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?”