The Gypsy in the Parlour Page 7

  “So long as there’s the farm,” said I, “I don’t think it matters very much. I mean, whether Charlie comes after Uncle Tobias, or Uncle Matthew’s sons after Uncle Matthew, or Uncle Luke’s.” (I couldn’t, delicacy and pity forbade, say, ‘Or Stephen’s, after Uncle Stephen.’) “I mean,” I ended, to settle matters, “the farm’s where Sylvesters live.”

  I hoped I had at last reassured her, because she smiled.

  “How safe and secure it all sounds!” said she. “Like a chapter from the Age of Innocence! You brush cobwebs from my mind, you clever little thing, just as you do the tangles from my hair!” (I was brushing it then, as I did two or three times a day. Fanny said it soothed her nerves.) “Neither, indeed, worth your pains,” she added remorsefully. “Such foolish fears, and such a short, ugly crop!—Tell me, dear, does Stephen ever mention my appearance?”

  3

  I had to pause and reflect. This particular conversation with Fanny Davis took place about a week after my arrival: conscientiously searching my memory, I couldn’t recall, during that interval, my Uncle Stephen saying anything to me whatever.—If it appears strange that all my uncles play so small a part in this narrative, I can say only that at the time their absence from it, so to speak, appeared perfectly natural. Farmers live out-doors, farm-women within. When my uncles talked between themselves it was afield, or after supper, while the women made ready for morning; all communication with their wives took place in their bed-chambers; the two modes of life, the male and female, ran concurrently but on the surface separate. I hadn’t expected Stephen to talk to me. He used to once; but grief rendering him silent as his brothers, and I respecting that grief with all my heart, our relation was now one of dumb good-will.… At the same time, Fanny’s question startled me, because I knew Stephen regularly visited her each evening, just before she was supported to bed.

  So when at last I found my tongue to answer no, Uncle Stephen hadn’t ever, in my hearing, mentioned Fanny’s appearance, or her hair, at all, I not unnaturally added the query, didn’t he ever say anything to her?

  Fanny smiled again.

  “My dear, he pretends adoration still! He pretends this—” she pulled a short lock over her forehead—“a curly cherub’s mop! So if he doesn’t speak of my looks, what more natural, when he’s almost poetical upon them—which I’m sure would shock all Sylvesters to the core! He calls me more winsome than ever—dear Stephen!—But if you ever hear him say anything else, to any of the others, you might just tell me,” said Fanny Davis.

  This last injunction I hardly heard, I was so surprised. I had long accepted all my uncles as inscrutable; but what Fanny had just told me of Stephen simply baffled me. I wanted to believe; I simply couldn’t. With the best will in the world, and though I knew love was blind (to me Fanny’s hair simply looked untidy), I couldn’t imagine Stephen so rhapsodising over it. Because I also knew the Sylvesters. I’d after all known them a good deal longer than Fanny had. When she exclaimed that they’d be shocked to the core, by Stephen’s poeticising, I felt she spoke only half the truth. Stephen would be shocked too …

  I was so occupied by this point, I unilaterally abrogated our treaty of sympathetic silence to corner my Uncle Stephen by the pig-styes and ask him point-blank what he thought of Fanny’s hair.—The circumstances weren’t ideal: we stood side by side at the paling of Cissy of Frampton’s yard, and she grunted continuously.

  “Fan’s hair?” repeated my Uncle Stephen slowly. I waited without impatience. All Sylvesters needed time to shift their minds from one thought to another, and Stephen’s mind had been on Cissy. He had first to detach, then redirect it. I suppose half a minute passed before he deliberately replied that no doubt ’twould grow in time.

  “Yes, but if it doesn’t?” prompted I.

  “Then her must continue to wear it short,” said my Uncle Stephen.

  He spoke with perfect kindness. If the written words look harsh, they didn’t sound harsh, as my Uncle Stephen spoke them. They were filled with a sort of compassionate acceptance, in which even I, raw to life as I was, perceived a depth of affection, and a depth as it were of goodness, extraordinarily impressive. I still, little donkey that I was, persisted.

  “Doesn’t it remind you at all of cherubs’?”

  He turned on me his old, very gentle smile.

  “Be I a chap knowledgeable in cherubim? Tell Fanny ’tis so pretty as ’ee wish. Tell Fanny all that may comfort she in her affliction—as maybe ’ee can do better than I.”

  I thought this over. I thought he was quite possibly right, all Sylvesters being so tongue-tied. (Fanny had evidently divined what he thought about her hair.) I thought that beautiful messages from Stephen, even if I had to invent them, and he was really giving me carte blanche, might play an important part in Fanny’s cure. Without quite knowing why, I said impulsively,

  “Uncle Stephen, will you wait for Fanny for ever?”

  His great, solemn head slowly bent to my level. (Exactly, I couldn’t help the simile, like the great, solemn head of one of our horses. I felt, just as I felt before Prince, complete confidence in an enormously powerful docility.)

  “B’aint us promised?” said my Uncle Stephen. “H’aint I brought she here, if not to be ’xactly amongst strangers, still so far from her accustomed ways? I’ll wait for she, my little dear, just so same as if we’m wedded, until death us do part.”

  My Uncle Stephen was the best man I have ever known. He was good.—“Also, him b’aint passionate,” said my Aunt Grace, at a later date. That indeed may have made patience easier to him; certainly the wild Sylvester blood ran always cooler in Stephen than in his brothers; but I think now, as I dimly realised at the time, that it was plain goodness made his situation tolerable. He had loved Fanny Davis at sight; wooed her with all the Sylvester strength of purpose, perhaps foretasted, under the crab-tree, such sweets his brothers never knew; and at the snatching away of his full feast drew up from resources of sheer goodness all necessary patience. Looking back, it strikes me quite forcibly that I never for a moment questioned Fanny’s worthiness of him. My thoughts were all for her.

  I nonetheless saw my Uncle Stephen as very good indeed.—It didn’t at all surprise me that about this time he turned Chapel. Sylvesters as a race were Church—or rather their wives were, who hauled the menfolk after them into religion’s upper class. But I had often noticed, in cooks, the chapel-goer’s superior fervour. Church-of-England looked well in a character, but chapel-cooks actually went to chapel. (One tried to take me with her; my mother’s anger rose as at an insult.) So I could sympathise with my Uncle Stephen. He never tried to lure me from Frampton St. Paul’s, where I attended every Sunday morning with my aunts; but I could well imagine that he found more nourishing spiritual food among the chapel’s rag-tag-and-bobtail.

  CHAPTER IX

  1

  Spending so much time with Fanny Davis, I naturally spent less with my aunts. I was sorry for this, but there were only twenty-four hours in a day, and I had a great deal on my hands. (Fanny’s hair-brushing alone regularly occupied three periods of twenty minutes.) Within doors, as I say, I was constantly at her side; when I ran out, it was to change her novels. She obtained them from a circulating-library in Frampton, and got through almost one a night, when she couldn’t sleep. I grew expert at waylaying any Frampton-bound vehicle—Dr. Lush’s trap, the butcher’s cart, our own carrier’s—to beg a lift townwards; and if I had to walk the two miles back, lugged my three-volume burden uncomplaining. Because Fanny told me this was almost the kindest thing I could do for her, before I came she had had to rely on my Aunt Grace once a week; who sometimes forgot Fanny’s novels altogether.… I remember, on hearing this, feeling both grave and angry; prettily as Fanny pleaded Grace’s preoccupations—she did the whole week’s shopping for the whole household—I couldn’t excuse her. She should have put Fanny first.

  Incidentally, this was what my own treatment for a decline essentially amounted to—putting the patient f
irst; and I was pleased rather than surprised to find Dr. Lush in agreement with me. I had to badger him a little into giving an opinion; unlike the butcher and our carrier, he was always a trifle taciturn, as though he didn’t really want my company. I thought him chagrined at not having cured Fanny himself, so bore him no ill-will, but just badgered him.

  “Dr. Lush,” I remember saying once, “weren’t you very surprised when Fanny couldn’t get up?”

  He replied, rather gruffly, that where female nerves were concerned no doctor was surprised by anything.

  “Well, would you be surprised if she got up now?” I persisted.

  He disappointed me a little by saying no. I see now that he was an unusually honest man. (He was too honest to send Fanny medicine, which the Sylvesters would certainly have paid for.) I said importantly,

  “I’m more or less in charge of Fanny, at present. Of course I know quite a lot about declines, but I shouldn’t like to do anything wrong. I think Fanny needs to be amused, and looked after, and, specially, made to feel how much every one loves her and wants her to get better, and puts her first.”

  Cocking an eye whose expression I read as admiring, Dr. Lush gravely assured me that twenty guineas in London wouldn’t buy better advice. We shook hands as confrères, and I climbed down outside the library.

  Besides brushing Fanny’s hair, changing her books and treating her for a decline, I also had to attend on Fanny’s callers.

  They were another new thing, at the farm. We never used to have callers. Every farmer’s wife in the shire, and half the squires’ ladies as well, bowed to my aunts in Frampton High Street; and would have been ready enough to visit too, had they received the least encouragement. But the Sylvester women were sufficient unto themselves, among them they’d hoisted the Sylvesters to such a pinnacle of prestige and respectability, they didn’t need to be reassured of it. They went to the Assembly once a year; latterly, like so many dowager duchesses, without bothering even to get new gowns for it. (Best quality silk, put on but once a year, wears for ever: my Aunt Charlotte’s purple, my Aunt Grace’s black and my Aunt Rachel’s grey, were as known, and as respected, as a dowager’s diamonds.) At Christmas they exchanged visits with the Beers, and with Aunt Rachel’s family by Exeter; otherwise they didn’t visit. They didn’t have callers, because they didn’t want them.

  Fanny Davis, perhaps less secure, liked as many as she could get. When females arrived—close upon the triumph of the Assembly, the débâcle of the postponed wedding—to enquire after her health, she exerted herself to see them. She forced a voice to call out (Charlotte bustling an enquirer from the hall), that she felt just able, for a moment, to receive the kind attention. During those earliest days Fanny lay still in her bedroom—but Charlotte’s voice was still loud, and Fanny could always hear when callers came. She asked them to come again. Soon Mrs. Brewer, from the draper’s, and Miss Jones, who kept a hat shop, came regularly once or twice a week; and it was for this reason amongst others that Fanny was moved by daytime into the parlour.—For this reason also she coaxed my Aunt Rachel to take the lustre-ware plates from their cabinet, to serve scones or cakes Upon. All my aunts enjoyed doing things in style, but not to such a foolhardy degree as that; Rachel let Fanny have her way because she thought it might turn out a dying wish.…

  “Which as is well known,” explained my Aunt Rachel, “be most unlucky, as well as unkind, to refuse. So death-pale as her appeared, poor soul!—us gave she a month at longest; and then we’d ha’ put my china back.”

  (It was within that same month that Charlotte bought the sofa—or rather, made an exchange for it. Like most farmers’ wives, she never saw money of her own save what she made from her poultry, and her savings had been exhausted by the purchase of Fanny’s gown. She therefore traded for the sofa, 1870 horsehair and walnut, a mahogany tallboy come with her plenishings from Norfolk. It was more than a hundred years old, so Charlotte considered she had a bargain; and regretted it chiefly because she kept best sheets in it, and a little because it had been her grandmother’s.)

  Fanny could thus receive her callers in style—on a sofa, in a parlour, best china to hand. When she had me too, she had a maid. I was in attendance Tuesday and Thursday, when Mrs. Brewer and Miss Jones always came together, to make their tea. (Gooseberry-wine wasn’t smart enough.) Since other ladies might appear Monday, Wednesday or Friday, on those days too I held myself in readiness—hair brushed, hands washed, best blue alpaca. I got no enjoyment from these parties. Indeed, it was the unfortunate fact that no one liked Fanny’s callers except Fanny: my aunts despised them for gadabouts, while I positively detested them because they reminded me of my mother’s visitors in London. Now I come to think of it, it may have been just such ladies they incompetently aped, when they tinkled with affected laughter, and told me not to listen, and pinched my cheek with their gloves on. I would have had nothing to do with them, if I hadn’t been putting Fanny first.

  She, to my surprise, never seemed tired by these visits at all. She seemed if anything better, and stronger for them.—I remember with what a look of life, almost of energy, she once called me back from seeing Miss Jones and Mrs. Brewer out.

  “Sit down, dear, another moment,” cried Fanny Davis, “before Mrs. Toby calls you to the great, groaning board.” (She meant our supper. Her guests often stayed so late, they smelled cooking as they left. My Aunt Grace used to affirm they’d be glad enough to stay for that also, but Fanny herself could endure pork no more than noise.) “If you, dear, find my little parties rather dull and lifeless,” continued Fanny Davis, quite sharply, “that’s just your London breeding. Just reflect how much duller we should be without them! Has there ever been any society here before?—Though Sylvesters are almost County? So I really must ask you not to pull quite such a long face again, when Miss Jones offers to kiss you.…”

  It was the measure of her emotional empire over me that I didn’t protest. Because to speak of Miss Jones or Mrs. Brewer in the same breath as County was simply fantastic. County didn’t even shop at their shops. If Sylvesters wanted County-callers my Aunt Charlotte had only to pay one visit-in-form upon the Lord-Lieutenant’s lady, to be sure of her return visit at least once every two years.… I didn’t protest, because Fanny’s callers gave her pleasure. But I wasn’t blind. I saw more than Fanny perhaps thought. Miss Jones, and Mrs. Brewer, produced a little illusion of society; Miss Jones also, occasionally, brought Fanny a letter.

  2

  I naturally wasn’t cut off from my aunts entirely. I recall in particular, about mid-August, one specially enjoyable conversation with Charlotte.

  It was a very warm, still evening: I, glancing from the window of Fanny’s bedroom, (where I had been sent after a fresh handkerchief), saw her standing for once idle beside the little crab; and for once letting Fanny wait, ran down, and out, to join her.

  (To reach the crab-apple plot from any upstairs-room one had to go down the main stair, then out through the kitchen, and round the whole west wing of the house. By the great front door it would have been quicker, but that door was always barred. It had been barred on the night of Fanny’s arrival; like all Sylvester brides, she had entered by the court. I remembered this as I ran down, because I was also remembering seeing Fanny there, under the crab; looking up at the house, as though—why should the childish fancy strike me now? It certainly hadn’t then—as though putting a spell on it.)

  My Aunt Charlotte turned as I approached, and, smiling, laid a hand to the tree’s slender trunk.

  “Be ’ee come to portray our crab at last?” said she.

  I was a little disconcerted. It hadn’t occurred to me that my absorption in Fanny Davis, and my consequent neglect not only of my aunts, but of all my usual occupations, might have been in any resentful sense noticed. Certainly my Aunt Charlotte didn’t sound resentful, now. But because the handkerchief wasn’t my sketching-block, I held it behind me. I said, awkwardly,

  “I just saw you, so I came out.”

&
nbsp; “So I be still worth coming out for, that’s better than portraying the crab,” said my Aunt Charlotte.

  I cannot describe with what simplicity she said it. I think, now, that she felt quite acutely my defection from her to Fanny Davis. I think, now, that she waited for me to run, at bed-time, to her room—I running instead to Fanny’s. (To talk about the man of my choice.) But nothing whatever of this showed in her tone, there wasn’t a breath of reproach in it, nor a note of chiding. She said simply, what she simply meant; that if I still wanted to be with her, she was glad.

  The small, the so elegant tree—the tree so admired of us both—stood like a gay and elegant friend to ease my awkwardness. I went up close to my Aunt Charlotte and pushed my free hand into hers. I didn’t try to explain anything. There was no need. I could straightaway tell her something.

  “Aunt Charlotte,” I said, “when Charles came home last year, was it the day I left?”

  “Sure as daylight ’twas,” said she. “However did ’ee guess?”

  “I saw him at the station,” I announced conceitedly. “I saw him get out of the train.”

  “Did ’ee now!” marvelled my Aunt Charlotte. “And how did ’ee know ’twas he?”

  When I said, because he was such a Sylvester, she immediately looked round for something to give me to eat. But the crabs weren’t ripe, and would in any case have been sour, so she just knocked the breath out of my body with a hug.

  “Ain’t it true!” cried my Aunt Charlotte. “B’aint he a Sylvester all over? And b’aint he the very handsomest of all?”

  I violently agreed. I asked eagerly, didn’t everyone think he was wonderful, at the Assembly?

  “Sure as daylight they did,” said my Aunt Charlotte—with such a lift in her voice as I can only describe by the word seagulls: seagulls, in London, on the river, or on the ponds in the parks, being my highest simile for all that was proud and glorious. “Him showed to all what son I bore for my eldest,” said Charlotte. “To see ’un dance, all rejoiced!”