Bulldog John and his rival came last of all, though they ran like hounds, and they crossed the bridge and dashed through the crowd together.
‘Oh, John,’ cried the agonised mother, clutching at him as though he were an ark of safety. ‘You’ll save her—won’t you? God help her! You’ll save her—won’t you, John?’
One figure, black as night against the fierce glow of the flame, dashed across the space between the crowd and the farmhouse. It was hardly seen, and scarce believed in by those who thought they saw.
‘John,’ cried the wretched mother, ‘you’ll save her! You as loved her so! You’ll save her!’
There is no manhood in the world that needs to be ashamed to hang back from an enterprise so hopeless and so terrible. The woman shrieked and prayed—the man stood motionless with white face and staring eyes.
Then came one wild cry from half a dozen throats at once, and next upleapt a roar that struck the noise of the fire out of being for an instant. For the figure, black against the fiery glow, was back again, by some such stupendous chance, or heaven-wrought miracle, as only desperate valour ever wins. A figure huddled in a blanket lay in his arms, and as he came racing towards the crowd they fell together. They were lifted and borne out of the circle of fierce heat and flying sparks.
The house was left to burn, and every thought was centred on the rescuer and the rescued. The fresh air roused Bertha from her swoon, and at the first opening of her eyes and the first words she spoke the mother went as mad with joy as she had been with terror.
‘Alive!—alive! Safe!—safe! And oh, my God! my Christian friends, it was the Butterfly as did it!’
But it was a full month later when Lane Protheroe asked his first question,
‘Where’s Bertha?’