The Changeling

by Walter Besant

"That is the musicians' gallery. It is a late addition—Elizabethan, I believe."

"The musicians' gallery? Well, Miss Woodroffe, I am the music. Let me play you something in return for the fine ancestors you have given me, and for your gracious hospitality."

He took up his violin-case, to which he had clung with fidelity, marched down the hall, climbed up into the gallery, and began to tune his fiddle.

"Hilarie," Molly said, "Dick plays in the most lovely way possible. He carries you quite out of yourself. That is why everybody loves him so."

However, the artist, standing up alone in the gallery, struck a chord, and began to play.

I suppose that the magic belonged to the fiddle itself. It is astonishing what magical powers a fiddle may possess. This was the most sympathetic instrument possible. It was a thought leader or inspirer. The moment it began, all the listeners, including the servants below the salt, sat upright, their eyes fixed upon the gallery, rapt out of themselves.

Hilarie, for her part, saw in a vision, but with a clearness and distinctness most marvellous, her ancestor Robert with Hilarie his wife. They were both well-stricken in years; they were standing in the porch with their eldest son, his wife and children, to receive their visitors. And first, across the drawbridge, rode the great Lord Archbishop and Lord Chancellor, followed by his retinue. When the Archbishop dismounted, the old man and his wife, and the son, and his wife, and his children went on their knees; but the Archbishop bade them rise, and kissed his parents lovingly. Meantime, the pages and the varlets were unloading pack-horses and pack-mules, because the Archbishop would not lay upon his father so great a charge as the entertainment of his following. And she saw next how the Lord Mayor and the Sheriff, his brother, rode up side by side, the Sheriff a little behind the Mayor, and how they dismounted and knelt for their father's blessing; and so all into the hall together, to take counsel for the great things they were minded to do for their native village.

Hilarie turned to her cousin on the right. "Cousin," she said, still in her dream, "we must think of our forefathers, and of what they did. We must ask what the Archbishop would have done in our place."

But her cousin made no reply. He was looking with a kind of wonder at Molly. Had the man never seen an attractive girl before? He had; but out of a thousand attractive girls a man may be attracted by one only.