Part 12

She and Eleanor were on their feet in an instant, hands grasping hands, startled eyes searching each other's and then turning toward the door. This time it was no stealthy presence which had crept upon the house to peer in at the window. Even while they held each other, there in their safety before the fire, something stumbled across the piazza, fell against the door, cried out, seemed to fall farther, as if at the limit of strength--and was still.

Even the negroes in the kitchen heard the noise, and came running in with scared faces.

Rosamund moved quickly and quietly to the door, silently slid back the bolt, and flung it open.

There was no lurking enemy to surprise. Instead, a huddled form lay, as if crushed, before the doorsill. Between them they managed to lift it and bear it upstairs. All the way up Eleanor, though trembling and very white, carried her full share of the burden, and kept saying over and over to Rosamund:

"It's all right, sweet! Don't be frightened! It's all right, sweet! Don't be frightened!"

And Rosamund was saying over and over, on sobbing breath, "O Grace! Poor Grace! O Grace!"

They laid her on a bed and undressed her. The poor cut feet were soiled with blood and seemed frozen; the forehead beneath the pale strands of hair--those pathetic strands of the woman in whom pride and vanity are dead--was cut and bruised; on her body they found larger bruises. They bathed her, and wrapped her in clean linen, and made her as comfortable as they could. Aunt Sue and Eleanor exchanged looks, and shook their heads. They sent Matt after the doctor. Then Timmy called out, and Eleanor went to him. Aunt Sue said something about more hot water, and descended to the kitchen.

Rosamund knelt beside the bed, and presently Grace fluttered back to a dim consciousness.

"Miss Rose! Miss Rose!" were her first words, uttered in a tone of fright.

"Yes, dear! I am here," said Rosamund, laying one of her cool hands on Grace's forehead.

Grace closed her eyes as if satisfied. "I had to come," she whispered. "It wasn't only for me."

XVI

The doctor promptly, in his most professional manner, turned Rosamund out of the room as soon as he got there. He preferred the old colored woman even to Eleanor as assistant; and he showed no sign of remembering that night in the Allen house when Rosamund had fought beside him, through the heavy hours, for a woman's life. When he closed the door of Grace's room upon her, she was keenly hurt; she could not know that while he worked over poor Grace he was recalling every moment of that earlier scene, viewing it now through the glamor of his later knowledge of her.

Aunt Sue was installed as supreme power in the sick-room. Grace's life hung by a thread for days, and before the doctor could be sure that all would be well the disquieting news of Joe Tobet's arrest came to disturb them still further.

Snow lay deep over everything before Grace came down among them, a pale wraith of a woman, but with a deepened sweetness of expectation in her face. They feared to tell her of Joe's predicament, but knew afterward that it would have been better to do so; for she was to discover it in one of those unforeseen, brutal ways that so often accompany the disasters of the poor. One day a shivering small boy brought a note to the back door, and Grace herself happened to be the one to take it in. It would have been less cruel to give her a coal of living fire.

The folded paper was soiled, as if it had been passed from hand to hand. Its pencilled words were:

"You or she told Youl be got even with Curs you JOE."

Grace waited to speak of it until the doctor came. Then her dignity of manner was a revelation to Rosamund, who had yet to discover that elemental passions can sometimes be as silent as the ages that create them.

Grace looked unfalteringly at Ogilvie as she spoke. "Where have they got Joe?" she asked.

Rosamund exclaimed, and motioned to him not to reply; but he was wiser than she. His answer, as simple and direct as her question, gave no evidence of surprise. "In the city. The jail is stronger there."

"Will they let him out?"

"The evidence may not be enough to hold him. He is awaiting trial."

"Will we know if they let him out?"

"I think so."

Then she gave him the soiled paper, which he read and passed on to Rosamund. "He wrote that," she said. "Miss Rose hadn't ought to be here when he gets out."

She gave Rosamund a look of agonized tenderness, then left them. Presently they heard her walking in her room upstairs, up and down, up and down. Ogilvie shook his head when Rosamund asked him to go up to her.

"She must work it out alone," he said. "She's strong enough."

But Rosamund, uneasy, went to Mother Cary.

"Yes, she's strong enough," the old woman said, when she had heard all about it. "Land! She's got to be! An' she's jest got to fight it out by herself. Don't you try to cross her, honey, nor say anything to ease her, 'cause that ain't the way to treat hurts like that. Joe's her man, an' she'd lay down her life for him, ef 'twas only her own life; an' I reckon even ef she thought 'twould save his soul she couldn't 'a' found stren'th to tell on him. Yet that's what he thinks she done! Eh, me! The contrairy fools men like him can be when they sets out!"

"He's not worth her caring for! He's not worth it!"

"Land, no! I shouldn't think he was! But that ain't got a mite to do with it! Women folks don't care for them they ought to care for, jest because they ought to; nor they don't stop carin' when they ought to stop, neither. An' Joe bein' her man, she can't give a thought to whether he's worth it or not; she's jest got to go on lovin' him."

"But, oh!" the girl cried, "shouldn't you think his distrust would make her loathe him? To know herself a true and faithful wife, and to be distrusted! Oh!"

Mother Cary's eyes were very bright as she looked out of the window across the snowy field to where Pap was cutting down a tree for firewood. She took one of Rosamund's hands in hers before she spoke, and patted it.

"Yes, I reckon distrust must be about one of the hardest things to set down under," she said. "I know somethin' about it, 'cause time was when I distrusted Pap, though 'twas before we was married, o' course. I distrusted Pap's love, like poor Joe distrusts Grace's. I thought he couldn't possibly love me enough to last for ever an' always, me bein' crippled up like I be; an' I thought it wasn't fair to let him try. So I up an' run away. I tried to get to the station an' so back to the city. It was a long ol' walk for me, an' I had to hide all one night in a barn. But betwixt walkin' an' hobblin' an' crawlin' I got to the station at last; an' there was Pap a-waitin' to take me into his arms, which he did then an' there, good an' strong. I ain't never tried to get far from 'em sence!"

Rosamund was afraid to break the thread of the story by a question, and the old woman mused a while before she went on.

"I reckon there's a door o' distrust that most of us have to open and pass through an' shet fast behind us, before we get to the place where's only content, an' love, an' trust. It ain't confined to jest a few; 'pears to me most everybody has to go through it."

Again she paused, while the girl waited.

"When your time comes, honey--an' I hope it will come, 'cause you can't rightly feel the glory tell you know the shadder--when your time comes to feel distrust, or have it felt against you, jest you do as your Ma Cary tells you! You take a firm holt o' your heart and your thoughts, an' don't you let 'em turn all topsy-turvy! You jest take a firm holt on 'em an' wait. WAIT! Don't run away, like I did; 'cause they ain't any more Pap Carys in the world! It ain't everybody you'd find ahead of you at the station, waitin'. You jest remember that it ain't but a door, even though the doorsill does seem dretful wide. It'll shet behind you, when the right time comes, an' you'll find yo'self a-standin' in the land o' content. That's the best dwellin'-place there is, I'm a-tellin' you!"

Rosamund had not been alone with John Ogilvie since the afternoon, three weeks earlier, when Flood's automobile interrupted them; but during the interval she was conscious of an uplift of the soul, a new serenity.

One of the great memories of her life was of an hour of her childhood when for the first time a revelation of something beyond her childish world was vouchsafed to her. She had been awakened at night by a touch of light upon her face; the full moon shone through her window, and its rays had called her from sleep. In her little bare feet she slipped from bed and went toward the casement, drawn by the moon-magic to look upon the beauty her early bedtime had left undiscovered. Great dark masses of cloud floated across the face of the golden disc, black on the side that hung over the shadowy fields and woods, but shining with a marvelous radiance where the moonlight touched them from above.

The child had watched them floating, forming, massing, until they had passed away to the horizon, and left the moon, a floating ship of light, far, far up in the sky, dimming the brilliance of the stars. She had crept back to her little bed with a new sense of things hitherto undreamed of in her childish imaginings, yet never again to be entirely lost--a sense of majesty, of order and immutability, of strange beauty, and of the Greatness that kept watch while she, a little child, safely slumbered.

The hour left its mark upon her entire life; and now once more such an impression of security, of beauty, and perhaps of destiny had been laid upon her in the moment when she had faced his soul through John Ogilvie's eyes.

There was no need to hasten further revelation. Indeed, she did not wish for it. She was more than content to rest for a while in the calm of unspoken assurance. It was enough, as much as the hours would hold, until they could grow used to it and expand to the greater glory that was to come.

Ogilvie, too, had something of the same sense of uplift. He, too, had had his revelation. But, man-like, he would have grasped at once at something more definite, more dear, if he had not, with a lover's keenness of intuition, seen that Rosamund was satisfied to wait. He had no fear, no misconception; he felt, rather, a reverence which forbade his hastening her toward the avowal which would bring the surrender he so ardently desired. The same force of love which made him long for it, made him also too tender to urge it. His coming to the brown cottage every day was too much a matter of custom to be remarked upon. There were Eleanor and Grace, Yetta and Timmy to talk to, as well as Rosamund; and he fell into the way of arriving in time for the mid-day dinner, just as Tim fell into the way of waiting for him with the announcement of what good things Aunt Susan was going to give them to eat. Rosamund teased Ogilvie about it a little, but Eleanor, the ostensible hostess, remembered the ancient person with whom he lived, took pity on him, and kept him as often as she could. Indeed, Eleanor, like Mother Cary, regarded him as an overgrown boy, very much in need of maternal attentions; if she suspected the state of affairs between him and Rosamund, she tactfully gave no sign of it. So Ogilvie came and went as naturally as if he were a member of the household, and his daily sight of Rosamund lent him patience.

But always he was on the watch for signs of the distrust that still muttered against "the stranger woman." Grace's taking refuge in the brown house had affected the mountaineers in two ways. One faction--for so strongly did each side feel that there were, indeed, definite factions--held that Rosamund had only offered her the shelter which any woman would have given to another in such sore need, and declared that all of Grace's friends were bound to Rosamund by the obligation of gratitude. The other faction, and perhaps the larger, held that if Grace had not actually betrayed her husband to the authorities, she had run away from him and so failed in her duty of hiding him, and that Rosamund shared her guilt, if, indeed, she was not directly responsible for it. Mother Cary, whom all adored, came in for a share of blame, for being friends with the guilty ones, and even the doctor, though he was known to be faithfully in sympathy with all his mountain patients, and though no one suspected his integrity toward them, found many faces turned away from him which had hitherto shown only confidence and affection.

That Rosamund was aware of the state of things he could only guess; she gallantly denied any uneasiness, although there were many evidences of the bad feeling against her. They were only trivial things, little annoyances, surly answers, eyes that would not see her; yet they told their story with unmistakable plainness.

It was while things were in this unsettled state that she was surprised by a second visit from Flood and Pendleton; not, this time, in the car, for the roads were impassable. They drove up in the only sleigh that was for hire at the Summit.

Pendleton had hardly got out of his great fur coat before he opened fire; he had evidently come primed.

"What's all this about arrests and moonshiners, Rosamund?" he demanded. "Cecilia's very uneasy. Had a letter from her day before yesterday, saying she'd come herself if she could do any good, and wouldn't I run up and look around a bit. So here we are, both of us, because Flood wouldn't be left behind!"

"That wasn't quite fair of Cecilia," Rosamund said, flushing angrily. Pendleton had promptly got on her nerves with the alacrity that only an old friend is capable of. "I thought I had made it plain that I mean to be let alone."

"Oh, please!" Flood, the peacemaker, besought them; and Rosamund had come to like his helpless "Oh, please!" so well that she smiled at him, though her eyes were still bright with anger.

"I say, Pendleton," he went on, "you're always trying to fight with Miss Randall." Pendleton only grinned at him. "Really, Miss Randall, we haven't come to interfere, not in the very least, I assure you! Mrs. Maxwell did write; but we wanted very much to see you. That is why _I_ came, anyway!"

So far he dared venture, and at the very bathos of his distress Rosamund laughed, and peace reigned again. She told them of Tobet's arrest, and that his wife was now a member of her household. She declared that there remained no possible danger, with Joe out of the way.

Pendleton appealed to Eleanor; and Flood, too, gave her a questioning look. She could not hide her anxiety; but that she was not afraid to admit it gave Flood a feeling of security that he would have missed if she had shown herself, like Rosamund, inclined to deny the danger. For Flood believed that the newspaper accounts of trouble present and to come must be the smoke of some fire; yet he feared only a possible unpleasantness for Rosamund, rather than any actual danger.

Ogilvie came in while they were still discussing it. To-day there were no traces of tell-tale emotion to be hidden. He had seen the sleigh before the house, guessed who were within, and now showed himself unaffectedly glad to see Flood. Rosamund inwardly trembled lest Ogilvie should express himself on the subject of the mountaineers' suspicions; she could not know that a look, passed between himself and Flood, was enough to set Flood on the alert.

She talked feverishly while they were at dinner, and her heart sank when, afterwards, Pendleton announced that he was hit with an idea. He was standing at the window, taking in the white sweeps and stretches of snow, the black trunks of the leafless trees, the dark pyramids of the spruces, the more distant shadow of pines.

"Jove!" he cried. "Just look at those slopes for skiing and tobogganing! It's better than Davos!"

Then he turned from the window, his hands deep in his pockets, and stood in front of Rosamund, his head on one side, tipping backward and forward from heels to toes.

"I say, Rosy," he said, "the best way you can convince us, and poor dear Cecilia, that you are safe up here is to let us stay for a while and see for ourselves!"

Rosamund flushed; he was so wilfully provoking. "Marshall! How can you? You know very well I can't have two men in my house! Why do you want to make me appear so inhospitable?"

Flood, too, looked as if he would like to express himself forcibly. "Oh, I say, Pendleton----" he began.

But Ogilvie, apparently, saw something of good in the suggestion. "That's a capital idea, Mr. Pendleton," he said. "Stay up here a while, and see for yourselves. I'll be very glad to put you up, if Mrs. Reeves will invite us over to dinner once in a while! My landlady isn't much of a chef!"

Flood had turned to him quickly, with a keen look of questioning. "Could you really, old man?" he asked.

"Bully!" Pendleton cried, grinning at Rosamund. "Bet I can beat you in a snow fight, Rose!"

But Rosamund, biting her lip in dismay, would not look at him.

"I can snow-fight!" Tim announced. "I know how to make a snow man, too! My muvver showed me!"

XVII

It ended in their remaining ten gala days. Flood telegraphed for the implements of winter sports, and got them the next day. They opened them on the brow of the hill, and Pendleton, who took it upon himself to be master of ceremonies, "dared" Rosamund to lead off on the skis.

"What for is vey long sticks?" Tim asked. And when he saw Miss Rose walk off on them he shrieked, and hid his face in Eleanor's skirts.

The entire household had come to look on. Matt and Sue stood at the corner of the cottage, he leaning on a snow-shovel to keep him in countenance, Aunt Sue with one apron over her turbaned head and her hands rolled up in another. Grace, as white as the snow itself, sat bundled up in rugs on a sunny corner of the piazza; Ogilvie had seen to that.

Eleanor and Rosamund were in scarlet caps and long blanket coats. When Pendleton had fastened on her skis, Rosamund threw aside the coat, and stood, a figure of white against the vaster white, save for the red of her cap and the warm brightness of her hair and face.

She had known many Alpine winters, and was as much at home on skis and snowshoes as in a ball-room.

She turned away from the interested little group to look across the unbroken slope gleaming in sunlight that kissed it to a rosy glow in places, in others turned its frozen crystals to a myriad sparkling points of light. In the hollows and under the shadow of drifts and pines the snow looked blue. She knew where the fields lay, now under their blanket, patterned by fences in the summer. The road wound off to the left, then down, down----

It was only a step or two to the crest of the hill; the leap would be glorious! She turned a laughing glance over her shoulder; Eleanor, Ogilvie, Flood, were watching her intently.

"I dare you!" Pendleton cried again; and she was off, off in one splendid rush and leap, a leap that carried her out and down, far down.

Again Timmy shrieked, and Yetta fell on her knees. Eleanor's face flushed in admiration, and Pendleton called out,

"Good girl! Never knew you to take a dare!"

It was a phase of her new to the two men who loved her. Ogilvie had seen her in many situations, Flood in more; each believed that he knew the full excellence of her, yet, oddly enough, neither had thought of her as this wild, boyish, graceful creature of the out-of-doors. The sudden discovery of it came as a shock to both; for both were by nature men of the open, notwithstanding the fact of Flood's accumulated millions and Ogilvie's eminence in the laboratory. Now, in their surprise, they stood above, on the edge of the slope, and watched her, each thrilling, each showing his emotion in his own way.

Flood, in his surprise, had called out, then thrust one clenched fist into the other palm with a resounding smack; but in a moment his face took on its expressionless mask--expressionless save for the gleam from the half-closed eyes.

Ogilvie had made no sound; he stood perfectly still, with out-thrust under lip, the corners of his eyes wrinkling to a smile; his face wore something of the indulgent, restrained look of a mother when she sees an adored child perform some wonder, yet refrains from praise of that which is so intimately her own; his first move was to run his fingers through his hair.

The two stood there as if spellbound until Rosamund reached the valley and waved up to them. Then Flood and Ogilvie turned, and met each other's eyes. There was something of a shock; instantly each looked away again, with an unspoken feeling of apology, as if he had looked upon a disclosure that was not meant for him.

Neither analyzed what he had seen; until that moment neither had suspected that the thought of Rosamund might be living in the heart and desire of the other. Instantly each put the suspicion aside, as if it were an unworthy one; yet, through the hours that followed, it persisted in returning again and again. Each man acknowledged that if it were true of himself, it might well be true of his friend; but each tried to assure himself of its impossibility, even while admitting that, if it were true, there could have been nothing of unfairness on the part of the other.

From their first meeting on the mountain-top Flood and Ogilvie had intuitively liked each other. Through a knowledge of varied types of men, they had learned to look beneath the surface; each recognized in the other many qualities to respect. Men are by nature hero-worshipers, from the time that they look with covetous admiration on the policeman's brass buttons and the motorman's thrilling power, through the period when they worship the home league's star pitcher and third-base-man, the captain of their college foot-ball eleven, and on to their political enthusiasms. There is far more of pure hero-worship in the friendships of men than the world gives them credit for. Flood and Ogilvie had met on a mountain-top, and on a height their friendship was to remain. Each saw in the other "a splendid fellow"; neither would have admitted in his friend the least shadow of baseness. So, after the unforeseen disclosure of that look, each man felt generously on his honor to appear unaware of any possible feeling on the part of his friend toward Rosamund, even going so far, in his heart and hopes, as to deny that such might exist.

But while this ardent liking existed between Flood and Ogilvie, there was something far different between each of them and Pendleton.

Pendleton liked Flood. He liked him for the virile strength of his personality, as well as for his possessions; he knew him only in his hours of leisure, and might not have liked him so well, nor at all, if he had known him only when he was engrossed in business. But toward Ogilvie he could not disguise an antagonism which would have shown itself openly if he had been more courageous, and which as it was, appeared in countless small spitefulnesses.

To the man who does nothing there are no creatures less interesting than those whose every moment is taken up with affairs. Between the deliberate idler and the man of absorbing occupation there can be nothing in common; indeed, there often arises more or less antipathy. The business man is apt to retain a hearty disrespect for the idler; to him, the man of leisure must always appear an anomaly, an excrescence, a parasite of civilization. And even when the worker has developed toward the plane of the connoisseur, the collector, the lover of sports and arts, he seldom does more than tolerate the man who has begun where he finds himself only toward the end of an active career.