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Updated: June 23, 2025
That room had already begun to occupy my thoughts from another point of view, and hence, in part, no doubt the suggestion. I was anxious to have a visit from Charley. He might bring with him some of our London friends. There was absolutely no common room in the house except the hall-kitchen. The room we had always called the lumber-room was over it, and nearly as large.
The featherbed left his own bedstead, the watch came out of his pocket, and the walls of the hall-kitchen gaped and yawned in the places where the pictures had been. "The bog-bane to the rushy curragh, say I, Nancy," said Pete. "Not being used of such grandeur, I was taking it hard. Never could remember to wind that watch. And feathers, bless you!
The pallid light in the great hall-kitchen faded; the candles were lighted; and then the children, first borrowing the stockings of their elders to hang at the bed's foot, were packed off early for it was the custom to bring them down again at midnight for the carols. Aunt Rachel had their good-night kisses, not as she had them every night, but with the special ceremony of the mistletoe.
"Stay you here; I will give the lady dear our thanks," said Annabel to the group of gipsies gathered about the porch; and she entered the great hall-kitchen. She approached the chair in which Aunt Rachel sat. There was obeisance in the bend of her body, but command in her long almond eyes, as she spoke. "Lady dear, you must rock or you cannot live." Aunt Rachel did not look up from her work.
"Yes, we will, presently, Aunt Rachel; gee up, horse!... Shall we go and ask the chair-woman if she's warm enough?" "Do, dears." Again the message was taken, and this time it seemed as if Annabel, the gipsy, was not warm enough, for she gathered up her loops of cane and brought the chair she was mending a little way into the hall-kitchen itself.
She stood in the latticed porch, dark and handsome against the whiteness, and then, advancing, put her head into the great hall-kitchen. "Has the lady any chairs for the gipsy woman to mend?" she asked in a soft and insinuating voice....
I moved a little, holding him fast, and mechanically he followed his support; so that, although with some difficulty, I soon got him round the house, and into the great hall-kitchen, our usual sitting-room; there was fire there that would only want rousing, and, warm as was the night, I felt him very cold. I let him sink on the wide sofa, covered him with my cloak, and ran to rouse old Penny.
My uncle had insisted that she should be received where we usually sat, and had given Penny orders to show her into the hall-kitchen. I was alone there, preparing something for John. We were not expecting her, for it seemed now too late to look for her. My uncle was in the study, and Martha somewhere about the house.
Pete worked steadily for half an hour, and then came back to the hall-kitchen with his tools in his hands. The cob of coal had kindled to a lively flame, which flashed and went out, and the quick black shadows of the chairs and the table and the jugs on the dresser were leaping about the room like elves.
As she worked, she cast curious glances into the old hall-kitchen. The snow outside cast a pallid, upward light on the heavy ceiling-beams; this was reflected in the polished stone floor; and the children, who at first had shyly stopped their play, seeing the strange woman in the porch the nearest thing they had seen to gipsies before had been the old itinerant glazier with his frame of glass on his back resumed it, but still eyed her from time to time. In the ancient walnut chair by the hearth sat the old, old lady who had told them to bring the chairs. Her hair, almost as white as the snow itself, was piled up on her head
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