This Merry Bond Read Online Free PDF Page B

that their cottages were in need of repairs, wages were in some cases long overdue, and bills had reached alarming proportions.
    In the past he had always relied on a lucky speculation to set his affairs right and quite often he had brought it off. But during the last year nothing seemed to have gone his way. Every reckless gamble had only added to his debts until he had been forced to sell his land to save himself from bankruptcy.
    Nicky was used to lean times at Nye when the staff was cut down to a minimum and the wastepaper basket filled with unopened bills. It never unduly worried her, for Charles’s cellar remained miraculously unimpaired, and Charles’s stable and preserves were as good as ever. She was used to things being shabby, and meals indifferently served. Nye wouldn’t have been Nye with a system that ran like clockwork, and they were so seldom there that it wasn’t surprising the place was neglected. She didn’t see that they lived perpetually on the bri n k of disaster, that Charles’s roving spirit was only a drug to blind him to his responsibilities. But Mouse saw.
    Mouse, with her twenty odd years of service to the Bredon family, saw more clearly than any of them. She was devoted to them all, but her devotion wasn’t blind. Charles frequently angered her by his failure as a parent. Nicky was her ewe lamb. She disapproved strongly of the girl’s mode of life, but she didn’t see what else you could expect from such an upbringing. It was Mouse who ran the house, harried the ill-paid servants into some semblance of efficiency, and patched and mended and turned curtains and tapestries that had long since had their day. Nye was her life. She had grown to womanhood there, and lived through the long years with no wish for any life except one of service to the Bredons. She watched with tight lips and unhappy eyes the sale first of Wet Wood and the east boundary, and then the South Spinney and with it that piece of river that had always been the children’s, and sometimes she wondered if Sir Charles would be forced into selling Nye itself. She heard plenty of talk in the village, and she wondered sadly how much longer the Bredons could continue to demand the good things of life without paying for them.
    Nicky was so pleased to be back at Nye that she didn’t pay much attention to graver matters. She wished only that Michael might be there to share it with her. He was part of all the old associations with Nye, so much more like Charles than his own father that he might well have been her brother. But Michael was the other side of the world, picking up a living where and how he chose, the Bredon wanderlust stronger in him than in any of them. She hadn’t seen him for four years.
    As November approached, Charles was less and less at home. He would snatch a couple of days hunting, then dash back to town, returning when he chose, looking thinner than ever, with the marks of dissipation strongly upon him. At weekends he often filled the house with casual acquaintances, a raffish crowd whom, likely as not, he barely knew, but who seemed for the moment to satisfy that fever of impatience that possessed him. Nicky entertained them in that casual spirit she had caught from her father, and by Monday morning he would watch the last car departing down the drive with evident relief and turn to Nicky with the air of a naughty child.
    “A tatty crew this weekend, weren’t they, my pretty? Now we can enjoy ourselves and get a sight of Nye as it really is.”
    But the next day he would be off again, and Nicky, left to her own devices, drove herself about the country in a disreputable old sports car and pursued her own affairs unchecked.
    She met Simon Shand at the usual functions, but since that last encounter at Bassetts Ponds he had made no further effort to get to know her better. He was seen a great deal with Stella Lucy and, in common with everyone else, Nicky suspected a mild affair and thought no more about it.