The Ranch Girls and Their Great Adventure Part 8

Jack gave Vive into Captain MacDonnell's keeping.

"Yes, I'll go if you'll come back to dinner with Frank and the rest of us," she agreed. "I'll be ready in five minutes."

Jack sent the nurse to look after the baby and in ten minutes was ready for the ride.

It was a sultry August afternoon, very still, and yet with a strange throbbing in the air of many tiny insects. The hawthorn was no longer in bloom, but the two friends rode along the English lanes sweet with blossoming elderberry and blackberry bushes.

Curious how, when one comes to say farewell, there is so little that seems worth saying!

During the first part of the ride Jack and Captain MacDonnell were frequently silent, except that Jack, of course, made the conventional inquiries one might ask of a soldier. Was he in good condition? Did he have everything he needed? Was there anything she could do for him--such as looking after his house while he was gone?

In response to each question Captain MacDonnell shook his head. He had turned over his house to be used for the Belgian refugees.

They were actually on their way home before he began to talk.

Then he took a letter from his pocket.

"I wish you would give this to Frank for me, Lady Jack, and if anything happens to me ask him to read it, and to let you read it afterwards if he thinks best. Sorry to be mysterious, but this is a kind of cranky wish of mine."

Jack slipped the letter inside the coat she was wearing.

"All right, Bryan. You know I have always felt rather like a big sister to you; I am nearly a year older. But, today I think I feel like your mother," she continued, trying to smile, but with her voice breaking a little. "So you must promise me, if there is anything I can ever do for you later on you will let me know. In a way I believe I am almost envious of you, Bryan. I think I have wanted to be a boy ever since I could sit on the back of a horse and ride over our ranch with my father.

That is why people have always called me 'Jack,' I suppose. Anyhow, just now, I think I would like to go out to meet a great adventure. I wonder what a woman's great adventure is. I presume it is marriage for most of us. At any rate Frank is terribly envious of you, Bryan. He has said so to me half a dozen times. He does not seem to know whether he ought to go to the front, which is what he wants to do, or to stay on here doing his work in Parliament. Of course, he ought to stay," Jack argued, repeating what she had been saying a good many times to her husband recently. "There never was a time when a member of Parliament had such great work to do, and that is Frank's real duty."

When Jack gave Captain MacDonnell's letter to her husband that night she spoke of their having had a ride together. Although he made no comment, she could see that he was not altogether pleased. It occurred to Jack then, though only vaguely, that if Frank objected to her disobeying him in small matters, their life might be pretty difficult if ever they had a difference of opinion and she disobeyed him in a large one.

"Strange for Bryan to have confided this letter to us," Frank remarked, as he put it carefully away in a strong box where he kept his important papers. "I wonder what old Bryan has written? I never dreamed he had a secret in his life which he has never told to me. But, perhaps he wants us to do some favor or other for him. Truly I hope we may never have to open the letter."

CHAPTER VIII

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER

FRIEDA read a letter she had just received and laughed.

Laughter was not frequent at Kent House those days, so that Jack and Olive looked up from the work they were doing. Olive was rolling bandages and Jack was writing notes at her desk. The three of them were in Jack's private sitting room where, only a few moments before, the afternoon mail bag had been brought in.

"What is it, Frieda?" Jack asked, turning her head to glance over her shoulder in some surprise at her sister. She wondered if Frieda realized that she was fully aware of the way in which she had been watching the mail for these past few months. For Frieda had watched in vain for the particular letter which certainly she seemed to expect; even if she did not greatly desire it.

"Oh, I have just received a note from a young soldier to whom I sent the first pair of socks I ever made," she returned. "He may not have originated the poem, but it is almost worth the trouble and the time I took on the socks. Do listen:"

"Thanks, dear lady, for the socks you knit; Some socks, some fit.

I used one for a hammock and the other for a mitt.

I hope I meet you when I've done my bit, But where in the h... did you learn to knit?"

Then Frieda dropped the letter to wave another long grey sock, shot through with shining knitting needles. It was somewhat narrow in the ankle and bulged strangely at the heel.

"I wonder if I am improving?" she inquired anxiously. The utilitarian nature of Frieda's occupation contrasted curiously with the general fluffiness of her appearance. For no amount of inward anguish could ever keep Frieda from the desire to wear pretty clothes and to make herself as attractive as possible. However, no one had any right to say she was unhappy, except as every one else was, through sympathy with the added troubles which the war had lately brought upon the world.

Like most of the other women in the larger part of Europe and also in the United States, Jack and Olive were devoting all their energies to the work of the war. They had both taken short courses in Red Cross nursing and had organized clubs and cla.s.ses in the neighborhood for every kind of relief work, while Frank had turned over several of his houses to the Belgian refugees.

Therefore, only Frieda remained more or less on the outside of things.

She had undertaken to learn to knit for the soldiers, but insisted that since her name meant peace and was a German name as well, she would do nothing more. The truth was she seemed not to wish to go out or mix with society a great deal, which was odd, as one of the reasons she had given for her unhappiness in her own home was that her husband wished to spend too much time there, so that she had become bored.

However, Frieda had agreed to visit the poor people on the estate and in the neighboring village, in order to relieve Jack from this one of her many duties.

Moreover, she enjoyed the odd types of old men and women, so unlike any other people whom she had ever before known, and she became a great favorite with them. Instead of giving her money for war purposes Frieda preferred bestowing it on these same queer old persons and the children who had been left behind.

This afternoon, after she had finished reading the second of her two letters, the latter from Jean in Wyoming, Frieda got up from her chair.

"Jimmie and I are going to drive down to the village to see old Dame Quick," she announced, "I promised to read to her this afternoon." 'Dame Quick' was the t.i.tle Frieda had borrowed to give to the oldest woman in Granchester, because she was so extraordinarily lively.

"What will you do with Jimmie while you read? He will never keep still,"

Jack called, as Frieda moved toward the door.

Frieda paused. "Oh, he and nurse will return back in the governess cart.

I want to walk home. Don't worry if I am a little late," and before Olive or Jack would speak, she had disappeared.

"I hope Frieda won't be too long. She does not know this country as I do," Jack murmured afterwards, but not thinking of the matter seriously.

Frieda and Jimmie had a way of jogging in the little governess cart on many afternoons, sometimes taking the nurse with them and more often not. Jimmie was rather a troublesome small boy of an age when he was into every kind of mischief, and Frieda was not fond of children.

Therefore, her family had wondered why she appeared to desire so much of Jimmie's companionship. Frieda might have answered that he asked so many questions that she did not have time to think of other things; however, she had never said this, even to herself.

The governess cart was a little wicker carriage swung low on two wheels, with an ancient, s.h.a.ggy pony, who never moved out of a slow trot.

That afternoon, like all the great ladies in the English novels, Frieda stored away under the seat of her cart as much jelly and jam as her sister's housekeeper would allow her. At the nearest grocery shop she bought a package of tea, some tins of biscuits and a half pound of tobacco. For the truth was that Frieda's old woman liked a quiet smoke.

This habit was not common among the villagers, but Dame Quick whose real name was "Huggins" was so very old that she allowed herself certain privileges.

It was a dismal late fall afternoon, but English people and particularly English children do not stay indoors because of bad weather.

Frieda wore a blue rain proof coat and a soft hat which she pulled down over her yellow hair, to keep the soft mist out of her eyes as well as she could. Jimmie and his nurse were also enveloped in mackintoshes.

But the rain was not actually falling. There was only a November haze and a pervading dampness, making Jimmie's cheeks redder than ever and bringing more color than was usual to Frieda's face.

On the way to the village Jimmie and his aunt, whom he regarded as of his own age, sang "America" in not a particularly musical fashion, but with a great deal of earnest effort, since Frieda was trying to teach the British Jimmie to be more of an American.

Jimmie, of course, wished to go into Mrs. Huggins' cottage with his aunt, but on that point Frieda was resolute. She had a fancy for seeing her old friend alone this afternoon. Actually she had a reason which had been developing in her mind for the past twenty-four hours, although Frieda herself considered her reason nonsensical.

In answer to her knock the old woman came to the door. She looked like one of the pictures one remembers in the Mother Goose books, and also like one of them, "she lived alone, all in her little house of stone."

Dame Quick's cottage of two rooms was set in the middle of a long row of little stone houses, in one of the half a dozen streets in Granchester.

Frieda always felt a shiver as she went inside, since the floor was of stone and there was a dampness about the little house as if it had never been thoroughly warmed inside by the sun.

Yet Mrs. Huggins had managed to live there in contentment for about seventy years. She had come there as a bride before she was twenty and was now "ninety or thereabouts," as she described herself.