Perhaps the moon was in good season. Perhaps the fool had regained a little sanity in the mere act of going contrary to his sister. At any rate his madness showed itself chiefly in his bringing every sort of musical instrument to my prison house. Upon these he played with considerable skill, but with a strange, weird, irresponsible irony running through even the most familiar tunes—something, as one might say, like "God save the King" played by the host's own piper, when George the Fourth made his state entrance into his own palace.
It must have been a strange sight to see us, seated of an evening in a little semicircle, Jeremy with the three younger of his sisters—but always without Aphra, or Euphrasia, as I found her real name to be. And these occasions were by no means unwelcome. For, mad as the women were, there was about them something of the village "innocent," lit with a certain flame of religious enthusiasm. They were very different from that tall, stern figure of granite—their elder sister. Honorine, who had had some training in dressmaking, was always at work with futile industry, confectioning some garment which, when finished, was more like the dress of a Christmas guiser or carnival clown than a respectable garment for everyday use. Her sisters, Camilla and Sidonia, sat looking listlessly at nothing, or engaging in purposeless infantile controversies with one another. Jeremy at one end of the circle sat strumming fitfully upon his latest instrument, violin or Jew's harp, his half-savage music breaking in upon Honorine's ceaseless chatter without prelude or apology. But these interruptions did not in the least put out his sister. She was proud of some remnants of a former short-lived beauty, and loved to recount and magnify the ancient flames she had kindled when "head of a department," dictating the fashions to the good ladies of Thorsby at Hood and Truslove's long extinct but once celebrated emporium in the High Street there.
It did not occur to me till afterwards that I ought to have been frightened—thus sequestered from the world, and my life hardly worth five minutes' purchase, if I should chance to incur the anger of one of those mad creatures. But at the time I sat with my French grammar on my knees, thinking chiefly how funny it was to see the five of us all seated with the soles of our feet turned to a blank wall. This we did for the warmth of the dividing wall. And indeed it was never cold—for before my side had time to cool, Jeremy was firing up his oven again for the next batch of bread to feed the Deep Moat Grangers and their guests.
That these could be dangerous thieves and murderers, in spite of the gossip I had heard, never crossed my mind. They were to me, as I think to Mr. Ablethorpe, just so many poor things who had lost their senses. I noticed, however, that all except Jeremy were accustomed to hush their voices when they spoke of their terrible sister Aphra. And little by little I was able to draw from Honorine (who, above all things, loved to talk) the sad history of their wanderings. I will not attempt to reproduce in detail all her babblings. Indeed, she never quite finished a sentence. Nor did she ever continue where she left off. But, so far as I understood her relation, controlled as it was continually by the denials of Sidonia and Camilla, and punctuated by the scornful strains of Mad Jeremy, the story of the Orrin family amounted to this—
Their father had been a teacher in a large Lanarkshire village; but some money having come into his hands by the death of a distant relative, he went to Lancashire and there started a mill. He left a fortune to his children, valued at some £40,000. But what had been quickly gained proved just as easy to lose.
At his death Aphra kept on the spinning mill, and for a time made a brave face to adverse fortune. But a combination among bigger employers froze her out. The mill failed, and with it was engulfed the wealth of her sisters and the portion of her one brother. Hitherto Jeremy had behaved more humanly than any of the others, learning the business of the mill, with the hope that some day he might be able to conduct one of his own. But the sudden failure of all his hopes overthrew an ill-balanced brain. He grew wild and untamable in his habits, only appearing at home at rare intervals, and then only to claim more and more money from his sister.
The others, Honorine, Camilla and Sidonia, mentioned the name of their eldest sister with a kind of awe, but Jeremy never without a sneer or a taunt—except only in her presence, and when taxed with digging in the garden, a habit for which, Honorine whispered, Aphra was accustomed to punish him severely.
After their failure in Wigham, the passage of the Orrin family southward through England is marked only by some vague reminiscences of Honorine. She would begin a sentence "When we were at Bristol" and end it with "This happened after Aphra had brought us to Leeds." Nevertheless the nodded confirmations of the other two sisters, silently listening as they twisted their fingers, together with the "humphs" and denials of Jeremy, let me understand the truth with sufficient clearness.
If Aphra had been alone, unsaddled with her flock of mad folk, whom she treated like grown-up children, yet loved with more than sisterly devotion, she would have had no difficulty in providing for herself.
At Bristol, for instance, she had established herself with what remained of their small capital in a ready-made shoe shop in a well-frequented street, while Honorine and Sidonia interpreted the latest London fashions to the dwellers in Clifton. But the latter branch failed because Honorine refused to serve those customers who, on entering the shop, would not consent to bow the knee and worship the statue of the Virgin, which they kept in a wall niche surrounded with ever-burning candles. This did not at all suit the ideas of the Cliftonians, and soon the two sisters were back hanging on as before to the skirts of Aphra. As for Jeremy, he wandered about the docks, finding mysterious means of filling his pockets, but always sharing the proceeds.