The members of the family were few. Miss Mary Archdale was ill when they arrived. She was the only child of the ex-Sergeant, who was a widower; and the new inmate of the house heard of her with a terror founded on his awe of her silent father.
They entered a small parlour, and the boy sat down in the chair indicated by the Sergeant. That person hung his hat on a peg in the hall, and placed his cane along the chimneypiece. Then he rang the bell.
The elderly woman who was the female staff of the kitchen entered. She looked frightened, as all that household did, in their master’s presence, and watched him with an alarmed eye.
“Where’s Miss Mary?”
“A-spitting blood, sir, please.”
“Bring in supper,” said the Sergeant.
The boy sat in fear at the very corner of the table. His grief would not let him eat, and he sipped a cup of tea that was too hot, and had neither milk nor sugar enough. The Sergeant snuffed his candle, and put on a pair of plated spectacles, and looked through his weekly paper.
While he was so employed there glided into the room a very slight girl, with large eyes and a very pale face. Her hair was brown and rich.
The hand with which she held her shawl across was very thin; and in her pale face and large eyes was a timid and imploring look that struck the little boy. She looked at him and he at her silently; her sad eyes lingered on his face for a moment, and he felt that he liked her.
She took a chair very softly and sat down without saying a word.
In a little while the Sergeant laid down his paper and looked at her. Her large eyes were raised toward him with timid expectation, but she did not speak.
“Not well just now?”
“No, sir.”
“You take the bottle regularly?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll be better in the morning belike.”
“I’m sure I shall, sir.”
He lighted a candle that stood on a side-table, and his dog Bion got up to attend him. It was a large pug-dog, gambouge-coloured, with a black nose. The boy often afterwards wished to play with Bion, and make his acquaintance. But he did not know how the attempt would be taken either by the dog or his master, and so he did not venture.
No caresses passed between the dog and the Sergeant. Each did his duty by the other, and they understood one another, I suppose, but no further signs of love appeared.
The Sergeant went out and shut the door, and the girl smiled very sweetly on the little guest, and put out her hand to welcome him.
“I’m very glad you are come here. I was very lonely. My father is gone to the workroom; he’s making an organ there, and he won’t come back till a quarter to nine. That’s an hour and three-quarters. Do you hear — listen.”
She raised her finger and looked toward the partition as she spoke, and he heard a booming of an organ through the wall.
“Tony blows the organ for him.”
Tony was a little boy from the workhouse, who cleaned knives, forks, shoes, and made himself generally useful, being the second servant, the only male one in their modest establishment.
“I wish I was better, I’m so out of breath talking. We’ll be very happy now. That’s tuning the pipes — that one’s wolving. I used to blow the bellows for him, but the doctor says I must not, and indeed I couldn’t now. You must eat something and drink more tea, and we’ll be great friends, shan’t we?”
So they talked a great deal, she being obliged to stop often for breath, and he could see that she was very weak, and also that she stood in indescribable awe of her father. But she said, “He’s a very good man, and he works very hard to earn his money, but he does not talk, and that makes people afraid of him. He won’t be back here until he comes here to read the Bible and prayers at a quarter to nine.”
So she talked on, but all the time in an undertone, and listening every now and then for the boom of the pipes, and the little boy opened his heart to her and wept bitterly, and she cried too, silently, as he went on, and they became very near friends. She looked as if she understood his griefs. Perhaps her own resembled them.
The old woman came in and took away the tea things, and shortly after the Sergeant entered and read the chapter and the prayers.
CHAPTER XIX.
A SILENT FAREWELL.
At Noulton Farm each day was like its brother. Inflexible hours, inflexible duties, all proceeded with a regimental punctuality. At meals not a word was spoken, and while the master of the house was in it, all conversation was carried on, even in remote rooms, in an undertone.
Our little friend used to see the workhouse boy at prayers, morning and evening, and occasionally to pass his pale disquieted face on the stairs or lobbies when his duties brought him there. They eyed one another wistfully, but dared not speak. Mr. Archdale had so ordained it.
That workhouse boy — perhaps he was inefficient, perhaps too much was expected from him — but he had the misfortune perpetually to incur — I can hardly say his master’s displeasure, for the word implies something emotional, whereas nothing could be at all times more tranquil and cold than that master — but his correction.
These awful proceedings occurred almost daily, and were conducted with the absolute uniformity which characterised the system of Noulton Farm. At eleven o’clock the cold voice of the Sergeant-Major called “Tony!” and Tony appeared, writhing and whimpering by anticipation.
“My cane,” said the master, stepping into the room which he called the workshop, where the organ, half finished, stood, stop-diapason, dulciana, and the rest in deal rows, with white chips, chisels, lead, saws, and glue-pots, in industrious disorder, round. Then Tony’s pale, miserable face was seen in the “parlour,” and Miss Mary would look down on the floor in pale silence, and our little friend’s heart would flutter over his lesson book as he saw the lank boy steal over to the chimneypiece, and take down the cane, and lingeringly disappear.
Then was heard the door of the workshop close, and then very faint the cold clear voice of the master. Then faint and slow the measured cut of the cane, and the whine of the boy rising to a long hideous yell, and “Oh, sir, dear — oh, sir, dear; oh, Mr. Archdale, oh, master, dear, oh, master, dear!” And this sometimes so protracted that Mary used to get up and walk round the room in a kind of agony whispering— “Oh, poor boy. Oh, poor Tony. Oh mercy — oh goodness. Oh! my good Lord, when will it be over!” And, sitting apart, the little boy’s eyes as they followed her would fill with tears of horror.
The little fellow said lessons to Mr. Archdale. There was nothing unreasonable in their length, and his friend Mary helped him. It was well for him, however, that he was a bright little fellow, with a good memory, for the Sergeant was not a teacher to discriminate between idleness and dulness.
No one ever heard Mr. Archdale use a violent expression, or utter a curse. He was a silent, cold, orderly person, and I think the most cruel man I ever saw in my life.
He had a small active horse, and a gig, in which he drove upon his outdoor business. He had fixed days and hours for everything, except where he meditated a surprise.
One day the Sergeant-Major entered the room where the boy was reading at his lessons, and, tapping him on the shoulder, put the county newspaper into his hand; and, pointing to a paragraph, desired him to read it, and left the room.
It was a report of the proceedings against Tom Orange, and gave a rather disreputable character of that amusing person. There was a great pain at the boy’s affectionate heart as he read the hard words dealt to his old friend, and worse still, the sentence. He was crying silently when the Sergeant returned. That stern man took the paper, and said in his cold terrible tones —
“You’ve read that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And understand it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If I find you speaking to Thomas Orange I’ll tie you up in the workshop, and give you five dozen.” And with this promise he serenely left him.
Children a
re unsuspicious of death, and our little friend, who every night used to cry in his bed silently, with a bursting heart, thinking of his mammy and old happy times, till he fell asleep in the dark, never dreamed that his poor friend Mary was dying — she, perhaps, herself did not think so any more than he, but every one else said it.
They two grew to be great friends. Each had a secret, and she trusted hers to the little friend whom God had sent her.
It was the old story — the troubled course of true love. Willie Fairlace was the hero. The Sergeant-Major had found it all out, and locked up his daughter, and treated her, it was darkly rumoured, with cruel severity.
He was proud of his daughter’s beauty, and had ambitious plans, I dare say; and he got up Willie’s farm, and Willie was ruined, and had enlisted and was gone.
The Sergeant-Major knew the postoffice people in the village, and the lovers dared not correspond directly. But Willie’s cousin, Mrs. Page, heard from him regularly, and there were long messages to Mary. His letters were little else. And now at last had come a friend to bear her messages to trusty Mrs. Page, and to carry his back again to Noulton Farm.
After her father had gone out, or in the evening when he was at the organ in the “workshop,” and sometimes as, wrapped in her cloak, on a genial evening, she sat on the rustic seat under the great ash tree, and the solemn and plaintive tones of the distant organ floated in old church music from the open window through the trees and down the fragrant field toward the sunset sky, filling the air with grand and melancholy harmony, she would listen to that whispered message of the boy’s, looking far away, and weeping, and holding the little fellow’s hand, and asking him to say it over again, and telling him she felt better, and thanking him, and smiling and crying bitterly.
One evening the Sergeant was at his organ-pipes as usual. The boy as he stood in the garden at his task, watering the parched beds, heard a familiar laugh at the hedge, and the well-known refrain —
“Tag-rag-merry-derry-perrywig and hatband-hic-hoc-horum-genetivo!”
It was Tom Orange himself!
In spite of his danger the boy was delighted. He ran to the hedge, and he and Tom, in a moment more, were actually talking.
It became soon a very serious conversation. The distant booming of the organ-pipes assured him that the light grey eye and sharp ear of the Sergeant were occupied still elsewhere.
Tom Orange was broaching a dreadful conspiracy.
It was no less than that the boy should meet him at the foot of the field where the two oziers grow, at eleven o’clock, on the night following, and run away with him, and see mammy again, and come to a nice place where he should be as happy as the day is long, and mammy live with him always, and Tom look in as often as his own more important business would permit.
“I will, Tom,” said the boy, wildly and very pale.
“And oh! Tom, I was so sorry about the trial, and what lies they told,” said the boy, after they had talked a little longer; “and saying that you had been with gipsies, and were a poacher; and oh! Tom, is mammy quite well?”
“Yes.”
“And all my ships were lost on the moor; and how is little Toozie the cat?”
“Very well; blooming — blushing.”
“And, Tom, you are quite well?”
“Never better, as I lately told Squire Harry Fairfield; and mind ye, I’ll be even yet with the old boy in there,” and he indicated the house with a jerk of his thumb.
“I don’t hear the organ, Tom. Goodbye.”
And Tom was off in a moment, and the boy had resumed his watering-pot. And that evening he sat down with, for the first time, a tremendous secret at his heart.
There was one grief even in the hope of his liberation. When he looked at poor Mary, and thought how lonely she would be. Oh! if poor Mary could come with him! But some time or other he and Tom would come and take her away, and she would live with him and mammy, and be one of that happy family.
She did not know what thoughts were in the boy’s mind as his sad earnest eyes were fixed on her, and she smiled with a little languid nod.
But he need not have grieved his gentle heart on this account. There was not to be a seeming desertion of his friend; nor anything she could mistake for a treacherous slight.
That morning, at two o’clock, Mary died.
About ten minutes before an alarm from the old servant who slept in the room called up her father.
Her faithful little friend was on his knees sobbing beside the bed, with her wasted hand in his, as the Sergeant-Major, hastily dressed, walked in, and stood by the curtain looking down into those large deep eyes. She was conscious, though she could not speak. She saw, as she looked up her last look, a few sullen drops gather in those proud eyes, and roll down his cheeks. Perhaps the sad, wondering look with which she returned these signs of tenderness, smote him, and haunted him afterwards. There was a little motion in her right hand as if she would have liked him to take it — in sign of reconciliation — and with those faint tokens of the love that might have been, the change of death came, and the troubled little heart was still, and the image of Willie Fairlace was lost in the great darkness.
Then the little boy cried aloud wildly —
“Oh! Mary, pretty Mary. Oh! Mary, are you dead? Oh! isn’t it a pity; isn’t it a pity! Oh! is she dead?”
The Sergeant dried his eyes hastily. He hoped, I dare say, that no one had seen his momentary weakness. He drew a long breath. With a stern face he closed the pretty eyes that Willie Fairlace, far away now, will never forget; and closed the little mouth that never will complain, or sigh, or confess its sad tale more.
“You had better get to your room, boy. Get to your bed,” said the Sergeant, not ungently laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’ll take cold. Give him a candle.”
CHAPTER XX.
THE MARCH BY NIGHT.
The next day the Sergeant was away in his gig to Wyvern, a long journey, to report to the Squire, and obtain leave of absence from his duties for a day or two. He was to spend that night at Hatherton, there to make arrangements about the funeral.
It was a relief to all at Noulton Farm, I need hardly say, when the master of the house was away.
A very sad day it was for the boy; a day whose gloom was every now and then crossed by the thrill and fear of a great excitement.
As evening darkened he went out again to the garden in the hope of seeing Tom Orange. He would have liked that cheer at the eve of his great venture. But Tom was not there. Neither counsel nor encouragement to be heard; nothing but the song of the small birds among the leaves, and the late flowers, soon to close, peeping from among the garden plants, and the long quiet shadows of the poplars that stood so tall and still against the western sky.
The boy came in and had his lonely cup of tea in the “parlour,” and a little talk with the somewhat sour and sad old servant. He was longing for the night. Yearning to see Tom’s friendly face and to end his suspense.
At last the twilight was gone. The night had indeed come, and the moon shone serenely over the old gray roof and the solemn trees; over the dead and the living.
The boy lay down in his bed at the accustomed early hour. The old woman had taken away his candle and shut the door. He lay with his eyes wide open listening with a palpitating heart for every sound.
The inflexible regularity which the absent master had established in his household was in the boy’s favour. He heard the servant shut and bar the outer door at the wonted hour. He saw the boy’s candle in his window for a while and then put out. Tony was in his bed, and for tired Tony to lie down was generally to be asleep.
Peeping stealthily from his lattice he saw the old servant’s candle glimmering redly through the window on the juniper that stood near the wall in the shadow; and soon that light also disappeared, and he knew that the old woman had gone into her room. It was halfpast ten. She would be asleep in a quarter of an hour, and in another fifteen minutes his critical adventure would h
ave commenced.
Stealthily, breathlessly, he dressed. His window looked toward the ozier trees, where Tom was to await him. It opened, lattice fashion, with a hinge.
Happily the night was still, and the process of preparing to descend perfectly noiseless. The piece of old rope that lay in the corner he had early fixed on as his instrument of escape. He made it fast to the bedpost, and began to let himself down the wall. The rope was too short, and he dangled in air from the end of it for a second or two, and then dropped to the ground. The distance of the fall, though not much, was enough to throw him from his feet, and the dog in the lock-up yard at the other side of the house began to bark angrily. For a minute the boy gave himself up.
He lay, however, perfectly still, and the barking subsided. There was no other alarm, and he stole very softly away under cover of the trees, and then faster down the slope toward the appointed oziers.
There indeed was Tom Orange in that faint light, more solemn than he ever remembered to have seen him before. Tom was thinking that the stealing away this boy might possibly turn out the most serious enterprise he had yet engaged in.
He had no notion, however, of receding, and merely telling the boy to follow him, he got into a swinging trot that tried the little fellow’s endurance rather severely. I think they ran full three miles before Tom came to a halt.
Then, more like himself, he inquired how he was, and whether he thought he could go on fifteen miles more that night.
“Oh, yes, he could do anything that night. Quite well.”
“Well, walk a bit that you may get breath, and then we’ll run again,” said Tom, and so they set forward once more.
They had now accomplished about four miles more. The little fellow was not so fresh as at starting. A drizzling rain, too, had commenced, with a cold change of wind, and altogether the mere adventure of running away was not quite so pleasant, nor even Tom’s society quite so agreeable on the occasion, as he had fancied.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 517
