Читать книгу The Unbidden Guest - Hornung Ernest William - Страница 3

It was not a very good beginning, and the first to feel that was John William himself. He felt it at tea. During the meal his mouth never opened, except on business; but his eyes made up for it.

He saw everything. He saw that his mother and Missy would never get on; he knew it the moment they kissed. There was no sounding smack that time. The visitor, for her part, seemed anxious to show that even she could be shy if she tried; and as for Mrs. Teesdale and her warm greeting, it was very badly done. The tone was peevish, and her son, for one, could hear between the words. “You’re our old friends’ child,” he heard her saying in her heart, “but I don’t think I shall like you; for you’ve come without letting me know, you’ve smoked, and you’ve set my own son against me – already.” He was half sorry that he had checked, what is as necessary to some as the breath they draw, a little plain speaking at the outset. But sooner or later, about one thing or another, this was bound to come; and come it did.

“I can’t think, Miriam,” said Mrs. Teesdale, “how you came by that red hair o’ yours! Your father’s was very near black, and your mother’s a light brown wi’ a streak o’ gold in it; but there wasn’t a red hair in either o’ their heads that I can remember.”

At this speech John William bit off an oath under his beard, while David looked miserably at his wife, and Arabella at their visitor, who first turned as red as her hair, and then burst into a fit of her merriest laughter.

“Well, I can’t help it, can I?” cried she, with a good-nature that won two hearts, at any rate. “I didn’t choose my hair; it grew its own colour – all I’ve got to do is to keep it on!”

“Yes, but it’s that red!” exclaimed Mrs. Teesdale stolidly, while John William chuckled and looked less savage.

“Ah, you could light your old pipe at it,” said Missy to the farmer, making the chuckler laugh outright.

Not so Mr. Teesdale. “My dear,” he said to his wife; “my dear!”

“Well, but I could understand it, David, if her parents’ hairs had any red in ‘em. In the only photograph we have of you, Miriam, which is that group there taken when you were all little, you look to have your mother’s fair hair. I can’t make it out.”

“No?” said Missy, sweetly. “Then you didn’t know that red always comes out light in a photograph?”

“Oh, I know nothing at all about that,” said Mrs. Teesdale, with the proper disregard for a lost point. “Then have the others all got red hair too?”

“N – no, I’m the only one.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, Miriam, I’m sure it is!”

“Nay, come, my dear, that’ll do,” whispered David; while John William said loudly, to change the subject, “You’re not to call her Miriam, mother.”

“And why not, I wonder?”

“Because she’s not used to it. She says they call her Missy at home; and we want to make her at home here, surely to goodness!”

Missy had smiled gratefully on John William and nodded confirmation of his statement to Mrs. Teesdale, who, however, shook her head.

“Ay, but I don’t care for nicknames at all,” said she, without the shadow of a smile; “I never did and I never shall, John William. So, Miriam, you’ll have to put up with your proper name from me, for I’m too old to change. And I’m sure it’s not an ugly one,” added the dour woman, less harshly. “Is your cup off, Miriam?” she added to that; she did not mean to be quite as she was.

It was at this point, however, that the visitor asked Mr. Teesdale the time, and that Mr. Teesdale, with a sudden eloquence in his kind old eyes, showed her the watch which Mr. Oliver had given him; speaking most touchingly of her father’s goodness, and kindness, and generosity, and of their lifelong friendship. Thus the long hand marked some minutes while the watch was still out before it appeared why Missy wanted to know the time. She then declared she must get back to Melbourne before dark, a statement which provoked some brisk opposition, notably on the part of Mr. Teesdale. But the girl showed commendable firmness. She would go back as she had come, by the six o’clock ‘bus from the township. None of them, however, would hear of the ‘bus, and John William waited until a compromise had been effected by her giving way on this point; then he went out to put-to.

This proved a business. The old mare had already made one journey into Melbourne and back; and that was some nine miles each way. There was another buggy-horse, but it had to be run up from the paddock. Thus twenty minutes elapsed before John William led horse and trap round to the front of the house. He found the party he had left mildly arguing round the tea-table, now assembled on the grass below the red-brick verandah. They were arguing still, it seemed, and not quite so mildly. Missy was buttoning a yellow glove, the worse for wear, and she was standing like a rock, with her mouth shut tight. Mr. Teesdale had on his tall hat and his dust-coat, and the whip was once more in his hand; at the sight of him his son’s heel went an inch into the ground.

“Only fancy!” cried the old man in explanation. “She says she’s not coming back to us any more. She doesn’t want to come out and stay with us!”

Arabella echoed the “Only fancy!” while Mrs. Teesdale thought of the old folks who had been young when she was, and said decisively, “But she’ll have to.”

John William said nothing at all; but it was to him the visitor now looked appealingly.

“It isn’t that I shouldn’t like it – that isn’t it at all – it’s that you wouldn’t like me! Oh, you don’t know what I am. You don’t, I tell you straight. I’m not fit to come and stay here – I should put you all about so – there’s no saying what I shouldn’t do. You can’t think how glad I am to have seen you all. It’s a jolly old place, and I shall be able to tell ‘em all at home just what it’s like. But you’d far better let me rest where I am – you – you – you really had.”

She had given way, not to tears, indeed, but to the slightly hysterical laughter which had characterised her entry into the parlour when John William was looking through the crack. Now she once more made her laughter loud, and it seemed particularly inconsequent. Yet here was a sign of irresolution which old David, as the wisest of the Teesdales, was the first to recognise. Moreover, her eyes were flying from the weather-board farmhouse to the river timber down the hill, from the soft cool grass to the peaceful sky, and from hay-stack to hen-yard, as though the whole simple scene were a temptation to her; and David saw this also.

“Nonsense,” said he firmly; and to the others, “She’ll come back and stay with us till she’s tired of us – we’ll never be tired of you, Missy. Ay, of course she will. You leave her to me, Mrs. T.”

“Then,” said Missy, snatching her eyes from their last fascination, a wattle-bush in bloom, “will you take all the blame if I turn out a bad egg?”

“A what?” said Mrs. Teesdale.

“Of course we will,” cried her husband, turning a deaf ear to John William, who was trying to speak to him.

“You promise, all of you!”

“Of course we do,” answered the farmer again; but he had not answered John William.

“Then I’ll come, and your blood be on your own heads.”

For a moment she stood smiling at them all in turn; and not a soul of them saw her next going without thinking of this one. The low sun struck full upon the heavy red fringe, and on the pale face and the devil-may-care smile which it over-hung just then. At the back of that smile there was a something which seemed to be coming up swiftly like a squall at sea; but only for one moment; the next, she had kissed the women, shaken hands with the young man, mounted into the buggy beside Mr. Teesdale, and the two of them were driving slowly down the slope.

“I think, John William,” said his mother, “that you might have driven in this time, instead o’ letting your father go twice.”

“Didn’t I want to?” replied John William, in a bellow which made Missy turn her head at thirty yards. “He was bent on going. He’s the most pig-headed old man in the Colony. He wouldn’t even answer me when I spoke to him about it just now.”

He turned on his heel, and mother and daughter were at last alone, and free to criticise.

“For a young lady fresh from England,” began the former, “I must say I thought it was a shabby dress – didn’t you?”

“Shabby isn’t the word,” said Arabella; “if you ask me, I call her whole style flashy – as flashy as it can stick.”