Betty looked at the girl in sullen surprise. She had not expected to be met in this neighborly fashion. She thought to herself that if she were being held a prisoner, no one could get her to “chirk up” like that.
“No, you bet you can’t,” she said in answer to the girl’s question. “Now me, I used to wash my hair and brush it, and keep my hands pretty. I wasn’t always a battered old ship of the desert like I be now.” Bet could be rather picturesque in her speech when she had a mind. “Fact is, I reckon I had too much good looks and too little sense once on a time. Both the sense and the looks have been knocked out of me now. I guess you or anybody can see that.”
“Whatever made you take up with this show life, Mrs. Bowen?” the girl asked. They were sitting together then on the ground, their little odd tasks being all done. Azalea was playing idly with some pine needles, braiding them together after a fashion she had, and weaving them into a little mat. In the old days she would have sat idle, but Ma McBirney had got her into the way of occupying herself with one thing and another.
“What made me take to it?” demanded Bet, turning her haggard eyes on her companion, “Why, the same thing that made your mother take to it.”
There was something threatening and angry in the way she spoke, and Azalea looked at her with fear in her eyes. She could feel her heartbeats fairly strangling her, but she had the courage to seize at the remark. Ever since she was old enough to think at all, she had been puzzled and bewildered by the things about her. And now it seemed she might be told something of all she wished to know.
“And why was that, Betty?” she asked softly. “Why did my mamma have to wander around and act in a show?”
Mrs. Bowen drew an old rag of a shawl about her shoulders and leaned back against a tree. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind whether to tell this child the truth or not. But finally she gave a little nod.
“I’m just going to up and tell you why,” she said. “I think it’s coming to you to know. She did it because she married a poor shiftless coot of a man, the black sheep of a way-up family, and she done it against the wishes of all her folks. She ran away from home with him, and she took care of him while he lazed around and wouldn’t do nothing, and she looked after him like he was the best man in the world, and stuck to him when he gambled away all she earned. And then you was born, and she had to run away from him to get money enough to care for you.”
“Oh,” gasped Azalea, her hand at her heart and a sick feeling stealing over her.
“And I will say,” went on Bet, “that she cared for you as tender as if you was respectable folks living in the finest house in town. She just done the best she could; and she went along with us because we didn’t object to having a baby in the troupe. We began training you like a little puppy as soon as you had any mimicry in you, and the folks that came to the show liked it. Her and you was drawing cards, I can tell you. And for all of her broken heart she was nice and cheerful except when we’d go to the towns near by where she used to live. Then she was afraid she’d meet some of them that used to know her in the old days. But at last, when she found she was going to die, she seemed glad we was edging along toward her home.”