He laughed. “Don’t tell your aunt I said that,” he cautioned Anthony. “She’s worried enough about me, poor old girl, as it is.”
His aunt had looked for a death-bed repentance, but the end came before she expected it, in the night.
“He wasn’t really a bad man,” she said, crying. “That’s what made me hope, right to the end, that the Truth would be revealed to him.”
Anthony sought to comfort her. “Perhaps it came to him when he was alone,” he said.
She clung to that.
The burying of him was another trouble. She had secured the site she had always wished for herself beneath the willow. She would have liked him to be laid there beside her, but his views and opinions had been too well known to her people. They did not want him among them. There was a neglected corner of the big cemetery set apart for such as he; but to lay him there would be to abandon hope. The Lord would never venture there. Anthony suggested the Church. He undertook to interview the vicar, a kindly old gentleman, who possibly would ask no questions.
He found the vicar in the vestry. There had been a meeting of the churchwardens. The Reverend Mr. Sheepskin was a chubby, blue-eyed gentleman. He had heard of Anthony’s uncle. “A very hard nut to crack,” so the vicar had been given to understand.
“But was always willing to listen, I gathered,” added the vicar. “So perhaps the fault was ours. We didn’t go about it the right way.”
Something moved Anthony to tell the vicar what his uncle had once said to him when he was a child about the world being a very different place if people really did believe all that they say they believe.