Kitabı oku: «The Unbidden Guest», sayfa 3
CHAPTER IV. – A MATTER OF TWENTY POUNDS
This is jolly!” exclaimed Missy, settling herself comfortably at the old man’s side as she handed him back the reins. They had just jogged out of the lowest paddock, and Mr. Teesdale had been down to remove the slip-rails and to replace them after Missy had driven through.
“Very nicely done,” the farmer said, in his playful, kindly fashion. “I see you’ve handled the ribbons before.”
“Never in my life!”
“Indeed? I should have thought that with all them horses and carriages every one of you would have learnt to ride and drive.”
“Yes, you would think so,” Missy said, after a pause; “but in my case you’d think wrong. I can’t bear horses, so I tell you straight. One flew at me when I was a little girl, and I’ve never gone near ‘em since.”
“Flew at you!” exclaimed Mr. Teesdale. “Nay, come!”
“Well, you know what I mean. I’d show you the bite – ”
“Oh, it bit you? Now I see, now I see.”
“You saw all along!”
“No, it was such a funny way of putting it.”
“You knew what I meant,” persisted Missy. “If you’re going to make game of me, I’ll get down and walk. Shall we be back in Melbourne by seven?”
Mr. Teesdale drew out his watch with a proud smile and a tender hand. He loved consulting it before anybody, but Missy’s presence gave the act a special charm. He shook his head, however, in answer to her question.
“We’ll not do it,” said he; “it’s ten past six already.”
“Then how long is it going to take us?”
“Well, not much under the hour; you see – ”
A groan at his side made Mr. Teesdale look quickly round; and there was trouble under the heavy fringe.
“I must be there soon after seven!” cried the girl petulantly.
“Ay, but where, Missy? I’ll do my best,” said David, snatching up the whip, “if you’ll tell me where it is you want to be.”
“It’s the Bijou Theatre – I’m supposed to be there by seven – to meet the people I’m staying with, you know.”
David had begun to use the whip vigorously, but now he hesitated and looked pained. “I am sorry to hear it’s a theatre you want to get to,” said he gravely.
“Why, do you think them such sinks of iniquity – is that it?” asked the girl, laughing.
“I never was in a theatre in my life, Missy; I don’t approve of them, my dear.”
“No more do I – no more do I! But when you’re staying with people you can’t always be your own boss, now can you?”
“You could with us, Missy.”
“Well, that’s bully; but I can’t with these folks. They’re regular terrors for the theatre, the folks I’m staying with now, and I don’t know what they’ll say if I keep ‘em waiting long. Think you can do it?”
“Not by seven; but I think we might get there between five and ten minutes past.”
“Thank God!”
Mr. Teesdale wrinkled his forehead, but said nothing. Evidently it was of the first importance that Missy should not keep her friends waiting. Of these people, however, she had already spoken so lightly that David was pleased to fancy her as not caring very much about them. He was pleased, not only because they took her to the theatre, but because he wanted no rival Australian friends for his old friend’s child; the farm, if possible, must be her only home so long as she remained in the Colony. When, therefore, the girl herself confirmed his hopes the very next time she opened her mouth, the old man beamed with satisfaction.
“These folks I’m staying with,” said Missy – “I’m not what you call dead nuts on ‘em, as I said before.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” chuckled David, “because we want you all to ourselves, my dear.”
“So you think! Some day you’ll be sorry you spoke.”
“Nonsense, child. What makes you talk such rubbish? You’ve got to come and make your home with us until you’re tired of us, as I’ve told you already. Where is it they live, these friends of yours?”
“Where do they live?” repeated Missy. “Oh, in Kew.”
“Ah – Kew.”
The name was spoken in a queer, noticeable tone, as of philosophic reflection. Then the farmer smiled and went on driving in silence; they were progressing at a good speed now. But Missy had looked up anxiously.
“What do you know about Kew?” said she.
“Not much,” replied David, with a laugh; “only once upon a time I had a chance of buying it – and had the money too!”
“You had the money to buy Kew?”
“Yes, I had it. There was a man who took me on to a hill and showed me a hollow full of scrub and offered to get me the refusal of it for an old song. I had the money and all, as it happened, but I wasn’t going to throw it away. The place looked a howling wilderness; but it is now the suburb of Kew.”
“Think of that. Aren’t you sorry you didn’t buy it?”
“Oh, it makes no difference.”
“But you’d be so rich if you had!”
“I should be a millionaire twice over,” said the farmer, complacently, as he removed his ruin of a top-hat to let in the breeze upon his venerable pate. Missy sat aghast at him.
“It makes me sick to think of it,” she exclaimed. “I don’t know what I couldn’t do to you! If I’d been you I’d have cut my throat years ago. To think of the high old time you could have had!”
“I never had that much desire for a high old time,” said Mr. Teesdale with gentle exaltation.
“Haven’t I, then, that’s all!” cried his companion in considerable excitement. “It makes a poor girl feel bad to hear you go on like that.”
“But you’re not a poor girl.”
Missy was silenced.
“Yes, I am,” she said at last, with an air of resolution. It was not, however, until they were the better part of a mile nearer Melbourne.
“You are what?”
“A poor girl.”
“Nonsense, my dear. I wonder what your father would say if he heard you talk like that.”
“He’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Not when he’s worth thousands, Missy?”
“Not when he’s thousands of miles away, Mr. Teesdale.”
Mr. Teesdale raised his wrinkled forehead and drove on. A look of mingled anxiety and pain aged him years in a minute. Soon the country roads were left behind, and the houses began closing up on either side of a very long and broad high road. It was ten minutes to seven by Mr. Teesdale’s watch when he looked at it again. It was time for him to say the difficult thing which had occurred to him two or three miles back, and he said it in the gentlest tones imaginable from an old man of nearly seventy.
“Missy, my dear, is it possible” (so he put it) “that you have run short of the needful?”
“It’s a fact,” said Missy light-heartedly.
“But how, my dear, have you managed to do that?”
“How? Let’s see. I gave a lot away – to a woman in the steerage – whose husband went and died at sea. He died of dropsy. I nursed him, I did. Rather! I helped lay him out when he was dead. But don’t go telling anybody – please.”
Mr. Teesdale had shuddered uncontrollably; now, however, he shifted the reins to his right hand in order to pat Missy with his left.
“You’re a noble girl. You are that! Yet it’s only what I should have expected of their child. I might ha’ known you’d be a noble girl.”
“But you won’t tell anybody?”
“Not if you’d rather I didn’t. That proves your nobility! About how much would you like, my dear, to go on with?”
“Oh, twenty pounds.”
Mr. Teesdale drew the breeze in through the broken ranks of his teeth.
“Wouldn’t – wouldn’t ten do, my dear?”
“Ten? Let’s think. No, I don’t think I could do with a penny less than twenty. You see, a wave came into the cabin and spoilt all my things. I want everything new.”
“But I understood you had such a good voyage, Missy?”
“Not from me you didn’t! Besides, it was my own fault: I gone and left the window open, and in came a sea. Didn’t the captain kick up a shine! But I told him it was worse for me than for him; and look at the old duds I’ve got to go about in all because! Why, I look quite common – I know I do. No; I must have new before I come out to stay at the farm.”
“I’m sure our Arabella dresses simple,” the farmer was beginning; but Missy cut him short, and there was a spot of anger on each of her pale cheeks as she broke out:
“But this ain’t simple – it’s common! I had to borrow the most of it. All my things were spoilt. I can’t get a new rig-out for less than twenty pounds, and without everything new – ”
“Nay, come!” cried old David, in some trouble. “Of course I’ll let you have anything you want – I have your father’s instructions to do so. But – but there are difficulties. It’s difficult at this moment. You see the banks are closed, and – and – ”
“Oh, don’t you be in any hurry. Send it when you can; then I’ll get the things and come out afterwards. Why, here we are at Lonsdale Street!”
“But I want you to come out soon. How long would it take you to get everything?”
“To-day’s Thursday. If I had it to-morrow I could come out on Monday.”
“Then you shall have it to-morrow,” said David, closing his lips firmly. “Though the banks are closed, there’s the man we send our milk to, and he owes me a lump more than twenty pound. I’ll go to him now and get the twenty from him, or I’ll know the reason why! Yes, and I’ll post it to you before I go back home at all! What address must I send it to, Missy?”
“What address? Oh, to the General Post Office. I don’t want the folks I am staying with to know. They offered to lend me, and I wouldn’t. Will you stop, please?”
“Quite right, my dear, quite right. I was the one to come to. You’ll find it at the – ”
“Do you mind stopping?”
“Why, we’re not there yet. We’re not even in Bourke Street.”
“No, but please stop here.”
“Very well. Here we are, then, and it’s only six past. But why not drive right on to the theatre – that’s what I want to know?”
Missy hesitated, and hesitated, until she saw the old man peering into her face through the darkness that seemed to have fallen during the last five minutes. Then she dropped her eyes. They had pulled up alongside the deep-cut channel between road-metal and curb-stone, whereby you shall remember the streets of Melbourne. Nobody appeared to be taking any notice of them.
“I see,” said David very gently. “And I don’t wonder at it. No, Missy, it’s not at all the sort of turn-out for your friends to see you in. Jump down, my dear, and I’ll just drive alongside to see that nothing happens you. But I won’t seem to know you, Missy – I won’t seem to know you!”
Lower and lower, as the old man spoke, the girl had been hanging her head; until now he could see nothing of her face on account of her fringe; when suddenly she raised it and kissed his cheek. She was out of the buggy next moment.
She walked at a great rate, but David kept up with her by trotting his horse, and they exchanged signals the whole way. Close to the theatre she beckoned to him to pull up again. He did so, and she came to the wheel with one of her queer, inscrutable smiles.
“How do you know,” said she, “that I’m Miriam Oliver at all?”
The rays from a gas-lamp cut between their faces as she looked him full in the eyes.
“Why, of course you are!”
“But how do you know?”
“Nay, come, what a question! What makes you ask it, Missy?”
“Because I’ve given you no proof. I brought an introduction with me and I went and forgot to give it to you. However, here it is, so you may as well put it in your pipe and smoke it.”
She took some letters out of her pocket as she spoke, and shifted the top one to the bottom until she came to an envelope that had never been through the post. This she handed up to David, who recognised his old friend’s writing, which indeed had caught his eye on most of the other envelopes also. And when she had put these back in her pocket she held out her dirty-gloved hand.
“So long,” she said. “You won’t know me when I turn up on Monday.”
“Stop!” cried David. “You must let me know when to send the buggy for you, and where to. It’ll never do to have you coming out in the ‘bus again.”
“Right you are. I’ll let you know. So long again – and see here. I think you’re the sweetest and trustingest old man in the world!”
She was far ahead, this time, before the buggy was under way again.
“Naturally,” chuckled David, following her hair through the crowd. “I should hope so, indeed, when it’s a child of John William Oliver, and one that you can love for her own sake an’ all! But what made her look so sorry when she gave me the kiss? And what’s this? Nay, come, I must have made a mistake!”
He had flattered himself that his eyes never left the portals where they had lost sight of the red hair, and when he got up to it what should it be but the stage door? The words were painted over it as plain as that. The mistake might be Missy’s; but a little waiting by the curb convinced Mr. Teesdale that it was his own; for Missy never came back, as he argued she must have done if she really had gone in at the stage door.
CHAPTER V. – A WATCH AND A PIPE
Mr. Teesdale drove on to the inn at which he was in the habit of putting up when in town with the buggy. His connection with the house was very characteristic. Many years before the landlord had served him in a menial capacity, but for nearly as many that worthy had been infinitely more prosperous than poor David, who, indeed, had never prospered at all. They were good friends, however, for the farmer had a soul too serene for envy, and a heart too simple to be over-sensitive concerning his own treatment at the hands of others. Thus he never resented his old hand’s way with him, which would have cut envy, vanity, or touchiness, to the quick. He came to this inn for the sake of old acquaintance; it never occurred to him to go elsewhere; nor had he ever been short or sharp with his landlord before this evening, when, instead of answering questions and explaining what had brought him into Melbourne twice in one day, Mr. Teesdale flung the reins to the ostler, and himself out of the yard, with the rather forbidding reply that he was there on business. He was, indeed; though the business was the birth of the last half-hour.
It led him first to a little bare office overlooking a yard where many milk-carts stood at ease with their shafts resting upon the ground; and the other party to it was a man for whom Mr. Teesdale was no match.
“I must have twenty pounds,” said David, beginning firmly.
“When?” replied the other coolly.
“Now. I shan’t go home without it.”
“I am very sorry, Mr. Teesdale, but I’m afraid that you’ll have to.”
“Why should I,” cried David, smacking his hand down on the table, “when you owe me a hundred and thirty? Twenty is all I ask, for I know how you are situated; but twenty I must and shall have.”
“We simply haven’t it in the bank.”
“Nay, come, I can’t believe that.”
“I’ll show you the pass-book.”
“I won’t look at it. No, I shall put the matter into the hands of a solicitor. Good evening to you. I dare say it isn’t your fault; but I must have some satisfaction, one way or the other. I am not going on like this a single day longer.”
“Good evening, then, Mr. Teesdale. If you do what you say, we shall have to liquidate; and then you will get nothing at all, or very little.” David had heard this story before. “It was an evil day for me when I sent you my first load of milk,” he cried out bitterly; but in the other’s words there had been such a ring of truth as took all the sting out of his own.
“It will be a worse one for us when you send me your last,” replied the man of business. “That would be enough to finish us in itself, without your solicitor, in our present state; whereas, if you give us time – ”
“I have given you too much time already,” said the farmer, heaving the sigh which was ever the end of all his threats; and with a sudden good-humoured resignation (which put his nature in a nutshell), he got up and went away, after an amicable discussion on the exceeding earliness of summer with the man for whom he was no match at all. Throughout his life there had been far too many men who were more than a match for poor David in all such matters.
But the getting of the twenty pounds was a matter apart. He did not want it for himself; the person in need of the money was the child of his dear old friend, who had charged her to apply to him, David, in precisely that kind of difficulty which had already arisen. The fact made the old man’s heart hot on one side and cold on the other; for while it glowed with pride at the trust reposed in him, it froze within his breast at the thought of his own helplessness to fulfil that trust. This, however, was a thought which he obstinately refused to entertain. He had not twenty pounds in the bank; on the contrary, his account was overdrawn to the utmost limit. For himself, he would have starved rather than borrow from his friend the innkeeper; but he could have brought himself to do so for Miriam, had he not been perfectly certain that his old servant would refuse to lend. In all Melbourne there was no other to whom he could go for the twenty pounds; yet have it he must, by hook or crook, that night; and ten minutes after his fruitless interview with the middleman who sold his milk, a way was shown him.
He was hanging about the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, watching the multitude with an absent, lack-lustre eye; the post-office clock had chimed the hour overhead, and David, still absently, had taken his own cherished watch from his waistcoat pocket to check its time. It was not on his last day in Melbourne, nor on his last but one, that the watch had been set by the post-office clock, yet it was still right to the minute; and before the eighth clang from above had been swallowed in the city’s hum, David had got his idea. He closed the gold case with a decisive snap, and next moment went in feverish quest of the nearest pawnbroker.
It was with a face strangely drawn between joy and regret, between guilt and triumph, that Mr. Teesdale at length returned to his inn. Here, in the writing-room, now with the scared frown of a forger, and now with a senile giggle, he cowered over a blotting-pad for some minutes; and thereafter returned to the post-office with a sealed envelope, which he shot into safety with his own hands. It was well after nine before the horse was put to, and David seated once more in the buggy, with the collar of his dust-coat turned up about his ears and the apron over his long lean legs.
“Never knew you so late before, old man,” said his former servant, who was smoking a cigar in the yard, and perhaps still thinking of his first snub from David Teesdale.
“No, I don’t think you ever did,” replied David, blandly.
“Second time in to-day, too.”
“Second time in,” repeated Mr. Teesdale, drawing the reins through his fingers.
“And it’ll take you a good hour to get home. I say, you’ll be getting into trouble. You won’t be there before – What time is it now, old man?”
“Look at the post-office,” said David, as he took up his whip.
“I can’t see it without going out into the street; besides, I always thought they took their time from that wonderful watch of yours?”
“You’re a clever fellow!” cried David, as the other had never heard him speak in the whole course of their previous acquaintance; and he was gone without another word.
He drove away with a troubled face; but the Melbourne street-lamps showed deeper furrows under the old tall hat than David carried with him into the darkness beyond the city, for the more he thought of it, the surer did he become that his late action was not only defensible, but rather praiseworthy into the bargain. There was about it, moreover, a dramatic fitness which charmed him no less because he did not know the name for it. Throughout his unsuccessful manhood he had treasured a watch, which was as absurd in his pocket as a gold-headed cane in a beggarman’s hand, because Oliver had given it to him. For years it must have mocked him whenever he took it from his shabby pocket, but in the narrowest straits he had never parted with it, nor had his gold watch ever ceased to be David Teesdale’s most precious possession. And now, after two-and-thirty years, he had calmly pawned it, on the spur of the moment, and, as it seemed to himself, for the most extraordinary and beautiful reason in the world; for what he could never bring himself to do in his own need he had done in a moment for the extravagant behoof of his friend’s daughter; and his heart beat higher than for many a year in the joy of his deed. So puffed up was he, indeed, that he forgot the fear of Mrs. Teesdale, and some other things besides; for at the foot of the last hill, within a mile of the farm, the horse shied so suddenly that David, taken off his guard, found his near wheels in the ditch before he could haul in the slack of the reins; and when another plunge might have overturned the buggy, a man ran out of the darkness to the horse’s head, and before David could realise what had happened his ship had righted itself and was at anchor in the middle of the road.
“My fault, as I’m a sinner!” cried a rich voice from near the horse’s ears.
“Nay, I’m very much obliged to you,” said Mr. Teesdale, with a laugh, for he made no work of a bit of danger, much less when past.
“But it was me your horse shied at,” returned the other, and fell to petting the frightened animal with soft words and a soothing hand. “I was going to take the liberty of stopping you for a moment.”
“I never saw you,” said David; “it was that dark, and I was that busy thinking. What is it I can do for you? The horse ‘ll stand steady now, thank you, if you’ll come this way.”
The wayfarer came round to the buggy wheels and stood still, feeling in all his pockets before answering questions. The near lamp shot its rays upon a broad, deep chest, and showed a pair of hairy hands searching one pocket after another. The rays reached as high as a scarlet neckcloth, but no higher, so that the man’s face was not very easily visible; and David was only beginning to pick out of the night a heavy moustache, and a still heavier jaw, when from between the two there came the gleam of teeth, and the fellow was laughing a little and swearing more. He had given up his search, and stood empty-handed under the lamp.
“I’m not a bushranger,” said he, “but you might easily think me one.”
“Why so?” asked David.
“Because I stopped you to ask for a match to light my pipe, and now I’m hanged if I can find my pipe in any of my pockets; and it was the best one ever I smoked,” said the man, with more of his oaths.
“That’s a bad job,” said David, sympathetically, in spite of a personal horror of bad language, which was one of his better peculiarities.
“A bad job?” cried the man. “It would be that if I’d lost my pipe, but it’s a damned sight worse when it’s a girl that goes and shakes it from you, and she the biggest little innocent you ever clapped eyes on. Yet she must have shook it. Confound her face!”
He was feeling in his pockets again, but as unsuccessfully as before. The farmer inquired whether he was on his way back to Melbourne, and suggested it was a long walk.
“It is so,” said the man; “but it’s a gay little town when you get there, is Melbourne – what?”
“Very,” said Mr. Teesdale, to be civil; but he was beginning to find this difficult.
“You prefer the country – what?” continued the other, who was now leaning on the wheel, and showing a face which the old man liked even less than the rest of him, it was so handsome and yet so coarse. “Well, so do I, for a change. And talk of the girls!” The fellow winked. “Old Country or Colonies, it’s all the same – you give me a country lass for a lark that’s worth having. But damn their souls when they lose your favourite pipe!”
“What sort of a pipe was it?” asked David, to change a conversation which he disliked. “If I come across it I’ll send it to you, if you tell me where to.”
“Good, old man!” cried the stranger. “It was a meerschaum, with a lady’s hand holding of the bowl, and coloured better than any pipe ever you saw in your life. If you do find it, you leave it with the boss of the ‘Bushman’s Rest’. then I’ll get it again when next I come this way – to see my girl. For I can’t quite think she’s the one to have touched it, when all’s skid and done.”
“Very good,” said David, coldly, because both look and word of this roadside acquaintance were equally undesirable in his eyes. “Very good, if I find it. And now, if you’ll allow me, I’ll push on home.”
The other showed himself as ready with a sneer as with an oath. “You are in a desperate hurry!” said he.
“I am,” said David; “nevertheless, I’m much obliged to you for being so clever with the horse just now, and I wish you a very good night.” And with that, showing for once some little decision, because this kind of man repelled him, old Tees-dale cracked his whip and drove on without more ado.
Nor is it likely he would have thought any more about so trifling an incident, but for another which occurred before he finally reached home. It was at his own slip-rails, not many minutes later; he had got down and taken them out, and was in the act of leading through, when his foot kicked something hard and small, so that it rattled against one of the rails, and shone in the light of the buggy lamp at the same instant. The farmer stopped to pick it up, found it a meerschaum pipe, and pulled a grave face over it for several moments. Then he slipped it into his pocket, and after putting up the rails behind him, was in his own yard in three minutes. Here one of the men took charge of horse and buggy, and the master went round to the front of the house, but must needs stand in the verandah to spy on Arabella, who was sitting with her Family Cherub under the lamp and the blind never drawn. She was not reading; her head was lifted, and she was gazing at the window – at himself, David imagined; but he was wrong, for she never saw him. Her face was flushed, and there was in it a wonder and a stealthy joy, born of the romantic reading under her nose, as the father thought; but he was wrong again; for Arabella had finished one chapter before the coming of Missy, and had sat an hour over the next without taking in a word.
“So you’ve got back, father?” she was saying presently, in an absent, mechanical sort of voice.
“Here I am,” said Mr. Teesdale; “and I left Missy at the theatre, where it appears she had to meet – ”
“Missy!” exclaimed Arabella, remembering very suddenly. “Oh yes! Of course. Where do you say you left her, father?”
“At the Bijou Theatre, my dear, I am sorry to say; but it wasn’t her fault; it was the friends she is staying with whom she had to meet there. Well, let’s hope it won’t do her any harm just once in a way. And what have you been doing, my dear, all the evening?”
“I? Oh, after milking I had a bit of a stroll outside.”
“A stroll, eh? Then you didn’t happen to see a man hanging about our slip-rails, did you?”
Mr. Teesdale was emptying his pockets, with his back to Arabella, so he never knew how his question affected her.
“I wasn’t near the slip-rails, I was in the opposite direction,” she said presently. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I found this right under them,” said Mr. Teesdale, showing her the meerschaum pipe before laying it down on the chimney-piece; “and as I was getting near the township, I met a man who told me he’d lost just such a pipe. And I didn’t like him, my dear, so I only hope he’s not coming after our Mary Jane, that’s all.”
Mary Jane was the farm-servant. She had not been out of the kitchen since milking-time, said Arabella; and her father was remarking that he was glad to hear this, when the door flew open, and Mrs. Teesdale whistled into the room like a squall of wind.
“At last!” she cried. “Do you know how long you’ve been, David? Do you know what time it is?”
“I don’t, my dear,” said he.
“Then look at your watch.”
“My dear,” he said, “I’ve left my watch in Melbourne.”
“In Melbourne!” cried Mrs. Teesdale among her top notes. “And what’s the meaning of that?”
“It means,” said Mr. Teesdale, struggling to avoid the lie direct, “that it hasn’t been cleaned for years, and that it needed cleaning very badly indeed.”
“But you told Miriam how well it was going; time we were having our teas!”
“Yes, I know, and – that’s the curious thing, my dear. It went and stopped on our way in.” For there was no avoiding it, after all; yet in all the long years of their married life, it was his first.
