The first few months after my lady's death passed thus. Then the relatives of the Admiral begged to be allowed—as they thought—to come to the rescue. First the Admiral's two sisters, then various cousins, offered to come to Garth and mother the motherless maid for him. The Admiral made short work of it, answering each with a blank refusal. The refusal sufficed for all except one: Mistress Keziah Penrock, a maiden lady living at Exeter in a great rambling house that had been built by an eccentric maternal grandfather in the shadow of old Rougemont Castle. A correspondence lasting for some months ran between the pair, the lady holding up the prospect of 'civilisation' in the Cathedral town in contrast with the savage state of a remote Cornish village. In the end, Mistress Keziah, losing her temper, wrote a letter which the wise Admiral left unanswered, knowing that in no way would the last word be said quite so effectively as in silence. Meantime half a year had run on and little Marion was still untended.
The parson, hearing rumour of this from Mrs. Curnow, the housekeeper, ventured to come up and argue the point with his patron over a game of piquet. But the Admiral listened only to the first few words.
'Let her be brought up well or ill,' he said, laying down his cards and fixing the parson with an unwinking, parrot-like stare, 'she bides here alone with me. The matter is settled. The housekeeper can teach her her needle. There's Mistress Trevannion yonder who, I'll wager, will know when she wants a new petticoat. You and I will see to her books.'
And that, Mr. Stowe found, was the end of the argument; but the Admiral, roused (though he would not have confessed it) to the sense of his child's needs, bestirred himself.
The carrier brought down from a book-stall at the sign of the Three Bibles on London Bridge, a box of school books, French and Latin. On these volumes, which the small pupil turned over in unfeigned dislike, the parson nodded approval. 'Must I learn all these?' asked Marion, her mouth down at the corners. 'I had far rather play with you, Father.'
'And my daughter be brought up as unlearned as a kitchen-wench?' retorted the Admiral.
The child pondered. 'Did my mother know all these books?' she asked.
'She did,' said the Admiral, his great voice breaking. 'She was wiser than your father.'
Here the parson bethought himself. 'But the English reading, sir,' he said. 'There's nothing here but foreign tongues.'
His patron pointed to the two volumes that constituted his own library: Hakluyt's Voyages and Plutarch's Lives. 'And there is the Bible and Master Shakespeare's works in her mother's room above,' he said. 'If she thrives not on these she thrives not at all.'