The Gazebo Read Online Free PDF Page A

we’ve been, looking for somewhere to settle down now I’m retiring, and there’s been something wrong with all of them. Either the water or the soil, or too high or too low down – there’s always been something that didn’t suit. And what all the doctors say is, “Let her do as she wants, Mr Blount. Don’t push her, or you’ll be sorry for it.” Very interested in her case the doctors are. And what they say wrapped up in the doctor’s language, which I’m no good at and I don’t suppose you are either – well, it amounts to this, if there’s anything she wants, get it for her, and if she wants it badly get it for her quick. Now this house, we’ve been walking past and looking at it and she’s taken the biggest kind of fancy for it – haven’t you, Milly?’
    Mrs Blount had sunk down upon one of the hall chairs. She had a limp discouraged look, from her stringy sandy hair to her toed-in feet. She drooped on the upright chair and looked past Althea with pale watery eyes. She didn’t seem capable of having a violent enthusiasm about anything. She opened the lips which hardly showed in the general pallor of her face and said,
    ‘Oh, yes.’
    Althea found herself saying in the voice she would have used to a child, ‘I’m sorry, but we really don’t intend to sell,’ and with that the drawing-room door opened and Mrs Graham stood there. There could have been no greater contrast to the sagging Mrs Blount. Mrs. Graham wore her invalidism in a very finished and elegant manner, from her beautifully arranged hair to the grey suède shoes which matched her dress. It is true that she wore a shawl, but it was a cloudy affair of pink and blue and lavender which threw up the delicate tints of her face and complimented the blue of her eyes.
    ‘Darling, I heard voices. Oh…’ she broke off.
    Mr Blount advanced with his hand out.
    ‘Mrs Graham, permit me – I am Mr Blount, and this is Mrs Blount. We have an order to view, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. Miss Graham…’
    Mrs Graham smiled graciously.
    ‘Oh, yes. I had a little chat with Mr Martin this morning, Thea darling. I ought to have told you, but it slipped my memory. I didn’t think he would be able to arrange anything so soon. Perhaps you will take them over the house.’ She turned a deprecating look upon Mr Blount. ‘I am not allowed to do the stairs more than once a day.’
    Impossible to have a scene in front of two strangers. Althea took them over the house, Mr Blount talking all the time and Mrs Blount repeating in every room the same two words – ‘Very nice.’ When she had said it in four bedrooms, a bathroom, the dining-room, the drawing-room, and the kitchen, they went into the garden, where two bright borders and a strip of grass led up to a shrubbery and a summerhouse. The slope was really quite a steep one, so much so that Mrs Graham considered it beyond her. Althea’s conscience took her to task for the feeling of gratitude which this induced and she had no defence against it. The place was a refuge, and the house afforded her none. There was no room in it where she could turn a deaf ear to the sound of her mother’s high, sweet voice calling her, or to the tinkle of her summoning bell.
    Mr Blount looked at everything. He obviously didn’t know a delphinium from a phlox, or a carnation from a marigold, but he admired them all. He admired the old summerhouse, which was really, as Mr Martin could have told him, what used to be called a gazebo and was a good deal older than the house. In the days when Grove Hill was really a hill with wooded slopes it had been contrived to afford an agreeable view of fields going down to the river. Since it held some of Althea’s most deeply hidden memories, she was glad to find that Mr Blount was not interested in it, passing it over with the remark that summerhouses were draughty, and that Mrs Blount had to be very careful about draughts.
    When they were gone she went back up the garden