With Love from Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #2) (19 page)

“Pretty good, I guess,” Dudley answered in a tight voice, and Gregor looked at the younger man with a question in his narrowed eyes.

He suspected this was not a casual visit. No one, in the dead of winter, had sufficient reason—outside of an emergency or sheer desperation in the face of loneliness—to trek somewhere through bad weather just to sit. It was done, but always with a purpose.

So they talked about feed, cows going dry, hens freezing. They talked about being isolated and snowbound; they talked about loneliness. They talked about the future.

“Yah,” Gregor confirmed, “dis iss da place for me. Lonely or not, I got me a goot place. Besides, I tink I yust luff Bliss. You?”

“Oh, Bliss is all right. But I dunno . . . it’s not the only place on earth, is it?”

Gregor’s light-colored eyebrows lifted. “Nah,” he agreed. “I guess dere’s udder places. You tinking about any special place?”

“Well, don’t you get, ah, lonely for that place of yours in the Peace River country? On the Parsnip, wasn’t it?”

“It’s yust timberland. Nah, I’m bedder off here.”

Silence.

Gregor gulped his coffee, and Dudley was glad Ma wasn’t around to hear it. The fire snapped and popped.

Silence.

A clock ticked clearly, and Dudley’s eyes were drawn to the sound.

On a shelf on the wall sat an incongruous item, made more so because of the cabin’s masculine look and smell and the massive size and prodigious strength of the man who owned it. It was a clock, no larger than six inches high and five inches wide. The case was made to resemble a basket and was cast in bronze. It had a handle of twisted brass, and from the open top of the basket two tiny brass kittens peeped out, one looking down at the clock dial, the other with a paw raised, batting at something unseen. Dudley was mesmerized. What was the story behind this girlish item?

Gregor watched his guest for the moment. Then, quietly, he explained.

“Dat belonged to my Marta. My vife. She iss buried in da old coundry and our liddle dodder vit her.”

Suddenly Dudley’s portrayal of being a landowner and adult vanished. Although past his nineteeth birthday, he was as gauche and dumbstruck as any ten-year-old.

“I didn’t know,” he mumbled, going fiery red. “I’m sorry.”

“I’s vy I’m here, I guess you’d say,” Gregor continued. “Dere was nodding for me over dere anymore. So I vent to da Peace country . . . too lonely. And den I come here, to Bliss. Here I like; here I gonna stay.”

After an uncomfortable silence on Dudley’s part, he finally spoke, trying to make his voice natural and probably failing, for Gregor’s sharp eyes studied the young man’s face, learning more than words alone implied. “Well, then, if you’re going to stay in Bliss, maybe you want to get rid of your property in the Peace country.” Casual, so casual.

“I tink aboud it, sometimes, yah.”

“Well, listen.”

And Gregor did so while Dudley proposed a most amazing offer.

“I own half interest in our place,” Dudley explained in a rush of words, as though they were pent up and ready to burst the dam that had held them back. “I want to get away . . . start new somewhere else. You own a place in the Peace country and don’t need it, maybe don’t want it. It’s just sitting there waiting to be tamed. Could we make some kind of trade? Maybe with a little cash thrown in, on your part, or some arrangement for payments because of my place being proved up and in pretty good shape? Whaddya say, Gregor? Eh? Eh?”

Dudley was pale now, his few remaining blemishes standing out like bare spots in a field of snow. His words, once started, tripped over themselves, and he studied the face of the older man with blazing, eager eyes.

What he had suggested was incredible. Or was it? Gregor, like all homesteaders, planned to farm more than his original quarter-section. But to obtain more land, unless he sold and moved, he would have acreage that was separated from his homestead, perhaps by a great distance, making it next to impossible to work both places. The Baldwin place was the fourth quarter in his own section.

Gregor drew a deep breath; there was one insurmountable problem. Or was there?

“Della—your mudder. Vat does she say? Haff you talked mit her aboud it?”

Dudley’s slender shoulders sagged. “No.”

“Vould she agree, do ya tink?”

“No. Never.”

“Vell den—”

“Listen, Gregor—”

A desperate Dudley laid out his case: He had to get away, start on his own, be his own man. Gregor nodded. “I own half the homestead,” Dudley explained. “I can sell it, or trade it. Or just let it sit idle!” And now Dudley’s voice was a tightly worded threat:
Just let it sit!

“It’s blackmail, I suppose, of a sort,” Dudley admitted. “Ma can’t work our place alone, and if I leave it sit, she’s sunk! She’ll have to agree, if I stick to my decision. She’ll be glad to agree—either to have someone work it on shares or buy it outright.”

“Vat if she don’t?”

“She doesn’t have to agree, Gregor. That’s my land, or half of everything is, and I can sell or trade it. She’ll have to go along with it. She won’t have any choice.”

“If I don’t do it, Dudley, vill you fin’ someone else?” Gregor asked quietly.

“Absolutely! I’m getting out of here!”

Perhaps Gregor thought compassionately of the widow with an uncaring, ruthless partner. Perhaps he saw the arrangement a true godsend. Perhaps, having prayed about additional land, he had a feeling this might be God’s answer.

“Tell you vat—I’ll tink aboud it some more. How’s dat?”

“You will? Honest?” Again the young man sounded like a child. Laying out his offer had been easier than he had anticipated. It was, after all the planning and explaining, too good to be true. Dudley found himself trembling, partly from relief, partly from anxiety that it wouldn’t work out after all.

“Gif me a liddle vile, yah? Ve’ll see vat ve can vork oud.” After that amazing demonstration of his grasp of the English language, Gregor subsided.

Dudley’s back straightened. His breath, as quickened as though he had been in a race or, more likely, a tough fight, returned to normal. His rapid heartbeat slowed.

“Gimme some of that coffee,” he said, holding out his cup.

D
r. Blake came out of the sickroom looking very grave. Very grave indeed. Charlotte and Kerry were awaiting him in the parlor, and it was there Gladdy led the dignified man of medicine. There with a sigh he seated himself, at Charlotte’s invitation.

With two faces turned toward him—one lined and pale and obviously greatly concerned; the other young and pale, and just as concerned—his usual brisk demeanor gentled, and with sympathy he said, “It’s not what you wish to hear, ladies. Not at all, I’m afraid.”

“I knew it!” the young woman muttered half aloud, her pale face clouding with the feelings that darkened it. Her fingers were threaded into a knot in her lap, and her lips, usually full and full of fun, were as twisted as her fingers, and the agony in each was clear to be seen.

“Yes,” Charlotte said sadly, “hoping for good news, I’ve been braced for bad. The evidence before our eyes is overwhelming. Nothing we do seems to help—not palatable food, which Mrs. Finch has worked so faithfully to provide, not loving encouragement, not even the mild scolds I’ve administered for her own good. Nothing has reached her; it’s as if she’s shut away in a cocoon of suffering and won’t, perhaps can’t, come out. We’ve tried humor, music, reading to her—though it was all pretty poor stuff, I’m afraid. We couldn’t reach past the barrier. The barrier,” she finished bitterly, “that cruelty erected.”

Kerry spoke up. “I don’t know if it was so much cruelty as carelessness. And that’s what puts me in a rage! That . . . that
man,
that
creature,
just so carelessly tossed her aside, as if she didn’t matter! I’ve heard of men who consider women nothing more than playthings! It’s as if he were playing with her. His careless unconcern for her feelings was the cruelest blow of all. Now it seems that blow was a deathblow! Something in her died; it’s as if she doesn’t want to have help . . . doesn’t care anymore.”

“That’s true; she isn’t cooperating in any way,” Dr. Blake confirmed. “She just lies there, silent, and growing weaker by the hour.”

“Those bright cheeks—they’re not a good sign, it seems to me,” Charlotte offered. “And though her face is pale otherwise, her eyes glitter. But it’s an unhealthy glitter.”

“Too bright of eye, too brilliant of cheek,” Dr. Blake agreed. “It’s not the bloom of health. You knew, of course—have known for years—that her lungs are involved. Her hopes, her excitement about a new life, infused her with an energy that was false. But this blow she suffered—it has swept away all pretense at normalcy. She’s sunk back, and ever further back, into what we call—”

“Pining sickness,” Kerry supplied abruptly.

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Blake said, startled.

In response, Kerry quoted a Scripture learned long ago and hidden in her heart ever since, a portion of the Bible that seemed to her to be sadly fitting now: “‘I have cut off like a weaver my life: he will cut me off with pining sickness.’”

“That’s Bible, Doctor,” Charlotte explained. “Kerry has this way of resorting to Scripture when greatly moved, or when nothing else will do—”

“Pining sickness?” the good doctor repeated. “I never heard it explained like that, but I believe she’s described it very well.”

“The question is,” Charlotte faltered, “can one die of pining sickness?”

“I never heard it diagnosed as the cause of death,” Dr. Blake said thoughtfully, “but pining . . . grieving . . . can take the heart out of recovery. But the really fatal thing, you must remember, is the disease that’s eating at her lungs. I know of no cure.” The doctor spoke heavily but honestly.

“Tell me, Doctor, could she have gotten well if she had gone West? Could that have worked a cure?” Kerry spoke tersely, as if much depended on the answer. “If so,” she continued, wrath building, “Connor Dougal—never will I forget that name!—is personally to blame for Franny’s illness, and I’ll hold him responsible if she dies!”

“We’ll never know, of course, whether carrying out her plans, going West, might have worked a cure. But certainly it could have lengthened her days. Contentment is a great healer.” The doctor’s voice trailed away. It was supposition, pure supposition, and he was, after all, a man of science.

“And her recovery now depends on her incentive to live and get well,” he added finally. “The human will is a marvelous thing, a powerful thing, more so than we understand. Someday we’ll be better trained to handle these body/mind illnesses. Until that day, we do the best we can. And the best we can do now is to make Frances comfortable, care for her tenderly, and be prepared for the . . . inevitable.”

The inevitable. It had an ominous, a final sound. Kerry could not settle for it.

Back to the sickroom Kerry went to do what she could, though half sick herself with the despair that ate at her heart. Having little or no memory of her mother and many unpleasant memories of her father, Kerry deemed Frances the dearest
person in the world to her, and now she was pining away before Kerry’s eyes.

As Kerry sat by the sleeping invalid, waiting for—she knew not what, memories thronged her mind, memories that took her back to the day of her introduction to Maxwell Manor and Frances Bentley.

Even in those days Franny had not been well. But she had rallied and strengthened, and ten years had passed during which she enjoyed fairly good health. Recalling those early days and her own precocious ways, Kerry smiled—sitting there by the sickbed—thinking of her own childish ignorance, shyness, and boldness. Her boldness, then as perhaps now, was ever a means of covering up the shyness.

There was no other way she could account for the courage that had prompted the first rush of verses as she met the Maxwell household, and Franny in particular. A classic example was her effort to describe her immediate fascination with Franny, calling forth soulful descriptions such as, “Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes.”

From her sickbed Franny had squeezed Kerry’s hand and laughed her delicious little laugh, captivated by this refreshing child. Never had the small Kerry had such an appreciative audience.

Kerry remembered now that she had followed up that particular quotation with a question, asking, “Why did she ravish him with
one
eye? What do you suppose was wrong with the other eye? Once I had a pink eye, and I could hardly keep it open. Do you think the bride had a pink eye? Whatever it was, the bridegroom loved her anyway. Do you know he thought her hair was like a flock of goats? I’m sure he meant something nice, don’t you? Maybe he just didn’t have a good ’magination.”

“Well, little one,” Franny had said through a mist of tears, “you have enough ’magination for all of us.”

“I ’magined sometimes that Papa married Miss Perley or maybe some beautiful lady who was much kinder, and we got us a house, and there was a garden, and a cow to milk, and chickens to give us eggs. Once when we were in our ears in the rent, Papa boiled eggs for our supper in a can in the fireplace.”