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The Unbidden Guest
The Unbidden Guest
CHAPTER I. – THE GIRL FROM HOME
Arabella was the first at the farm to become aware of Mr. Teesdale’s return from Melbourne. She was reading in the parlour, with her plump elbows planted upon the faded green table-cloth, and an untidy head of light-coloured hair between her hands; looking up from her book by chance, she saw through the closed window her father and the buggy climbing the hill at the old mare’s own pace. Arabella went on reading until the buggy had drawn up within a few feet of the verandah posts and a few more of the parlour window. Then she sat in doubt, with her finger on the place; but before it appeared absolutely necessary to jump up and run out, one of the men had come up to take charge of the mare, and Arabella was enabled to remove her finger and read on.
The parlour was neither very large nor at all lofty, and the shut window and fire-place closely covered by a green gauze screen, to keep the flies out, made it disagreeably stuffy. There were two doors, but both of these were shut also, though the one at the far end of the room, facing the hearth, nearly always stood wide open. It led down a step into a very little room where the guns were kept and old newspapers thrown, and where somebody was whistling rather sweetly as the other door opened and Mr. Teesdale entered, buggy-whip in hand.
He was a frail, tallish old gentleman, with a venerable forehead, a thin white beard, very little hair to his pate, and clear brown eyes that shone kindly upon all the world. He had on the old tall hat he always wore when driving into Melbourne, and the yellow silk dust-coat which had served him for many a red-hot summer, and was still not unpresentable. Arabella was racing to the end of a paragraph when he entered, and her father had stolen forward and kissed her untidy head before she looked up.
“Bad girl,” said he, playfully, “to let your old father get home without ever coming out to meet him!”
“I was trying to finish this chapter,” said Arabella. She went on trying.
“I know, I know! I know you of old, my dear. Yet I can’t talk, because I am as bad as you are; only I should like to see you reading something better than the Family Cherub.” There were better things in the little room adjoining, where behind the shooting lumber was some motley reading, on two long sagging shelves; but that room was known as the gun-room, and half those books were hidden away behind powder-canisters, cartridge-cases, and the like, while all were deep in dust.
“You read it yourself, father,” said Arabella as she turned over a leaf of her Family Cherub.
“I read it myself. More shame for me! But then I’ve read all them books in the little gun-room, and that’s what I should like to see you reading now and then. Now why have you got yon door shut, Arabella, and who’s that whistling in there?”
“It’s our John William,” Miss Teesdale said; and even as she spoke the door in question was thrown open by a stalwart fellow in a Crimean shirt, with the sleeves rolled up from arms as brown and hard-looking as mellow oak. He had a breech-loader in one hand and a greasy rag in the other.
“Holloa, father!” cried he, boisterously.