The Family at Misrule/Chapter 12

OPPET had been for lunch with Esther or Meg to the Fresh Food and Ice Company, Quong Tart's, and such places on various occasions. But the restaurant to which Malcolm and Martha took her was quite a new experience. She did not know the name of the street it was in, but it was not very far from the Quay, and there was a rather mixed, if interesting, assembly of diners. Not that it was a particularly low-class place; it had a very good name for the excellency of its food and its moderate prices, and its patrons comprised poor clerks who minded fashion less than a good dinner,—tradesmen, sailors, and occasional wharf labourers. Martha had asked Malcolm whether, as she had Poppet with her, they had better go to some place higher up town. Malcolm, who dined there regularly, seemed to see no reason why he should change his custom for a little slip of a girl under ten.

As for Poppet, it was all one with her where she went, and while Martha and Malcolm were studying the bill of fare, she fell to watching some sailors at an adjoining table with the deepest interest.

"Now, Miss Poppet," said Martha, "what will you have? Me and Malcolm have fixed on sucking pig, sweet potatoes and baked pumpkin, but I think you'd better have something plainer; there's roast mutton, or corned beef, or beefsteak pie."

"Why," said Poppet, "we have those things at home. No, I'll have sucking pig too, please, Martha; I like tasting new things."

"Did you ever!" remarked Martha, looking troubled; "it might make you ill, Miss Poppet dear. Have corned beef like a good little girl."

But Poppet could be firm on occasion. She did not dine at a restaurant every day, and when she did she had no intention of confining herself to ordinary things.

"Sucking pig for two," said Malcolm to the waiter, and paused for Poppet's order.

"For three," said Poppet, softly but firmly. While he had gone to execute the order, she occupied herself with considering what pudding she would have. There were five or six down on the list: plum duff, apple pie and custard, treacle rolypoly, stewed pears, and macaroni and cheese. She was wavering between macaroni and plum duff, when the waiter returned with the three great steaming plates of sucking pig and vegetables.

Malcolm and Martha were soon busily occupied, both considering it would be sheer wilful waste, after paying a shilling each, to leave an atom on their plates; but Poppet found a very little satisfying, and fell to watching the sailors again.

She heard them give their orders—five of them, each a different meat and different vegetables; she wondered how the waiter could keep it all in his head, and watched quite anxiously when he returned with the tray to see if he made any mistake.

Just behind the screen where they filled the trays somebody stood handing plate after plate to the one busy waiter. Presently, as the place filled more and more she heard him say he must have some one to help at once, a number of people were waiting.

A boy in a long white apron stepped out from the screen, a tray with three corned beefs, two sucking pigs, and a roast mutton in his hand.

"Miss Poppet, dear, do eat up your potato," said Martha, pausing with a knifeload midway between her plate and mouth. But Poppet's face was deadly pale, and in her eyes was a look of strange wildness.

"She's ill," said Martha; "I knew she oughtn't to have it." She looked at Malcolm in a helpless way for a second, and then pushed back her chair to go round to the child.

But Poppet flung up her arms, and with a wild, piercing shriek darted from her place and flew across the room.

There was a crash of crockery, one of those slow, piece-after-piece crashes, when you wonder if there can be anything left to be broken, angry words from the waiter and manager, confusion and laughter on the part of the diners, blankest amazement on the faces of Martha and Malcolm, and in the midst a small girl in a white frock and big hat clinging frantically to "a tallish little boy with brown eyes and dark, rough hair,"—a shabby, white-faced boy in a waiter's apron.

"Oh-h-h-h!" she sobbed, "oh-h-h! oh-h-h-h! Bunty!" She laughed and sobbed and laughed again.

This extraordinary scene went on for two or three minutes; then the manager recovered his wits and began to storm, and Martha, still wearing an expression of stupefaction, made her way to the group.

Malcolm, after an expressive shoulder shrug, returned to his sucking pig, which he was enjoying immensely.

"There's nothing them kids could do as 'ud surprise me," he said, as he took a fresh supply of mustard and settled down again.

He had known the family for seven years, so the remark was not unjustifiable. Martha had withdrawn to a back room with the manager. She explained that his young waiter was the son of a gentleman; she gave him Captain Woolcot's address that he might be reimbursed for the breakages.

"But 'owever he got 'ere, so help me, I can't imagine," she said. "Why, he's in America." She put out her hand to touch the lad and feel if he were real flesh and blood, the evidence of her senses could not be accredited. "It's really you, is it?" she said slowly.

But Bunty did not answer; he seemed half stupefied, and was standing perfectly still, while Poppet sobbed and asked questions and clung to him.

Such a tall, gaunt boy he had grown. His face was thin and sharp, there was a look of silent suffering in his eyes and round his lips, his clothes hung loosely on him, and were threadbare to the last degree.

"Get your hat and come with us, Master John," she said, a touch of her old sharpness in her manner to him. "Don't take on so, Miss Poppet. Hush! every one is looking at you; be quiet now, an we'll go to the Gardens, or somewhere where we can talk, and then we'll go home."

"I can't go home," Bunty said faintly.

He wondered if those five terrible months behind him were a dream; or if little trembling Poppet, who was holding him so tightly, was a vision his disordered imagination had called up.

"Oh, I can't go home, of course," he said, and pushed his thick hair back in a tired kind of way. "Hush, Poppet; go home with Martha like a good girl, and, on no account, say you've seen me. Promise me——"

He did not wait for an answer, however, but made fresh confusion by fainting dead away on the floor at Martha's feet.

The manager of the restaurant felt himself a very ill-used man that such things should happen at his busiest time; but he was not inhuman, and the boy's deathly face and the little girl's exceeding distress touched him. Besides, Malcolm was his most regular customer; it would be unwise to offend him. So he helped to lift the boy into an inner room, gave Martha brandy and water, and recommended burnt feathers.

"I'll go and send a tellygrum for the Captain," Malcolm said, picking up his hat. He too felt ill-used, for there were some choice morsels still on his plate, and there was no knowing when he would get his pudding.

But Poppet caught his coat sleeve.

"Not father, on any account," she said. "Esther, or Meg, or even Pip—but oh, not father!"

"No, you'd better not fetch the Captain," Martha said. "Oh no, he wouldn't do at all. Better telegraph for Miss Meg—she's got a head on her. The missus is ill with a headache, so it's no good fetching her—yes, send for Miss Meg."

It was between half-past one and two when all this happened; at five Bunty was half-sitting, half-lying on the old, springless sofa in the nursery. Poppet had squeezed herself on the half-inch of space he had left, and was gazing at him, a look of great content and unspeakable love on her little face; and Meg on the low rocking-chair beside them was holding a hand of each.

The others had been turned out. Bunty lay with his face to the wall and his lips shut in a dogged kind of way when they had all crowded round asking questions; and at last Meg, seeing he was totally unfit for any excitement or distress, persuaded them to leave him to Poppet and herself till he was stronger.

And when the room was quiet, and Meg rocking softly to and fro, and Poppet occasionally rubbing her smooth little cheek against his old coat, he told them everything of his own accord.

He had not been to America at all, he had never even heard of a boat called the Isabella; it must have been some other boy the police had heard of, and a chance resemblance that made them connect the two.

He had been in or near Sydney all the time, living he hardly knew how. The first month he had done odd jobs, fetched and carried for a grocer in Botany. Then he had managed to get a place on a rough farm in the Lane Cove district, where he was paid four shillings a week and given board and lodging—of a kind. But there had been a long spell of rainy weather and rough westerly winds, and he had been in wet things sometimes from morning to night.

"And it gave me fever—rheumatic—pretty badly," he said; "so they shipped me down to the hospital here in Sydney."

Poppet buried her nose in the sofa cushion, and Meg gave an exclamation of horror.

"And you didn't tell the people who you were, and send for us?" she said, wondering if this could be the same boy who, when he was small, required the sympathies of the house if he scratched his knees.

"How could I?" was Bunty's low reply, "when you didn't know about that!"

Meg held his hand closer.

"Didn't the people at the hospital ask who you were?" she said.

"I told them I hadn't any home, and my name was John Thomson," he answered. "Of course they thought I was nothing but a farm boy. Well, I was there a long time—about two months, I think; it seemed like years."

Meg's face was pale, and her eyes full of hot tears.

She pictured the poor lad lying in that hospital bed week after week, strange faces all around him, strange hands ministering to him,—weak, racked with pain, and yet with almost incredible strength of mind persevering in his determination not to let his family know anything.

"How could you help sending for us?" she said, in a low tone.

He moved his head a little restlessly.

"I knew you were all sick of me, and ashamed of me. I know I'm not like the rest of you, and I kept saying I'd get well and work hard and do something to make you respect me before I came back."

Respect him! In Poppet's eyes Nelson was less of a hero, Gordon had infinitely less claim to glory.

"Two or three times I nearly told the nurse," he continued, half-shamefacedly; "the pain was pretty bad, I couldn't go to sleep for it, and I thought I'd like Poppet to come,"—he gave her hand a rough squeeze,—"but then I used to stuff the blanket in my mouth and bite it, and it kept me from telling her. I used to have to shut my eyes so I shouldn't see her coming to my end of the ward; I used to get so frightened I'd say it without meaning to."

"And then," said Meg—the narration was almost too painful—"what did you do then—when you got better?"

The rest of the story he hurried over; it made him shudder a little to think of it all, now he was lying in this dear old room with two faces full of love close to him.

He had not been strong enough for any regular work after he came from the hospital. He had twelve shillings of his wages left, and this kept him for a fortnight, with the help of what he received for an odd job or two. The last week had been the worst of all. On Saturday he had elevenpence only left; he lived on it that day, Sunday, and Monday, sleeping in the Domain at night. On Tuesday he had in the course of his wanderings come to Malcolm's favourite restaurant, and lingered around it, trying to feed his poor hungry body with the appetising smells that issued from the door. At last he could bear it no longer; he went in and asked if they wanted a boy to wash up or wait, offering to do so in return for food and a bed at night. They had been very pushed for help, for one of the waiters had fallen ill, and they told him he could try it for a day or two. All Tuesday he worked hard there, washing up, peeling potatoes, running errands; the meals seemed more than ample repayment to him in his half-starved state.

On Wednesday the absent waiter had sent word to say he would be at his duties the following day. Just as Bunty was lading his tray to carry it round he dropped a couple of tumblers,—he had broken two or three things the previous day,—and the manager in annoyance told him he could stay the rest of the day but need not come back to-morrow. Sick at heart at the thought of the streets again, the poor boy had picked up his tray and gone out into the big room with it.

And the next minute there came that wild, glad shriek, and Poppet had flung herself upon him half mad with joy.

Just as the tale ended Nellie burst into the room. She went straight over to the sofa and fell down on her knees beside it.

"Oh, how can you ever forgive us, Bunty!" she said, tears brimming over in her eyes. "Oh, Bunty, I shall never forgive myself, never!"

Esther had followed, her face' shining with gladness. "Mr. Burnham is here," she said, "and——"

"Bunty never did it, 'twath Bully Hawkinth!" burst out Peter, pushing Nellie aside, and actually trying to kiss his injured brother in his excitement.

Bunty rose to his feet, pale, trembling.

"What is it, Esther?" he said. "Nellie—tell me!"

"Only it was young Hawkins after all who took the money," said Esther, in tones that trembled with gladness for the news, and grief for the poor boy's unmerited sufferings. "He broke his collar bone at football yesterday, and he thought at first he was going to die; he confessed it to his mother, and made her send word to school. Mr. Burnham has come straight here with the news, and says he can never forgive himself for all you have suffered over it."

"Oh, Bunty! how hateful we were not to believe you," said Nellie, wiping her eyes; "we don't deserve for you to speak to us."

But Bunty put his poor rough head down on the cushions again, and great hard sobs broke from him, sobs that he was bitterly ashamed of, but that he had absolutely no strength to restrain.

No one would ever know quite how wretched this thing had made him. However warm the welcome home had been, there would always have been that cloud.

The relief was almost too much for him in his weak state.

At night, when Meg was tucking Poppet up in bed, the little girl sat up suddenly.

"Meg, that is the most wonderfullest tree in the world," she said in a low, almost reverential tone.

Meg asked her to explain, and she told how she and Martha had walked backwards three times, around the "wishing-tree" in the Botanical Gardens.

Meg stooped down and kissed the dear little face; how she envied Poppet to-day! she was the only one who had had faith all the time.

"What did you wish?" she asked, though she knew without telling.

"That Bunty might be found this vewy day, and that they might find out about the money."

"But I think I know a little girl who has said that in her prayers every day for five months," whispered Meg. "Which do you think answered, God or the tree?"

The little girl was quiet for a minute, then she knelt up on her pillow and drooped her sweet, grave face with its closed eyelids over her two small hands.

When she cuddled down among the clothes again, she drew Meg's bright head down to her.

"I was thanking Him," she said.