CHAPTER XI

TOM'S LAST EFFORT

THAT very same evening, Mrs. Keith received an ill-written letter from Tom:

"MADAM,—This is to say as little Miss to my sertain nowledge have not toled a lie. There be anuther party in the bisness wich if you cud discover wud be rather near home but I am pleged to say nothing. They that lives most with her knows and is hidinge the truth.

"Your obedient servant "TOM TRIGGS."

Mrs. Keith showed this to her husband. As Harebell was cleared, they did not tell her anything about it, but Tom was written to and thanked for his intervention.

And very soon the Rectory party returned from the seaside. Peter and Harebell had a very solemn interview. He was made by his mother to come up and tell Mrs. Keith exactly what he had said; and then he apologised to Harebell.

She took his shamefaced apology very gravely. But when she began to relate to him her runaway ride, he brightened up and was most interested.

"It's just like a story! What a pity you came back. I should have gone to sea!"

"I couldn't have. I couldn't have taken Chris with me. It was him I didn't like leaving."

"Girls never keep things up. They always get frightened and stop in the middle."

"What would you have felt like if I had never come back?"

Peter reflected.

"I think I should have told people it was my fault, and then I should have felt obliged to run away after you to find you. That would have been good fun! I should have gone on the donkey, and you bet I should have caught you up!" His eyes gleamed at the idea.

"I'm very glad I didn't go on. It's horrid if you feel you're quite alone in the world. I felt when I was in that empty house, as if I had lost my friends and my home—and the most awful thing of all—that I had lost God, and didn't belong to Him any more."

It was Peter's turn to look grave.

"I'm glad I'm not you, without a mother. Mother is ripping. She wasn't a bit angry when I told her, only very sorry—and—well—loving. I was rather a cad, and, of course it was a lie I told. I'm never going to tell another as long as I live. If I die for it, I won't!"

Peter clenched his fists determinedly.

His sin, and the burden of it, and then the confession, had made him a different boy. Harebell felt he was a much nicer Peter afterwards, and other people felt so too.

Lessons began again, and life went on with cheerful regularity, varied by picnics on half-holidays, and later on by blackberrying and nutting expeditions. Harebell grew into a strong rosy girl. Her aunt was fast losing her cold indifferent manner towards her, and Harebell now chatted to her as freely and unconstrainedly as to any one else. Then the winter came: but Harebell enjoyed the cold, and welcomed the frost and snow with delight and interest.

Christmas was a most enjoyable time, and she and the Rectory children were inseparable during the holidays.

When the New Year came, there was a good deal of sickness in the village, and many of the old people died. Amongst them was Mrs. Crake and Mrs. Triggs. Tom came to his mother's funeral, and the village hardly knew him. He had gone steadily on in the right way, and was now a respectable sober hardworking man.

Mrs. Keith no longer objected to Harebell's interest in him, and one day she was allowed to go to tea with Tom and his sister. She walked off very proudly, and was soon sitting up at a well-spread table in the little front parlour.

Miss Triggs was in deep mourning and was rather sad. Harebell was too excited to be so. She had never much cared for old Mrs. Triggs, who did not welcome her as a visitor, and made no secret of her dislike to children. And now she could not pretend to mourn for her.

"Do you know, Miss Harebell, I may be going away?" said Miss Triggs with a sigh.

"You'll have to get somebody else to make your frocks for you. I've had an offer from an uncle of ours, who is a big draper in Swansea. He wants me to go there and be one of the skirt hands, and Tom and me have been talking it over, and I think I'd like to go."

"Oh, dear! This is dreadful news," said Harebell in dismay. "And who will live in your cottage?"

"I'll give it up. I have only to give a month's notice."

"But won't Tom want it? You'll come back and live here again, won't you, Tom? I do want you so much."

"Not yet awhile, missy. I'm feelin' a bit unsettled like. True, the Squire talked about wantin' an estate carpenter now his head man be off to Canada: but that be too good a billet for me. There be a small cottage, too, for the lucky chap who gets it—"

"Oh, but what a lovely thing for you! And then you'd get a wife. Do say you would, Tom. And Fanny isn't married to anybody else, and now she's all alone, it would be just right, wouldn't it, Miss Triggs? She has lost her mother as well as you."

Miss Triggs smiled, but Tom did not. He got rather red.

"Eh, dear? But you do go on about a wife; I ain't ready for one yet."

"I'll help you to get ready," said Harebell earnestly; "there seem a lot of cottages ready for your wife. This one, and Fanny's, and the Squire's."

"Have one of these little cakes, dear," said Miss Triggs, who wished to change the conversation.

Harebell ate the cake and thought hard. At length she said:

"You see, Tom, you've given up the beer, and you've got work, and now you've got cottages all round you, and the wife is the last thing and the best of all."

"'Tis to be hoped she will be," said Tom, half to himself.

"Well," said Miss Triggs, "I wouldn't go off and leave him, Miss Harebell, if he'd make his home with me. But he won't. 'Tisn't disagreeableness; the fact is, he have kept on sendin' his money home to mother, and he hasn't enough just now to start a house on his own, and he have got proud, and won't let me pay the rent and such like."

"You have spent too much on me all these years," muttered Tom. "Now we'll let my affairs bide for a bit, missy. Do you think you could find room in your home for a little chair I've been making in my odd moments? I brought it back with me when I come—"

He went into the back kitchen and brought out a beautiful little rocking-chair, which he presented to Harebell. Then he showed her some letters carved on the back:

F.T.T. A.B.S. I.T.D.

Harebell screamed with delight over the chair, but puzzled over the letters.

Tom at length enlightened her.

"I'm not a very good scholar, and my tools be not fine enough to carve words, but I've put the first letter, see?"

"From Tom Triggs A black sheep Inside the Door."

"That do describe me, by God's help."

"Oh, it's beautiful!" exclaimed Harebell. "And so clever! I am sure Aunt Diana will let me have it, and I do adore a thing that rocks! It will be much nicer than a rocking-horse. I used to have one of those in India."

Tom promised to bring it up that night; and Harebell was overwhelming in her thanks.

At last she had to leave her friends, and she trotted home. It seemed to her that it was not chance that made her meet the Squire of the neighbourhood riding home from a hunt, with two other gentlemen with him. It was too good an opportunity to be lost.

Harebell had often seen the Squire in church, and had spoken to him once when he had been calling upon her uncle. She now stepped into the middle of the road and held up her hand authoritatively.

The Squire reined up his horse with a good-natured laugh.

"Well, little maid, are you a suffragette? Or a policeman? What do you want?"

Harebell was nothing if not direct.

"I want you to stop to listen to me. Tom Triggs is a very good man, and a friend of mine, and he can make beautiful rocking-chairs fit for a queen. Please take him as your carpenter and give him a cottage."

"Upon my word! Tom Triggs! Who is he? Surely not that drunken loafer who spends his days over his beer-pot!"

"Oh, that was long, long ago; he's quite a changed man; everybody says so. At least, he's really the same, only much, much nicer."

"I know him," said one of the Squire's companions. "He's doing up the house I'm buying. Tom Triggs—I know the chap. He isn't a bad workman. My foreman of works says he's the most dependable of the whole lot out there."

The Squire looked down upon Harebell with laughing eyes.

"Now may I ask why you and he have chummed up together? An odd companion for you, I should say."

Harebell looked up with big earnest eyes.

"I liked him when he was wicked, because I'd never seen a wicked man before. And then—well, you know I've been trying to get him to do things, and he's done them all except a cottage and a wife. I could get the wife if you would give the cottage."

The Squire laughed heartily.

"This is most entertaining. So you can get wives for people. Could you get one for me? I haven't one, you know."

Harebell shook her head.

"I don't know you well enough. Tom is a very great friend of mine. We talk over things, specially since we're together inside the Door. That's the best thing of all he has done. He has got right through and is quite safe."

"What door?"

"It's the Door of the Kingdom. He likes to call it the sheepfold, but it means the same. It tells you all about it in the Bible."

There was a minute's pause; then the Squire said genially:

"I really must see this wonderful carpenter. Send him up to see me—not to-day. To-morrow morning about ten. I shall be in, and I'll have a talk with him."

He nodded to her, then rode on; and Harebell danced along the road for joy.

"He'll get that cottage, and then Fanny must marry him!"

She told her aunt all about it when she got home. Mrs. Keith told her she must not speak to gentlemen whom she hardly knew when they were riding.

"It makes them think you're a most forward little girl," she said.

"I was so full of Tom, I didn't stop to think," said Harebell; "and he's made me the most beautiful rocking-chair, Aunt Diana, and he's going to bring it round to-night. You'll let me take it, won't you? And may I tell him the Squire wants to see him to-morrow?"

Permission was given. When Tom arrived, he looked quite confused when Harebell gave him the message.

"Upon my word, missy, you don't let the grass grow under your feet! Why, you be just wonderful with your tongue."

"And you'll tell me if you get the cottage, Tom? You'll tell me directly it's settled."

"There be not much chance of that, missy. The Squire have knowed me in the old days."

However, Tom had his interview with the Squire, and was taken on trial for a month, to his unbounded pride and delight. Harebell went straight off to see Fanny Crake when she heard of it.

Unfortunately, Fanny was away from home. But Harebell was not easily daunted. She came home and procured a piece of paper. In large copper-plate writing she wrote on it:

"Please Fanny, Tom Triggs may have the Squire's cottage. Get ready for his wife. From Harebell."

And then the next day she took the paper and slipped it underneath the door.

But she heard nothing from Fanny. And Tom was too busy at work to come near her.

Lessons and games and talks with everybody who came across her path now occupied her time.

Mrs. Keith said to her husband one night:

"I really dread the development of that child. I don't know which is busiest—her brain or tongue. I hope she won't grow into a chattering woman. I found her having a long dissertation to-day on the back doorstep with a wandering pedlar. She knows his history, and all the names and ages of all his relations, for I heard her repeating it all to Andy in the pantry."

"Oh, she's all right!" said Colonel Keith kindly. "She is interested in her fellow-creatures. It is better to have one's interest circle round them than round oneself."

And then one day Harebell got a letter, and it was a letter that filled her small heart with joy and satisfaction. It was from Tom Triggs:

"MY DEAR MISSY,—I have not yet wrote you a letter but I do so now hoping this will find you well as it leaves me. I write to say the Squire, he have give me the job and I thank you down to the ground for arsking of him to do it. I have the cottage in the wood, and all is going on as you said it ought. Nex April I hopes to get it, and mother's bits will stock it fine. And Fanny Crake and me are walking out, for on looking round I felt as how I ought to oblige you, and there seems no other to soot me, and Fanny says your heart be terrible set on to it. So we hopes if things go on well, to be husband and wife in April. Wishing you well.

"Your obedient servant, "TOM TRIGGS."

"P.S. The best which has come to me is what I have not the learning to speak on. But I am still I humbly trust, I. T. D."

She carried this letter all day about with her and slept with it under her pillow.

Her aunt found her one evening spelling it out to herself by the light of a candle.

"You are very fond of Tom Triggs," she said.

"He's such a good kind of friend," said Harebell in her old-fashioned way, as she folded up her letter and tucked it under her pillow. "He has done every single thing I wanted him to. And not many friends do that, do they?"

"Perhaps not."

"It's just five things he has done, and the wife is the last and best of all."

"What things?"

"Well, first he gave up drinking, and then he got some work, and then he got his cottage, and now he has got his wife."

"That is four."

"I s'pose the other thing is the really best thing," said Harebell, slowly and thoughtfully. "He has put it last in his letter, but I really believe it came first of all."

"And what is that?"

"He came to the Door of the sheep and got through it into the sheepfold."

Harebell's eyes were shining and earnest as she spoke.

Mrs. Keith stooped and kissed her.

"Yes, that is the only thing that really matters," she murmured.

And then when she left the room, Harebell added to herself:

"And in April, I mean to go to tea with them in their cottage. I said from the very first I would do it."

She hugged her letter as she spoke, then she fell asleep.

THE END

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