Lord Mullion's Secret Read Online Free PDF

well.
    â€˜Or did you ever hear,’ Swithin asked, ‘of something being described as smart as a gardener’s dog with a polyanthus in his mouth?’
    â€˜I don’t think I ever did.’
    â€˜Then you ought to have, m’lady. Because, you see, it’s in The Water-Babies . And it must have been in your nursery, I’d be thinking, that book.’
    â€˜I suppose so. In fact, I’m sure it was.’ Patty found herself not resenting the measure of reproof in Swithin’s observation. She had also become conscious that Swithin, although he didn’t talk in the refined manner of, say, Savine, her father’s butler, didn’t quite have the accents of a gardener’s boy either. It was odd that her ear had never detected this now perfectly patent fact. As ears go, Swithin’s must be better than hers. And he must have employed it, whether consciously or not, during such opportunities as he had of listening to the conversation of what Great-aunt Camilla would call his betters. Perhaps he had notions of improving himself, which would be sensible enough. More probably – since the result was so far from disagreeable – it was something that had just happened. But now a new line of inquiry had presented itself. And Patty, being a straightforward young woman, went ahead with it. ‘Do you read a lot?’ she asked.
    â€˜Yes.’ This was the rather abrupt Swithin again. Patty recalled how the Vicar of Mullion, an old man given to antique usages, sometimes described himself as having been ‘villaging’ – by which he meant going round the cottagers and chatting them up. It wouldn’t do to turn on a villaging act with this twenty-year-old young man. On the other hand, having once taken him on, as now, not as a hind but as a human being, why funk it? Patty again went ahead. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Stop on here? I suppose you might become my brother’s head gardener one day. If there continue to be such people, that is. But perhaps it would really come down to the turnips – and to the two of you tugging them out and mashing them up together. That’s my sister’s vision of the future.’
    â€˜She might have a worse one.’
    Much as if she had been a turnip herself, this pulled Patty up.
    â€˜It would be to chuck a lot on the scrap heap,’ she said.
    â€˜Obviously. But I don’t reckon there’s any cause for alarm. Lady Lucy’s fine, but just a bit doctrinaire. She’s very young, of course.’
    This was a moment of perfect agreement between these two mature persons. Boosie (at eighteen) was demonstrably very young. As for Swithin, he was rapidly becoming increasingly puzzling. But he was rapidly (although Patty didn’t clearly formulate just how) becoming something else as well. It was with an entire lack of awkwardness that, in the interest of this sustained conversation, he had now desisted from his labours. He had been working hard, and there were tiny beads of perspiration on his forehead. He had an agreeable and slightly disturbing smell. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up to the armpit, and on the bronzed skin thus revealed glinted a fine powdering of golden hairs. These ought not to have suggested anything in particular to Lady Patience Wyndowe. But in fact they did. Had this encounter – she suddenly realized – ended only some moments ago she might have returned to the castle and blithely remarked to her mother that she had been flirting with Swithin Gore. It was something she would not now do.
    â€˜I might manage to get to a polytechnic,’ Swithin said prosaically.
    Patty’s wild thought that she was perhaps falling in love with Swithin was far from rendered the less disconcerting by this announcement. Swithin as less garden boy than garden god was one thing; Swithin as hopeful postulant for some gruesome form of further education was quite