The Unbidden Guest

Mr. Teesdale sat in his accustomed corner, with his chair pushed back and pointing neither towards the table nor the fire, but between the two. On his knee was a bare-legged child, perhaps fourteen months old. Arabella, when she was in the room, took a chair near the table, if she sat down at all, and the lamplight only blackened the inscription of sleepless nights and anxious days that was cut deep upon her pallid face. John William sat at that end of the sofa which he had invariably affected, watching Missy; they all did this, even to Mr. Tees-dale, who was also occupied with the child upon his knee; but all save the child, who sometimes crowed and was checked, sat more like waxworks in a show than living, suffering beings.

When one spoke, it was in a whisper. But there was very little speaking. If Missy had not come back at all they could scarcely have been more silent.

Yet the way they spoke to her when they spoke at all – the way they looked at her, whether they spoke or not – this was much more remarkable than their silence, for which there was good reason. They spoke to Missy as to an old and valued friend, who had come at a cruel time, but who brought her own welcome even so; they looked at her with hospitable, grieved eyes that entreated her to take the kindly will for the kindlier deed. Across their faces, too, there now and then swept looks of apprehension which she did not see; but never a shade that would have led a stranger to suspect that they knew aught but good of this girl, or that she had rendered aught but kindness to them and theirs.

As for Missy, she did not see half their looks, because her own eyes had been either averted or downcast during the whole of the hour that she had already spent in the room. Now they were averted. She was sitting on a stool by the fireside – by that side of the fire which was furthest from Mr. Teesdale and nearest to the door. Her body was bent forward; her eyes were fixed pensively upon the fire; her left elbow rested upon her knee, and her chin in the hollow of her left hand. Hand and face were brown alike from hard work in all weathers. It was the weather of that day, however, that had quenched the colour from her hair; limp and soaking as it was, it looked much less red than formerly in the glare of midsummer. Also the fringe had disappeared entirely; but this alteration was permanent. Most notable of all changes, however, was the gauntness and angularity of the old good figure, which had struck Arabella even in the darkness; it was painfully conspicuous in the light. Missy had been to her box with Arabella, and was clad in a blouse and skirt that had been made for her ten months earlier. They fitted but loosely now. A hat and jacket, which she had also obtained from her box, had been taken away from her by John William: it lay within reach of his hand upon the sofa, where he appeared content to sit still and stare fixedly at Missy’s back. Thus he was not aware that she had taken a small roll of papers out of her blouse, and that her right hand had been for some time fidgeting with it in her lap. And when David, who had a much better view, broke the silence with a low-toned question, the younger Teesdale had to get up in order to understand what his father meant.

“What is it you have got there, Missy?”

“It is something that I – I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Teesdale.” She turned her head and looked a little wistfully at John William and Arabella; but neither of these two perceived that she wished to speak to Mr. Teesdale alone; and, after all, there was no reason why she should not speak out in front of them. So she proceeded. “It’s something rather important – it’s the only thing that could ever have brought me back here. Mr. Teesdale, you never took possession of my box after all!”

“‘Twasn’t likely,” said David.

“But I meant you to. I told Arabella – ”

“Yes, yes, but you didn’t really and truly expect me to take you at your word, Missy?”

“Of course I did. The box was yours. It and all that was in it had been bought with your money.”

“I wouldn’t have anybody touch the box,” said David, with characteristic pride. “I took and locked it up myself, and I’ve kept the key in my pocket ever since.”

“But it was all yours by rights – ”

“I care nothing at all about that!”

“The dresses and things, as well as the box itself, were worth something. Not much, perhaps – still, something. And then there were four pounds and some silver which I’d never touched. Here they are – four pounds.”

She got up and laid them in a row on the tablecloth under the lamp. The others had risen also; and John William, for one, had his eyes fixed upon the little roll of paper in her right hand. It was a roll of one-pound notes. She began to lay them one by one upon the table, counting aloud as she did so.

“One, two, three, four, five, six – ”

“Stop a moment,” said David, trembling. “How did you come by them, Missy?”

“Seven, eight. Didn’t I tell you that I’ve been working all this time upon a farm? Nine – ”

“Ah, yes, you did.”

There had been a few explanations – a very few – when John William had first brought her in. Then dry clothes, then supper, then silence. It must be remembered that the shadow of death hung over the farm.

“Ten. I was there thirty-three weeks last Saturday. Eleven. They gave me ten shillings a week, and they found me – twelve – in food and clothes. I had things to put up with – thirteen – but nothing I couldn’t bear. I was thankful you’d taught me to milk here. Fourteen, fifteen. I was so! Sixteen, and that’s the lot. Sixteen and four’s twenty. Twenty pound I got out of you, Mr. Tees-dale, because I couldn’t resist it when you said what you may recollect saying as you drove me back into Melbourne that first day. I never meant to pay you back; I wasn’t half sure that I’d ever let you see me again. I don’t say I should have done it if I’d known you’d go and pawn your watch for me; still I did do you out of the twenty pounds, and I meant to do you out of them for good and all. But here they are.”

“Thank you, Missy,” said David at last. The others said nothing at all.

“Thank me! I don’t want you to thank me at all. What have I done but rob you and pay you back again? No – I only want you – to forgive me – if you can!”

“I do forgive you, my dear; but I forgave you long ago,” said David, smoothing back her hair and kissing her upon the forehead.

“You two forgive me, I know,” she said, turning to the others.

Arabella embraced her tearfully, but John William only laughed sardonically. What had he to forgive?

“I knew you did. So now there is only one thing more that I want to send me away happy.”

“Send you away! Where to? You’ve only just come,” cried Mr. Teesdale, as loud as he dared; but even as he spoke he remembered the special difficulty of the occasion, and his face twitched with the pain. “Why, where did you think of going to?” he added, wiping his lips with his red pocket-handkerchief.

“Back to the Dandenong Ranges. I’m so happy there, you don’t know! Thought I’d left? Not me, don’t you believe it. No, I must get back to my work as quick as I can. And you’ll be able to sit in quietness and look out through the gun-room window” – she pointed to the gun-room door – “and across the river-timber to them blue ranges, and you’ll be able to say, ‘Missy’s working there. She’s honest now, whatever she was once; and she’s trying to make up for her whole life.’ Yes, and you may say, ‘She’s trying to make up for it all, and it was us that taught her; it was us that took her out of hell and gave her a glimpse of the other thing!’ That’s what you’ll be able to say, Mr. Teesdale. And I’ll know you’re looking at the ranges, and I’ll think you’re looking at me, every evening in the summer-time, and every dinner-time all the year round. They ain’t so blue as they look, when you get there – I guess the sky isn’t either when you get there– but they’re blue enough for Missy; they’re blue enough for me.”

The tears were running down her face. John William had interjected, here and there, “You’re never going back at all.” But she had taken no notice of him; and when he repeated the same speech now, she shook her head and only sobbed the more.

“What is it that would send you away happy?” asked poor David; for he knew well what the answer was to be; and by now he was himself intensely agitated.

“I want someone else to forgive me, too,” said Missy, “if it is not too late.” And she looked at the door that led into the passage that led to Mrs. Tees-dale’s room. This door, also, was kept carefully closed.

“It is too late for you to see her; it would not be safe,” said Mr. Teesdale, sadly shaking his head. “But she lies yonder at peace with all mankind; she has told me so herself. Rest assured that she forgives you, Missy.”

“She would forgive you with all her heart,” said Arabella. “She has been so brave and good – and gentle – ever since she first fell ill. She would forgive you, Missy, as freely as my father has done.”

“She has forgiven you long ago,” declared John William. “She spoke to me about you the morning after she had been to see the doctor without telling us she was going. She spoke of you then without any bitterness; so she had forgiven you as long ago as that.”

Missy received these optimistic assurances with a look of dissatisfied doubt, as though she could accept no forgiveness that was not actual and absolute. Then her eyes found their way back to the passage door; and she could scarce believe them. She sprang backward with a cry of fear. The other three started also with one accord – so that the room shook. For the door was open, and on the threshold, like a spectre, stood none other than the dying woman herself.

“Forgive you!” she said, in a crazy rattle of a voice. “You!”

She entered without stumbling, shut the door behind her, and took two steps forward. They appeared the steps of a decrepit, rather than a dying woman; but they brought her no nearer to Missy, who backed in terror towards the gun-room. Nor was poor Missy worse than any of the rest, who not one of them could put out a hand to uphold this tottering, terrible figure, so scared and shaken were they. And the old woman stood there in her bedclothes, with a ghastly dew upon her emaciated face, and ordered the young girl out of the house.

“Forgive you!” she said. “Go; how dare you come back? David – all of you – how dare you take her in – a common slut – with me on my deathbed? How long have you had her here, I wonder? Not long, I know, or I should ha’ felt it – I should ha’ known! Do you think I could have died in my bed with that – with that in the house? God forgive you all; and you, out you go. Do you hear? Go!”

She pointed to the gun-room door with a bony, quivering hand; and because the girl she abhorred was paralysed with horror, she brought that hand down passionately upon the table, so that the four sovereigns rang together, and she saw the gold and notes, and fiercely inquired where they came from.

But now at last David was supporting her in his arms, and he answered soothingly:

“They are twenty pounds that Missy borrowed from me when she was with us – I never told you about it. She has come to-night and paid them back to me. That’s the only reason she is here. She has been all this time earning them, just to do something to atone.”

“Pah!” cried Mrs. Teesdale, stiffening herself in her husband’s arms, and reaching her skinny hands to the notes and gold. “How came you to have twenty pounds to give her? How comes she to have them to give you back? How do you think she earned them? Shall I tell you how?” the poor woman screamed. “They’re the wages of sin – the wages of sin – of sin!” She snatched up gold and notes alike and flung the lot at the fire with all her feeble might. The gold went ringing round the whitened hearth. The notes fell short.

“Now go,” she said to Missy, her scream dropping to a whisper, “and come back at your peril.”

Missy got her hat and jacket from the sofa, brushing the wall all the way, and never taking her eyes from that awful, menacing, death-smitten face. Then suddenly she plucked up courage, took one step forward, and stood in profound humility, mutely asking for that forgiveness which she was never to get. A strong hand, young Teesdale’s, had laid hold of her arm from behind and given her strength.

David, too, was putting in a quavering word for her.

“She is going,” said he. “She was going in any case. You are wrong about the money. She has earned it honestly, as a farm servant, like our Mary Jane. Can’t you see how brown her face and hands are? We have all forgiven her, as we hope to be forgiven. Cannot you also forgive her, my dear, and let her go her ways in peace?”

The sick woman wavered, and for a moment the terrible gaze, transfixing Missy, turned, by comparison, almost soft. Then it shifted and fell upon the bearded face of him who was supporting the unhappy girl, and moment, mood and chance were gone, all three, beyond redemption.

“John William,” said his mother, “leave her alone. Do you hear me? Let her go!”

Nothing happened.

“Let her go!” screamed Mrs. Teesdale. “Choose once and for all between us – your dying mother and – that – woman!”

At first nothing; then the man’s hand dropped clear of the girl.

“Now go,” said the woman to the girl.

The girl fled into the gun-room, and so out into the night, only pausing to shut the doors behind her, one after the other. With the shutting of the outer door – it was not slammed – they heard the last of Missy.

“Now follow her,” said the mother to the man.

But the man remained.

CHAPTER XXI. – “FOR THIS CAUSE.”

Now there was nothing but wet grass between the gun-room window and the river-timber; and that way lay the Dandenong Ranges; therefore it was clearly Missy’s way – until she stopped to think.

This was not until she had very nearly walked into the Yarra itself; it was only then that she came to know what she was doing, to consider what she must do next, and to recall coherently the circumstances of her last and final expulsion from the farmhouse of the Teesdales. Already it seemed to have happened hours ago, instead of minutes. The hat and jacket she had snatched up from the sofa were still upon her arm; she put them on now, because suddenly she had turned cold. Another moment and she could not have said on which arm she had carried them, she had carried them so short a time. Yet the deathly face and the deathlier voice of Mrs. Teesdale were as a horror of old standing; there was something so familiar about them; they seemed to have dwelt in her memory so long. But, indeed, her mind was in a mist, through which the remote and the immediate past loomed equally indistinct and far away.

The mist parted suddenly. One face shone through it with a baleful light. It was the dreadful face of Mrs. Teesdale.

“Dying!” exclaimed Missy, eyeing the face judicially in her mind. “Dying? Not she – not now! She may have been dying; but she won’t die now. No, I’ve saved her by dragging her off her deathbed to curse me and turn me out! I’ve heard of folks turning the corner like that. She was right enough, though. You can’t blame her and call her unkind. The others are more to blame for going on being kind to one of my sort. No, she’d better not die now, she’d much better leave that to me.”

Her mind was in a mist. She tried to see ahead. She must live somewhere, and she must do something for her living. But what – but where?

There was one matter about which she had not spoken the truth even now; neither to Arabella, nor to John William, nor to Mr. Teesdale himself. That was the matter of her new home in the Dandenong Ranges, where she said she had been so happy, they didn’t know! It was no home at all. She was particularly wretched there. She had stayed on with one object alone; now that this was accomplished there would be no object at all in going back. She had not intended ever to return, when leaving; but then her intentions had gone no further than the paying back to Mr. Teesdale of the twenty pounds obtained from him once upon a time by fraud. This had been the be-all and end-all of her existence for many months past. It was strange to be without it now; but to go back without it, to that farm in the ranges, would be terrible Yet go somewhere she must; and there was the work which she could do. They would give her that work again, and readily, as before; they would overwork her, bully her, speak hardly to her – but clothe her decently, feed her well, and pay her ten shillings a week, all as before. She must do some work somewhere. Then what and where else?

Her mind was in a mist.

She saw no future for herself at all, or none that would be tolerable now. If she had dreamt once of unanimous forgiveness at the farm – of getting work there in the kitchen, in the cow-shed – that dream had come to such utter annihilation that even the memory of it entered her head no more. And she wanted no work elsewhere. So why work at all? She had done enough. Rest was all she wanted now. It was the newborn desire of her heart; rest, and nothing more.

And here was the river at her feet; but that thought did not stay or crystallise just yet.

Before it came the thought of Melbourne and the old life, which parted the mind’s mist with a lurid light. That old life need not necessarily be an absolutely wicked one. There were points about that old life, wicked or otherwise. It had warmth, colour, jingle and glare, abundant variety, and superabundant gaiety. But rest? And rest was all she wanted now – all. And the mist gathered again in her mind; but the river still ran at her feet.

The river! How little heed she had taken of it until this moment! She had watched without seeing it, but she noted everything now. That the rain must have stopped before her banishment from the house, since her dry clothes were dry still; that overhead there was more clear sky than clouds; that the clouds were racing past a sickle moon, overwhelming it now and then, like white waves and a glistening rock; that the wind was shivering and groaning through the river-timber, and that it had loosened her own hair; that the river itself was strong, full, noisy and turbulent, and so close, so very close to her own feet.

She stooped, she knelt, she reached and touched it with her fingers. The river was certainly very cold and of so full a current that it swept the finger-tips out of the water as soon as they touched it. But this was only in winter-time. In summer it was a very different thing.

In summer-time the river was low and still and warm to the hand; the grass upon the banks was dry and yellow; the bottle-green trees were spotted and alive with the vivid reds, emeralds, and yellows of parrot, parrakeet, and cherry-picker; and the blue sky pressed upon the interlacing branches, not only over one’s head but under one’s feet, if one stood where Missy was standing now and looked where she was looking.

She was imagining all these things, as she had heard and seen and felt them many a time last summer. Last Christmas Day was the one she had especially in mind. It was so very hard to realise that it was the same place. Yet there was no getting over that fact. And Missy was closer than she knew to the spot where she had cast herself upon the ground and shut out sight and hearing until poor John William arrived upon the spot and brought about a little scene which she remembered more vividly than many a more startling one of her own unaided making. Poor Jack, indeed! Since that day he had been daily in her thoughts, and always as poor Jack. Because he had got it into his head that he was in love – and with her – that was why he was to be pitied; or rather, it was why she had pitied him so long, whom she pitied no longer. To-night – now, at any rate, as she stood by the river – of the two she pitied only herself.

To-night she had seen him again; to-night he had carried her in his arms, but spoken no word of love to her; to-night he had stood aside and allowed her to be turned out of the house by his mother who was not dying – not she.

It was as it should be; it was also as she had prayed that it might be. He did not care. That was all. She only regretted she had so long tormented herself with the thought that he might, nay, that he did care. She felt the need of that torment now as keenly as though it had been a comfort. Without it, she was lonely and alone, and more than ever in need of rest.

Then, suddenly, she remembered how that very day – last Christmas Day – in the gorgeous summer-time, but in this selfsame spot – the idea had come to her which was with her now. And her soul rose up in arms against herself for what she had not done last Christmas Day.

“If only I had,” she cried, “the trouble would have been over when it seems it was only just beginning. I shouldn’t have disgusted them as I did on purpose that very afternoon. A lot of good it did me! And they would all have forgiven me, when they found out. Even Mrs. Teesdale would have forgiven me then. And Jack – Jack – I shouldn’t have lived to know you never cared.”

She clasped her hands in front of her and looked up steadily at the moon. It was clear of the clouds now – a keen-edged sickle against a slatey sky; and such light as it shed fell full enough upon the thin brown face and fearless eyes of the nameless girl whom, as Missy, two or three simple honest folk had learnt to like so well that they could think of her kindly even when the black worst was known of her. Her lips moved – perhaps in prayer for those two or three – perhaps to crave forgiveness for herself; but they never trembled. Neither did her knees, though suddenly she knelt. And now her eyes were shut; and it seems, or she must have heard him, her ears also. She opened her eyes again, however, to look her last at sky and moon. But her eyes were full of tears. So she shut them tight, and, putting her hands in front of her, swung slowly forward.

It was then that John William stooped forward and caught her firmly by the waist; but, after a single shrill scream, the spirit left her as surely as it must had he never been there… Only, it came back.

He had taken off his coat. She was lying upon it, while he knelt over her. The narrow moon was like a glory over his head.

“Why did you do it?” she asked him. “You might have let me get to rest when – when you didn’t care!”

“I do care!” he answered; “and I mean you to rest now all the days of your life – your new life, Missy. I have cared all the time. But now I care more than ever.”

“Your father and ‘Bella – ”

“Care as much as I do, pretty nearly, in their own way. Missy, dear, don’t you care, too, – for me?”

She looked at him gratefully through her starting tears. “How can I help it? You picked me up out of the gutter between you; but it was you alone that kept me out of it, after I’d gone; because I sort of felt all the time that you cared. But oh, you must never marry me. I am thinking so of your mother! She will never, never forgive me; I couldn’t expect it; and she is going to get quite better, you know – I feel sure that she is better already.”

He put his hand upon the hair that was only golden in the moonshine: he peered into the wan face with infinite sadness: for here it was that Missy was both right and wrong.

THE END