Armorel took down the fiddle that hung on the wall and began to tune it, twanging the strings and drawing the bow across in the manner which so pleasantly excites the theatre before the music begins.
'Not family prayers, then,' said the young man, perhaps disappointed.
What did happen, however, was a series of things quite new and wholly unexpected. Never was known such a desert island.
First of all, the lady of many generations moved uneasily in her sleep at the twanging of the strings, and her fingers clutched at her dress as if she was startled by an uneasy dream.
And then the door opened, and a small procession of three came in. At this point, had the young man been a Roman Catholic, he would have crossed himself. As he was not, he only started and murmured, 'As I thought. The worship of the ancestor! These are the ghosts of the grandfather and the grandmother. The old lady is a mummy. They are all ghosts—I shall presently awake and find myself on my back among the barrows.'
First came an ancient dame, but not so ancient as she of the great chair. Grey-headed she was, and equipped in a large cap; wrinkled was her face, and her chin, for lack of teeth, approached her nose, quite in the ancestral manner. She was followed by an old man, also grey-headed and grey-bearded, wrinkled of face, his shoulders bent and twisted with rheumatism, his fingers gnarled and twisted. These two took the chairs set for them by Armorel. The third in the procession was a woman already elderly and with streaks of grey in her hair. She was thin and sharp-faced. She sat down before the spinning-wheel and began to work, not as you may now see the amateur, but in the quiet, quick, professional manner which means business.
The stranger was not quite right in his conjecture. They were not ancestors. The old man, who had worked on the farm, man and boy, for nearly seventy years, and now managed it altogether, was Justinian Tryeth. The old woman was Dorcas, his wife. The middle-aged woman was their daughter Chessun, who had been maid on the farm, as her brother Peter had been boy, all her life.
Whatever was intended was clearly a daily function, because each dropped into his own place without hesitation. The old woman had brought some knitting with her, her daughter picked up the thread of the spindle, and the old man, taking the tongs, stimulated the coals into a flame, which he continually nursed and maintained with new fuel. There was neither lamp nor candle in the room; the ruddy firelight, rising and falling, played about the room, warming the drab panels into crimson, sinking into the dark beams of the joists, flashing among the china in the cupboard, painting red the Venus's-fingers in the cabinet, and throwing strange lights and shadows upon the aged lady in the chair. Was she really alive? Was she, after all, only a mummy?
Roland looked on breathless. What was to be done next? Time had gone back eighty years—a hundred and eighty years—any number of years. As they sat here in the firelight with the spinning-wheel, the old serving-people with their mistress, without lamp or candle, so they sat in the generations long gone by. And again that curious feeling fell upon him that he had seen it all before. Yet he could not remember what was to be done next. Armorel, the tuning complete, turned with a look of inquiry to the old man.
'"Singleton's Slip,"' he commanded with the authority of a professor.