“I will not let you forget; and in return for my kindness in reminding you I shall want to see the letter, or at least to hear it read, unless indeed it is very particularly private,” replied Grace.
“It cannot be that, or Mr. Fricker would not have given it to me to read,” said Bertha. “I thought it was rather funny of him to bring it to me, but he seems to think that because we both come from Nova Scotia we ought to have a great deal in common. For my part, I don’t see that it follows; but he is such a nice, friendly boy, that it is too bad to snub him. And I fancy that he is homesick too, poor lad, so I am obliged to have a soft corner in my heart for him.”
“That is undoubtedly good for you. It makes your sympathies wider, and you can save the snubbing for Mr. Long when he comes home again. Fricker is happily too young to need it,” laughed Grace.
It was not until the children were all in bed that Bertha fetched the letter from the pocket of her thick driving-coat and, sitting down by Grace, proceeded to read it aloud.
It was a long epistle in a woman’s handwriting, signed Mary Fricker, and commencing “My dear son”. The first page was devoted to small items of family interest, just those things which a homesick boy would love to hear about, and then Mrs. Fricker plunged into the chief interest of her letter.
“I was very much interested by your letter telling us about the shortage of food at Pentland Broads in the blizzard. That girl Bertha Doyne was fine and courageous to leave such a helpless household to drive the sledge over for you, and it must have been maddening indeed to discover that it was not foodstuffs after all. I am glad to hear that she comes from Nova Scotia. It is fine to think that our little state can produce real live heroines as well as a fictitious Evangeline. Now, I am going to tell you something which will amaze you, and that is, the Edgar Bradgate who got so mixed as to the sledges is from Nova Scotia also, and, though not actually your kinsman, is so nearly connected with our family that we may almost consider him one of ourselves. He is stepson to Cousin Fanny’s husband, whom you do not know, but who is a very good fellow. His name is Mallom, and he came over to see us yesterday, when he told us of Edgar’s long illness at the police barracks at Rownton. He told us, too, of some of the things that unfortunate young man has battled through, and really it made my heart ache. It seems that, when Edgar was of age, there was a little money to come to him from his dead mother’s estate. This he was induced to invest in a company which speculated in land and real estate of various kinds. They gave Edgar employment as a travelling agent, and he was abroad a great deal in the interest of his firm. For a whole year he was in Peru, then he went to Australia, and afterwards he was for a long time in Prince Edward Island. But there was treachery somewhere; the promoters feathered their own nests at the cost of the agent and the shareholders. After the company was wound up there was a meeting of shareholders at Paston, at which Edgar was present, and he was set upon by the infuriated people, who would persist in believing that he was entirely to blame, although he was really innocent, and very much the victim of the rascally promoters. He would have been severely mauled, perhaps even killed, if he had not succeeded in slipping away in a boat, intending to row himself some distance along shore and then to strike inland to reach the rail. But he was always the most unfortunate of creatures. His boat got wedged in those Mestlebury rocks which they call the Shark’s Teeth, and he himself would have been drowned if it had not been for the pluck of a girl—a poor fisher girl, I think she was—who swam out with a rope to his boat, and so he was towed to safety. It took almost his last cent to reward the girl for what she had done for him, and he had to walk seventy miles to Mr. Mallom’s house, earning his food by doing chores, or going hungry when he could not get a job. I wish that you would cultivate his acquaintance, my dear boy, for he is the sort of man it is good for a fellow to know—undaunted in disaster, falling only to rise again, he is bound to succeed in the long run. It is easy to see how much Mr. Mallom thinks of him, and the pride he has in him. But Edgar Bradgate is proud, and rightly so. He will not live on his stepfather, but will make his own way in the world or starve, and that is the right spirit to show.”
“Oh, Grace, what shall I do? To think that I have been keeping Mr. Bradgate’s property from him for so many weeks, and he so poor; it makes me feel unutterably mean!” cried Bertha, with actual tears in her eyes, as she broke off from reading her letter. “But why, oh why did he not try to find me out to ask for his coat and what was in it?”
“I should not be surprised to know that in the trouble of having to escape in that fashion from the angry shareholders, he entirely forgot that he had left his valuables in an outside coat; it might even be that he forgot he had a coat with him at all. A man in peril of his life twice in one day might be forgiven a lapse of memory like that,” replied Grace, whose face showed a little pucker of anxiety, although she tried to speak as cheerfully as usual.
“Then I must remind him of it as speedily as possible, for no one can even guess how utterly thankful I shall be to get the wretched things out of my possession. If I write a letter to him to-night, I may get a chance to post it before the week is out,” said Bertha.
“But what can you say in your letter?” asked Grace, and now the pucker of anxiety showed more plainly than before.