For answer Olive rose and going over to her desk, returned with the sandalwood box containing her three treasures. “This is all I have of my own,” she said, first putting the box into Miss Winthrop’s lap and then tearing up the letter just written to Ruth, before sitting down again on her stool near the older woman. Gratefully she touched her lips to Miss Winthrop’s hand, saying: “I would like very much to tell you all I can recall about myself, for lately queer ideas and impressions have come to me and I believe I can remember a time and people in my life, whom I must have known long before old Laska and the Indian days.”
CHAPTER XVIII
FANCIES OR MEMORIES?
Miss Winthrop nodded. “Tell me everything you can recall and keep back nothing for fear it is not the whole truth or that I will not understand. Whoever your father and mother may have been, you certainly have ancestors of whom you need not be ashamed.”
Then Olive, clasping her fingers together over her knee with her eyes on the floor, began to speak. And first she told the story of the Indian village and of Laska and how she could not recall a time when she had not spoken English as white people speak it, then of her years at the Government school for Indians taught by a white woman, who had always been her friend and assured her that she was not of the same race as the Indian children about her. But in proof of this she had nothing save the ornaments in the sandalwood box, which, in the interest of her story, Miss Winthrop had not yet examined.
Yes, and one thing more Olive could remember. Through all the years she had lived with the Indian woman there had come to old Laska in the mail each month a certain sum of money, large enough to keep her and her son in greater wealth and idleness than any of the other Indians in the village enjoyed. But from what place this money had come nor who had sent it Olive did not know, and so to her this fact did not seem of great value, although Miss Winthrop’s face had shown keen interest on hearing it.
“Was there not a postmark on the outside of the letter, Olive?” she demanded.
Clasping her fingers over her eyes in a way she had when puzzled, the girl waited a moment. “Why, yes, there was,” she said slowly. “How strange and stupid of me never to have thought of this before! The postmark was New York! But New York meant nothing to me in those days, Miss Winthrop, except just a name on a map at school. You cannot guess how strange and ignorant I was until the ranch girls found me and began teaching me a few things that were not to be found in school books. But no one could have sent money to Laska for me from New York. I must have been mistaken and this money did not come for me as I have always hoped. Laska must have received it for some other reason.” And then Olive, either from weariness or disappointment, stopped in her narrative, not as though she had told all that she knew, but because she could not quite make up her mind to go on.
A few moments of quiet waiting and then Miss Winthrop spoke again:
“The money was sent Laska for your care, Olive, I am sure of it. But this story of the Indian woman and your life there you have told to other persons, to the ranch girls and your chaperon, Miss Drew. What I most wish you to confide to me are the ideas and impressions of the years when you may not always have lived in the Indian village.”
Sadly the girl shook her head. “Miss Winthrop, the fancies that I have had lately have been too ridiculous for me to feel I can confide even to you, kind as you are to me. For how can it be possible that a human being can remember things at one time of their life and not have known them always? Why, since my arrival at Primrose Hall, do I seem to recall impressions that I did not have at the Rainbow Ranch?”