[adapted]

by
Saki
(H. H. Munro)

“My aunt will come down soon, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very calm young lady of fifteen; “for now you must try to be patient with me.”

Framton Nuttel tried to say the right thing that would properly please the niece at the moment without making the aunt that was to come seem less important. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits to a series of total strangers would do much to help the nerve cure which he was supposed to be having.

“I know how it will be,” his sister had said when he was preparing to move to this quiet country place; “you will hide yourself down there and not speak to anyone, and your nerves will be worse than ever from feeling sad and bored. I will just give you letters to introduce you to all the people I know there. Some of them, as I remember, were quite nice.”

Framton asked himself if Mrs. Sappleton, the lady he was giving one of the introduction letters to, was in the nice group.

“Do you know many of the people round here?” asked the niece, when she thought that they had had enough quiet time together.

“Almost no one,” said Framton. “My sister was staying here, at the priest’s house, you know, about four years ago, and she gave me letters to introduce me to some of the people here.”

He said the last thing in a voice that sounded clearly sorry.

“Then you know almost nothing about my aunt?” asked the calm young lady.

“Only her name and address,” said the visitor. He was wondering if Mrs. Sappleton was married or a widow. Something he could not describe about the room seemed to show that a man lived there.

“Her very sad thing happened just three years ago,” said the child; “that was after your sister’s time.”

“Her terrible event?” asked Framton; somehow in this quiet country place terrible events seemed wrong here.

“You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon,” said the niece, pointing to a big glass door that opened to the grass.

“It is very warm for this time of year,” said Framton; “but does that window have something to do with the sad event?”

“Out through that window, exactly three years ago today, her husband and her two young brothers went out for a day of shooting. They never came back. While crossing the moor to their favourite place to shoot snipe, all three of them sank into a dangerous patch of bog. It had been that terrible wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years suddenly went soft without warning. Their bodies were never found. That was the terrible part of it.” Here the child’s voice lost its calm sound and became shaky and human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown dog that was lost with them, and walk in through that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening until it is almost dark. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white raincoat 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 upset her. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a scary feeling that they will all walk in through that window — ”

She stopped with a little shiver. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt hurried into the room with many apologies for being late in coming.

“I hope Vera has been making you laugh?” she said.

“She has been very interesting,” said Framton.

“I hope you don’t mind the open window,” said Mrs. Sappleton quickly; “my husband and brothers will be home soon from shooting, and they always come in this way. They’ve been out hunting snipe birds in the wet fields to-day, so they’ll make a big mess on my poor carpets. So like you men, isn’t it?”

She talked on cheerfully about the shooting and the lack of birds, and the chances for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all completely horrible. He tried very hard but only partly succeeded to turn the talk to a less awful topic; he knew that his hostess was giving him only a small part of her attention, and her eyes kept going past him to the open window and the grass outside. It was clearly an unlucky chance that he came on this sad anniversary.

“The doctors agree that I must have complete rest, no mental excitement, and avoid anything like very hard physical exercise,” said Framton, who was under the fairly common wrong idea that total strangers and people he met by chance want the smallest detail of one’s illnesses and health problems, their cause and cure. “About diet they do not agree so much,” he continued.

“No?” said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice that had almost been a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly became very alert and interested — but not to what Framton was saying.

“Here they are at last!” she shouted. “Just in time for tea, and don’t they look like they are muddy all over!”

Framton shivered a little and turned toward the niece with a look meant to show kind understanding. The child was staring out through the open window with shocked fear in her eyes. With a cold, sudden fear he could not name, Framton turned quickly in his seat and looked in the same direction.

In the growing evening light three people were walking across the grass towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them also had a white coat over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel dog kept close behind them. Silently they came near the house, and then a rough young voice sang out of the evening: “I said, Bertie, why do you jump?”

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate were faintly seen steps in his quick run away. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid a near crash.

“Here we are, my dear,” said the wearer of the white raincoat, coming in through the window; “quite muddy, but most of it’s dry. Who was that who ran out quickly as we arrived?”

“A very strange man, a Mr. Nuttel,” said Mrs. Sappleton; “could only talk about being ill, and left quickly without saying good-bye or sorry when you arrived. You would think he had seen a ghost.”

“I expect it was the spaniel dog,” said the niece calmly; “he told me he had a fear of dogs. He was once chased into a graveyard somewhere by the Ganges River by a group of stray dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the animals growling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their courage.”

Making up stories with little time to get ready was what she was best at.