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Philiberta: A Novel

Chapter XLVIII. Little Teddy

Chapter XLVIII. Little Teddy.

Philiberta was up and out long before the breakfast-hour next morning. The night had been long and sleepless for her. Her mind had been distracted with a strange sense of unreality, her heart filled with vague throbbing pain and disappointment. She felt oddly helpless, and unable to control herself. Her thoughts wandered wildly from page to page of her past life, some experiences of which seemed written in letters of fire that glittered there and scorched her eyballs as she read them in the darkness. Looking back, every sadness of her life seemed sadder and heavier and crueller now than ever before. And there was no help, no remedy; nothing could be undone or altered or even forgotten. There was nothing to do but endure. With the light and the freshness and fragrance of morning came a sense of calm. The station sights and sounds came familiarly to her, bringing a restful home-like feeling. The sun and the breeze gave her strength. The world—the world of trees and flowers and birds under the bright blue dome of sky —was very lovely, after all.

Walking by the creek, she was startled by a thin sharp cooee from somewhere overhead.

'Who calls?' she asked, looking all about and seeing no one.

'Do you think you could get me down, please?' said a childish voice. And then Philiberta saw a hammock suspended high from the ground to a tree-limb overhanging the creek, and over the side of the hammock the head and shoulders of a child. 'Do you think you could get me down?'

'It is possible,' said Philiberta; 'but how did you get up?'

'Old Rob put me here. He puts me here every morning. But if you are going to get me down, be quick, please, else I shall never catch up to it.'— 'To what?'

'To my ship, I dropped it in the creek, and it's not half ready for a voyage yet. Be very careful, please. If you let me fall, I might get knocked crookeder than ever.'

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With some difficulty Philiberta lifted him to the ground, and he ran off with a limping gait along the bank of the creek. What a quaint crooked little figure it was! And what pitiful acquaintance with suffering the small grave face betrayed! What an ancient queer little smile that was over the recovery of the truant toy, a tiny, half-rigged ship, carved out of a bit of myall!

'You can put me back in my hammock now, if you won't mind the trouble, and if I am not too heavy.'

'I think I can manage it,' laughed Philiberta, swinging the light weight up easily.

'It was lucky for me you came along just then,' said the child. 'It took me a week to make this ship as far as I've got. I should have felt awful sorry to lose it. And I might have sat up here squealing till crack o' doom before anyone at the house would have heard me. Who are you, please?'

'My name is Tempest. I am come to live at Yoanderruk.'

'Are you? I'm awful glad o' that. I like the look of you very much,' said the child, eyeing her with a critical approving gravity that made her laugh again.

'Are not you afraid of being so high up there?'

'Oh no. I like to be high. I shall never grow high, Rob says, because of my crookedness, so I will be high in the only way I can. Did you come home with my papa, last night?'

'Yes.'

'Do you like my papa?'—'Yes. Do you?'

'Pretty well. But he always pities me, and calls me poor little Teddy, and that's hateful. Papa doesn't understand me, Rob says.'

'Who is Rob?'

'Haven't you seen him yet? Rob's my friend, my mate.'

'A boy?'

'Oh dear no. There he comes now, and Colin too, my other mate.'

An old man and an old dog, who had been comrades together so long that they had gotten a look of each other. If you met them separately, and at long intervals, each would remind you page 313of the other. The two had been established at Yoanderruk ever since Edgar Paget had first settled there, and had originally had charge of multitudinous sheep, but of late years the title of Shepherd Rob had been one of courtesy, for all the shepherding he and his dog had done was of his master's crippled little son, between whom and them an attachment, little short of idolatry on one side, existed and increased as the years increased.

'I don't know how it is that you are always out of the way when I want you, Rob,' said the child, as soon as the old man was close under the hammock.

Rob was rather deaf, as indeed was Colin also, but neither would have owned to it for anything you could mention.

'What says the laddie?' said Rob; and Colin arched his neck and pricked his ears in similar inquiry.

'The Ocean Monarch has had a narrow escape,' said the child. 'She fell in the creek, and was like to have been totally wrecked.'

'Ech, sirs, but that would ha' been an awfu' calamity,' quoth Rob, turning his serious old eyes up in horror.

Colin, labouring under a misapprehension, made at Philiberta in a way that would have been terrifying in his youth, but was only amusing now.

'Call off that dog, Rob,' cried the child imperatively. 'Here is a gentleman who saved my boat, who lifted me in and out of my hammock, as well as you could yourself, and here you are setting that savage animal on to worry him into shreds.'

Philiberta laughed aloud at the farce of Colin's being held back by main force from slaughtering her.

'Ye awfu' deevil!' cried Rob, dragging him by the tail. 'It's plain tae be seen 'at we'll hae ta muzzle ye, ye're gettin' that dangerous.'

'Ye had better take him into the house now, and give him some milk and get some whisky for yourself. You are both fearfully out of breath,' said the boy, still as grave as an owl.

'This gentleman,' indicating Philiberta, 'will look after me.'

'Ou, aye,' said the old man, 'it's jist like ye tae be sae ready at gie'n up an auld friend for a new ane.'

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'Now, Rob, that's foolish. When did I ever give you up for anybody? Or Colin either? Mightn't I have had a brand-new dog brought up from Melbourne—pa offered to bring him —and didn't I refuse because I wouldn't vex Colin? And that day, when I might have gone to Tarragut, didn't I say no because I had promised to let you carry me up the creek to see that satin bird's bower? Come now!'

'Aweel, aweel, laddie, I'm no grum'lin', am I?'

'Yes, you are. You're always at it. I never have an hour's comfort with you lately.'

Old Rob, standing well under the hammock, winked slowly and solemnly at Philiberta, and then proceeded seriously to the house, Colin following; both walking with a stiffness of gait that spoke of years and rheumatism, and established still more positively the likeness between them.

'You must not think,' said the boy, when they were out of earshot, 'that Rob is a bad one because he's such a temper. He's awful good. I love him better than anyone else in the world, and Colin next.'

From the moment she had seen and heard the old man, Philiberta had known how to account for the quaint turn of speech and Scottish accent of the child.

'Rob understands me,' continued the boy. 'When I have bad days—pain in my back, you know—Rob knows without my speaking about it, and looks after me, and doesn't pity me with "poor little Teddys," and doesn't even talk unless I want him to. Have you seen my mamma?'

'Yes; you love her, don't you?'

'No, I am afraid of her. I never know whether she is going to kiss me or lick me. She's very irritable, so irritable that she licks me for nothing. But I've always Rob to go to after it, so it doesn't matter. It was Rob got me my lyre bird's tail, and my emu, and my native companion. Only the native companion bit all the skin off my nose, and then Rob killed him and stuffed him, and he roosts always in my room now—dead, you know. I say, do you know whether my papa brought any glass eyes home with him?'

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'Glass eyes! I don't know at all What do you want glass eyes for?'

'For the native companion. He does look so absurd, standing there with nothing but holes to look out of. But it is only tit for tat, Rob says, because when he took the skin off ray nose it was only his bad aim that made him miss my eyes. It is awkward enough to be crooked; it would be worse to be blind, I think.'

'Yes, indeed,' said Philiberta.

'My bob-tailed calf has only one eye,' said the boy.

'How is that?' inquired Philiberta.

He was born so. Most of my animals are queer about the eyes. There's Colin has a white spot in one of his; didn't you notice? But that bob-tailed calf is a perfect cure. Bob gave it to me the very day it was born. Janet said it wouldn't live, but it did, though it used to tumble down the dry waterhole over there every day regularly.'

'And how did you get it out again?' said Philiberta, becoming interested in the bob-tailed calf with one eye.

'Oh, Rob and Jack used to lower it up with a rope round its belly. Once it let out a kick at Jack, and oh, you should have heard him grunt and swear.' Here a quiet laugh at the recollection. 'But by-and-by it stopped tumbling into the hole, and then it grew into a cow and had a calf of its own, and it gives half a bucket of milk now. Not bad for a bob-tailed thing with one eye, is it?'

'Not bad at all,' said Philiberta.

'I say, lift me down, please, and I'll show you all my things.'

She obeyed and followed him to the back of the house, where the week's washing hung already on the clothes line, and the calf of the bob-tailed cow with one eye was pensively chewing the sleeves of someone's shirt to a pleasant pulp, and a yellow-crested white cockatoo was talking softly in his own language as he swiftly steered his way from one clothes post to another, carefully removing the pegs as he went.

'There'll be an awful stir when Janet comes out and sees that,' said Teddy, pointing to the heap of linen on the dust page 316ground, and driving the calf away from the shirt. 'Come round here and see my emu.'

The emu was busy with a saucepan full of boiling-hot potatoes, one of which would have been enough to send any ordinary bird to an early grave, but which this one gobbled wholesale with perfect impunity and hearty relish. Philiberta then was introduced to the eyeless native companion, which looked very handsome in its stately attitude and lavender plumage, despite its defective optics. Then there were sundry kittens and a squirrel and a magpie to be interviewed; and finally they came to the kitchen, where old Rob was drinking whisky.

'Don't take too much of that before afternoon, Rob,' said Teddy, gravely, as one giving good counsel.

'Did ye ever ken me male a swine o' mysel' by exceeding the regulation quantity?' said Rob.

'And what do you reckon the regulation quantity, then, Rob?' questioned Philiberta, with a smile.

'Weel, it differs, ye ken. I've kent a mon wha couldna carry mair nor a decent two tum'lers. As for me, I've kent mysel' gang steadily afore the wind under a cargo o' sixteen stiff nobblers, feelin' like Dominie Sampson, "mightily elevated, and fearing no evil that might befall unto me." The regulation quantity is jist as muckle as a mon can carry wi'oot makin' a mere swine o' himsel'.'

Just then Janet entered.

'You've had no breakfast, sir?' she said.

'Not yet,' replied Philiberta.

'Then ye'd better make haste within, for they're all at it now.'