"I can grind your pen-knife for you, if you like," suggested Archie magnanimously. "I"d admire to do it."
"Haven"t got one," said Peggy sadly. "I lost mine out of my pocket the other day, when I fell into the stream."
"Ah! girls have such stupid pockets, they never can keep anything in them. Never mind, perhaps this will be more in your line;" and lifting up a lid, he showed a tiny churn, calculated to fill the feminine soul with rapture.
"You could put some cream in that, and make enough b.u.t.ter for your tea,"
he said, when Peggy had exhausted her list of admiring adjectives. "I"ll let you do it some time, if you want. But if you like the churn, what do you think of this, now?" And, stooping forward, he moved a switch, and the strains of a little musical-box were heard playing "The Last Rose of Summer" with wonderfully correct time and tune.
"You"ll never persuade me you made that, too!" cried Peggy, turning upon him with wide-open eyes.
"Indeed I did!" laughed Archie. "Oh, it"s not so difficult, after all.
See, I"ll show it to you. It"s only made with pins set round in a circle on a piece of board, with a nail on a pivot in the centre to revolve round and strike them. The hard part of it was to set the pins just right. You see, the shortness or longness of them makes the difference in the notes, and the distance between gives the time. It took me a jolly long while to puzzle it all out, I can tell you!"
"I think you"re a genius!" declared Peggy, who was absolutely steeped in admiration.
"Why, no!" said the boy. "But I reckon to go in for engineering some time, so it"s all practice, you see. When I can get some more tools and things I want to set up a hydraulic pump to water the garden. I believe I could put electric light all over the house, if aunt would only let me try."
"I"m afraid you might blow us all up, my dear boy!" exclaimed the pleasant voice of Miss Forster, who had joined them un.o.bserved. "So you have been making Peggy"s acquaintance? She had better stay to tea, now she is here. I will send a message up to the Abbey to say we are keeping her."
Peggy beamed with delight, for she wanted to see more of Archie"s wonderful work, and also the cakes and jam at the Willows had a reputation for excellence quite unsurpa.s.sed in the neighbourhood.
Miss Forster was a little elderly lady, with a neat, bird-like appearance, and a brisk, cheerful manner, who seemed to match the prim, square house with its green door and bra.s.s knocker, and white sun-blinds over the windows. Everything about the place was kept in the most exquisite order--never a weed on the paths nor a daisy on the lawns--while indoors the old-fashioned rooms were the very perfection of neatness, and the polish on the Chippendale furniture was a thing to wonder at.
When Miss Forster had adopted her brother"s youngest boy from Colorado, her neighbours held up their hands in amazement, and suggested that one of her London nieces would have proved a far more satisfactory companion. But Miss Forster herself thought otherwise.
"My nieces are dear girls," she said, "but they take all I say for gospel, and have not an original idea among them. I want some fresh young life in the place, to keep me from quite stagnating. Archie brings a breath of the new world with him, and outside interests which I hope may prevent me from falling into the narrow rut that is so often the fate of elderly spinsters in retired villages. It is quite possible that he may upset the house in some slight degree, but on the whole it is good for me to have my little ways interfered with. One is apt to get into the habit of thinking that the set of a curtain, or a speck of dust on the mirror, are of more importance than the affairs of the universe."
Since his arrival, Archie had certainly done his best to preserve his aunt from any danger of stagnation, for his fertile brain kept her in a perpetual tremor as to what the "dear boy" would do next.
"We work everything by machinery out in America, you know, aunt," he explained. "And it feels just terribly behind the times to come home and find you jogging on in the same hum-drum way this old country has done since the conquest. I guess if you could come out to Colorado, you"d get an eye-opener!"
Miss Forster opened her eyes wide enough, as it was, to see a neat telephone, made of two empty cocoa-tins and a piece of waxed string, fixed up between the house and the stables, while a small windmill on the scullery roof turned the coffee-grinder in the kitchen, to the huge amazement and delight of the cook. She had gasped a little at the incubator, made of an old biscuit-tin, and placed on the greenhouse pipes.
"Would not a good sitting hen be really better, my dear boy?" she suggested mildly. "I don"t see what you are going to do with the young chicks when you hatch them out."
"Oh, I"ll have fixed up a foster-mother before the three weeks are up,"
said Archie. "I"m lining a shallow box with plaster of Paris, and sticking it full of feathers while it"s wet. Then, if I keep it on the hot pipes, it will feel for all the world like an old hen, and I don"t believe there"ll be a chick that"ll find out the difference!"
There seemed to be no end to Master Archie"s wonderful inventions. The boy had a great talent for mechanics, and was very painstaking in carrying out all the minute details of his work. Most of his schemes were really of use in the household, though occasionally some of them were not attended with quite the success they deserved. He had hung the great dinner-bell in the cherry-tree, and fastened a string from it to his bed-post, so that he might scare the birds from the fruit in the early morning; but unfortunately he had flung out his arms in his sleep and set the bell ringing soon after midnight, bringing the neighbours hurrying up to the Willows, thinking it was an alarm of fire. He had manufactured a marvellous hat-grip, warranted to defy the windiest of weather, and presented it to the housemaid; but when the poor girl tried to take off her Sunday hat, she found it so tightly fixed to her hair that it took the combined efforts of the other servants, aided by the liberal use of a pair of scissors, to remove the construction from her head. He had fixed a fire-escape to the landing window, and nearly killed the trusting parlour-maid by letting her down in a blanket "just for practice," while the cook was soaked through in a sudden application of the hose-pipe to quench imaginary flames in the region of the back-kitchen.
But I think the crowning achievement was an automatic currying-brush, which was to be wound up and fixed on to the horse"s back, and was to do the work "in just half the time old Fleming takes pottering over it."
"Don"t ee, now, Master Archie--don"t ee, now!" remonstrated the poor old coachman, with dismay in his soul. "Horses is kittle cattle, and it aren"t right to play no tricks with "em!"
"Don"t you be alarmed, Fleming. I guess Captain will like it just first-rate. He"ll find it sort of soothing, and it"ll put such a gloss on him you"ll be able to see your face in his coat. If it works all right, I"ll rig up an arrangement to milk the cows next."
And the confident inventor wound up his little machine, and started it on Captain"s fat back. But the old horse would have nothing to say to such a newfangled contrivance, and, with a snort of alarm, had nearly kicked through the side of his stall, sending the currying-brush flying in one direction and Master Archie head over heels in another.
"I reckon he"s rather too old to catch on to it," said the boy, determined not to own himself beaten, as he picked up the ruins of his clock-work. "It would be best to start on a colt, and put it in as part of the training. Never mind, I can use the wheels to make an alarum, and fix it up in the harness-room, to go off at any time you like, Fleming!"
But Fleming showed such a rooted distrust for anything that was intended to "go off," and, indeed, such absolute abhorrence of any further mechanical contrivance in the vicinity of the stables, that Archie had transferred his attentions to the garden, where he was full of a scheme for utilizing the water power of the little stream to irrigate the soil, after the fashion of the Nile in Egypt, in a series of ca.n.a.ls between the beds, and had already made the hose-pipe work with capital effect by means of a siphon and an old barrel.
This was a form of amus.e.m.e.nt which appealed far more to Miss Forster"s mind, for her flowers suffered much from drought in summer time, and she was a keen compet.i.tor at the local horticultural shows, exhibiting some of the largest carnations and the roundest dahlias in the neighbourhood.
So she watched with delight the growth of the hydraulic pump, groaning a little over the dirty boots and muddied clothes that ensued, but a.s.suring her friends that the "dear boy" was a perfect genius, and would make his mark in the world, and relating the story of his achievements with most unbounded pride and satisfaction.
CHAPTER XII
IN THE RECTORY GARDEN
"A good man"s life is like a fairest flower: It casts a fragrant breath on all around."
Though Miss Forster"s pet flower-beds were a subject for modest congratulation to their owner, they were not to be compared to those at the Rectory, which were indeed a feast of scent and colour. The Rector was worthily proud of his garden. It represented a considerable amount of skill and artistic taste on the part of himself and his handy-man, for the rare plants and exquisite groupings of contrasting blossoms would have done credit to a more imposing establishment, and he had as choice a collection of shrubs as could be grown anywhere in the county.
It was almost sunset when Peggy, having seen the last of Archie"s contrivances, and bidden good-bye to kind Miss Forster, pa.s.sed by the Rectory hedge, and hearing the brisk sound of the mowing-machine, pushed open the little gate and went in, knowing she was always sure of a welcome.
Peggy loved to get Mr. Howell sometimes quite to herself. Perhaps it was because he was one of those rare characters in whose presence we can feel certain of perfect sympathy, or perhaps it grew from a more subtle and silent bond, felt keenly by the child, though never spoken of, for Peggy could remember a time when the Rector"s hair was raven black, and there had been a little Raymond Howell playing about on the smooth lawns of the old garden. Folks had said that the Rector, like many a man who marries late in life, had made an idol of his motherless boy, and they had said, again, that the father"s heart was broken and the print of death was on his face as he stood by his child"s open grave. But they judged wrong, for he had wrestled with his sorrow, like Jacob with the angel of old, and came forth from the struggle with hair indeed as white as snow, but a face so full of the glory of his conquest that those who looked felt as if he, too, had died, and they saw his immortality.
"Ah, he"s a changed man!" said Ellen, the nurse, to Susan, the cook, as they talked in whispers over the night-nursery fire when the children were in bed. "If he was a saint before, it"s an angel he is now, and nothing less. They say he takes no thought for himself at all. His heart"s been left in the grave with the poor boy, it"s true, but, mark my words, if there"s a soul in trouble in all the parish it"s no kinder friend they"ll find than Mr. Howell."
Little five-year-old Peggy, lying wide awake, straining her ears to overhear the whispered conversation, sat up in bed with burning cheeks.
"Oh, nurse!" she cried. "_Poor_ Mr. Howell! Have they lost his heart in the churchyard, and can"t anybody find it for him?"
"Go to sleep at once, you naughty girl, or I"ll call your aunt," said Ellen, putting out the candle to avoid further complications, for she knew she ought not to have been talking within hearing of her charges, and hoped Peggy would forget the matter by morning.
But the child lay awake for a long time, puzzling her small brain. She was not quite sure what a heart was, but she thought the Rector would miss it, and that he was in some sort of trouble she realized well enough.
"Can people live without hearts?" she asked Lilian next day.
"Of course not," replied Lilian, with the superior wisdom of nine years old, and dismissed the idea with scorn.
But Peggy did not consider the question ended by any means. Like most children, with the instinctive dread of being laughed at, she never thought of confiding her difficulty to an older person, but solving the problem according to her own quaint ideas, she dodged the vigilance of Ellen, and trotted off alone to the churchyard. The lych-gate was locked, but she toiled over the steep steps that spanned the wall, and wading through the long gra.s.s under the yew-trees, found the spot, all covered with flowers, which Lilian had pointed out on Sunday, where "Mary, the wife of the Reverend Philip Howell," slept, "in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life," and where the stonemason had been already busy with the newly-added line: "Also Raymond, only son of the above."
Who can tell all that goes on in the mind of a little child, or what it understands of death? In a vague way Peggy knew that her playfellow had "gone to heaven, where mother is," but she did not think of that as any cause for sorrow, nor did she connect him for an instant with the place where she stood, but, with her nurse"s words still troubling her, she knelt down and searched among the white flowers that hid the bare earth beneath.
A step on the gravel walk startled her to her feet, but it was only the Rector, coming slowly down the path from the church-door.
"Don"t go away, little Margaret," he said quietly. "G.o.d"s acre is free to all. We have both precious seed sown here that we hope to find blooming some day in Paradise."
"Oh, Mr. Howell," burst out Peggy, her gray eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with tears, "is it really true that your heart is lost here? Don"t you think, if we were both to look, we might find it again?"
The Rector stroked the brown curls with a tender hand.
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No, child, it"s not here, but up in the light beyond;" and he pointed where the sun, breaking through the clouds, burst out in a flood of golden glory. "We make our plans for this world," he said softly, speaking as much to himself as to Peggy, "and say we will do this or that, but sometimes G.o.d takes it out of our hands and arranges it for us; but His ways are better than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts, and, after all, death is but the gate to life immortal."