The poor boy, who had had little care from his natural guardians while alive from the hour of his being doomed by the fortune-teller, was now loudly mourned as dead. Yet the mourning was strangely mixed with exultation at the fortune-teller having been right in the end. The mother, suddenly awakened, groaned and screamed, so that it was fearful to hear her. All efforts to restore quiet were in vain. Margaret was moved, shocked, terrified. She could not keep her own calmness in such a scene of confusion: but, while her cheeks were covered with tears, while her voice trembled as she implored silence, she never took off her glove. In the midst of the tumult, Platt sank back and died. The renewed cries had the effect of bringing some neighbours from the end of the lane. While they were there, Margaret could be of no further use. She promised to send coffins immediately—that stage of pestilence being now reached when coffins were the first consideration—and then slipped out from the door into the darkness, and ran till she had turned the corner of the long lane. She usually considered herself safe abroad, even in times like these, as she carried no property of value about with her: but now that she was wearing her precious ring again, she felt too rich to be walking alone in the dark.
She did not slacken her pace till she approached lights and people; and then she was glad to stop for breath. She could not resist going first to Maria, to show her the recovered treasure; and this caused her to direct her steps through the churchyard. It was there that she came in view of lights and people; and under the limes it was that she stopped for breath. The churchyard was now the most frequented spot in the village. The path by the turnstile was indeed grown over with grass: but the great gate was almost always open, and the ground near it was trodden bare by the feet of many mourners. Funeral trains—trains which daily grew shorter, till each coffin was now followed only by two or by three—were passing in from early morning, at intervals, till sunset, and now might be often seen by torchlight far into the night. The villager passing the churchyard wall might hear, in the night air, the deep voice of the clergyman announcing the farewell to some brother or sister, committing “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” There was no disturbance now from boys leaping over the graves, or from little children, eager to renew their noisy play. Such of the young villagers as remained above ground appeared to be silenced and subdued by the privation, the dreariness, the neglect, of these awful days: they looked on from afar, or avoided the spot. Instead of such, the observer of the two funerals which were now in the churchyard, was a person quite at the other extremity of life. Margaret saw the man of a hundred years, Jem Bird, the pride of the village in his way, seated on the bench under the spreading tree, which was youthful in comparison with himself. He was listlessly watching the black figures which moved about in the light of a solitary torch, by an open grave, while waiting for the clergyman who was engaged with the group beyond.
“You are late abroad, Mr Bird,” said Margaret. “I should not have looked for you here so far on in the evening.”
“What’s your will?” said the old man.
“Grandfather won’t go home ever, till they have done here,” said a great-grandchild of the old man, running up from his amusement of hooting to the owls in the church tower. “They’ll soon have done with these two, and then grandfather and I shall go home. Won’t we, granny?”
“Does it not make you sad to see so many funerals?” said Margaret, sitting down on the bench beside him.
“Ay.”
“Had you not better stay at home than see so many that you knew laid in the ground?”
“Does he understand?” she asked aside of the boy. “Does he never answer but in this way?”
“Oh! he talks fast enough sometimes. It is just as you happen to take him.”