Читать книгу The Youngest Sister: A Tale of Manitoba - Bessie Marchant - Страница 7

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It was a week later, and the first snow had fallen, just a thin white coating on the hills and the plains, while the wind moaned with a new mournfulness through the forests of pine and of hemlock, stirring the fluttering pennons of black moss, as in the days when Evangeline’s people, the simple Acadian peasantry, tilled the land and lived upon the products of their industry. But the face of the countryside was changed since the driving forth of the village lovers to the long exile of separation and suffering. Where had stood the forest primeval, the ground was covered with fat orchards, with fruitful fields, and with bustling townships, which had “Progress” for their watchword.

Bertha had lived through the week in a kind of dream. Anne and Hilda discussed the various schemes they were making for her benefit, but at present she was too dazed to take much interest in them herself. It did not seem to matter in the least what became of her, and she found herself wishing sometimes that when she was ill she had been a little more ill, just enough to have carried her through the dark portal, and settled the question of her future once and for all. Of course this was very wrong. It was also very unnatural. But then Bertha at this time was scarcely normal, and so was to be forgiven and pitied, instead of being held up to censure or severe criticism.

Then at the end of the week the mail came in, bringing with it a letter which effectually settled the question of Bertha’s destiny, and that without any chance of appeal. The letter was from Cousin Grace, now Mrs. Ellis, who had been so good to the girls when their own mother died.

“So Anne is going to be married, and is to live in Australia. What a piece of luck for me! Now, girls, what you had better do is to break up your home, let Hilda take a teaching post in a school, where she will have a regular salary to fall back upon, and then I can have Bertha. Oh, you can’t think what it will mean to me to have someone that I can depend upon in the home! Life is really a terror sometimes with so many babies to look after, to clothe and feed, and only my one pair of hands to do it all.”

Anne read so much of the letter aloud, and then she stopped short, with a quiver of breakdown in her voice.

“Why, what a charming idea!” cried Hilda, looking up from a great heap of theory exercises through which she had been laboriously wading. “I wonder that it never occurred to either of us to ask Grace to take Bertha. Why, the arrangement will be perfectly ideal!”

Bertha, who was kneading a batch of bread at the table at the far end of the room, jerked up her head with a quick motion of protest, but before she could utter the words which rose to her lips, Anne, who was sitting back to her, began to speak—

“If I had asked Grace to take Bertha, I do not think that I should have felt so sure that it was the right thing to do. But seeing that the settlement of her future has been, as it were, taken right out of my hands and all arranged for me, I am sure that it must be right. With Grace, Bertha will be as safe as if she were with you or me, and she will be as kindly cared for. Oh, I am too thankful for words!”

“Poor old Anne!” muttered Hilda, and then, sweeping the pile of exercises on one side, she jumped up, and flinging her arms about Anne, she gave her a sounding kiss.

Bertha clenched her fists hard and punched the bread with quite unnecessary vigour, while she winked and winked to keep back the tears she was too proud to shed.

Oh, it hurt her! No one could even guess how it hurt her to think that her sisters had so much trouble to dispose of her. She knew that Hilda had asked Mrs. Sudeley to have her as a sort of mother’s help, but because she was not musical Mrs. Sudeley would have nothing to do with her. Bertha knew that she might have been musical if only she had tried hard enough. It was never any trouble to her to learn anything, but she had never worked at scales and exercises as Hilda had; indeed, she had never worked at anything, and now this was the price she had to pay, that when a home was needed for her no one wanted to be burdened with her.

Mrs. Sudeley’s refusal to have her had been a bitter mortification, although she had said no word about it. Once, nearly a year ago, she had paid a visit to the Sudeley homestead, and had been charmed with all the comfort, and even luxury, which the house contained. It was in most romantic country, too, and Bertha, who was always most strongly influenced by her surroundings, had been filled ever since with the longing to go there again. So it had not made her disappointment easier to bear to know that it was entirely her own fault that she could not teach elementary music and look after the piano practice of the elder children.

And now she would have to go thousands of miles away, right out on to the prairie, away from the sea, away from the forests, into a house crowded with little children, whose mother was overdone with work, and wanted someone to help her drudge through the monotonous, unlovely days!

“Bertha, Bertha, do you hear? Cousin Grace wants you to go and live with her. Do you think that you will like it?” called Anne, holding out her hand with the letter in it.

“It is very kind of Grace, but won’t it be a very expensive journey?” asked Bertha dubiously. She could not say outright that she simply hated the thought of going to Grace, and that if she had to be left with strangers she would much rather they were real strangers. Her memories of Grace were not very vivid, and Mr. Ellis she had only seen twice, and it was dreadful to think of being pitch-forked into a household and in a manner forced to remain there whether she liked it or not.

“Of course it will be an expensive journey,” replied Anne; “but, my dear, think of the comfort of it! Why, I shall be able to take my happiness now with a clear conscience, which so far I have not been able to do. Oh, Bertha, you do not know how bad I have felt about it!” and, to the surprise and dismay of both the girls, Anne, the brisk, brave, and capable, put her head down upon her hands and burst into a passion of tears.

In a moment Bertha had crossed the floor, and was sliding a pair of hands well caked with dough round her sister’s neck.

“Anne, dear Anne, don’t cry like this. Of course it is most awfully good of Cousin Grace to want me, and I expect that we shall get on most beautifully together,” said Bertha, making up her mind that in any case Anne would not be told about it, however unhappy she might be.

“Poor old Anne! you have been overdoing it lately,” put in Hilda, in a tone of pitying common sense, and it restored Anne to composure quicker than anything else could have done.

Somehow Hilda never could bear anything that even verged on emotional display, and Anne was careful not to upset her in this direction. Bertha was quite different; indeed she was a regular bundle of nerves and emotions, with a strong dash of sentimentality thrown in. And when later in that same day Hilda told her that once before Mr. Mortimer had written from Adelaide, asking Anne to marry him, and she had refused because of the two younger girls, for whom she must make a home, that little bit of confidence, joined to the sight of Anne’s breakdown, settled the future for Bertha without any hope of appeal. If her lot in the Ellis household were to be ever so hard or uncongenial, Anne must never know of it. There was something of the spirit of the martyr about Bertha, and she set herself to endure this hard thing which had come into her life with a Spartan disregard for pain.

But oh, the relentless heartache of those next few weeks! There were things in after-life which she could never see nor touch without it coming back to her in waves of pain and homesickness.

There was another letter from Grace, directly she heard of Hilda’s good fortune, and in this second epistle she gave all the necessary directions for Bertha’s journey westward, and with great generosity even enclosed the money to pay for her ticket through to the nearest railway station, which was thirty miles from the farm.

But she wanted Bertha to go at once, before the snow became so very deep. Sometimes in winter even sledges could not get through to the railway for weeks at the stretch, and it would be so very trying if Bertha were to be held up en route in this fashion. Moreover, if the home were to be broken up, there seemed to be no sense in delaying the upheaval.

“That is just what I think!” exclaimed Hilda, when she read the letter. “And if Bertha starts before I do, I can take her to Halifax and put her on the cars myself, then she will be all right until she gets to Winnipeg. I wish that Mr. Ellis could have met her there, but I suppose that is too much to expect. But anyhow, it will be a great relief to be able to start her on the journey myself.”

“Oh, I could manage somehow; I am not a baby, you see,” said Bertha, with a nervous laugh. As a matter of fact, she dreaded the journey horribly, but she was not going to upset Anne’s peace of mind if she could help it.

“It will be better for Bertha to go before the sale of the furniture. Let me see, that is next Wednesday; then Bertha had better go on Tuesday,” said Anne, who was up to her eyes in work of all sorts, arranging for the break-up of the only home they had ever known, making plans for her wedding, which was to take place almost directly; for Mr. Mortimer, having waited so long, was not disposed to wait any longer.

“But that will mean that I shall have to go before you are married,” said Bertha, with a note of protest in her tone.

“It cannot be helped, dear, and, after all, you will be spared a little more sadness,” Anne replied gently. “Weddings are harrowing things at the best of times, and mine must be sadder than ordinary, since it means so much parting for us all.”

Bertha turned away. Of course it was best that she should go away before Anne was married. But it was just horrible, like everything else. And because no one wanted her in the house just then, she thrust her arms into her coat, and, dragging her hat on, she set out through the snow to that part of the shore where the road from Paston came out on to the rocks.

She had only been there once since that day when she swam out to the rescue of the man, who had gone away without saying thank you, or even claiming the coat which was his. The thought of the coat came into her head now as she plunged along the snowy road, where the drifts were not yet packed hard enough to make walking a very pleasant exercise.

Of choice, she would have sent, or taken, the coat along to old Jan Saunders, and had no more responsibility in the matter. But she knew that it would not do to trust Mrs. Saunders even with the coat, and, of course, there was the morocco case with those grubby-looking pebbles which might be diamonds, or might be only the commonest stones of the roadside for aught she knew.

Oh no, it would never do to let Mrs. Saunders know anything about that case. Indeed, Bertha did not feel inclined to trust her in the matter of the coat either, so she had decided that the best thing that she could do would be to give the old people her address, and then they could write to her if the man wrote to them, or even came to interview them on the subject of his missing property.

A moaning wind swept round the headland, and Bertha shivered, for it was as if the wind were voicing her lament at leaving the sea and the rocks and the trees, with all the other beautiful things to which she had been accustomed all her life.

“Oh, I cannot bear it, I cannot!” she muttered between her set teeth; yet she knew all the time that she would have to bear it, and many a hard thing besides, since to bear and to endure is the lot of the human family.

“But I will come back some day. I will not stay all my life buried away on the prairie,” she said, as she turned from the sea towards the little house where old Jan Saunders lived.

It was the woman who opened the door to her to-day, and the old creature said that Jan was ill in bed, and that he had just fallen into a quiet sleep—the first rest that he had had for two days and nights.

“Then, of course, you must not disturb him on my account,” said Bertha, although she would much rather have done her errand to the old man, who at least meant to be honest.

“It would be a sin and a shame to disturb him, missie,” said the old woman. “But if you will tell me what it is that you wanted to see him for, I can let him know when he wakes up.”

“I am going away from Mestlebury, and my home now will be a long way off in the west, and so I thought that I had better bring you my new address, so that you might write to me if you hear anything of the man whose boat we pulled off the Shark’s Teeth. I must write to him as soon as I can, as I have something of his which I want to give back to him,” said Bertha, and then she produced a stamped and addressed envelope, which she gave to Mrs. Saunders.

“Something belonging to the gentleman? Now—why didn’t you say so when you was here before?” asked the old woman in a whining tone, as she shook her head disapprovingly.

“But it would have been no use if I had,” replied Bertha, with a laugh. “Don’t you remember that you told me you did not know who he was or where he had gone?”

“Still, I might have found out,” objected the old woman.

“Just so. And it is because I want you to find out now that I have told you this. Of course, I cannot make any promises for another person, but I should not be at all surprised if the man were to give you some small reward, if you could put me in communication with him,” said Bertha, hoping to raise the old woman’s curiosity, and to stimulate her endeavours by this suggestion of profit to be gained.

But again there was a look of something like dread on the face of Mrs. Saunders, and although she promised to do what she could towards the furthering of Bertha’s wishes, there did not appear much prospect of ultimate success in that direction.

Bertha was turning her steps homeward again, feeling that she had not achieved much beyond a little extra heartache by her outing, when, as she was passing the little store kept by the fat German, she heard her name called, and, looking round, she saw him beckoning to her to come nearer.

For a moment she hesitated, half-disposed to go on her way without heeding a summons of such a sort. But reflecting that his manners were, after all, made in Germany, and hence their limitations, she crossed over the patch of trodden snow to the door of the little store and asked the fat man, what it was that he wished to say to her.

“Ach, himmel, it is the bad manners of me to call you so, but it is the bad foot on me which will let me only stand and not walk,” said the German, pointing downward to a bandaged foot, whereupon Bertha promptly forgave him for the lack of courtesy that he had displayed.

“You have a bad foot? I am very sorry,” she said gravely.

“It has been bad, very bad, ever since the day when the stranger’s boat got stuck on the Shark’s Teeth,” explained the fat man, puffing and snorting and spreading his pudgy hands out as if his feelings were too much for him, and then, suddenly leaning forward, he asked, in a confidential whisper: “Has the old woman given you your share yet?”

“What do you mean?” asked Bertha, drawing herself up with an offended air.

“The man we saved left money with the old woman to be given to you. I heard him say so myself. He thought that you were poor, and he sent the money to you with his best thanks. Has she given it to you?” said the German anxiously.

Bertha drew herself up, looking more haughty than ever. “No, indeed; and I should not think of taking money for doing a thing like that!” she said indignantly.

The German laughed in a deprecating fashion as he said, in his deep, rumbling tones: “That may be all very well for you, but she has kept the money that was meant for me also, and this I do not approve.”