Hearing the other party’s enquiry, Ye Chen smiled faintly and spoke, “You must be Grandma Jiang’s son, right? My surname is Ye, my father and your father are old acquaintances and asked me to come and see Grandma Jiang.”
The other party asked in surprise, “Your old man’s son recognises my old man’s son?”
Ye Chen nodded gently.
At that moment, an old woman slowly walked out from under the hayloft where the cooking was taking place. The other party looked at Ye Chen with some confusion and asked with a frown, “Young man, do you know my husband?”
Ye Chen said, “You are Grandma Jiang, right? My father knows your husband.”
The old lady hesitated for a moment and said, “Please come in, please come in!”
With that, she said to her son, “Youngest son, quickly invite the guest into the house and pour water for him.”
The middle-aged man hurriedly went forward to open the door and said politely, “Please come in and have a seat inside!”
Ye Chen nodded and thanked him before entering the courtyard with Chen Zekai.
There were three wooden rooms and two straw huts, one on the left and one on the right, one with no shelter, only a thatched roof and a stove made of clay underneath, and the other built against the wall with a circle of shelter, which was not large and looked like a toilet.
The three wooden rooms, on the other hand, were directly opposite the main entrance, with the door of the central hall wide open and a room to the left and right inside, the door of which was covered with a cloth curtain.
Ye Chen and Chen Zekai followed the middle-aged man into the hall. In the middle of the room, against the wall, there was a slender offering table, which was black and lacquered, and it was impossible to tell what it was made of, but from the colour of the covering, it was clear that it was definitely a very old object.
Above the table are incense burners and a number of tablets, all with the name Jiang written on them.
On the wall above the table are three Chinese portraits.
The portrait in the centre is of a middle-aged man in a green tunic, thin and bony, but robust, standing on a boulder at the top of a hill with his hands behind his back and his long beard stretched out in the wind along with the hem of his coat.
To the left of this portrait was a child of seven or eight years old sitting cross-legged at a stone table at the top of a mountain, reading a book; to the right was a portrait of an old man sitting with his head held high.
Ye Chen had come into contact with antiques, and he could see that these paintings were all ancient paintings, and were quite old.
He couldn’t help but sigh in his heart, “Although I don’t know if these three paintings came from the hands of ancient famous artists, just by looking at the exquisite painting work and the unique charm, we can also conclude that they are not ordinary products, if they were taken to the market, not to mention more, they would cost at least several hundred thousand a pair, three paintings should be sold for a million, easily.”
“If the three paintings hanging in the old lady’s house were worth that much, why was her son tricked into going to Mexico on the pretext of being a seaman? Even both mother and son nearly died in a foreign country ……”
By this point, Ye Chen had more questions in his mind.
However, he could also see from this that his guess yesterday was right, the old lady was now living in poverty, but the family had been pa*sed down in order for over a thousand years, the family background was definitely not ordinary!
At this moment, the middle-aged man looked at the two well-dressed young people, more or less nervous and rushed, he pointed to the low wooden table and wooden stools in the middle of the hall and said somewhat awkwardly, “Please sit down, please sit down, I’m really sorry for the poor conditions of the family, I’m sorry for your indignity, I’ll go and pour water for you two.”