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 post-office 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.