“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.