Brentwood by Grace Livingston Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

But I could look after Father and Mother if worst came to worst. I could perhaps get away with playing I’m you if I put on one of your dresses. I’m a pretty good nurse, you know.”
    Betty’s eyes filled with tears, but she smiled through them and shook her head.
    “I wouldn’t know where to find Ted. He goes all over the city when he gets desperate. He’ll come pretty soon perhaps, because he said if he couldn’t find something else this morning he’d come back and get that chair and take it to the pawnbroker. He felt we ought to have some coal as soon as possible, but he hated to give up the last chair.”
    “Oh, my dear!” said Marjorie, her eyes clouded with tears of sympathy. “Oh, if I had only known sooner!”
    “Oh, don’t you cry!” said Betty. “You’ve come, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it is just to have it warm here again and have something to eat, and not be frightened about Mother and Father. That sounds awfully sordid, I know. But those things had to come first. And you don’t realize how awful it’s been. I’m sure I’ll love you afterward for yourself, but just now I can’t help being thankful for the things you’ve done. Maybe I can make you understand sometime when I’m not so tired. But you see, I’ve hated you and blamed you for being better than we were for so long! I see now it wasn’t fair to you. You couldn’t help what they did to you when you were a baby, of course. Only I never dreamed they wouldn’t tell you anything about us. Mother said Mrs. Wetherill had said they would tell you you were adopted, and I supposed, of course, you knew and didn’t care to have anything to do with us.”
    “I don’t think Mrs. Wetherill knew much about you either,” said Marjorie slowly, thoughtfully. “Not till Mother came to see her. And she never told me about that at all. She just left a letter. I think she couldn’t get courage to talk with me about it when she knew she was going to leave me so soon. You see, when I was little, they just told me they had picked me out from all the babies in the world to be theirs, and I was more to them than if I had even been born to them. That satisfied me when I was small, but as I got older and went to school and heard more about adoption, I began to wonder why my parents had been willing to give me up. It seemed very heartless of them. But when I asked more questions about them, I got very little satisfaction, just that somebody had been sick and they couldn’t afford to keep me. So I confess I grew up feeling rather hard toward my own parents. Oh, I was having a good time, of course, and not a hardship in the world, everything money could buy heaped upon me, but sometimes I got a little depressed or sentimental or something, and felt that I had been cheated by my own folks.
    “You aren’t the only one, Betty, that had hard feelings! I sometimes felt like a castaway. My own mother being willing to give me up when I was tiny and helpless. And, of course, I loved Mrs. Wetherill all the more fiercely in consequence because she had come to my rescue. There! That’s the way it looked to me! Now I guess we’re somewhat even, and perhaps we can understand each other better. Anyhow, it wasn’t any of it our fault.”
    “I see,” said Betty sadly. “I was all wrong, of course. But I guess that was what made Mother suffer so, thinking she had let you go. She has cried and cried over that. Whenever she wasn’t well, she would cry all night. She said Mr. Wetherill came to her when she was weak and sick and didn’t realize fully what she was doing. Father was threatened with tuberculosis. He had had lung fever, and the doctor said he simply must get away from the office and out into the open for a few years, and Mr. Wetherill promised to put him on a farm and start him out, with the privilege of buying the farm if he wanted to. He also gave them quite a sum of money to have me treated. It seems I wasn’t very strong and had to be