Part 4

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.

VI

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.

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.