Ready now for a little conversation, he puffed thoughtfully at his pipe while Lilac stood near washing the dishes and plates.
“It’s thirty years ago,” he said, speaking in a jerky voice so as not to interfere with the comfort of his pipe, “since I had a fowl for dinner—and I mind very well when it was. It was my wedding-day. Away up in the north it was, and parson gave the feast.”
“Was that when you used to play the clar’net in church, Uncle?” asked Lilac.
Joshua nodded.
“We was a clar’net and a fiddle and a bass viol,” he said reflectively. “Never kept time—the bass viol didn’t. Couldn’t never get it into his head. He wasn’t never any shakes of a player—and he was a good feller too.”
“Did they play at your wedding?” asked Lilac.
“They did that,” he answered; “in church and likewise after the ceremony. Lor’! to hear how the bass viol did tag behind in Rockingham. I can hear him now. ’Twas like two solos being played, as one might say. No unity at all. I never hear that tune now but what it carries me back to my wedding-day and the bass viol; and the taste of that fowl’s done the same thing. It’s a most pecooliar thing, is the memory.”
Lilac liked to hear Joshua talk about old days, but she was eager too to tell her own news. There was so much that he did not know: all about hay-harvest, and her butter-making, about Lenham fête, and her cousins, and, finally, all about None-so-pretty and Peter. “I do think,” she added, “as how I like him best of any of ’em, for all they say he’s so common.”
“Common or uncommon, they’d do badly without him,” muttered Joshua. “He’s the very prop and pillar of the place, is Peter; if a wall’s strong enough to hold the roof up, you don’t ask if it’s made of marble or stone.”
“Are common things bad things?” asked Lilac suddenly.