Ernest Hornung - The Unbidden Guest

“I’m not a bushranger,” said he, “but you might easily think me one.”

“Why so?” asked David.

“Because I stopped you to ask for a match to light my pipe, and now I’m hanged if I can find my pipe in any of my pockets; and it was the best one ever I smoked,” said the man, with more of his oaths.

“That’s a bad job,” said David, sympathetically, in spite of a personal horror of bad language, which was one of his better peculiarities.

“A bad job?” cried the man. “It would be that if I’d lost my pipe, but it’s a damned sight worse when it’s a girl that goes and shakes it from you, and she the biggest little innocent you ever clapped eyes on. Yet she must have shook it. Confound her face!”

He was feeling in his pockets again, but as unsuccessfully as before. The farmer inquired whether he was on his way back to Melbourne, and suggested it was a long walk.

“It is so,” said the man; “but it’s a gay little town when you get there, is Melbourne – what?”

“Very,” said Mr. Teesdale, to be civil; but he was beginning to find this difficult.

“You prefer the country – what?” continued the other, who was now leaning on the wheel, and showing a face which the old man liked even less than the rest of him, it was so handsome and yet so coarse. “Well, so do I, for a change. And talk of the girls!” The fellow winked. “Old Country or Colonies, it’s all the same – you give me a country lass for a lark that’s worth having. But damn their souls when they lose your favourite pipe!”

“What sort of a pipe was it?” asked David, to change a conversation which he disliked. “If I come across it I’ll send it to you, if you tell me where to.”

“Good, old man!” cried the stranger. “It was a meerschaum, with a lady’s hand holding of the bowl, and coloured better than any pipe ever you saw in your life. If you do find it, you leave it with the boss of the ‘Bushman’s Rest’. then I’ll get it again when next I come this way – to see my girl. For I can’t quite think she’s the one to have touched it, when all’s skid and done.”

“Very good,” said David, coldly, because both look and word of this roadside acquaintance were equally undesirable in his eyes. “Very good, if I find it. And now, if you’ll allow me, I’ll push on home.”

The other showed himself as ready with a sneer as with an oath. “You are in a desperate hurry!” said he.

“I am,” said David; “nevertheless, I’m much obliged to you for being so clever with the horse just now, and I wish you a very good night.” And with that, showing for once some little decision, because this kind of man repelled him, old Tees-dale cracked his whip and drove on without more ado.

Nor is it likely he would have thought any more about so trifling an incident, but for another which occurred before he finally reached home. It was at his own slip-rails, not many minutes later; he had got down and taken them out, and was in the act of leading through, when his foot kicked something hard and small, so that it rattled against one of the rails, and shone in the light of the buggy lamp at the same instant. The farmer stopped to pick it up, found it a meerschaum pipe, and pulled a grave face over it for several moments. Then he slipped it into his pocket, and after putting up the rails behind him, was in his own yard in three minutes. Here one of the men took charge of horse and buggy, and the master went round to the front of the house, but must needs stand in the verandah to spy on Arabella, who was sitting with her Family Cherub under the lamp and the blind never drawn. She was not reading; her head was lifted, and she was gazing at the window – at himself, David imagined; but he was wrong, for she never saw him. Her face was flushed, and there was in it a wonder and a stealthy joy, born of the romantic reading under her nose, as the father thought; but he was wrong again; for Arabella had finished one chapter before the coming of Missy, and had sat an hour over the next without taking in a word.

“So you’ve got back, father?” she was saying presently, in an absent, mechanical sort of voice.

“Here I am,” said Mr. Teesdale; “and I left Missy at the theatre, where it appears she had to meet – ”

“Missy!” exclaimed Arabella, remembering very suddenly. “Oh yes! Of course. Where do you say you left her, father?”

“At the Bijou Theatre, my dear, I am sorry to say; but it wasn’t her fault; it was the friends she is staying with whom she had to meet there. Well, let’s hope it won’t do her any harm just once in a way. And what have you been doing, my dear, all the evening?”

“I? Oh, after milking I had a bit of a stroll outside.”

“A stroll, eh? Then you didn’t happen to see a man hanging about our slip-rails, did you?”

Mr. Teesdale was emptying his pockets, with his back to Arabella, so he never knew how his question affected her.

“I wasn’t near the slip-rails, I was in the opposite direction,” she said presently. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I found this right under them,” said Mr. Teesdale, showing her the meerschaum pipe before laying it down on the chimney-piece; “and as I was getting near the township, I met a man who told me he’d lost just such a pipe. And I didn’t like him, my dear, so I only hope he’s not coming after our Mary Jane, that’s all.”

Mary Jane was the farm-servant. She had not been out of the kitchen since milking-time, said Arabella; and her father was remarking that he was glad to hear this, when the door flew open, and Mrs. Teesdale whistled into the room like a squall of wind.

“At last!” she cried. “Do you know how long you’ve been, David? Do you know what time it is?”

“I don’t, my dear,” said he.

“Then look at your watch.”

“My dear,” he said, “I’ve left my watch in Melbourne.”

“In Melbourne!” cried Mrs. Teesdale among her top notes. “And what’s the meaning of that?”

“It means,” said Mr. Teesdale, struggling to avoid the lie direct, “that it hasn’t been cleaned for years, and that it needed cleaning very badly indeed.”

“But you told Miriam how well it was going; time we were having our teas!”

“Yes, I know, and – that’s the curious thing, my dear. It went and stopped on our way in.” For there was no avoiding it, after all; yet in all the long years of their married life, it was his first.

The Monday following was the first and the best of some bad days at the farm; for Missy had never written to tell Mr. Teesdale when and where he might call for her, so he could not call at all, and she did not come out by herself. This they now firmly expected her to do, and David wasted much time in meeting every omnibus; but when the last one had come in without Missy, even he was forced to give her up for that day. There would be a letter of explanation in the morning, said David, and shut his ears to his wife’s answer. She had been on tenter-hooks all day, for ever diving into the spare room with a duster, dodging out again to inquire what time it was now , and then scolding David because he had not his watch – a circumstance for which that simpleton was reproaching himself before long.

For there was no letter in the morning, and no Missy next day, or the next, or the next after that. It was then that Mr. Teesdale took to lying awake and thinking much of the friendly ticking that had cheered his wakefulness for thirty years, and even more of a few words in the Thursday’s Argus , which he had not shown to a soul. And strange ideas concerning the English girl were bandied across the family board; but the strangest of all were John William’s, who would not hear a word against her; on the contrary, it was his father, in his opinion, who was to blame for the whole matter, which the son of the house declared to be a mere confusion of one Monday with another.