The Gypsy in the Parlour Read Online Free PDF Page A

it lay most spreadingly, a stencilled pagoda), disengage a shadow that moved.
    Out of the shadow of the crab-tree stepped first the shadow, then the figure, of Fanny Davis, whom I had just left seated at her dressing-table.
    She stood looking at the house. I saw her plainly. It was no trick of moonlight; no moon-trick ever produced image so solid, likeness so doppelgänger-exact. I saw her.
    My panic, for it was panic, fixed itself on one point: that she might see me. I crouched down on the window-seat, flattening myself below the sill; thence at last to slide stiffly to the floor, and creep into my cold bed.
    4
    With morning, of course, everything became explicable. I saw that I had made an error in judging what time elapsed since I left Miss Davis’ room. No doubt I ran straight from her door to the window-seat: but quite probably fell straight asleep on it. It could have been an hour later, or two hours, before I awoke to see Fanny Davis under the crab. (I was perfectly certain it was no dream.) As to why she was there, my romantic imagination easily supplied an answer: she had gone to meet my Uncle Stephen.—I have already described the milling jollity of their welcome; the one thing no one seemed to have imagined, for one instant, was that the lovers might wish some little time alone …
    I was so pleased with my perspicacity, I ran out early to examine the ground under the little tree. I hoped to find footprints—hers narrow and pointed, my Uncle Stephen’s horseshoe-broad. But there had been no rain for a week, the ground about the crab was like iron: Assemblies could have danced there, without leaving a trace.

CHAPTER III
    1
    The wedding was set for a month off, just time, (so all Sylvesters wedded), to call the banns; the betwixt-and-between interval, while Fanny Davis hung poised between maiden- and matron-hood, was characterized, so to speak, by being un characterized.
    It was a month just like any other. Nothing was changed. The torrent of my aunts’ talk rushed loud and unceasing through the house with never a new note in it. Admittedly one had to be quick, one had to shout, to get a word in, and Miss Davis’ voice was peculiarly soft; but in the early days at least my aunts used actually to pause , to check themselves and wait, to give her a chance. Miss Davis never seemed to wish to take it.
    She seemed to have nothing to say. She had neither opinions nor tastes. She hadn’t even an appetite. The amount she left on her plate would have fed a plough-boy—I believe often did feed a plough-boy; she made no more impression on the viands than did her extra place at the table itself. It was such a large table, it could easily have accommodated, besides the eight Sylvesters and myself, half-a-dozen more such wrens as Fanny.
    So the Sylvester women came gradually to ignore her. They didn’t mean to. The original joke, the joke of Stephen’s finding himself a wife, still aroused in them the old hilarity. (It was odd, sometimes, to hear them go off in a reminiscent gale of laughter, of which the very cause and spring sat quietly by.) They had meant to cosset Stephen’s bride uncommonly, perhaps spoil her a little, as they spoilt him. But how could they, when she slipped so unobtrusively about that one never knew, without looking, whether she was or wasn’t in the room?—When she uttered never a ‘no’, always a ‘yes’, to every proposal? She didn’t even choose her marriage chamber. I knew I was to be dispossessed, as soon as I went home, of my room above the grassplot—but on the say-so of my Aunt Charlotte. “’Tis the best that’s left,” she coaxed me. “’Tis the one most fitting. When ’ee comes back next year, us’ll hang new curtains for ’ee where Fanny bides now; maybe there’ll be a new carpet. ’Twill be so pretty, ’ee did never see the like …”
    If I didn’t protest,