“But they are going to be realized now, oh, I am sure of it! Oh, to think that there is a ray of hope for me after all these weeks and weeks of black despair! Bertha, Bertha, do you know what it will mean to me and to my poor dear Tom?” and she burst into a fit of sobbing, her brave self-control breaking down at this tiny ray of hope, as it had never broken down since her hard fate overtook her.
Bertha dropped on her knees beside the couch, soothing Grace as she would have soothed one of the children. Such stormy emotion must surely be bad for the invalid, and it would shake the feeble spark of life in the helpless body, might indeed even shake it out, or so in her ignorance she feared. But Grace was soon quiet again, only there was a deep glow of happiness in her eyes, and the radiance of hope on the face which had grown so wan from the weeks of hopeless helplessness.
“Often and often I would have prayed to die, if it had not been for Tom,” said Grace, after a while, when she had grown calm enough to speak of this wonderful hope which had come to her. “But he said to me, on that first day when I realized that I was as helpless as a log, that he would rather have me like that than not have me at all, and that I should be ten times more his inspiration than I had been. So for his sake I had to keep hold of life for a little while, at least, until he and the children could do without me. But I don’t think that my courage for the effort would have held out if it had not been for you, dear. If I had seen the children neglected, or Tom bowed down with more worries than he could stagger under, I should have turned coward, and asked the good, kind Father in Heaven to take me out of this evil world, and spare me the sight of misery that I had no power to relieve. If I get better I shall owe it to you, for you have kept the hope alive in my heart.”
Bertha got on to her feet in a scrambling, unsteady fashion and rushed out on to the veranda. She was afraid that Grace would be able to read all the miserable selfish thoughts and desires that were in her heart, and she did not want to be despised at this the very sweetest moment in all her life.
No, she would not go to Australia, she could not. Anne and Hilda must think what they liked about her incapacity and general helplessness. She must be of some use in the world, for she had given Grace the courage to keep alive. It was a joy that more than repaid her for the hard toil, the monotony, and the unloveliness of her life. But the trouble was that the temptation would keep coming back, and for weeks afterwards, while the shortening days crept down to winter, and the sting of bitter cold came into the little house on the prairie, Bertha was fighting her longings for a life of leisured ease.
CHAPTER XVI
A Blow of Fate
It was summer again, and for more than a year Bertha had borne the burden of the household on her shoulders. They were stronger shoulders from the strain, which had not broken her down, but in some mysterious manner had seemed to build her up and bring out the very best that was in her.
It had been a hard winter. The weather had been so fearfully cold, that it had been almost impossible to keep Grace warm at all. Then the children had all sickened with measles at once, and followed this with a bout of whooping cough. But that was happily all over now, and five stronger or more mischievous children it would surely have been hard to find. Grace had not improved so fast as Bertha had hoped or expected; indeed, to a casual observer it would seem as if she hardly improved at all. She could certainly use her hands a little, but her other limbs were as helpless as ever.
“It will take me ten years before I am able to stand on my feet at this rate, and I expect that you will want to be married before then,” Grace would say to Bertha, with a rueful pucker on her face.
And Bertha would always reply with a merry shake of her head and a laugh that matched, “Oh, don’t worry on that score, all my instincts are towards single blessedness; but if I did happen to want to get married, I am quite sure that Molly will be able to keep house by the time she is twelve years old.”