Part 13

Yet Flood found Marshall amusing and likable enough. He was perfectly aware of Pendleton's qualities of the sycophant, the flatterer, the gatherer of crumbs from the rich man's table. He thought of them rather pityingly as a natural outgrowth of the life of that class in which Pendleton was so much at his ease, and regarded them leniently because he believed that there was also to be found in that class so much that was desirable, so much that he himself coveted. He was willing to accept its evil with its good, its defects with its excellence; if it had brought forth a Pendleton, it had also borne the perfect flower that was Rosamund.

But to Ogilvie Pendleton was altogether an abomination; he could see no good in him; his very palms itched to smite him!

They were fortunate in their weather. It seemed as if nature, satisfied with her latest marvel, were holding her breath. Every day of their ten was brilliantly clear and cold and windless. Their voices rang far across the white silence of valley and mountain in that hushed atmosphere. The frozen snow crunched even under Timmy's little trudging feet; and the mountain people apparently felt that it was useless to lurk among the spruces when every step they took told where they would be hidden. They came from far and wide to stare at the strange antics of the "foreigners," and grinned at Rosamund, more friendly than they had ever been before.

Pap drove Mother Cary across the valley to look on at the sports; Rosamund called her attention to the new friendliness of the other spectators. The old woman smiled rather grimly. "Land! No wonder!" she said. "Nobody could suspicion those young fellers were spies, cuttin' up sech capers as them, sliding down hill head foremost on their stummicks, an' prancin' around on slappers. I never saw such goin's on, myself--and John Ogilvie one of 'em!"

They laughingly compared notes afterward, and decided that Mother Cary had been quite scandalized by their "capers;" Ogilvie admitted that she had been very severe toward him the day after her drive across the valley.

But for themselves they were glorious hours. Rosamund threw aside the burden of care that had enveloped her during the past weeks, and became as merry as a child, more gay and joyous, than Ogilvie had ever seen her. She skimmed down the slopes on her toboggan with Tim holding on behind her, his curls blowing out in the onrush of their swift descent; and she would carry him back up the hill again, "pick-a-back," to show him how strong a horse she was. She could outdistance them all on skis, but Ogilvie proved himself the best on snowshoes--thanks to his boyhood in northern Vermont, although Flood, who had faced many a blizzard on the plains, was not far behind him.

On the last day of the joyful ten Flood had gone with Rosamund on snowshoes across the valley to carry something to Mrs. Allen. Snow had fallen during the night, and every bough of pine and spruce and fir had its burden of downy white. The two paused, when they had come past Father Cary's wood-lot, to look down upon the valley.

They stood for a moment or so without speech. Flood looked from the snow-covered fields to the face beside him, as if to compare one loveliness with another; then he drew a deep breath.

"Well," he said, as they went on again, "I'm sorry to be leaving all this!"

For a moment she did not reply; she looked up at him once or twice, and he divined that she had something to say which she did not quite dare to put into words. They had become very good friends, thanks to the freedom of the out-of-door life of the past days. He laughed.

"Go on, please! Don't mind saying it! I haven't any feelings!"

"Oh," she protested, laughing, "I was not dreaming of hurting your feelings! I was only thinking how--how curious it is that you should--should care so much for what you are going back to."

But he did, nevertheless, show himself a little hurt at that. "Why shouldn't I like it?" he asked. "Do I seem such a savage?"

"Oh, precisely not!" Her mood was kind. "You are not a savage. You are very nice--I'm very glad I've found out how nice you are. But that's just what makes me wonder, you see, how you can like it!"

"Like being nice?"

"No--of course not! Like what you're going back to. New York. Cecilia! Oh--all of that--you know what I mean, don't you?"

"Why," he said, a little puzzled, "I'm afraid I don't see anything wrong with it--with your 'all of that!' Do you think I ought to?"

"Oh, it isn't so much what is wrong with it. It's only that it doesn't satisfy--does it? It is chaff--husks--a bubble--it has no substance."

He considered it for a moment. Then he submitted: "Has this?"

"Well, at least this has substance. It isn't empty."

"Isn't it?" he asked. "Do you know, I should just have reversed that opinion. I should have said there was a good deal more in the life you've deserted this winter than in the life you're choosing to live here!"

She laughed. "Perhaps I've reverted! Or perhaps we are in different phases of evolution! You have reached your--we'll call it your New York--and I have passed through it and come on to something better. Or if that sounds impolite we'll say that I have reached it and tumbled down again!"

"Oh, there's no impoliteness in the truth! You are generations, infinite ages, ahead of me!"

She made no answer to his humility, and for a while neither spoke again. Their talk was, of necessity, largely broken by intervals when all their attention was needed for the task in hand. The light snow made the going uncertain; they were taking the shorter way home, along the upper slopes, instead of crossing the valley, and they had, more or less, alternately to feel their way and to rush swiftly on across possible dangers.

At the crest of the last slope Rosamund paused, and they turned to look back at the way they had come. Flood watched her with eyes of devotion, as she stood there with her head thrown a little upwards, breathing deeply, her face warm with her delight in the beauty of the scene before her.

"How lovely it is!" she said, in the vibrating tone that always thrilled him.

"Yes, it is lovely," he said, "but only for a time. It is too much like the real thing!"

"Isn't it the real thing?" she asked, surprised.

He laughed, and shook himself a little. "I mean the real thing that I used to know, the drifts on the plains, sleet in the face, the numbness in your feet that tells you they're frozen--that's the real thing! Believe me!"

She looked up at him, interested. "And you have really felt that?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "I've felt it--but it's a long time ago. I'm glad it is, too. A very little of it satisfies. Nowadays my real thing is--well, what you called a while ago, New York, though that's only a manner of speaking, you know."

"Yes, I know. We've talked back in a circle! I am still wondering why you like it as you do!"

They had crossed their last hummock, and had come to the place not far from the brown house where Matt now spread rugs and cushions every morning; but no one was there to greet them. Far down the long slope of white they could see Eleanor and Tim, moving slowly over the crust; Yetta was already at home on snowshoes, and her crimson-clad figure was skimming over the snow-covered fields. Apparently she was playing a game of ball with Pendleton--something they had invented for themselves; Ogilvie, also on snowshoes, was with them.

Rosamund sent a clear Valkyrie call down to them. They all looked up, and waved. Ogilvie moved closer to Pendleton's side, and the game of ball went on.

Rosamund threw herself down on one of the blankets, and Flood took his place beside her. She still wore her snowshoes, and sat with her knees drawn up, her arms clasped about them, boy fashion. She was watching the others at their game down below, but Flood looked no farther than her face.

Suddenly she became intensely aware of the man beside her; she could not tell how the change came, or whether there were a change at all, except in her intense consciousness of him. She did not turn to look at him; she did not so much as tremble from her position; but slowly, as if the blood were retreating to her heart, her face grew white.

Flood saw the change in her face, and knew that he was the cause of it. His heart beat triumphantly faster.

"Why did you say that you wonder at my liking--New York?" he asked.

She tried, vainly, to speak.

"You know what it represents, to me. It's something better than I ever had before. It's friends, it's music, and art, and the whirl on the Avenue. It is 'up and on'--and--Rosamund, don't you know what it is above all else? It is you."

He had meant to say a great deal, when this moment should have arrived; he had often wondered just how it would come, when he should find courage where they two should be. He had tried to teach himself the words he thought would be most sure to move her, words that would best disclose the fullness of his faith and his desire; yet now that the moment for speaking was upon him he reverted to the man that was his inmost self, forgetting his practiced phrases, not speaking the words he had rehearsed, but telling his longing in short, rushing sentences of pleading, voicing to her silence the cry of the strong soul to its chosen mate, the appeal, even the demand, of the man who had won a high place to the woman who could lead him up to even greater altitudes of the spirit. He pleaded as a man who has much to offer, but who is yet begging for the crowning gift. Unconsciously he disclosed his own greatness of soul, while making her understand that he held her supreme, beyond all that was beautiful, above all that was high.

Before he was done speaking, her head had bent itself until her face was on her knees. Never had she felt herself so unworthy; never had her humility been so great. Yet when he paused, she did not answer; even for his last strong appeal she had no word. He had shown her the depths of his heart, and hers was shaken to its own depths. But yield she could not, turn to him she could not. It was as if two great elemental forces met, and clashed, and refused to combine. She could not altogether repudiate his appeal, yet she must be true to the stronger one which held possession of her heart.

As he watched her in a silence that seemed still to vibrate with the strength of his words, she raised her head to look at the figures now coming toward them up the long slope. Suddenly she saw that Ogilvie stopped short, and, apparently at some word from Pendleton, looked up toward herself and Flood. He took a hesitating step or two, came on at a wave from Pendleton; then he turned away, leaving the others to return without him.

Some silent message had come up the mountain to her; Rosamund had found her answer to poor Flood. The others were out of sight for the moment behind a low growth of pine; only Ogilvie was visible as he made his way along the other ridge, taking his steps heavily, seeming suddenly to have become weary.

Rosamund watched him for a moment; then she turned her white face, pitiful with the knowledge of the hurt that she must give him, toward Flood. He must have read something there, for, startled, he bent a little closer; then, following her look, he glanced from her to Ogilvie, and back again. Her eyes did not waver from him, and when they had to answer the question in his, the paleness left her face, and a great wave of color flooded it. He held his breath, and his unspoken question must have become imperative; for she nodded, her parted lips refusing to form words. Then, withdrawing her look, she hid her face in her arms.

Neither of them ever realized that she spoke no word at all. Her reply had been too well-defined to need speech. Flood understood.

XVIII

The morning after the departure of Flood and Pendleton, Eleanor and Rosamund went out to the veranda for their usual after-breakfast "breath of air," and stood arm in arm, looking over the long slopes which had been the theater of their wonderful ten days' sport. Apparently the same thought came to them simultaneously. They looked at each other and smiled.

"Did you ever see any place so empty?" Eleanor asked.

Rosamund shook her head. "I never did," she said. "Isn't it absurd?"

"It's like being in a room when the clock stops!" said Eleanor, and Rosamund laughed.

"Isn't it curious how much of the city feeling those two brought with them? Before they came I felt as if New York were miles--oh, continents--away. This place was home, the center of the universe. Now--well, now this is 'way off in the country'!"

Eleanor laughed understandingly. "I know! And yet not once while they were here did we do anything we should have done in town! No one so much as mentioned bridge!"

"It must have been Marshall's presence," said Rosamund. "Certainly Mr. Flood never suggests town to me!" She flushed, remembering what their last talk of New York had led to. He had taken it so well, proved himself so completely the master of his emotions, shown her so gently that he held her blameless and still supreme, that she had never liked him so much as after having shown him how little she liked him!

Eleanor looked at her curiously, for she suspected something of what had passed the day before; but she had cause to look at her wonderingly more and more, in the days that followed, days which, for Rosamund, soon became filled with mixed emotions.

"I want to see my doctor," Tim said at dinner one day.

The three women looked at one another as if it had just occurred to them that Ogilvie had not, indeed, been to the brown cottage that day, nor the day before, nor the one before that. Nearly a week in fact, had passed since the departure of the two men, and not once in that time had White Rosy stopped before the house.

"Why, he has not been here since Mr. Flood left! He must be ill," said Eleanor, trying to speak as if the idea had just occurred to her.

"No, he ain't," said Yetta, always willing to give information. "I saw him driving around by the other road yesterday. He ain't sick."

"Why, it's five days since he was here," Grace said. "He must 'a' forgot you, Timmy!"

Tim's lip began to tremble, and he turned to the ever ready Eleanor to be comforted.

It had been a week of restlessness for Rosamund. The visit of Flood and Pendleton had recalled enough of the old familiar atmosphere of cities to make the solitude of the mountains seem strange. She had been so sure that the new life was the best one! Now she was disgusted with herself to find that something of the old restlessness had returned. She told herself, with increasing determination, as the empty days wore on, that she had become dissatisfied with the pleasant monotony of the new life because a breath of the old one had blown toward her. For her admission to Flood, drawn from her unawares, as it had been, even before Ogilvie himself had demanded it, gave her a self-consciousness which was hard to bear. But apparently her secret was to remain with Flood. Ogilvie did not come to claim it. It had long become his habit to stop at the cottage whenever he passed there. For the first few days of his absence, she was only sorry that he did not find time to come. She could have no doubts of him. For weeks she had been happily sure that he was only waiting for a sign from her to put into words what his eyes and manner were always saying. To have doubted him would have been to doubt the foundations of the world.

But gradually she became anxious at his prolonged absence. All sorts of womanish fears began to crowd upon her. Although for a long time she had heard no mutterings of trouble from among the mountaineers, yet now she imagined all sorts of horrors, with Ogilvie as their victim. When Mother Cary told her, one day, that the doctor certainly must be sick, her fears went beyond bounds. She knew herself to be his own, she believed him to be hers; courageously she ignored her maidenly hesitancies, and went forth to meet him.

All night she had lain awake nerving herself to seek him out; but when morning brought the hour of their meeting she forgot everything save her anxiety for him. She had convinced herself that he was in trouble, and staying away so that no shadow of it should fall on her.

She knew which way White Rosy would bring him. It was snowing, but she put on her warm red coat and cap, and went quietly out of the house, walking down the road toward the Summit, to meet his sleigh on its way to the valley. She waved to him when he came in sight, but apparently he did not see her; as he drew nearer she waved again, and called.

He answered, for such a greeting had passed between them many times before, and was not to be ignored. But when the sleigh stopped beside her she cried out at the drawn whiteness of his face.

"Oh!" she cried, her hand over her heart, "you are ill!"

But he managed to smile, and threw aside his worn old fur rug with an inviting gesture. "Ill? Not a bit of it! Let me give you a lift to the cottage!"

Mechanically she took her place beside him, and he urged White Rosy on. She looked at him with anxious eyes and parted lips, feeling all the while as if she were in some bewildered dream, where the real was unreal, where everything was distorted--like itself, yet strangely unlike.

Always before they had talked as fancy led them, or were comfortably silent; now he was so unlike himself as to manufacture small-talk, commonplaces, nothings. There was no reference to his not having been to the cottage, no hint of having missed her, no least word, in fact, of anything personal between them. He talked on, almost feverishly, without looking at her, while she sat there numbly, dazed at the change in him, but wounded far beyond other thought or speculation.

He stopped the sleigh in front of the brown house, and she got down without looking at him; and still without speaking she went inside. He had not so much as suggested her driving on with him, as she had done half a hundred times before!

Grace, in a deep basket chair, was smilingly watching the pretty group before the fire--Eleanor, teaching the two children how to pop corn, with Tim on her knee vigorously shaking the wire basket. They looked up as Rosamund entered, and at sight of the girl's face Eleanor put Timmy quickly down from her lap and jumped up, with a little anxious cry.

But Rosamund blindly, unheeding, went past them and up to her own room. She closed the door and locked it, and made some incoherent answer to Eleanor's entreaties. She never knew how long she sat there, silent, motionless, without removing her hat or coat, dumbly trying to control the mingled shame and longing that surged through her. Vainly she searched through her memory for an explanation; she had done nothing to offend him, no least thing that should estrange him. Even now she could not believe that he would wantonly hurt her; her faith in their love had rooted itself too deep in her heart to be easily disturbed.

At last she called upon her pride for help, only to find that pride itself lay sorely wounded. But it was that which enabled her at last to lay aside hat and coat, to bathe her face and rearrange her hair, even to dress herself in her most becoming gown--that sure refuge of a suffering woman!--and go downstairs to meet Eleanor's questioning, anxious eyes. It was not until Ogilvie came back later in the day, for a hasty call at an hour when he knew the entire household would be assembled, that anger came, mercifully, to her relief. She saw that he wished to make it seem as if he had always come at that hour, as if his visits were habitually that far apart; she understood that he was determined to make it impossible for her to ask wherein he suspected her of offense. He meant to give her no opportunity to explain or demand explanation; instead, he was taking this way of turning back the hands of the clock. He was deliberately withdrawing from their intimacy, putting their friendship back upon a plane of formality. It would seem as if he were trying to show her that his feelings had changed. Yet she had faced her own love too frankly, in her heart's secret communings, to be able to deny it now. She could only, in an agony of shame, tell herself at last that she had been deceived in his.

The days that followed were full of misery for her. All her life she had been the center of a little world of love and admiration. For the first time some one had turned from her; the pain of it was not lessened because the one who spurned her had come to hold first place in her heart. Yet such was her attitude that not even Eleanor dared say a word which might touch upon the subject ever so remotely. Eleanor did, indeed, watch her with yearning eyes, and Rosamund, sensitive in her suffering, believed that she talked of her with Grace and Mother Cary; but it was only by their avoidance of Ogilvie's name that they showed any suspicion of what was in her heart. Had Eleanor dared to speak, Rosamund would not have been able to silence her; for she needed every atom of her strength to appear unconscious and natural whenever Ogilvie came. She would not avoid him. She could only be feverishly gay before him; and Eleanor noticed how much more grimly his face set itself after each visit.

The weeks passed, quickly for the rest of the household, slowly enough for Rosamund. She took long walks with Yetta; as Grace grew in strength she went with them, taking them to call on her mountain friends, who had shown themselves more friendly toward Rosamund since they had watched her at play--and since the arrest of Joe Tobet, always a disturbing personality. They came to see Grace at the brown house, where Rosamund made them feel at home, and gave them coffee and cake and talked to them about their children, and loaned them patterns, which she bought for the purpose, and which Eleanor showed them how to use. Rosamund's greatest comfort lay in the fact that she was coming to be of use to them, thus fulfilling the desire which had been her excuse for remaining among them.

For other exercise she had no desire; she could not put on snowshoes or skis without recalling a time which she was trying to forget; besides, she had no heart for play. And soon even the walks became not unalloyed pleasure. Although no further warnings had come, either to herself or Grace, and although the mountain people continued to show themselves more and more friendly, Rosamund was conscious of a feeling of uneasiness, a dread of ominous, unseen horrors hovering near, of stealthy presences following her, of eyes peering at her from the leafless undergrowth or through the branches of the scrub pine. She tried to persuade herself that it was all a part of the foolish imaginings of a timid woman, yet had to admit that she had never been timid before; gradually the feeling of uneasiness became almost unbearable, in her increasing nervousness.

She welcomed the relief of Christmas, although it was Eleanor who went to New York for their Christmas shopping. Rosamund resolved with herself that she would not leave the Summit until she had overcome the vague fear that was now present with her whenever she left the house. She would conquer that, or find out the reason for it, even though the relations between herself and Ogilvie were at an end forever. So she sent Eleanor in her place, reigning alone for two weeks in the house which had come to seem more Eleanor's than her own.

Eleanor returned on Christmas eve, all prepared to be a most munificent Santa Claus. It was only after the tree was trimmed, and they had filled bulging stockings for everybody--including the Carys and John Ogilvie--that she had a moment alone with Rosamund.