The Weavers
CHAPTER I
AS THE SPIRIT MOVED
The village lay in a valley which had been the bed of a great river in the
far-off days when Ireland, Wales and Brittany were joined together and the
Thames flowed into the Seine. The place had never known turmoil or stir. For
generations it had lived serenely.
Three buildings in the village stood out insistently, more by the authority
of their appearance and position than by their size. One was a square, red-brick
mansion in the centre of the village, surrounded by a high, redbrick wall
enclosing a garden. Another was a big, low, graceful building with wings. It had
once been a monastery. It was covered with ivy, which grew thick and hungry upon
it, and it was called the Cloistered House. The last of the three was of wood,
and of no great size—a severely plain but dignified structure, looking like some
council-hall of a past era. Its heavy oak doors and windows with diamond panes,
and its air of order, cleanliness and serenity, gave it a commanding influence
in the picture. It was the key to the history of the village—a Quaker
Meeting-house.
Involuntarily the village had built itself in such a way that it made a wide
avenue from the common at one end to the Meeting-house on the gorse-grown upland
at the other. With a demure resistance to the will of its makers the village had
made itself decorative. The people were unconscious of any attractiveness in
themselves or in their village. There were, however, a few who felt the beauty
stirring around them. These few, for their knowledge and for the pleasure which
it brought, paid the accustomed price. 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.