Chapter XX: An Impossible Favour

THE snow came down and hid the ruins of the ungathered harvest from sight. The nights were long, and on some days there seemed almost no daylight at all. It was so different from last winter, however, that Bertha was astonished at the lack of monotony in the days which, to an outsider, must have seemed so much alike. Nearly every day someone happened along, either in a sledge or on snow-shoes, and although these visitors never stayed long, it was something to see an outside face and to hear a different voice.

Just before Christmas another mysterious packing case arrived, and, like the previous one, it came in the night, but with this difference, that on the second time none of the lonely household was disturbed, or knew that anything out of the ordinary was happening. It was a bigger case than the last one had been, and there were toys for the children, which seemed to have been chosen by someone who had scanty knowledge of children and their ways. There was also a great store of good things for Christmas and the New Year, and because their neighbours had such a poor chance of anything approaching to a merry Christmas that year, Grace and Bertha put their heads together to see what they could do by way of sharing their good things with these less fortunate ones.

A Christmas party on quite a big scale was the first idea, but it had to be abandoned for several reasons. Nothing had been heard of Tom or of the expedition, and it would be impossible to get enough of a festive feeling to make a party enjoyable when, for all they knew to the contrary, the master of the house might be face to face with starvation, or suffering all sorts of hardships. Then, too, there was only one pair of hands to make all the necessary preparations, and, willing as Bertha was, Grace declared that she could not endure the thought of anything which would lay an extra burden on her shoulders.

“Why not make up a parcel of things for all the people we want to send to—I mean a parcel for each house?” said Bertha, waxing incoherent from sheer excitement. “Then I could hitch Pucker to the sledge and take them all round on Christmas Eve. I dare say Mrs. Smith would bring her children over and stay with you. If she did that, I could take Dicky and Molly with me, and the outing would be a festival to them.”

“That is a simply lovely scheme!” exclaimed Grace. “But it won’t do to put it off to Christmas Eve, for, if I know anything about prairie housekeeping, Mrs. Smith will be much too busy on that day to be willing to pay a visit of uncertain length here, and the more scanty the Christmas fare, the more careful the preparations will have to be in order to cover the gaps in the feast. We must make our arrangements for the day before that, and then if we tell Mrs. Smith that the happiness of the community depends entirely on her coming here to stay with me, I am pretty sure that she will come.”

“Then the day before Christmas Eve it shall be, and we shall just have to get to work at once to get everything arranged,” Bertha replied; then followed an eager discussion as to the things to be sent to this one and to that.

From the time the big case arrived until the day of the distribution, Bertha gave up her room as a storeplace for the things, and slept on the couch by the kitchen stove, while the children were packed as thickly as sardines in a tin in the beds in their mother’s room. But the festival feeling ran so high that week, that no one minded anything about such minor matters as overcrowding. The children lived in a continual whirl of paper and string, of carrying parcels from one room to the other, and of doing this and that towards helping forward the preparations for the great distribution, that Grace declared they would all be worn out with the dissipation.

At last the great day arrived—a fine morning, with a keen frost, and a temperature something below zero, but with a crisp quality in the air which made the youngsters positively hilarious, while Bertha darted to and fro, feeling that, in spite of very pronounced drawbacks, it was going to be a very nice Christmas indeed.

Mrs. Smith arrived in good time, a little anxious and concerned about the work which she ought to have done that day at home, but more resigned to the inevitable, because she had brought a great bundle of household mending with her, which she could get through while she talked to Grace. Her face changed, however, and a shower of tears seemed imminent, when she was told why she had been sent for, and was presented with her share of the contents of that wonderful packing case.

“There would have been no Christmas fare in our house this year,” she said, her face working pitifully. “We shall have to be in debt for necessaries later on, so we dare not have the least thing that we can by any means do without.”

“All the more reason why we should help each other,” said Grace softly, and then with infinite tact she managed to keep Mrs. Smith from dissolving into tears, which would doubtless have induced a similar shower from some of the small people; and this was no day for tears.

Dicky and Molly, wrapped up until they looked like a couple of Eskimos, were in a state of uproarious delight. They laughed, sang, and shouted at such a rate that old Pucker nearly did a bolt on the outward journey, which would have been disastrous, seeing how heavily the sledge was laden. The old horse had done so little work for weeks past, that the outing must have been quite a pleasure trip.

Bertha herself was in a jubilant mood, and this was increased, on arrival at the post office, by finding a letter of acceptance from a New York editor of one of the stories she had sent to him a couple of months before.

“Oh, it is good to be alive!” she exclaimed, as she tied Pucker fast to the post outside the door and went in to see how it fared with Eunice.

Mrs. Humphries was doing the post-office work at the present, for Eunice was too ill to rise from her bed, and the elation in the heart of Bertha turned to dismay at the sight of the suffering on the face of the sick woman.

“Don’t look like that, child,” whispered Eunice. “Your face was like a picture with happiness when you walked in at the door, and then it changed into dreary melancholy, all because I carry my woes of body writ large outside for anyone to read.”

“Oh, I had hoped to find you better, and now you look like this!” Bertha’s tone was shocked, for no one had told her of the change in Eunice, and she had not seen here for weeks.

“The doctor says that I shall get better if I try hard enough; but I suppose it is the indolence of my nature revolting against hard work, for it seems too much trouble to struggle on trying to get better. Death looks so easy and pleasant, just getting a little weaker every day and then dropping to sleep at the last, like a child that is too tired to play any longer,” said Eunice, and she looked so white and worn, that Bertha thought she was actually dying then.

But instead of words of grief, or even of resignation, a torrent of reproaches rose to the lips of Bertha, and were uttered through an irresistible impulse, cruel though they must have sounded at the time.

“Oh, you are selfish, most dreadfully selfish, to want to die and leave us all just when we need you so much! I have no friend outside my own people except you, and I cannot do without you!” she wailed. “And think how dreadful it will be for your brother when he comes home, to find no one to give him a welcome. Oh, it is not like you to think of yourself first and not to mind what becomes of other people!”

Great tears came into the eyes of Eunice and rolled unchecked down her face. “I don’t want to be selfish,” she said meekly, “but I am so tired, that I thought other people could get on without me somehow. And you could comfort my brother, Bertha, if you would, and make him the happiest man in the world.”

“No, I couldn’t, really, I couldn’t—oh, don’t speak of it!” cried Bertha distressfully, turning very red in the face.

“Are you sure?” asked Eunice, and there was such a world of wistful entreaty in the eyes of the sick woman, that Bertha turned her head away from a fear that she might be drawn into giving promises impossible to fulfil.

“I am quite, quite sure. Oh, please dear, do not ever speak of it to me again—it is too dreadful!” burst out Bertha, with tremendous emphasis.

“Is there anyone else?” persisted Eunice.

An indignant denial rose to the lips of Bertha and stopped there, for before her eyes rose the picture of a grey heaving sea, a rising tide, cruel black rocks, and a small boat so wedged that its occupant could not get it off the rocks. But she never could recall with any vividness the face of the man she had rescued, that is, she could not see it so clearly that she could be sure of knowing it again. At the time when the wheat fired, she had felt quite sure that the man who came along with the Smiths to help fight the fire had been the man whom she had helped, but many times since then she had told herself that there was no real certainty in her mind about the matter.

Of course, if she could have got hold of him afterwards, to have asked him if he had lost a coat and anything else, it would have been different. But Mrs. Smith, who did not know his name, had said that he was leaving the firm for whom he travelled on the next week, and one would want to be very sure indeed before making enquiries.

“Is there anyone else?” asked Eunice, and this time there was undisguised anxiety in her tone.

“Oh no, of course not—it is not possible!” exclaimed Bertha, coming out of her embarrassed reverie, and speaking in a great hurry, yet without any conviction whatever.

Eunice looked pained and disappointed, but said no more, and Bertha made haste to bring the uncomfortable interview to an end. It was certainly dreadful to have to disappoint a good friend such as Eunice had been to her, but not for forty friends could she consent to make that dreadful Mr. Long happy. Not that he had ever ventured to ask her; his plan of action had seemed to consist in paying her the most embarrassing sort of attentions, which rendered him the laughing-stock of the community, and made her simply furious with indignation. If he had asked her straight out to marry him, she would have been able to say, “No, thank you”, and so have ended the miserable business. But it had never entered into Mr. Long’s calculations to do anything so sensible, and so the discomfort for Bertha had gone on.

Somehow the flavour of the trip was spoiled for Bertha now. She was so terribly upset by the change in Eunice, and the fear that the poor thing would slip out of life. But she had to thrust the trouble into the background, and be as merry as she could for the sake of the good folk to whom she was playing an amateur Santa Claus.

It was quite late in the afternoon, the sledge was empty, and she had turned Pucker’s head in the direction of Duck Flats, when she encountered the doctor. She pulled up in a great hurry then to ask him if he had been over to see Grace.

“No, not to-day. Did you want me to see her?” he asked.

“Oh no, there was no need, only, I have been away since the morning, and I did not know if you might have been coming anywhere near us, and so had dropped in,” she answered.

“Duck Flats is not near to anywhere. It is the most out-of-the-way location that any man could ever have fixed upon for his home, I think,” rejoined the doctor testily. “I can’t think how ever you manage to endure life in such a place, Miss Bertha; but, upon my word, you seem to thrive on it, and so do the youngsters. Why, they grow like weeds!”

“I am used to the loneliness now. Of course it is awkward to be so far from civilization sometimes, but if one is very busy it does not matter much in an ordinary way,” said Bertha, and then she asked anxiously, “Is Miss Long very dangerously ill? I was frightened to see her looking so badly.”

“She is starved,” said the doctor grimly.

“Oh, you cannot mean it!” cried Bertha, in a tone of protest, while her face went very white.

“I do mean it, or I should not have said it,” said the doctor bluntly.

“But surely, surely that need not have been?” cried Bertha, who was dreadfully distressed. “We are all poor, of course, and dreadfully pushed for ready money, but so far as I know no one has had to go short of food yet. Besides, we understood that Eunice had money from the bank in Winnipeg, just the same as Mrs. Ellis does.”

“Of course she has had it, and that is where the maddening part of it comes in,” said the doctor crossly. “But instead of living on the money, as a sensible person would, and leaving her brother to make good the value of the postal orders which were destroyed on that black Sunday, the silly woman goes and simply starves herself to death in order that the loss may be made good the sooner.”

“Oh, what shall I do? I have been saying the most dreadful things to her to-day, but I did not know all this!” exclaimed Bertha. “Oh, she must have thought me cruel, cruel! I would go back now and tell her how sorry I am, only I should be so late home, and Mrs. Smith will not want to stay with Mrs. Ellis much longer.”

“And pray, what was it you said that needs so much repentance?” asked the doctor, a gleam of amusement showing on his face; for he had never found Bertha addicted to cutting speeches.

“She said that she did not want to get better, and I told her that it was miserably selfish of her to want to die when she was so useful, and everyone needed her friendship and advice so much. It was horrid of me, I know, but I felt as if I had to say it, and so out it came. Poor Eunice, she looked so startled and surprised; for I don’t suppose that anyone ever dreamed of calling her selfish before.”

The doctor burst into a shout of laughter. “Well done, Miss Bertha, I should not wonder if you have half-cured my patient for me, and if so you have earned my lasting gratitude. No one can even guess what a fight I have had for her life, and all because of this mistaken idea of self-sacrifice. Why, she had better have let the Government people send her to prison for embezzling moneys entrusted to her care; for at least she would have got enough to eat then, and this illness would have been averted.”

But Bertha was almost reduced to tears by the thought of how disagreeable she had been, and was not even comforted by the doctor’s congratulations on the drastic measures she had used to bring Eunice to a more reasonable frame of mind. The thought of the things she had said haunted her all the way home, making her silent and absorbed, instead of bright and merry from the pleasure of the gifts she had been out to bestow.

Grace believed that she was tired, and so refrained from asking her any questions. But after Mrs. Smith had gone home and the children had all been put to bed, Bertha plunged into the story of her trouble, and told Grace all that she had not been able to tell the doctor, of how Eunice had asked her to be kind to the brother so that the sister might die in peace. And then Grace did what the doctor had done, she laughed and laughed until Bertha began to feel afraid that she would do herself an injury.

“I can’t see anything very funny in it myself, but that is because I lack a sense of humour, perhaps,” Bertha remarked, almost disposed to feel affronted at having provoked so much mirth.

“Oh, my dear child, do forgive me!” cried Grace. “It is too bad to make fun of you. But the fancy picture of you attempting to console that dreadful Mr. Long for the loss of his sister was too much for me. Eunice must have been a little delirious, poor dear, or she would never have suggested such a thing.”

“Then you don’t think that it was wicked of me to refuse to make her happy, to let her die in peace?” said Bertha, drawing a long breath of relief, for it had been a real trial to her to refuse Eunice anything, and the pinched white face of the sick woman haunted her still.

“Why should you throw your life away at the whim of a sick woman who doubtless does not know what she wants?” said Grace, her voice unconsciously stern. “Do you know, I have been so afraid of asking rash things myself that one day, when I was fairly capable of knowing what I was about, I got Tom to draw up a sort of statement, in which I besought my friends to take no notice of silly favours which I might ask when body and mind were alike under the influence of sickness.”

“But you have never asked for impossibilities,” said Bertha.

“And I trust that I never shall. But I am thankful to hear you speak of it as an impossibility, Bertha; for I should never have forgiven myself, nor have been able to look Anne or Hilda in the face again, if that sort of settlement had been possible to you. Oh dear! oh dear! I think that poor Eunice must have been mad!” cried Grace.

“Well, it is settled once and for all, and there is no more need for you to think about it,” Bertha replied soothingly, and then, in spite of herself, she found her thoughts back again with that stranger who had sat so helplessly in his boat, while she swam out to his rescue, and she wondered anew whether he would ever cross her path again, then grew angry with herself because her thoughts would wander so persistently in that direction.