“Yes, it was,” returned Mrs. Dolbear, “if only to hear sense. You must be large-minded, or else you’re lost, and instead of quarrelling with everybody who thinks you’ve done wrong, which will take you all your time, Medora, better be sensible and sing small and tread on nobody’s corns more than you can help. We’ve forgiven you for your dear mother’s sake, and when you’re married to Mr. Kellock, you will be welcome here and treated without any thought of the past. And so will he; and if that isn’t Christianity made alive, I should like to know what is.”
Mrs. Dolbear was so pleased with her own charity that neither Medora nor Jordan had the heart to argue about it. Indeed argument would have been wasted on Mary’s intelligence. She made Medora nurse the new baby again, and consideration of the infant occupied her.
“After your mother she has been called,” said Mrs. Dolbear, “and her name’s the brightest thing about her so far. She’s healthy and seems to have a live and let live sort of nature.”
“She’s got lovely blue eyes,” said Medora.
“They’ll fade, however,” explained her aunt. “Most of my children have blue eyes to start with, but it ain’t a fast colour and can’t stand the light. If you look at my husband’s eyes, you’ll see they be a very pale, washed-out blue; and the children mostly take after him.”
Lydia, her daughter and Mr. Kellock presently went for a walk before supper. As a treat, Billy, Milly, Clara and Jenny Dolbear accompanied them, and Tom himself started with the party. But he disappeared at the “Man and Gun,” and they proceeded alone to the churchyard, that Lydia might put some flowers on a new-made grave.
The evening light brought out detail in the great grey tower above them. Seed of fern had found the ledges and run little lines of dim green along them. Over the battlements a white image of a cock hung for weather-vane. The churchyard extended so that the evening sun flung the shadows of the gravestones upon neighbour mounds, and Mrs. Trivett pointed this out.
“All his life long Noah Peeke darkened his daughter’s life,” she said, “and now you see his slate flings a shadow on her grave, poor woman.”
She put her nosegay on the raw-grass-clods built up over the sleeping place of Miss Peeke, and removed some dead flowers. Then they climbed the hill and extended their ramble with the children running on before.
“My friend, Nancy Peeke, was father-ridden,” explained Lydia. “She sacrificed herself to her widowed father, and though a good few offered for her, she never left him. He reigned over her like a proper tyrant, but he never saw what he was doing and wasn’t grateful to the day she closed her eyes. By that time it was too late to do much herself; and he ruled from the grave you may say, because up to her last illness, what her father would have done was always the ruling passion in her. It worked unconsciously; but it worked. He ruined her life so far as we can say it. However, she’s at peace now. Death’s only a King of Terrors to the living. He can’t fright her no more—nor her father can’t neither.”