CHAPTER XX
Spring came late to Alberta that year, and it was May before the farmers were upon the land.
Zero weather followed the heavy March snowfalls, and May was well advanced before the first thaw began.
Angella Loring was particularly anxious that year to be upon her land early, for she wished to keep Nettie with her, and had conceived an ambitious scheme which she believed would tempt the girl to remain. Ever since her recovery Nettie had been waiting for the weather to break, so that she might go to Calgary and try to find work there, where she would be unknown, and Dr. McDermott had told her how great was the scarcity of help in the city. Angella, from the first day, had taken charge of the baby, and indeed it might have been her child rather than Nettie's. For Nettie was afraid of this child of the Bull's. Before the cold spell had broken, and while she was still weak, she would sit at the window and stare out over the bleak landscape with unseeing eyes. Spring is always an unpleasant season in Alberta, and that year it was even worse than usual. While Angella was away at the barns or the fields busy with her work, Nettie found herself shut in alone with her baby, but she never went near it, or attempted to take it in her arms or caress it.
The child was undersized and frail, but it cried very little, and its tiny, weird face looked curiously like a bird's. There was something pitifully unfinished about it although it was in no way deformed. It had simply been forced into the world before its time, and denied the sustenance of its mother's breast—for Nettie was unable to nurse her child—it made slow progress. At the end of April it weighed no more than the day it was born.
If Nettie, immersed in her own sorrow, was oblivious of her child's condition, its foster-mother was filled with alarm and anxiety. Dr. McDermott was no longer an unwelcome visitor at the shack, indeed he was often sent for when Jake, who had taken to haunting the ranch, and sleeping in Cyril's deserted sheds, could be despatched upon such an errand. No matter where he was, or what he was doing, the doctor seldom failed to respond to Angella's summons. Tramping into the shack, stamping the snow off his feet, he would look with pretended fierceness at the two women, looking for something to scold about and always, finding it, but although his words were rough, his hands were gentle as a mother's as he took the baby in his arms. He would gaze intently at the little creature with all a parent's anxiety while its mother held aloof, keeping her gaze riveted upon the window.
More than once, Angella Loring found herself very close to the doctor, and looking up, he would see her eyes were misty with solicitude over "her" baby. To cover his own feelings, he would ask her to fetch this and that and she waited upon him meekly. Once kneeling by his side, as the baby lay upon his knees, she saw its little wan face puckered into something that she firmly declared was a smile. In her delight and excitement she put her arms around the baby on his knee, and before she realized what was happening she found her hand enclosed in the doctor's warm clasp. Their eyes met, and the color slowly receded from her cheeks.
That night, she went into the bedroom, carefully closing the burlap curtain between it and the outer room, and searching amongst the contents of the box she had brought with her from England, Angella Loring found something that was no familiar object in that prairie shack—a mirror—a woman's hand mirror, of tortoiseshell, with a silver crest upon it. For some time she held it in her hand, face down, before she mustered courage to lift it slowly to her face. For a long time she gazed into the glass, the bright, haunted eyes slowly scanning the strange face, with its crown of soft gray curls. She was kneeling on the floor by her bed, and suddenly the hand holding the mirror fell into her lap, and Angella Loring said in a choking whisper looking down at her reflection, "I'm an old fool! God help me!"
Her program for that season was an ambitious one for a fragile woman; she purposed to put in one hundred and fifty acres of crop, and to hay over sixty more acres, and not content with working her own land, she intended to work and seed Cyril's as well. This latter was the stake to which she hoped to tie Nettie to her. She felt sure that the girl would not fail to respond to this opportunity to help the man she loved, for according to the homestead law of that time, land had to be fenced, worked and lived upon for a certain term of years, and by abandoning his homestead, Cyril stood to lose the quarter, besides the waste of all the work and money already expended upon the place. When Angella laid her proposition before Nettie, she was rewarded by the first sign of animation the girl had shown since the doctor had brought her to the ranch. Her apathy and despair fell from her, and when Angella told her that unless Nettie would give her the help she needed she would be obliged to employ hired hands which she could not afford, Nettie's eagerness knew no bounds.
"Oh my, yes, Angel, I just wisht you'd give me the chance. I'd love to do the work. I'll do it alone if—you'll let me—I'll work my fingers to the bone to—to—make up to him—and to you, Angel."