Missy retreated a step from the verandah, stood still, and gasped. Then she pressed both hands to her left side. She was as one walking on the down line in order to avoid the up train, only to be cut to pieces by the down express, whose very existence she had forgotten.
Her eyes fastened themselves upon one object. Presently she found that it was Mrs. Teesdale's pebble brooch. Her ears rang with a harsh, shrill voice; it took her mind some moments to capture the words and grasp their meaning.
“You wicked, wicked, ungrateful woman! To dare to come here and pass yourself off as Miriam Oliver, and live with us all these weeks—you lying hussy! If you have anything to say for yourself be sharp and say it, then out you pack!”
The convicted girl now beheld the verandah swimming with people. As her sight cleared, however, she could only count four, including Mrs. Teesdale. There was the veritable Miss Oliver, but Missy took no note of her just then. There was Arabella, white and weeping; and there was Mr. Teesdale, looking years older since the morning, with the saddest expression Missy had ever seen upon human countenance. He was gazing, not at her, but down upon the ground at her feet. John William was not there at all. Missy looked about for him very wistfully, but in vain; and her glance ended, where it had begun, upon the furious face of Mrs. Teesdale. Furious as it was, the wretched girl found it much the easiest face to meet with a firm lip and a brazen front.
“Do you know that you could be sent to prison?” Mrs. Teesdale proceeded, still at a scream. “Ay, and I'll see that you are sent, and all!”
“Nay, come!” muttered Mr. Teesdale, shaking his head at the grass, but without looking at anybody.
Then suddenly he lifted his eyes, stepped down from the verandah, and went up to Missy.
“Missy,” said he, in a low, hoarse voice, “Missy, I'll take your word as soon as the word of a person I've never set eyes on before. Is this true, or is it not? Are you, or are you not, Miriam Oliver, the daughter of my old friend?”
“It is true,” said Missy. “I'm no more Miriam Oliver than you are.”
Neither question nor answer had reached the ears of those in the verandah. But they saw David turn towards them with his head hanging lower than before, and he tottered as he rejoined them. Miss Oliver, however, may have guessed what had passed, for she smiled a supercilious smile which no one happened to observe. This young lady was a contrast to her impersonator in every imaginable way. She was not nearly so tall, and she had exceedingly fair hair. Her nose was tip-tilted to begin with, but she seemed to have a habit of turning it up even beyond the design of nature. This was perhaps justified on the present occasion. She was very fashionably dressed in a costume of extremely light gray; and in the dilapidated framework of the old verandah she was by far the most incongruous figure upon the scene.
“Has she anything to say for herself?” Mrs. Teesdale demanded of her husband. He shook his head despondently.
And then, at last, Missy opened her mouth.
“I have only this to say for myself. It isn't much, but Mr. Teesdale will tell you that it's the truth. It's only that I did do my level best to make a clean breast to him last night.”
“She did!” exclaimed the old man, after a moment's rapid consideration. “Now I see what she meant. To think that I never saw then!”
“You were very dense,” said Missy; “but not worse than John William. I did my best to tell you last night, and I did my best to tell him only this morning, but neither of you would understand.”
As she spoke to the old man her voice was strangely gentle, and a smile was hovering about the corners of her mouth when she ceased. Moreover, her words had brought out a faint ray of light upon Mr. Teesdale's dejected mien.
“It's a fact!” he cried, turning to the others. “She did her best to confess last night. Shedidconfess. I remember all about it now. It was a full confession, if only I'd put two and two together. But—well, I never could have believed it of her. That was it!”
He finished on a sufficiently reproachful note.
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 ifIhave anything to do with it! No confession could have undone all that; and no confession shall keep her out of prison neither, not ifIknow 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 thenI'lltellthemsomething.”
“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 theParramatta?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 theArgusthat 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 theArguswhen 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 whetherthatmakes 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 thatyouforgive 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 pad-dock 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 tobeyour 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.
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 inherway. 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 eyes 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'sherlie—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.”
It may have been because he was now quite calm outwardly, but at this the man winced more visibly than at what had come out before.
“From father,” he repeated at length; “hecouldn't let her have much, anyway!”
“He let her have twenty pounds.”
“Never; the bank wouldn't lethimhave it.”
“The bank didn't; he got it on his watch.”
“On the watch that's—mending?”
The truth flashed across him before the words were out. Arabella nodded her head, and her brother bowed his in trouble.
“Yes, that's bad,” said he, as though nothing else had been. “There's no denying it, thatisbad.” It was a thing he could realise; that was why he took it thus disproportionately to heart.
“Surely it is all bad together!” said Arabella. John William spent some minutes in a study of the bare boards by his bedside.
“Where do you think she went to?” he said at last, looking up.
“I have no idea.”
“Have you told me all that she said? She didn't—she didn't send any other messages?” It was wistfully asked.
“No, none; but she did tell me how she hopes and prays that you will never give her another thought. She declares she has never given a single thought to you. It is true, too, I am sure.”
“We shall see—we shall see. So you have no idea where she went? She gave you no hint of any sort or kind?”
“None whatever.”
“She has gone back to Melbourne, think you?”
“I don't know where else she could go to.”
“No more do I,” said John William, rising from the bed at last. He opened the window softly and looked out into the night. “No more do I see where else she could go to,” he whispered over again. Then he turned round to Arabella. She was watching him closely. Neither of them spoke. But John William picked his wideawake from off the bed and jammed it over his brows. Then he took a pair of spurs from the drawers-head and dropped them into his coat pocket. Then he faced Arabella afresh.
“Do you know what I am going to do?”
“I can guess. You are going to ride into Melbourne and look for Missy.”
“I am—and now, at once. I'm going out by that window. Don't shut it, because I shall be back before milking, and shall come in the same way I get out.”
“But you'll never see her, John William; you'll never see her,” said Arabella in misery. “It'll be like hunting for a needle in a haystack!”
“You may always find the needle—there is always a chance. For me, if half of what she told you has a word of truth in it I shall have a better chance by night than by day. It can't be much after eleven now, and I guess I shall do it to-night in half an hour.”
“But if you don't see her?”
“Then I shall have another try to-morrow night—and another the next—and another the night after that. There are plenty of horses in the paddock; there are some that haven't been ridden this long time, and some that nobody can ride but me. The mare will have to sweat for it to-night, but not after to-night. Only look here. I shall be found out sooner or later, then there will be a row, and you know who'll make it. You'll let it be later, won't you,'.ella, so far as you're concerned?”
“You must know that I will!”
“Then bless you, my dear, and good night.”
They had seldom kissed since they were little children. They were both of them over thirty now, in respect of mere years. But with his beard tickling the woman's cheek, the man whispered, “You said that she had done something for you, too, you know!”
And the woman answered, “Something more than I can ever tell any of you. You little know what I might have come to, but for Missy. Yet what are you to do with her, poor Jack, if you do find her?”
And the man said, “Make her good again, so help me God!”
ASunday morning early in the following February; in fact, the first Sunday of the month.
It was, perhaps, the freshest and coolest morning of any kind that the hot young year had as yet brought forth. Nevertheless, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Teesdale had gone to chapel, as was their wont. For this Sabbath day was also one requiring a red letter in the calendar of the Teesdales, insomuch as it was the solitary entire day which a greatly honoured visitor over the week-end had consented, after much ill-bred importuning, to give to her father's old friends at the farm.
The visitor was gone to chapel with Arabella. But the farmer and his wife had stayed at home, the one to shoot a hare, and the other to cook it for the very special Sunday dinner which the occasion demanded.
Naturally David's part was soon performed, because the old man was so good a shot still, and there were plenty of hares about the place. It was less natural in one of his serene disposition to light a pipe afterwards and sit down in the verandah expressly and deliberately to think of things which could only trouble him. This, however, was what he proceeded to do. And the things troubled him more and more the longer he allowed his mind to dwell upon them.
One thing was the whole miserable episode of Missy, of whom the old man could not possibly help thinking, in that verandah.
Another was the manner and bearing of the proper Miriam, which was of the kind to make simple homely folks feel small and awkward.
A third thing was the difference between the two Miriams.
“She is not like her mother, and she certainly is not like her father—not asIknew him,” muttered David with reference to the real one. “But she's exactly like her portrait in yon group. Put her in the sun, and you see it in a minute. She frowns just like that still. She has much the same expression whenever she isn't speaking to you or you aren't speaking to her. It isn't a kind expression, and I wish I never saw it. I wish it was more like——”
He ceased thinking so smoothly, for as a stone stars a pane of glass, that had shot into his mind's eye which made cross-roads of his thoughts. He took one of the roads and sat pulling at his pipe. Here from the verandah there was no view to be had of the river-timber and the distant ranges so beloved of the old man's gaze. But his eyes wandered down the paddock in front of the farmhouse, and thence to the township roofs, shifting from one to another of such as shone salient in the morning sun, and finally running up the parched and yellow hill upon the farther side. That way lay Melbourne, nine or ten miles to the south. And on this hill-top, between withered grass and dark blue sky, the old eyes rested; and the old lips kept clouding with tobacco-smoke the bit of striking sky-line, for the satisfaction of seeing it break through the cloud next instant; while on the worn face the passing flicker of a smile only showed the shadow of pain that was there all the time, until at length no more smoke came to soften the garish brilliance of the southern sky.
Then David lowered his eyes and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. And presently he sighed a few syllables aloud:
“Ay, Missy! Poor thing! Poor girl!”
For on the top of that hill, between grass and sky, between puff and puff from his own pipe, a mammoth Missy had appeared in a vision to David Teesdale. Nor was it one Missy, but a whole set of her in a perfect sequence of visions. And this sort of thing was happening to the old man every day.
There was some reason for it. With all her badness the girl had certainly shown David personally a number of small attentions such as he had never experienced at any hands but hers. She had filled his pipe, and fetched his slippers, and taken his arm whenever they chanced to be side by side for half a dozen steps. His own daughter never dreamt of such things, unless asked to do them, which was rare. But Missy had done them continually and of her own accord. She had taken it into her own head to read to the old man every day; she had listened to anything and all things he had to say to her, as Arabella had never listened in her life. Not that the daughter was at all uncommon in this respect; the wife was just the same. The real Miriam, too, showed plainly enough to a sensitive eye that poor David's conversation interested her not in the least. So it was only Missy who was uncommon—in caring for anything that he had to say. And this led Mr. Teesdale to remember the little good in her, and doubtless to exaggerate it, without thinking of the enormous evil; even so that when he did remember everything the old man, for one, was still unable to think of the impostor without a certain lingering tenderness.
There kept continually recurring to him things that she had said, her way of saying them, the tones of her voice, the complete look and sound of her in sundry little scenes that had actually taken place during her stay at the farm. Two such had been played all over again between the smoke of his pipe, the rim of yellow grass, and the background of blue sky which had formed the theatre of his thoughts. One of the two was the occasion of Missy's first blood-shedding with John William's gun. David recalled her sudden coming round the corner of the house—this corner. A whirlwind in a white dress, the flush of haste upon her face, the light of triumph in her eyes, the trail of the wind about her disorderly red hair. So had she come to him and thrown her victim at his feet as he sat where he was sitting now. And in a trice he had taken the triumph out of her by telling her what it was that she had shot, and why she ought not to have shot it at all. He could still see the look in her face as she gazed at her dead handiwork in the light of those candid remarks: first it was merely crestfallen, then it was ashamed, as her excitement subsided and she realised that she had done a cruel thing at best. She was not naturally cruel—a thousand trifles had proved her to be the very reverse. Her heart might be black by reason of her life, but by nature it was soft and kind. Kindness was something! It made up for some things, too.
Thus David would console himself, fetching his consolation from as far as you please. But even he could extract scant comfort from the other little incident which had come into his head. This was when Missy drank off Old Willie's whisky without the flicker of an eyelid; there has hitherto been no occasion to mention the matter, which was not more startling than many others which happened about the same time. Suffice it now to explain that Mr. Teesdale was in the habit of mixing every evening, and setting in safety on the kitchen mantelpiece, a pannikin of grog for Old Willie, who started townwards with the milk at two o'clock every morning. One fine evening Missy happened to see David prepare this potion, and asked what it was, getting as answer, “Old Willie's medicine;” whereupon the girl took it up, smelt it, and drank it off before the horrified old gentleman had time to interfere. “It's whisky!” he gasped. “Good whisky, too,” replied Missy, smacking her lips. “But it was a stiff dose—I make it stiff so as to keep Old Willie from wanting any at the other end. You'd better be off to bed, Missy, before it makes you feel queer.”
“Queer!” cried Missy. “One tot like that! Do you suppose I've never tasted whisky before?” And indeed she behaved a little better than usual during the remainder of the evening.
That alone should have aroused his suspicions—so David felt now. But at the time he had told nobody a word about the trick, and had passed it over in his own mind as one of the many “habits and ways which were not the habits and ways of young girls in our day.” Their name had indeed been legion as applied to the perjured pretender; that sentence in Mr. Oliver's letter, like the remark about “modern mannerisms,” was fatally appropriate toher. Remained the question, how could those premonitory touches apply to a young lady so cultivated and so superior as the real Miriam Oliver?
It was a question which Mr. Teesdale found very difficult to answer; it was a question which was driven to the back of his brain, for the time being, by the return of the superior young lady herself, with Arabella, from the township chapel.
David jumped up and hurried out to meet them. Miss Oliver wore a look which he could not read, because it was the look of boredom, with which David was not familiar. He thought she was tired, and offered her his arm. She refused it with politeness and a perfunctory smile.
“I'm afraid you've had a very hot walk,” said the old man. “Who preached, Arabella?”
“Mr. Appleton. Miss Oliver didn't think——”
“Ah! I thought he would!” cried David with enthusiasm. “We're very proud of Mr. Appleton's sermons. It will be interesting to hear how he strikes a young lady——”
“She didn't think much of him,” Arabella went on to state with impersonal candour.
“Nay, come!” And Mr. Teesdale looked for contradiction to the young lady herself; but though the latter raised her eyebrows at Arabella's way of putting it, she did not mince matters in the least. Perhaps this was one of those ways or habits.
“It was better than I expected,” she said, with a small and languid smile.
“But didn't you like our minister, Miss Oliver? We all think so highly of him.”
“Oh, I am sure he is an excellent man, and what he said seemed extremely well meant; but one has heard all that before, over and over again, and rather better put.”
“Ah, at Home, no doubt. Yes; I suppose you would now, in London. However,” added David, throwing up his chin in an attempt to look less snubbed than he felt as they came into the verandah, “as long as you don't regret having gone! That's the main thing—not the sermon. The prayers and the worship are of much more account, and I knew you'd enjoy them. Take this chair, Miss Oliver, and get cooled a bit before you go inside.”
Miss Oliver stopped short of saying what she thought of the prayers, which, indeed, had been mostly extemporised by the Rev. Mr. Appleton. But Arabella, had she not gone straight into the house, would have had something to say on this point, for Miss Oliver had been excessively frank with her on the way home, and she was nettled. It was odd how none of them save Mrs. Teesdale (who was not sensitive) thought of calling the real Miriam by her Christian name. That young lady had refused the chair, but she stood for a moment taking off her gloves.
“And why didn't you come to chapel, Mr. Teesdale?” she asked, for something to say, simply.
“Aha!” said David slyly. “That's tellings. I make a rule of going, and it's a rule I very seldom break; but I'm afraid I broke it this morning—ay, and the Sabbath itself—I've broken that and all!”
Miss Miriam was a little too visibly unamused, because, with all her culture, she had omitted to cultivate the kind art of appreciation. She had never studied the gentle trick of keeping one's companions on good terms with themselves, and it did not come natural to her. So David was made to feel that he had said something foolish, and this led him into an unnecessary explanation.
“You see, in this country, in the hot weather, meat goes bad before you know where you are.” This put up the backs of Miss Oliver's eyebrows to begin with.
“You can't keep a thing a day, so, if I must tell you, I've been shooting a hare for our dinners. Mrs. T. is busy cooking it now. You see, if we'd hung it up even for a couple of hours——”
“Please don't go into particulars,” cried Miss Oliver, with a terrible face and much asperity of tone. “There was no need for you to tell me at all. You dine late, then, on Sundays?”
“No, early, just as usual; it will be ready by the time you've got your things off.”
“What—the hare that you've only shot since we went out?”
“Why, to be sure.”
Miss Oliver went in to take off her things without another word. And David gathered from his guilty conscience that he had said what he had no call to say, what it was bad taste to say, what nobody but a very ill-bred old man would have dreamt of saying; but presently he knew it to his cost.
For nothing would induce the visitor to touch that hare, though Mrs. Teesdale had cooked it with her own hands. She had to say so herself, but Miss Miriam steadily shook her head; nor did there appear to be much use in pressing her. Mrs. Teesdale only made matters worse by so doing. But it is impossible not to sympathise with Mrs. Teesdale. She was by no means so strong a woman as her manifold and varied exertions would have led one to suppose. A hot two hours in the kitchen had left their mark upon her, and being tired at all events, if not in secret bodily pain, she very quickly became angry also. There was, in fact, every prospect of a scene, when David interposed and took the entire blame for having divulged to Miss Oliver the all too modern history of the hare. Then Mrs. Teesdalewasangry, but only with her husband. With Miriam she proceeded to sympathise from that instant; indeed, she had set herself to make much of this Miriam from the first; and the matter ended by the young lady at last overcoming her scruples and condescending to one minute slice from the middle of the back. But she had worn throughout these regrettable proceedings a smile, hardly noticeable in itself, but of peculiarly exasperating qualities, if one did happen to remark it. And it had not escaped John William, who sat at the table without speaking a word, feeling, in any case, disinclined to open his mouth before so superior a being as this young lady from England.
In the heat of the afternoon, however, the younger Teesdale found the elder in the parlour, alone too, but walking up and down, as if ill at ease; and John William then had his say.
“Where's everybody?” he asked, putting his head into the room first of all. Then he entered bodily and shut the door behind him. “Where's our precious guest?” he cried, in no promising tone.
“She's gone to lie down, and so has——”
“That's all right! I shan't be sorry myself if she goes on lying down for the rest of the day. I don't know what you think of her, father, but I do know what I think!”
Mr. Teesdale continued to pace the floor with bent body and badly troubled face, but he said nothing.
“She's what I told you she would be,” proceeded the son, “in the very beginning. I told you she'd be stuck up—and good Lord, isn't she? I said we didn't want that kind here, and no more we do. No, I'm dashed if we do! Don't you remember? It was the time you read us the old man's letter. I liked the letter and I might like the old man, but I'm dashed if I like his daughter! She doesn't take after her father, I'll be bound.”
“Not unless he is very much changed,” admitted David sadly. “Still, I think you are rather hard upon her, John William.”
“Hard upon her! Haven't I been watching her? Haven't I ears and eyes in my head, like everybody else? It's only one meal I've set down to beside her, so far, but one 'll do for me! With her nasty supercilious smile, and her no-thank-you this and no-thank-you that! I never did know anybody take such a delight in refusing things. Look at her about that hare!”
“Yes; and your mother had spent all morning at it. I'm very much afraid she's knocked herself up over it, for she's lying down, too. Your mother is not so strong as she was, John William. I'm very much afraid that matter of Missy has been preying on her nerves.”
“I'd rather have Missy than this here Miriam,” said John William, after a pause, and all at once his voice was full of weariness.
The same thought was in Mr. Teesdale's mind, but he did not give expression to it. Presently he said, still pacing the room with his long-legged, weak-kneed stride:
“I wonder what Mr. Oliver meant when he hinted that I should find Miriam so different from the girls of our day? Where are the tricks and habits that he alluded to? Poor Missy had plenty, but I can't see any in Miriam.”
“Can't you? ThenIcan. Ways of another kind altogether. Did the girls in your day turn up their noses at things before people's faces?”
“No.”
“Did they sneer when they talked to their elders and betters?”
“No; but we are only Miriam's elders, mind—not her betters.”
“Could they smile without looking supercilious, and could they open their mouths without showing their superiority?”
“Of course they could.”
“There you are then! One more question—about Mr. Oliver this time. When you left the old country he hadn't the position he has now, had he?”
“No, no; very far from it. He was just beginning business, and in a small way, too. Now he is a very wealthy man.”
“Then he hadn't got as good an education as he's been able to give his children, I reckon?”
“No, you're right. We went to school together, he and I,” said Mr. Teesdale simply.
“Then don't you see?” cried his son, jumping up from the sofa where he had been sitting, while the old man still walked up and down the room. “Don't you see, father? Mr. Oliver was warning you against what he himself had suffered from. You bet that Miss Miriam picks him up, and snubs him and sneers at him, just as she does with us!”
Which was the cleverest deduction that this unsophisticated young farmer had ever arrived at in his life; but puzzling constantly over another matter had lent a new activity to his brain, and much worry had sharpened his wits.
Old Teesdale accepted his son's theory readily enough, but yet sorrowfully, and the more so because the more he saw of his old friend's child, the less he liked her.
Indeed, she was not at all an agreeable young person. It appeared that she had been merely reading in her own room, so when Arabella owned to having been asleep in hers, she looked duly and consciously superior. There was something comic about that look of conscious superiority which broke out upon this young lady's face upon the least provocation, but it is difficult to give an impression of it in words—it was so slight, and yet so plain. To be sure, she was the social as well as the intellectual superior of the simple folk at the farm, but that in itself was not so very much to be proud of, and at any rate one would not have expected a tolerably well-educated girl to exhale superiority with every breath. But this was the special weakness of Miss Miriam Oliver. Even the fact that some of the Teesdales read theFamily Cherubwas an opportunity which she could not resist. She took up a number and satirised theFamily Cherubmost unmercifully. Then she was queer about the poor old piano in the best parlour. She played a few bars upon it—she could play very well—and then jumped up shuddering. Certainly the piano was terribly out of tune; but not more so than this young Englishwoman's manners. In conversation with the Teesdales there was only one subject that really interested her.
It was a subject which had been fully dealt with at supper on the Saturday night, when Mrs. Teesdale had waxed very warm thereon. Old Teesdale and Arabella had listened in silence because to them it was not quite such a genial topic. John William had not been there; the misfortune was that he did sit down to the Sunday supper, when Miss Oliver brought up this subject again.
“Did my under-study like cocoa, then?” she inquired, having herself refused to take any, much to Mrs. T.'. discomfiture.
“You mean that impudent baggage?” said the latter. “Ay, she was the opposite extreme to you, Miriam. She took all she could get, you may be sure! She made the best use of her time!”
“Do tell me some more about her,” said Miss Oliver. “It is most interesting.”
“Nay, I would rather not speak of her,” replied Mrs. Teesdale, who was only too delighted to do so when sure of a sympathetic hearing. “It was the most impudent piece of wickedness that ever I heard tell of in my life.”
“The queer thing to me,” remarked Miss Oliver, “is that you ever should have believed her. Fancy taking such a creature for me! It was scarcely a compliment, Mrs. Teesdale. A more utterly vulgar person one could hardly wish to see.”
“My dear,” began Mr. Teesdale nervously, “she behaved very badly, we know; yet she had her good points——”
“Hold your tongue, David!” cried his wife, whom nothing incensed more than a good word for Missy. “She curry-favoured with you, so you try to whitewash her. I wonder what Miriam will think of you? However, Miriam, I can tell you thatInever believed in her—never once! A brazen, shameless, lying, thieving hussy, that's what she——”
A heavy fist had banged the table at the lower end, so that every cup danced in its saucer, and all eyes were turned upon John William, who sat in his place—trembling a little—very pale—but with eyes that glared alarmingly, first at his mother, then at the guest.
“What did she steal?” he thundered out. “You may be ashamed of yourself, mother, trying to make the girl out worse than she was. And you, Miss Oliver—I wonder you couldn't find something better to talk about—something in better taste!”
Miss Oliver put up her pale eyebrows.
“Thisisinteresting!” she exclaimed. “To think that one should come here to learn what is, and what is not good taste! Perhaps you preferred my—my predecessor to me, Mr. Teesdale?”
“I did so!” said John William stoutly.
“Ah, I thought as much. She was, of course, rather more in your line.”
“By the Lord,” answered the young man, forgetting himself entirely, “if you were more in hers it would be the better for them that have to do with you. She could have taught you common civility, at any rate, and common kindness, and two or three other common things that you seem never to have been taught in your life!” There was a moment's complete silence. Then Miss Oliver got steadily to her feet.
“After that,” she said to David, “I think my room is the best place for me—and the safest too.”
She proceeded to the door without let or hindrance. All save herself were too much startled to speak or to act. Mr. Teesdale was gazing through the gun-room window with a weary face; his wife held her side as if it were a physical trouble with her; while Arabella looked in terror at John William, who was staring unflinchingly at the first woman he had lived to insult. The latter had reached the threshold, where, however, she turned to leave them something to keep.
“It serves me right,” she said. “I might have known what to expect if I came here.”