Read Online Short Stories 1895-1926 by Walter de la Mare - Free Book Online

And oh, my dear, dear lady, will you be my wife?’
    â€˜Ach – nonsense, nonsense, old friend,’ said my aunt. ‘And you and me so old and staid! Grey hairs. Withered sticks. From the bottom of my heart I thank you for the honour. But – why, Count, you discommode an – an old woman.’ She laughed like a girl.
    And she pushed her gloved hand along the wall of the passage, moving very heedfully and slowly. ‘Richard, may I ask you just once more to support my poor gouty knees down these odious steps?’ My aunt was speaking in a foreign tongue. The Count strode after us.
    â€˜Is this all?’ said he, gazing into her face.
    â€˜God bless the man! – would he stare me out of countenance?’ Her hand felt limp and cold beneath her glove. And we went out of the house into the sunlight, and descended slowly to the cab.
    And that was the end of the matter. My aunt had divined the truth. Her volatile, fickle, proud, fantastic old friend moped for a while. But soon the intervention of scribbling, projects, books, and dissensions with his neighbours added this one more to many another romantic episode in his charming repertory of memories. Moreover, had my aunt chosen to return, here was a brotherly affection, flavoured with a platonic piquancy, eager to welcome, to serve, and to entertain her.
    Not for many a year did I meet my aunt again. I twice ventured to call on her; but she was ‘out’ to me. Rumours strayed my way at times of a soured blind old woman, for ever engaged in scandalous contention with the parents of her domestics; but me she altogether ignored. And then for a long time I feared to force myself on her memory. But when the end came, and the Count was speedily sinking, some odd remembrance of her troubled his sleep. He begged me to write to my aunt, to ‘ask her to come and share a last crust with an old, broken, toothless friend.’ But my poor old friend died the next evening, and the last stillness had fallen upon the house before she could answer his summons.
    On the day following I was sitting in the empty and darkened diningroom, when I heard the sound of wheels, and somehow divining what they portended, I looked out through the Venetian blind.
    My aunt had come, as she had gone, in a hackney cab; and, refusing any assistance from the maid who was there with her, she stepped painfully down out of it, and, tapping the ground at her feet with her ebony stick, the wintry sun glinting red upon her blue spectacles as she moved, she began to climb the flight of steps alone, with difficulty, but with a vigorous assurance.
    I was seized with dismay at the very sight of her. Something in her very appearance filled me with a sense of my own mere young-manliness and fatuity. I drew sharply back from the window; hesitated – in doubt whether to receive her myself, or to send for Mrs Rodd. I peeped again. She had come on slowly. But now, midway up the steps, she paused, slowly turned herself about, and stretched out her hand towards the house.
    â€˜Cabman, cabman’ – her words rang against the stucco walls – ‘is this the house? What’s wrong with the house?’
    The cabman began to climb down from his box.
    â€˜Agnes, do you hear me?’ she cried with a shrill piercing horror in her voice. ‘Agnes, Agnes – is the house dark ?’
    â€˜The blinds are all down, m’m,’ answered the girl looking out of the window.
    My aunt turned her head slowly, and I could see her moving eyebrows arched high above her spectacles. And then she began to climb rapidly backwards down the steps in her haste to be gone. It was a ludicrous and yet a poignant and dreadful thing to see. I could refrain myself no longer.
    But she was already seated in the cab before I could reach her. ‘Aunt, my dear Aunt Lucy,’ I said at the window, peering into the musty gloom. ‘Won’t you please come into the house? I have many