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.
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