"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,"
said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; "in the meantime you
must try and put up with me."
Framton Nuttel
endeavored to say the correct something which should duly Hatter the niece of
the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he
doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total
strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to
be undergoing
"I know how it will be," his sister had said when he was preparing
to migrate to this rural retreat; "you will bury yourself down there and
not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from
moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know
there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice."
Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton,
the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction came into
the nice division.
"Do you know many of the people round here?" asked the niece, when
she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.
"Hardly a soul," said Framton. "My
sister was staying here, at the rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she
gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here."
He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.
"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" pursued the
self-possessed young lady.
"Only her name and address," admitted the caller. He was wondering
whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed
state. An undefinable something about the room seemed
to suggest masculine habitation.
"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," said the child;
"that would be since your sister's time."
"Her tragedy?" asked Framton; somehow in
this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.
"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October
afternoon," said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened
on to a lawn.
"It is quite warm for the time of the year," said Framton; "but has that window got anything to do with
the tragedy?"
"Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her
two young brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never came back. In
crossing the moor to their favorite snipe-shooting ground they were all three
engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer,
you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without
warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of
it." Here the child's voice lost its self-possessed note and became
falteringly human. "Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back
someday, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in
at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open
every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how
they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and
Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always
did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes
on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they
will all walk in through that window--"
She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton
when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in
making her appearance.
"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.
"She has been very interesting," said Framton.
"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my husband and brothers will be
home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way. They've been out
for snipe in the marshes today, so they'll make a fine mess over my poor
carpets. So like you menfolk, isn't it?"
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and
the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it
was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful
effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic, he
was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention,
and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn
beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid
his visit on this tragic anniversary.
"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental
excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical
exercise," announced Framton, who labored under
the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances
are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause
and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement,"
he continued.
"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice
which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened
into alert attention--but not to what Framton was
saying.
"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea,
and don't they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece
with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring
out through the open window with a dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock
of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and
looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards
the window, they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was
additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown
spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then
a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you
bound?"
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the
hall door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong
retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid
imminent collision.
"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh,
coming in through the window, "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was
that who bolted out as we came up?"
"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel,"
said Mrs. Sappleton; "could only talk about his
illnesses, and dashed off without a word of goodby or
apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."
"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly; "he
told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere
on the banks of the
Romance at short notice was her speciality.
END