The Gazebo Read Online Free PDF

and sat down in the gazebo.
    FOUR
    NICHOLAS CAREY CAME back to Grove Hill because he had left a lot of kit there and he supposed he had better go through it. If he had thought about it at all in the last few years, it was to imagine that Emmy Lester would have taken it with her when she moved, or failing that, would have thrown most of it away. But no, the letter which greeted him on arrival in England informed him that she had left the attic positively stuffed with his things. There was a good deal on the lines of ‘You know the Harrisons have bought the house – some distant cousins of mine – and Jack Harrison couldn’t have been kinder about my leaving everything just as it was. But I don’t know his wife Ella quite so well, and I think she would be glad if you could go down and just sort out what you want to keep. We haven’t much room here, but anything we can take in…’
    Emmy came up before him as he read the letter – a kind, vague creature with a heart as soft as butter. But no fool… He fancied that in the reference to Ella Harrison the sense could be reversed. After meeting Ella he was to be quite sure of it. Emmy had seen right through her, and didn’t like what she saw.
    There is always something strange about the return to a place which has once been very familiar. The you who lived there comes back out of the past. It is no longer you yourself, because you have gone on and left it behind. Its loves and likings, its sorrows and despairs, are no longer yours. The misty years have dimmed the memory of them and they can no longer give pleasure or pain. But when you go back in the flesh, walk the old streets, and see the old places, the mists have a tendency to wear thin. A snatch of verse came into his mind and whispered there:
    ‘Grey, grey mist
    Over the old grey town,
    A mist of years, a mist of tears,
    Where ghosts go up and down –
    And the ghosts they whisper thus and thus
    Of the days when the world went well with us.’
    The Harrisons had invited him to stay, and he had accepted. He told himself afterwards that Emmy’s letter ought to have warned him. He should have made it his business to be much too busy to come down except for the day. Ella Harrison was everything he disliked most in a woman, and poor old Jack couldn’t call his soul his own. He gathered that they had returned in the late spring from a cruise of the jazziest kind, and that every minute of it had been pure poison as far as Jack was concerned.
    ‘We had the most marvellous time!’ Ella said. ‘Such a gay lot of people! Maria Pastorella – the film star, you know – eyelashes about a yard long, and the most marvellous figure! And her latest husband, an enormously rich South American with a name nobody could pronounce, so we all called him Dada! Really – these South American men! The things he said! He rather singled me out, and I don’t think she liked it! We really had a wonderful time! I’m telling all our friends they ought to go!’ She called across to her husband on the other side of the room.
    ‘Jack, I believe the Grahams are going to sell their house and go off! Winifred is getting all excited! She says that man who came to see it has taken the biggest sort of fancy to it! He offered five thousand, and she turned it down, and now he says he’ll go to six!’ She came back to Nicholas.
    ‘By the way you knew them, didn’t you?’ Her voice became rather arch. ‘Rather well by all accounts!’ She gave the laugh he disliked so much. ‘There’s nothing quite so dead as one’s old affairs, is there? But the poor girl has just sat here gathering mould ever since! Not an attractive occupation! I expect she was quite good-looking when you knew her.’
    Emboldened by a position behind the sheltering pages of The Times, and perhaps a little by the presence of another man, Jack Harrison said,
    ‘She is very good-looking now.’
    Ella’s laugh was not quite as ringing as it had been a moment ago.
    ‘Really,