The Gypsy in the Parlour Read online

  I had always wanted to hear more about the Assembly. I asked now, did he dance with anyone besides Fanny?

  My Aunt Charlotte laughed her old big laugh.—We were a long way from the parlour, so Fanny couldn’t hear us.

  “He asked his old mother,” said she. “He invited I, my lamb, to stand up wi’ him for the Lancers! As the handsomest woman present, said he! Goes wi’out saying I denied ’un, so he took Fanny again; but I’ll lay there be few females in Devon have refused both Lord-Lieutenant and their own big, handsome son.”

  We didn’t stay much longer. When I asked where Charlie was now, and why he’d gone off, she simply shrugged her big shoulders. All Sylvesters being so wild as hawks, and in particular so hating any authority over them, Charlie’d gone off as ’twere by nature. When him wrote, she’d a good mind to summon him back; but in the meantime contentedly basked in the recollection of his, and her, Assembly-triumphs. She could recall every single one of his partners—including the Lord-Lieutenant’s daughter. “Bred just as ’ee, my lamb,” gloried my Aunt Charlotte, “in the best of London schools—yet not too proud to stand up wi’ my Charlie, and indeed complimenting he after the valse, upon his remarkable stepping!”

  It was a pity we couldn’t stay longer; she had her multifarious duties, I a handkerchief to take to Fanny. But we had recaptured, if only for minutes, the old, golden happiness: as my Aunt Charlotte stood laughing beside the crab-tree, with its leaves in her hair.—I remember the incident particularly, as one remembers a last up-shooting ray, before the sun sets.

  CHAPTER X

  1

  The first time I heard my aunts quarrel, it was as though the skies fell.

  They were all upstairs in the great linen-closet. There was an enormous quantity of linen at the farm, each aunt having her separate store, marked with her own maiden initials; about once a year, when they needed new pudding-cloths, it was all taken out, and gone through, and regraded from unused best to ready for cutting up. As a rule my aunts enjoyed this business enormously: they had a great feeling for linen, and so loyally and lengthily admired each other’s double-damask napkins, or hand-worked runners or Irish linen sheets, it was often a couple of hours before the last pile was hoisted back in place. On this occasion, to make things even pleasanter, they were replenishing the lavender-bags at the same time: when I looked in all the small muslin sacks lay empty in a neat pile, their contents tipped into, and almost filling, a two-quart measure, and my Aunt Rachel stood spoon in hand beside a great fragrant purple mound on a great wooden tray.

  The scent was indescribably delicious. I determined to stay and help. Just as I was about to advance this proposal, my Aunt Rachel, turning to smile at me, with a brush of her big arm sent a sprinkle of lavender over Grace’s counted napkins; and Grace called her a clumsy fool.

  “Grace Beer, hold thy tongue,” said Charlotte.

  “Then let Rachel hold her great fist. My stars, so mad I be driven by her clumsiness, ’tis like working with a bullock.”

  “Sure enough ’ee should know their ways,” retorted Charlotte, “only bullocks buying damask so shoddy ’tis damaged by a blossom. Sweep away the mighty disaster, Rachel, ere Grace’s bed-linen also reveals its cheap worth.…”

  I stared incredulously at the tiny palmful of lavender Rachel managed to scoop up. I could almost count the grains: a dozen, no more, and most sweet-scented. I couldn’t believe they had caused the first quarrel I ever heard between my aunts.

  2

  As of course they had not. The roots of the quarrelling lay far deeper. But it was some time before I realised what these were: even after I had overheard, more than once, my Aunt Grace snap that Fanny should be sent away, I was still so far from comprehending that I thought she meant Fanny should be sent to the sea, to try sea-air, or even to London, to consult some famous doctor. (I freely proffered advice, and was snubbed for my pains.) The tiny, foolish quarrel in the linen-closet as its first result simply drove me more than ever in on Fanny’s parlour, away from the house.

  Or had I already, subconsciously, felt the house divided? Its citadel of content mind, its golden solidarity split? I find the question hard to answer: yet surely, had my aunts’ abundant mirth still showered like the honey-fountain of old, I must have abandoned Fanny Davis to run out and play in it. I think I felt, long before I consciously recognized them, such changes in the farm’s life as I did not wish to face. Heaven should be immutable.

  I therefore ran to Fanny’s parlour, and shut my eyes.

  My aunts, I am quite sure, did their best to promote my blindness. They did their best to keep their dissension from me. But after I had witnessed that first quarrel—first to me—they grew a little careless, as they grew a little careless of me altogether. They were never unkind, but I felt myself no longer quite so much their pet. (I was Fanny Davis’ pet.) They always tried not to quarrel when I was there, but their bickering grew to be so continual, nothing could conceal the fact that there was now dissension between my aunts.

  It was appalling, it was incredible, but it was so. Only to the outside world did they still present the united front of the three Sylvester women: within doors they were divided—Charlotte ranged against Grace, Rachel an unhappy trimmer. There were days when Charlotte and Grace would not speak to each other. There were days when the quarrel flared—yet could not flare out, into the shouting and loudness that would have relieved them both. I see now how much their natures must have been exasperated by the constant effort after quiet, by the constant frustration of their natural tendency to noise and clatter. They were not naturally quiet women. But how could they shout their day-long argument, when even a banging door made Fanny ill? How, above all, could they shout a quarrel—so, at last I comprehended—of which Fanny Davis was the argument?

  What at last opened my eyes began as no more than a trivial passage of words, such as I was now unhappily accustomed to, between my Aunts Rachel and Grace.

  “See there, now!” mourned my Aunt Rachel—handling a chipped lustre plate above her own private wash-bowl in the kitchen. “If I h’ain’t damaged ’un at last!”

  “So more fool ’ee,” snapped my Aunt Grace. “Why did ’ee ever fetch ’un forth, as I warned ’ee ’gainst, from its rightful situation? Why don’t ’ee put all back and turn the key?”

  “Fanny sets such store by the use of ’em,” said my Aunt Rachel weakly.

  “Then let Fanny save ’em from destruction by swallowing her conceit. However, ’ee knows my opinion ere this.”

  “Sure as daylight us do: ’ee’ve dinned it often enough in our ears,” said my Aunt Charlotte—who happened also to be in the kitchen, raising pastry for a pie.—So was I in the kitchen too, under the table with a stolen handful of dough. Two inches of oak sheltered me from the storm about to break above: I nonetheless cowered. I sensed, without actually anticipating, the imminence of thunderbolts. For a moment all was still—just as in nature; then I heard my Aunt Grace, who was stuffing a fowl, deliberately throw down, like a gauntlet, her big metal spoon.

  “Din it I may have, into ears so deaf as adders’,” said she. “I’ll din it yet again, for the Sylvester good. I’ll say now as I’ve said before: I say go her must and shall.”

  “And I say, she shall stay,” said my Aunt Charlotte.

  Again there was a pause; then Grace laughed, a short, bitter laugh. It was so unlike her old hilarious gust that had I not known for certain, I could never have believed she uttered it.

  “And who be ’ee, Charlotte, so to lay down the law?”

  “I be Tobias’ wife,” returned Charlotte. “I be wife to the eldest son, and accordingly head in this house. ’Twas I, for example, wedded ’ee to Matthew, Grace Beer—as ’ee was once very grateful to acknowledge.”

  My Aunt Grace laughed again. There was such an edge to her laugh, it was like a whip.—Yet it wasn’t loud. They all, still, kept their voices down. It made the quarrel more dreadful than ever.

  “I took what I’d a mi
nd to,” said she. “I took ’un drunken, I took ’un unlettered as a hind, for that I fancied the black Sylvester looks. I could ha’ picked he up any day after market, Charlotte, wi’ my father and brothers to back I …”

  “’Ee were glad enough still of my favour,” said Charlotte. I couldn’t see, I only heard and felt her pain. But she controlled it, as she controlled her voice. She said steadily, “Leave that all aside, bor, with the rest. ’Ee knows as well as I the thing be impossible, for whither would Fanny go?”

  “Back whence her came. To Plymouth.”

  “To fare how in Plymouth? B’aint her little shop sold up this twelvemonth?”

  “Then halt the first gypsy-van past our gate,” said my Aunt Grace, “and let ’em take back their own.”

  I didn’t realise, then, all the words implied. I knew only that they were a threat. I waited most anxiously for Charlotte to turn it aside.

  “Superstitiousness belongs to maids and fools,” said she greatly. “I be neither. And if maybe I care no more for Fanny Davis than ’ee do, I care much for Sylvester standing. To turn her away, so sick as she be, scarce able to set foot to ground, would be accounted by all a very shameful, unchristian act. ’Twould be said, at best, we’m so skinflint as misers, grudging her bite and sup; or that maybe we’m struck down by sudden poverty, and ourselves be open to parish-aid.”

  So, and so overwhelmingly, spoke my Aunt Charlotte. Yet Grace answered her.

  “’Tis maids and fools also,” said she, “fear hard words. I care for Sylvester standing no less than ’ee do. Maybe more: for I see most plainly, and be ready to bear all cost, that ’less Fanny be rooted from amongst we, us may pay in more than unkind talk.”

  In the final silence that ensued I crept quietly out, and slid through the door, and ran to the only place about the farm I knew to be unhappy in.

  3

  This was a stone-walled, slate-roofed outhouse, open on one side, accommodating a pump now in disuse: therefore no longer kept in repair, and left standing only because its extreme solidity made it troublesome to pull down. Moss-grown, damp and dilapidated, it had witnessed, from my first visit to the farm, what few tears I ever shed there.—Tears only once, as I remember, of remorse or guilt, after I spoiled a whole baking by opening the oven-door to look inside; but tears almost regularly on the day before I went home. Misery now drove me thither by instinct, not to weep but to think.

  And rightly: my thoughts were most wretched. It wasn’t only the revelation of my aunts’ disunity that shook me, though this was quite bad enough. It wasn’t only the revelation of their dislike for Fanny Davis. I didn’t even begin, (pressing my forehead against the cold iron upright of the pump, scuffing a heel over the flags, cruelly scarring the moss), to examine either. I accepted, for the moment, both dislike and disunity as facts, but beyond comprehension. My most pressing trouble was purely personal.

  I was Fanny Davis’ little friend, and I was her little Queen’s Messenger.

  I had promised to bring her word of all everyone did, and thought.

  Hitherto, at the news of a setting of eggs, or the sale of a chicken, Fanny had raised whimsical, disappointed brows. I now, for the first time, found myself in possession of information. I had such information, I could turn informer.

  I felt like a person who, accepting for prestige and excitement the rôle of spy, suddenly finds himself called upon to betray.

  —But betray whom? Two loyalties equally divided my soul. Fanny’s absolute ignorance of what threatened made her to me a more pathetic figure than ever. I didn’t minimize the threat; I sensed Rachel at heart Grace’s ally. I saw Charlotte, however formidably, facing them alone. I saw also how Rachel might possibly be detached; when I thought what Fanny could do, the trivial conclusion was not so trivial as it may seem. Fanny could stop having callers, and so stop using Rachel’s china: Rachel, thus touched, might very well veer to Charlotte.…

  Moreover I also knew Fanny’s callers to be a point of annoyance all round, as a sort of dereliction from Sylvester standards. I thought I might do quite a lot of good, if by telling Fanny, I ridded us all of Mrs. Brewer and Miss Jones. In this way my informing could produce nothing but benefit.

  Unfortunately I was equally conscious that my Aunts Charlotte, Grace and Rachel would have forbidden me, had the notion entered their heads that I might do so, to repeat a single one of their words. That they didn’t think of such a thing was because they trusted me.—I remembered with accuracy my Aunt Charlotte’s look as I slipped from the kitchen: of surprise, because she had forgotten I was there, and of distress, at the distress she guessed at in myself; but no hint of warning, of hold-your-tongue. She could most easily have called me back, to warn me in words; it simply hadn’t occurred to her to do so …

  I scuffed at the mossy flags. (The scars so criss-crossed each other, I could have played myself noughts-and-crosses.) My forehead grew cold, and probably dirty, from contact with cold iron. I still didn’t know what to do. Fanny Davis was waiting for me to make tea: my Aunt Charlotte, very likely, was waiting for me to run and be comforted—waiting perhaps with some word that would make all right again. But for once, for the first time, I doubted my Aunt Charlotte’s powers; I felt that what I had heard would take as long to heal over, as the scarred moss underfoot.

  CHAPTER XI

  1

  The court, as I recrossed it, was extraordinarily quiet. So was the whole house; there seemed to be no one about at all. (Long afterwards, I learnt that my Aunt Grace had taken out the pony-trap, and my Aunt Charlotte gone down to the hen-runs, and my Aunt Rachel to her own room. It was the Sylvester women’s tragedy that the first real threat to their house found them disunited.) I washed my face in the empty kitchen: mounted, noiselessly, the silent stair. Evidently no one had called; when I as quietly as possible pushed open the parlour-door, there lay Fanny Davis silent and alone.

  “Fanny?” I whispered. “Shall I make your tea?”

  She raised her head, painfully. The short, smoky fringe of her hair clung in uncombed wisps about her forehead; she had no colour whatever. I saw at once it was one of her worst days—and my heart went out to her.

  “Then I’m not quite forgotten, after all?” said she—not crossly, pathetically. “The fire is almost out, dear; but blow, and it may still boil my little cup …”

  Guilty and wretched, I hastened to the bellows. Fortunately only a puff was needed. From the logs brought in each morning I pulled out oak and ash, for substance and flame, and let the kettle down on its chain. Fanny Davis watched me fondly.

  “What in the world should I do, dear,” she murmured, “without my little friend? How sweet you look there, just like a little Cinderella!—Isn’t the house very quiet to-day?”

  I mumbled that everyone seemed to be out. I added that it wasn’t Miss Jones’ and Mrs. Brewer’s afternoon.

  “So we may be all the snugger by ourselves,” said Fanny Davis. “Really, dear, if the man of your choice were to see you now, I’m sure he’d pop at once! The firelight, on your pretty hair, is quite enchanting!”

  She had the most caressing voice I have ever heard. Indeed, indeed we could be snug together … Have I not described already the snugness of the parlour—Fanny and I nested before the fire? If only my mind hadn’t been so distracted I could have asked for nothing more than to sit so beside her for ever …

  “Where have they gone?” enquired Fanny, rather abruptly.

  I knew she referred to my aunts. I said they hadn’t told me.

  “That’s unusual,” said Fanny Davis.

  She was of course right. The kettle began to sing, I busied myself with warming the tea-pot. I felt her scrutinising me rather closely; I hoped she was still admiring my hair, and consciously tossed back a braid.

  “In four or five years,” said I, “I expect I’ll have it up.”

  “When you’ll look sweeter than ever, dear,” Fanny Davis assured me. “We must hope chignons are still in … I, of course—” she
rubbed her head carelessly against the cushions—“I, of course, with my poor crop, must remain completely indifferent. But you shall bring me your first hair-pins, dear, and let Fanny transform you!”

  I had to turn my face away. She spoke with such innocent confidence, in such complete assurance that any number of years would find her still there for me … But in even one year, where would poor Fanny be? Luckily I now had the tea to make, and made it, and looked about for the cream. For once there wasn’t any. Rachel, who usually brought up a special little jug after dinner, had forgotten. Well I knew why!—and with the knowledge heavy on my heart, heard Fanny excuse her.…

  “Forgotten?” smiled Fanny Davis. “Quite natural, if they’re all, as you say, abroad. No invalid can hope to be remembered every day; that’s asking too much altogether!”

  She wasn’t even vexed. When—I offering to run for it—she stopped me, saying perhaps after all Mrs. Luke hadn’t the cream to spare, she looked almost gay.

  “Indeed, there may be other reasons still,” added Fanny Davis lightly, “such as the success of my poor little tea-parties: jealousy often—as I hope you, dear, may never live to find-taking the most trivial form imaginable. So just pour me a horrid creamless cup—which I believe is at least fashionable—and let the rest of the world sulk as it likes. What an oasis of peace this is!” exclaimed Fanny Davis, casting an affectionate glance over her parlour. “My own, own room, sacred to me and my own little friend!—For if I let in Joneses and Brewers, dear, it’s but to keep just in touch with the world beyond; really and truly, this room belongs to you and me.”

  With passionate sincerity I cried yes, that was what I wanted too: Fanny always there for me in our parlour, for ever and ever.…