CHAPTER VIII.—THE SAVING OF ARABELLA.

One night early in December, Arabella burst into Missy's room with singular abruptness. Missy had said good-night to the others and was very nearly in bed, but she had not seen Arabella, who had been out all the evening. Evidently she had only now come in. She was breathing quickly from hurrying up-hill; and there was a light in her countenance which Missy noticed in due course.

"Missy," she began, as abruptly as she had entered, "do you remember the day you first came, and we showed you that group of you all taken when you were quite little?"

Missy nodded in the looking-glass. She was busy with her fringe.

"Well," continued Arabella, "you said red came out light, talking of your hair. Do you remember that?"

"Red came out light? No, I can't say I do."

"You must, Missy! You were speaking of your hair in that group———"

Missy flourished a brave bare arm. "Now I see. My poor old carrots! Of course they came out light; they couldn't come out red, could they?"

"No; but I'm told that red comes out black—that's all."

Missy faced about in a twinkling. Her bare arms went akimbo. She was pale.

"So that's what excited you, eh?" she cried derisively; yet it was only in the moment of speaking that she perceived that Arabella was excited at all.

"I'm not excited, Missy!"

"No?"

"Not a bit," said Arabella, as she gave herself the scarlet lie from neck to forehead. This amused Missy.

"Then what is it?" said she at last, with a provoking smile which the other could not meet. "Is it only that you're just dying to bowl me out? All right, my dear, we'll put it down to that. Only take care I don't bowl you out too—take very good care that I don't find out something about you!"

Arabella had the pale face now.

"Take very extra special good care," continued Missy, nodding nastily, "that I haven't found out something already!"

"Have you?"

The hoarse voice was unknown to Missy, and the frightened face seemed a fresh face altogether. She read it in a moment, and was laughing the next.

"Of course I haven't, my good girl!"

"O Missy!"

"Just as if you'd done anything you'd mind being found out! No, my dear, I was only having a lark with you; but you deserved it for having one with me. Now as to my hair in that photograph——"

"Oh, but of course I believe you, Missy, and not—and not the person who told me different."

"Now I wonder who that was?" said Missy to herself; but aloud—"That's a blessing! And now if you'll let me go to bed, my dear, we'll neither of us think any more of all this tommy-rot that we've been talking."

Nevertheless she herself thought about it half that night. And a variety of vague suspicions crystallised at last into a single definite conclusion.

"She has a man on," muttered Missy to her pillow. "That's what's the matter with Arabella."

Her mind was fully made up before she slept.

"I must find out something about it; what I do see I don't like; and I've just got to take care of Arabella."

Forthwith she set herself to watch. It was first of all necessary to become really intimate with Arabella. The latter's addiction to personal catechism, to name one thing, had kept Missy not a little aloof hitherto. Now, however, in the nick of time, this weakness passed away, and with it this barrier. There were no more questions asked obviously for the sake of doubting or discrediting the answer. On the other hand, about some things Arabella was as inquisitive as ever; especially to wit, Missy's love affairs. Curiously enough, this was the one point on which Missy was markedly reticent, for very good reasons of her own; but she had no objection to discussing with Arabella the general subject of love. She noted the fascination this had for her companion. When the latter came to speak of her male ideal, from the point of view of his appearance, Missy noted much more. "He has a black moustache and very dark eyes," said she to herself. "That's the kind I trust least of all!" She knew something about it, evidently.

A tiny incident, however, which happened when Missy had been some five or six weeks at the farm, told her more than Arabella had done, directly or indirectly, in any of their conversations. The girls were in the room with Mr. Teesdale, who was looking on the chimney-piece for a lost letter, when he exclaimed suddenly:

"What's got that meerschaum pipe, Arabella?"

"Which one was that, father?" was the only answer, in a suspiciously innocent voice.

"The one I picked up by our slip-rails the night I took Missy back to Melbourne. It belonged to yon man I told you I met on the road. I was saving it in case I ever set eyes on him again."

"Oh, that one!" cried Arabella; then, after a pause, she added, with a nonchalance which Missy for one admired: "I gave it back to him the other day."

"To whom?"

"Why, the man that lost it!"

"You gave it back—to the man that lost it?" cried David, in the greatest surprise, while Missy became buried in the Argus of that morning. "Dear me, where have you seen him, honey?"

"In the township."

"In the township, eh? Now what sort of a man was it that you saw in the township? Tell me what he was like."

"Like? Oh, he had—let's see—he had very dark eyes; oh, yes, and a dark moustache and all; and he was very—well, rather handsome, I thought him."

"Ay, that's near enough," said Mr. Teesdale, greatly puzzled; "quite near enough to satisfy me that he's the same man; but how in the world did you know that he was? That's what I can't make out!"

"Why, he told me himself, to be sure!"

"Ay, but how came he to speak to you at all? That's what I want to know."

"Then I'm sure I can't tell you," said Arabella, with a toss of her head, not badly done. "I suppose he saw where I came from, and I dare say he'd been leaning again' our slip-rails that night he lost his pipe. Anyhow, he asked me whether I'd found one, and I said you had, and he described the one he'd lost, and I knew that must be it. So I came back and got it for him. That was all."

Mr. Teesdale seemed just a little put out. "I wonder you didn't say anything about it at the time, my dear," said he, in mild remonstrance.

"Me? Why, I never thought any more of it," the young woman said, with a slightly superfluous laugh. "I—you see that was the first and last I'd seen of him," added Arabella, as if to end the discussion; but her father had not finished his say.

"I'm glad it was the last, however—I am glad of that!" he exclaimed with unusual energy. "Why? Because, my dear, little as I saw of him, I didn't like the cut of that man's jib. No," said Mr. Teesdale, letting his eyes travel through the window to the river-timber, and shaking his head decidedly, as he sat down in his accustomed seat; "no, I didn't like it at all; and very sorry I should have been to think a man of that stamp was coming here after our Mary Jane!"

And Missy said never a word; but neither word, look nor tone had escaped her.

Her eyes were very wide open now. Arabella went out more evenings than one, but never, it appeared, on two consecutive evenings; so the man was not living in the district. And Missy said so much the worse; he was not merely passing his time. To clinch matters, the unhappy girl began to hang out signs of sleepless nights and perpetual nervous preoccupation by day; signs which Missy alone interpreted aright.

At length, a little before Christmas, there came a night when Arabella kissed them all round and went off to her room much earlier than usual. And the fever in her eyes and lips was noted by Missy, and by Missy alone.

It was a night of stars only. The moon by which Missy had killed her one native cat, and nursed an infant opossum, had waxed and waned. The night, when Mr. Teesdale took a breath of it last thing, looked black as soot. Twenty minutes later, the farmhouse was in utter darkness; not a single ray from a single window; and so it remained for nearly two hours.

Then suddenly a light shone in the parlour for a single instant only. The outer door of the little gun-room was now opened, as noiselessly as might be, and shut again, hairbreadth by hairbreadth. The odd thing was, that this happened not once, but twice within five minutes. And each time it was a woman's figure that stood up under the stars, and then stole forth into the night.

There were two of them; and while the first went swiftly in a given direction (towards the timbered gully), the second made a quick circuit of the premises, and, as it happened, intercepted the first among the trees as though she had been lying in wait there for hours. Then it was "O Missy!" and Arabella uttered a stifled, terrified scream.

"Yes, it's Missy," said that young woman soberly. "And I wonder what we're doing out here at this time of night, both of us?"

"I'm having a walk," said Arabella, giggling half hysterically.

"That's exactly what I'm doing; so we can walk together."

"You've followed me out, you mean liar!" cried Arabella, with wholly hysterical wrath. She had, indeed, been for pushing forward after the first shock, but when Missy stepped out alongside there was nothing for it but a pitched battle on the spot.

"I have so," said Missy. "I know all about it, you see."

"All about what?"

"What you are after."

"And what am I after, since you're so mighty clever?"

"You're meeting that man."

"What man?" Arabella was quaking pitifully. "The man you're always meeting; but to-night you meant to run away with him."

"Spy!" said Arabella. "What makes you think that?"

"You have put on all your best things."

"But what makes you think there is a man at all?"

"Oh, I saw that ages ago; though mind you, I have never seen him. It is the man with the meerschaum pipe, now isn't it?"

Arabella's first answer was a shaking fist. Next moment she was shaking all over, in a storm of tears during which Missy took hold of her with both arms, was thrown off, took a fresh hold, and was then suffered to keep it. At last she asked:

"Where were you to meet him, Arabella?"

The answer came with more sobs than words. "At the top corner of the Cultivation: the road corner: he is to wait there till I come."

"Good!" said Missy. "That's half a mile away, and where we are is out of hearing of the house. Not so sure, eh? Well, come a little, further down the gully. That's better! Now we're safe as the bank, and you'll stop and tell me something about him, won't you, dear, before you go?"

Before she went! Could she ever go now? All the strength which this poor creature had imbibed from a man as masterful as the woman was weak—an imitative courage, never for a moment her honest own—had been rooted up easily enough from the soul where there was no soil for it, and was now as though it had never existed. Such nerve as she had summoned up was gone. Yes, she would stop and talk; that would be a relief. And Missy should hear all, all there was to tell; but this was very little, incredibly little indeed.

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. She said as much now, in other words, but wasted time in unnecessary dilatation upon the man's good looks before proceeding with her confession. He had spoken soft words to her in the soft night air. He had kissed her across the slip-rails. And Arabella had lived thirty years in her tiny corner of the world, but never before had she been kissed by the mouth of man not a Teesdale. Missy might stare as much as she liked; it was the sacred truth, was that.

So much for the first meeting, which was a pure accident. There had been others which were nothing of the kind. Missy nodded, as much as to say she knew all about those other meetings, and hurried Arabella to the point. That the foolish girl knew less than nothing worth knowing about this man was only too evident; but it seemed his name was Stanborough. And to-morrow, said Arabella, with a sudden hauling at the slack of her nerves, this would be her name too.

Then she still meant to go?

Arabella fell to pieces again. She had promised. He was waiting. He would kill her if she broke her promise.

"Kill your grandmother!" said Missy. "Let him wait. Shall I tell you who'll kill who if you do go?"

"Who?" said Arabella in a whisper.

"Why, you'll kill your father, as sure as ever God made you, my girl."

"But we should soon come back—and with money enough to help them here tremendously! He has promised that; and you don't know how well off he is, Missy. Yes, yes, we should soon come back after we were married!"

"I dare say—after that," said Missy dryly.

"Then you don't think he—means——"

"Of course he doesn't."

"How do you know?"

"Never mind how I know. It's enough that I do know, as sure as I'm standing under this tree. You've told me quite sufficient. I feel as if I knew your man as well as I've known two or three. The brutes! And I tell you,'Bella, 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!"

"Never mind how much I know, or how I came to know it," cried the other. "I know enough to want to save you from what some girls I've known have come to. To say nothing of saving your dear old father's life. For kill him it would."

Arabella had been marvelling; but now her own difficulty clutched her afresh.

"He will kill me if I don't go to him. He has said so," she moaned in her misery, "and he will."

"Not he! He's a coward. I feel as if I knew the beast—and precious soon I shall."

Arabella started. "What do you mean?" said she.

"I mean that you've got to leave your friend to me. I'll soon settle him."

Missy spoke cheerily. Her new tone inspired confidence in the breast of Arabella, who whispered eagerly, "How can you? Ah, if you only could!"

"You would like it?"

"I should thank God! O Missy, I have been such a wicked, foolish girl, but you are so strong and brave! I shall love you for this all my life!"

"Will you? I wonder," said Missy. "But never mind that now. Go you back to the house, and if I don't come to your room in less than half an hour and tell you that I've sent Mr. Stanborough about his business——"

"Hush!" exclaimed the other in low alarm. "I hear him now. He is coming to look for me."

It was a very faint sound, but terror had sharpened the girl's ears. It was the sound of a walking-stick swishing the dry grass on the further slope of the gully. Missy heard it also when she bent her ear to listen, and the next moment she had her companion by the shoulders.

"Now run." said she, "and run for your life. No, we've no time for any of that stuff now. Time enough to thank me when I come and tell you I've sent him to the right-about for good and all. Run quickly—keep behind the trees—and all will be well before you're an hour older."

And so they separated, Arabella hurrying upward to the farm, her heart drumming against her ribs, while Missy trudged down the hill at her full height, with a marble mouth, and both fists clenched.