The Unbidden Guest. Hornung Ernest William

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      “She was joking,” said John William.

      “I don’t think it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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