The Honeywood Files (28 page)

Here we are eventually! We commenced to take up residence at Honeywood Grange on Thursday and occupied the sleeping apartments last night for the first occasion. Although there still remain a vast number of dispositions of furniture to adjust I desire, on behalf of Lady Brash and myself, to intimate that we are completely charmed and delighted with the mansion. We consider it to be most elegant in every respect and anticipate that we shall esteem the convenience and appropriateness of the various different arrangements still more as time progresses, and we already have had occasion to appreciate the recommendations you have suggested and your forethought in providing beforehand many excellent devices. We shall anticipate seeing you here when we have settled down. Believe me with best regards from Lady Brash and myself,

Yours very sincerely,

So that’s that; and a handsome letter for even a grateful client to write.

SPINLOVE TO BRASH

Dear Sir Leslie, 14.2.26.

Very many thanks to you and to Lady Brash for your most kind letter, which, I can assure you, gave me great pleasure. I shall look forward to seeing the house when you have settled down. One cannot really see a house properly until it has been furnished.

I am sure that Mr. Grigblay would very much appreciate a line from you telling him you are pleased with his work. He has taken great pains to make it a success.

With kind regards and good wishes to Lady Brash and yourself,

Yours sincerely,

And so the file ends; but it ends at the point where the folder will hold no more papers: the last score of letters have, in fact, been packed under the clip to bring the chapter to a close—for a chapter, only, it is. There must somewhere in Spinlove’s office be another chapter enshrined in another folder. That second chapter
*
may be a short and uneventful chapter, or it may be neither short nor uneventful nor even the last. The Honeywood account has to be settled, and the numerous items of that account may raise many questions of fact and lead to a review of events gone almost out of memory. Question of extras may arise in which the architect, although involved by his own acts of omission or commission, has to keep the scales balanced between builder and client, and gild for the latter, as best he may, the often bitter pill called “final balance due.” Last, this second chapter will contain the history, be it long or short, of the inevitable small defects and the possible big ones, which reveal themselves after a house has been occupied and which, should they appear within nine months—or more or less—and so far as they are due to improper workmanship or materials, the builder is engaged under the terms of his contract to make good. Yet a third chapter clipped, perhaps, within another folder may lie upon Spinlove’s shelves; but we, who have come to know him, may hope that it does not exist. It could only be a record of pains and miseries—a chapter of bitter memories; for while the builder’s liabilities end when he has redeemed those of his faults which reveal themselves within the limit of nine, or other, months fixed by the contract, the architect’s liabilities are for all defects due to his negligence, whether faults of himself, of manufacturers, of specialists or of builders, which may appear within the limit of six years fixed by the law. We know, however, nothing of what other files may lie in Spinlove’s office. The last page of The Honeywood File is the front cover, and that we now close.

* This second chapter will be published under the title
The
Honeywood Settlement.