“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.