The Gypsy in the Parlour Read Online Free PDF

it was because I knew something my aunts didn’t; and I thought Fanny Davis must have said something —uttered perhaps no more than some half-caught words which nonetheless lodged in Charlotte’s memory—denoting a wish to look out for ever on our crab. If so, I considered it highly romantic. (I was as avid, that year, for romances, lent me by our cook at home, as I had once been for fairy-tales.)—I think now that perhaps Fanny shared my taste, for as the days passed, as it became increasingly obvious that she understood nothing whatever of the female work of a farm, my aunts’ uninhibited questioning drew forth a highly romantic history.
    It was romantically vague. Of her childhood, even of her young girlhood, the most that could be discovered was a sort of shadow-novelette. A father deceased before she could remember him nonetheless trailed clouds of glory: hints of aristocratic connections at once explained and made impressive an absence of paternal relations so complete as to have been otherwise suspicious. Her mother, also in the grave, had been so distinguished for ethereal beauty that her early death occasioned no surprise. If it seemed likely that she had also been a milliner, that was simply because Fanny Davis herself was so apprenticed.—This last was the single fact possible to check, impossible of disguise: my Uncle Stephen having first encountered her in a milliner’s shop.
    â€œWhatever was he at, dear souls?” marvelled my Aunt Rachel.
    â€œHim saw she through the window,” said my Aunt Grace.
    â€œAnd what did he see? I be proper baffled,” said my simple Aunt Rachel. “If ’twas any one of we, for example, ’twould make sense …” She turned—I was with them in the kitchen, for baking-day, so I saw her—and in a scrap of mirror preened her long, milk-coloured throat. She was in fact the beauty of them all; and modestly but thoroughly knew it.
    â€œHark to me, bors,” said my Aunt Charlotte. “There’s women catch men by beauty, and others that catch ’em by worth. Us three, and why not speak it, caught our men by both.”
    â€œSo far as concerns Matthew, ’twas all made up ’twixt ’ee and I,” said my Aunt Grace calmly.
    â€œAh, but he’d never have taken ’ee without your beauty,” retorted Charlotte. “That’s a Sylvester male all over—wants the earth and also the moon. But there’s some women catches ’em by something other; ’tis not beauty—for to me Fanny’s no more than an emmet—and not by worth, for she knows naught to any purpose. ’Ee might call it a kind of female charm; which I say she must possess, or how would young Stephen be so beguiled?”
    â€œYou say it, but do ’ee see it?” demanded my Aunt Grace.
    â€œNo,” said my Aunt Charlotte. “But I might, were I a male.”
    There was a short pause. I think I was forgotten—by this time I was under the table, cutting cats out of pastry.
    â€œCharlotte: what’s she to do here?” asked my Aunt Grace point-blank.
    â€œTrim up our bonnets,” said Charlotte, laughing.
    Thus good-humouredly, tolerantly, almost off-handedly, they accepted Stephen’s choice: no doubt feeling the Sylvesters strong enough to afford, as a sort of luxury, this little, last, useless bride.
    2
    She did nothing all day long.
    It was astonishing to me, in an adult. I suppose that in a sense I did nothing either—or nothing useful; but I was so perpetually running after my aunts, or strumming on the piano, or loitering about the yard or drawing the crab-tree, that I certainly couldn’t have been called inactive. Fanny Davis did nothing but sit at a window, or wander about the house. (She liked to look at things, particularly in the parlour: she liked looking at the lustre-ware in the cabinet, which I once or twice found her handling, and at the big