A Trick of Memory
POOR old Pucker had a good deal of stick on the return journey also, but
he was a horse that mostly needed considerable encouragement of this
kind. Moreover, Bertha was sick with anxiety on account of Grace, who
had never been left alone since the accident. She had not had time to
think about her before, the need had been too desperate, but now—well,
Pucker had to do his very best in the matter of speed, that was all,
while the empty wagon bounced and bumped, threatening to overturn at
least half a dozen times, yet never quite managing to do it.
What a relief it was when the house and barn came in sight! What a still
greater relief when she drove up to the gate of the paddock, to find
Dicky running to open it for her! And when she had driven through, and
the gate was shut again, she stopped the horse and reached down to help
the adventurous Dicky to climb up beside her.
“Have you taken good care of Mummy?” she asked, letting Pucker cross the
paddock at a walk, because she felt that she could not bear any more
bumping just then.
“Of coorse I has,” replied Dicky, with a great deal of swagger. “But I
just wish that I had been able to come and help you fight the fire,
Bertha. Wasn’t it fine?”
“No, it was not—it was horrible!” she exclaimed, with a shudder,
thinking of some of the moments when she was almost at the point of
despair before help came.
“I shouldn’t have been afraid, at least not much,” said the small boy,
with a sigh; and then he burst out: “I say, Bertha, a man has been here
since you went away.”
“What man?” asked Bertha sharply, thinking that if it were a stranger,
Grace must have been dreadfully upset.
“I don’t know, and I don’t like him either, though he gave me half a
dollar, and he gave Molly another,” said Dicky, frowning heavily. In his
estimation people who could bestow largess to that amount ought to be in
every way satisfactory, which made it disappointing when they were not.
Bertha drove up to the house with very active wonder stirring in her
mind, and, jumping down, she lifted Dicky out also, and then hurried
indoors to see how it fared with Grace. One look at the face on the
pillow was enough to show Bertha that the excitement of the afternoon
had been far too much for the invalid, and, letting everything else go,
she set herself to the task of making poor Grace quiet and composed once
more.
“Is the fire under?” asked Grace, who was wild-eyed with fear and
agitation.
“Yes, it is quite out; but Mr. Smith and Mr. Humphries are both there,
and one of them will stay until there is no more fear of it lighting up
again, though it looks as if it might rain, in which case there will not
be any danger at all,” said Bertha. And then she refused to talk, or to
let Grace talk, finally succeeding in getting the invalid off to sleep
for a short time. Not a word had Grace said of any person having been at
the house, and Bertha might have been inclined to think that Dicky had
dreamed it but for those two half-dollars, which he and Molly displayed
so proudly when she went out to them in the paddock after their mother
had dropped into a doze.
Having unhitched Pucker and turned the old animal loose to feed, she
went indoors to change her singed and dirty garments, and incidentally
to wash her face.
“Oh! oh! what an unutterable fright I look!” she gasped, staring at
herself in the glass, and reflecting ruefully that Mrs. Smith had not
looked bad at all; there had not been the shadow of a smudge across her
face, and her hair, although a little loosened by the wind and the hard
work, had been quite passably tidy.
But Bertha’s heavy masses of hair were hanging down her back, her face
was streaked and smudged with dust and blacks, her blouse was torn open
at the neck and slit up the arm where it had taken fire, and her skirt
was a ruin.
“It is my fate to look a most awful guy when I am forced to do anything
out of the common,” she muttered to herself, as she washed her face with
tremendous zeal and energy, and then, as she did her hair, she recalled
that time when she had been forced to swim out to the Shark’s Teeth at
Mestlebury in that dreadful garment with the patches of vivid green.
Suddenly she dropped her comb with a clatter, and stood before the glass
with her hands tightly clasped. She was recalling the face of the man
whose life she had saved. He reminded her of—of—of whom?
“Why, why, I do believe that the man with the Smiths to-day was the very
same individual!” she gasped. “But surely, surely the coincidence is too
ridiculous!” and she laughed nervously as she stooped to pick up the
comb; then she twisted up her hair in a great hurry, clothed herself in
tidy garments, and went out to get supper.
There was little room in her busy days for dreaming now, and to-night
she seemed more driven than ever. Grace was decidedly unwell from the
strain and excitement of the afternoon, while the children were tired,
hungry, and, truth to tell, rather cross; for the day had been fiercely
hot, and they had been running about since early morning.
For a time her one pair of hands were more than full, but when the
little ones had been fed, washed, and put to bed, there was a brief
half-hour of respite in which she could sit still and think. And the
more she thought the more sure she was that the man with the Smiths
to-day and the individual whom she had saved from the Shark’s Teeth
rocks were one and the same person. To-morrow she would go over to Mrs.
Smith and ask for the name of the unknown. Then she would write to him
and tell him that she was the girl who had saved him, and she would
remind him that she had his coat still, if he wished to claim it again.
Would she write to him?
She was remembering what the fat German had told her about the man
having left money to be given to her, which old Mrs. Saunders had
appropriated. Well, what of that? Surely she could tell him that she had
never had the money, and did not want it. But it would be a horribly
difficult task. If she told him that she had never had a reward for what
she had done, it would seem, it must seem, as if she were asking for
something, and all her pride was up in arms at the mere suggestion. But
there were the diamonds! If she kept them and said nothing at all, how
much better would she be than a thief?
Then again came the old question, why had the man never made exhaustive
enquiries for his valuables, which he surely must have missed long ago?
If he had come by them honestly, he of course must have made a fuss, and
that he had made no move at all made it look very much as if he did not
dare to make a stir. Oh, it was altogether a most worrying business! If
it had not been for the valuables in her possession, she would not have
minded so much. Indeed, she would not have minded at all. But these, of
course, made all the difference.
Tom was late in getting back with the reaper and binder which he had
gone to fetch, and Bertha knew that Grace was uneasy about him. She was
just going indoors to see what could be done by way of cheering the
invalid up, when she heard the clank of machinery in the distance, and
guessed that he was coming along the trail. Calling to Grace that she
was going to open the paddock gate, she set off across the sun-dried
pasture at a run, and had the gate open before the horses reached the
place. But instead of driving on to the house and leaving her to come
slowly after him, Tom jumped off the machinery and came up to her,
seizing her hand and nearly wringing it off.
“Bertha, you are a brick, a downright brick!” he said, and his voice was
so unsteady, that to her alarm she saw he was on the verge of breakdown.
“It is of no use to call me nice things,” she said, and her voice was
more harsh than she knew. “I am afraid that I should have been too much
of a coward to have stirred half a dozen steps to fight that fire alone.
It was Grace who spurred me on to do it, so the credit does not belong
to me.”
“The town thinks differently, I can tell you,” said Tom heartily. “And,
my word, you were plucky! Smith said that your clothes were burning on
you when they drove up.”
“Yes, they were, and the pathetic part of it was that I had come to the
end of my water, so what would have happened to me if they had not come
along just then, I cannot imagine. I rolled frantically, but the ground
was so hot that I could not quench the fire,” said Bertha, with a
nervous laugh that was very near to being a sob.
“Were you badly hurt?” asked Tom, with an air of concern, realizing what
a grave risk she had run to save his wheat and that of his neighbours
from destruction.
“I was not hurt at all; that is the incredible part of it,” said Bertha.
“But I think that what saved me was the fact that I had torn the sleeve
of my blouse badly in swarming up and down to get the water from the
wagon, so when my sleeve caught fire it did not touch my arm. Does
anyone know what started the blaze?”
“Smith said that he found a piece of a glass bottle lying to windward of
the burned patch, so doubtless it was the focusing of the sun’s rays on
the glass which set the corn on fire. It might have been a very serious
matter for me, and would have about spelled ruin, I am afraid,” Tom
replied gravely.
Bertha nodded in complete understanding, and then she offered to unhitch
the horses for him while he went in to talk to Grace.
But this he would not hear of, declaring that she must be far more tired
than he was, which was most likely true. So leaving her to hold the
horses for a minute, while he went in to assure his wife that he had
reached home safe and sound, he came out again and unharnessed, while
Bertha put his supper ready and did those other things which were
necessary. Then she went away to her bed, leaving husband and wife
together. Bedtime was one of the hardest parts of her hard days just
now, for that was when regrets rose up and assailed her, and she had
neither the strength nor the philosophy to keep them at bay. And
to-night the struggle bade fair to be harder than common, for in her
hurried dressing, when she came back from fighting the fire, she had
come across the package containing the story which she had been writing
on the evening when Grace had her bad fall.
To be shut back from the life she loved and longed for, and forced into
a round of drudgery which led to nothing, was surely the hardest
discipline that any girl ever had to face. But there was no help for it.
She knew very well that no one could have taken her place in the little
house at Duck Flats and filled it as she was filling it now. There was
nothing heroic in Bertha’s nature, or at least she thought that there
was not, so she got no satisfaction from the fact of her self-sacrifice,
and indeed did not consider it in the light of self-sacrifice at all; it
was merely that she had to do the work, that there was no way out of it,
and no one else to do it.
Poor girl! Her mood was very bitter to-night. She was too ignorant to
know that she could not write words that would live until she had been
taught by that hardest of taskmasters—experience. Her idea of life
hitherto had been to dream the precious days away, to spend hours in
analysing her own moods, and then to write feeble verse upon the
results. Then Grace, knowing the commercial valuelessness of that sort
of poetry, had directed her attention to stories, but these could have
been in the end no better than the poetry, seeing how deficient her
education had been and how narrow her outlook was.
But it was hard, so very hard, to grub when one wanted to soar. And it
was small wonder that when she laid her head on her pillow that night,
Bertha yielded to the weakness of tears and cried herself to sleep,
which perhaps had a beneficial effect upon her by relieving the strain
of her nerves and making her rest more profound.
She was in a whirl of domestic work the next morning, washing up dishes
on the veranda, where she did every bit of the housework that it was
possible to carry out-of-doors, when Tom came along and, seizing the
dish-towel, started to wipe a great pile of plates and basins while he
talked, which is a little way they have of economizing in time on the
prairies, where time is of more value than money, especially in harvest.
“Did you know that Uncle Joe came here yesterday?” he asked, his voice a
little lower than usual, as if he did not want what he said to reach the
ears of Grace, who had not yet been brought out of her bedroom.
“Do you mean the uncle that cast you off?” she asked, staring at him in
a dazed fashion, and then, suddenly remembering the children’s talk of
the man who had come and had given them half a dollar each, she said, “I
really thought that the children must have dreamed it, because Grace did
not say anything about it to me.”
“Grace is badly upset, poor girl, for I do not think that the old man
was any too kind in the things he said to her. She won’t tell me
everything, but she is quite transparent enough for me to be able to
read between the lines, as it were, and she forgets how well I know the
old man. But I guess that if I had come along yesterday and heard him
telling her that an invalid wife and a houseful of little children were
enough to take the spirit out of any man, that even his grey hairs would
not have saved him from the thrashing he so jolly well deserved,” said
Tom, in a wrathful tone, putting the basin he was wiping down with such
a bang that it was quite wonderful that it was not damaged by the
treatment.
“But I don’t understand.” Bertha looked at Tom in a puzzled fashion. “I
thought that you had quite lost sight of your uncle, that he did not
know where you lived or anything about you. So how did he know where to
find you out here?”
“That is the funny part of it.” Tom started on another basin as he
talked, and this one being rather badly cracked, he handled it in a
gingerly fashion. “It seems that the old man knows you, and it is
through that he found out where I lived.”
“Well, I haven’t the pleasure of his acquaintance, so it is a rather
one-sided sort of knowledge,” said Bertha, poking a pile of plates into
the dish pan and using the mop vigorously.
“Just so, but there are similar cases on record,” answered Tom. “For
instance, you and I know the German Emperor, the President of the United
States, not to speak of the King of England, yet none of these gentlemen
have the slightest knowledge of us. It is the penalty of greatness to be
known and not to know.”
“Don’t you think it would be quicker to tell me plain out what you mean,
instead of talking in riddles?” asked Bertha, with an air of
exasperation; then she said, with a little jump of amazement which made
the dishes rattle, “Was that old man who was taken ill in the train when
I was coming here your Uncle Joe? What an astonishing coincidence!”
“Just what I thought,” remarked Tom dryly. “But it is the sort of
coincidence that I could do without, seeing how the old fellow contrived
to upset Grace, who has enough to bear without stings of this sort being
added on to her load. It is rather curious, though, the old man was
always taunting me with wanting his money when I lived with him, and now
that he has lost it all, or nearly all, he takes the trouble to look me
up to see if I can help him.”
“But why did he not stay to see you, or at least wait until I came
back?” asked Bertha.
“I expect he thought there was not enough chance of getting what he
wanted,” said Tom, “though Grace said that he told her he might give us
a look in on his way back from Rotten Edge. He asked Grace if I could
lend him five hundred dollars for six months, but she told him that the
visit of the specialist had made us so poor that we should have our
hands full to keep out of debt until the wheat was sold.”
“Does Grace know how much that cost? Oh, I thought that you did not mean
to tell her!” cried Bertha, in a reproachful tone.
Tom shrugged his shoulders and wiped away energetically, then remarked,
“Grace always could turn me inside out. You see, I am no match for her
in point of cleverness, and when she wants to know a thing she mostly
gets her own way. I told her that it did not matter to her, and that if
it had cost twice as much, I would still have had the specialist.”
“What did she say to that?” asked Bertha, laughing a little; for well
she knew that Tom was quite right when he said that he was no match for
Grace, who always seemed to twist him round her little finger.
“Oh, she was very cross, and declared that she would have to make haste
and get better, if only to save me the expense of a funeral,” said Tom;
but he winced as he spoke, for Grace was everything to him, and the bare
mention of her dying was more than he could endure.
[Illustration: “SHE WAS MAKING NO HEADWAY”]