Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!
Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot, but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means. Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely daughters, all pressing on "la belle Duchesse Anglaise" peaches and apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.
For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very short time—that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in five minutes as though she had known them for many years.
I may as well state here that a few months later she received from Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin that had once belonged to la belle Verrière, and which Count Hector had found in the possession of an old farmer—the great-grandson of Gatienne's coachman—and had purchased, that he might present it as a New-year's gift to her descendant, the Duchess of Towers.
It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!
* * * * *
To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we could our own immediate progenitors close by—as Gogo and Mimsey, as Monsieur le Major, and the rest.
The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne de Boismorinel (who married François Pasquier de la Marière). It was her father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.
I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were called out of nothingness into life.
Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined that I had composed them myself—little impromptus of my own. And lo, again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical, was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain where all the cobwebs are.