“All that with their dinners?”
“Rather! I should think they did. The whole lot, one after the other!”
“What! Beer and brandy and sherry wine?” Arabella’s incredulity was disagreeably apparent.
“Yes, everything you can think of; but look here, if you don’t want to believe me, you needn’t, you know!” said Missy, turning as red as her fringe as she stared the other girl full in the eyes across the supper-table. In the awkward pause following John William turned and glared furiously at his sister; but it was their father who cleared the air by saying mildly:
“Arabella, my dear, I’m afraid you don’t know a joke when you hear one.”
Then Arabella coloured in her turn.
“Do you mean to say you were joking, Missy?” she leant forward to ask; as though she could no more believe this than recent statements.
But Missy had given one quick glance at Mr.
Teesdale, and then, with a little gasp, had burst into an immoderate fit of laughter.
“Of course I was,” she cried out as soon as she could speak; “of course I was joking — you old silly!”
CHAPTER VII.
MOONLIGHT SPORT.
So the first few days were largely spent in teaching Missy to shoot. A very plucky pupil she made, too, if not a particularly apt one; but head and chief of her sporting qualities was her enthusiasm. That was intense. The girl was never happy without a gun in her hand. So far as safety went, she took palpable pains to follow every injunction in the matter of full-cock and half-cock, and laid to heart all the rules given her for the carrying and handling of a loaded firearm. Thus, no one feared her prowling about the farm on tiptoe with John William’s double-barrels pointing admirably to earth; least of all, the sparrows and parrots which she never hit. Old Teesdale would go with her and stand chuckling at her side when she missed a sparrow sitting; once he snatched the smoking gun from her, and with the other barrel picked off the same small bird on the wing. Then there was much practice at folded newspapers, of which Missy could sometimes make a sieve, at her own range; and altogether these two shots enjoyed themselves. Certainly it was a sight to see them together — the weak-kneed old man, who could shoot so cleverly still, when he had a mind, and the jaunty young woman who was all slang and fun and rollicking good-nature, plus a cockney lust for blood and feathers.
Missy’s first feathers, however, were not such as she might stick in her hat, and her first blood was exceedingly ill-shed. To be sure, she knew no better until the deed was done, and the quaint dead bird with the big head and beak carried home in triumph to Mr. Teesdale. That triumph was short-lived.
“Got one at last!” cried Missy, as she dropped her prey at the old man’s feet. Mr. Teesdale was smoking in the verandah, and he pulled a long face behind his smile.
“So I see,” said he; “but do you know what it is you have got, Missy?”
“No, I don’t, but I mean to have him stuffed, whatever he is.”
“I think I wouldn’t, Missy, if I were you. It’s a laughing jackass.”
“Yes? Well, I guess he won’t laugh much more!”
“And there’s a five-pound penalty for shooting him, Missy. He kills the snakes, therefore you are not allowed by law to kill him. You have broken the law, my dear, and the best thing that we can do is to bury the victim and say nothing about it to anybody.” He was laughing, but the girl stood looking at her handiwork with a very red face.
“I thought I was to shoot everything,” she said. “I thought that everything eat the fruit and things. I never knew I was so beastly cruel!”
She put away the gun, and spent most of that summer’s day in reading to Mr. Teesdale, for whom she had developed a very pretty affection. They read longest in the parlour, with the window shut, and the blind down, and a big fly buzzing between it and the glass. The old man fell sound asleep in the end, whereupon Missy sat very still indeed, just to watch him. And what it was exactly in the worn and white-haired face that fetched the tears to her eyes and the shame to her cheeks, on this particular occasion, there is no saying; but Missy was scarcely Missy during the remainder of the afternoon.
That evening, however, had already been pitched upon for some ‘possum-shooting, given a good moon. From the moment she was reminded of this, at tea-time, the visitor was herself again, and something more. It is saying a good deal, but they had not hitherto seen her in such excessively high spirits as overcame her now. She lent Mr. Teesdale a hand to load some cartridges in the gunroom while the others were milking; but she was rather a hindrance than a help to that patient old man. She would put in the shot before the powder. Then she got into pure infantile mischief, letting off caps under David’s coat-tails, and doing her best to make him sharp with her. Herein she failed; nevertheless, the elder was glad enough to hand her over to the younger Teesdale when the time came, and with it a moon without a cloud. Neither Arabella nor her father was going, but three of the men were who worked on the place, and with whom John William was obliged to leave Missy alone in the yard while he went for the dogs. It was only for a minute or two; but the men were in fits of laughter when he returned. It appeared that Missy had been giving them some sort of a dance under that limelit moon.
“Down, Major! Down, Laddie!” John William cried at the dogs as they leaped up at Missy.
But Missy answered, “Down yourself, Jack — I like ‘em.” And the three men laughed; in fact, they seemed prepared to laugh at Missy whenever she opened her mouth; but John William laughed too as he led the way into the moonlit paddocks.
Here the hunting-ground began without preliminary, for on this side of the farm there were trees and to spare, the land dipping in a gully full of timber before it rose to the high ploughed levels known as the Cultivation. The gully was well grassed for all its trees, which were divers as well as manifold. There were gum-trees blue and red, and stringy-barks, and she-oaks, each and all of them a haunt of the opossum and the native cat. The party promptly surrounded a blue gum at the base of which the dogs stood barking, and Missy found herself doing what the others did — getting the moon behind the branches and searching for what she was told would look more like the stump of a bough or a tangle of leaves than any known animal.
“I believe it’s a lie,” said John William; “for Laddie barked first, and Laddie always did tell lies.”
“Tell lies?” echoed Missy, with a puzzled grin.
“Yes, barking up trees where there’s nothing at all — that’s what we call telling lies; and old Laddie’s started the evening well by telling one already.”
“Not he,” cried a shrill voice; and the youngest of the three farm-hands — a little bit of a fellow — stood pointing to a branch so low that everyone else had overlooked it.
“I see a little bit of a knot on the bough,” said Missy, “but blow me tight if I see anything else!”
“That’s it,” cried John William. “That little knot is a native cat.”
Missy lowered her gun at once. “Oh, I didn’t come out,” said she, “to shoot cats!”
“But they aren’t cats at all,” Teesdale explained (while his men stood and laughed); “they’re much more like little leopards, I assure you. We only call them cats because — because I’m bothered if I know why! It’s not the name for them, as you’ll say when you’ve shot this beggar. And you don’t know the way they tear our fowls to pieces, Missy, or you wouldn’t make so many bones about it; besides which, you won’t get an easier shot all night.”
“Oh, if that’s the kind of customer, I’m on to try,” said Missy. She raised her gun there and then, pressed it to her shoulder, and took aim at the black notch against the silver disc of the moon. The moonlight licked the barrels from sight to sight, getting into Missy’s eyes, but there were barely a dozen feet between muzzle and mark. The report was quickly followed by a lifeless thud upon the ground; and when the smoke cleared, that notch was gone from the bough. Then one of the men struck a match to show Missy what
she had done; and she had done it so effectually as to give herself a sensation which she concealed with difficulty. It was not pity; there was no pitying a spotted little horror with so sharp a snout and such devilish fangs: but whatever it was, that sensation kept Missy modest in her success, so that she refused the next shot point-blank. John William took it, with the only possible result.
“A bushy,” someone said, turning over the dead bush-tailed opossum with his foot It looked very big and soft and gray, lying dead in the moonlight. Missy found it in her heart to pity an opossum.
“Don’t you skin them?” she asked at a respectful range. “Do you make no use of them after all?”
“It’s so hard not to spoil them,” John William said as he slipped another cartridge into the breech. He would have shown her how this particular skin had been ruined by the shot, but Missy said she quite understood.
He was beginning to think her squeamish. He asked her whether she had not had enough. She would not admit it, and took another shot to prove her spirit. This time she failed, and bore her failure with an equanimity which (in Missy) amounted almost to apathy. That she was neither squeamish nor apathetic, however, was demonstrated very suddenly while the night was still young.
A ring-tailed opossum had been brought to earth by a charge from the muzzle-loader of that stunted young colonial whose eyes were as sharp as his voice — he who had “mooned” the native cat. The others called him Geordie. The three of them were kneeling over the dead “ringy,” and Missy was taking no more notice of them than she could help; only Geordie’s was a voice that made itself heard. Missy had taken little stock of what the kneeling men were doing or saying until suddenly she heard:
“Young ‘uns it is! I told you there was young ‘uns! That little beggar’s as dead as his mother, but this one ain’t. ‘Ere, come off ‘er back, can’t yer? She ain’t no more good to you now, do you ‘ear?”
This was Geordie’s manner of speech to the bunch of breathing fur that stuck tight to the dead doe’s back, whence his fingers were busy disengaging it; but Geordie suddenly found himself on his back in the grass, and when he picked himself up it was Miss Oliver herself who was kneeling where he had knelt, and even going on with his work. It took her some moments, and when done her hands were bloody in the moonshine. Then, first she took that bit of warm fur and nursed it in her neck, stroking it with her chin. And next she turned a calm face up to her companions, and said distinctly to them all, “I call this a damned shame, so I tell you straight!” Indeed she was anything but squeamish.
She lowered her eyes immediately, undid three buttons, and slipped the small opossum into her bosom. There she fixed it, with great care, but not the smallest fuss; and looking up once more, saw the three hirelings walking off together through the trees.
“I tell you,” she called after them — shaking her fist at their backs— “I tell you it’s the damnedest shame that ever was!”
The words rang clear through the clear night, then found an answer at Missy’s side. “You are quite right. It is. And now won’t you get up and come back home, Missy?”
“Jack!” cried the girl faintly, as she stumbled to her feet. “I’d quite forgotten you were there.”
“I have been here all the time,” said John William.
“Then do tell me what I’ve been saying,” said Missy, anxiously, as she took his arm and they started homeward. “I couldn’t see no more and keep my scalp fixed. I hope to God I haven’t been swearing, have I?”
“Not you, Missy. You’ve only said what was right and proper. It was cruel, and I blame myself for the whole thing.”
“No, no, no! I wanted some sport. I thought I could kill things, and never give a — no, never give a thought to ‘em. Now I know I can’t. That’s all. I say, though, if I did use a swear-word, you won’t give me away, will you? I don’t know what I said, and that’s all about it; but when I lose my scalp — ah well, I know I can trust you.”
“Of course you can,” said John William cheerily. And involuntarily he pressed to his side the hand that was still within his arm.
“I wouldn’t say swear-words unless I did lose my scalp — you understand?” said Missy, coming back to it again.
“Of course you wouldn’t; but you didn’t.”
“I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t have your parents hear of it if I did; they’d take it so terribly to heart.”
“They shall hear nothing — not that there’s anything for them to hear.”
“Now my parents are different; they swear themselves.”
“Come, I can’t credit that, you know!”
“But they do — like troopers!” persisted the girl. “It’s the fashion just now in England. You may not know — how should you?”
“Missy,” said John William, as he opened her the gate into the homestead yard, “it’s impossible to tell when you’re joking and when you’re not.”
“Aha, I mean it to be,” cried the girl, bowing low to him, with the moon all over her. Then she stood up to her last inch, smiled full in his face, and turning, left him that smile to keep if he could. He would have followed her, but a burst of laughter in the men’s room took him off his course, as good reasons occurred to him for calling in there first.
The room was a part of one of the farm outhouses. In each corner was a bunk, and on each bunk a man (counting Geordie), the fourth being one Old Willie, a retired salt, who drove the milk into Melbourne in the middle of every night. Old Willie was sitting on the side of his bunk and chuckling so windily that the sparks were flying out of his cutty like fireworks. There was nothing, however, to show which of the other three was the entertainer, for each turned silent and looked guilty when John William entered and planted himself in their midst.
“I just thought I’d tell you,” said he, with forced blandness, “that there is to be no more ‘possum-shooting on this place for good and all. The man who shoots another ‘possum, I’ll hide him with my own hands, and the man who catches me shooting one, he may take and shoot me. For it’s a grand shame, men, it’s a grand shame! You heard Miss Oliver say it was, didn’t you?” he added sharply, turning to the three.
For the moment they looked blank; the next, it was such a fierce person who was repeating the question, with eyes so like pointed pistols, that one after the other of those three men meekly perjured their souls.
“Exactly,” said John William, nodding his head in a deadly calm. “She said it was the grandest shame ever was; and if any man says she said anything else — well, he’d better let me hear him, that’s all!”
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SAVING OF ARABELLA.
ONE night early in December, Arabella burst into Missy’s room with singular abruptness. Missy had said good-night to the others and was very nearly in bed, but she had not seen Arabella, who had been out all the evening. Evidently she had only now come in. She was breathing quickly from hurrying up-hill; and there was a light in her countenance which Missy noticed in due course.
“Missy,” she began, as abruptly as she had entered, “do you remember the day you first came, and we showed you that group of you all taken when you were quite little?”
Missy nodded in the looking-glass. She was busy with her fringe.
“Well,” continued Arabella, “you said red came out light, talking of your hair. Do you remember that?”
“Red came out light? No, I can’t say I do.”
“You must, Missy! You were speaking of your hair in that group—”
Missy flourished a brave bare arm. “Now I see. My poor old carrots! Of course they came out light; they couldn’t come out red, could they?”
“No; but I’m told that red comes out black — that’s all.”
Missy faced about in a twinkling. Her bare arms went akimbo. She was pale.
“So that’s what excited you, eh?” she cried derisively; yet it was only in the moment of speaking that she perceived that Arabella was excited at all.
“I’m not
excited, Missy!”
“No?”
“Not a bit,” said Arabella, as she gave herself the scarlet lie from neck to forehead. This amused Missy.
“Then what is it?” said she at last, with a provoking smile which the other could not meet. “Is it only that you’re just dying to bowl me out? All right, my dear, we’ll put it down to that. Only take care I don’t bowl you out too — take very good care that I don’t find out something about you!”
Arabella had the pale face now.
“Take very extra special good care,” continued Missy, nodding nastily, “that I haven’t found out something already!”
“Have you?”
The hoarse voice was unknown to Missy, and the frightened face seemed a fresh face altogether. She read it in a moment, and was laughing the next.
“Of course I haven’t, my good girl!”
“O Missy!”
“Just as if you’d done anything you’d mind being found out! No, my dear, I was only having a lark with you; but you deserved it for having one with me. Now as to my hair in that photograph —— —”
“Oh, but of course I believe you, Missy, and not — and not the person who told me different.”
“Now I wonder who that was?” said Missy to herself; but aloud— “That’s a blessing! And now if you’ll let me go to bed, my dear, we’ll neither of us think any more of all this tommy-rot that we’ve been talking.”
Nevertheless she herself thought about it half that night. And a variety of vague suspicions crystallised at last into a single definite conclusion.
“She has a man on,” muttered Missy to her pillow. “That’s what’s the matter with Arabella.”
Her mind was fully made up before she slept.
“I must find out something about it; what I do see I don’t like; and I’ve just got to take care of Arabella.”
Forthwith she set herself to watch. It was first of all necessary to become really intimate with Arabella. The latter’s addiction to personal catechism, to name one thing, had kept Missy not a little aloof hitherto. Now, however, in the nick of time, this weakness passed away, and with it this barrier. There were no more questions asked obviously for the sake of doubting or discrediting the answer. On the other hand, about some things Arabella was as inquisitive as ever; especially to wit, Missy’s love affairs. Curiously enough, this was the one point on which Missy was markedly reticent, for very good reasons of her own; but she had no objection to discussing with Arabella the general subject of love. She noted the fascination this had for her companion. When the latter came to speak of her male ideal, from the point of view of his appearance, Missy noted much more. “He has a black moustache and very dark eyes,” said she to herself. “That’s the kind I trust least of all!” She knew something about it, evidently.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 55