Perhaps, if the events of the next few hours had come to pass at any other time, they would not have left the same mark upon her life. As it was, Rosamund had come to that state of moral restlessness which is bound either to open the windows of the soul to fresher air and wider fields of vision, or else to induce the peevish discontent which so often falls to the lot of the idle woman. Although she consciously longed for happiness, she knew that she was not sentimentally unhappy; neither was she fatuously so, like her sister. Cecilia was only one of many women of her age and class, who imagine that possession brings enjoyment. She often declared that if she had as much as her acquaintances she could make herself content, but that if she had more than they she could be supremely happy. Rosamund had no such illusions; her clear mind had never been perverted to the futility of such ambitions, although there was nothing in her environment to suggest a satisfying substitute for them. If she was restless, it was not for something she might not have. It pleased her pride to think that she valued neither wealth nor social eminence, but accepted them only as her birthright; but, as in the case of the infatuated Flood, she resented any sign of invasion upon the sacred precincts which for generations had respected their Berkleys and their Stanfields and Randalls. It was her pride which had induced her to neglect, as unimportant, the things Cecilia yearned for; Rosamund Randall was to be above manifestations of wealth—although Rosamund Randall was not above occasional haughty stubbornness.
The charitable pastimes in which some of her friends indulged held no appeal for her; she was too impatient for immediate results to be successful in them. She vaguely felt that some fault must lie with the unfortunate, and she could not imagine that the individual might be interesting. Even Eleanor's experience, although it had stirred her heart to pity, brought her no closer to the mass of suffering. She had no particular talents, no pet enthusiasms; yet her intelligence was too keen to be satisfied with the round of days that constituted life for Cecilia, as well as for most of their friends. Nothing suggested itself as a substitute for them, and to-day not even the charms of nature satisfied her, however beautiful the country through which the big car carried them. But insensibly it made its effect upon her. Away from the scars of battle, through orchard and grass-land, between fields of ripening corn and pastures where drowsy cattle were ruminating in shady fence-corners; past little white farmhouses with red barns at their backs, and tangled gardens where bees feasted in front of them; up towards the hills, through stretches of cool woodland, where little spring-fed brooklets crossed the road, and where the turns were so narrow that the call of the horn had often to pierce the stillness; out again upon cleared spaces, and at last far up on the mountain-tops—so they traveled, Rosamund alone seeming to notice the beauties they passed so swiftly.
Cecilia kept up an easy chatter with the two men. Flood seemingly had eyes for the older woman only, yet he was keenly aware of the girl beside him. All the way he was inwardly cursing himself for the ill-timed compliment which had silenced her, and he was too good a judge of human nature to follow his first mistake with a second. If Rosamund wished to be silent, no interruption to her revery should come from him, at least. As there was only the one way across the mountains, Pendleton had put away his road map and was leaning sideways over the back of the seat, facing Cecilia and Flood; the three found plenty to talk about, and ignored Rosamund's pensive withdrawal.
For miles they had passed no living thing; even the birds and woodland creatures seemed to have gone to sleep; and the chauffeur, taking them along at second speed, believed it unnecessary to sound his horn at every winding of the road.
Then, so suddenly that no one knew just what had happened, there was a shriek from somewhere, a wild cry from the man at the wheel, a stopping of the car so quickly as to throw the women forward and Flood to his knees. Pendleton, facing back, was the only one who could see the road behind them; with a cry that was either oath or prayer, he leaped from the car and ran back, the chauffeur scarcely four yards behind him. Flood scrambled up and Rosamund sprang to her feet. Cecilia covered her ears with her hands, and was the only one who could voice her horror.
"We have killed someone!" she cried wildly, crouching down to shut out sight as well as sound. "We have killed someone! Oh, what shall we do? What shall we do? I cannot see it—I cannot stand the sight of it!"
But no one heeded her outcry. Flood had opened the door and was speeding after the others; and Rosamund, too, as quickly as her trembling would allow her, ran towards the little group at the roadside.
When she reached them, they were bending over two forms—a boy and a young girl. The boy had been struck by the step of the car, and lay huddled where its force had thrown him; the girl lay beside him, her face down in the weeds and grass. Pendleton and the chauffeur, with ghastly faces, were feeling for her heart. As Rosamund came up they turned her upon her back. Rosamund tore off her gloves, and pressed her hand against the girl's throat.
"I think she has only fainted," she said. "Get a cold thermos bottle, someone!"
The chauffeur ran to do her bidding, but before he got back the girl had opened her eyes. Rosamund bent closer.
"Are you hurt?" she asked. "Did we hit you? Can you speak to me?" But the girl could not answer at first; then the iced water and something from Flood's pocket flask revived her, and she sat up, leaning against Rosamund.
"Gee!" she said. "I was scared! What d'yer think of an automobile up here! Where's Tim?"
The men had left the girl to Rosamund, and were kneeling by the child; Rosamund glanced over her shoulder at them. "I'm afraid he is hurt," she said. "Do you think you can take care of yourself for a moment while I see? I wouldn't try to stand up quite yet, if I were you."
"Oh, sure," the girl replied. "They ain't anything the matter with me. You go right on."
But all of Rosamund's ministrations failed of any response from the boy. Flood's varied experience had given him a passing acquaintance with broken bones, but he could find none in the little limbs that were thin to emaciation; his search revealed only a few scratches on the child's face, and a cut on his head. At last he looked across the little form at Rosamund.
"I'm afraid there's concussion," he said. "We shall have to take him to a doctor."
The girl had risen, and was standing, with arms akimbo, looking down at them. "Doctor Ogilvie," she said at once. "He's the one. He's right over at the Summit."
Flood looked quickly at Rosamund. "Ogilvie! I had no idea his territory extended this far!" Then he turned to the girl. "So you know Doctor Ogilvie? How far are we from the Summit?"
"Gee! I dunno! It's awful far to walk it, I know that!"
Rosamund looked up with troubled eyes. "There must be some house near by," she said, "where we could take him. I don't believe he ought to be carried very far. Do you live near here?" she asked the girl.
"Laws, no! We live in the city, him an' me. We ain't any kin, y'understand; he's a tubercler, an' my eyes give out, and we're just visitin' Mother Cary."
Flood was becoming impatient. "Well, where does the Cary woman live?" he demanded. "We don't need your family history, my girl."
Instantly the girl's black eyes flashed, and her chin went up. "Well, an' you ain't goin' to get it, my man!" she returned. "I know the likes of you; seen you by the million!"
She glared up at him belligerently, but Rosamund laid her hand on her shoulder. "Don't," she said quietly. "Where is this place where you're staying?"
"It's just back of the woods there. The road's on up a piece, about two squares; yer can't miss it, 'cause it's the only one there is."
So they lifted the child, and laid him carefully, on the broad back seat. They decided that Mrs. Maxwell and Pendleton should wait beside the road, while Rosamund and Flood saw to the boy's safety, and the girl rode with the chauffeur to point the way. She seemed but little impressed by the accident, and greatly pleased at the motor ride.
"Laws, but I wish the girls at the factory could see Yetta Weise settin' up here," she remarked as she took her place.
As she had told them, the house was not far; and notwithstanding her anxiety for the injured boy, Rosamund looked at it in amazement, so unlike was it to anything she had ever seen, so quaintly pretty, so tidy, so homelike.
It stood on the hillside, a few yards back from the road. From a little red gate set in the middle of the whitest of tiny fences a narrow brick path led straight to the front door. The upper story of the house overhung the lower, making a shady space beneath that was paved with bricks and made cheery and comfortable with wooden benches piled with crocks and bright tin milk pans set out to air; and all about the little white farm-buildings wound narrow brick paths bordered with flowers—geraniums, nasturtiums, pansies, with, here and there, groups of house plants in tin cans and earthen pots, set outside for their summer holiday. Unaccustomed though she was to such ingenuous simplicity of decoration, Rosamund could not but recognize it as a haven of peace, a little home where love and time had impressed their indelible marks of beauty.
The big car drew up to the gate very gently; Yetta called, loudly and shrilly; Flood lifted the boy and carried him towards the house, and Rosamund followed; but halfway up the path she paused, half in amazement, half in repulsion.
Yetta's call had brought to the doorway the strangest of small creatures—a tiny, bent old woman. She braced herself on one side against the doorway, on the other with a queer little crutch with padded top, held by a strap across her shoulder; as she came forward to meet them she moved the crutch, like some strange crab, obliquely, grotesquely, yet with the adeptness of the life-long cripple. She was evidently startled, even frightened; but when her eyes met Rosamund's she smiled. At once the girl's feeling of repulsion vanished, for on the tiny old face there was none of the suffering and regret that so often mark the deformed. It was not drawn or heavy; plain and homely though it was, it was made radiant by a world-embracing mother-love, transfigured by that quality of tenderness and sweetness that Rosamund had learned to associate with pictured mediæval saints and martyrs. With Mother Cary's first smile, something entered the girl's consciousness which never again left it.
The old woman paid no attention to Yetta's voluble explanations, nor wasted any time on questions.
"Take him into the room on the left and lay him on the sofy," she directed, and hobbled along behind the little procession; but when they had lain the still unconscious child in the shaded best room, she looked from Flood to Rosamund for explanation, with a dignity which could not fail to impress them.
"Maybe he's just been knocked senseless," she said, when they had told her all they could. "But anyways, we ought to have Doctor Ogilvie here's soon as ever we can. If the young lady'll help me undress the little feller, you can take Yetta, sir, to show you the way."
Flood hesitated; to undress the child would be a strange task for Rosamund. "Can't I do that before we go?" he asked.
But the old woman had no such hesitation. "No, you can't," she said, "an' I wish you'd hurry. Timmy ain't strong, anyway."
So, with a troubled look, Flood followed Yetta, and in a moment Rosamund heard the purr of the motor as the car sped off towards the Summit; then, as she afterwards remembered with surprise and wonder, she found herself obeying the old woman's directions.
"Now, honey, you jest lift the little feller right up in your arms, bein' careful of his head; he don't weigh no more'n a picked chicken. We'll get him to bed time the doctor gets here, an' have some water b'ilin' an' some ice brought in, case he wants either one. Here, right in here—my house is mostly all on one floor, so's I can manage to scramble around in it when Pap's in the fields. That's the way—no, he won't need a piller. I'll take off his little clo'es whilst you lift him—that's right. My! Think o' that gentleman wantin' to do for him—as if any woman with a heart in her body could let a man handle sech a little thing's this! But he didn't know, did he, honey?"
And strangely enough Rosamund was conscious of a wave of tenderness towards the pathetic little figure, limp and emaciated; long afterwards she realized that people always did and felt what Mother Cary expected them to. She even bathed the little dusty feet, while the old woman hobbled about to bring her different things, talking all the while.
"Pore little soul, seems like he had enough without this—not but what I reckon he'll come out o' this a heap sight easier than he will the other. Not a soul on the top o' the yearth to belong to, he hasn't; sent here to fatten up an' live out o' doors, 'count o' being a tubercler. No, honey, he ain't nothin' to Pap an' me 'ceptin' jest one o' the pore little lambs that have a right to any spare love an' shelter an' cuddlin' that's layin' around the world waitin' for sech as him. I used to wonder why the Lord let sech pore little things stay in the world, until I found out how much good they do to folks that look after 'em. Land! I wouldn't be without one of 'em on my hands now, not for more'n I can say. What? Oh, yes, dearie, I take one or more of 'em and build 'em up an' get 'em well, with Doctor Ogilvie's tellin' me how; an' when they go back to the city all well again, I jest take one or two more. Pap an' me wouldn't know what to do now, ef we didn't have some pore little thing to look after. I'm jest that selfish, I begrudge everybody else that has a bigger house the room they got for more of 'em."
When the child had been made clean and cool, and the old woman had shown Rosamund how to draw in the blinds and leave the room in pleasant shadow, she led the way out to the paved place in front of the house.
"You look all tuckered out, honey," she said, when Rosamund had sunk wearily into a rush-seated armchair, "an' I'm goin' to get you some fresh milk."
So for a few minutes the girl was alone, with time to think over the crowding events of the past half hour, which seemed almost like a day. One emotion had come closely upon another, and now she was in this strange little harbor where, apparently, only kind winds blew, the storms of the world outside, a harbor where weak vessels found repair, where passers-by were welcomed and supplied with strength to go on. Subconsciously she wondered whether it might not be the harbor of a new, fair land, herself the storm-buffeted traveler about to find shelter. Then, more in weariness of spirit than in bodily fatigue, she drew the long hatpin from her hat and tossed it aside, leaning her head back against the stone of the house, and closed her eyes.
When Mother Cary returned with a glass of creamy milk, she noted the girl's pallor, the shadows her long lashes cast on her white cheeks.
"I wouldn't feel too bad about it," she said. "The little feller can't be hurt very bad, and I reckon it was jest bein' so scared an' so weak, anyway, that made him go off in his head like that."
Rosamund could not confess that her thoughts had been of herself rather than upon the injured child. "Do you think he will recover?" she asked.
"Well, what Doctor Ogilvie can't do ain't to be done, I know that much," Mother Cary replied. "Folks do say it's an ill wind blows nobody any good, an' it cert'n'y was his ill wind blew us good; 'cause if he hadn't been that sick he couldn't live in the city, he never would 'a' come to the mountings, an' I'm sure I don't see how we ever did get along without him. Why, he's that good a doctor folks still come up here from the city to see him; and many's the one stays at the Summit just to be where he can look after them; and Widder Speers that he lives with told me that doctors from 'way off send for him to talk over sick people with them—jest to ask him what to do, like. Oh, Doctor Ogilvie can do anything anybody can!"
Rosamund was amused, in spite of herself, at the old woman's naïveté. "He was sick, then, when he came?" she asked, idly.
"Yes, but you'd never 'a' known it," Mother Cary told her. "Land! How he did get about from place to place, huntin' out other folks that was ailin'! He hadn't been up here more'n a month before he knew every soul in these mountings, which is more'n I do, though I've lived here forty year an' more. He jest took right a holt, as you might say. That's how come I begun to take care of these pore little helpless city things.
"First time he come here, he looked all about the place when he was leavin', an' he says to Pap, 'Plenty o' good room an' good air you got here, an' I guess there's plenty o' good food, too, ain't there?' Pap, he says, 'Well, we manage to make out, when the ol' lady feels like cookin'!' An' the doctor laughs an' says to me, 'Ain't got quite as much to do as ye had when that son an' daughter o' yours were home here, have ye? Don't ye miss 'em?' At that the tears jest come to my eyes, like they always do whenever I think o' my own child'en bein' two or three miles away from me on farms o' their own; an' the doctor he smiles an' says, 'Well, I'm goin' to supply your want,' he says.
"Pap an' me never thought 'ny more about it tell a week or so later when we see him drive up behind that old white horse o' his with the puniest little boy alongside o' him ever I set my two eyes on. 'Here's something to keep you from bein' lonesome, Mis' Cary,' he says; an' ever since then, it bein' goin' on five year, I've had one or another o' them pore little—land! There he comes now, without a sign of a hat on his red head! Ef he ain't that forgetful!"
Flood's big car had whirled rapidly into sight along the woodland road, and before it stopped the doctor was out and into the house. When Mother Cary hobbled in, Rosamund remaining to say a word or two to Flood, the doctor was already bending over the injured child.
Cecilia was waving a frantic hand from the car, and Rosamund and Flood walked down the little path to the red gate.
"Where is your hat?" was the first thing Mrs. Maxwell asked Rosamund. "Do get in! We've miles and miles to go, and we've wasted hours! I'm sure I don't see why they couldn't have sent for the doctor in the ordinary way; why, the road back there was something terrible!"
Rosamund was conscious of an absurd longing to slap or pinch Cecilia; she was really too vapid for polite endurance.
"We can't possibly leave until we know how badly hurt the child is," she said, and deliberately turned and walked back into the cottage.
After a moment or two Flood followed her, leaving Cecilia to pour out her indignation upon Pendleton.
The doctor was just coming out of the little bedroom, and nodded to them both in a general way. Rosamund looked at him curiously. She noted with some amusement that his hair was, as Mother Cary had somewhat more than suggested, frankly red; not even the best-intentioned politeness could have called it sandy. He was of average height, with keen eyes which looked black, although she afterwards knew them to be gray; his breadth of shoulder made him seem less tall than he was, and his frame was rather lightly covered, although his very evident restless energy seemed more responsible for it than any evidence of ill-health.
"Must have jabbed his ribs," he said, looking at Flood with a half smile, and seemingly ignoring the presence of this girl from his old familiar world. "Cracked a couple of them, but they're soon mended in a kiddie. Only thing now is this slight concussion; needs careful nursing for a few days."
Then he turned, looked squarely into Rosamund's face, and issued his orders in precisely the manner of a doctor to a nurse, without a trace of hesitation, apparently without a shadow of doubt that she would obey.
"Keep ice on his head, you know, and watch him every minute through the night. He's not likely to move; but if he should become conscious——" He continued his directions carefully, explicitly, all the while looking at Rosamund intently, as if to impress them upon her.
While he was speaking, Flood's face flushed darkly. With the doctor's last phrase, "Only be sure to watch him every minute," he spoke sharply. "You are making a mistake, Doctor Ogilvie," he said. "Miss Randall is not a nurse."
The doctor instantly replied, "I know she isn't, but we'll have to do the best we can with her!"
Flood's face grew redder still; Rosamund smiled a little. "Miss Randall cannot possibly stay here," Flood said. "That is entirely out of the question. I am willing to do all I can for the child, and I am very glad he is not seriously hurt, although the accident was, I think, unavoidable. I will send a nurse to-morrow—two, if you want them. But you will have to get along with the help here for to-night."
"Haven't any," said the doctor, briefly. "Yetta's a child, and Mother Cary goes down to her daughter's where there's a new baby."
For a moment no one spoke. Mother Cary was smiling at Rosamund, and her look drew the girl's from the two men. Then her smile answered the old woman's.
In a flash of inspiration she knew that she had found an answer to her questions of the earlier hours; something in her heart drew her symbolically toward the little silent, helpless child in the darkened room behind her, some mother-feeling as new and wonderful as the dawn of life. Both Flood and the doctor remembered, through all their lives, the look of exaltation on her face when she spoke.
"I will stay," she said, quietly, and walked into the darkened room.
During the long silent watches of that night there came to Rosamund one of those revelations, fortunately not rare in human experience, by means of which the soul is taught some measure of the power of the infinite—power to change or to create, to lead, to see more clearly, or better to understand. The afternoon had been crowded with new impressions and emotions following each other so swiftly as to preclude consideration of them, but during the hours beside the unconscious child her mind was busy; one thing after another came back to her, and, reviewed in comparison with all the other happenings of the day, took its rightful place of importance or unimportance.
"One thing after another came back to her.""One thing after another came back to her."
After the car had borne away her irate sister and friends, the red-headed doctor carefully went over his directions to her, and she had some difficulty in ignoring the twinkle in his eyes; Cecilia's horror and Flood's disgust had been as amusing as Pendleton's lazy irony. But before supper the doctor, too, had hurried away. Flood had not offered him a lift, and the walk back to the Summit was long. Father Cary, whom she found to be a friendly giant with a well-developed rustic sense of humor, had driven off with his tiny wife down the mountain to their daughter's home, leaving Yetta to clear away the supper.
Until then the black eyes of that other daughter of cities had scarcely left Rosamund. As soon as she had washed and put away the dishes, she came to the door of the room where the little boy lay, and after asking if 'the lady' were afraid of the quiet and dark, she went upstairs.
Then Rosamund stood at the window and watched the stars come out. The great boles of the oaks and chestnuts in the strip of woods across the way drew about themselves mantles of shadow. An apple fell from a tree near the low, white spring-house, and a cricket began to chirp. From some lower mountain slope there sounded the faint tinkle of a cow bell, and still farther down the valley twinkling lights marked, in the darkness, the places where people were gathered—little beacons of home; and she knew that overhead there shone another light, set in a window by the old woman before she went down the mountain. The placing of that light in the window, Mother Cary had told her, was the uninterrupted custom of the house since her first child was born. On that day of wonder, when the shadows had deepened in the quiet room where the miracle had taken place, they had set a lamp on the window sill, and a light had burned in the same window every night since then, a signal to all who should see it that happiness had come to live on the mountain, and still dwelt there. It was so small a light that, even when dark closed in, the girl standing beneath it could scarcely discern its rays; yet she knew that it was large enough to be seen far off, miles down the valley, across on the other mountains. Flood had told her of seeing it from Doctor Ogilvie's house at the Summit. She felt its symbolism—so small and humble a light, shedding its rays and carrying its message so far; and with that thought there came another.
This humble life of love and service, how beautiful it was! Only that morning she had believed her life the real one, her world the only one worth living in; but already she was beginning to suspect that there might be a life more real, a world less circumscribed. She looked back into the little bedroom, and beyond into the dimly lighted kitchen; it was so poor a house, so rich a home!
And of their poverty these mountain folk had given immeasurable largesse to how many waifs—dust of the city's greed and sin, taken them into this loving shelter, tended them back to usefulness, taught them cleanliness of heart and body. Yet even to the waif so rescued the city's power of harm reached out! How strange it was that the boy lying there should have escaped so many of the city's dangers, found this safe refuge on the mountain, and then have been injured on a quiet country road by one of those very dangers he had dodged every day since he first toddled across city streets!
As she watched the child, another thought presented itself, caused her cheeks to burn in the dark, sent a wave of disgust and shame over her: these people, who had added nothing to the city's harm, recognized their responsibility to the city's offspring; whereas Flood and Pendleton, her sister and herself, who fed upon the city and its workers, would almost have left the boy by the roadside, but for very shame of one another. Her friends believed her whimsical, unreasonable, utterly foolish to watch beside him through one night; and she had been, in her inmost heart, taking credit to herself for doing so!
She asked herself whether, indeed, she would have remained, if it had not been for the compelling force of Ogilvie, no less insistent for being unvoiced. She recalled what Flood had told her about him; yet, now that she had met him, all of Flood's enthusiasm did not seem to explain the man, and she smiled as she remembered how little of that enthusiasm poor Flood had shown in his disgust at Ogilvie's quiet demand for her assistance. She felt suddenly ashamed as she admitted to herself her secret delight in teasing Flood and Cecilia and Marshall by obeying the doctor's appeal. In her growing humility she was almost ready to believe that there had been no impulse of good in her remaining. Yet she knew that she would have had to remain, even if the others had not been there. What manner of man, she wondered, was this red-headed country doctor who had first aroused the admiration of a man like Benson Flood, and now had forced Rosamund Randall to perform a service that, a day before, she would have thought a menial one? Certainly he must differ in many respects from the men she had hitherto met.
The loudly ticking clock on the kitchen mantel struck off hour after hour. A lusty cock began calling his fellows long before the fading of the stars. Rosamund, standing again at the breast-high casement of the little window, for the first time in her life watched the day break. Rosy fingers of light reached up from the eastern mountains; valley and hillsides threw off their purple and silver wrappings of night, and gradually took on their natural colors; little fitful gusts of air, sweet with night-drawn fragrance, touched her face at the window; from their nests in the near-by fruit-trees faint, sleepy twitterings soon increased to a joyful chorus of bird music; the shadows melted, it was day, and the world awoke; but it was a new world to Rosamund. She had touched the pulse of life, and with the dawn there was born in her heart a purpose, feeble and immature as yet, but as surely purpose as the newborn babe is man.
Father Cary came up the mountain early to attend to his cattle, bringing word that his daughter was not so well, and that Mother Cary could not leave her until later in the day, but that Miss Randall was to feel at home, and Yetta was to do all she could for her comfort. He had made breakfast ready by the time Rosamund came into the kitchen; and presently Yetta stumbled down the stairs, yawning and sleepy-eyed.
"Gee!" she said, by way of morning greeting, "If this place ain't the limit for sleep! When I first come up here I jist had to set up in bed an' listen to the quiet; kept me awake all night, it did. Now I want to sleep all day an' all night, too! Ain't it the limit?"
"But that's the best thing in the world for you," Rosamund said, and smiled at her. The girl must have divined a difference in the smile, for she beamed cheerfully back.
"That's what Doctor Ogilvie says," she replied. "All's the matter with me is m'eyes. Y'see I been sewin' ever since I's about as big as a peanut; first I sewed on buttons to help my mother, an' then I sewed beads. There was my mother an' me an' m'father, on'y he wasn't ever there; an' we had four boarders. Course the boarders had to set next to the light, an' I couldn't see very well. Then after my mother died, I sewed collars day-times and beads at night, till I got the job in the shirt-waist shop. Tha's where m'eyes got inspected—they don't never inspect you till you get a good job. It don't do me no good to know my eyes is bad; I could a told 'em that m'self—only thing is, that was the reason they sent me up here, so I've that much to thank 'em for, I guess. Still, I——"
But Father Cary interrupted the stream of chatter. "Now look a here," he said, "supposin' you do less talkin' an' more eatin'! Two glasses of milk, two dishes o' oatmeal, and two eggs is what you got to get away with before you get up from this table."
But Yetta's tongue was irrepressible. "You watch me!" she replied, and grinned at him, her black eyes sparkling. "That's another funny thing about the country," she informed Rosamund, nodding. It was evident that she believed Miss Randall to be as much a stranger to the country as she herself had been. "In the city all you want to eat in the mornin' is a bite o' bread an' some tea; nobody ever heard o' eatin' eggs in the mornin', nor oatmeal any other time; but here—Gee! I can stow away eggs while the band plays on, an' tea ain't in it with milk—this yere kind o' milk!"
Rosamund's strained ear caught a faint rustle from the inner room; she sprang up, followed closely by the others; the child had moved his head, and his eyes were closed; before that they had been ever so slightly open. Rosamund laid her hand upon his forehead, bent down so that his breath fanned her soft cheek. Then she looked up at Father Cary.
"I believe he is really sleeping, not unconscious," she whispered. "I think we must keep very, very quiet."
Yetta nodded, tiptoed out of the room, and presently Father Cary's large form passed the window on the way to the stable.
So again was Rosamund's vigil renewed, unbroken through several hours except by faint noises from without, the humming of a locust, the chirps of birds, the homely conversation of some chickens, who had stolen up to the little house, lonely for Mother Cary. She must have dozed, for it seemed only a short time before the kitchen clock struck eleven, and almost at the same moment the doctor stood in the doorway, with Mother Cary behind him.
The doctor's hair had been very much blown by the wind, but it would have taken more than wind to send his smile awry.
"Morning!" he threw towards Rosamund.
She was at once aware that he thought of her only as the child's nurse, oblivious of all that other men saw in her, of her beauty and grace, of the signs of wealth and well-being in her garments and bearing. It amused her, though her smile was, perhaps, a little disdainful.
The boy was better; the doctor could find no serious injuries. "I am sure the car barely touched him," Rosamund said, and the doctor nodded.
"But it sometimes takes so little to shock the life out of a little underfed, weakened body like this," he said. "There's nothing to fight with, nothing to build on."
Rosamund's hand went over her heart. "Then you think," she asked, "you think that he will not——"
"On the contrary, I am very sure that he will," the doctor smiled at her. "Mother Cary, here, will teach you how to make him well."
Mother Cary laid her wrinkled hand on the girl's arm, but Rosamund's eyes filled with tears. "Poor mite!" she said, bending over the child, "we will try to make you well—but I don't know what for!"
Then Mother Cary spoke for the first time since her return. "Don't you trouble yourself about the what for, dearie," she said. "Folks is got plenty to keep 'em busy with the 'what way' and the 'what next' without troublin' themselves with the 'what for.' Ain't it so, Doctor?"
"It most certainly is," the red-headed doctor agreed, running his fingers through his already tousled hair. When he had given her further directions for the care of the child and driven off behind his jogging old white mare, he seemed to have left with her some of his own happy energy and assurance. Quite suddenly, the fatigue of her sleepless night fell from her, and from some unsuspected inner store-house of strength there crept a serenity and determination hitherto undreamed of. The boy would sleep, the doctor had told her, until late afternoon, probably awake hungry and thirsty, and then ought to sleep again; he must be kept very quiet, nourished regularly and lightly, made clean and comfortable; such careful and ceaseless nursing should, in a week or two, bring him out with even more strength than he had had before. So, until afternoon, there would be little for her to do.
She went into the kitchen to be with the old woman, who was moving about with her queer, crab-like motion of crutches and hands, preparing their dinner; Yetta had taken herself to the fields.
"No, indeedy, you can't help me one mite," Mother Cary declared, "exceptin' by settin' in that arm cheer and puttin' your pretty head back and restin.' There's nothin' I enjoy more'n a body to talk to whilst I'm a gettin' dinner, or supper. Yetta ain't that kind of a body, though! Land! The way the child can talk, and the things she knows!" Mother Cary turned about from her biscuit board to emphasize her horror. "Honey," she said, impressively, "that child knows more o' the world, the bad side of it, than—well, than I do!"
Rosamund smiled, and the old woman shook her head at her. "Oh, I was brought up in the city, honey," she told her, "so I know more about it than you think for. That's what makes me glad the doctor brought us a girl, this time; she's the first girl we've had this summer. I wisht it might be that she could stay up here as I did, but land! they ain't but one Pap! Pap jest mademestay, and me a cripple, too! He said he couldn't be happy without somebody to look after; and whilst it was a new idea to me then, I come to see the sense of it many a long year ago! That poor little Yetta! It's her eyes is bad. They ain't so bad but what they won't do well enough for most things; but all she knows how to do is to sew beads and buttons and run a big sewin' machine in a shop. They say her eyes won't hold out for that! Land! If I was rich, I'd have her taught music, that's what I'd do! You jest ought to hear the child sing, dearie! To hear her in the evenin's settin' down on the fence an' singin', why, it's prettier 'n a whip-poor-will a-callin'. It wouldn't surprise me a mite if Yetta could be learnt to sing that well, with some new songs and such, that folks would pay money to hear her!"
"Perhaps we could find some way to help her," Miss Randall suggested. Mother Cary flashed a keen look at her.
"Do you know any rich folks, honey, that might?" she asked eagerly. "Yetta's a good little thing, for all the bad she knows. An' she jest loves an' loves whatever is pretty an' sweet!"
"I think perhaps I do know someone," Rosamund said. "But I wanted especially to ask you to let me board with you here for a while. Is there room for me?"
"Room a plenty, dearie," the old woman said, as she hobbled to the door to strike the metal hoop that swung from the over-hanging floor of the second story. "But," she added, when she had sent the summons ringing out to Pap and Yetta, and had come back and seated herself near the girl, "but there ain't any call for you to pay. Pap an' me has a plenty to share with folks that come our way; and you're helpin' with Timmy. I'd be real pleased to have you stay."
But Rosamund hesitated. "I'm afraid I cannot do that," she said, "unless you will let me pay something. I can afford it, really," she added, smiling.
For a long moment the old woman looked at her, keenly, kindly, with the faintest, tenderest, most teasing smile on her little wrinkled face that was as brown as a nut. "An' can't you really afford to visit?" she asked. "There's a plenty of folks that can afford to pay and to give; there ain't so many as can afford to take and to be done for. Ain't you forgettin' which kind you be?"
Rosamund lifted her head, and looked directly into the twinkling, faded old eyes. "No," she said, "I'm not forgetting the kind I am! I think I am only beginning to find out!"
Mother Cary laid her hand over the girl's in her usual gesture of caress before she hobbled to the dinner table. Pap and Yetta had come in and were already seating themselves.
It was the sweetest meal that Rosamund had ever tasted; but she had still to find out more about herself. They had not risen from the table when a musical view-halloo sounded up from the road below the stretch of woods, and in a moment Flood and Pendleton sprang out of the big red car and came briskly up the little walk. Rosamund went forward to meet them.
"Why, I say," said Flood, beaming at her, "you're looking right as a trivet, you know!"
Pendleton drawled: "Ah, fair knight-errantess! Miss Nightingale! Also Rose o' the World! You wouldn't be smiling like that if you knew Cecilia's state of mind!"
Rosamund laughed, and held out her hand to them. "I can imagine it," she said. "It's plain that I had better keep out of her way for a time!"
"I'm at your service," cried Flood bowing low: with mock servility, delighted at her merry mood, at her smiles which included even himself.
But Pendleton understood her better. "Now, what are you up to, Rosy?" he asked, severely, uneasily. She came directly to the point.
"I am going to stay here," she announced.
Both men stared at her. "How d'ye mean?" asked Flood weakly.
"The deuce you are!" cried Pendleton.
"Oh! With Mrs. Reeves!" Flood beamed, as if he had found an answer even while asking.
"Is that it? Why didn't you say so? Where is Eleanor, anyway?" Pendleton asked.
Rosamund laughed again. "I'm sure I don't know!" she said. "She is at Bluemont, and that's miles away, isn't it? I haven't even asked. No, Marshall, no, Mr. Flood, I am going to stay here, right here, here in this house, or this valley, or this mountain, but here, here as long as I like—forever, if I want to! That's what I mean—or part of it!"
It was evident that her laughter carried more conviction than any amount of seriousness would have done. Poor Flood's face got redder, and he suddenly, after a stare, turned on his heel, and walked rather slowly down the path to his car, standing beside it with his arms folded, looking across at the strip of woods, but seeing nothing. Pendleton, however, felt it incumbent upon him to remonstrate.
"Of course, we all know you can afford any whim you like, Rosamund," he said, in the tone of the old friend who dares, "but I think I ought to warn you that this sort of thing is not—not in the best of taste, you know! It is not done, really—in—in—among our sort, you know!"
Rosamund openly showed her amusement. "That is undoubtedly true, my dear Marshall," she said, "but this time it is going to be done!Iam going to do it! You think it is a freak, and I'm sure I can say it isn't, because I don't in the least know what it is!"
"I think you're mad. If I had not been an unwilling observer of the accident, I should believe it was you had got concussion, and not the infant."
"My dear Marshall, your diagnosis is wrong! I may have a—a disease, but it is not madness. Did you ever hear of people who had suffered from loss of memory for years and years and quite suddenly recovered it? Perhaps I'm one of those—I feel as if I had only just come to my senses!"
"I don't know what you're talking about!" said Pendleton.
"Don't you? I thought you wouldn't!" Again she laughed, and at the sound Flood started, looked back towards the house where she stood, radiant and lovely, framed in the doorway, and then got into his car.
But Pendleton had one further protest. "Youcan'tstay in this—this hovel, alone, Rosamund! You can't think of doing it! Please rememberIhave got to go back to Cecilia! What on earth am I going to say to her?"
"Poor Marshall! Tell Cecilia, with my love, that I am going to stay here for the present. She may send me some clothes by express, or not, as she likes. Please give her my love, and tell her that I hope she will have a pleasant visit with the Whartons—she had better go there to-morrow. And try, my dear Marshall, to assure her of my sanity! Good-by! Don't let me keep you waiting!"
Pendleton pushed back his hat, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and looked at her. Then he drew a long breath and delivered himself, oracularly. "Rosamund," he said, "you're a fool! You can't, you really can't, do this sort of thing, you know. Why, my dear girl, it—it is not done, you know, in—"
But Rosamund ran back into the house, turned a flashing, smiling look upon him over her shoulder, cried, "Good-by, Marshall! Give my love to Cecilia!" and was gone, leaving him there agape. There was really nothing for him to do but rejoin Flood.
Cecilia, however, remained for a time inconsolable. Flood and Pendleton motored back across the mountain, told Mrs. Maxwell of Rosamund's decision to remain indefinitely in the little cottage on the mountain, and forthwith avoided the presence of the irate lady as much as possible. Fortunately, the newly arriving week-end guests had to be entertained. They were very good and very stupid; but, as Pendleton said, anything was better than Cecilia in a temper.
Left to herself, Cecilia's mind was occupied with a veritable jack-straw puzzle of events, motives, contingencies. She had had good reason, before this, to know that Rosamund enjoyed unforeseen departures; but that anyone should deliberately choose to forego the luxuries of Oakleigh, to stay, instead, in what Mrs. Maxwell considered a peasant's cottage—such conduct, such a choice, were beyond the lady's imagination and experience. Rosamund must be wild; for surely not even pique at Cecilia's generalship, not even annoyance at Flood's attentions, not even the desire to be near that tiresome Eleanor Reeves, could have determined her to such a move. As for the accident, anyone could have cared for the child. Rosamund could have paid a dozen nurses to stay there, if she was charitably inclined; and certainly Mr. Flood had shown that he wanted to do what was right. Cecilia could not understand it.
After the retreat of Pendleton and Flood, Rosamund went back to the little boy's room, smiling. Mother Cary looked up at her with a face slightly troubled.
"Seems like your friends ain't willing to have you stay here," she said. "Is there anything calling you home, honey, anything that needs you?"
The girl shook her head. "I think I have never been needed anywhere in all my life, until now," she said. Then, perhaps because of Flood's words, she remembered Eleanor. "Well, perhaps there is one person who has needed me, from time to time; and, dear Mother Cary, she is somewhere near here. She came to Bluemont to be near Doctor Ogilvie."
"There's a many a one that does," said Mother Cary.
"My friend is Mrs. Reeves. Do you know her?"
"Land, honey, rich city folks don't bother to become acquainted with the likes of me!" the old woman said, smiling.
"Mrs. Reeves is not 'rich city folks.' She is working for her living all the while she is here in the mountains; she is companion for another of the doctor's patients, Mrs. Hetherbee."
"Oh, I know!" Yetta exclaimed. "I saw her in the post-office one day askin' for the mail, while the old one waited outside in the automobile. Gee! That old one looked cross!"
Rosamund laughed. "And do you know where they live?"
"Sure! Want me to show you?"
"I should like it ever and ever so much if you would take a note there for me. Could you do that? Is it too far?"
Mother Cary patted Yetta's dark hair. "She can go over with Pap, when he goes to the store," she said. "She'll be real glad to; won't you, Yetta?"
So it came to pass that in the late afternoon Eleanor came in Mrs. Hetherbee's car. The boy Tim was resting so quietly that Rosamund had gone outside; she went swiftly down the little red path to the gate, and the two met, arms entwining, cheek to cheek, with little laughs and questions and soft cries.
"Your note said there was an accident!" These were Eleanor's first words. "Darling, that is not why you are here? You are not hurt?"
"Why I am here; but it was not I—I was not hurt! Look at me—feel me!"
"Nor Cecilia?"
"Nor anyone, you precious, that you know! A tiny mite of a boy, Eleanor, and I stayed to take care of him."
"You?"
"Oh, don't say it like that! And yet I don't wonder!"
Eleanor's arm was about her at once. "Sweet, I was only wondering that Cecilia let you!"
"Cecilia did not let me; and you were wondering, too, why I stayed, what really kept me. You are quite right; of my own accord I shouldn't have stayed. My own impulse would not have moved that way. I should have taken the easy, the obvious course, if I had been left to choose. But I wasn't, you see."
Eleanor looked at her keenly. This note of bitterness was quite new. Suddenly she remembered Ogilvie; but almost on the instant Rosamund spoke again.
"What manner of man do you find this red-headed doctor of yours?"
Eleanor laughed. "He gets his own way with people!" She looked at her friend, but Rosamund's face was turned from her. "I have never met anyone else like him. I thought at first that he was two people—a man of heart and a man of science; you know his reputation, and yet he stays up here mainly, I am told, to be near these mountain people. He says that they trust him, and seems to think that excuse enough for staying."
"I thought he stayed for the air or something?"
"He did, but now he is perfectly well again. And his character is not dual; nothing so romantic. He is a man of science just because he is a man of heart. He is one of the simplest people I have ever known."
"You seem to know him pretty well."
"Oh, he is the first object of interest to all his patients; we talk of nothing else! I am only a case to him."
Rosamund laughed. "Very likely, dear! And what does he think of you, as a case?"
Eleanor's face took on its shadow of sadness. "He—he does not know," she said; and Rosamund drew a swift breath of pain.
Eleanor came daily after that, Mrs. Hetherbee, a worn, eager little woman with restless eyes, showing herself entirely complaisant when it seemed likely that the very well known Miss Randall would return Eleanor's visits. Her attitude towards her companion had been pleasant enough before, but it certainly took on a new warmth after Rosamund's arrival in the neighborhood, and when she learned that Mrs. Reeves was one of Miss Randall's lifelong friends.
"You will have to drive over and call on Mrs. Hetherbee, Rose," Eleanor assured her. "If you don't I shall feel that I'm using her car under false pretenses!"
So Rosamund called, and Mrs. Hetherbee basked in the distinction of being the only person at the Summit whom Miss Randall cared to know. Thereafter Eleanor came daily across the valley, tenderly sweet as only she knew how to be, almost at once becoming fast friends with Mother Cary, and hanging over the boy with aching heart and arms weary of their emptiness. Rosamund always felt as if a hand of pain clutched at her heart as she watched them.
"Who is he?" Eleanor had asked the first day she saw him. "Is he the child of these people?"
"He is a waif," Rosamund said, and told how Mother Cary made of the little white house a refuge of love for the needy ones of the city. "And this tiny boy, Doctor Ogilvie says, needs love more than most of them. The Charities have tried to have him adopted; but most people do not want boys—not homely little boys, whose fathers were not at all good and whose mothers died very young and very forlorn. Timmy has gone begging—and he will have to go back after his summer here is over. The most to be hoped for is that he will go back stronger; then perhaps he will be prettier, and some one may want him. It is really unspeakably pathetic."
So Eleanor hung over the child, and gradually there grew up in Rosamund's heart and mind a plan, which, as it matured, was to alter the course of life for all of them.
But that was not until later; and while to her on the mountain the days passed uneventfully enough, they were days of distressful change for her sister. During the first week or two, Cecilia sent her four letters and eleven telegrams—the telegrams being duly delivered with the letters, whenever Father Cary drove across the valley to the store. Rosamund read them all, pondered, smiled, and then sent off a reassuring telegram by Eleanor. Later she wrote two letters; the first was to her banker, and in the second she said:
DEAREST CISSY:
Don't be too cross! You've always been an angel to me, and I love you; but I am tired, tired, tired of the sort of life we lead; and the other day, when Mr. Flood's man so obligingly bumped into the poor little boy, I was wondering how on earth I could get out of it for a time, get some sort of change. Then, the people here seemed to take it for granted that I would stay to nurse the child. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever taken for granted that I would do the right thing if it meant personal discomfort. Before, I had always been praised and applauded if I merely happened to do it. I don't suppose I can make you understand, dearest Cissy; but just that made all the difference in the world to me. And now I am going to stay here—for how long, I do not know. Until I get tired of it, perhaps, or until I can think up something else. The mountains are so big, Cecilia, and the stars so bright, and the sun does such good work!
I have put some money to your credit; I think there will be enough to last you for a while. You can even get the motor car, if you want to. And if I were you, I should stop in town and get a few linens and perhaps a hat or two and a parasol at Lucille's. You will need a lot of things at Bar Harbor. I suppose you will go right up to the Whartons'.
You say I have broken up Mr. Flood's plans. I'm afraid I don't altogether agree to that. There was only another week-end left in June, and we were not going to stay any longer than that. I do not choose to think that you referred to other plans of his. If you do, please understand that I have no interest in them.
Give my love to the Whartons; they have always thought me queer, anyway, so you will not have to account to them for me. And don't be too cross!
Cecilia's reply, which the doctor brought up the mountain a week later, was dated from Bar Harbor. It read:
DEAR ROSAMUND:
It's no use saying what I think. But you are exceedingly disagreeable about Mr. Flood, and the mountains were just as big at Oakleigh, and the sun is just as hot in one place as another at this time of year, and it is very selfish of you to break up everybody's plans. But at least I can say that I am glad you remain sane upon some subjects. I hope you got the trunks I sent over to Bluemont Summit; and I took your advice about the linens. There was a white serge, too, that was unusually good for the price. I haven't decided about the car. We play bridge here twice a day, and my game seems rather uncertain, since the shock you gave me. And Minnie has invited Benson Flood for two weeks, and a good many things may happen. I may not buy the car after all. I told Minnie that you were camping in the mountains, and she only raised her eyebrows. Well—all I can say is that poor dear Mamma always admitted Colonel Randall was peculiar. If you are not going to wear your opals this summer, you may as well let me have them.
Rosamund laughed aloud at the letter. Doctor Ogilvie was sitting on the side of Timmy's bed, and she had gone to the window to read it. At her laugh he looked up.
"Good news?" he asked, cheerfully. He was always cheerful, as cheerful as a half-grown puppy.
"Neither good nor bad," she replied, "only amusing."
"But whatever is amusing is good," he asserted.
She looked up from folding her letter, to see whether he was in earnest. "That," she said, slowly, "is rather a unique point of view!"
He ran his fingers through his hair, and came towards her. "Unique? I hope not," he replied. "Oh, I see what you mean—you're taking issue with my word 'amusing'! I'm not thinking of passing the time, as a definition of that word; I'm thinking of fun, mirth, that kind of amusement—nothing to do with chorus ladies and things to eat and drink and that sort of thing, you know!"
She was learning to watch his smile as one watches a barometer; to-day the signs were certainly propitious. There was something of indulgence in her look as she replied to him, the indulgence one feels towards the young and inexperienced.
"So you think it is a good thing to be amused—in your way?" she asked.
He nodded. "Most assuredly. Nothing like it. And the most amusing thing I know is the way we can cheat disease and dirt and a few other nice little things like them—turn the joke on them! Now, there's Master Tim—eh, youngster? Life will seem like a good deal of a joke to you, when you get over that ache in your hip, won't it? Think you'll find fun in life then, don't you, old chap? And there's a girl down in the valley—by the way, how'd you like to go down with me and make a call? Do you a lot of good!"
He cocked his head on one side and looked at Rosamund inquiringly, persuasively.
She had seen him every day for two weeks, and this was the first moment he had looked at her with the least shadow of personal interest. Until now, she had felt that she was no more to him than an article of furniture, certainly less of a personage than Mother Cary or Yetta or the sick child. She had a feeling that he tolerated her solely as an aid, that she had not even the virtue of being a 'case'; and she told herself in secret disgust that while she did not possess the last virtue, she at least shared the patients' fault, or absurdity; she had to admit that he piqued her interest, and she resented his doing so, blaming him even while disgusted at herself.
But, to-day, with the charming woman's intuition, she knew that he was seeing her with different eyes, as if she had only just now come within his range of vision; yet she knew that his was a look that she had not encountered from other men.
Hitherto, the men she knew had been quite evidently aware of her beauty. She had always accepted, quite calmly, the fact that there was enough of that to be of first consideration, over and beyond anything else that she might possess. This country doctor was the first man who had ever appeared unconscious of the excellence of her femininity; but the same pride which had led her to repel Flood's admiration forbade her making any conscious appeal for Ogilvie's. There was, after all, very little of the coquette in her. The amusement that his obliviousness caused her, or the interest it excited in her, was only increased by his suggestion that she should accompany him on a visit to some mountaineer's cottage; he had offered it as likely to do her good, and not, as she might not unreasonably have expected, that her going would brighten or benefit or honor the mountain girl. It was a new experience, surely, for Rosamund Randall!
On their way down the mountain, which White Rosy knew so well that to guide her would have been entirely superfluous, he talked cheerfully, as always, of many things—of White Rosy herself, of the mountain people, of the view across the valley, of roadside shrubs and flowers. It was the first of their drives together, and the woman they went to see that day became a most important factor in their destinies.
At first she listened to him with scarcely more interest than she would have felt towards the amiable volubility of any of the countrymen; but his talk soon rose above the commonplace. Insensibly he became aware that the girl beside him could understand, could sympathize, respond.
"I know you can't put ropes on the world and try to pull back against its turning round," the doctor said when at a bend of the road they could look down almost upon the roof of a cottage below, a cottage with a sadly neglected garden patch at one side and a tumbled-down chimney. "It's a good deal better to stand behind and push, or to get in front and pull. I'm fond of pulling, myself! But when it comes to the individual instance, it's sometimes more merciful to stand in the way of what we're pleased to call progress. Now that girl down there—daughter of a horse-dealer, the owner of a little store at one of the crossroads in the other valley—it would really have been better if she had never gone to school, never been away from home, never learned of anything beyond what she has. She has been taught enough to make her know how badly off she is. Her father was ambitious, and sent his daughter to board in town and go to the high school. She stayed there two years, and absorbed about as much as she could; then she came back home, but her education had taught her something finer and better than what she came back to. She did just what any restless young thing would do. Inside of a year she eloped with the handsomest rascal in the mountains. And Tobet's a moonshiner!"
"Moonshiner! But I thought the Government had done away with all that sort of thing? I heard a man say, at a place where I was staying before I came here, that there was really no more of it left, in these mountains. The men are intimidated, the stills discovered and broken up. Isn't that so?"
A wry smile from the doctor answered her. "Then there must be some natural springs of it about here," he said. He pointed back over his shoulder with his whip. "See that big pine up there on the left? Well, if an empty bottle be left there, at the foot of the tree, at night, with a fifty-cent piece under it, the bottle will be filled in the morning, and the coin gone. I don't ask any questions, and I suppose she would not answer any; but if she would, Grace Tobet could explain how that sort of thing happens."
Rosamund was not greatly impressed. "Well, there probably is not very much of it," she said, "and they must be quite used to it. I don't suppose it does them much harm, does it?"
The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he said, and his voice was very low, "Grace Tobet has lately lost her baby, her little girl. Joe came in one morning, struck by white lightning, as they say around here. He fell on the baby, and Grace came in from the garden too late. She told Mother Cary that perhaps it was just as well."
Rosamund paled. Presently the doctor went on, "And you see, poor Grace knows better things; she remembers that town and the school, and the little pleasures and gayeties there."
Neither spoke again until White Rosy drew up before the Tobet cottage. The front windows and door were closed, but on the sill of the back door a woman crouched, a woman in faded brown calico, whose face, when she raised it from her arms, showed a dark bruise on one side. She rose and smiled wanly.
"I've brought a lady to see you, Mrs. Tobet," the doctor said. He introduced them as formally as if Grace Tobet had been a duchess. Then he said, "Now you two talk, while I hunt up Joe. Where is he?"
The woman nodded towards the front of the house, and the doctor went indoors. Rosamund and Mrs. Tobet looked at each other.
To the mountain woman this stranger was a being from another sphere, who could not touch her own at any point of intercourse; while Rosamund was too deeply moved by the woman's story, by the livid mark on her temple, by the squalor of her dress and surroundings contrasting so strongly with the intelligence of her face, to find words. It was Mrs. Tobet who first remembered one of those phrases of common coin which are the medium of conversation the world over.
"Stranger about here?" she asked.
"I am staying with Mrs. Cary on the mountain," Rosamund replied; and, as, in a flash, the other woman's face was lit by a smile scarcely less radiant than Mother Cary's own.
"A friend o' Mother Cary's, be ye? I'm glad to see ye! I can't ask you into the front room, but there's a seat in my spring-house, real pleasant and cool; won't ye come try it?"
She led the way through the neglected garden to the little spring-house that was built of the rough stone of the hillsides, roofed over with sod. In front of the door-space was a wooden bench, where Rosamund sat down, while Grace drew a glass of sparkling water from the cool spring inside. It was a delicious draught.
"My baby could jest pull herself up by that bench," Grace Tobet said, as she took the empty glass. "She used to play here while I tended to the milk. Joe's sold the cow now; but that didn't make any difference; there wasn't any reason for keeping her."
The woman's deep-set dark eyes strained out towards the mountain-tops. Rosamund felt herself suddenly brought face to face with some primal force of which she had hitherto known nothing; for the first time in her life she looked upon the agony of bereft mother-love laid bare. She had been with Eleanor through her loss, but Eleanor's grief had seemed to turn her to white stone; this other mother's was a fiercely scorching, consuming flame of anguish before which Rosamund shrank away as from the blast of a furnace. Before she dared to speak, however, Grace Tobet's face was smiling again.
"I know you must like it up there," she said. "I do miss the mountains so, livin' down here in the valley. I don't know what I'd do ef it wasn't for Mother Cary's light. I look up there for it every night of my life, an' it's always there. An' I ain't the only one it talks to, neither."
"It has its message for everyone who sees it, I think," Rosamund agreed. "I know, because I am living under it!"
Grace looked into her eyes, and nodded. "Ain't it so?" she replied. "Why, there's never been a night when I was in trouble that her little lamp hasn't said to me, 'Here I am, honey, an' I know all about it. When it gets so bad you can't stand it, you jest send for me; I'll come!' An' she does come, too!"
There was silence between them for a moment; then Rosamund said, only wondering at herself long afterwards, "It says more than that! It is telling me that there is something in life worth while, that there's courage and goodness in many a dark corner where we'd never think of looking for them; oh, it is teaching me a great deal!"
"Yes," Grace Tobet agreed, and all barriers between them were gone.
They found so much to say that the hour the doctor spent with Joe passed like a moment. When at last he came out of the house and back to the spring for a drink of the pure water, the two women walked together to the buggy; and before she took her place Rosamund, yielding to a sudden impulse of which she knew she would have been incapable a fortnight earlier, turned and clasped both of the older woman's hands, and looked into her face.
"Will you be friends with me?" she asked simply.
Grace Tobet's eyes widened. It seemed long before she spoke. Then, "Yes," she said, and both knew that there was something sealed between them.
"May I bring a friend of mine to see you? She lost her baby boy last year, and—and we are afraid she is going to be—blind. Perhaps you can comfort her, in some way. She needs friends. May I bring her?"
"Pray do," Grace said, in the quaint mountain speech.
When they were slowly climbing the mountain, the doctor turned to Rosamund with a quizzical smile. "You and Grace seemed to progress somewhat!" he said.
For a few moments Rosamund pondered; then she met his look, but there was no smile on her face.
"Do you know," she said, "I have always thought that the people I lived among were the only ones who really knew life, the only ones who felt, or thought, orlived! Lately I seem to have come into a new world."
The doctor's smile faded, and he ran his fingers through his hair. "No," he said, "it's the same old world! Human nature's pretty much the same, wherever you find it. Human experience is bounded by life, and the boundaries are not very wide, either. It's the different combinations that make things interesting, although the basic elements remain the same!"
"Then I almost think there are more basic elements among these people than among—my kind!"
"Oh, no! The difference is that with your kind the surface is rounded and polished, and the points of possible contact therefore fewer; with the other kind the rougher surfaces offer more points of contact, more chances of combinations, that's all. And," he added, "even that's only partly true!"
Afterwards, when she went over in her mind the events of the whole afternoon, she wondered how Flood or Pendleton would have expressed themselves on the subject; but at the moment she was too deeply concerned with her problems to form any mental digression. For a while neither spoke; then she said:
"Reserve seems to have no place here! I find myself saying what I think, describing what I feel, opening my heart to Mother Cary, to Mrs. Tobet, to you—to anyone! I do not know myself!"
The doctor's face changed from one expression to another and another; he was about to speak, but her look was intense, rapt, uplifted, and very serious; he evidently changed his mind. Neither spoke again until they stopped before the little green gate. Then, he passed his hand over his head as if suddenly missing something.
"Lord bless my soul!" he exclaimed. "I believe I left my hat at Grace's!"