “Not the way we came in, quotha.”

They followed the path to a court or orchard in which a few old apple-trees supported clothes-lines on which some sheets were drying. A woman stood at the back door, looking shrewdly at them. She was of a medium height, and strongly built, with fine brown hair, touched with grey, with keen brown eyes, and an expression of disdain or pride. Margaret thought that the face might once have been merry, but that life had been too hard, to let much merriment stay there. The woman was neatly dressed, and wore an old-fashioned big star-brooch set with small diamonds. She had an apron over her dress, and looked as though she had been cooking. Frampton thought that she had a very beautiful pair of arms with wonderful skin.

“Is this Miss Knares-Yocksir?” he asked.

She moved her head to say yes.

“I’ve got an order to view here.” He handed it to her.

“Come in,” she said.

She was a lady, though she had come down in the world. She welcomed Margaret in, with charming manners. She understood very well, that the pair were engaged, and that Frampton was one who might be a rough customer.

“You had better keep your things,” she said to Margaret. “The house is chill. But perhaps you would like to sit in the kitchen? There’s a fire there.”

“Oh, no, I want to see the house,” Margaret said.

“Perhaps you will see the house first,” she said to Frampton. “My father isn’t very well, but I will show you the house, and you shall see him afterwards, if you wish.”

She showed them the house. It had been a noble thing, even as late as 1890, but it was now all come to grief. One room she did not show.

“My father is in bed there,” she explained.

Most of the rooms were empty; the furniture, pictures, and other fittings had been disappearing bit by bit in the last hundred years.

“This room was panelled,” Frampton said. “Have you any of the panelling put away?”

“Oh, it was sold,” she said. “And the other room was panelled too; some Americans bought it.”

One small Sheraton cabinet containing four pieces of Leeds porcelain was the only beautiful thing remaining to them.

“This is my room,” she said, throwing open a door.

Frampton glanced at its bareness. A photograph, evidently of her brother, a young man in uniform, was on the mantel. He judged that the brother had been the hope of the house, and had been killed in the War.

“Tell me,” he said, “what is the eighteenth-century building outside the house on this side?”

“That is the theatre,” she said.

“What is a theatre doing here?” he asked. Mr. Piggott had not mentioned a theatre, but had said: “Interesting period outhouses.”

“It was built in the eighteenth century,” she said. “Sir Jocelyn Petersbury built it. Afterwards it was sold to my great-grandfather, who used it as a kennels, I believe, for his foxhounds.”

“Might we see it? Is there anything to see?”

“Certainly.”

She took them out of the house, and along the path through the field.

“The audience part of it is untidy,” she said, “but you can see the stage.” She had a key in her pocket; she opened the door for them. “It’s very bleak in here,” she said. “I wouldn’t stay long, if I were you.”

They entered to a pleasant room, so well-proportioned that it was delightful to be in it.

“This is always called the green room,” she said. “I don’t know why. The actors and actresses used to meet here, I believe. Some of the old gilding is still there.” It was true; the fine old cornice still had traces of gilding visible through the dirt and cobwebs. “This is the way to the rest of it,” the woman said.

She led them into a dark, cold passage, moving quickly in front of them. She opened doors, so that they could see that they were in a passage which had the wings of the stage on the one hand and a row of small dressing-rooms on the other. “These are the dressing-rooms of the actors and actresses,” the woman said. “They had not much room; even the best; some are tiny.”

She went into one of the dressing-rooms, and opened a shutter. A ray of sunlight came into the passage. “Come in,” the woman said. “This is a chief dressing-room.”

They went into a cubby-hole, lit by a window from which the shutter had been turned. Some of the old wall-paper was on the wall. A neat old fireplace was there. Over it was an ancient mirror, its glass foxed with the fouling which besets old mirrors. Somebody had written on it with a diamond. Frampton pointed to the writing.

“What is the poem?” he asked.

The woman had not known that there was a poem. Frampton, with his driving glove, rubbed some of the filth from the glass, so that he could read one line; then, judging that what remained could not be indecent, the other. He read it aloud.

I’ll bet she wasn’t as chaste as all that,” he said.

“You don’t know,” Margaret said. “The writer had probably tried the matter and wrote from knowledge.” She leaned forward to examine the writing. “I expect he kneeled on a chair while he wrote,” she said. “The glass is let into the wall; he could not have had it down. What a pity the glass cannot show us his face, or Monimia’s.”

“I don’t want to see Monimia’s face, if she were as chaste as all that,” he said. “What staggers me about this building, is the elegance of its proportion. It looked small, when we were outside, but see how spacious it really is.”

The woman had moved along the passage and had opened more doors and shutters.

“You can see the stage, now,” she said.

It was true: they could. A step brought them to the verge of it. The supports for the scenes still stood, and there were slots in the floor, along which these supports, when set with scenery, had once been run. On some of the supports there were still the tin sconces for the candles which had once lit the scenes. Frampton strode on to the stage proper. It was, as he judged, very long and narrow, with a considerable rake. The row of footlights had been removed. Right across their line a partition of lath and plaster had been put.

“That is the division for the fowl-house and kennels,” the woman said.

The stage was heaped with garden things: packing straw, mouldy hay, pea- and bean-sticks, rhubarb-pots, flower-pots, some bricks, seed-boxes and flower-frames. There were also the remains of tools, spades with broken handles, rakes with missing teeth, saws rusted past sharpening, forks with the prongs gone, etc.

“When was the stage last used for a play?” Margaret asked.

“Oh, long, long ago,” the woman said, “in Sir Jocelyn’s time, 1777, the paper in my father’s desk says. The play was called Zimoire the Terrible; it was a French play.”

“And when was the partition put up?” Frampton asked.

“After my great-grandfather bought it,” she said. “He wanted a place for his hounds; so he shut off the stage, and put the hounds where the audience used to be.”

“Yes, of course, he would have wanted a place for his hounds,” Frampton said.

It was dark near the partition; the woman moved away, and let in light. Close to them, one on each side of the stage, were stage boxes.

“Do you see those, my Peggy?” Frampton said. “Those were the seats of the wicked lords. They lolled here, looking at the chaste Monimia at close quarters. When they sat in one of these, they could see her in the round, not as a picture in a frame. When she had a moving moment, or an aside to say, she played it or said it to the lord here. When the curtain came down, she was drawn into one or other of these boxes, and offered a knee, a rummer of port, and a dishonourable proposal. There has been some eye work and double entendre work between the stage and those boxes, I’ll bet.”

“What rubbish,” Margaret said. “Even the worst of your lords had their better feelings, and the women touched those better feelings. If the lords came here to make dishonourable proposals, they repented when they saw Monimia play. They offered her their hearts, what remained of them, and their coronets, if they were not in pawn.”

“Might we see the kennel part?” Frampton asked.

It was cold in that gloomy place. The woman led them out into the sunlight, and along the building to its farther end. At this point, the field had been paved, but the grass had grown over the paving so as to hide every trace of it. The woman unlocked a door, and threw it open. They could look into the big, bare auditorium. The gallery of seats, which had been a part of the original design, had been removed; but the marks of it still showed. The sleeping-benches for the hounds still remained. Poultry had perched above them. They were filthy, littered with old feathers and bits of broken egg-shell.

“We used to keep poultry here,” the woman said. “Will you excuse me, if I go in, to see if my father wants anything? You might care to look at the grounds at the back and over there. If you wish to see my father afterwards, perhaps you’ll come to the house when you’re ready.”

“Well, Peggy,” Frampton said, when the woman had gone, “we mustn’t be too long. I’ll go up to explore on this side, and get all the snapshots I can while the sun lasts. Will you have a look round on your side?”

“All right,” she said.

“Are you pleased?” he asked.

“It’s rather a sad place, don’t you think?” she said.

“It’s been allowed to get its socks rather over its boots,” he said.

When he had gone, she walked back past the place where the brook was falling into the cellars. Turning up-stream, she found a fallen willow, by which she could cross the flood to a jungle and ruin beyond. A trampled space there had been the summer camping-place of a tramp and his lady, who had left some boots, rags, ashes and a bit of old sock. The walls were all ruined here, with ivy, old apple-trees and triumphing nettles five feet high, and hard as reed. Beyond the wall was what had once been a rose garden, now all wild and brambled. Some of the trees were ten feet high and bright with hips. A stone pedestal was in the midst of the space. She walked to it. It had once borne a sundial, which had been brutally wrenched away, apparently quite recently, for the marks of the jemmy were fresh. At the end of the rose-garden was another beautiful little summer-house, from which the roof had gone. The floor had been wrenched away for firing. From this summer-house, she had a good view of the back of the Manor.

A jungle lay beyond her, of sloes, hawthorn, nettles, brambles, thistles, hazels, goutweed, ciders and sycamores. All had been sheltered and well-watered there, and all had grown lushly. She found a sort of track, made by rabbiters perhaps. Going along this, she heard continually the strange and moving cry of moorhens. She stopped to listen to the cry, which had always delighted her. As she stood, she heard overhead the mournful sweet laughter of a curlew. She saw him, with his curved beak and crooked wing, going off into his lonesome.

“O blessed bird,” she thought, “would I could go where you go and know what you know.”

After floundering through some thickets, she came through the jungle to the lip of a long narrow pond, the edges of which had once been bricked. Thirty yards of clear water were there, the rest was choked with reed and flag. Two wild duck went up as she came in sight, and some moorhens jerked away into cover. Water was gushing from a broken, but partly jammed sluice into a lower pond, which was much more completely blocked with reed, flag and other tangle. She went past this into drier ways, where she saw rabbits and smelt the reek of fox close to. She came out at a place where once a mill had stood. The mill had gone, every trace of it, except the grass-grown dam. She went up the rise, expecting to come to the mill-leat or race, but found to her surprise that she was staring at a lake, a quarter of a mile long by one hundred yards across. Woods came down on both sides of it; herons and wild duck went up from before her, the herons with easy flaps, the ducks with a swift scutter.

She had ever loved to be by waters, to hear their noises and to watch their creatures; now, all about her was the peace of waters, with reeds rustling, moorhens chirking, brooks plashing. All this was within two hundred yards of the house.

She turned back, by an easier way on the grass, towards some ilex trees on rising ground above the theatre. A path led her to the ruins of yet another old summer-house, falling to pieces like everything else on the estate, but she felt a thrill when she looked from its door to the view.

It faced very nearly west, over a great quiet valley. A darkness far away on the south-west was the sea. Opposite her were distant hills. A window, far away on the right, caught the sun, so that at first she thought that a house was blazing. Then a cloud shadow began to move across the valley towards her, almost like a living thing. It was one of the sights which she most dearly loved to watch; she watched it now, so intently that she never heard Frampton creeping near upon the grass. The intentness of her gaze made Frampton feel that he had never seen her so beautiful. He stood still, to watch what she was watching; she nodded, but did not turn her head.

Less than half a mile in front of them, beyond the dip in which the road ran, was a rising covered with wood. It was a good big covert, running out into the valley there. There were some hollies in the nearer hedge and a clump of fir-trees at the summit of its jut. As the two watched, the shadow swept over the wood and passed from it, leaving these dark green fir-trees vivid against the faint colour of the sky beyond. It was a most beautiful moment. Three fir-trees made Frampton think of the dark silhouette of a ship, seen long before at Corinth. Margaret quoted the lines:—

“Who wrote that?” Frampton asked.

“Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian poet.”

“That’s the effect he describes all right. What do you think of the place, now that you’ve seen it?”

“I liked the water,” she said, “and I love that wood. What is it called?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said, spreading his map and turning it. “Here we are,” he said, pointing. “There is the Butt, that distant hill. The wood is called Spirr Wood, S P I R R, whatever that may mean.”

“Do you think that you could buy it?”

“If it’s for sale. I don’t know whether the man here owns it. Why?”

“If we’re to live here, I’d love to have that wood as a bird sanctuary.”

“It would make a good one; but you could make as good a one nearer the house.”

“No. I might have cats at the house; that wouldn’t be fair on the birds. Can you see if there is a brook running through the wood?”

He glanced at the map, and said:

“Yes, a good brook; it runs just the other side of the high ground. You would get the water birds.”

“Would you mind if we just walked to the wood to see?”

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be muddy, but it won’t take more than a few minutes.”

The covert had the tumbledown, ill-kept look of much of that countryside. They entered by a gap in the hedge. They came soon to a lovely little glen between the fir-tree crest on the left and a rise peopled (since they looked like old men) with aged thorns. In the midst was a grassy patch, now a shallow pool from the floods. It was a place of singular beauty; a pagan would at once have placed an altar to its genius there.

“Do you think that this may have been a beaver-meadow?” Margaret asked.

“I wouldn’t wonder,” he said. “They’re said to have been in England. Would you like to introduce beavers?”

“I would indeed,” she said.

They walked on, past the little valley. When they had gone a few yards farther, Frampton said:

“There’s a great reek of fox here.”

“There is, indeed,” she said; “he must have just gone by.”

“No,” he said, pointing to a trampled patch ahead. “No. They were hunting here yesterday, or the day before. Look at these tracks. They killed and ate the fox here. The scent will hang for days sometimes in this weather. This is where they broke him up, poor chap; and these are all the pad-marks of the hounds.”

The place still stank of the slaughter, and gave them both a feeling of being haunted by a terrible event. Frampton looked about him.

“He’ll have been making for shelter somewhere here,” he said. “He’ll have been making for an earth; and, by Jove, I see it, I think; there in the slope. You see; they have got him just at his door; his earth is stopped.”

A couple of stout stakes had been driven inside the earth-mouth.

“Do you mean, that they stop up the holes that a fox might escape into?”

“Why, yes, my Peggy,” he said. “These chaps are sportsmen, that is, they want a better time than the other fellow. They aren’t going to spend all their money to let the fox get into a hole every half-mile or so, and stop their gallop, no fear. They want to make him run. So an old chap rides around on a pony and stops the possible holes.”

“What a loathsome thing,” she said. “Pull out the stakes, Fram.”

“It’s a bit late in the day for that poor chap,” he said, as he knelt and, with some difficulty, got them up. “It’s too late for him, but it may come in handy for the next one, I rather think that fox-hounds might a little disturb your beavers, if you had them,” he said.

As they walked back, he said: “I believe you don’t often see beavers. They move at night; and then, they are said to be very good to eat and the fur is precious. I dare say you’d have to have a warden, or people would come to poach them. Then, they would be said to kill the game, probably, or spoil the hunting or something.”

Near the house, they stopped for a moment to look at the old place; it was very beautiful, in the late autumnal sun.

“Well, what do you think, Peggy?” he said. “I must go in to see this man about it now. Would you like this place as your home?”

“It is very beautiful,” she said, “and I know that you’ve set your heart on it. It could be made the most beautiful place almost, in the whole wide world.”

“But you don’t like it?”

“I think I could love it, but I know that I would love it better if I had the Spirr Wood; I love that place.”

“You shall have it, if it’s to be had,” he said. “But it may not be for sale.”

“I don’t want to seem to be making a bargain with you, Fram. If you love this place, have it; in many ways it is most beautiful. If we have the Spirr Wood, do you think that my cousin, Timothy Holtspur, might be the warden? He would be so happy living alone in the wood there, painting the things there.”

Frampton wrinkled his nose, in a way he had, at the mention of Timothy, who was not much of a painter, and something of a drunkard.

“It might make Timothy pull up his socks,” he said. “So I’ll go in and see this, whatever he is, Knares-Yocksir. If he’s like his name he’ll be unique.

“About Timothy,” he added: “If he were warden, you would expect him to have a hut, or tiny cottage, right in the covert?”

“Yes, he wouldn’t mind that; he’d love to be right away, among wild things.”

“There’s a place well above the water,” he said, “where we could get in a very nice cottage. But how about a stiff winter there, and getting his supplies?”

“The people who bring our things could leave things for him,” she said, “and he could come in to us, once a week, and bring his drawings.”

He wrinkled his nose again, for he did not much value the drawings, so far.

“Did you ever meet old Bill,” he said, “Old Bill the Bosun, the bird-painter? He lives on a bird sanctuary in Essex somewhere. I could get some pointers from him.”

At the house, the woman was waiting.

“My father will be glad to see you now,” she said, “if you wish to see him.”

“I won’t stay,” Margaret said. “I’ll go out to your father.”

Frampton went in to see the sick man on his bed. He found him like most sick men, perverse, irritable and unwilling to make a decision. He was the grandson of the man who had put the hounds into the theatre; he had come down in the world from want of intelligence, more than from any failing, such as drink. He did not get on with his daughter, and didn’t want to sell. Piggott would do all that. On being asked if the Spirr Wood went with the property, he said: “Of course, and all the fields to Tibb’s Cross.” He was wearied by this time, and referred him again to Piggott.

On this, Frampton said, that he hoped he would soon be better. The daughter came with him to the door, and directed him to Stubbington, where Piggott’s office lay alongside the Abbey gates. It was under six miles, she said, by the road to the right there. He could see her watching him with her shrewd, hard eye, to try to discover if he were thinking of buying. Several people must have come there, he thought, and given her hopes, but then had gone and never made a sign.

“Of course,” he said to himself, “the place is mortgaged to the hilt, and when the mortgage is paid off, they’ll have possibly fifty pounds a year to live upon.”

He looked back as he went up the rise to the car, and saw her looking after him, with a strange look of anger, hope and despair.

“It’s a bad job for a woman,” he muttered, “to be all tangled up and annulled by a man like that. She ought to have been married and bred from.”

He found his father wrapped up in a rug, sitting inside the car.

“Well, Fram,” the old man said, “Margaret tells me that you’ve lost your heart at last. Is it as lovely as she says?”

“Oh yes,” Frampton said. “It’s good enough to bargain for. I want to go back by Stubbington to find out what the snags are. What have you been finding?”

“All sorts of wonders,” Margaret said.

“I did a bit of rummaging,” the old man explained. “You can see that there has been a chapel there. I probed about with my little spud, and found an old tile or two; see here. These are from the tile-works beyond Stanchester, brought down the river by barge and then packed across to this place. Fourteenth-century Stanchester tiles.”

He pulled up from the floor of the car some parts of broken, reddish tiles, each with a bit of some simple yellow design in the middle, a rose, a lily, a cross or a crown.

“I washed them in the spring,” he explained. “In an out-of-the-way place like this, the site didn’t get pillaged like most of them.”

“They would have had the priory to pillage, so much nearer the road,” Frampton said.

“Well, I’ve had a happy day, routing about,” his father said. “Now we’ll get along to Stubbington, and then home to tea.”

He did not speak for the next few miles; then said quietly:

“I suppose Rolly Marcham will have the job of doing it up?”

“I haven’t got it yet,” his son answered.

The old man laughed. “He says he hasn’t got it yet, Margaret,” he repeated. “If you hadn’t determined to get it, you would not have stayed there all this time. Besides, I knew you wouldn’t resist the water.”

“What do you know about the water?” Frampton said. “You never saw it.”

“It’s all marked on the map,” the old man said. “As I get older, I have to read maps instead of going to places. It’s a lovely valley, I suppose. Margaret says there are curlews.”

“All sorts of birds,” he said.

“I suppose it might be a bit rheumaticky, with all this water,” the father said.

“Oh no,” he answered. “Water will run wherever you lead it. You could carry all the water away, easily enough. As soon as she saw it, I knew that Peggy’s heart was saying what George the Third said to the dumpling?”

“What did he say?” the old man asked.

“‘That’s the jockey for me,’” his son said, “or so the history books tell me.”

“I did say something of the sort, perhaps,” Margaret said, “but as a practical housekeeper, I did a little wonder about stores, the post and the plumber.”

“And a doctor for the old father-in-law,” the old man said.

“As for stores,” Frampton said, “there are cars and vans and lorries. The post will come twice a day, and will carry mails away, if asked. As for plumbing, I have a man, Joe, who can do any sort of plumbing, right on the premises. As for a doctor, you’ll be so well you won’t need a doctor here.”

They talked thus for a few minutes, till they were in the Market Square of Stubbington; outside the severe brick Tudor gate-house of Stubbington Abbey. There on a brass plate was the name of PIGGOTT.

“I dare say, I won’t be long,” he said, as he left the car.

“Fram never yet was long in making up his mind or doing what he had decided,” his old father said. “He would make a good dictator.”

In a few minutes, Frampton came out again, climbed into the car and drove them away.

“Have you plunged, Fram?” his father asked.

“I think I’ve got it,” he said. “Nobody else is after it. I’m just going to telephone from the post office, to get my law chaps on to it.”

He stopped the car at the post office, and telephoned to London, giving his instructions, that the firm was to get busy about it.

“Sorry to keep you,” he said, “but I’ve set things going now, from both ends, so let us talk of the improvements.”

This was a pleasant occupation to them till they reached the old man’s old, beautiful house not far from Newbury. They were staying there for the next two nights.

Margaret came down before the others, to find tea ready, and the curtains drawn. She looked at the family portraits on the wall; there were but two, of Frampton’s grandparents, both by the famous painter, John Naunton. The grandmother had been painted from life, in old age; the grandfather from three old photographs. The old man came into the room and found her looking at them.

“Looking at the ancestors?” he asked. “Well, those are the only ancestors we have; but no man could ask for better. They were good souls, my dear. Thank God, I was able to look after them when they were old; not that Father was ever old. But we aren’t exactly from the top drawer, my dear; just the ordinary.”

“You needn’t tell me that you and Frampton are ordinary,” she said.

“Not when we are getting at our particular things,” he said. “No, we’re both clever in our ways, Fram and I; but apart from those times we’re fairly usual, and had better not presume. We’re ordinary folk. I don’t mind. I don’t even mind the people who do mind; formerly I did.”

“And you think that the man who discovered Cornine is ordinary, do you?” she said. “You’ll make me talk like a bolshie, if you say things like that.”

“I think a good deal at odd times about this point, Margaret,” he said, “and as the English race is deeply concerned with it, it’s one we all have to think about. We have an instinct for aristocracy. I don’t say that we have the thing, but we have the instinct for the thing. Deep down, the Englishman knows that he has no real esteem for discoverers and inventors, like Fram and myself. He wants somebody much more varied, much better bred, used to leisure, generously brought up, able in all sorts of affairs, skilled and bright and beautiful. But the discoverer and inventor, no. As a matter of fact, the world doesn’t need discoveries; it doesn’t know how to use discovery; it abuses every discovery. What the world cries out for is not the ordinary, such as Fram and myself, but the extraordinary, who will lift the conception of life, government and nationality, which are all so low all over the world. In their blind, groping way, the English feel that, and therefore give enormous chances to the leisured people among whom such a spirit may emerge. He may never emerge. I sometimes think he won’t. But I do think that our best sort of gentleman (a very different being from the usual sort) is the best extant attempt at what the world really needs.”

Frampton came into the room, looking strangely handsome as he always did, when excited by work.

“Aha, my Peggy,” he called. He crossed the room, caught her by both hands and swung her round. “I’ve got little Rolly Marcham coming to-night,” he said. “I’ve got a large-scale map of the place; my photos will come out from Stubbington; and here are some of my little sketches. Well go over the plans together, my Peggy, with Marcham, and then to-morrow we’ll go to the house again, he and I, if you’d rather not come, so that he can be ready to get busy as soon as the lawyers are fixed.”

“You’ve not wasted much time,” she said. “Here’s your tea.”

“It’s a foul sort of poison, tea,” he said. “It came in with good taste; it spread with the public school.”

“It came in and spread to make men fit for the society of ladies after dinner,” she retorted. “Till tea came in, you lay below the tables till next morning.”

“One thing about this Mullples, Fram,” the old man said: “it’s farther from London and the Works than anything you’ve been accustomed to, and these country telephones aren’t always what perhaps the Postmaster-General hopes they may be before his successor dies.”

“I think we can fix that,” Frampton said.

“Well, there’s another thing, which probably won’t weigh with you. You may find your neighbours rather stuck in the last century, if not in the century before. There’s been a great drain away from the country: even since I was a boy, men of character and brain have been flying from it, and what remains may be very much sediment. It’s a pity, but it is so.”

“One can get friends from all over the place,” Frampton said. “The car has made a world of difference. Besides, Stubbington is a considerable place, and Tatchester isn’t far.”

“You’ll have friends enough, and you’ll have the Works,” the old man went on. “But I’m thinking of the loneliness for the maids, and for your wife. I noticed a good many pheasants as we came along; and most of the inns were called ‘The Horse and Groom’ or ‘The Fox and Hounds.’ It’s what is called a sporting district. Here’s the leaflet of Piggott, the agent. He says: ‘This well-known residential country offers sport with three packs of hounds.’ I imagine, that if you don’t hunt or shoot, and I haven’t noticed any signs of either in you, you won’t find many friends among your neighbours. You won’t mind, but there’ll be others.”

“Meaning me?” Margaret cried. “But I shall have music and the garden and all sorts of reading to do. The clergyman will call, and the local syndicate of married women will send somebody to see and report. Who knows? She may like me.”

“Now you come along, Peggy,” Frampton said, “and look at these plans. This is the kind of thing I want to do.”

They went through the plans together. Margaret made suggestions; the old man left them to it. After dinner, little Rolly Marcham was announced. He was somewhat like a robin in build and brightness. He had a strange way of hopping on to a chair when excited by something beautiful. He was a lover of the arts, but was one of those who felt that art began in England in 1660, with the restoration of Charles the Second. He was a fine architect. He had done all the alterations to the house in which the Mansells were. He had caught the express, on hearing from Frampton.

“I’m glad you’ve come, Marcham,” Frampton said. “I hope it wasn’t inconvenient?”

“Not in the least. Delighted,” Marcham said. It had been very inconvenient; he had had to break an evening’s engagement with his fiancée, and sacrifice his theatre tickets; his fiancée was not well pleased with him.

“D’you know Mullples Priory?” Frampton asked.

“It was in Tatshire, a Benedictine House,” Marcham said; he knew this kind of thing. “There’s nothing left of the priory, is there?”

“No.”

“I thought not,” Marcham said. “I’d have seen it, if there had been.”

Frampton rang the bell. When the maid came, he asked:

“Did a roll of papers come from the station for me?”

“They’ve just come, sir,” the maid said.

“Those are the large-scale plans,” he said. “I telephoned to London for them to be put on the express and sent on: that’s a good service. Come along then, Marcham, and we’ll have some coffee and I’ll show you the idea.” As he led the way out of the room, he said: “The people who got the priory at the suppression built a manor. That’s the main problem now.”

He led the way to the study next door which he shared with his father. It was a long, low room, with two big oak tables, one for himself, one for his father. Both the long walls were covered with book-shelves. Above these was a frieze in raised relief, coloured proper, representing fallow deer, in covert, and in the open, resting, moving, grazing or running. It was a work of great spirit, done by a young man in whose work and future he had believed. The only other work of art in the room was a bronze head of his father, a powerful thing, but impossible as a likeness.

He took a chair at his table, and opened a packet of photographs just in from the local photographers, opened the plans, rolled them flat, and plucked a chair to his side for Marcham.

“Sit ye down,” he said; “and now look here. This is the place; first appearance of the landed gentry. Monks out, gents in. Here are the photos; took them myself to-day. The chap who got it, pulled down the church and built himself a pretty nice house from it. It’s all gone galley-west with neglect. This is the Tudor bit: like it? What d’ye say to the porch? Make you hop?”

It had made him hop; he was hopping all round the room, with little cries of “Golly.”

Frampton continued. “Are you doing anything to-morrow? Got a meeting with Roger? Well, I want you to put him off and come with me. We’ll go over it all and see what can be done. What d’ye think of the place? Like it, hey?”

“Golly,” Marcham said, “I didn’t know there was anything like this at Mullples. It isn’t figured in Perkins? What’s the roof like?”

“None too good, I expect. Perkins never got as far west as Mullples; he never touched Stubbington Hundred. I’ve just looked.”

Marcham was a man of great reading in his profession and had a memory.

“Wait a minute, now,” he said. “Mullples Manor. I do know something about it. There’s a theatre or something of that sort in the garden. A man wrote a letter about it to the Architectural, and said he couldn’t get in to see it.”

“That’s the place. The theatre stands. This is the snap of it.”

“That’s a beautiful place. Is the roof of that gone?”

“No. It’s dry as a bone. It’s been a kennels and then a fowlhouse. You have to keep your hounds and poultry dry.”

Marcham took photograph after photograph and seemed to eat them with his eyes.

“Well, what d’ye think?” Frampton asked. “Don’t be so damned critical.”

“Critical? I like that. You fill me with fizz and ask me why I’m sober. But these photographs look as though it needed seeing to. What’s it really like? Falling down?”

“It’s none too good, anywhere,” Frampton said. “The brook’s in the cellar, by the sound of it. No, they’ve let the place go to wreck.”

“But why did they let it get into this state? They could have sold it.”

“I expect they were always stupid and proud,” Frampton said. “The hounds were the important thing to them, not the house. Lately, I should think he’s clung on to it from sheer funk, of having nowhere to go, if he gets out of it. It’s mortgaged, and if the thing’s sold he won’t get much more than will pay the charge.”

“What will happen to him? The workhouse?”

“Well, what else is a chap like that good for? He can’t work with his hands and hasn’t any head; he’s just human scrap, with a poor, sour devil of a daughter. But come on, now; fall to. This is my idea of what ought to be done.”

He settled on to the plans as a bloodhound on to the trail; he was clear and forceful; and drove his enthusiasm into Marcham’s mind. Marcham was soon hopping about the room crying: “Golly; I see exactly what to do there. Now, how would this be?” Then he would rapidly sketch his suggestion, and give an estimate of the cost. He had a quick eye for a map, and saw from the big scale map all sorts of things which might be done. He also had a shrewd sense of the numbers of people needed to run the house and gardens, and where and how to house them.

“When will you know that you’ve got the house?” he asked at length.

“As soon as I can wring it out of them.”

“Will you get vacant possession by Christmas?”

“I mean to try. The chap will need some booting probably which I don’t mind if he gets.”

“Say you get the house clear at Christmas,” Marcham said, “that will mean work in the winter; short days and very likely frost. When do you want to be moving in?”

“I want to be married in July,” he said, “and I want the house to be finished and in apple-pie order before then, with all the men out to hell from it, and none of your little messes in the flowerbeds. You’ll have to get treble shifts on to it, but you’ll get it done.”

Marcham did not relish being bullied. He was thinking, that Mullples was a long way from any centre; men and gear would have to travel far to get to it. The nearest station was twelve, or more miles away. It would be a costly matter putting Mullples in order. Still, that was Mansell’s look-out: he was rich enough. He knew his patron well enough to know, that any suggestion of difficulty would lose him the job, which was attractive to him. He knew, too, exactly how to put Mansell into good humour. “Who have you got in mind for the walls?” he asked.

“Who says I’m going to decorate the walls?” Frampton asked.

“I know you won’t have them bare,” Marcham said, “so the sooner we can get the big rooms ready for the painters the better. How many frescoes have you in mind?”

“The big room, the dining-room, my study and my bedroom: four. I’ve been on the telephone about them. I’ll get the measures with you to-morrow and get them to get on with the cartoons.”

“Fine,” Marcham said. “I see this map marks a chapel here. Is that anything?”

“No; but it’s on the property and it’ll need tidying up. A few bits of wall are above ground.”

“Will you have all the water rights? Can you do what you like with the brooks?”

“Yes; and with the lake and with the springs. Oh . . . and then, here in this covert I want a watcher’s cottage. I mean to make this a bird sanctuary.”

“Spirr Wood; good name; fine,” Marcham said. “I’ll just make a note of that. A red brick bungalow idea, made to look sylvan.”

“That’s the idea,” Frampton said.

“Any sheds or outhouses or so?” Marcham asked. “But we can go into that on the spot. Fine. I say, I do hope that the roof’s pretty good.”

“I think the whole house is pretty bad,” Frampton said.

“Well then, I tell you what,” Marcham said, “I do hope it won’t rain to-morrow. If there is one sound I hate, it’s rain falling into a fine old house.”

“It won’t rain to-morrow,” Frampton said. “The glass is rising. It is going to be a lovely day to-morrow. And now, what d’ye say to a pot of hot grog and to bed. I’m going to rout you out of here at eight to-morrow. You’ll be called at six-thirty.”

At eight the next morning, just as the beauty of the day was beginning to show, they were off and away to Mullples, to infuriate the sick man, by their insistence on getting at parts of the roof that he didn’t know the way to, and angering the daughter by their laying of sacrilegious measures on the walls. She had not been used to energetic men, during her life on earth, and the sight of two was, therefore, the more revolting.

Marcham, when fired, was a man of the utmost keenness. The sight of Mullples was more than enough to fire him.

“By Jove. My Golly,” he kept crying, “what a place. And I’d never heard of it. Except just the mention of the theatre. By Jove. My good Golly. I do hope you’ll get this place. Golly, look at that front; and then the details. O, my Jove and Golly.”

Of course, Frampton got the place. Margaret felt for the fall of the Knares-Yocksirs. She pleaded for gentle treatment for them.

“Fram,” she said, “I’ve been worrying about the Knares-Yocksirs. They’ll have very little to live upon when their house has gone and their debts on it are paid. All that they have will hardly bring them fifty pounds a year, between them.”

“I know it,” he said, “and they’re not worth fifty pounds a year, between them.”

“Yes, they are, Fram,” she said. “Everybody is.”

“I deny that,” he said. “But go on, my Peggy. D’you want me to find him a job in the gun works? I won’t, nor the woman; they’re unemployable.”

“No, no; they’re not. She was born to some position in the county, but she has accustomed herself to a good deal, to cook, and run the house, and be a nurse, and so forth; she’s proved herself.”

“I hate that kind of woman,” he said. “She’s no use to anyone, and is sour with it.”

“Now, Fram,” she said, “we are going to be wonderfully happy; might not some little share of our happiness come to them?”

“You mean, I might build them a lodge, and take them on as keeper and house-keeper? I wouldn’t have them within extreme long range, I look on them both as duds. They were begotten by duds, the pair of them, and now our civilisation is slowly putting them out of action, as the duds they are.”

“Fram, I’m very sorry for them and should not care to live in Mullples thinking that those two are turned out to misery. Will you, to please me, let them have the cottage at Cullingdon, if they would like it, rent free, until the father dies, at any rate? Then perhaps, she might do something for herself.”

He did not relish doing anything for people of whom he disapproved, even for Margaret. The cottage at Cullingdon was a week-end cottage used by him in the summer when busily employed at the Works. It was a pleasant place, made of two improved cottages, knocked into one; it stood in a little apple orchard about half a mile from the village. He had hardly used it for the past two years; all his spare time had been given to travelling.

“Do, do this, to please me, Fram,” she pleaded. “You said you weren’t doing anything with Cullingdon.”

“Very well,” he said, not very graciously. “They can go to Cullingdon when they quit Mullples. I’ll get my books and things out. They can move in at Christmas, or before.”

“Oh, thank you, Fram,” she said. “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”

“I don’t think for a moment,” he said, “that they’ll like taking a favour from me, so will you go and offer them Cullingdon?”

“Let us do it together, Fram,” she said. “Let’s go over tomorrow and offer it to them; and then, mayn’t we help them over the move? for they are as nearly ruined as two souls can be, and what they spend in moving will have to be paid for out of their food, and I can’t bear the thought of it.”

He could have borne the thought of it very well, but Margaret was very gentle and winning; in his rough way he was very fond of her; he was going to be married, and he was in a good mood at getting Mullples at a bargain. Her gentle counsel prevailed. When the purchase of Mullples was sure, he went with her to see the Knares-Yocksirs, and offered more than she had hoped, or would have asked. When he had resolved upon a thing, he always did it well. Margaret was much pleased at the way he offered Cullingdon. They were in the sick man’s room at Mullples. Frampton, speaking to father and daughter together, said:

“I don’t know whether what I have to say will interest you. I have a place in Essex, called Cullingdon. It is this place in these photographs. We were wondering whether you would like to come over with us to look at it? If you like it, when you have seen it, we wonder whether you would care to stay there for a time, till you find something better; it needs some keeping up, but not much, and if you would do that for us, you would have to let us pay you some small sum. It is easy to get stores there, and the garden is very fruitful. Of course, if you liked the idea, we should undertake the getting you there and settling you in.”

He felt, in his own phrase, that he had done them proud, and expected a recognition of the fact, which did not come. He found the father obtuse and inclined to boggle.

“I see,” he said, “you keep to your one idea, of getting us out of this.”

The daughter said nothing, but looked at him in a peculiar way, as though she would like to cut his throat.

“Well, turn it over in your minds,” he said. “I must just get the measure of the room at the end.”

He went out into the garden, fuming. He walked up and down, saying he had cast pearls, and the swine had trodden them. But as they drove away, when he burst out against the couple, Margaret told him, that the woman had broken down, and been quite unable to thank him.

“She said that she had not known where to turn nor what to do. She had no relations and, of course, no friends, and now this plan was just salvation.”

She herself was weeping as she spoke. “Fram,” she said, “I do thank you for saving these people. I couldn’t have borne to live at Mullples, knowing that we had turned them out.”

“It’s up to them now,” he said. “I’ve done what I can for them. But my belief is, that when a chap or a family starts to go down, it’s a lot better to let ’em go. If I ever get into the feckless state that chap’s got into, I hope you’ll store me in the petrol cellar and give me plenty of matches.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” she said. “But you don’t know how you’ve pleased me.”

Before Christmas Day, the couple were out of Mullples, and in charge at Cullingdon.

On the day on which they gave up Mullples, Frampton took Margaret to the old house and walked over it with her. A cricket chirped by the not quite dead fire, in which, as they could see, a lot of old papers had been burned. One half-burned sheet of notepaper had fallen from the grate. It was dated the 7th July, 1852, from Something—wick Castle. The family had been prosperous then.

“This is to be our home,” Frampton said. “I hope I may make it a happy one for you, my Peggy.”

“I’ve no doubt you will,” she said.

“It’ll be the first real home I shall have had,” he said. “A bachelor’s dens don’t count. Now, I want to tell you my ideas, and what I’m doing by you. You know my views, that I don’t believe this bunk about artistic times. All times might be times of art. The talents in races don’t vary; only some decades use the talents, others neglect or thwart them, or just crush them and misuse them, as the fashion is to-day. Most modern houses just make me sick; they’re either plundered junk stores or the work of fakirs.

“Formerly houses had the marks of slow accretion about them; you could see the growth of the family in them, each generation adding something. There aren’t many like that now. Anyhow, I don’t belong to such a family. You know about us. I make no bones about it. We were on the ground, broke to the wide, in my own father’s young days, as you know.

“I’ve hopes, that this home will be a stable one for us. I’m founding my hopes on that. All this time is restless and shifting; it’s the only time that has been able to be restless; people can shift about and live away from their work. I know hardly anybody who is in the home he was born in. I want this place to be me, not anybody else, and my offering to you. I’ve designed every stick that’s coming into it for you. I’ve designed carpets, curtains, chintzes, the furniture, the metal-work, the china, the glass, everything; or gone over every design and approved it; and every stick and thread and cup and pot and pan will be made by men known to me; and if you don’t like any of ’em, why, you need only say the word and they’ll make ’em new, till they make something you do like. We’re alive, and we’ll have the work of life about us; not the death from the London junk stores, thanky. When we get home, you shall see some of the things, and I think you’ll agree with me, that you’re getting a better lot of gear than any young woman of your time.”

Margaret understood him well. He was filling the house with images of his energy; his thought was to be all round her there; well, it was living and clear thought. She hoped that she might presently touch it with gentleness.

Going out into the winter day, a horn blew not far from them; a clear voice cheered and cheered. They saw the hounds passing up the valley, and a blowzy and muddy company following after them.

“I do believe they’ve been running through the shrubberies there,” Frampton said, “trying for a fox just up by the summer-house. I’ll soon stop that little game.”

For the moment, however, he did nothing to stop their little game. He would do that presently, when some of the more pressing things were done. He saw the hounds go up the valley; and later followed on their tracks. They were all on his land, though they left it just beyond the water.

As he had not examined that end of his property with any care, he went on over it. It was a good big stretch of very poor soil. To the left of the water, the ground rose into a biggish, barren hill, wooded on the Mullples side with stunted and sickly trees, all jungled with bramble and blackthorn. A lot of this hill was of the starved, sickly colour of the Waste; it grew only a kind of grass so poor that it would hardly keep a goat. The wood upon it looked as though nothing entered it, ever. It went straggling down the slopes to more barren pasture, then there came the road, and beyond the road was Spirr. It was clear that the road was the dividing line. To the west of it, things grew fairly well, to the east of it was the Waste.

“It’s a case of denudation, I’ll bet,” he said. “The rains have washed out the life-giving things in the soil on this side and brought them all away down the hill. Well, in time, I may be able to help matters.”

He was shocked at the tumbledown, bankrupt look of everything.

“The first thing to do,” he said to Margaret later, “is to show that we don’t despair of this Waste. It has been told for five generations or so that it is only fit for fox-hunting. The poor soil has come to believe it. Wait a while. We’ll get the hunting off it, and life of a sort on to it. Lupins are said to be the things, but I’ll find out that. Then we’ll clear the jungle and let in the light, and do a bit of surgery or so. The drains must be cleared, too; half the hill is poisoned by retained rains. What this place has lacked has been work and the benefit of a mind upon it.”

Now that the property was his, he gave it work and the benefit of his mind upon it. He set to, like a new broom. He was busy at the time with ideas for a new machine, which he called “The Death Spray,” or “Mullples Multiple Murderer.” But this absorbed him only during working hours; all the rest of his time, except that doled out to Margaret, was given to Mullples and the driving of the artists, craftsmen and workmen employed upon it. But before this began, he did something which had its effect upon his future there. Before the old owners left, he had arranged with them that a firm at Stubbington should be allowed to send men over to clear the jungle and ruin from the premises, so that his own architect’s men might find a cleared field when they arrived. He saw the firm at Stubbington, and though he did not like their looks, still thought that they would be likely to do this work well, in the hope of future favours. It was suggested that they should send their men over to Mullples every day in a lorry and clear the place. He said that the work was to be pressed: the ground had to be clear by the week before Christmas. The manager assured him that the work should be pressed relentlessly.

“Believe me, sir, we’ll have everything off the ground in the time allowed.”

He did not believe him; he summed him up as one of those country contractors who flourish from the absence of rivals.

“I’ll see how you get along,” he said, “at a preliminary bit, before you get the contract for the rest. If you want the contract, you’ll have to work for it.”

He set the preliminary bit. The Manager, thinking that he would make him pay later for his insolence, accepted. He would soon show this London gent that in the Stubbington area you had to employ the one firm or go without. He meant to make Mansell sing small, before he had done with him.

In the afternoon of the day after which work was to be begun there, Frampton came down unexpectedly, and found nothing even begun, except that the workmen had started to build a small camp for themselves. He found the foreman smoking a cigarette and fishing in the lake. Frampton said that he hoped he was enjoying himself, and asked, what he thought he was doing and what his firm had done the day before. The Manager came up at this moment, rather hot from a run. The Manager said that they had to bring their men and stuff a long way, and until it was there, they could do nothing.

“That’s about the thing you’re best at,” Frampton said. “This is what you call ‘pressing things on relentlessly.’”

“I didn’t know you was in such a hurry,” the Manager said, “or I’d have hurried them on.”

“You’re quite incapable of hurrying things on,” Frampton said. “You knew my views, and this is how you put them in practice. You’re a set of slackers.”

“I’m sorry you should speak like that, Mr. Mansell,” the man replied, “but perhaps local workmen aren’t good enough for you.”

“If you’re a specimen of the local workman,” Frampton said, “let me tell you that you aren’t good enough, nor anything like it. Selling matches on the kerb is your job. Pack your traps and your firm’s traps, and be out of it.”

The firm did as they were bid. The foreman did so; some of the men had heard the dispute; they looked with anger at this new-comer from London, who made guns and wanted to drive them like slaves. In Stubbington they started a legend, which was soon to grow, that this Mr. Mansell was in such a hurry, that Stubbington men weren’t good enough for him. The Manager added his own comment, that he had his pride to consider, and would rather lose any work; he had been used to working for gentlemen. Mansell got them all out of it, and covenanted with the London firm, who had done the Works for him. A force of these men came down, with one of those portable camps of Mansell’s own devising, which had been such a boon during the War. They camped on the spot and got busy. The outraged local Manager wrote to a friend in London, who wrote to the Press.

The letter said that the desecration of ancient buildings now going on all over the country was not sparing even such well-known examples of Tudor domestic architecture as Mullples Priory in Tatshire. Lover of Old England asked whether the Anti-Vandal Society could not do something to preserve its beauties from the ruthless “Restoration” about to be put in hand there.

Rolly, the architect, saw the letter and showed it to Frampton, who replied to it. He said that until Christmas, the house would not be his, and that all that was being done to the Mullples estate at present was a clearing up. Some sycamores and elders were being cut, a tangle of thorns and jungle cleared, the choked ponds dredged, and the streams re-banked and their channels refaced. That after a half-century of neglect, the house would be overhauled thoroughly, and that Lover of Old England might have done better to write about it when the theatre was a fowl-house and the brook was running into the cellar. In fact, Lover of Old England and the Anti-Vandal Society ought to buy a little nest in Hogarth’s Gin Alley and stay there.

The outraged manager took the letter to heart and treasured it. He was a man of some little importance in local affairs. Through him, as one of the first in the district to meet Mansell, the Mansell idea began to form in the local mind.

“Mr. Mansell, the famous gun-man, who is going to do up Mullples, is quite impossibly rude to people. He says that no one in Stubbington is fit to touch the house he intends to live in.”

Presently, it took the form:

“He may be rich and he may be clever, but if he goes on as he’s begun, nobody will touch him with a barge-pole.”

On the day after Boxing Day, Frampton’s men took charge of Mullples and Roly-Poly began the work on the house. It was the biggest and most delightful task he had ever had; he put his heart into it. Frampton spent every moment which he could spare from his Death-Spray and Margaret, at Mullples, urging on the work.

“I’ll be the death of you, Roly-Poly,” he said, “if you don’t drive these chaps while the weather’s open.”

The weather that winter was open; the work could be pushed. Except for a part at the western end, the house was “not too bad, considering,” Roly-Poly said.

Frampton was at his best in a scene of this sort. He loved work and the direction of any kind of energy. He was at Mullples at all hours, bearing a hand with any job which took his fancy, and trying his own way at it, hoping to make it simpler. He had a fondness for all tradition of work, judging it to be a memory, however defective, of the methods of genius. He tried to lay bricks, and to do tiling. He dug with the best of them, and planed against the carpenters, to see who could cut the longest shaving. Always, when he could, he talked with the men, and tried to find out from them who had taught them their ways of working. Somewhere in the far past there had been wonderful fellows in all the crafts; odd ghosts of their methods still flitted. He heard only of men long since gone, Old Joe This, and poor Mr. Tom That, who had learned from men who had worked under Hawkesmoor, who had learned from men who worked under Wren, who had learned from old tother who had done some of the plastering at Nonesuch, who had learned from someone shadowy indeed, who had learned from the great unknown. But somewhere, genius had been bright in all the crafts, and the glimmer still showed.

It was necessary now and then to try to get work done at Stubbington and in Tatchester, When this happened, it was his fortune to fall foul of the country method, which was, perhaps, just the leisured method of genius, which he longed to recover. In his impatience he declared publicly, and the words were repeated “with advantages,” that the country workers were the sediment left, when all the guts had gone to the Colonies and all the brains to the towns. In the pubs at Stubbington, the labouring men summed him up as a slave-driver, who had a lot of chaps putting painted plaster on the walls, and spending pots of money on it, but that with it all, he’d no great cause to talk to them like that: his own father was only a baker’s boy, and his grandfather had been in Tatchester prison. He’d no cause to sing proud with that in his record. Let a man with a grandfather in prison not talk too loud about his place in the world, however much money he might have.

He had now set the lower and the lower middle-class against him; very soon, he was to shoot at higher game and rouse a prouder hatred.

But, in the meantime, the work engrossed and delighted him. One of the pleasantest parts of the work was exploring the nooks and crannies of Mullples with Roly-Poly. They went up to the attics and got at the roofs; they groped in the cellars, tapped at old walls, broke off old plaster, laid bare fireplaces and powdering chambers, rafters with splendid chamfers cut on them, done by some sure hand with an adze, in the one stroke, and hinges forged by the smith during the Wars of the Roses. But like Roly-Poly, he was less in love with these things, than with the later work. The theatre gave him the intensest thrill. There, under the stage, in a big store-room, so admirably built that it was dry as dust, were things which delighted him. There, behind the shards, the straw, the worn tools, harness and other rubbish of a country house, was a stack of stuff laid edgewise. It looked, at first sight, like hurdling, but it proved to be scenery, much the worse for wear. It represented a classical park or woodland, of the time of Louis Seize; the sets were all of trees, or parts of temples. Pinned to some of the sets were papers which told what play they once had decorated. It was the play of Zimoire the Terrible, a play in verse, translated from the French of M. le Vicomte de Bellencourt, Ministre du Roi. On one of the slats was a programme, which gave the names of the players, but not the date, only the days of the week, “on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, at 3 p.m. precisely.” On the floor were some written bits of parts, half a page of a Female Slave’s part, and the song, in manuscript, to be sung by Master Nashe, “Alas, O tender Rapture.”

Nothing more remained of the theatrical ambitions of that ancient lord of Mullples; local memory had forgotten him; the guide-books ignored him. Frampton searched for more in the British Museum and the public records. Surely, a man who cared for poetry and the other arts to this point must have left a mark on his time. What was the soul who produced Zimoire the Terrible in such a place?

Meanwhile, there was much to do at Spirr. He found, in Weston Mullples, an oldish man who was said to be very good indeed at fencing. Frampton wanted the outer fence of Spirr to be thoroughly repaired, cut, laid and ditched. He employed this old man among others to do this work.

Going out one day, in February, to see how the work was getting on, he found this man, on the western hedge, and stopped to talk with him. The work was excellent, for the man, Zine, was perhaps the greatest living master of fencing, then alive.

“That’s beautiful fencing,” Frampton said.

The old man knew that it was.

“There’s not many can do it now, the old way, the way it ought to be done,” he said.

“Who taught you to do it?” Frampton asked.

“Why, my father, sir,” he said, “my father, who used to work at Sir Peter’s, him and old Will, who was at the Rectory: good fencers both, at the trimming and laying. They didn’t give prizes for ’un, then; no, it was a well-done job, then; no need to give prizes.”

“How old are you?” Frampton asked, expecting to get some clue to the date when fencing was well done.

“I’m seventy-two, sir,” the old man said. He worked on, for a time, then he said: “You see, there, sir, away yonder, the hill in like the blue? That’s Wicked Hill, as they call it.”

“Indeed.”

“Yes, sir: Wicked Hill. They was hunting out that way, yesterday, from the Fox Inn, a matter of twelve mile. Are you a hunting man, sir?”

“No,” Mansell said, “not in the least.”

“Well, that’s where they went yesterday,” the old man said, “out Wicked Hill way; and two of their horses laid down and died.”

“Did they kill their fox?” Frampton asked.

“No, sir,” the old man said. “He got away on ’em, being artful. Very artful things are foxes, sir, as all the world knows. And a fox is better than a man at it, for he can be tired and artful, and a man can’t, not when he’s tired. That’s why polices catch thieves and foxes get away.”

“That’s a very good point,” Frampton said. “I’ve never heard it put before. And what killed the horses? Did they fall?”

“No, sir; I reckon they was just ridden till their hearts burst. It’s a good galloping country, over ’twixt the Fox and the Hill.”

He bent to his task, plainly cheered by the image of something excessive; then, seeing that Frampton wished to talk, he grounded his slasher, and straightened up, glad of an opportunity to pass on his experience.

“They don’t see the hunts they used to see in the old days,” he said; “there’s a lot of reasons for that, the one being the ground, that is now got cleared of the water it used to hold. There is a deal less boggy land now, than in my father’s time. That makes it hard for the foxes. The hounds can go now, fast, over what would ’a held ’em long ago. Then to my way, the foxes aren’t the same kind; all the good ’uns got killed off in the mange years, as they call ’em, when all the foxes got mange; you’d see some of ’em with no more hair than on a baby. They got in a lot of new foxes, presently, on the sly, from Germany, somebody was saying, but they aren’t like the old English sort, nor won’t be, yet awhile; for you can’t hurry Nature, that’s sure; she’s one that won’t be hurried, not for anything that you can do.”

“Do you hunt?” Frampton asked. “Were you ever a huntsman?”

“I? No,” the old man said. “No, sir; but when I was a young man, I was a groom, or under-strapper, as they called ’em then, to Sir Peter Bynd, over yonder, at the great Coombe House. That was this present Sir Peter’s father. He had the hounds then. And sometimes, when my luck was in, I rode second horseman, then; and sometimes I got more of a hunt of it than my master; till I had a fall and cracked my backbone into three. I’ve not rid a horse since then.”

He turned again to his work.

“What is it that you liked in hunting?” Frampton asked. “Why do men hunt? They could gallop over the fields in winter, without harm, at any time, without going to all this expense. Why shouldn’t they do that? Why should they torment poor foxes, and have all this swank and folly?”

The old man looked at him with some perplexity, as he might have looked at a foreigner whose tongue he did not well understand. He carefully leaned his curved slasher against the hedge, with an air of having done with work for a while.

“It’s in man’s nature to like sport, sir; they take to it naturally. And it gives a chance to every man to enjoy what he likes best. There’s some are all for putting on fine clothes and riding a cock-horse, all shiny, lots of that kind, men and ladies; then, there’s many likes riding, riding like the devil, three horses a day; then, some are all for watching the hunting of the hounds. There’s not many cares for that but some will. My father was one of them. He’d be in the covert, if he could ever get near ’em, watching each hound. He used to say that he’d give all the riding ten times over just to watch that. He said hunting went out when riding came in. He said they don’t hunt the fox at all now, they just run him off his legs. What he liked to see was the huntsman a part of the pack, in covert or out of it on one of these slow hunting days, when there’s nothing but wafts of scent. But not many care for that now. A lot cares for hunting because others care for it, and because it puts life into a country-side, to see a lot of life in it. And it is a fine sight, on a moist morning.”

“Don’t you think you could get the fine sight in some other way?”

“Ah, you might,” the old man admitted; “but then, you see, you don’t.”

He reflected on this, and on what other sights the countryside offered, the parade of the Territorials once in every summer, the Flower Show at Tatchester in early August, the point-to-point meeting in April. No, it did not seem to him that there would be much to see in that part of the world, if hunting were put out of the scheme.

“No,” the old man went on, “no. We’ve had hunting from time immortal, and I hope we always will have.”

It is possible, that at this moment a suspicion crossed his mind that this with whom he spoke was a city gentleman. He had heard of such as people quite without any feeling for sport, and no knowledge of country things. He had even heard of such as sometimes inclined to write that hunting ought to be abolished.

“But,” Frampton said, “we haven’t had fox-hunting long. It is a recent sport; it was hardly known before the reign of Queen Anne. People killed foxes, but they didn’t hunt them with hounds.”

“No, sir?”

“No.”

The old man resumed his slasher with a weary air.

“Ah, but hereabout they did, sir. This is Spirr Wood, where fox-hunting begun. The Fire of London begun, as I have heard say, sir, in one place, and fox-hunting begun at Spirr Wood. You may not have known, sir, that this is that Spirr Wood.” Seeing that Frampton remained blank, and not liking such ignorance, he went on: “This is what they call the great Spirr Wood. You be a stranger in these parts, sir, if I may make so bold, and you will let me speak. There be a noble great song about this wood.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Frampton said. “What sort of a song? Do you know it?”

“They call it the Spirr Wood Song,” the man said. “Not many of the people here remember it all now. It’s a hunting song. My father sung the most of it.”

“Will you sing it to me?”

“Ah, it’s not so easy, to go back over a song like that one.”

“Try. I’d like to hear it.”

The man put down his slasher, with care, after first wiping the blade. He straightened himself with care, being somewhat cramped from stooping. For a moment he stood, staring now with much attention at Frampton, for he meant to paint his portrait, with much exactness, at his favourite bar that night. After this had filled his mind, he turned up his eyes, gulped, and went down into the recesses of his memory, after odds and ends of words not used for years, perhaps.

Presently he began unexpectedly with words which went at first both above and below the tune, till he got to something midway between.

“Tom Jerkin was the huntsman, sir; my father used to know him in his latter day, when he’d come down a bit; for he had fall, Tom did, and never rode another ride. He couldn’t continue huntsman, not after the fall, so the gentlemen made him a cap, to set him up. But Tom spent it in a few weeks. Then, after that, he went about with the terriers and that, all he could, but it wasn’t much of a living, after being a huntsman and getting crowns and sovereigns and that from every lord in the land, so he came down in the world, as pride does.”

“How does the song go on, from there?”

“There comes a chorus, sir, there, what all are supposed to join in. It goes somehow. . . . There. . . . I do believe I’ve forgot the chorus. It goes with a bit of a cry, like it was the hounds joining in.

No, that doesn’t seem quite right to me. There was something came in before then about twice ten long miles.”

“I take it, that it’s a song about a fox-hunt?”

“Yes, like I’m singing it to you. It’s a song about the Spirr Wood Day. It was a day about the first of November. They drew the covert here and found a fox. Some said he wasn’t a fox and couldn’t ’a been, but must have been a wolf got away from a circus, for the dance he led ’em, but Tom Jerkin, who talked to my father, and who was in the covert and saw the fox, and was away with the hounds over that field there, Tom, who’d a right to know, and saw the fox, he said it was a fox, and not a very big one, just a small dog-fox, with a bit out of his ear. He may ’a been little, but he was good; little and good, as a Welshman’s cow, as we say.”

“And then he went away?”

“Yes, of course he did. Like I’m trying to sing to you, if you wouldn’t put me out of mind. And ever since then, the Tunster Hounds have drawed this cover the first day of the season, because in memory:

“They’ll have to find some other covert,” Frampton thought. “They will open here no more.” He spoke to the old man: “But tell me,” he said, “did they catch their fox on this day, whenever it was?”

He tried to judge, when the day had been. Zine was over seventy. He might have heard the song during the latest ’sixties, from a man who had heard it from Tom Jerkin, in the ’thirties, who might have learned it twenty years before.

“Tell me,” Frampton said, “have you lived all your life at Weston Mullples?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, “all my life. I’ve not been much of a traveller, except once with the old Rector to a rose show in London. That would ’a been the year of the first Jubilee, in old Mr. Drew’s time.”

“Did you ever hear of Sir Jocelyn Petersbury?”

“No, sir.”

“He lived at Mullples.”

“No, sir; never. Mr. Knares-Yocksir lived in Mullples, and his fathers before him.”

“This was the man who was there a hundred and fifty years ago, before the Knares-Yocksirs ever bought the place. He built a theatre and gave plays. Sir Jocelyn Petersbury.”

“No, sir.”

The local mind had remembered the fox-hunt, but not the giver of Zimoire the Terrible, at whose bidding Master Nashe had warbled “Alas, O tender Rapture.”

“Tell me,” Frampton said, “in this famous fox-hunt, did they kill the fox?”

“No, they didn’t catch him,” the man said. “He took ’em all up and down, all day long, and in the evening, he brought ’em all that was left, the three of ’em, back to this Spirr Wood, where they lost ’un. Lots of horses dropped dead, that day, ah, and Mr. Flaggon had his back twisted; he was never what you could call straight, after that, Mr. Flaggon.”

“Where did Mr. Flaggon come from?”

“Mr. Flaggon? He was a London gentleman.”

Frampton was not interested in the story of Spirr Wood, but was touched at this song being still in the old fellow’s memory; it was the only trace of art in him, this relic of a bad ballad about a fox-hunt, with only three left in it at the end, lovely horses galloped to death, and Mr. Flaggon twisted for life. He stayed on talking to the old man, but not encouraging him to delve further into the epic of Spirr Wood, but asking to be shown something of the mystery of ditching. He was ever fond of trying to do country things. He held, that all art comes from the power that does rough work, and the pride and joy of doing that rough work well. All the diseases of art, and he knew them all pretty well and had seen their practitioners, seemed to him to proceed from that very point of weakness. The artists could not do the rough work, they therefore were not men of power, and their work was consequently weak and despondent, without pride and unable to give joy, seeing that itself did not proceed from joy.

He remained with the old man, doing a bit of ditching and a bit of hedging under his guidance, for a while, and then returned home, thinking of the might of men, who in the course of centuries had made the art of the countryside, so trim and beautiful, ditching the fields, planting, trimming and plashing the fences, carrying away the standing meres, getting the boggy patches dry, a work of centuries, always noble because it taxed a strong man to the utmost at all times, and never could be relaxed nor ended. In that particular bit of England, as he very clearly saw, the effort to get the water off the land must have been heroic. Traces of old drains were everywhere. At one time, they had cared for that land as a mother cares for a child. Then, indeed, men had cared for England.

Thinking over what the old man had said, he decided that it would be best to write to the Hunt Secretary, to make it clear that Spirr Wood was to be a bird sanctuary, and that he wished the hounds to avoid it. He wrote this letter, and sent it off, thinking:

“Well, sooner or later, these chaps will be turned out of every covert; they’ve had five generations of Spirr.”

He had a busy week in the Works just after that and did not pay any attention to the plea of the Secretary, whose name seemed to be Bynd, that he would reconsider his decision. Taking the letter from his table by chance a few days later, he thought that he had better send a brief reply. He, therefore, wrote a formal line or two, to say that he was sorry that he could not reconsider his decision: Spirr was to be a sanctuary. Somebody told him a day or two later that a man of the name of Bynd had come up twice to Mullples, in the hope of seeing him. He did not pay any attention to this; did not, in fact, associate the name with the Hunt. Mullples was beset with tradesmen’s touts at all times; he thought: “Oh, this will be the baker, or the candlestick-maker.”

Afterwards it did occur to him: “Oh, it was the Hunt Secretary. Well, he has had his answer; and he must see, by this time, that I’m putting a warden’s hut inside Spirr. He must take No for an answer. Why should he think that I’ll give up a considered plan for a whim of a few fox-hunters? Margaret shall have her birds, and the Hunt may go chase itself.”

By the end of April, the work of the house was well forward. The painters who were doing his frescoes were getting along well, and enjoying the chance to show their power. Each toiled there with his plasterer from dawn till dark, as happy as the day. There were four main designs; one, in the hall, of the year’s work in the fields; one, in his library, of the story of Tristan and Isolt; another, in Margaret’s room, of the birds that haunt the water and watery places, herons, dippers, wild duck, moorhens, curlews, and the green plovers who cry from the marsh at night; and a fourth, in a big sitting-room, of the forest of England, with Robin Hood, his meyny, the deer and the wild things. The garden had been remade and planted. Enthusiasts were already coming out in cars from Stubbington, in the early mornings, to steal the plants.

In Spirr Wood, the “bungalow, made to look sylvan,” looked as sylvan as so new a thing could. The builders had made something of a mess in getting it up, but the Spring was pushing fast over the traces. Timothy had moved in there as soon as one room of it was covered; he had passed some weeks already, with much enjoyment, getting up nesting-boxes of different kinds in the trees. He worked at the making and disguising of these all day long, with the skill and pleasure of genius. He had a carpenter’s bench there; he was glad to be out of London and to have some excuse, not to work at his profession. He was a charming-looking lad of much sweetness and weakness. He made Frampton feel that he was, as he put it, “going to pull up his socks for good.”

He had a delicate way of disguising his nest-boxes, which pleased Frampton very much.

“If you would only put some of that instinct into your bird drawings,” he told him, “you would be as good as the best. Why do you try to draw a chaffinch as if it were a vulture? It isn’t.”

Timothy would look sullen, for he disliked Frampton and loathed his comments. Margaret would soothe his tender vanity.

On her birthday, early in May, Frampton gave a tea-party to Margaret and her friends inside the theatre, which had now been well restored, with new decorations and seats in the auditorium. It looked charming. He made a little speech to his twenty guests from the stage.

“I am glad to welcome you to the Mullples Theatre,” he said. “I have not yet finished my enquiries into its origin, but I have learned this about it: it was built by one Sir Jocelyn Petersbury, who bought this estate in 1769. The Petersburys were wealthy West Indian and Virginian traders; Sir Jocelyn was the last of them. As quite a young man, he gave up all the family businesses, bought this place and set out to make it beautiful. He was to some extent moved by the taste of the time, but more by a personal fondness for water, I mean the sight and the sound of water. All over the estate are pools of great beauty, with pleasant summer-houses from which the water could be contemplated, or the noise of the sluices heard. I have no doubt that this fondness for the sight and sound of water brought him here and inspired the lay-out of the property. This laying-out and so forth may have taken him a few years to finish. When he was not here, he was in London, and I think that an allusion in one of Gibbon’s letters may be to him. He was a dilettante, a Voltairean, and anything and everything that was against the weight of the time. He wrote a pamphlet called A Plea for Conscience Money, a copy of which will be handed to each of you as you go. It calls on the statesmen of the time to give a tithe of what they steal from the nation to establish a Theatre of Taste, where the elegant may not be ashamed to be seen. It is a witty paper; I am glad to have been able to reprint it. He wrote a few copies of verses under his own name; these are all in couplets; a few specimens will suffice you probably. On Matilda going to the Bath is his happiest effort.

One or two society newspapers seem to refer to him in lampoons as Sir Jesting Peter; but I cannot imagine what the lampoons mean. No doubt they refer to matters well known in his little clique. Boswell does not allude to him. A Voltairean would hardly have been welcomed by Dr. Johnson.

“I believe that he built this theatre and devoted it to the elegant French idea of art as a protest against the government’s policy against France and the American colonies. He must have been a brave man, who put on a translation from the French here, in the days of Squire Western and so forth; but beyond all doubt, he did. Who came to the performance or performances I cannot tell. The local bucks would probably have been much puzzled. The one play which we know to have been performed here was Zimoire the Terrible. The fashion of the theatre has turned away from that kind of thing, which was then much esteemed. It is a play in which the hero rants and the heroine pleads; finally the hero relents and is magnanimous, and the heroine says at great length that few things are so beautiful as virtue. Zimoire is an Eastern potentate; Carbante, his prize of war, is about to be added to his harem; Leandre, her lover, follows her to the capital and plots to rescue her. They are captured as they fly and threatened with torture; Carbante pleads, and Zimoire releases and pensions them. You will see from this that the plot offers good opportunities for both fierce and pathetic declamation. But it was, and was proclaimed to be, a translation from the French, when opinion was hostile to France and French things. One, therefore, concludes that Jesting Peter was a man of intellectual courage, or matchless insolence, according to your political opinions. After this, Sir Jocelyn seems to have faded out; there are no more poems by him in the accustomed papers. I cannot find that he wrote any other thing. He never married. Matilda’s eyes lighted some more favoured swain. I am inclined to think that his health broke down soon after 1777. He died in 1780, aged thirty-five, leaving no will; a cousin succeeded to the property. Local historians have not mentioned him, if we except Trott in 1822, who calls him the Eccentric Sir Jocelyn. Local guide-books mention the theatre. I am sorry that I cannot tell you more about him. I have little doubt that somewhere in England, perhaps not far from where we are, there is some portrait of him, perhaps by Reynolds, perhaps by Gainsborough, or perhaps by one of those lesser elegant painters, who had the favour and the patronage of the exclusives. If there were any such portrait, it was never engraved. I like to think that the elegant young man may have met the vehement young Blake and exchanged sympathies about intellectual liberty.”

After the party, he talked with Margaret about Sir Jocelyn. She said:

“It is very curious, Fram, but all the time while you were speaking, I felt that Sir Jocelyn was here, very happy, that he should be remembered. I am so glad that you have restored the place as a theatre. He must have given very much choice thought and care to make it one; and it is so exquisite; the proportions are so charming. You wondered who came to the performances of Zimoire; don’t you think that a rich eccentric, like this, who was called Jesting Peter, might give the play as a social duty, without caring, really, whether the people enjoyed it or not? He would enjoy giving it, and might have taken great pains with it. And I dare say a houseful of jesting friends, including Matilda, enjoyed watching the contortions of Squire Western during the performance. And all the countryside would have enjoyed the bustle and stir of the carriages and costumes, and remembered the declamations, too, perhaps.”

“This countryside would have been Puritan,” he said. “They would have expected hell to open and swallow the whole lot up.”

“That would have been part of the fun perhaps,” she said, “to wait for them all to be damned,”

“It must have been a puzzle to them,” he said, “when nothing happened. But then, they always get out of that by saying that the ways of Providence are inscrutable. Now what d’ye think, my Peggy? Here we are with this theatre, a very lovely little building; just the very thing, as you notice, for a kennels or a fowl-house. What are we to do with it? I say, why not use it for lectures and picture-shows? There’s lots of talent buried among these country workers; but what chance have they of seeing good modern work or decent design? None. None whatever. For instance, over in Stubbington, they’ve got a monumental mason, employing three or four men. I was talking to them the other day. They were quite clever fellows, but had never seen a decent modern sculpture in their lives. Think what it might be to those fellows, if they could come here and see a chap like old Tick demonstrating with clay or a block of marble. I vote we give shows of modern art here, and get a lot of good chaps in the different lines to come down and talk. I believe a whole lot of working people would be interested.”

“I’m sure they would,” she said. “Have you no thoughts of ever doing plays here?”

“Yes, but not for some time. I want to get a lot of young people into the way of coming here first, for discussion and to see works of art. Then, when I’ve got the people, we can turn them onto that, if they seem inclined that way.”

“It seems a pity not to use this charming little theatre for plays,” she said; “but I do a little wonder where the audience would come from. We are far from any community.”

“The motor has made all communities near,” he said. “If you dangle a good bait, or dangle a bad bait cleverly, you’ll get all the community you can manage. You’ll find that we shall be a good bait, and the fish will rise.”

They had walked out from the theatre into the open. It was a lovely May day; the plum and pear blossom was white in the orchards; some of the apple-trees were touched with bud. They looked at the men busy about the house, and listened to the noise of the work going forward, saws, hammers and the rush of planes. To the west was Spirr Wood, with its fir-trees like dark masts under sail. To the north, the low wooded hills stretched; a noise of rooks came from the rookery in one of the woods.

“What is that wood called?” she asked.

“It’s a part of what is called Stubbington Great Wood,” he said. “It belongs to a crusted old Tory called Colonel Purple Tittup. That’s his name and that’s his nature. He lives in a big house there; lots of land and no money, they say.”

“It’s a very beautiful wood,” she said.

“I don’t believe it really is,” he said. “I was up there not long ago on a wall; it didn’t look so well, near at hand. It’s all on this Waste, as they call it, where nothing really does. ‘Nothing’ll grow on the Waste,’ they say.”

“Fram,” she said, “do you really believe in a Waste? You were saying that art only fails from want of encouragement. Does not an estate only fail from the same cause? This Waste, as they call it, is only a stretch of land with some chemical deficiencies. If you fed those chemicals to the land, things would do there. Don’t you think it would be fun to try?”

“So you want me to buy that wood, too?” he said. “Well, wait a bit. That wood looked to me exactly like a modern city, all full of people and something wrong with the lot of them; not a tree wholesome, except perhaps some elders. Now I put it to you, does a doctor want to tackle an entire city when he first sets up in practice? In all those acres, I should have to feed chemicals of some sort to every tree.”

“But, trees have grown on it,” she said. “Trees have contrived to get a kind of life out of it; probably for centuries.”

“Have they?” he answered. “Have they? Are you so sure? The place reeked to me of the act of a Government. First there came peace, when a government sold all the possible oak woods and starved the Navy; then there came war, when a government wanted oak wood for the Navy and said that England must be prepared against all emergencies. Then all the patriots offered all the plots that were worthless, and the Government bought them all at ten times their value, and promptly planted them with woods that would do worst on them. Presently, when the scare died down, and peace was piping, the Government sold all the plots back to the patriots, dirt cheap. That’s what was done at Stubbington in the Napoleonic wars; don’t tell me it wasn’t.”

None the less, he always thought of Margaret’s suggestions, and soon came back to them. It would be fun to take on the Waste, bit by bit, and make it productive. It would be fun to remake Stubbington Great Wood, and pull down the old rotting barrack where Purple Tittup tittupped and was purple.

The summer, which had begun in April that year, continued with fair, dry weather for weeks together; the work at Mullples could be pushed on, both in and out of doors. It was a happy time for Frampton. Whenever he could find the time, he would rush to Mullples to urge on the work and to put his own hands to some of the jobs. Many of the men at work there were the pick of their crafts; he had a great pleasure in working with these and learning the depth of their skill. When he left Mullples, he would whirl back to his father’s house, see Margaret, and plan for the future. Then, in the morning, he would be back at his Works, where he was working out schemes for the instant increase of his plant, in case war should break out. He was also enjoying work upon his death-spray, or, as he now called it, his Death Rose. It was an ingenious, fatal and cheap machine-gun, for which he foresaw a great and grave-yard future. He loved to sit still, thinking of dodges by which this cobra among guns could be given more mouths and more fangs to each. He loved to devise advertisements for it:

It was a happy summer for him; all his energies were in full play, making either beauty or ingenuity; all his life was focused and aimed. The end of July was to see the crowning of his life, when he would marry, and presently bring Margaret home to the beautiful place his love was making for her. As the summer drew on, with her beauty, and the hawthorn gave way to the dog-rose, and the corn-crake called, and the cry and the flight of the swallows made the evenings marvellous, he felt, that he had made Mullples worthy of the beauty in which it stood. It was become again one of the beautiful houses of the land; “and when I say England,” he added proudly, “I mean the world.”

Presently, July came in with fair weather, intense heat and pressure to get the workmen out of Mullples. The pools in front of the house were now full of water. The garden was full of flowers; the house rang with songs and whistling as the last of the decorators and painters worked. By the 12th, the house was ready for him; the electricians had done; the engine was installed and running; the floors had all been scrubbed, and the screens removed from the frescoes. On the afternoon of the 15th, he walked with the artists about the empty rooms, looking at the work. The rooms looked a little raw in their bareness. The paintings looked a little startling in their newness; but he was pleased with them. As the light deepened into glow upon some of them, he felt the power of their design and knew that his four men had wrought four masterpieces for his new home in the wilds.

He was to be married in one week from that day. He had come to full maturity of manhood without wishing to be married; he had never met any woman before Margaret who drew him in the least. Margaret attracted him; he wanted her; he felt that his life would be completed by her. In his savage way, he wanted children and felt that she would be the mother for them. He could not say why he wanted children. He was not fond of them, when he met them, nor did they take to him. He tried to answer the question, why he wanted children, and found it hard to answer. He was fortunate in life, and knew that his children would have the advantage which fortune gives. He had not much faith in the future of England and none whatever in the future of civilisation.

“So why,” he asked himself, “should I, or anyone, want to bring helpless beings into the world where they may have the very devil of a beastly time? Just as I’m perfecting my Death Rose to blast to death half the sons of men, I’m going to take a wife and try to beget a few. If I succeed, I shall bring some unfortunates out of the unknown night of nothing to a world where they may curse me heartily for my reckless act. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ the parents always say; but by Jove, the children say a different thing; unwanted virgins, poor devils in cells and mad-houses, down and outs on the benches, misfits, geniuses, and ninety-seven per cent of the normal as well, would a damn sight rather have been left blank. Not much wish among them to honour the senseless two who fetched them out of nothing to suffer and be sick.”

Yet, even in his savagery, he felt, that children were living and that these thoughts of his were destructive of life.

“It may be,” he thought, “that without children people become inhuman. Without children this place will be a pretty empty shell. I’d like my children to have what I planned and put good work into.”

He was looking out over the valley in the sunset as he thought these thoughts. He turned to see the geese in Bill Caunter’s great design behind him. He would like his son to have that evidence of his father’s sense of decoration. And as he thought this, there floated into his brain the idea for a new gun, almost too bad to be true, which would make the Death Rose, lethal as it was, almost a health cure in comparison.

For a moment, the simplicity of it took his breath away. “There must be some snag,” he thought. He sat down on the window seat and made some jottings on a pocket pad. No, the inspiration had spoken truth from a well of all truth; the gun might be and could be. Whether it would be was another matter, for he knew what getting a gun adopted meant. He had been up against the pigs of lead of retardation and obstruction. No soldier would look at a gun of this sort.

“Why,” he cried, “this will reduce the weight of a soldier’s equipment by fifteen pounds, increase his deadliness perhaps five hundred fold, make an army unnecessary, and a staff an even greater pest than at present. This gun will make war a game aux petits pois; curates will play it; girls’ schools will take to it instead of hand-ball. Make more men my children, Frampton’s new muzzles’ll want meat.”

He was filled with such joy by the new idea, that he ceased to think of Margaret, nor of the fact, that his things were coming in to the new home the next day. Presently, he remembered both these matters and drove home to telephone to Margaret and to talk to his housekeeper, Mrs. Haulover.

Mrs. Haulover was a lady of some distinction. She was the widow of an old etcher and art-critic, with whom Frampton had had some acquaintance that had almost been friendship. She was younger than Haulover by ten years, and was now perhaps sixty-five. She had at one time been a good copyist at the National Gallery, and still modelled figurines with talent. She had been left penniless by Haulover. Frampton had put her in charge of his establishments after explaining his ideas, and for nearly six years she had managed for him. What she thought of him, she never said; but sometimes she compressed her lips. On the one hand, she loved loyalty; and Frampton was loyal to old Haulover and had organised and made successful the memorial exhibition of old Haulover’s prints. She made that excuse much. Frampton’s ideas of servants revolted her; but she had learned from old Haulover, that a genius has his own ways and may sometimes make those ways extremely effective in his own way by his own personality. Frampton chose his servants himself, and explained his methods to Mrs. Haulover, at one of their first interviews.

“I see their testimonials first, and they have to be good and written in a hand that shows character. I go to see the writers, if I feel that the person’s testimony is any good at all. Then I see the applicant, and make up my mind about her. She has to be a good animal, first of all; she has to be strong and look cheerful and intelligent, but she has to be a good animal first; somebody you wouldn’t mind breeding from. I won’t have one of these flimsy minowderers, with a powdered nose and a mouth like a film girl. Then I ask her to write her name, and then I ask her if she can draw or has ever read a book. None of them yet has been able to draw, and only two of them had read a book; a real book, that is. Then, of course, she has to be clean and look distinguished; I’ll not have one of these damned minowderers all cut after a pattern. Then I ask her what wages she wants, and tell her I’ll give her from half to twice as much, if she will put her guts into it. I make it clear she won’t get any damned nonsense from me and she’d better not try any of hers. I tell her, she’ll have a wireless set, and a library subscription; that I expect her to go at my expense to a picture show or a concert or a theatre once a week. I contrive to send two of ’em together. And I make ’em talk of it to me next morning. They’ve got to do their job on the ticker, without any shinnannikin. I pay them myself, every Friday morning, and give them a talk each time on world affairs and expect them to talk to me. I don’t get any rotters. I cut them out at the first interview; I get a good lot of workers, who stay a long time, and only leave to get married. It isn’t my idea at all. It’s my old father’s idea. He’s the wisest man I’ve ever met; and it was his system from the first. He wanted to get a servant who would really share a lot of the best that life has with him. It is expensive, perhaps, in that you pay more than the market rate; but you get something that isn’t to be had in the market, and never will be. Anyhow, that’s my way, and it’s going to be it.”

That was that. It wasn’t Mrs. Haulover’s way, but as Frampton had the knack of making it work, she said no more, but helped him to apply it. She had the job of moving into Mullples, and wondered, as she moved in, how long the maids and men would be able to stand the quiet of the valley. Frampton had been kind to the maids in his very rough way. He had seen, that they understood the kind of life he was taking them to. They had all seen the new house and had a look at the neighbouring towns of Stubbington and Tatchester. He would not tempt them into a place they might loathe. He told them, that if they liked they could go to take lessons in country things, such as pruning and dairy work, before going down.

Mrs. Haulover was moved in by the night of the nineteenth, and telephoned through to Frampton that the house was ready for him to see, if he would care to come in to see it, the next day, with Miss Holtspur.

On the twentieth, therefore, two days before his wedding, he drove over to Holtspur, her old home in Berkshire, a few miles from Newbury, picked her up there, and then drove her to see the Mullples. It was a day of great beauty, fine, sunny and not too hot; the garden was not at its very best, perhaps, but there was a fair show of roses for so new a planting. The house was looking its best, all new and trim. She went all over the new home; she had not seen it since her birthday, as Frampton had wished to surprise her with it. She was enchanted with what he had done and proud indeed, to know that he had done it for her. Some of the very young men who had been brought in almost as afterthoughts, to decorate the attics, had worked to the stretch of all their powers and done memorable work. She was much pleased by a rough, rude, powerful fresco by young Charles, done on the wall of an attic, representing a fence, of paling and thorn, with fern and flowers, and beasts looking over into the room.

“I love this,” she said.

He was much pleased, for he had spotted Charles as a future winner and had given him his chance; he was now thinking of using him in a new scheme which was not yet set upon paper. He himself, was in a glow of joy that day.

Mrs. Haulover reported, that the maids had liked their new rooms, and had settled in. Helga and Charlotte saw him later and thanked him, and said, that they were sure they would be happy there. They welcomed Margaret and hoped that she, too, would be happy there. He had to settle some points about the household’s attending his wedding. He was going to have caretakers in Mullples for a part of the day, so that all the staff might attend the wedding near Holtspur; after the wedding, he and Margaret were going to fly to Sweden for their honeymoon.

They lunched together in the new dining-room; she liked the new things; furniture, china, glass and cutlery were all new; and the vegetables and fruit were out of the garden.

“You’ve made a beautiful home for me, Frampton,” she said.

“They’ve done me well, my chaps,” he said. “Little Roly-Poly put his guts into it, and the men were what I knew they would be. If you put it to English chaps the right way, they’ll do anything. The trouble is, that they’re so used to doing tripe that they’ve come to look on tripe as the right thing. By the way, I’ve got a neat idea for a new gun; but I’ll tell you of that when we’re away.”

“Fram, I don’t think well talk of guns and killings while we’re away,” she said.

“No, perhaps not,” he said. “But it’s a neat idea. And now, come, we must have a look at Spirr Wood and your cousin’s bungalow.”

The cottage at Spirr had been finished more than a month before. Margaret’s cousin, Tim, was already there, settled in. The two walked to the cottage by the track left by the builders. They did not find the cousin at home. They called, “Tim,” as they approached, but had no answer except a kind of whistling mew from within the living-room from a young hawk, fallen from its nest, which Tim was trying to rear. On the back door was an old envelope, marked:

in black chalk.

“He’s off,” Frampton said. “He oughtn’t to have gone off like that. I specially told him we should be here. You can see, he’s got rather a jolly place of it.”

The place was, indeed, very pretty, and in a pretty part of the wood. On the one hand, it looked down to the water, where the valley had been dammed, so as to make an attractive pool, big and deep enough for the warden to bathe in, if he wished. On the other side, you looked up the slope of the wood into a variety of green. As they looked, a red squirrel came down and gibbered at them, from within a few feet of their heads.

“That’s Tim’s squirrel,” Frampton said. “It comes into his shed for monkey nuts and things.”

Margaret held a hand to it gently, and spoke to it; presently it took a standing leap to another bough, whisked and cocked there two or three times in its jerky way, and then sped round a tree bole. Watching still, they saw its little head cocked round the bulge of the trunk, looking at them.

“You’ll have plenty of friends of that sort in your sanctuary,” he said. “Tim says the wood is full of them.”

Margaret was looking about her with an air of blissful happiness, such as he had not seen upon her face before. She was very beautiful, he thought; old Naunton ought to have taken her for his Madonna.

“I think this place is one of the most beautiful in the world,” she said. “I shall spend hours here. I’m going down to see if there are any moorhens’ nests among the reeds.”

“While you go down, I’ll just go up to the far end,” he said. “I want to see how the fencing looks. And I want to see the spindle trees. I do want spindles there. I’ll not be a minute.”

He went swiftly through the thin scrub of Spirr, to a patch which had been cleared, to make way for a broom plantation later. Crossing this, he came to the fence and could examine it. He craned over and looked to his left. There was nothing amiss with the work on that side. He then looked to his right, and at the same time caught a whiff of cigarette smoke, and knew that there were persons there. Looking to his right rear, he saw that he was being watched, with no friendly eyes. He was not sensitive to unfriendly looks; he could be as unfriendly as anybody he knew; so he looked back, and summed them up. There were three of them, two women and a man. They were standing inside the covert, under the fir-trees which had so caught Margaret’s fancy, when first she had seen the wood. The women were spare, hard-faced ladies, in tweed suits; the man, who was much younger, was a tall fellow, in brown golfing clothes, with little red tassels at the knees. They were looking at him with disfavour; they were commenting on him unfavourably, under their breaths; and instantly he knew that these were the dwellers in the district resenting this gunman fellow. He judged, too, that as they had been caught trespassing, just under his notice, they would be rude first. One of the women advanced towards him. She had a groom face. She was hard in the eye and the jaw, yet she had made concessions to her sex; her hair had been expensively treated, her eyebrows had been plucked to a narrow line, and her bare right hand, which held her cigarette, showed finger-nails the colour of blood.

“It must have cost all of forty quid to fit you for the ring,” Frampton muttered to himself, as he took in these details, with the comment, “and god-awful waste, at that.”

She was used to an insolent world, and was pretty well insensitive to the feelings of others. She came up to Mansell; she knew well who he was.

“Mr. Mansell,” she said, “is it true that you’re going to preserve Spirr?”

“Yes.”

“I mean for birds?”

“Yes.”

“It has never been preserved before.”

“It will be now.”

“And that’s a keeper’s cottage, with a keeper living in it?”

“Yes.”

“Ha.” She turned at this and went back to her friends. “It’s true,” she said. “Well, I told Posh he’d regret it. Now the harm’s done.”

Frampton was not sure what harm had been done, but saw that his stock among them had fallen even lower.

“Well,” the speaker continued, “we’d better get out of it, before the keeper turfs us out.”

The other woman gave a hard little dry giggle, and the party moved off and clambered over the fence. The man said something, which made them all laugh. A few minutes later, Frampton saw them at the cross lanes, Tibb’s Cross as it was called, at the end of the long pale pasture outside Spirr. They were getting into a big bright yellow car, which drove off swiftly, presently, towards Tatchester.

“They didn’t seem to like me,” Frampton said to himself. “Rash souls; I tremble for them.” He knew that Spirr had inspired a poem still partly remembered there. “It’s that fox-hunt,” he thought, “that began at Spirr. I suppose,” he mused, “these people have a kind of superstition about it; a sort of Hart Leap Well feeling.”

However, he rejoined Margaret, who had seen the nests of three moorhens down by the water; they had much to talk of; she was delighted with the bird-boxes; so many of them had been occupied.

“I’m sorry Tim wasn’t there,” she said. “I’d have liked to have gone to the long-tailed tit’s nest and seen the dreys that he writes of.”

Frampton was vexed at Tim’s not being in. Why the devil had he not been in, when he had been told to be in? He had a shrewd suspicion that the fine weather was taking Tim out on the binge. Now that the nest-boxes were up, he had relaxed. However, it was only a few hours to his wedding day; he was not going to bother about Tim just then.

“The thing that lad needs,” he thought, “is dam-slam hard physical work that must be done. I’ll put him to the job of building a bathing-shed and plunge there. That’ll keep his socks pulled up, the damn young slacker.”

Margaret said: “After tea, Fram, I want you to drive me home to Holtspur. I’ll give you dinner there, and then you can see me to the Women’s Institute. You must leave me there at half-past eight. They’re making me a presentation, I don’t know what; but you won’t be able to come in to it. Then, to-morrow, I shall not see you at all probably, for I’ve a mort of packing to do, still, and people to see and so forth.”

“Right,” Frampton said. “I’ll see you to your Institute. I’ll bet you it’s a clock in a glass case.”

At home, at Newbury, they found the old man in great excitement, having that noon laid bare some Roman remains in his kitchen-garden; from what had been laid bare, it was plain, that a villa had stood there. As the things were interesting, Frampton and Margaret stayed on with him after tea, helping to clear the pavement, in the midst of which a sort of beast, a cross as it seemed between a tiger and a Newfoundland dog, was done in mosaic, gardant, passant.

“Look at him,” Frampton said, “the results of empire and capitalism. Bad taste making itself felt a thousand miles from the centre. Think of the impulse which sent this beast out here and set him down as a flooring. Think of the mind that chose it and insisted on its being done.”

“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” Margaret said. “But no museum is complete without one of these things. I’m going to have one more shovelful for luck. I’m going to try at the side here.”

She thrust her little spade into the earth and drew it away, loaded. Emptying the load carefully, she looked at her catch and parted it asunder with a piece of garden stick.

“I’ve got something here,” she said. “I do believe it’s gold.” She disentangled the thing from the roots of nettle that had grown through some of it and scraped it with the point of stick. Frampton went over to her side to see. “It is gold,” she said, “or has gold about it. It’s a fibula,” she said, as the cloggings fell from it.

“It’s a jolly fine fibula,” he said. “Debased period. And some of it certainly is gold. Let’s put it under a hot-water tap and see what we shall see.”

“I wonder how it got there,” she said. “It isn’t the kind of thing that people would have left about.”

“I fancy the Romano Britons left everything about towards the end,” he said, “and took to the woods for safety and never came back.”

The moon was near her full that night. After he had left Margaret at the Institute to receive the wedding present, he drove up to the Downs. He stayed there for hours, enjoying the solitude, the space and the continual booming drone of the cockchafers which came blundering about him. He loved the Downs, as almost the last thing left to us of peace and bigness. The night was fine and still, save for the light wind which always blows on the downland. The moon was ringed with tiny white cirrocumulus which held about her and never seemed to shift. A hem of brownness was round her; she was tranquil and spilled quiet upon the night. An owl or two passed from time to time; and others called from far away. The valley lay below, with a few moving gleams, flashing and disappearing as motors went or came round particular bends. A big express train swept its line of lights across the county. He was deeply moved by the beauty and peace. For a few minutes he doubted whether he could justify his life work of making guns, which would destroy so many of the sons of men; including his own, perhaps. He loathed professional soldiers more than any people in the world, in spite of the simple virtues which so many of them showed. From the beauty of the night, he began to think of soldiers, and decided that while professional soldiers had power in the world, and the chances were that they would have such power for many years to come, any guns that lightened the tasks of the unhappy slaves under them, and tended to make the ruthless folly of modern war effective, fatal and perhaps brief, would be to the good.

He stayed on so long upon the downland that he was startled presently by hearing the church clocks from many hamlets and villages out of sight on all sides of him, striking midnight and chiming for it. Soon, the cocks would be crowing. He thought with a pang, then, “to-morrow will be my wedding day, and I shall be married to Margaret.” A qualm passed through his mind, that he had perhaps left marriage till too late in life, and that he would loathe to find his freedom checked. Still, he would have Margaret instead of freedom; a pretty good exchange, for what of value was there in the life he had been leading? and who would care if it ended? He wanted something liker a home than that.

“Well,” he said to himself, “it’ll be cock-crow soon. I’ve got to be at the Works at ten to finish off before going away. I’d better be thinking of moving.”

He walked back to his car through the longish, dry downland grass from which the cockchafers came whirring and blundering. He turned the car across the track, still known as the Shipway, from its having once been the path along which so many thousands of sheep were driven to the downland sheep fairs of May. The chafers blundered against his glass, or hit the bonnet and slithered off it. Soon he was on the road, driving for home. It was not a long drive, for one like himself who liked pace, on a clear night, after midnight. On his way, he suddenly thought of Margaret a few miles from him. He thought that he would like to see her house and garden in the moonlight.

“I’ll just turn aside and have a look at it in the moonlight,” he thought.

About a hundred yards from the house, he left the car and walked along the road towards the rookery trees among which the house stood. He saw what he thought to be a light in Margaret’s bedroom window, but another step showed him that it was only moonlight upon the glass. On his left was a copse or spinney, towards which some little creature ran across the road; to his right a side door into the garden. He thought that this side door might not be locked, as it had a curious catch or trick for opening, not known to many people. He knew the catch, the door at once opened to him: he went into the garden, treading on the grass and feeling a little like a burglar.

There were some white roses close to him; farther on there were masses of white tobacco plant. All the garden was in the drowse of heavy summer, with the moonlight over all. A few moths were moving silently from flower to flower. From time to time a bat came past. He was one of those keen hearers able to catch the faint shrill cry of bats. He listened to the reedy calls, and counted the owls within hearing. From time to time, the noise of these things ceased, leaving a silence unbroken save for some sudden collapse of rose-petals, falling from the overblown flower upon the grass beneath, or the drone of a beetle, or the rustle and click of some beetle alighting perhaps upon a leaf.

He moved farther into the garden, so that he could see the high, sharp roof of the old house. Somebody had said that the house had been a nunnery grange, and that the garden had been laid out by the nuns. It was one of the most beautiful and simple gardens known to him. At the two ends were the very old, simple, graceful summer-houses with pointed roofs and a neat little stone globe over each of the points.

He was thinking, “how wonderful it would be if Margaret were here to share this beauty with me,” when he became aware suddenly that she was in the garden, not fifty yards from him, standing in the grassy walk, half turned away from him, and looking at the moon. She was in a white wrap, which he well knew. He feared to move forward, lest he should scare her, but at last he called “Margaret” in a way agreed on between them, and as she turned, went forward.

“I half thought you might turn up here,” she said. “Isn’t the night wonderful?”

“I’ve been up on the Downs until just now,” he said. “Then, as I came down, I thought I’d just look in to the garden here.”

“Mrs. Grundy will jump if she sees us,” she said.

“Mrs. Grundy may.”

Her hair had been plaited for the night; the dark plaits were caught about her head with a bright narrow clasp. She looked extraordinarily unearthly in her white dress in the moonlight. He was reminded for a moment of one of the Sylphides; the face looked like a mask.

“You’re just like the Prelude dancer in the Sylphides,” he said.

“It is strange, your saying that,” she said. “I was thinking I might be like one of the dancing swan women in the Northern Story. Did you know, that I have a sort of Russian cousin, who dances?”

“No, I didn’t know.”

She moved from him, with swaying arms, in little pas de bourrées.

“You didn’t know that I can dance,” she said.

“Not know?” he said. “Didn’t I fall in love with you at a dance?”

“My cousin was dancing in London last May; but I was away in Sweden.”

“I don’t want to hear about your cousin,” he said, “when I’ve got you here.”

“You’ll have lots of me presently,” she said.

“I’ve long had the idea,” he said, “as you know, of having some of the processes of the Works done up on the Waste above Mullples, if I could get the land there. I’d like to build a real Works with a real town about it. It is only a thought.”

“Well, St. Paul’s was only a thought once,” she said. “We must talk of this thoroughly. What will you call your real town?”

“St. Margarets.”

They talked for a while; the talk of lovers interests themselves only; he suggested that they should meet late that afternoon, or early in the evening, for a walk to the barrow called Grim’s Grave. It was a short walk from where they were at that moment; perhaps two-thirds of a mile over the fields, to a little spinney where the barrow stood, like a little old extinct volcano, with its top all fallen in. He would meet her at the stile leading to the fields at half-past five. At six, they would part until they met at the church next day.

They talked merrily together for a little while; then she told him that he had better be off to bed, as he was still half an hour from his father’s house and might well puncture on the way.

“This time next moon,” he said, “we’ll be looking on the Baltic, I hope. I hope you’ll be happy, Peggy.”

“If I were not sure I would be, do you think I would be marrying you?”

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

They turned to leave the garden. She turned at the garden door.

“Good-bye and good luck,” she said. “Half-past five, then, at the stile beyond the wheelwright’s.”

“Half-past five. I’m glad we’ve had this moonlight talk. I shall remember it.”

“So shall I,” she said. “Good night.”

He was up early, in spite of his late going to bed. He was in his car by seven, so as to dodge the rush of traffic; by nine he was in the Works, with a dozen different things to see to, each sufficient to put Margaret and the moonlight out of his mind. By twelve he had done his necessary tasks; he could hand over for a month, to his partner. He washed his hands of works and guns, shook hands with his partner, received the usual good wishes from two or three of the staff, and so escaped to his car, which was driven rapidly to a country club where he had a plunge in the swimming-pool, and then lunch. After lunch, he had to see a man in London about some prints for Margaret. It was full three before he turned out of London. He had plenty to think of on the way, because the road was full of traffic; however, he was used to that, and made good time notwithstanding. He was a vindictive driver. If a man cut in on him, to pass, he would accelerate and cut in on him. He gave rather more than he received in this way. He was at the stile a quarter of an hour before the appointed time. He pulled the car on to the strip of grass by the roadside, where a wisp of copse gave shade. He sat on the stile, thinking that at that time on the morrow he would be a married man. He supposed that it would be a clipping of his wings, but all men consented to it sooner or later, pretty nearly all; he had dodged it a lot longer than most; but then, he hadn’t been susceptible; he hadn’t been caught in the man-trap; he had waited till he had met the woman he really wanted. The wisp of copse was fenced by a wall. A weasel appeared upon the wall and looked at him with interest. The two stared at each other for a few seconds, then the weasel popped down into the copse and pattered about there on its affairs. It went off presently; a robin and then a hedge sparrow hopped on the grassy strip, gathered each some food and flew away. He heard the Windlesham church clock chime for half-past five, but Margaret did not appear. He looked at his watch; the church clock was a minute fast; she was sure to be there in a minute; she was a punctual soul; even the day before her marriage she would be punctual. He himself loathed unpunctuality as the very devil; appointed moments ought to be kept; people with no sense of time got short shift from him.

Five minutes after the half-hour, he heard footsteps coming, and went to the bend in the road, thinking that they must be Margaret’s; but they were the steps of an old woman, whom he had seen once or twice in the village, “rather a character,” that is, not quite sane, wearing the old battered hat and shapeless clothes which the old in English villages affect. She was mumbling to herself; she looked at him curiously as she went by, with a shrewdness which was not mad, wished him “Good evening” and passed on; but turned to look at him after she had passed.

He loathed old age, as he loathed poverty; it was so often inefficient; he wanted to scrap it. He remembered something which had been told him about this old woman: she had bewitched a farmer’s sheep, so the story went, so that they all vomited needles. He wished that he could think that the story were true.

The minutes passed, to his growing impatience. Presently, it was a quarter to six; yet still there was no Margaret. He had always held a theory that the simplest explanation is generally the right one, when problems of this sort occur. No doubt, on the eve of her wedding, people would be coming in with gifts, or asking to see her, or telephoning, from that misguided interest which goes with want of understanding.

“The female bore has got her,” he muttered, “one of these old prurient crones.”

He thought, that as their walk would now be ruined, he had better walk up towards the house, meet her on the way and walk home with her. He stepped up the road, round the bend. She was not in sight yet. The wheelwright, so-called, was at work outside his shop; he was no longer a wheelwright, but did odd jobs with bicycles, motors and the sale of oils and petrols. He was bent over a basin of water in which he held a bicycle tyre. He was slowly turning the tyre round, watching for the bubbles which would betray the puncture; when he heard Frampton’s footsteps he looked up. He was a somewhat slow-witted, but very gentle and good man. His wife, who was standing by him, said something to him in a low voice; he thereupon straightened himself up and put down the tyre. Frampton had seen him singing in Margaret’s choir at the village concert; he had also heard him imitating the cries of several British birds; he had spoken to him then; and had liked him. Seeing that the man now advanced to speak, he turned to him. The man wavered always in his speech, so much Frampton remembered. He noticed that he was now looking very solemn.

“Good evening,” Frampton said.

The man was wearing his black Sunday trousers, which seemed odd to Frampton.

“Mr. Mansell, sir,” the man said, “they been trying to get at you, sir. I hope as someone told you the sad news.”

A pang of coming frightful disaster went into Frampton’s very soul and was then turned out by an act of will, so that he might deal with the situation.

“What news is that?” he asked.

“There’s been an accident, Mr. Mansell; to poor Miss Margaret.”

He was a simple good soul; he began to cry; his wife was crying at his side and mopping her eyes with the end of her apron.

“She was killed, sir, in her motor-car,” the wife sobbed.

“Along about twelve o’clock, sir,” the wheelwright said. “She was turning into the road in her car when a London car went into her. She was killed, sir, and the London man not far short of killed.”

Stunned as he was, Frampton thanked them. He remembered something in the life of Drake, when disaster threatened, how Drake had contrived to keep going, and to keep his crew going.

“‘There will be time,’” he quoted to himself; his world was spinning about him, as he walked on; “‘that will be the end of me, pretty much,’” he said. Odds and ends of verse rang in his head, about the little house they had built to be so gay with. That came into his mind over and over again. Yet he felt now and again that perhaps the news was not true. In the village, there was a sort of awe, as he passed; all stood to look.

“Look, damn you,” he muttered savagely, as he saw the elbows nudging and the faces turning. “Here you’ve got a moving picture for nothing; and to-morrow you’ll have the gutter press. Take a good look.”

At the outside of Holtspur Manor, a group of idlers lounged smoking and chatting. They had camped in the shade of the trees and had been there for some time. As he drew near, these people dropped their cards and cigarettes; they sprang up, seized their cameras and at once began to photograph him. “Famous Gun-Maker Walks to House of Dead Fiancée.” There were a dozen of them, male and female. The clicks of the cameras reminded him of triggers. One robust man, with a cinema camera, seemed to be machine-gunning him. There were little cries of:

“Look this way, Mr. Mansell; just turn your head. Won’t you just look this way a second?”

He was the corpse, they were the cannibals; there could be no doubt that the news was true. The vultures would not gather for Life.

The news was true. Presently, he was at the old house, speaking to Margaret’s sister. Margaret’s body was upstairs. He heard all that was known. It was an accident, like most of the disasters on the road. The chief cowman at the dairy farm was the only man who had with his own eyes seen it happen; two had heard it from a little distance; these two dairymen had seen a big car going at great speed along the road, and had then heard a crash at the corner. They had no doubt that the car was going too fast, and cutting across side roads without warning. All three men swore to having heard Margaret sound her horn as she drove out.

At the inquest, these things were repeated and sworn to. The London man had died by that time. He was a well-known sporting man, who had had his licence endorsed for careless driving. He had had four whiskies, topped off with a gin “to settle them,” at a road-side inn, a few miles away, and was supposedly hurrying to keep a luncheon engagement with his fiancée. His car was smashed almost beyond repair. It was supposed that at the moment of impact, he was moving at sixty miles an hour. All the upper part of the car was torn clean off the body and flung along the road. The coroner’s court found that deceased met their ends as the result of accident, due primarily to drunkenness and want of common caution in the male driver. They expressed their sympathy with the two bereaved fiancées, and recommended that a danger sign be placed near the turning where the disaster had occurred. One of the jury wished it to be set on record that the accident was directly due to the abuse of alcohol, and that it ought to be made a penal offence, to serve alcohol of any sort to one in charge of a car.

That was the end of Margaret Holtspur, a charming and beautiful woman, “killed on the eve of her wedding,” as the gutter press printed in big type.

Margaret was buried. The whole village turned out to the funeral. The grave was heaped with flowers. Photographers on the churchyard wall got various views of Frampton and his father as they stood near the grave during the service. These were in the evening papers that night, and in the cheaper morning papers next day. “Well-Known Gun Manufacturer Mourns Fiancée Dead in Car Smash,” was one heading; “Frampton Mansell at Grave,” was another; “The Long Farewell: Frampton Mansell Bids Adieu to Love,” was a third.

However, the burial came to an end; the body was laid in the grave and left there. The mourners moved from the grave to their cars, followed by a great rush of photographers, who wanted to get close-ups of the gun-maker and his father. Frampton looked at some of these men, and said: “You damned carrion-hunters,” and was thanked by them for giving them so fair a chance to take him. After this, he drove away with his father to the house at Newbury. His father was quiet and sympathetic, being a very feeling man, who had been through many sorrows of his own. He said little on the way home except:

“The great thing is, never to let it make you cynical. It is all in that.”

Presently, they were at the house at Newbury. The father went up to his room to rest. Frampton went out to walk up and down in the walk between the hedges of hornbeams. His father’s spaniel, Joe, saw him there, and came floundering and wagging out to suggest a walk together. He scowled at the dog, who saw that something was amiss, and wagged and cringed, still hoping against hope, but at last saw that the walk was hopeless and lay down there, at the walk’s end, to watch if perchance the black mood would pass.

After a long, long time, he went in, flung off his mourning clothes, and bathed and dressed for dinner. It was delayed for a minute by a telephone enquiry from the Press, to ask if the recent sad bereavement would interfere with his plans for the new gun.

“Then I can say, Mr. Mansell, that you are carrying on as usual? Business as usual, eh?”

He hung up on this optimist, and let the telephone ring unacknowledged for the rest of the evening.

During dinner, his father said:

“You will come away with me to-morrow, Fram. I’ve taken berths to New York. We’ll fly to Vancouver together and see some of those plants there. I’ve long wanted to do that. We’ll be away three weeks or a month.”

The next morning, they motored to Southampton and so away into the West.

He had planned to be in the West for three weeks only, but stayed on for six, in frequent change of scene and in the great heat which his father always enjoyed. He found no consolation for his loss, but something which kept his mind from it; strangers to talk with, and new landscape to look at. Before leaving England, and while on the sea, he had determined to sell Mullples for what it would fetch as soon as he returned, but in the far West, the thought of that old house, which he had rescued from ruin, plucked at his heart; he had put a lot of thought and imagination into it, as well as all his hope. “Peggy liked it,” he thought. “She wanted that sanctuary at Spirr. I’ll keep it going for her sake. I’m not likely to meet another woman I shall want to marry.”

On their return to England, late in September, they drove to the Newbury house. It was all full of memories of Margaret; it was a grim home-coming to Frampton. He spent a couple of days there before going back to the Works.

“Look here, Fram,” his father said, “what d’you say to giving up Mullples and keeping on with me here for your week-ends? We’ve always got along together, and you know I’d be glad of you.”

“No,” Frampton said, “I’ve made Mullples. It’s my flesh and blood. I put my guts into that old house. It’s me. Besides, I’ve begun something there. I’ll not draw back, now I’ve put my hand to the plough. I’ll winter it and summer it before I chuck it.”

“I expected you’d say something like that,” the old man said, “but I’m thinking that the winter’s on us. You won’t find much congenial company there in winter-time, with nobody but shooters and fox-hunters. What will you do with all those sportsmen? Why not spend the autumn and winter here, at any rate? In the spring, go down to Mullples.”

“No,” he said, “I ought to go to Mullples. I’ve got all the household there. I’ve got them all pledged to stick it with me, and I won’t go back on them. I’ve got the thing to go. I mean to make it go. You see, it can’t go without me.” He mused for a moment and then went on. “You must not bother about the sportsmen. I’ve never failed to find congenial company, wherever I’ve been,” he said. “I shall only be there for the long week-ends; and there’ll always be work to do in the gardens or along by the waters. I can bring people down from the Works, and from Town, to eke out the local supply. I’ve got my gun to work at, if I’m bored; but I’ve never been bored yet.”

“I don’t believe you ever have been, Fram,” his father said. “It’s a good record. But you’ve never had a winter yet, in an English countryside. By the way, which pack of hounds is it at Mullples?”

“We are in the Tuncester country, what they call the Tunster; and close to the edge of the PDQ.”

“Are you going to hunt?”

“I? Hunt? No. Why do you ask a thing like that? Is thy servant a dog?”

“Not at all; but there’s a note in the paper here that the master of the Tunster has broken his thigh in a fall and will be unable to ride for a long time; the mastership will be taken by somebody else. You might do worse than offer your services. It would tide you through a bad time.”

“I’d rather have the bad time. Why hunt, when there are a thousand things that need doing right under one’s nose?”

“I think you under-estimate fox-hunting,” the old man said. “The English have only had two pleasures, as far as I can follow the matter, in the last three hundred years; puritanic religion and fox-hunting. Both seem to me now to be in their decadence. I do not feel that either yields or ever has yielded a very desirable joy, but remove them and what remains to the poor land?”

“Drink,” Frampton said.

“No, no. The days of drink are past. The present seeming boom in drink is only due to the fact that drink now is weaker than it was, so that women have discovered it. No. I’m afraid the only thing remaining will be patent medicines. I’m not sure that they haven’t ousted the old firms already. And they have every advantage. The Puritans have only one God, and the fox-hunters only one kind of fox, the one to be worshipped and the other to be killed in only one sort of way. But man has two hundred and forty major ailments, and two hundred and forty nostrums for each, so I think the drug people will win.”

“I hope so, I’m sure,” Frampton said.

“Yes, I suppose you do; but why, Fram?”

“I’m not religious in any way. You were generous to me in that. You helped me to see that unless religion is a mystical thing, it is not important to the soul. I loathe sport, because it is based on cruelty. No man would tolerate the torture of sport if he would consider it. Think of the outcry there would be if, I will not say grown men and women, but boys were to chase a cat, or a dog, or a pony, with dogs. It would be counted an infamy and the boys would be birched by magistrates’ order, or have their souls examined by some analyst. Yet sportsmen (grown men and women, mind you; mature beings) are permitted to run stags, foxes and otters to death in every county of the land. These same people are quick enough to raise a stir, if some lout or brute draws a badger or has a main of cocks. Then they’ll hunt a stag or a fox or an otter till he drops; and boast of it in the Press for years, especially if a few horses are killed. ‘Grand day with the Tunster: Stag takes to sea: Seven couple of hounds drowned’: you know the kind of tosh. And then the tripe about all these fellows being born cavalry leaders and the rest of it. And the improvement in the breed of horses. What is the hunter good for, except hunting? He isn’t any use for draught. As for chargers, I hope we’ve come to the end of them. As to the devotion of the fox-hunter for his favourite horse, it may exist, and probably does; but I’ve seen several hunting men scrap their old hunters after years of service. . . .

“You were saying that the English are giving up their two pleasures, Puritanism and fox-hunting, for a third pleasure, the taking of patent medicines. D’ye know, I take that for a sign of life. They realise they aren’t up to the mark and are trying to make themselves fit. Presently, they’ll learn that they’ll not be really well till they work in the fields again, in the open air, and eat the fresh food they raise; then they’ll find that health will suggest and cause pleasure enough. Long before then, though, they’ll drop a few of the forms of death they love most, including Mansell’s matchless guns. They’ll drop a lot of bunk and a deal of blah before they get to that point.”

“They’ll drop what we call civilisation.”

“Yes. And what does it amount to? Money-snatching in cities and fox-hunting in the country. Who would be tuppence the worse if the whole of Europe died to-night?”

The old man looked at his son with sad eyes; Margaret’s death had made him cynical, as he had feared it might.

“The world would be the worse,” he said; “some right ways are being tried, as well as some wrong ones. But, think over my suggestion about hunting, or at least riding. There is something in being a part of one’s community, whatever it may be; a man gets strength from it. All the mess in the world seems to me to come from that one point, that the governors are out of touch with the governed. You’ll find that they’ll expect you to hunt. In that Mullples district, hunting is the main occupation and interest of the inhabitants. The paper said that the chap with the broken thigh had brought it, that is the Tunster pack, to a fine pitch of perfection. He’s a fox-hunter who knows his business, it said.”

“I suppose it isn’t a difficult business,” Frampton growled. “Judging by the people who do it most. Few of them do anything else and couldn’t if they had to. Imagine them on a committee. They were in charge in the early part of the War, and a pretty lot of tombstones are raised to their credit.”

“You’re unjust to them, Fram,” the old man said. “The vote of the world is for them. I regret it, perhaps, but I don’t cavil at it. In this case, the thing that weighs is beauty. The beauty of the hunt is so great that people forget the cruelty.”

“Don’t tell me that the fox-hunters care for the beauty,” his son said. “They like the swank and the display. If they cared for beauty, there’d be more of it in the towns and houses they live in. They don’t; they don’t give a tuppeney curse for anything about it, but going fast in an expensive suit.”

“My own youth would have been the poorer without that beauty,” the old man said. “However, you will presently be settled where you can judge of it better than I. I had nothing to put in its place; you have.”

Frampton had to spend the next week at the Works picking up the strings and resuming control. At the end of the week, he took train to Tatchester, meaning to spend the week-end at Mullples. It was to be his first home-coming.

He had so loathed the thought of going home without Margaret that he had put it off as long as he could; it was now a time of beginning frost, short days and fluttering leaves. The line kept beating in his brain, about the little house “we built to be so gay with.” He had never gone to Mullples from Tatchester with Margaret; he chose that route so that he might not be reminded of her; but he was reminded of her cruelly continually. He had seen most of the landmarks on the line with her, at one time or another. There were women in the compartment with him of the kinds he most loathed; creatures with plucked eyebrows, machined hair, rouged lips, scarlet nails; all smoking. The sight of them filled him with rage; they were left and she had been taken; he could see no sense nor justice in it.

“It’s part of the infernal game called Life,” he thought.

He bought an evening paper and read it as the train sped through the fields. At the end of the paper, his eye caught a familiar name in the column headed “Hunting Gossip.” He read the paragraph through.

“The hell he hopes it,” Frampton muttered to himself. “Annual-Tilter again, that dud in the Anti-Progress Office, who turned down my gun in the War, and blocked even the trial of it for a year. Hopes to show as good sport as his predecessor, does he? Let him not come near Mullples, he and his damnation pack.”

His old rage with the dud rose up in him. He had longed to fire a few rounds of his gun through Annual-Tilter’s foolish head. Now Tilter might be bringing his hounds to draw Spirr. Would he, by George? Just let him try. The thought of having a little of his own back was almost more than he could bear.

The train drew up at the dismal station of Tatchester. He descended; his driver, who had been waiting for him, ran up and took his gear. Looking back at the train, Frampton saw the hated Colonel himself getting down from one of the smoking compartments in the same carriage. It was dark by this time, and Tatchester station was ill-lit, as ever, but the Colonel was unmistakable.

“The same simple English character,” Frampton muttered. “But if I’d a mouth like that, I’d either grow a moustache or have it sewn up.”

The Colonel’s mouth was not his strong point, but he was not a bad-looking man; he bore himself well. As he looked about him under one of the light-standards, a lady advanced to meet him; she was the lady who had spoken to Frampton in Spirr Wood a few weeks before. She was dressed at much greater cost and less success than on the last occasion, having been to a sherry-party; Frampton caught a reek of sherry and scent from her as she passed. She hailed the Colonel in her rather high, cracked voice.

“Evenin’, Posh.”

“Evenin’. Marvous train,” the Colonel said.

“Absooty marvous,” the lady agreed.

The Colonel was fumbling for his ticket.

“So you are the Posh who was to regret my having Spirr,” Frampton muttered. “Well, my son, if I can make you regret it, I will.”

It was an unfortunate meeting. He drove on from that point to Mullples with none but sad and bitter thoughts. But for death, Margaret would perhaps have been to the station to meet him, as this Tilter woman had come to meet her man. Now Margaret was gone, and that thin hag, eyebrow-plucked and with the sherry stink, was here. He was coming alone to a house he had made for his love and did not want for himself one little bit.

The car turned to the left at last, at the conspicuous white gate and posts which he had put there, at Margaret’s suggestion, to show their guests where to turn. He saw the lights of his home, a long line of festal lights, all on for his homecoming. This was the little house he had built to be so gay with; it seemed like a country house in hell. This was his first home; he hated the look and the thought of it.

The door was thrown open; a gush of light spread across the terrace and made visible some small, whitish moths flitting in the evening air. There in the hall ready to welcome him, were the servants, who had been with him for years, though he supposed that they liked his father much better than himself. There was Charlotte, red-faced, very devout, strong as an ox, and good at a game of bowls. At her side was the stalwart Helga, with the fine contralto voice, which he had had trained; she had some sense of design, too, and embroidered her dresses at wrists and throat. Farther back was the kitchen staff; the cook, whom they all called Pongie, a short, plump, very good-humoured soul, an admirable cook, still under thirty, whose deplorable husband had left her. With Pongie were the two kitchen-maids, Binnie and Minnie, both of them the daughters of Mark, for years his driver and general aid, who was said to be related to one who had been in the boat with Captain Bligh. There they all were, glad to welcome him home, and determined to welcome him specially this time, for all were sorry for him, more than they cared to say. Mrs. Haulover came through the people in the porch and was the first to welcome him.

He had promised Margaret, in some idle moment, that when they came to Mullples he would give his parish church a fair trial. He remembered this, in time, the next morning, and therefore set out for Weston Mullples Church to attend morning service there. Bitter thoughts were in him as he walked, of the injustice of Margaret’s death.

“A senseless fury with abhorred shears,” he said to himself, “a fury who sees the world made a muckheap and never lifts a finger, and then sends a drunkard loose in a car to kill the one bright star in the nation.”

He thought over the few church services he had attended in his life. He had been to very few, save the compulsory ones at school, and remembered none, as touched in any way with what he could imagine to be religious feeling.

“I suppose each of the worshippers is supposed to bring his share of God into the communal church,” he mused, “and I suppose I’ve never done that. I wish to God I could find God. Some chaps do or have. These places, churches, are said to help in the search. They’ve never helped me yet; but they may, now, perhaps. Yet how can they? How can this old rigmarole, with its whine and its oiliness, and its bad verse and ancient prose and worn-out tunes and the tales one can’t believe, help a chap like me, who have power in my thought to kill half a nation?”

He did not expect much from his visit to Weston Mullples Church. He kept thinking, that religion ought to be and is an exciting, kindling, overwhelming thing; it was a getting into the love of God, which was like the light and energy of the Sun. Who could be in that light and energy and see his brother have need? Who could be in that light and energy and want to make a Mansell Death Spray? He felt far enough from any sharing of that light and energy.

As he drew near to the church, his mind began to prickle against the curiosity of the neighbours. He had timed his arrival for the stroke of eleven, thinking that the parson would be punctual, and that the loiterers would be all in the church at that time. He found the church clock five minutes slow; about fifty people were loitering outside the church; a horrible little bell was going in the tower, and he was well stared at, as he entered the church and took his seat. There were whisperings and nudgings.

“That’s Mr. Mansell, who makes the guns. . . . That’s the new man at Mullples. . . . That’s the chap whose girl was killed the day of marriage. . . . He spent thousands on his house, now he’ll never live there. . . . He makes guns. . . . His girl killed herself, they say, rather than marry him. . . . Mullples. . . . Pots of money. . . . Father was a baker. . . . Awful bounder. . . .”

He heard, or imagined that he heard, all these things. The churchwarden, an old farmer, ushered him to a seat. He sat down, bent his brow into his hand in the way usual among church-goers, and then settled to an examination of the church.

He knew a good deal about churches. He summed up this one as follows: “Norman plan, small and beautiful; nothing but the sanctuary remaining; present structure begun in fourteenth century, 1350, and added to, with much rebuilding and changing, till about 1520. After that, very little until a ceiling and some whitewash, about 1740. After that, an almost total neglect for a hundred and forty years, then a collection and a bazaar, a scraper firm put in and a general clean-up, coinciding with the first bath-room in the squire’s manor; the results before us, bright pine pews, varnished, ye olde churche style; gas brackets the same, by the well-known firm; the Bish. out from Tatchester to open it.”

At this point, the padre came in with the choir and the service began. It went on in the usual way, with the usual intonations, the usual tunes, the usual signals and smiles from woman to woman, the farmers coming out strong in the psalms, the ladies getting their own back in the hymns, a sigh of content when the litany ended, a rustle of bliss when they all settled for the sermon.

The sermon did not interest Frampton; during the giving out of the text, his eye was caught by a bit of old glass in a window across the church in the north aisle. He decided, that he would not enter this church again, except to look at this glass. Yet he gave the parson a good mark; he seemed a good chap. Somehow, he was angry with the institution. He was a hungry sheep looking up and not being fed; there was no food for him there. He had the justice to ask himself, if he would have taken any good offered by this particular shepherd, who no doubt would offer some, if he had the inkling of a suspicion that some were wanted. The service came to an end; he walked swiftly out and away, followed by curious eyes.

He was much discussed at lunch-time throughout the parish.

“He went away so quickly,” the parson’s wife said. “I meant to speak to him, to ask him to come to tea this afternoon.”

“The fellow went away as if the hounds were after him,” the squire, Button Budd, said. “A dark-looking fellow. Didn’t at all like his looks. To tell the truth, I’m glad. I didn’t want to have to ask him to lunch. Fellow makes guns; father was a baker; low fellow, not at all the sort of thing.”

All the same, Mrs. Button Budd, who shared his prejudices, felt that her husband ought to call at Mullples.

“It is only leaving a card,” she said. “He will very likely be out; and even if he’s in you need not see him; the cards are the important thing. We need not see him, if he returns the call; but anyhow, we shall have done our duty, if anything should crop up later.”

Button Budd did not much relish calling.

“They say he’s got all sorts of queer painter fellows to do his walls,” he objected.

However, in the sacred name of neighbourliness, he dared this menace to his morals, and through his, the State’s, and called.

As it chanced, Mansell was at home when he came. It chanced, also, that he was at the point of coming out through the front door, at the instant of the squire’s ringing of the bell. There the two met; the squire could not at the moment find the wit to say:

“I only came to leave cards; I don’t want to know you, of course.”

Frampton shook him by the hand and asked him to come in; in fact, had him in, somehow, before the squire quite knew where he was. Frampton took him into his study, and offered him tea and a smoke. He replied that he never drank tea, except when called in the morning, and never smoked, except after dinner. He settled into a chair, and looked with much perplexity and misgiving at the loves of Tristan and Isolt, then looking at their best. The two men took stock of each other. Budd was a short, erect, stocky, lean man. He had an eyeglass, which was often the most important thing in his face. He had a tendency to fuss; he did not look too healthy; and wore good country clothes. He nursed his riding bowler, his riding gloves and the crop which he carried instead of a cane, as though they were reins. Frampton asked him if he would like a whisky and soda; he said he would, but his doctor had warned him off it for a bit, until after Christmas anyhow. He looked again at Tristan and Isolt.

“So you’ve come down to live in these parts?” he said at length.

Frampton said that he had.

The squire had never seen so many books in one room before; he looked in vain for the library edition of Surtees. Frampton said that it had been a lovely autumn. The squire said it had been the best he could remember, ever since shooting began.

“That’s why I always like a fine spring,” he said. “When it’s a fine, dry spring, I know the shooting’ll be good. The young birds grow up, and then you get what I really like, big coveys and all strong on the wing. Do you shoot?”

Frampton said that he did not shoot, but that he made guns and was accustomed to trying all his ideas with his own hands.

“Must be very interesting, making guns,” the squire thought; he had had no knowledge of any of Frampton’s inventions during the War, and did not know what they were like. To him, there were but two guns, for the killing of game, small and killing of game, big; to these might be added an occasional rook rifle.

“Are you a hunting man?” he asked.

Frampton said that he was not and would not be.

“We’re mostly huntin’ men in these parts,” the squire said. “By the way, have you met Bynd yet? Peter Bynd? He used to be Master here; now he’s secretary. He was going to write to you.”

“Yes, I’ve had his letter,” Frampton said.

“About Spirr Wood?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll excuse me asking about that,” the squire said. “I’ve been connected with the Hunt here all my life, except when I was in India. We always begin our season with a meet at Tibb’s Cross, just below here, and then draw Spirr Wood. It’s an old custom of the Hunt. Someone was saying, that you were going to preserve Spirr very strictly. I hope you aren’t going to turn us out, what?”

“I am, though,” Frampton said. “I’m making a kind of sanctuary for birds and beasts in Spirr; and though I’ve not really got going at it yet, and am only beginning with it, I don’t want it disturbed. I wrote and explained all this to Sir Peter Bynd. I’m going over to see him to-morrow.”

“I don’t know what we should do, turned out of Spirr,” the squire said. “I told Posh Tilter he ought to buy it, to make sure, when the Yocksirs were selling, but he took it for granted you’d be a hunting fellow. However, I hope Bynd’ll persuade you; an awfully good fellow, Bynd; been here a long time; clever fellow.”

“Are you fond of birds?” Frampton asked.

The squire said that he had always been fond of shooting.

“You must come out in the Spring with field-glasses,” Frampton said. “I may have some birds worth watching, then.”

“A sort of Nature study?” the squire said. “I’ve heard they do that kind of thing at some of the schools now. Fascinating thing, Nature, the more you study it. You never quite get to the bottom of it, do you?”

On this they parted. The squire’s last looks at Tristan and Isolt remained in Frampton’s memory for the rest of his life. However, he did not ask about them, shook hands and went, with some few words about the weather; and how steady the glass kept, in spite of all this cloud.

He went home, to report faithfully to his wife the conversation, and to accept from her reading of it the estimate of Frampton which was to be the Budds’ thenceforward. On the whole, Mrs. Budd judged it better, that that sort of man should not be asked into Fletchings House.

“If he’s going to turn us out of Spirr, we can keep him out of our houses; that’s the least we can do. Besides, a man living alone like that, with a lot of good-looking servants and indecent paintings on the walls, one does not know what to think. Anyhow, he is hardly the sort of man I’m accustomed to. I was talking to old Lady Maidy on Wednesday; she said she remembered the man’s grandfather, who was a wild Red and in prison for it. She saw this fellow’s father coming round with the bread-van. You’ve done all that is expected of you. You’ve left cards. He isn’t going to shut us out of Spirr and then expect to be received. He may make guns and employ modernist painters, but he can’t be a gentleman by instinct, or he wouldn’t put us out of Spirr; and that he isn’t one by birth we know too well.”

She had a great fluency when roused. She spoke in this vein among her friends, some of whom were dining with her that night.

On the morrow, Frampton went over to lunch with Sir Peter and Lady Bynd, who had no knowledge of Mansell as yet, save by hearsay. Lady Bynd had prejudice; Sir Peter, who was a much wiser person, hoped to win him. Lady Bynd held and voiced the opinion that the county ought to be made too hot to hold him. Sir Peter, who had had dealings with many odd men in many odd and tight places, had come to know that a gentle method is often much more effective. He had caused him to be asked to lunch, and hoped that he might win him to his side.

They lived at Coombe House, a fine old brick manor, which had been built in the form of an E in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The central jut of the E had long since been removed; the house was some seven miles from Mullples, towards Wicked Hill.

Frampton entered the hall, which was hung with fox-masks, guards’ coach-horns, “yards of tin,” hunting-horns, racks for whips and crops, the head of a rhinoceros, and the swords and guns of seven generations of soldier-sportsmen. He was led past these along a passage decorated with paintings by Alken and by prints from the same artist; among these were some recent paintings of fox-terriers and hunters, including several of a white horse, plainly a favourite. The yap of dogs grew louder as he advanced. When he entered the room where his host and hostess waited, two little dogs rushed yapping at him. His hostess sat on a sofa with a lap-dog in her lap.

“I can’t get up,” she said. “I’ve got Diddums here.”

Frampton shook hands with the pair and summed them up. The man was a big fellow, in very good, hard condition, with a look of great charm and sweetness of nature. The woman was a big woman, with “a face like an angry ham,” as he defined it to himself. She wore expensive, ugly clothes, as prescribed by her dressmaker; there was no trace of personal choice in anything about her; it was all arranged, hair, eyebrows, nails. She remained “the angry ham” to him through life.

There were no books in the room, nor anything that could be read. Yet he felt sure that somewhere in the house there would be a study, where Sir Peter would have a great many pamphlets about new dressings for soils, Williams on the care of cider trees, Hawkins on the management of clay; books of farriery and kennel management; hound books and game books; the works of Surtees and Whyte-Melville; books of local history and archaeology; perhaps even Drayton’s Polyolbion and certainly Somerville’s Chase. His heart warmed to Sir Peter.

They went in to lunch in a big, lofty room hung three deep with family portraits of the Bynds. Frampton cast a shrewd glance at them, and judged them as a very poor lot; no good painting among them. The lunch began; it was a very good lunch, with excellent wine. The conversation was not easy, because the angry ham was not a charming hostess to guests of whom she disapproved. When the port was passed, Sir Peter said:

“I ought not to ask you this, Mr. Mansell, for you have already refused us; but it is a question about which we feel deeply. Is there any hope of your relenting about Spirr Covert?”

“No, really none; I’m going to be adamant,” Frampton said.

“You’re a great birdist, somebody was saying, and keen about bringing back bitterns and so forth,” he went on. “I expect you will know my cousin, Jim Bynd, who has the hoopoes nesting in his garden each year.”

“No, I do not know him,” Frampton said.

Sir Peter had made his opening and was about to develop it, when the lady intervened with a little grit for the bearings.

“What I cannot understand, Mr. Mansell,” she said, “is how a visit of the hounds in November could disturb your birds; they won’t be game-birds and they can’t be nesting then.”

“Ah,” he answered, “I want the wood to be for wild animals as well as for birds. That is why I want the hounds away. I want the place to be a shelter.”

“What do you reckon as wild animals?” she asked.

“There aren’t too many, are there?” he answered. “Foxes, otters, squirrels, weasels, possibly pine martens, dormice; it isn’t a long list.”

“But a lot of those are vermin,” she said. “They oughtn’t to be sheltered; they ought to be shot.”

“By gamekeepers, perhaps; but I’m not a gamekeeper. I don’t call them vermin. I call them very beautiful, clever things, of enormous interest.”

“I say, I shan’t love you, Mr. Mansell, if you go bringing otters here. I’ve got a trout hatch, you know,” Sir Peter said.

“Otters are great rovers,” Frampton said. “They would be hard to keep in one place. The beast I would really love to introduce would be the beaver.”

This was the beginning of the final damnation of Frampton Mansell in all that countryside. He spoke out of a genuine wish to fulfil the thought of Margaret, now in her grave; but it fell like a spark into the fuming gas of his hostess.

“I would love to have beavers in the valley in Spirr,” he said.

“But really, Mr. Mansell,” the lady said, “the Government has just had to go to quite enormous expense in putting down beavers. They have got into the river-banks and are destroying them everywhere to an extent the papers say must be seen to be believed. Surely you aren’t going to bring in more?”

“Beavers?” he asked. “Where are there beavers in England?”

“But all down the Severn, destroying all the banks.”

“Surely you mean musk-rats?”

“Aren’t they the same as beavers, destructive to the banks?”

“No, no. Beavers are quiet beasts, who build dams. I can send you a book about them, which will quite change your views about them.”

“No, no, please; I don’t want to know more about them than I do at present.”

“I fear you don’t know anything about them at present.”

“I know more than enough. I do not believe in introducing wild animals to a country like this.”

“But not long ago, the Hunt here introduced a lot of German foxes,” he said.

“I know nothing about that; and in any case foxes are different.”

“In what way are they different?”

“They are not destructive like beavers and these other things.”

“But they are,” Frampton said. “They are very destructive. I met an old man, a day or two ago, who had had three of his twelve hens taken by a fox. He said he might get a shilling a head for them, from the Hunt, if he kept at it long enough, but that he was not going to be bullied and badgered and have his word doubted; he was going to shoot every fox he could see from that day forth.”

“Of course,” the lady said, “if a man does not keep his hens properly shut up or looked after, a fox is sure to get them.”

“It is not possible for a poor man to watch his hens as a shepherd would watch his flock,” Frampton said. “He has other things to do. Foxes are destructive beasts, kept alive here so that people can hunt them. I think that the people who hunt them and want them should either protect folk from the results, in supplying wire-netting to poor poultry-keepers, or meet claims for damage with generosity.”

“I quite agree, Mr. Mansell,” Sir Peter said, “I quite agree. I’ve been shocked to find some Hunts mean in those ways. I hope, and indeed feel sure, that the old man you mention was not anyone near here.”

“No, no; miles away,” Frampton said.

“I’ve found that some poor chaps are afraid to push their claims,” Sir Peter said. “It is sometimes hard to find out who has suffered. But, by Jove, some farmers are up to every dodge, and would ruin the Bank of England in claims. In my young days, I knew of a claim for a young giraffe.”

“Killed by the foxes?” Frampton asked.

“No, dead of a nervous strain from seeing the hounds. He was in a private zoo, and we were just outside the fences. Certainly, the hounds made the beast caper very oddly, but it looked to me more like joy than terror. Anyhow, it died soon afterwards and the owner claimed. He did not win, of course. Hunting is like every other great pleasure, it may make people who are having it a bit inconsiderate.”

Frampton warmed to the man, who was a fine fellow, generous, brave, simple and kind-hearted. Sir Peter, on his side, felt that there was much in Frampton, and that he could win him, if he could only find some piece of mental ground on which they could walk together.

“I wonder,” he said to his wife, “I wonder, my dear, if we cannot together make Mr. Mansell our friend sufficiently to change his views about Spirr. Now, Mr. Mansell is a friend to animals; he is, therefore, a friend of man, and will probably class fox-hunters as men. You will go so far as that, Mr. Mansell?”

“‘Ay, in the catalogue, ye go for men,’” Frampton quoted, but neither hearer knew what he meant.

“We have many of the infirmities of men,” Sir Peter said; “for instance, we of the Tunsters hold very much by our traditions. George the Second granted us a Hunt button; he dined with us once and praised our punch. We drink the same punch to his memory at our Dinner every year. But our great tradition is the day from Spirr Wood, when we found in Spirr in the morning and hunted the fox all day long for over twenty miles and lost him near Spirr in the evening. He went right out to Wicked Hill and then all the way back again. Five horses were killed during the hunt, two from falls and three others ridden dead. Two men, the Huntsman and John Bynd; Happy John, they called him; that’s his portrait in the grey velvet coat; were up when the hounds lost him. They had been lucky in getting remounts. We have kept up the memory of the Spirr Wood Day ever since. We have a song, which we sing at our Dinners and Balls; that, too, is old, dating from about 1789. We have also a most interesting account of the whole day. The Master, then the John Bynd I spoke of, went to the trouble of persuading everybody who was out that day to write an account of what he saw and did. More than that, he went to the very great trouble of collecting the reports of eye-witnesses from all over the line the fox took; so that it is unique; there’s nothing like it. He had it printed, with some drawings by the painter Sartorius, who does those long-legged horses, you may know the kind of thing. The book is very rare now, but I’ll show you a copy. It is very interesting, for many of those who were out could hardly write their names, but dictated what they saw. The original letters are all in my study at this moment. I’ll be happy to show them to you, if you’re at all interested. I believe I’m right in claiming that the Spirr Wood run is one of the longest recorded runs. It is our great day, and we do treasure the tradition of drawing Spirr on our opening day.

“Now I’ve talked a great deal about Spirr, and I’m afraid bored you dreadfully, but what I want to lead up to is whether, now that you know the feelings, or even the passions, involved, you will not think about putting your bird sanctuary somewhere else, and letting the Hunt buy Spirr from you?”

“I’m sorry,” Frampton said. “The place has associations for me, which go deep.”

He stopped a moment, thinking how deep they went, and wondering whether Margaret would have advised him to accept this offer, not to be churlish and stand out against what people so much wanted. He liked this hunting man; he was a very fine, simple fellow; but then, he did not like the fellow’s wife, with the face like the angry ham and the folly about the musk-rats and the beavers. She had not made him welcome there. She had shown him plainly that he was there on sufferance, against her will. He thought at once that his dead love would have told him to agree with the adversary and let the covert go. Then he thought, no, she wouldn’t; she loathed fox-hunting, and despised its followers: “grown-up people,” she said said, “running a poor fox to death.” She had planned to make the wood a sanctuary, and it now was one. She had much enjoyed the thought of it, and loved the sight of it. Perhaps some of her last thoughts on earth had been of it and about it. Then he thought of Posh Tilter and hardened his heart. Never should they draw Spirr.

The lady said, with bitter and evil intention: “I had not understood that you had associations nearer than Condicote.”

“Those were my father’s,” he answered. “My father came from there. I do not know the place much. But for Spirr Wood, I have very deep feeling.”

He knew that the lady had wished him to know, that she and everybody there knew, that his grandfather had been a baker in Condicote. He decided that the lady had ruined the Hunt’s chance of ever having a fox from the covert in time to come. He resolved to hit back in a way that would make them squirm; he did so.

“Another thing I’ve thought of doing presently,” he said, though the matter had only at that moment floated into his mind, “is to develop all this countryside as building sites. Tatchester is an appalling city from every point of view. The Cathedral has its points, of course, but apart from the Close, there isn’t a decent house in the place. Now out by Spirr, and along by Mullples, there are wonderful views and lovely country. What I want to do, and I’m sure you’ll welcome the idea, is to build a couple of hundred red brick villas, just to the east of Spirr, grouped round a cinema; for that is the modern centre of any community, the cinema; you can hardly have the one without the other. Don’t you think that that would be a God-send for the poor chaps who have to live in Tatchester? They could come out on their motor-bikes after work and enjoy themselves. Or we could have three or four of these big red charries to bring them. Don’t you think that that would be a good thing?”

He knew that he had dealt them a deadly thrust apiece; with his best poker face he watched their misery and rage. The lady’s face gave him acute pleasure. She had been hardly able to contain her indignation with him hitherto; now she boiled over.

“Surely, Mr. Mansell,” she began, “surely, Mr. Mansell, you are not seriously thinking of desecrating this wonderful part of England?”

“Desecrating?” he said. “Really, no; I would never desecrate. I like buildings, and I like this country. I only want to give a lot of poor chaps a chance of enjoying it.”

“Enjoying it? Mr. Mansell, but they wouldn’t enjoy it as we should.”

“Very likely not; I hope not; for they are very different sort of people, but they would enjoy it, I don’t doubt.”

“Yes, at the expense of everybody else.”

“No, at my expense; but the scheme would be self-supporting.”

“You know what I mean, Mr. Mansell; it would be at the expense of everybody who cares for this countryside. It has been kept hitherto by people who love it.”

“Wouldn’t you rather that it were lived in henceforth by people who love it.”

“Those people you talk of bringing wouldn’t love it. They would bring the slum spirit here. And they would not thank you; they would do nothing but growl, even if you gave them the houses rent free. A great deal is done for the poor; a very great deal too much, if you ask me; and they’ve got into the way now of expecting a great deal and giving nothing in return for what they have. They get an education free, which they don’t value and don’t really want. They leave school, and they turn up their noses at the work that is offered to them, at good wages, in the districts they know. I speak here with authority, Mr. Mansell, for I have to try to get maids and cooks here, and I cannot get them. I have found it much easier and a great deal more satisfactory to go to the trouble of getting maids from Sweden and Norway, who come over here for a year to learn English. I can’t get English maids, though I offer them twice and three times the wages the same maids got in my mother’s house. The young women will not take indoor service. What they want is to be free for the day at half-past five, and to go to a cinema with a young man; and then on Sunday to drive off with him on a motor-bicycle to the other side of the county.”

“I’m only a bachelor,” he said. “My housekeeper does most of that kind of thing for me. We haven’t had any trouble yet. Most of my servants have been with me for years. Servants take a world of trouble off one’s shoulders, and it’s a troublous kind of job, so they ought to have as good a time as one can afford, don’t you think? I think it all lies in that; giving them plenty of time to be absolutely theirs, and also a fair share of one’s own good time.”

This was not at all the doctrine to which Lady Bynd was accustomed, from her parents, her pulpit, her daily paper and her own persuasion. Sir Peter was distressed to see the bearings running hot. Mansell had risen to go. He tried hard to bring the talk to a gentler level.

“It is the swing of the pendulum,” he said. “People were too much repressed, and now are a little too much for themselves. They’ll come back to the old loyalties. But, Mr. Mansell, you’ll forgive me for harping so on my one string of Spirr Wood. I realise that you have deep feelings about the covert, so, if you cannot make us happy, I hope that your sanctuary will give you much happiness. But, if you ever should change your mind, will you remember the Tunsters, who drink still to George the Second?”

“I have a receipt for a punch of that time,” Frampton said. “I’ll send it to you, if you’d like that. I must keep Spirr as a bird place. If in the Spring you would care to see the birds, I hope you will come to see them. I hope to have some then.”

This was meant as a friendly ending to the meeting. He showed his sympathy with the Tuncesters, to the extent of sending them a receipt for a punch; showed that he was going to be adamant about Spirr, and also showed them that he recognised that they would not be friends, and indeed belonged in opposite camps, but that what he had to share with them, a knowledge and love of birds, he would share, if they wished, to the full. He turned to say good-bye to his hostess, who was not content to end on a low note.