As she paused on the threshold, looking round at the glory of the outdoor world before entering the house, some words of her dead father, spoken in the last days of his life, came into her mind.
“We are all a part of God’s great plan, and there is a niche for every one of us to fill, so let us see that neither by discontent nor fear we spoil the Creator’s purpose concerning us.”
CHAPTER VIII
Moved on
THE next three days were filled with much hard work, heavy nursing, and considerable anxiety for Nell.
Mrs. Munson was slowly mending, but now that she was on the high-road to recovery, she was quite positive that she was on the point of dying, and harassed her long-suffering nurse accordingly.
Since his aunt was getting better, Giles Bailey was able to turn his attention to the outdoor work, which had been neglected before Nell’s arrival, and he was abroad in his fields from dawn to dark, only coming into the house to eat and to sleep.
This was a great comfort to Nell, who felt she could easily have too much of his society, for on the brief occasions when he was in the house, he would sit with his chubby round face propped on one hand, silently gazing at her, until she became so nervous that she did not know what to do with herself.
It never occurred to her that his silent gazing was prompted by deep admiration for her active movements and resourceful ways, or she would have been more uncomfortable still. But, as it was, she was thankful his farm work kept him so busy that it left him scanty leisure for sitting in the house.
The day before Nell expected the doctor to pay his second visit, she had a scare which made her heart beat furiously.
She was looking out of the window in the afternoon, thinking how she would love to go berry-gathering in the forest, if she could have left her invalid, when a man on horseback rode in at the gate shutting off the forest trail, and she instantly recognized him to be Joe Gunnage, who had come to live on Blue Bird Ridge.
Giles Bailey, who was in the yard, came up and spoke to the man, and talked to him for perhaps ten minutes; then, without dismounting, Joe Gunnage rode back by the way he had come, and Giles came on towards the house with news writ large across his fat round face.
Nell fled at his approach, taking refuge in the sick-room, where she dropped into a chair on the far side of the bed, and, picking up a half-darned stocking, worked away as if her whole attention were absorbed in the effort to get the holes filled in with the utmost dispatch.
Mrs. Munson was sitting up in bed, propped up with pillows and swathed in shawls, for the day was cool, with a brisk wind blowing.
“It’ll be a warning to me if I pull through this, Miss Hamblyn, not to let Giles get so short of socks and stockings,” she was saying, in a plaintive tone. “It always seemed so prudent and economical to be just doing with the three pairs, two off and one on, but a fit of sickness is a regular eye-opener, I can tell you, and the poor lad would have gone barefoot in a few days more if it had not been for you.”
“I say, aunt, here is news! May I come in? But I mustn’t stay more than two minutes, for I’ve left the hosses hitched to the field gate, and there ain’t much telling what mischief they will be up to if I ain’t there to look after ’em. Whom do you think I’ve been talking to here, just outside the window?”
“Not the President, I suppose, though I don’t know as you could look more bursting with news if it had been him and half the senators from Washington to keep him company,” Mrs. Munson replied, in a caustic manner.
Her manner to her nephew was, as a rule, severely repressive. She believed that he, in common with all other young people, required a great deal of keeping in order.
“It was Joe Gunnage as we used to know at Lewisville ever so long ago, and he has come to live at Blue Bird Ridge,” said Giles, taking off his straw hat and rumpling his hair wildly, which had the effect of making him look more foolish than before.
“Where’s that? I can’t remember that I’ve ever heard of the place,” Mrs. Munson said feebly, for she was very weak still, and neither able to speak nor think with her accustomed vigour.
“Why, you remember the Lone House on the long trail, where old Doss Umpey used to live!” exclaimed Giles.
Mrs. Munson gave a start of surprise, but Nell sat like a figure carved in stone—only her needle moved in and out of the stocking with a mechanical, almost unconscious, action.
“If you’d said the Lone House, I should have knowed before; but Joe Gunnage won’t be such a very near neighbour, for it’s a good thirty miles from here, I should say. What has become of Doss Umpey? Is he dead?”
“No; he has had to flit in a hurry, that’s all. It’s the inside of a prison he ought to see, only Joe says it’s doubtful whether they’ll catch him, because he’s such a slippery old rascal,” Giles remarked, with an air of such intense enjoyment, that Nell, writhing in her secret shame and misery, felt that she hated him.
“Oh! Has he been doing anything fresh, or was it the old business up again?” Mrs. Munson asked, with eager interest.
“A bit of both so far as I could make out. It seems that Brunsen has been talking a good deal, and that has stirred the police up. Then Joe has been grubbing out a hole at the back of the Lone House, and he has come on some things as had best be reported to the border police; that is what made him ride this way.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to come in and see me?” demanded Mrs. Munson.
“I did; but when I told him you were sick with fever, he said he’d rather not, for it was hard enough for well folks to get on at the Lone House, but sick ones would have no sort of a chance at all.”
“That Joe Gunnage always were a regular downright coward,” replied Mrs. Munson, with a snort of disgust. Then she lay back on her pillows, looking so white and spent with the brief excitement, that Nell nodded an emphatic command to Giles to go away and leave the invalid quiet.
In her own heart a storm of fear and misery was raging. What was this old business connected with her grandfather and the man named Brunsen, about which Giles Bailey and his aunt talked so glibly? Was there some law-breaking connected with his life, concerning which she knew nothing?
A vague unreasoning terror seized upon her then, and she quailed at heart as nothing had ever made her quail before.
Ever since she could remember she had had to face hard, grinding poverty, but there had been no shame in that. The father whose memory she cherished so fondly had been a preacher, a scholar, and a gentleman; and although Doss Umpey had been none of these, she had always supposed him to be a straight man according to his lights.
How intensely thankful she felt that she had so carefully hidden the secret of her identity from these people, among whom she had been flung by accident! Of course, the fact might leak out yet; indeed, it must, if Joe Gunnage called at the farm on his way back from the frontier.
Then she thought of the strange manner in which her secret had been so far protected. Both Giles and his aunt had at first supposed her to be Gertrude Lorimer, the other girl; then when the doctor came and explained why the other girl had not been able to come, they had still looked upon the stranger nurse as having come from the neighbourhood of Nine Springs, some one sent by the doctor.
“If only I can get away from here quickly, and hide myself in some place where no one has ever heard of Doss Umpey or the Lone House on the long trail, how thankful I shall be!” Nell exclaimed to herself, and little thought how hard she was to find the task of escaping