“What a short little thing summer is,” meditated Aunt Jane, “and butterflies are caterpillars most of the time after all. How quiet it seems. The wrens whisper in their box above the window, and there has not been a blast from the peacock for a week. He seems ashamed of the summer shortness of his tail. He keeps glancing at it over his shoulder to see if it is not looking better than yesterday, while the staring eyes of the old tail are in the bushes all about.”
“Poor, dear little thing!” said coaxing Katie. “Is she tired of autumn, before it is begun?”
“I am never tired of anything,” said Aunt Jane, “except my maid Ruth, and I should not be tired of her, if it had pleased Heaven to endow her with sufficient strength of mind to sew on a button. Life is very rich to me. There is always something new in every season; though to be sure I cannot think what novelty there is just now, except a choice variety of spiders. There is a theory that spiders kill flies. But I never miss a fly, and there does not seem to be any natural scourge divinely appointed to kill spiders, except Ruth. Even she does it so feebly, that I see them come back and hang on their webs and make faces at her. I suppose they are faces; I do not understand their anatomy, but it must be a very unpleasant one.”
“You are not quite satisfied with life, today, dear,” said Kate; “I fear your book did not end to your satisfaction.”
“It did end, though,” said the lady, “and that is something. What is there in life so difficult as to stop a book? If I wrote one, it would be as long as ten ‘Sir Charles Grandisons,’ and then I never should end it, because I should die. And there would be nobody left to read it, because each reader would have been dead long before.”
“But the book amused you!” interrupted Kate. “I know it did.”
“It was so absurd that I laughed till I cried; and it makes no difference whether you cry laughing or cry crying; it is equally bad when your glasses come off. Never mind. Whom did you see on the Avenue?”
“O, we saw Philip on horseback. He rides so beautifully; he seems one with his horse.”
“I am glad of it,” interposed his aunt. “The riders are generally so inferior to them.”
“We saw Mr. and Mrs. Lambert, too. Emilia stopped and asked after you, and sent you her love, auntie.”
“Love!” cried Aunt Jane. “She always does that. She has sent me love enough to rear a whole family on,—more than I ever felt for anybody in all my days. But she does not really love any one.”
“I hope she will love her husband,” said Kate, rather seriously.
“Mark my words, Kate!” said her aunt. “Nothing but unhappiness will ever come of that marriage. How can two people be happy who have absolutely nothing in common?”
“But no two people have just the same tastes,” said Kate, “except Harry and myself. It is not expected. It would be absurd for two people to be divorced, because the one preferred white bread and the other brown.”
“They would be divorced very soon,” said Aunt Jane, “for the one who ate brown bread would not live long.”
“But it is possible that he might live, auntie, in spite of your prediction. And perhaps people may be happy, even if you and I do not see how.”
“Nobody ever thinks I see anything,” said Aunt Jane, in some dejection. “You think I am nothing in the world but a sort of old oyster, making amusement for people, and having no more to do with real life than oysters have.”
“No, dearest!” cried Kate. “You have a great deal to do with all our lives. You are a dear old insidious sapper-and-miner, looking at first very inoffensive, and then working your way into our affections, and spoiling us with coaxing. How you behave about children, for instance!”
“How?” said the other meekly. “As well as I can.”
“But you pretend that you dislike them.”
“But I do dislike them. How can anybody help it? Hear them swearing at this moment, boys of five, paddling in the water there! Talk about the murder of the innocents! There are so few innocents to be murdered! If I only had a gun and could shoot!”
“You may not like those particular boys,” said Kate, “but you like good, well-behaved children, very much.”
“It takes so many to take care of them! People drive by here, with carriages so large that two of the largest horses can hardly draw them, and all full of those little beings. They have a sort of roof, too, and seem to expect to be out in all weathers.”
“If you had a family of children, perhaps you would find such a travelling caravan very convenient,” said Kate.
“If I had such a family,” said her aunt, “I would have a separate governess and guardian for each, very moral persons. They should come when each child was two, and stay till it was twenty. The children should all live apart, in order not to quarrel, and should meet once or twice a day and bow to each other. I think that each should learn a different language, so as not to converse, and then, perhaps, they would not get each other into mischief.”
“I am sure, auntie,” said Kate, “you have missed our small nephews and nieces ever since their visit ended. How still the house has been!”
“I do not know,” was the answer. “I hear a great many noises about the house. Somebody comes in late at night. Perhaps it is Philip; but he comes very softly in, wipes his feet very gently, like a clean thief, and goes up stairs.”
“O auntie!” said Kate, “you know you have got over all such fancies.”
“They are not fancies,” said Aunt Jane. “Things do happen in houses! Did I not look under the bed for a thief during fifteen years, and find one at last? Why should I not be allowed to hear something now?”
“But, dear Aunt Jane,” said Kate, “you never told me this before.”
“No,” said she. “I was beginning to tell you the other day, but Ruth was just bringing in my handkerchiefs, and she had used so much bluing, they looked as if they had been washed in heaven, so that it was too outrageous, and I forgot everything else.”
“But do you really hear anything?”
“Yes,” said her aunt. “Ruth declares she hears noises in those closets that I had nailed up, you know; but that is nothing; of course she does. Rats. What I hear at night is the creaking of stairs, when I know that nobody ought to be stirring. If you observe, you will hear it too. At least, I should think you would, only that somehow everything always seems to stop, when it is necessary to prove that I am foolish.”
The girls had no especial engagement that evening, and so got into a great excitement on the stairway over Aunt Jane’s solicitudes. They convinced themselves that they heard all sorts of things,—footfalls on successive steps, the creak of a plank, the brushing of an arm against a wall, the jar of some suspended object that was stirred in passing. Once they heard something fall on the floor, and roll from step to step; and yet they themselves stood on the stairway, and nothing passed. Then for some time there was silence, but they would have persisted in their observations, had not Philip come in from Mrs. Meredith’s in the midst of it, so that the whole thing turned into a frolic, and they sat on the stairs and told ghost stories half the night.