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
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.”