THREE COURSES, ONE SHILLING.
“Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday’s wounds which smarted and bled
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.”
Poppet 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 roly-poly, 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.
[Illustration: “POPPET FLUNG UP HER ARMS, AND WITH A WILD, PIERCING
SHRIEK FLEW ACROSS THE ROOM.”]
“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, and 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.