Nevertheless, Mrs. Teesdale turned upon him as fiercely as though he had spoken from a brief in Missy’s defence.
“What if she had confessed? I’m ashamed of you, David, going on as though that could ha’ made any difference! She’d still have deceived us and lied to us all these weeks. Black is black and this — this woman — is that black that God Himself couldn’t whiten her!”
And Mrs. Teesdale shook her fist at the guilty girl.
“We have none of us a right to say that,” murmured David.
“But I do say it, and I mean it, too. I say that she’d still have stolen Miriam’s letter of introduction, and come here deliberately and passed herself off as Miriam, and slept under our roof, and eaten our bread, under false pretences — false pretences as shall put her in prison if I have anything to do with it! No confession could have undone all that; and no confession shall keep her out of prison neither, not if I know it!”
Some of them were expecting Missy to take to her heels any moment; but she never showed the least sign of doing so.
“No, nothing can undo it,” she said herself. “I’ve known that for some time, and I shan’t be sorry to pay the cost.”
Then the real Miss Oliver put in her word. It was winged with a sneer.
“It was hardly a compliment,” she said, “to take her for me! You might ask her, by the way, when and where she stole my letters. I lost several.” She could not permit herself to address the culprit direct.
“I’ll tell you that,” said Missy, “and everything else too, if you like to listen.”
“Do, Missy!” cried Arabella, speaking also for the first time. “And then I’ll tell them something.”
“Be sharp, then,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “We’re not going to stand here much longer listening to the likes of you. If you’ve got much to say, you’d better keep it for the magistrate!”
Missy shook her head at Arabella, stared briefly but boldly at Mrs. Teesdale, and then addressed herself to the fair girl in gray, who raised her eyebrows at the liberty.
“You remember the morning after you landed in the Parramatta? It was a very hot day, about a couple of months ago, but in the forenoon you went for a walk with a lady friend. And you took the Fitzroy Gardens on your way.’
Miss Oliver nodded, without thinking whom she was nodding to. This was because she had become very much interested all in a moment; the next, she regretted that nod, and set herself to listen with a fixed expression of disgust.
“You walked through the Fitzroy Gardens, you stopped to look at all the statues, and then you sat down on a seat. I saw you, because I was sitting on the next seat. You sat on that seat, and you took out some letters and read bits of them to your friend. I could hear your voices, but I couldn’t hear what you were saying, and I didn’t want to, either. I had my own things to think about, and they weren’t very nice thinking, I can tell you! That hot morning, I remember, I was just wishing and praying to get out of Melbourne for good and all. And when I passed your seat after you’d left it, there were your letters lying under it on the gravel. I picked them up, and I looked up and down for you and your friend. You were out of sight, but I made for the entrance and waited for you there. Yes, I did — you may sneer as much as you like!
But you never came, and when I went back to my lodgings I took your letters with me.”
Still the young lady sneered without speaking, and Missy hardened her heart.
“I read them every one,” she said defiantly. “I had nothing to do with myself during the day, and very good reading they were! And in the afternoon, just for the lark of it, I took your letter of introduction, which was among the rest, and then I took the ‘bus and came out here.”
She turned now to David, and continued in that softer voice which she could not help when speaking to him.
“It was only for the fun of it! I had no idea of ever coming out again. But you made so much of me; you were all so kind — and the place — it was heaven to a girl like me!”
Here she surprised them all, but one, by breaking down. Mr. Teesdale was not astonished. When she recovered her self-control it was to him she turned her swimming eyes; it was the look in his that enabled her to go on.
“If you knew what my life was!” she wailed; “if you knew how I hated it! If you knew how I longed to come out into the country, when I saw what the country was like! I had never seen your Australian country before. It was all new to me. I had only been a year out from home, but at home I lived all my life in London. My God, what a life! But I never meant to come back to you — I said I wouldn’t — and then I said you must take the consequences if I did. Even when I said good-bye to you, Mr. Teesdale, I never really thought of coming back; so you see I repaid your kindness not only by lies, but by robbing you—”
She pulled herself up. David had glanced uneasily towards his wife. The girl understood.
“By robbing you of your peace of mind, for I said that I would come back, never meaning to at all. And now do you know why I was in such a hurry to get to the theatre? Yes, it was because I had an engagement there. All the rest was lies. And I never should have come out to you again, only at last I saw in the Argus that she — that Miss Oliver — had gone to Sydney. Don’t you remember how you’d seen it too? Well, then I felt safe. I was only a ballet-girl, I’d done better once, for at home I’d had a try in the halls. So I chucked it up and came out to you. I thought I should see in the Argus when Miss Oliver came back from Sydney, but somehow I’ve missed it. And now—”
She flung wide her arms, and raised her eyes, and looked from the sky overhead to the river-timber away down to the right, and from the river-timber to David Teesdale.
“And now you may put me in prison as fast as you like. I’ve been here two months. They’re well worth twelve of hard labour, these last two months on this farm!”
She had finished.
Mrs. Teesdale turned to her husband. “The brazen slut!” she cried. “Not a word of penitence! She doesn’t care — not she! To prison she shall go, and we’ll see whether that makes her care.”
But David shook his head. “No, no, my dear! I will not have her sent to prison. What good could it do us or her? Rather let her go away quietly, and may the Almighty forgive her — and — and make her—”
He looked down, and there was Missy on her knees to him. “Can you forgive me?” she cried passionately. “Say that you forgive me, and then send me to prison or any place you like. Only say that you forgive me if you can.”
“I can,” said the old man softly, “and I do. But I am not the One. You shall not go to prison, but you must go away from us, and may God have mercy on you and help you to lead a better life hereafter. You — you have been very kind to me in little ways, Missy, and I shall try to think kindly of you too.”
He spoke with great emotion, and as he did so his trembling hand rested ever so lightly upon the red head from which the hat was tilted back. And the girl seized that kind, caressing hand, and raised it to her lips, but let it drop without allowing them to touch it. Then she rose and retreated under their eyes. And all the good women had been awed to silence by this leave-taking; but one of them recovered herself in time to put a shot into the retiring enemy.
“Mr. Teesdale is a deal too lenient,” cried the farmer’s wife. “He’s been like that all his life! If I’d had my way, to prison you should have gone — to prison you should have gone, you shameless bad woman, you!”
Old David heard it without a word. He was seeing the last of Missy as she descended the paddock by the path that led down to the slip-rails; the very last that he saw of her was the sunlight upon her hair and hat.
Arabella had darted into the house, and she now came out with a small bundle of things in her arms. With these she followed Missy, coming up with her at the slip-rails, against which she was leaning with her face buried in her hands.
Now this was the spot where Arabella had first met the man from whom this abandoned girl had rescued her,
body and soul. She had desired to tell them all that story, to show them the good in Missy, and so make them less hard upon her. The person who had prevented her, by forbidding look and vigorous gesture, was Missy herself....
It was half an hour later when Arabella returned to the house. This was what she was in time to see and hear.
The real Miss Oliver was sitting in the buggy beside the man in livery, replying, with chilly smiles and decided shakes of her fair head, to the joint remonstrances, exhortations, and persuasions of Mr and Mrs. Teesdale, who were standing together on the near side of the buggy.
“But I’ve just made the tea this minute,” Arabella heard her mother complain. “Surely you’ll stop and have your tea with us after coming all this way?”
“Thank you so much; it is very kind of you; but I promised to be back at the picnic in time for tea, and it is some miles away.”
“But Mrs. Teesdale takes a special pride in her tea,” said David, “and she has made it, so that we shouldn’t keep you waiting at all.”
“So kind of you; but I’m afraid I have stayed too long already. I was just waiting to say goodbye to Mrs. Teesdale. Good-bye again—”
“Come, Miriam,” said Mrs. T., a little testily, “or we shall be offended!”
“I should be very sorry to offend you, I am sure, but really my friends lent me their buggy on the express condition—”
From her manner Mr. Teesdale saw that further pressing would be useless.
“We will let you go now,” said he, “if you will come back and stay with us as long as you can.”
“For a month at least,” added Mrs. T.
Miss Oliver looked askance.
“We are such very old friends of your parents,” pleaded David.
“We would like to be your parents as long as you remain in Australia,” Mrs. Teesdale went so far as to say. And already her tone was genuinely kind and motherly, as it had never become towards poor Missy in all the past two months.
Miss Oliver raised her eyebrows; luckily they were so light that the grimace was less noticeable than it otherwise might have been.
“Suppose we write about it?” said she at length. “Yes, that would be the best. I have several engagements, and I am only staying out a few weeks longer. But I will certainly come out and see you again if I can.”
“And stay with us?” said Mrs. T.
“And stay a night with you — if I can.”
“By this time,” exclaimed David, “we might have had our tea and been done with it. Won’t you think better of it and jump down now? Come, for your parents’ sakes — I wish you would.”
“So do I, dear knows!” said Mrs. Teesdale wistfully. But Miss Oliver, this time without speaking, shook her head more decidedly than ever; gave the old people a bow apiece worthy of Hyde Park; and drove off without troubling to notice the daughter of the house, who, however, was not thinking of her at all, but of Missy.
CHAPTER XVI.
A MAN’S RESOLVE.
How to tell John William when he came home, that was the prime difficulty in the mind of Arabella. Tell him she must, as soon as ever he got in. She felt it of importance that he should hear the news first from herself, and not, for example, from their mother. But it was going to be a very disagreeable duty; more so, indeed, than she ever could have dreamt, until Missy herself warned her, almost with her last words, at the slip-rails. Missy had opened her eyes for her during those few final minutes. Till then she had suspected nothing between her brother and the girl. And now the case seemed so clear and so inevitable that her chief cause for wonderment lay in her own previous want of perception. It made her very nervous, however, with the news still to break to John William. She wished that he would make haste home. He had ridden off early in the afternoon to look up another young farmer several miles distant; not that he wanted to see anyone at all, but because he was ill at ease and anxious to be out of Missy’s way, as Arabella now made sure. But poor Missy! And poor John William! Would they ever see each other again? She hoped not. Her heart grieved for them both, but she hoped not. No woman, being also a sister of the man concerned, could know about another woman what Arabella now knew against Missy, and hope otherwise. And the state of her own feelings in the matter was her uppermost trouble, when at last John William trotted his mare into the yard, and Arabella followed him into the stable.
Then and there she hurriedly told all. Her great dread was that their mother might appear on the scene and tell it in her way. But the attitude of the man greatly astonished Arabella. He took the news so coolly — but that was not it. He seemed not at all agitated to hear what Missy was, and who she was not, but very much so on learning how summarily she had been sent about her business. He said very little even then, but Arabella knew that he was trembling all over as he unsaddled the mare.
“My heart bled for the poor thing,” she added, speaking the simple truth. “It would have bled even if she hadn’t done more for me than ever I can tell anybody. I was thankful I went after her, and saw the last of her at the rails—”
“Which way did she go?”
“To the township to begin with; but she gave me—”
“Which way did she mean to go — straight back to Melbourne?”
“She didn’t say. I was going on to tell you that at the slip-rails she gave me some messages for you, John William.”
“We will have them afterwards. Let us go in to supper now.”
“Very well — but stay! Are you prepared for mother? She is dreadful about it; she makes it even worse than it is.”
“I am prepared for anything. I shall not open my mouth.”
Nor did he; but the provocation was severe. Mrs. Teesdale was glad of an opportunity of rehearsing the whole story from beginning to end. This enabled her to decide what epithets were too weak for the occasion, and what names were as nearly bad enough for Missy as any that a respectable woman could lay her tongue to; also, by what she now said, this excellent woman strengthened her own rather recent convictions that she had “suspected something of the kind” about Missy from the very first. Certainly she had felt a strong antipathetic instinct from the very first. Quite as certainly she had now just cause for righteous rage and desires the most vindictive. Yet there was not one of those three, her nearest, who did not feel a fresh spasm of pain at each violent word, because every one of them, save the wife and mother, had some secret cause to think softly of the godless girl who was gone, and to look back upon her more in pity than in blame.
For sadness, Mr. Teesdale was the saddest of them all. He crept to his bed a shaken old man, and had to listen to his wife until he thought she must break his heart. Meantime Arabella and John William foregathered in the latter’s room, and talked in whispers in order not to wake two old people who had neither of them closed an eye.
“About those messages,” said John William. “What were they?”
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, and he pared a cake of tobacco as he spoke. His wideawake lay on the quilt beside him, and he had not taken off his boots. Arabella stood uneasily.
“Poor girl! she spoke about you a good deal just at the last.”
Arabella hesitated.
“I want to know what she said,” observed John William dryly.
“Well, first she was sorry you weren’t there.”
“If I had been she never should have gone like that!”
“What, not when everything had come out—”
“No, not at all; she shouldn’t have been kicked out, anyway. I’d have given her time and then driven her back to Melbourne, with all her things. What right have we with them, I should like to know?”
“She wanted us to keep them, she—”
“Wanted us! I’d have let her want, if I’d been here. However, go on. She was sorry I wasn’t there, was she?”
“Well, at first she said so, but in a little while she told me that she was glad. And after that she said I didn’t know how glad she was for you never to set ey
es on her again!”
“Never’s a long time,” muttered John William.
“Did she explain herself?” he added, as loud as they ventured to speak.
“Y — yes.” Arabella was hesitating.
“Then out with it!”
“She told me — it can’t be true, but yet she did tell me — that you — fancied yourself in love with her, John William!”
“It isn’t true.”
“Thank God for that!”
“Stop a moment. Not so fast, my girl! It isn’t true — because there’s no fancy at all about it, d’ye see?”
Arabella saw. It was written and painted all over his lined yet glowing face; but where there could be least mistake about it was in his eyes. They were ablaze with love — with love for a woman who had neither name, honour, nor common purity. He could not know this. But Arabella knew all, and it was her business — nay, her solemn undertaking — to repeat all that she knew to John William.
“I was told,” she faltered, “what to say to you if you said that.”
“Who told you?”
“She did — Missy.”
“Then say it right out.”
But that was difficult between brother and sister. At first he refused to understand, and then he refused to believe.
“It’s a lie!” he cried hoarsely. “I don’t believe a word of it!”
“And do you suppose I would make it up? Upon my sacred honour, John William, it is only what she told me with her own—”
“I know that; it’s her lie — I never meant it was yours. No, no, it’s Missy’s lie to choke me off. But it shan’t! No, by Heaven, and it shouldn’t if it were the living truth!”
There was no more to be said. The man knew that, and he relit the pipe, which he had scarcely tasted, without looking at the sister whom he had silenced. Presently he said in a perfectly passionless voice, coming back from the unspeakable to a point which it was possible to discuss:
“About those things of hers — all her clothes. Did you say that she wanted us to keep them? And if so, why?”
“Because,” said Arabella with some reluctance, “they were bought with money which — as she said herself — she had obtained from father on false pretences.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 62