Читать книгу The Unbidden Guest - Hornung Ernest William - Страница 2

At the sound of the voices outside, John William, for his part, had slipped behind the gun-room door; but he had the presence of mind not to shut it quite, and this enabled him to peer through the crack and take deliberate stock of the fair visitant.

She was a well-built young woman, with a bold, free carriage and a very daring smile. That was John William’s first impression when he came to think of it in words a little later. His eyes then fastened upon her hair. The poor colour of her face and lips did not strike him at the time any more than the smudges under the merry eyes. The common stamp of the regular features never struck him at all, for of such matters old Mr. Teesdale himself was hardly a judge; but the girl’s hair took John William’s fancy on the spot. It was the most wonderful hair: red, and yet beautiful. There was plenty of it to be seen, too, for the straw hat that hid the rest had a backward tilt to it, while an exuberant fringe came down within an inch of the light eyebrows. John William could have borne it lower still. He watched and listened with a smile upon his own hairy visage, of which he was totally unaware.

“So this is my old friend’s daughter!” the farmer had cried out.

“And you’re Mr. Scarsdale, are you?” answered the girl, between fits of intermittent, almost hysterical laughter.

“Eh? Yes, yes; I’m Mr. Teesdale, and this is my daughter Arabella. You are to be sisters, you two.”

The visitor turned to Arabella and gave her a sounding kiss upon the lips.

“And mayn’t I have one too?” old Teesdale asked. “I’m that glad to see you, my dear, and you know you’re to look upon me like a father as long as you stay in Australia. Thank you, Miriam. Now I feel as if you’d been here a week already!”

Mr. Teesdale had received as prompt and as hearty a kiss as his daughter before him.

“Mrs. Teesdale is busy, but she’ll come directly,” he went on to explain. “Do you know what she’s doing? She’s getting your room ready, Miriam. We knew that you had landed, and I’ve spent the whole day hunting for you in town. Just to think that you should have come out by yourself after all! But our John William was here a minute ago. John William, what are you doing?”

“Cleaning my gun,” said the young man, coming from behind his door, greasy rag in hand.

“Nay, come! You finished that job long ago. Come and shake hands with Miriam. Look, here she is, safe and sound, and come out all by herself!”

“I’m very glad to see you,” said the son of the house, advancing, dirty palms foremost, “but I’m sorry I can’t shake hands!”

“Then I’d better kiss you too!”

She had taken a swinging step forward, and the red fringe was within a foot of his startled face, when she tossed back her head with a hearty laugh.

“No, I think I won’t. You’re too old and you’re not old enough – see?”

“John William ‘ll be three-and-thirty come January,” said Mr. Teesdale gratuitously.

“Yes? That’s ten years older than me,” answered the visitor with equal candour. “Exactly ten!”

“Nay, come – not exactly ten,” the old gentleman said, with some gravity, for he was a great stickler for the literal truth; “only seven or eight, I understood from your father?”

The visitor coloured, then pouted, and then burst out laughing as she exclaimed, “You oughtn’t to be so particular about ladies’ ages! Surely two or three years is near enough, isn’t it? I’m ashamed of you, Mr. Teesdale; I really am!” And David received such a glance that he became exceedingly ashamed of himself; but the smile that followed it warmed his old heart through and through, and reminded him, he thought, of Miriam’s mother.

Meantime, the younger Teesdale remained rooted to the spot where he had been very nearly kissed. He was still sufficiently abashed, but perhaps on that very account a plain speech came from him too.

“You’re not like what I expected. No, I’m bothered if you are!”

“Much worse?” asked the girl, with a scared look.

“No, much better. Ten thousand times better!” cried the young man. Then his shyness overtook him, and, though he joined in the general laughter, he ventured no further remarks. As to the laughter, the visitor’s was the most infectious ever heard in the weather-board farmhouse. Arabella shook within the comfortable covering with which nature had upholstered her, and old David had to apply the large red handkerchief to his furrowed cheeks before he could give her the message to Mrs. Teesdale, for which there had not been a moment to spare out of the crowded minute or two which had elapsed since the visitor’s unforeseen arrival.

“Go, my dear,” he said now, “and tell your mother that Miriam is here. That’s it. Mrs. T. will be with us directly, Miriam. Ah, I thought this photograph’d catch your eye sooner or later. You’ll have seen it once or twice before, eh? Just once or twice, I’m thinking.” The group still lay on the table at Mr. Teesdale’s end.

“Who are they?” asked the visitor, very carelessly; indeed, she had but given the photograph a glance, and that from a distance.

“Who? Why, yourselves; your own family. All the lot of you when you were little,” cried David, snatching up the picture and handing it across. “We were just looking at it when you came, Miriam; and I made you out to be this one, look – this poor little thing with the sun in her eyes.”

The old man was pointing with his finger, the girl examining closely. Their heads were together. Suddenly she raised hers, looked him in the eyes, and burst out laughing.

“How clever you are!” she said. “I’m not a bit like that now, now am I?”

She made him look well at her before answering. And in all his after knowledge of it, he never again saw quite so bold and dibonnaire an expression upon that cool face framed in so much hot hair. But from a mistaken sense of politeness, Mr. Teesdale made a disingenuous answer after all, and the subject of conversation veered from the girl who had come out to Australia to those she had left behind her in the old country.

That conversation would recur to Mr. Teesdale in after days. It contained surprises for him at the time. Later, he ceased to wonder at what he had heard. Indeed, there was nothing wonderful in his having nourished quite a number of misconceptions concerning a family of whom he had set eyes on no member for upwards of thirty years. It was those misconceptions which the red-haired member of that family now removed. They were all very natural in the circumstances. And yet, to give an instance, Mr. Teesdale was momentarily startled to ascertain that Mrs. Oliver had never been so well in her life as when her daughter sailed. He had understood from Mr. Oliver that his wife was in a very serious state with diabetes. When he now said so, the innocent remark made Miss Oliver to blush and bite her lips. Then she explained. Her mother had been threatened with the disease in question, but that was all. The real fact was, her father was morbidly anxious about her mother, and to such an extent that it appeared the anxiety amounted to mania.

She put it in her own way.

“Pa’s mad on ma,” she said. “You can’t believe a word he says about her.”

Mr. Teesdale found this difficult to believe of his old friend, who seemed to him to write so sensibly about the matter. It made him look out of the gun-room window. Then he recollected that the girl herself lacked health, for which cause she had come abroad.

“And what was the matter with you, Miriam,” said he, “for your father only says that the doctors recommended the voyage?”

“Oh, that’s all he said, was it?”

“Yes, that’s all.”

“And you want to know what was the matter with me, do you?”

“No, I was only wondering. It’s no business of mine.”

“Oh, but I’ll tell you. Bless your life, I’m not ashamed of it. It was late nights – it was late nights that was the matter with me.”

“Nay, come,” cried the farmer; yet, as he peered through his spectacles into the bright eyes sheltered by the fiery fringe, he surmised a deep-lying heaviness in the brain behind them; and he noticed now for the first time how pale a face they were set in, and how gray the marks were underneath them.

“The voyage hasn’t done you much good, either,” he said. “Why, you aren’t even sunburnt.”

“No? Well, you see, I’m such a bad sailor. I spent all my time in the cabin, that’s how it was.”

“Yet the Argus says you had such a good voyage?”

“Yes? I expect they always say that. It was a beast of a voyage, if you ask me, and quite as bad as late nights for you, though not nearly so nice.”

“Ah, well, we’ll soon set you up, my dear. This is the place to make a good job of you, if ever there was one. But where have you been staying since you landed, Miriam? It’s upwards of twenty-four hours now.”

The guest smiled.

“Ah, that’s tellings. With some people who came out with me – some swells that I knew in the West End, if you particularly want to know; not that I’m much nuts on ‘em, either.”

“Don’t you be inquisitive, father,” broke in John William from the sofa. It was his first remark since he had sat down.

“Well, perhaps I mustn’t bother you with any more questions now,” said Mr. Teesdale to the girl; “but I shall have a hundred to ask you later on. To think that you’re Mr. Oliver’s daughter after all! Ay, and I see a look of your mother and all now and then. They did well to send you out to us, and get you right away from them late hours and that nasty society – though here comes one that’ll want you to tell her all about that by-and-by.”

The person in question was Arabella, who had just re-entered.

“Society?” said she. “My word, yes, I shall want you to tell me all about society, Miriam.”

“Do you hear that, Miriam?” said Mr. Teesdale after some moments. She had taken no notice.

“What’s that? Oh yes, I heard; but I shan’t tell anybody anything more unless you all stop calling me Miriam.”

This surprised them; it had the air of a sudden thought as suddenly spoken.

“But Miriam’s your name,” said Arabella, laughing.

“Your father has never spoken of you as anything else,” remarked Mr. Teesdale.

“All the same, I’m not used to being called by it,” replied their visitor, who for the first time was exhibiting signs of confusion. “I like people to call me what I’m accustomed to being called. You may say it’s a pet name, but it’s what I’m used to, and I like it best.”

“What is, missy?” said old Teesdale kindly; for the girl was staring absently at the opposite wall.

“Tell us, and we’ll call you nothing else,” Arabella promised.

The girl suddenly swept her eyes from the wall to Mr. Teesdale’s inquiring face. “You said it just now,” she told him, with a nod and her brightest smile. “You said it without knowing when you called me ‘Missy.’ That’s what they always call me at home – Missy or the Miss. You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“Then I choose Missy,” said Arabella. “And now, father, I came with a message from my mother; she wants you to take Missy out into the verandah while we get the tea ready. She wasn’t tidy enough to come and see you at once, Missy, but she sends you her love to go on with, and she hopes that you’ll excuse her.”

“Of course she will,” answered Mr. Teesdale for the girl; “but will you excuse me, Missy, if I bring my pipe out with me? I’m just wearying for a smoke.”

“Excuse you?” cried Missy, taking the old man’s arm as she accompanied him to the door. “Why, bless your life, I love a smoke myself.”

John William had jumped up to follow them; had hesitated; and was left behind.

“There!” said Arabella, turning a shocked face upon him the instant they were quite alone.

“She was joking,” said John William.

“I don’t think it.”

“Then you must be a fool, Arabella. Of course she was only in fun.”

“But she said so many queer things; and oh, John William, she seems to me so queer altogether!”

“Well, what the deuce did you expect?” cried the other in a temper. “Didn’t her own father say that she was something out of the common? What do you know about it, anyway? What do you know about ‘modern mannerisms’. Didn’t her own father let on that she had some? Even if she did smoke, I shouldn’t be surprised or think anything of it; depend upon it they smoke in society, whether they do or they don’t in your rotten Family Cherub. But she was only joking when she said that; and I never saw the like of you, Arabella, not to know a joke when you hear one.” And John William stamped away to his room; to reappear in a white shirt and his drab tweed suit, exactly as though he had been going into Melbourne for the day.

It was Mrs. Teesdale, perhaps, who put this measure into her son’s head; for, as he quitted the parlour, she pushed past him to enter it, in the act of fastening the final buttons of her gray-stuff chapel-going bodice. “Now, then, Arabella,” she cried sharply, “let blind down and get them things off table.” And on to it, as she spoke, Mrs. Teesdale flung a clean white folded table-cloth which she had carried between elbow and ribs while busy buttoning her dress. As for Arabella, she obeyed each order instantly, displaying an amount of bustling activity which only showed itself on occasions when her mother was particularly hot and irritable; the present was one.

Mrs. Teesdale was a tall, strong woman who at sixty struck one first of all with her strength, activity, and hard, solid pluck. Her courage and her hardness too were written in every wrinkle of a bloodless, weather-beaten face that must have been sharp and pointed even in girlhood; and those same dominant qualities shone continually in a pair of eyes like cold steel – the eyes of a woman who had never given in. The woman had not her husband’s heart full of sympathy and affection for all but the very worst who came his way. She had neither his moderately good education, nor his immoderately ready and helping hand even for the worst. Least of all had she his simple but adequate sense of humour; of this quality and all its illuminating satellites Mrs. Teesdale was totally devoid. Yet, but for his wife, old David would probably have found himself facing his latter end in one or other of the Benevolent Asylums of that Colony; whereas with the wife’s character inside the husband’s skin, it is not improbable that the name of David Teesdale would have been known and honoured in the land where his days had been long indeed, but sadly unprofitable.

Arabella, then, who had inherited some of David’s weak points, just as John William possessed his mother’s strong ones, could work with the best of them when she liked and Mrs. Teesdale drove. In ten minutes the tea was ready; and it was a more elaborate tea than usual, for there was quince jam as well as honey, and, by great good luck, cold boiled ham in addition to hot boiled eggs. Last of all, John William, when he was ready, picked a posy of geraniums from the bed outside the gun-room outer door (which was invisible from the verandah, where David and the visitor could be heard chatting), and placed them in the centre of the clean table-cloth. Then Mrs. Teesdale drew up the blind; and a nice sight met their eyes.

Mr. Teesdale was discovered in earnest expostulation with the girl from England, who was smoking his pipe. She had jumped on to the wooden armchair upon which, a moment ago, she had no doubt been seated; now she was dancing upon it, slowly and rhythmically, from one foot to the other, and while holding the long clay well above the old man’s reach, she kept puffing at it with such immense energy that the smoke hung in a cloud about her rakish fringe and wicked smile, under the verandah slates. A smile flickered also across the entreating face of David Teesdale; and it was this his unpardonable show of taking the outrage in good part, that made away with the wife’s modicum of self-control. Doubling a hard-working fist, she was on the point of knocking at the window with all the might that it would bear, when her wrist was held and the blind let down. And it was John William who faced her indignation with the firm front which she herself had given him.

“I am very sorry, mother,” said he quietly, “but you are not going to make a scene.”

Such was the power of Mrs. Teesdale in her own home, she could scarcely credit her hearing. “Not going to?” she cried, for the words had been tuned neither to question nor entreaty, but a command. “Let go my hands this moment, sir!”

“Then don’t knock,” said John William, complying; and there was never a knock; but the woman was blazing.

“How dare you?” she said; and indeed, man and boy, he had never dared so much before.

“You were going to make a scene,” said he, as kindly as ever; “and though we didn’t invite her, she is our guest – ”

“You may be ashamed of yourself! I don’t care who she is; she shan’t smoke here.”

“She is also the daughter of your oldest friends; and hasn’t her own father written to say she has ways and habits which the girls hadn’t when you were one? Not that smoking’s a habit of hers: not likely. I’ll bet she’s only done this for a lark. And you’re to say nothing more about it, mother, do you see?”

“Draw up the blind,” said Mrs. Teesdale, speaking to her son as she had spoken to him all his life, but, for the first time, without confidence. “Draw up the blind, and disobey me at your peril.”

“Then promise to say nothing about it to the girl.”

They eyed each other for a minute. In the end the mother said: “To the girl? No, of course I won’t say anything to her – unless it happens again.” It was not even happening when the blind was drawn up, and it never did happen again. But Mrs. Teesdale had given in, for once in her life, and to one of her own children. Moreover, there was an alien in the case, who was also a girl; and this was the beginning between these three.