The Gypsy in the Parlour (8 page)

When I asked had anything
happened
at the Assembly, she beamed with reminiscent pleasure.

“Dear soul, 'twas sheer triumph!” said my Aunt Rachel. “Fanny in her new gown, so fine 'ee never did see, and young Charles the handsomest male present! Up 'un stood before all and invited she to dance!—Which her did, through two sets and a valse.”

I digested this in silence. I knew that my aunts, like most farmers' wives, went year by year to the Assembly without dancing at all. They went to see and be seen—particularly, as Sylvesters, the latter. It was legendary that Charlotte, on
her
first appearance, had been asked by the Lord-Lieutenant himself. She refused. (She said afterwards she was feared of treading him, he being no more sizable than a kitten to her. The Lord-Lieutenant, with a duty-list longer than his programme, bore Charlotte nothing but goodwill.) The precedent thus set, my aunts never danced at all; possibly they knew themselves more impressive, at a ball, in repose.—But when Charles asked her, Fanny stood up; and made a wonderful show too, whisking her peacock train over the floor.…

“'Twas then I gave Charlotte best,” said my Aunt Grace, who at, this point joined our conversation. “Right and left beside me I heard females guessing to its price. ‘'Tis a proper piece of Sylvester pride,' I heard 'un say; naturally taking no note.”

Fanny had in fact been the belle of the ball—dancing, when the Lord-Lieutenant asked her, with him too, and dancing after that with her own Stephen. (“Who made a proper bees'-nest of it,” said my Aunt Grace. “No Sylvester knowing straw-foot from hay-foot—save Charlie, who'm travelled.”) So they came home in great triumph; my Aunt Charlotte particularly glorying in the figure cut by her son.…

It was like her that she gloried almost as much in Fanny. She had indeed in a sense
made
Fanny, re-created Fanny's whole personality, by the gift of the peacock gown; a lesser woman might still have been jealous.—They were none of them jealous. Even Fanny's break with tradition by dancing delighted them—all Sylvesters reflecting each other's glory: whatever the neighbourhood expected, it hadn't expected
that
, and its bedazzlement was the completer. “What did I tell 'ee!” cried Charlotte, beaming right and left like a midnight sun. “What did I say to 'ee, Mrs. Brewer? Mrs. Pomfret, what did I tell 'ee? Haven't our Stephen brought home the beautifullest bride yet?”

So they returned in great triumph. It was upon the heels of triumph, not of failure, that Fanny's illness struck.

Next morning, as Charlotte had told me, she didn't find herself so well. This was at first put down to natural fatigue; she was given breakfast in bed. But she couldn't stomach it. She wasn't queasy, she just had no appetite. This again at first occasioned no alarm; Fanny always ate like a wren. But when by night-fall she still hadn't eaten, and when, attempting to get up, she could totter no more than half-a-dozen steps, my aunts began to look at each other. The wedding was but two days off; a very poor thing 'twould look, if Fanny couldn't march smartly up the aisle.…

By the following afternoon they had the doctor over from Frampton. For all his cleverness—and no one set a broken leg, or a broken collar-bone, more expeditiously—he couldn't put a name to what ailed Fanny. The one thing he said for certain was that it wasn't catching; and advised, sensibly enough, a week's repose in a darkened room.

When Charlotte pointed out that Fanny couldn't repose next day, because she was going to be married, Dr. Lush pulled at his beard and said he'd better have a word with the patient alone. This Charlotte naturally refused, seeing no reason in the world to do otherwise; moreover Fanny from her bed stretched a hand—a hand already pale, already an invalid's—to detain her. (“And very right and proper too,” said my Aunt Charlotte. “Fanny behaved most proper all along.”)

“Dear Dr. Lush,” whispered Fanny Davis, “dear Mrs. Toby knows all. I would go to my Stephen if it meant my death. If I can be carried into church—let me be carried.”

Charlotte and Dr. Lush looked at each other. What risk he might run, if he let Fanny be put on a stretcher and so borne to her wedding, I suppose he didn't quite know. No doctor likes a patient to die in public, especially with, so to speak, his permission. Charlotte's answering glance put him out of a dilemma.

“Us must wait,” said Charlotte decidedly. “Let a week pass: 'twill do no harm. Let Fanny get back her strength, which have so mysteriously departed, by whatever clever means 'ee have to offer; and I'll be much obliged to 'ee, Doctor, if 'ee'll spread the news in Frampton as to the sad postponement.”

On second thoughts, however, she kept him drinking cider while she consulted her sisters-in-law. They both agreed that she had acted in the only possible way.

At the end of the week Fanny Davis was neither better nor worse. She complained of no pain, save in her breast—“Which may well be heart-ache,” said Fanny pathetically. “
How
my heart aches, to see my dearest Stephen so forlorn!” Stephen indeed went wretchedly about his work, and sat night after night by his beloved's couch. (One of my aunts chaperoning them. All my aunts believed firmly, and were probably right in doing so, that once one got a Sylvester on the proper track to matrimony, there should be no loosening up on 'un.) In this particular case, however, I fancy the chaperonage was purely conventional, in order to leave no chink for evil tongues; to my aunts Fanny appeared much worse than Dr. Lush made out. They weren't used to illness. No Sylvester ever ailed a day. The Sylvester women, unlike their menfolk, did not thence draw the conclusion that they were immortal; what they did tend to conclude was that anyone taking to bed must be on the point of death.

“Us never left she alone one instant,” my Aunt Rachel assured me, “all that first parlous week. And 'twas then Charlie showed his good heart, for what wi' work and watching, and the consequent need of day-time slumber, us were very thankful indeed to know him seated beside she of an afternoon.”

(“'Tis my belief, as 'tis Charlotte's, 'twas that drove 'un off,” said my Aunt Grace rather tartly. “There's naught a male tires of quicker than a sick-room.”)

For all their care, at the end of the week it was plainly apparent that the wedding would have to be postponed indefinitely.

Fanny could only just stand. To walk, she had to be supported. She seemed to be suffering from a complete cessation of physical strength. If she could presently move, a little, and eat, just a little, she could do no more. As more weeks passed she got a little better. When I arrived a year later she was able to be moved, by day, into the parlour. But she hadn't regained any useful strength. She was in a decline.

2

What the doctors of to-day would have made of Fanny's case I am not sure. Possibly it wasn't a case for doctors at all; possibly it was a case for psychiatrists. Yet certainly it wasn't, at the time, a particularly uncommon one: ladies lay in declines all up and down the country. (For example, the sister of the Reverend Thomas Leigh, no farther off than Taunton, and so practically a neighbour, lay down on her sofa at the age of sixteen, and remained there—1859 to 1880—until her edifying demise.) There are all sorts of words, to-day, to fit Fanny's condition; my aunts used the word decline. Fanny Davis was gone into a decline: they found it most sad and misfortunate, but I don't think unnatural. She wasn't yet a Sylvester, who no more went into declines than they took pleasure-trips, and had always appeared both weakly and genteel—the two essential conditions one couldn't go into a decline without. (No common person ever went into one. Common persons couldn't afford to. Also, there needed to be a sofa. No sofa, no decline.) I think that at the beginning my aunts found Fanny Davis' decline almost a source of prestige; and certainly would have resented it far more, had she succumbed to pink-eye.

I spent hours on end in Fanny's parlour. It was no hardship to me, the parlour was so snug.—The word worth examination: snug is a winter word: outside Fanny's parlour summer blazed. But because she kept always, as I have described, the curtains half-drawn, and because there was always a fire, to go into Fanny's parlour was to go from summer into winter. I do not believe I ever consciously noticed this; I felt only, by her sofa, a warm enclosed intimacy quite different from the open airy humour of the surrounding house. (I never, for example, save to the parlour, admitted even the shadow of the man of my choice.) This frequentation made of course a certain change in my habits—paralleling certain other changes, in the habits of my aunts; my first impression of changelessness having been mistaken.…

The house, outside Fanny's parlour, was no less light and sun-filled than before, but it was much quieter.

My aunts no longer carried on their long shouted conversations from room to room, and even at close quarters subdued their big voices to a normal volume. The reason was that Fanny lay always with the parlour-door ajar, so as to be not quite cut off from the life of the house. At the same time, her nerves couldn't endure noise, and they were so delicately tuned that even a shout shouted in the kitchen sounded absolutely in her ear. This was so well understood that if one of my aunts accidentally reverted to her usual pitch, someone immediately ran to see if Fanny was all right. I was often so dispatched myself—“Are you all right, Fanny?” I would enquire anxiously; and though she always replied that she was, she would still be quivering all over, from shock. Naturally everyone did all they could to spare her, and if I at first found the house so very quiet as to seem almost mournful, I soon got used to it. I saw it as necessary, and the interest of having such a tremendous invalid to cherish amply consoled me for the lack of familiar noise. I not only shot to Fanny's side at the banging of a door, but stayed there, as I have said, for hours on end.

CHAPTER VIII

1

The house was much quieter, my aunts' big voices were subdued; I spent more time indoors, especially on Fanny's calling-days, of which more later; but whatever changes took place in the women's world, none showed in the masculine world without. The life of the Sylvester farm, (to me, paradoxically, so remote), was no more affected by old Mr. Sylvester's death, than if he had been a bird tumbled from its perch. Tobias, inheriting, merely became master in name as for years he had been master in fact: for years it was he who settled all policy, set the dates to, plough or sow. Perhaps a little more than Charlotte he was inclined to play the despot; but his brothers were used to that too, and bore his yoke by custom.

I don't think old Mr. Sylvester was mourned very much. All my aunts had been scrupulous in their observance of him, and perhaps fond of him, in a way, because he wasn't the nusiance he might have been. They weren't at all sentimental women. They'd have been glad to have had in Dr. Lush, just for the look of the thing, but they certainly didn't regret any lingering illness. They had one invalid on their hands already. “'Twas best for he and we alike,” said my Aunt Charlotte philosophically …

His sons were even less affected. I heard that even at his funeral—a most proper and well-attended occasion—they showed no emotion whatever. But when Tobias, under the eye of half Frampton, cast into the grave the last clod his father would ever own, it wasn't any sexton-handful. Tobias bore all the way in his pocket, my Aunt Charlotte told me, a fistful of proper farm-soil from the Sylvester fields.

Tobias inherited.—Even less, now, than I did then, can I understand the Sylvester theory of primogeniture. They behaved, so far as I can see, as though they were earls, or barons; subject to some undefined law of entail. Old Mr. Sylvester left no will; it was nonetheless accepted that Tobias inherited. It also seemed to be assumed that his brothers had the right of what one can only term
livelihood
. They, with their wives, had such rights to the Sylvester farm as would enable them to live upon it not only during their work-days, but also when they too should perch and blink, like their father, by the tribal hearth. None of this was put into words, still less into writing; it was simply the common assumption, directed to the common good.

2

The only person in the least uneasy was Fanny Davis; and I found it extraordinarily touching, if at the same time superfluous, that even on her bed of pain she took such anxious thought for my Aunt Charlotte.

“Call me over-careful if you will,” said Fanny Davis humbly. “No doubt it's my own unfortunate experience makes me so.” (Her mother had bequeathed her a pearl necklace: Fanny never even saw it.) “For high as Mrs. Toby rides
now
,” said Fanny Davis, “what if Matthew's sons, or Luke's, ever incline to dispute the inheritance?” I said I thought, or had heard someone say, they hadn't gone abroad empty-handed. I remembered some complaint of my uncles' as to the farm being so stripped of capital, there'd be no improvement in a generation. “Grant that if you will,” said Fanny Davis. “Certainly I'm aware cash doesn't
flow
here. I only ask myself, for Charlotte's sake, does
her
son truly inherit? Isn't your father a lawyer?” demanded Fanny Davis. “What would your father say, to see such a property as this passed about like a bandbox? So far as I can tell, whether Charles inherits or no depends first on Tobias making a will, and secondly, upon such a will standing. I happen to know that Mr. Pascoe, in Frampton, has the
gravest
doubts …”

I happened to know this too. Mr. Pascoe, the Frampton lawyer, had been so incautious as to present himself at the farm unasked. He wasn't physically thrown out; but the Sylvesters left no doubt of their sentiments towards attorneys in general. However, seeing Fanny so distressed, I turned, as in the first days of that summer I still did, to my Aunt Charlotte. I said,