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?”