Margaret was curious to know what were the meditations among the tombs of one so aged as this man: so she spoke again.
“I have heard that you knew this place before anybody lived in it: and now you seem likely to see it empty again.”
“It was a wild place enough in my young time,” said Jem, speaking now very fluently. “There was nothing of it but the church; and that was never used, because it had had its roof pulled off in the wars. There was only a footpath to it through the fields then, and few people went nigh it—except a few gentry that came a-pleasuring here, into the woods. The owls and I knew it as well then as we do to-day, and nobody else that is now living. The owls and I.”
And the old man laughed the chuckling laugh which was all he had strength for.
“The woods!” said Margaret. “Did the Verdon woods spread as far as this church in those days? And were they not private property then?”
“It was all forest hereabouts, except a clear space round the church tower. It might be thin sprinkled, but it was called forest. The place where I was born had thorns all about it; and when I could scarce walk alone, I used to scramble among the blossoms that made the ground white all under those thorns. The birds that lived by the haws in winter were prodigious. That cottage stood, as near as I can tell, where Grey and Rowland’s great granary is now. There used to be much swine in the woods then; and many’s the time they have thrown me down when I was a young thing getting acorns. That was about the time of my hearing the first music I ever heard—unless you call the singing of the birds music (we had plenty of that), and the bells on the breeze from a distance, when the wind was south. The first music (so to call it) that I heard was from a blind fiddler that came to us. What brought him, I don’t know—whether he lost his way, or what; but he lost his way after he left us. His dog seems to have been in fault: but he got into a pool in the middle of the wood, and there he lay drowned, with one foot up on the bank, when I went to see what the harking of the dog could be about. He clutched his fiddle in drowning; and I remember I tried to get the music out of it as it lay wet and broken on the bank, while father was saying the poor soul must have been under the water now two days. So I have reason to remember the first music I heard.”
“You have got him talking now,” said the grandchild, running off; and presently the owls were heard hooting again.
“Whereabouts was this pool?” asked Margaret.
“It is a deep part of the brook, that in hot summers is left a pond. It is there that the chief of the sliding goes on in winter now, in the meadow. It is meadow now; but then the deer used to come down through the wood to drink at the brook there. That is how the village got its name.”
“So you remember the time when the deer came down to drink at the brook! How many things have happened since then! You have heard a great deal of music since those days.”