Free Miss Buncle Married by D. E. Stevenson

bargain. It was quite a ridiculous price. He bought the house, and then, with a magnificent gesture, he gave it to his wife.
    Barbara was enchanted. What a husband! What a house! It was the most marvelous present she had ever had. Her gratitude was quite embarrassing. Arthur was a little uncomfortable about it. They had decided long ago that Arthur was to buy the house, and Barbara was to “do it up.” Arthur had got off very easily with his part of the bargain—he had bought a ruin for half nothing—but Barbara’s part was going to cost a small fortune. It was only fair—so thought Mr. Abbott—that the house, which was going to cost Barbara more than himself, should belong to her when it was finished. He tried to explain all this to his wife as they drove home to Sunnydene together, but Barbara only saw what she wanted to see—the amazing generosity of her husband, and the superlative beauty of her house.
    No sooner was the house hers than Barbara filled it with plumbers, joiners, electricians, and decorators. The peace of the sunlit rooms was disturbed by the noise of hammering and of men’s voices, by the sound of heavy footsteps clattering on the parquet floors. The dust swirled from forgotten corners in choking blinding clouds, and settled again over everything in a thick gray film. Charwomen with buckets of dirty water cluttered the stairs, and crawled patiently over the floors waging an endless battle with the dirt. The place was an inferno, and Barbara drove its denizens like a whirlwind. She cajoled the foremen and bullied the underlings from morning to night—sometimes, when occasion seemed to demand a change of tactics, she reversed the process. The workmen were all terrified of Mrs. Abbott; she was the most impatient lady they had ever met.
    Barbara’s efforts to make The Archway House a place for heroes to live in were hindered and impeded to an alarming extent by “the ghost.” She had never seen this apparition herself but apparently she was unique in this. Local charwomen refused to come and work in the haunted house, and those recruited from other districts soon got to hear of it and faded away mysteriously with their work half done. None of them would remain in the house after the workmen had left, and this was trying, because it was only after the workmen had left that the field was clear for the cleaning to be done. The ghost was a very annoying sort of ghost—a kind of Poltergeist— an embodiment of mischief. Its great delight seemed to consist in hindering the work. Pails and brooms and workmen’s tools disappeared from their rightful places and were discovered, hours later, in different parts of the house. Barbara soon got extremely sick of the ghost. But she carried on bravely with all her preparations—no ghost on earth was going to make the slightest difference to her arrangements. She worked like a slave herself and saw that everyone else worked like a slave. And through it all the ghost continued to play a villain’s part. It appeared to charwomen and sent them into hysterics; it appeared to workmen and interfered with their work. Some said it was a tall figure in white draperies, that wrung its hands and coughed dismally, others said it was headless and moved with the clanking of chains.
    Weeks passed, and gradually out of the chaos, a pattern emerged, and The Archway House began to look like a human habitation. As the time drew near for the furnishing of the rooms Barbara began to feel a little anxious. She was fully aware of the limitations of her taste, and she was desperately keen to have everything right, to choose for her house the sort of furniture that the house would like. Nothing—or very little—that had been suitable for Sunnydene or Tanglewood Cottage was suitable for The Archway House. She and Arthur were agreed on this—and she was to have a free hand to get what she liked. It was a delightful