Unwilling to pass through the street with eyes brimming over with tears, she went back through the garden and by the little wicket gate. But the sight of the sunny south walk did not raise her spirits, and with the terror that even now Gabriel might be lying dead at Kineton, she could hardly endure the sound of the gardener’s dismal ditty. He still toiled away at the apple gathering, and still chanted, in lugubrious tones, the gruesome words:
Hurrying away from this unbearable song and half blinded by tears, she suddenly found herself brought to a pause by Dr. William Coke, who was standing at the door that he might more closely inspect in the sunshine a fossil which they had brought back from Whitbourne.
“Whither away so fast, little niece?” he said in his genial voice. Then catching sight of the wet eyelashes, “Eh, what is amiss, my dear?”
“’Tis only that the stupid gardener will sing gruesome ballads about graves and channerin’ worms just on this special day when we have heard how thousands are dead and dying at Kineton,” said Hilary.
He sighed as he patted her shoulder, caressingly.
“True, child, it is indeed a dark day for England. May God send us peace! But dwell not on that thought of the grave. Remember rather the words, ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.’”
“But they were not all righteous,” said Hilary, in a choked voice.
“Many were rebels,” she said, “and Dr. Rogers thinks that all rebels will burn for ever in hell.”
“My dear, though Dr. Rogers is a learned man, he knows no more than the rest of us about the future state. I would even venture to say,” and here Dr. Coke’s eyes twinkled, “that he knows less than many, for his heart is not dominated by love but by zeal for orthodoxy, a thing which some folk mistake for the following of Christ. And though, as you know, I am loyal to His Majesty, I am bound to own that there has been much in his rule which rightly roused the indignation of free Englishmen, and I see that even in my own parish many of the best and the most God-fearing men have felt it to be their duty to resist the King and to join the Parliamentary forces.”
Hilary was comforted by these words, and through that weary autumn, while they vainly hoped for news of Gabriel, she often thought of them, and something of her uncle’s wider and nobler way of looking at things began to dispel the bitter and contemptuous spirit which’ Dr. Rogers’s teaching had fostered in her. Happily for her, he was not just then in residence, and in his absence her heart had some chance of softening and expanding.