“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.