“Then you think there were troubles in Eden?” said Cecilia, mischievously.
“I was not there,” said my Aunt Kezia. “After the old serpent came there were troubles enough, I’ll warrant you. If Adam came off scot-free for saying, ‘The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me,’ Eve must have been vastly unlike her daughters.”
I was quite unable to keep from laughing, but Cecilia did not seem to see anything to laugh at. She never does, when people say funny things; and she never says funny things herself. I cannot understand her. She only laughs when she does something; and, nine times out of ten, it is something in which I cannot see anything to laugh at—something which—well, if it were not Cecilia, I should say was rather silly and babyish. I never did see any fun in playing foolish tricks on people, and worrying them in all sorts of ways. Hatty just enjoys it; but I don’t.
However, before anything else was said, Father came in, and a young gentleman with him, whom he introduced as Mr Anthony Parmenter, the Vicar’s nephew (He turned out to be the Vicar’s grand-nephew, which, I suppose, is the same thing.) I am sure he must have come from the South. He did not shake hands, nor profess to do it. He just touched the hand you gave him with the tips of his fingers, and then with his lips, as if you were a china tea-dish that he was terribly frightened of breaking. Cecilia seemed quite used to this sort of thing, but I did not know what he was going to do; and, as for my Aunt Kezia, she just seized his hand, and gave it a good old-fashioned shake, at which he looked very much put out. Then she asked him how the Vicar was, and he did not seem to know; and how long he was going to stay, and he did not know that; and when he came, to which he said Thursday, in a very hesitating way, as if he were not at all sure that it was not Wednesday or Friday. One thing he knew—that it was hawidly cold—there, that is just how he said it. I suppose he meant horribly. My Aunt Kezia gave him up after a while, and went on sewing in silence. Then Cecilia took him up, and they seemed to understand each other exactly. They talked about all sorts of things and people that I never heard of before; and I sat and listened, and so did my Aunt Kezia, only that she put in a word now and then, and I did not.
Before they had been long at it, Fanny and Amelia came in from a walk, in their bonnets and scarves, and Mr Parmenter bowed over their hands in the same curious way that he did before. Amelia took it as she does everything—that is, in a languid, limp sort of way, as if she did not care about anything; but Fanny looked as if she did not know what he was going to do to her, and I saw she was puzzled whether she ought to shake hands or not. Then Fanny went away to take her things off, but Amelia sat down, and pulled off her scarf, and laid it beside her on the sofa, not neatly folded, but all huddled up in a heap, and there it might have stayed till next week if my Aunt Kezia (who hates Amelia’s untidy ways) had not said to her,—
“My dear, had you not better take your things up-stairs?”
Amelia rose with the air of a martyr, threw the scarf on her arm, and carrying her bonnet by one string, went slowly up-stairs. When they came down together, my Aunt Kezia said to Fanny,—
“My dear, you had better take a shorter walk another time.”
“We have not had a long one, Aunt,” said Fanny, looking surprised. “We only went up by the Scar, and back by Ellen Water.”
“I thought you had been much farther than that,” says my Aunt Kezia, in her dry way. “Poor Emily (Note 1.) seemed so tired she could not get up-stairs.”