The Weavers: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

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.

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