The Square Peg or The Gun Fella полностью

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.”