E. W. Hornung

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Teesdale lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking hard. She thought of their long married life together; and had she been a good wife to David? She thought of the easy-going, sweet-tempered young man who had made laughing love to her long ago in some Yorkshire lane; of the middle-aged philosopher who had found it rather amusing than otherwise to watch worse men making their fortunes while he stood still and chuckled; of the frail, white-haired sleeper who would presently awake with a smile to one day more of indolence and unsuccess. ”

“ On that first evening, when Missy had come and gone, Arabella had taken a stroll by herself after supper; had been thinking more about the Family Cherub story, in which she was then engrossed, than of anything else that she could now remember; but it appeared her head had been full at the time of romantic stuff of one kind or another, so that when she came very suddenly upon a handsome stranger leaning over the slip-rails and smoking his pipe, it was readily revealed to Arabella that she had been waiting for that moment and that stranger all her life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A week and more had passed since Miriam Oliver left them, with undisguised relief in her eyes and the coldest of cold farewells upon her lips, which not even Mrs. Teesdale, who half attempted it, was allowed to kiss in memory of her parents. Since that day Mrs. T. had not been herself; but David was only now beginning to perceive it. When one has lived thirty-five years with another the master-spirit of the pair, it must be hard indeed for the weaker to discern the first false ring, telling of the first flaw in the stronger vessel. ”

“ Mr. Teesdale became greatly depressed as he made these reflections, and gradually got as much of the blame on to his own shoulders as one man could carry. It was very dark. He was sitting out on the verandah and smoking; but it was too dark to enjoy a pipe properly, even if David could have enjoyed anything just then. He was sitting in one of those wooden chairs in which he had so often sat of late while Missy read to him, and one hand rested mournfully upon the seat of the empty chair at his side. Not that he as yet really dreaded never seeing Missy again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 brutes! And I tell you,'.ella, that if you go to him now, as you thought of doing, your life will be blasted from this night on. He will never marry you. He hasn't gone the right way about that. No, but he'll ruin you and leave you in your ruin; and when he does, may the Lord have mercy on your soul!”
She had said. And the extraordinary emotion which had gathered in her voice as she went on had the effect of taking Arabella out of herself even then.
“Missy,” she whispered—“Missy, you are crying! How can you know so much that is terrible? You seem to know all about it, Missy!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Teesdale, I must ask you whether you're in the habit of telling lies.”
David opened his mouth to answer very promptly indeed, but kept it open without answering at all at the moment. He had remembered something that sent his left thumb and forefinger of their own accord into an empty waistcoat pocket. “No,” said he presently with a sigh, “I'm not exactly in the habit of saying what isn't true.”
“But you do it sometimes?”
“I have done it, God forgive me! But who has not?”
“Not me,” cried Missy candidly. “There's not a bigger liar in this world than me! ”

“ Certainly it was a sight to see them together—the weak-kneed old man, who could shoot so cleverly still, when he had a mind, and the jaunty young woman who was all slang and fun and rollicking good-nature, plus a cockney lust for blood and feathers.
Missy's first feathers, however, were not such as she might stick in her hat, and her first blood was exceedingly ill-shed. To be sure, she knew no better until the deed was done, and the quaint dead bird with the big head and beak carried home in triumph to Mr. Teesdale. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A sort of chance came almost immediately; it was not the best sort, but Missy had grown so desperate that now she was all for running up her true piratical colours and then sheering off before a gun could be brought to bear upon her. So she seized the opportunity which occurred in the best parlour, to which the party adjourned after tea. The best parlour was very seldom used. It had the fusty smell of all best parlours, which never are for common use, and was otherwise too much of a museum of albums, antimacassars, ornaments and footstools, to be a very human habitation at its best. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Missy knows heaps of them—don't you, Missy?”
“Well, a good few,” said Missy, with some show of modesty.
“To be sure you would,” murmured Mr. Tees-dale, adding, as his eyes glistened, “and yet you'll come and stay with the likes of us! You aren't too proud to take us as you find us—you aren't above drinking cocoa with your supper.”
“What do the lords and ladies drink with their suppers?” asked Arabella, as Missy smiled and blushed.
But the farmer cried, “Their dinners, she means; I'll warrant they dine late every night o' their lives.” ”

“ The room was a part of one of the farm outhouses. In each corner was a bunk, and on each bunk a man (counting Geordie) , the fourth being one Old Willie, a retired salt, who drove the milk into Melbourne in the middle of every night. Old Willie was sitting on the side of his bunk and chuckling so windily that the sparks were flying out of his cutty like fireworks. There was nothing, however, to show which of the other three was the entertainer, for each turned silent and looked guilty when John William entered and planted himself in their midst. ”