Chapter XIII: A Trick of Memory

POOR old Pucker had a good deal of stick on the return journey also, but he was a horse that mostly needed considerable encouragement of this kind. Moreover, Bertha was sick with anxiety on account of Grace, who had never been left alone since the accident. She had not had time to think about her before, the need had been too desperate, but now—well, Pucker had to do his very best in the matter of speed, that was all, while the empty wagon bounced and bumped, threatening to overturn at least half a dozen times, yet never quite managing to do it.

What a relief it was when the house and barn came in sight! What a still greater relief when she drove up to the gate of the paddock, to find Dicky running to open it for her! And when she had driven through, and the gate was shut again, she stopped the horse and reached down to help the adventurous Dicky to climb up beside her.

“Have you taken good care of Mummy?” she asked, letting Pucker cross the paddock at a walk, because she felt that she could not bear any more bumping just then.

“Of coorse I has,” replied Dicky, with a great deal of swagger. “But I just wish that I had been able to come and help you fight the fire, Bertha. Wasn’t it fine?”

“No, it was not—it was horrible!” she exclaimed, with a shudder, thinking of some of the moments when she was almost at the point of despair before help came.

“I shouldn’t have been afraid, at least not much,” said the small boy, with a sigh; and then he burst out: “I say, Bertha, a man has been here since you went away.”

“What man?” asked Bertha sharply, thinking that if it were a stranger, Grace must have been dreadfully upset.

“I don’t know, and I don’t like him either, though he gave me half a dollar, and he gave Molly another,” said Dicky, frowning heavily. In his estimation people who could bestow largess to that amount ought to be in every way satisfactory, which made it disappointing when they were not.

Bertha drove up to the house with very active wonder stirring in her mind, and, jumping down, she lifted Dicky out also, and then hurried indoors to see how it fared with Grace. One look at the face on the pillow was enough to show Bertha that the excitement of the afternoon had been far too much for the invalid, and, letting everything else go, she set herself to the task of making poor Grace quiet and composed once more.

“Is the fire under?” asked Grace, who was wild-eyed with fear and agitation.

“Yes, it is quite out; but Mr. Smith and Mr. Humphries are both there, and one of them will stay until there is no more fear of it lighting up again, though it looks as if it might rain, in which case there will not be any danger at all,” said Bertha. And then she refused to talk, or to let Grace talk, finally succeeding in getting the invalid off to sleep for a short time. Not a word had Grace said of any person having been at the house, and Bertha might have been inclined to think that Dicky had dreamed it but for those two half-dollars, which he and Molly displayed so proudly when she went out to them in the paddock after their mother had dropped into a doze.

Having unhitched Pucker and turned the old animal loose to feed, she went indoors to change her singed and dirty garments, and incidentally to wash her face.

“Oh! oh! what an unutterable fright I look!” she gasped, staring at herself in the glass, and reflecting ruefully that Mrs. Smith had not looked bad at all; there had not been the shadow of a smudge across her face, and her hair, although a little loosened by the wind and the hard work, had been quite passably tidy.

But Bertha’s heavy masses of hair were hanging down her back, her face was streaked and smudged with dust and blacks, her blouse was torn open at the neck and slit up the arm where it had taken fire, and her skirt was a ruin.

“It is my fate to look a most awful guy when I am forced to do anything out of the common,” she muttered to herself, as she washed her face with tremendous zeal and energy, and then, as she did her hair, she recalled that time when she had been forced to swim out to the Shark’s Teeth at Mestlebury in that dreadful garment with the patches of vivid green.

Suddenly she dropped her comb with a clatter, and stood before the glass with her hands tightly clasped. She was recalling the face of the man whose life she had saved. He reminded her of—of—of whom?

“Why, why, I do believe that the man with the Smiths to-day was the very same individual!” she gasped. “But surely, surely the coincidence is too ridiculous!” and she laughed nervously as she stooped to pick up the comb; then she twisted up her hair in a great hurry, clothed herself in tidy garments, and went out to get supper.

There was little room in her busy days for dreaming now, and to-night she seemed more driven than ever. Grace was decidedly unwell from the strain and excitement of the afternoon, while the children were tired, hungry, and, truth to tell, rather cross; for the day had been fiercely hot, and they had been running about since early morning.

For a time her one pair of hands were more than full, but when the little ones had been fed, washed, and put to bed, there was a brief half-hour of respite in which she could sit still and think. And the more she thought the more sure she was that the man with the Smiths to-day and the individual whom she had saved from the Shark’s Teeth rocks were one and the same person. To-morrow she would go over to Mrs. Smith and ask for the name of the unknown. Then she would write to him and tell him that she was the girl who had saved him, and she would remind him that she had his coat still, if he wished to claim it again.

Would she write to him?

She was remembering what the fat German had told her about the man having left money to be given to her, which old Mrs. Saunders had appropriated. Well, what of that? Surely she could tell him that she had never had the money, and did not want it. But it would be a horribly difficult task. If she told him that she had never had a reward for what she had done, it would seem, it must seem, as if she were asking for something, and all her pride was up in arms at the mere suggestion. But there were the diamonds! If she kept them and said nothing at all, how much better would she be than a thief?

Then again came the old question, why had the man never made exhaustive enquiries for his valuables, which he surely must have missed long ago? If he had come by them honestly, he of course must have made a fuss, and that he had made no move at all made it look very much as if he did not dare to make a stir. Oh, it was altogether a most worrying business! If it had not been for the valuables in her possession, she would not have minded so much. Indeed, she would not have minded at all. But these, of course, made all the difference.

Tom was late in getting back with the reaper and binder which he had gone to fetch, and Bertha knew that Grace was uneasy about him. She was just going indoors to see what could be done by way of cheering the invalid up, when she heard the clank of machinery in the distance, and guessed that he was coming along the trail. Calling to Grace that she was going to open the paddock gate, she set off across the sun-dried pasture at a run, and had the gate open before the horses reached the place. But instead of driving on to the house and leaving her to come slowly after him, Tom jumped off the machinery and came up to her, seizing her hand and nearly wringing it off.

“Bertha, you are a brick, a downright brick!” he said, and his voice was so unsteady, that to her alarm she saw he was on the verge of breakdown.

“It is of no use to call me nice things,” she said, and her voice was more harsh than she knew. “I am afraid that I should have been too much of a coward to have stirred half a dozen steps to fight that fire alone. It was Grace who spurred me on to do it, so the credit does not belong to me.”

“The town thinks differently, I can tell you,” said Tom heartily. “And, my word, you were plucky! Smith said that your clothes were burning on you when they drove up.”

“Yes, they were, and the pathetic part of it was that I had come to the end of my water, so what would have happened to me if they had not come along just then, I cannot imagine. I rolled frantically, but the ground was so hot that I could not quench the fire,” said Bertha, with a nervous laugh that was very near to being a sob.

“Were you badly hurt?” asked Tom, with an air of concern, realizing what a grave risk she had run to save his wheat and that of his neighbours from destruction.

“I was not hurt at all; that is the incredible part of it,” said Bertha. “But I think that what saved me was the fact that I had torn the sleeve of my blouse badly in swarming up and down to get the water from the wagon, so when my sleeve caught fire it did not touch my arm. Does anyone know what started the blaze?”

“Smith said that he found a piece of a glass bottle lying to windward of the burned patch, so doubtless it was the focusing of the sun’s rays on the glass which set the corn on fire. It might have been a very serious matter for me, and would have about spelled ruin, I am afraid,” Tom replied gravely.

Bertha nodded in complete understanding, and then she offered to unhitch the horses for him while he went in to talk to Grace.

But this he would not hear of, declaring that she must be far more tired than he was, which was most likely true. So leaving her to hold the horses for a minute, while he went in to assure his wife that he had reached home safe and sound, he came out again and unharnessed, while Bertha put his supper ready and did those other things which were necessary. Then she went away to her bed, leaving husband and wife together. Bedtime was one of the hardest parts of her hard days just now, for that was when regrets rose up and assailed her, and she had neither the strength nor the philosophy to keep them at bay. And to-night the struggle bade fair to be harder than common, for in her hurried dressing, when she came back from fighting the fire, she had come across the package containing the story which she had been writing on the evening when Grace had her bad fall.

To be shut back from the life she loved and longed for, and forced into a round of drudgery which led to nothing, was surely the hardest discipline that any girl ever had to face. But there was no help for it. She knew very well that no one could have taken her place in the little house at Duck Flats and filled it as she was filling it now. There was nothing heroic in Bertha’s nature, or at least she thought that there was not, so she got no satisfaction from the fact of her self-sacrifice, and indeed did not consider it in the light of self-sacrifice at all; it was merely that she had to do the work, that there was no way out of it, and no one else to do it.

Poor girl! Her mood was very bitter to-night. She was too ignorant to know that she could not write words that would live until she had been taught by that hardest of taskmasters—experience. Her idea of life hitherto had been to dream the precious days away, to spend hours in analysing her own moods, and then to write feeble verse upon the results. Then Grace, knowing the commercial valuelessness of that sort of poetry, had directed her attention to stories, but these could have been in the end no better than the poetry, seeing how deficient her education had been and how narrow her outlook was.

But it was hard, so very hard, to grub when one wanted to soar. And it was small wonder that when she laid her head on her pillow that night, Bertha yielded to the weakness of tears and cried herself to sleep, which perhaps had a beneficial effect upon her by relieving the strain of her nerves and making her rest more profound.

She was in a whirl of domestic work the next morning, washing up dishes on the veranda, where she did every bit of the housework that it was possible to carry out-of-doors, when Tom came along and, seizing the dish-towel, started to wipe a great pile of plates and basins while he talked, which is a little way they have of economizing in time on the prairies, where time is of more value than money, especially in harvest.

“Did you know that Uncle Joe came here yesterday?” he asked, his voice a little lower than usual, as if he did not want what he said to reach the ears of Grace, who had not yet been brought out of her bedroom.

“Do you mean the uncle that cast you off?” she asked, staring at him in a dazed fashion, and then, suddenly remembering the children’s talk of the man who had come and had given them half a dollar each, she said, “I really thought that the children must have dreamed it, because Grace did not say anything about it to me.”

“Grace is badly upset, poor girl, for I do not think that the old man was any too kind in the things he said to her. She won’t tell me everything, but she is quite transparent enough for me to be able to read between the lines, as it were, and she forgets how well I know the old man. But I guess that if I had come along yesterday and heard him telling her that an invalid wife and a houseful of little children were enough to take the spirit out of any man, that even his grey hairs would not have saved him from the thrashing he so jolly well deserved,” said Tom, in a wrathful tone, putting the basin he was wiping down with such a bang that it was quite wonderful that it was not damaged by the treatment.

“But I don’t understand.” Bertha looked at Tom in a puzzled fashion. “I thought that you had quite lost sight of your uncle, that he did not know where you lived or anything about you. So how did he know where to find you out here?”

“That is the funny part of it.” Tom started on another basin as he talked, and this one being rather badly cracked, he handled it in a gingerly fashion. “It seems that the old man knows you, and it is through that he found out where I lived.”

“Well, I haven’t the pleasure of his acquaintance, so it is a rather one-sided sort of knowledge,” said Bertha, poking a pile of plates into the dish pan and using the mop vigorously.

“Just so, but there are similar cases on record,” answered Tom. “For instance, you and I know the German Emperor, the President of the United States, not to speak of the King of England, yet none of these gentlemen have the slightest knowledge of us. It is the penalty of greatness to be known and not to know.”

“Don’t you think it would be quicker to tell me plain out what you mean, instead of talking in riddles?” asked Bertha, with an air of exasperation; then she said, with a little jump of amazement which made the dishes rattle, “Was that old man who was taken ill in the train when I was coming here your Uncle Joe? What an astonishing coincidence!”

“Just what I thought,” remarked Tom dryly. “But it is the sort of coincidence that I could do without, seeing how the old fellow contrived to upset Grace, who has enough to bear without stings of this sort being added on to her load. It is rather curious, though, the old man was always taunting me with wanting his money when I lived with him, and now that he has lost it all, or nearly all, he takes the trouble to look me up to see if I can help him.”

“But why did he not stay to see you, or at least wait until I came back?” asked Bertha.

“I expect he thought there was not enough chance of getting what he wanted,” said Tom, “though Grace said that he told her he might give us a look in on his way back from Rotten Edge. He asked Grace if I could lend him five hundred dollars for six months, but she told him that the visit of the specialist had made us so poor that we should have our hands full to keep out of debt until the wheat was sold.”

“Does Grace know how much that cost? Oh, I thought that you did not mean to tell her!” cried Bertha, in a reproachful tone.

Tom shrugged his shoulders and wiped away energetically, then remarked, “Grace always could turn me inside out. You see, I am no match for her in point of cleverness, and when she wants to know a thing she mostly gets her own way. I told her that it did not matter to her, and that if it had cost twice as much, I would still have had the specialist.”

“What did she say to that?” asked Bertha, laughing a little; for well she knew that Tom was quite right when he said that he was no match for Grace, who always seemed to twist him round her little finger.

“Oh, she was very cross, and declared that she would have to make haste and get better, if only to save me the expense of a funeral,” said Tom; but he winced as he spoke, for Grace was everything to him, and the bare mention of her dying was more than he could endure.