The party in the drawing-room—I had walked straight in, you understand, without ringing the bell, or giving any notice of my approach—consisted of four laughing rosy children, of ages from about fourteen down to ten, who were, apparently, all coming towards the door (I found they were really walking backwards), while their mother, seated by the fire with some needlework on her lap, was saying, just as I entered the room, “Now, girls, you may get your things on for a walk.”
To my utter astonishment—for I was not yet accustomed to the action of the Watch—“all smiles ceased” (as Browning says) on the four pretty faces, and they all got out pieces of needlework, and sat down. No one noticed me in the least, as I quietly took a chair and sat down to watch them.
When the needlework had been unfolded, and they were all ready to begin, their mother said “Come, that’s done, at last! You may fold up your work, girls.” But the children took no notice whatever of the remark; on the contrary, they set to work at once sewing—if that is the proper word to describe an operation such as I had never before witnessed. Each of them threaded her needle with a short end of thread attached to the work, which was instantly pulled by an invisible force through the stuff, dragging the needle after it: the nimble fingers of the little sempstress caught it at the other side, but only to lose it again the next moment. And so the work went on, steadily undoing itself, and the neatly-stitched little dresses, or whatever they were, steadily falling to pieces. Now and then one of the children would pause, as the recovered thread became inconveniently long, wind it on a bobbin, and start again with another short end.
At last all the work was picked to pieces and put away, and the lady led the way into the next room, walking backwards, and making the insane remark “Not yet, dear: we must get the sewing done first.” After which, I was not surprised to see the children skipping backwards after her, exclaiming “Oh, mother, it is such a lovely day for a walk!”
In the dining-room, the table had only dirty plates and empty dishes on it. However the party—with the addition of a gentleman, as good-natured, and as rosy, as the children—seated themselves at it very contentedly.
You have seen people eating cherry-tart, and every now and then cautiously conveying a cherrystone from their lips to their plates? Well, something like that went on all through this ghastly—or shall we say “ghostly”?—banquet. An empty fork is raised to the lips: there it receives a neatly-cut piece of mutton, and swiftly conveys it to the plate, where it instantly attaches itself to the mutton already there. Soon one of the plates, furnished with a complete slice of mutton and two potatoes, was handed up to the presiding gentleman, who quietly replaced the slice on the joint, and the potatoes in the dish.
Their conversation was, if possible, more bewildering than their mode of dining. It began by the youngest girl suddenly, and without provocation, addressing her eldest sister. “Oh, you wicked storyteller!” she said.
I expected a sharp reply from the sister; but, instead of this, she turned laughingly to her father, and said, in a very loud stage-whisper, “To be a bride!”
The father, in order to do his part in a conversation that seemed only fit for lunatics, replied “Whisper it to me, dear.”
But she didn’t whisper (these children never did anything they were told): she said, quite loud, “Of course not! Everybody knows what Dolly wants!”
And little Dolly shrugged her shoulders, and said, with a pretty pettishness, “Now, Father, you’re not to tease! You know I don’t want to be bride’s-maid to anybody!”
“And Dolly’s to be the fourth,” was her father’s idiotic reply.
Here Number Three put in her oar. “Oh, it is settled, Mother dear, really and truly! Mary told us all about it. It’s to be next Tuesday four weeks—and three of her cousins are coming to be bride’s-maids—and—”
“She doesn’t forget it, Minnie!” the Mother laughingly replied. “I do wish they’d get it settled! I don’t like long engagements.”
And Minnie wound up the conversation—if so chaotic a series of remarks deserves the name—with “Only think! We passed the Cedars this morning, just exactly as Mary Davenant was standing at the gate, wishing goodbye to Mister—I forget his name. Of course we looked the other way.”
By this time I was so hopelessly confused that I gave up listening, and followed the dinner down into the kitchen.
But to you, O hypercritical reader, resolute to believe no item of this weird adventure, what need to tell how the mutton was placed on the spit, and slowly unroasted—how the potatoes were wrapped in their skins, and handed over to the gardener to be buried—how, when the mutton had at length attained to rawness, the fire, which had gradually changed from red-heat to a mere blaze, died down so suddenly that the cook had only just time to catch its last flicker on the end of a match—or how the maid, having taken the mutton off the spit, carried it (backwards, of course) out of the house, to meet the butcher, who was coming (also backwards) down the road?
The longer I thought over this strange adventure, the more hopelessly tangled the mystery became: and it was a real relief to meet Arthur in the road, and get him to go with me up to the Hall, to learn what news the telegraph had brought. I told him, as we went, what had
