A chill dismay came over her then as her hand touched her heavy serge skirt. It would have to come off, and she had nothing underneath but a grey underskirt patched with green. How her sisters had laughed at those two patches with the contrast of colour! But she had been too indolent to alter them. Yet now she winced as she stood before the three, erect and slim, with those two patches of vivid green upon her knees.
“God speed you, missie!” muttered old Jan, as he knotted the rope about her waist. “Swim east when you start, and the current will drift you right down on the boat.”
A man’s life on her futile hands!
What was it Hilda had said to Anne only that morning at breakfast when the porridge was burned and the coffee was half-cold? “Bertha is hopeless; she dreams all day, and wastes every atom of her strength in building castles in the air, while we have to work and to bear all the discomforts of her incompetence.”
And now she, Bertha, the incompetent one, had to save a man’s life or to see him drown!
“Oh, I would rather die myself than see him drown!” she sobbed, and then she took the water with a motion so swift and graceful that the three on the steep, rocky shore gave a wavering cheer of encouragement.
The man in the boat called out something too, but it was a warning to her not to risk her life for him. This she did not hear, however, and would not have heeded if she had.
She was swimming steadily, gliding through the water with quick, curving strokes, which Anne had taught her on the holiday afternoons in summer, when they had gone to bathe from the little strip of sand in front of Seal Cove. Anne held a silver medal for swimming, but Bertha had never even thought of competing.
The water was cold, so cold; for autumn was far advanced. The great storm of yesterday was still leaving its effect upon the sea. Bertha felt the heave and throb of it even in that sheltered little bay, and before she was halfway across to the Shark’s Teeth she knew that it would be an awful struggle to get there. But now there was no thought of turning back. If she had to die she must, but she could not—oh, she could not!—fail that man out yonder whose life depended upon her. Panting heavily, she was swimming almost blindly, struggling forward, yet knowing all the time that the drift of the current had her in its grip, and she was powerless to fight against it.
She could not go much farther, she could not. She would have to fail after all, and her sisters would say, “Bertha is always so ineffectual, poor little girl!”