The Weavers | Page 4

The records of their lives were the only
notable history of the place since the days when their forefathers
suffered for the faith.

One of these was a girl--for she was still but a child when she died; and
she had lived in the Red Mansion with the tall porch, the wide garden
behind, and the wall of apricots and peaches and clustering grapes. Her
story was not to cease when she was laid away in the stiff graveyard
behind the Meeting-house. It was to go on in the life of her son, whom
to bring into the world she had suffered undeserved, and loved with a
passion more in keeping with the beauty of the vale in which she lived
than with the piety found on the high-backed seats in the Quaker
Meeting- house. The name given her on the register of death was
Mercy Claridge, and a line beneath said that she was the daughter of
Luke Claridge, that her age at passing was nineteen years, and that "her
soul was with the Lord."
Another whose life had given pages to the village history was one of
noble birth, the Earl of Eglington. He had died twenty years after the
time when Luke Claridge, against the then custom of the Quakers, set
up a tombstone to Mercy Claridge's memory behind the Meeting-house.
Only thrice in those twenty years had he slept in a room of the
Cloistered House. One of those occasions was the day on which Luke
Claridge put up the grey stone in the graveyard, three years after his
daughter's death. On the night of that day these two men met face to
face in the garden of the Cloistered House. It was said by a passer-by,
who had involuntarily overheard, that Luke Claridge had used harsh
and profane words to Lord Eglington, though he had no inkling of the
subject of the bitter talk. He supposed, however, that Luke had gone to
reprove the other for a wasteful and wandering existence; for desertion
of that Quaker religion to which his grandfather, the third Earl of
Eglington, had turned in the second half of his life, never visiting his
estates in Ireland, and residing here among his new friends to his last
day. This listener--John Fairley was his name--kept his own counsel.
On two other occasions had Lord Eglington visited the Cloistered
House in the years that passed, and remained many months. Once he
brought his wife and child. The former was a cold, blue-eyed Saxon of
an old family, who smiled distantly upon the Quaker village; the latter,
a round-headed, warm-faced youth, with a bold, menacing eye, who
probed into this and that, rushed here and there as did his father; now
built a miniature mill; now experimented at some peril in the laboratory

which had been arranged in the Cloistered House for scientific
experiments; now shot partridges in the fields where partridges had not
been shot for years; and was as little in the picture as his adventurous
father, though he wore a broad-brimmed hat, smiling the while at the
pain it gave to the simple folk around him.
And yet once more the owner of the Cloistered House returned alone.
The blue-eyed lady was gone to her grave; the youth was abroad. This
time he came to die. He was found lying on the floor of his laboratory
with a broken retort in fragments beside him. With his servant, Luke
Claridge was the first to look upon him lying in the wreck of his last
experiment, a spirit-lamp still burning above him, in the grey light of a
winter's morning. Luke Claridge closed the eyes, straightened the body,
and crossed the hands over the breast which had been the laboratory of
many conflicting passions of life.
The dead man had left instructions that his body should be buried in the
Quaker graveyard, but Luke Claridge and the Elders prevented that--he
had no right to the privileges of a Friend; and, as the only son was afar,
and no near relatives pressed the late Earl's wishes, the ancient family
tomb in Ireland received all that was left of the owner of the Cloistered
House, which, with the estates in Ireland and the title, passed to the
wandering son.

CHAPTER II
THE GATES OF THE WORLD
Stillness in the Meeting-house, save for the light swish of one
graveyard-tree against the window-pane, and the slow breathing of the
Quaker folk who filled every corner. On the long bench at the upper
end of the room the Elders sat motionless, their hands on their knees,
wearing their hats; the women in their poke-bonnets kept their gaze
upon their laps. The heads of all save three were averted, and they were
Luke Claridge, his only living daughter, called Faith,