Bertha turned a grateful face towards him. His uniform was comforting, and then Mrs. Walford had said so much in his praise during the long and weary journey, that she knew he was to be trusted apart from his official position.
“Oh, could you manage that I have a chance to see Mr. Edgar Bradgate alone for ten minutes as soon as possible?” she asked, turning her white, weary face eagerly towards him.
Mike Walford stared at her in blank amazement. “Mr. Bradgate, did you say? Why, it was he who helped you up the trestling. Didn’t you know him then?”
A wave of hot, distressful colour swept over Bertha’s face. Surely no girl was ever forced into a position so strange and horrid as this in which she found herself! But she took the shortest way out, by speaking with direct simplicity.
“Mr. Bradgate does not remember me, and he has no idea that there is any reason why I should come so far to see him on business which could not be settled otherwise than by a personal interview, and although I tried I simply could not get up enough courage to ask him to let me see him alone, and so I thought that I would ask you to manage it for me.”
“I’ll do it; you trust me. If there is no other way, I will arrest him and run him in,” said Mike, with a jolly laugh at his own joke, and then he stalked into the hotel and ordered the very best meal obtainable for his wife and Bertha. But he would not stay to share the meal, for he had promised to get Bertha the interview she wanted, and he guessed that there might be difficulties if he let the matter wait, for the workers at Brocken Ridge had scanty leisure, and the work of rescue had already made serious inroads into the day of toil.
It was nearly an hour before he appeared again, and then he was smiling and victorious, and he did not choose to tell Bertha how near it had come to his being compelled to resort to force to induce Edgar Bradgate to come back to the hotel for an interview with a girl who had come all the way from Rownton, no, thirty miles wide of Rownton, for the sole purpose of interviewing him in private.
“Miss Doyne, did you say? I don’t seem to remember having heard the name before, and if she wanted to see me, why couldn’t she have said so when I was helping her up the framework of the bridge,” he had said, when Mike told him what Bertha had come for. “The private interview could even have taken place then, seeing that Jan has next to no English, and then my time need not have been wasted.”
“Oh, if it is a question of a dollar or so, the time you lose can be put down to me,” said Mike Walford. “I’m too grateful to Miss Doyne for standing by my wife to begrudge that much in her service.”
So Edgar Bradgate had been forced to come, and because he was a gentleman first and a workman second, he even washed his hands and face before appearing at the hotel.