CHAPTER XIX.—TO THE TUNE OF RAIN.

Towards the close of a depressing afternoon in the following winter Arabella might have been seen (but barely heard) to steal out of the farmhouse by the front door, which she shut very softly behind her. Twilight had set in before its time, thanks to the ponderous clouds that were gathered and still gathering overhead; but as she came forth into the open air, Arabella blinked, like one accustomed to no light at all. Rain had fallen freely during the day, but only, it seemed certain, as a foretaste of what was presently to come. At the moment all was very still, which rendered it the more difficult to make no noise; but this time Arabella was not bound upon any secret or private enterprise. She stepped out naturally enough when a few yards from the house, her simple object being a breath of fresh air; and from her white face and tired eyes, of this she was in urgent need. She picked her way as quickly as possible across the muddy yard, but ere she reached the gate was accosted by Old Willie, who was off duty until milk-cart time in the small hours, and who peered at her with a grave, inquiring look before opening his mouth.

"About the same, Miss?"

She shook her head.

"No better, at any rate; if anything, worse."

"And Mr. Teesdale?"

"He is keeping up. The woman who is helping me to nurse has a baby. She had to bring it with her. Father plays with it all day, and it seems to occupy his mind."

"Well, that's something. Now get your snack of air, miss. I mustn't keep you."

"No, you mustn't. I am going to the Cultivation, it is so high and open there. Do you think it will rain before I can get back?"

Old Willie looked aloft. He was an ancient mariner, who had deserted his ship for the diggings in the early days; hence the aptitude for regular night-work.

"I think we shall catch it before pitch-dark," said he; "so you'd better look sharp, miss; and—good-night!"

"Good-night; and thank you—thank you."

But Arabella walked away wincing, and she opened the gate with her left hand; for the horny-fisted old sea-dog had shown his sympathy by nearly breaking her right.

It was the gate that led one among the gum-trees, down into that shallow gully, and so upward to the Cultivation. The trees were as leafy as ever in summer-time; the grass at their feet was much greener. There was no other striking difference to mark the exchange of seasons, saving always the heavy gray sky and the damp raw air. Arabella drew her shawl skin-tight about her shoulders, and walked rapidly; but far swifter than her feet went her thoughts—to last summer.

Heaven knows there were others to think of first—and last—just then. Yet in a minute or two Arabella was thinking only of the wicked, the dishonest, the immoral Missy. Nothing was known of her at the farm from the day she left it. That was nearly eight months ago, and eight months was time enough, surely, to forget her in; but here, of all places, Arabella could never forget the woman who had saved her own woman's honour. Here it had happened. It was at the Cultivation corner that she had made the tryst that would infallibly have been her ruin; it was somewhere hereabouts that Missy had kept that tryst for her and saved her from ruin. She could never come this way without thinking only of Missy, and wondering whether she was alive, and where she was, and what doing. Therefore that which happened this evening was in reality less of a coincidence than it looked.

The girl of whom she was thinking stood suddenly in Arabella's path.

The recognition, however, was not so immediate. Missy was clad in garments that were the meanest rags compared even with those in which she had first appeared at the farm; also, she was thin to emaciation, and not a strand of her distinguishing red hair could be seen for the unsightly bonnet which was tightly fastened over her head and ears. Consider, further, the light, and you will have more patience than Missy had with the dumbfounded Arabella.

"Don't you know me, 'Bella, or won't you know me?"

Arabella did know her then, and her hands flew out to the other's and caught them tight. Then she doubted her knowledge—the hands were harder than her own.

"Missy! No, I don't believe it is you. Where's your fringe? Why are you—like this? How can it be you? You never used to have hard hands!" Yet she held them tight.

"Don't talk so loud," said Missy, nervously; "there might be someone about. You know it's me. I wonder how you can bear to touch me!"

"I can bear a bit more than that," said Arabella warmly, and she flung her arms about the other, and reached up and kissed her lovingly upon the mouth, upon both cheeks. The cheeks were cold, and the back and shoulders were wet to the hands and wrists encircling them.

"You're a good sort, 'Bella," murmured Missy, not particularly touched, but in a grateful tone enough. "You always were. There, that'll do. Fancy you not even being choked off yet—and me like this!"

"Fancy you being back again, Missy! That's the grand thing. I can hardly credit it even now. But you're terribly wet, poor dear! It's dreadful for you, Missy, it is indeed!"

"Oh, that's nothing; it did rain pretty hard, but there'll be some more in a minute, so it would come to the same thing in any case."

"Then you have walked, and were caught in it on the road?"

"Do I look as if I'd ridden? Yes, and it was a pretty long road——"

"From Melbourne?—I should think it was." Missy laughed.

"From Melbourne, that's no distance. I've travelled more than twice as far since morning, my dear, and I shall have it to travel all over again before to-morrow morning."

"Then you haven't come from Melbourne?" cried Arabella, highly amazed.

"Haven't set foot in it since I saw you last."

"Where in the world have you been, then, Missy?"

But even as they were speaking, the grass whispered on every hand, the leaves rustled, and down came the rain in torrents. Arabella found herself taken by the arm and led into the shelter of the nearest tree—a spreading she-oak. She was much agitated.

"Oh, what am I to do?" she cried. "I dare not stay many minutes; but I would give anything to stay ever so long, Missy! You don't understand. Tell me quickly where you have been, if you never went back to Melbourne?"

"Nay, if you're in a hurry, it's you that must tell me things. That's what I've come all this way for, 'Bella—just to hear how you're all getting on. How's Mr. Teesdale?"

"He's as well as he ever is."

"And you, 'Bella?"

"Oh, there's never anything the matter with me."

"And John William?"

"There's not much the matter with him, either."

"Then that's all right," Missy fetched a sigh of relief.

It struck Arabella as very odd indeed that the only one of them after whom Missy did not ask should be Mrs. Teesdale. But was it odd? Quite apart from any rights or wrongs, Mrs. Teesdale had been Missy's natural enemy from the first. Moreover, she had struck Missy as an old woman who would never grow older or die; and Arabella let it pass. She was in a hurry, and it was now her turn to get answers from Missy.

"Where have you been," she repeated, "if you never went back to Melbourne? Be quick and tell me all about it."

Missy shook her head, shaking the rain that had gathered upon her shabby bonnet into Arabella's eyes. It was raining very heavily all this time, and the she-oak's shelter left much to be desired. But Missy was now the one with her arms about the other, who was, as we know, a much shorter woman; so that Arabella, whose back was to the tree-trunk, was being kept wonderfully dry. Missy shook her head.

"I can't tell you much if I'm to tell you quickly. You are in a hurry, I can see, and indeed it's no wonder——-"

"Oh, you don't understand, Missy!" cried the other in a torment. "If only you would come into the house——"

"That I never can."

"I tell you that you don't understand. You could—just now."

"Never," said Missy firmly. "I know my sins pretty well by this time. I've had time to study 'em lately; and the worst of the lot was how I played it upon all of you here. Now don't you begin! You want to know where I've been lying low all this while, and what I've been doing. I'll tell you in two twos; then I'll give you what I've got for Mr. Teesdale, and then you shall run away indoors, and back I go to the place I come from. Where's that? Over twenty miles away, in the Dandenong Ranges. It's a farm like this—What am I saying? There never was or will be a farm like this! But it isn't so unlike, either, in this and that; and I'm the girl in the kitchen there, same as Mary Jane is here, and help milk the cows, and cook the dinner, and clean up the place, and all that."

"Oh, Missy, I can scarcely believe it! Yet I felt hard work on your hands the moment I touched them—they are as rough and hard as Mary Jane's," said Arabella, taking fresh hold of them, "and your dress is just like hers. Where did you get such a dress? And how did you come to get taken on at the farm? We all thought you'd gone straight back to Melbourne; as for John William——"

She hesitated. It was one thing to befriend Missy; but Arabella could not help taking a special and a different view of her in relation to her own brother.

"Yes?" said Missy.

"John William was quite sure of it."

"Then—I suppose—he never thought of looking for me? No, of course he wouldn't. Why should he?"

"You—you could hardly expect it, dear, I think," said John William's sister, very gently.

"Hardly; what a cracked thing it was to say!" cried Missy, laughing down the wistful tone into which she had dropped. "But you none of you could have guessed much about my life there, if you thought I was likely to go straight back to Melbourne from here. No, and you can't have known what it was to me to have lived here for two months, even as a cheat and a liar. There's worse things than cheating and lying, 'Bella; there's things that cheating and lying's a healthy change after! But never mind all that. When I left you, and had got through the township, I didn't take the road to Melbourne at all; I took the other road. Bang ahead of me was them Dandenong Ranges that your dear old father's always looking at as he sits at the table. I wonder does he look at 'em as much as ever? So I said, 'Them ranges is the place for me;' and I stumped for them ranges straight away. I swopped dresses with a woman I met on the road; this is the rags of what I got for mine; and then I stopped at all the farms asking for work. How I got work, after ever so long, and all about it, I'd tell you if you weren't in such a hurry to go. You'll get wet, you know, and here you're as dry as a bone. But I suppose it's only natural!"

"It isn't natural, Missy, and it isn't true," said Arabella, earnestly. "Oh, if only you understood everything! As if I could ever forget what you did for me—in this very paddock!"

"It was under this very tree, for that matter," said Missy, with a laugh. "I found it easily enough, and I was standing under it for old acquaintance when you came along. Do you know what he got?"

Arabella hung her head, because in the Argus she had read his sentence, to whom once she had been prepared to commit body and soul. She did not answer; but in her anxiety to be good to Missy, she forgot that other anxiety concerning her brother.

"If only you would come into the house, and let me give you some dry things and some supper! You must need both; and you have no idea how clear the coast is. You don't understand!"

"What is it that I don't understand?" asked Missy, pertinently. "You keep on saying that."

"It is my mother—you never asked after her. She is very ill. She is—on her deathbed."

For more than a minute Missy remained speechless, while the fall of the rain on leaf and blade seemed all at once to have grown very loud. Then she shook her head firmly.

"I am so sorry for you all; but it's all the more reason why I mustn't come in. If she were well, I daren't."

They argued the matter. The want of food was admitted; that of dry clothes, obvious.

"If you would only come as far as the cart-shed; there's not the least chance of anyone going there till Old Willie does at two o'clock in the morning; and there I could bring you some supper and a change as well. If you would only do that," Arabella urged, "it would be something."

"You would promise not to tell a soul?"

"I do promise."

"Not even John William?"

Arabella remembered her forgotten anxiety. "Certainly not John William," said she, emphatically. And Missy gave in at last.

Five minutes later they stood, wet and dripping, in the cart-shed. It was one of the many more or less ramshackle shanties which stood around the homestead yard. It had a galvanised iron roof, a back and two sides of wattle and dab, and no front at all. And no sooner had the two women gained this shelter than a man's voice calling through the rain caused them to cling instinctively together. The man was John William, and, low as his voice was purposely pitched, the words carried clear and clean into the cart-shed.

"'Bella! 'Bella! Where are you, 'Bella?"

And the voice was coming nearer.

"I must go," whispered 'Bella.

"Remember your promise!"

Missy could not know how superfluous was her caution; it comforted her to remember that she had given it, now that she was left alone, able to think, and to examine the situation. This was not that situation which she had planned and bargained for in her own mind; this was the better of the two. She had intended to waylay Arabella, but she had never hoped to manage it so far from the house. She had contemplated the impossibility of waylaying her at all—the necessity of knocking at her window as she was going to bed—the circumstances of a more difficult and a more dangerous interview than that which had already taken place. She knew the daily ways of the farm well enough to know also that she was tolerably safe at present where she was. Soon Arabella would return with eatables and dry clothing, and the one would be as welcome as the other. Meantime, Missy had hidden herself under the spring-cart, lest by any chance another should look into the shed before Arabella. When the latter came back, she would confide into her safe keeping that which she had brought for Mr. Teesdale, to be given him not before Missy had been twenty-four hours gone from the premises. And after that——

Nothing mattered after that.

But Arabella did not return so very soon, after all; and it was uncomfortable for body and nerves alike, crouching under the spring-cart; and the rain made such an uproar on the iron roof that it would be impossible to hear footsteps outside, came they never so near; and this made it worse still for the nerves.

The cow-shed was not far from that which sheltered buggy and carts and Missy in the midst of them. On a perfectly still evening it would have been possible to hear the jet of milk playing on the side of the pail; but to-night Missy could hear nothing but the rain and her own heart beating. It was raining harder than ever. She crouched, watching the sputtering blackness outside until, very suddenly, it ceased to be absolutely black. The light of a lantern came swinging nearer and nearer to the shed.

"What can she want with a lantern?" thought Missy, shrinking for a moment as the rays reached her. Then she extricated herself from the spring-cart wheels, stood upright, and asked the question aloud when the lantern itself was within a yard or two of the shelter. Now you cannot tell who is carrying the ordinary lantern when the night is dark and there is no other light at all; and Missy never dreamt that this was any person but Arabella, until strong arms encircled her and the breath was out of her body.

At last she gasped—

"Arabella told you! She has broken her sacred promise!"

"No one told me; but I saw it in Arabella's face.... Missy! Missy! To think that I have got you safe! I shall never let you go any more—never—never!"

Suddenly he swept her off her feet and bore her into the rain.

"Where are you going to take me? Not into the house?"

She could scarcely speak; she was quite past struggling. Without answering, he bore her on.