The Gypsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp Read Free Book Online Page B

less withered than she, as she took up her candle and stood, half-smiling, half-sighing, beside my bed. The mild yellow light gilded her tawny head—gilded even the grey in it; her Paisley shawl glowed plum-colour, her broad ruddy cheeks shone to match; even her sighs were so big and whole-hearted, the candle was nearly blown out.
    I left her, next morning, in such a blaze of sunshine as dazzled all our eyes. When the cart came to take me to the station she stood waving from the gate—tall as a sunflower, headed like Ceres; a step behind my Aunts Grace and Rachel backed her, big and comely and confident as herself. A sudden school-book memory darted into my mind: I thought they looked like the Three in Horatius who kept the bridge … My new Aunt Fanny hovered in their rear, and also waved to me, rather timidly.
    5
    As I waited on the platform at Exeter—I was always deposited there half-an-hour early—a train came in from Plymouth. Quite a number of passengers emerged, among them a young man whose black-thatched head so easily overtopped all others that my eye naturally followed it.—Followed it, and was fixed: fascinated, half-incredulous, at the same time wholly certain, I stared and stared.…
    There was no mistaking him, he was a Sylvester all over. He was my Aunt Charlotte’s son Charles.
    If I had been quicker, or bolder, I could have spoken to him. I could have been the first to greet him! But he was off while I hesitated, lounging rapidly down the platform—his stride was so long, he moved fast, but at the same time so peculiarly loose and easy, he still seemed to lounge —with never a glance left or right. (As though he returned from Australia every day—and that too was a Sylvester all over.) Just too late, I started to run after him; he was already past the barrier, and gone.

PART TWO

CHAPTER V
    1
    No one at the farm ever wrote to me in London. I had tried hard, before I left, to make my Aunt Charlotte promise to send me a letter about the wedding, but she would say only that she might if she had time, so I knew that she would not. Nor would my Aunts Grace and Rachel promise either—pointing out that I’d hear all about it next year; and though this was no more than their usual lavish handling of time, for once I found it irritating. Even Fanny Davis’ oath to write immediately and at length could not entirely console me; I feared, or rather confidently expected, that she would be too much bemused by bliss to remember details.
    In fact no one wrote to me. Evidently Fanny was too much bemused to remember anything. The usual winter-silence dropped like a curtain of fog between the life that I loved, and the life that I led.
    2
    To remember all London winters as fog-bound is doubtless as untruthful as to remember all Devon summers as radiant. At the same time, the coal-burning London of my childhood was undoubtedly foggier than the London of to-day: the legend of the pea-souper, like all legends, has roots in fact. Once or twice each winter fog gathered, thickened, solidified into an element: omnibuses lost their way, horses stood pawing in the streets, clerks walking home from the City clubbed to hire linkboys; indoors, life was gas-lit and stuffily cold.—We did not, as I say, experience more than one or two such fogs in a winter; but even the intervals between them appear, (to my recollection), uniformly dark.
    This was possibly due to the arrangement of our house. Its front faced south, its back north: we children lived at the back. Our day-nursery or schoolroom looked out across no more than a few yards at the back of the terrace paralleling our row: half-out of the window, one still saw nothing but brick. Moreover, to say ‘we children’ is inaccurate; both my brothers were at boarding-school, and I, once returned from my inferior day-establishment, did my home-work, and employed my leisure, alone. (One reason I enjoyed cook’s novelettes