Part 6

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, or _lived_! 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!"

VIII

Eleanor was most free to motor across the valley--where now a double magnet drew her--while Mrs. Hetherbee still slumbered in the mornings. Since the first day when Tim's little hand had reached up to touch her cheek, she had yearned towards the boy. Rosamund laughingly accused her of coming to see him instead of herself; Eleanor, in reply, held the mite to her heart, smiling over his curls through gathering tears, at Rosamund.

The summer had done much for Timmy. The pain in his hip was disappearing, and by the end of August there were pink baby curves where the skin had been white and drawn over his little bones. There were times, when he was cuddling against Eleanor or tumbling about in the sun, that he was almost pretty. He was glad enough of ministrations from Rosamund or Mother Cary, but Eleanor was the bright lady of his adoration.

"My White Lady," he called her, taking great pains always to pronounce every consonant of the beloved name, though he usually discarded most of them as not at all necessary to intelligent conversation. With the inquisitiveness of childhood, he soon discovered that she had once had a little boy of her own.

"Where is your little boy?" he asked one day with infantile directness.

"He is gone away," she told him.

But that was not enough. "_Did_ somebody 'dopt your little boy?" he persisted.

Eleanor looked at Rosamund; the same thought was in the minds of both. How many times had little Tim been offered for inspection to would-be adopters, and refused? How much of it had he understood? What had it all meant, to his poor little lonely heart? Eleanor drew him more closely to her.

"W'y don't you tell Timmy? Did somebody 'dopt your little boy?"

She gave him the simplest answer. "Yes, dear," she said.

Timmy was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, "I guess he must have been a _pretty_ little boy!"

Neither Eleanor nor Rosamund could speak, but Tim was oblivious of their emotion. A new idea, an entrancing one, had presented itself. He climbed upon Eleanor's lap, took her face between his palms, and said, smiling divinely,

"If I was a great big man, White Lady, _I_ would 'dopt you!"

It seemed to Rosamund that Eleanor, while reaching out with all the ardor of her loneliness, was being daily wrung by seeing him; she spoke of it to Ogilvie, after Eleanor herself had denied it. But he was inclined to agree with Mrs. Reeves that it could not harm her.

"Women find comfort in strange things," he said. "Let her have her own way."

Rosamund sighed. "It does not seem to me that her summer here has helped her at all," she said. "She is more a 'White Lady' than ever. I wish you would tell me what you think of her, Doctor Ogilvie!"

"I cannot tell you any more than I have," he replied. "There is no incurable fault of vision, no defect of the eye itself. If I could prescribe a large dose of happiness for her, she would get well. As it is--nerves have very elusive freaks sometimes, you know!"

"Then she will--she will be--oh! Don't say that! Not my Eleanor!"

"Now you are taking too much for granted. I do _not_ say it. Her eyes are no worse than when she came here. If she were strong they would recover; if she were happy she would quickly become strong! As it is--who can say?"

"Oh, how helpless you all are!" she cried.

He ran his fingers through his hair--his cap was apt to be anywhere but on his head. "Helpless! Good Lord, yes!"

As the weeks passed, they had become very good friends, spending many hours together, driving about the countryside as he made his rounds. Knowing Eleanor to be there in the mornings, Ogilvie fell into the way of making Mother Cary's his first house of visitation in the afternoon. They were always waiting for him at the gate--the now inseparable three; and if Rosamund left all show of eager greeting to Yetta and little Tim, the doctor seemed never to notice the omission. It was enough to find her there.

Hitherto, John Ogilvie had passed his life, first, in study, and later in investigation and service. Women had appeared as people who cooked his meals, or as nurses trained to careful obedience, or as those who, more or less ill, were apt to be more or less querulous. There were one or two who had seemed to possess different characteristics, especially here in the mountains. There was Mother Cary, who had helped him on more than one occasion when more trained assistance, if not assistance more experienced, was not to be had; he warmly loved Mother Cary, whose indulgent affection persisted in regarding him as a boy--a clever boy, to be sure, but not by any means one who had outgrown the need of maternal attention. And there were Grace Tobet, and a few other of the mountaineers' wives, who stood out from the mass of women as he had known them.

Miss Randall was of still another sort, already beginning to inspire him with emotions new and different. But he was too far past the introspective phase that is a part of early youth to analyze his emotions. He was less concerned with the phenomenon of his own heart throbs than with the happily recurring hours of their being together, and the increasingly dreary intervals when his duties carried him away from her.

He knew very well to what world she belonged. He had had enough experience of it among his patients, the overfed, overwrought women who came to Bluemont in the summer to be near him--near the young doctor of high scientific attainments, who remained in this out-of-the-way place of his own choice, "Who can be just as disagreeable and firm, my dear, as if his sign hung two doors from Fifth Avenue, and whose fees are only one-fifth as high as Dr. Blake's," as one of them wrote home. Even if she had not come into the valley as one of Flood's guests, he would have known of what class she was a part. Mrs. Hetherbee, in her overflowing complaisance after Rosamund's call, had poured out to his bored and impatient ears, in a torrent that was not to be stemmed, the facts of the girl's inheritance and position.

"Witherspoon Randall's only daughter! He made all his money, millions, they say, in Georgia pine--only had to go out on the land he had inherited and cut down trees! Think of it! And left every penny to this girl, nothing to the mother, nothing to the mother's daughter by her first marriage, nothing to charity--everything, everything to this girl! And you know she is just the smartest of the smart, in town; thanks to her sister's marriage, in the very heart of the most exclusive----"

So he had, in spite of himself, been told what she was, given some idea of what she possessed; yet so wholly did he discard as immaterial the material things, and measure her only by the weight of personality, that Rosamund was deceived into thinking that he knew nothing about her.

The friends she made while at Mother Cary's had not questioned her; she had dropped among them from an automobile, and later her sister had sent her some clothes of deceptive simplicity. Their seeming to accept her as she tried to appear deceived her into believing that they were not curious; as a matter of fact their code of good manners forbade their showing curiosity; nothing could prevent their having it. She believed that Ogilvie, also, had been deceived in like manner. During their drives together she carefully avoided any reference to her possessions; it amused her to imagine how surprised he would be when he knew.

Yet she found herself becoming more and more contented that he did not know. In her own world she had been unable to ignore her wealth; she could read knowledge of it on every face, deference to it in every courtesy, and the very fact that it had set her apart was largely the cause of her old discontent. She would not voluntarily have discarded it, but she would have welcomed an escape from all but its agreeable consequences.

The other men she had known might have been able to command riches larger than her own, or possessed that which weighed equally in the social scales; yet they remained conscious of what her very name signified, and invariably showed it. Even Mr. Flood, or so she believed, although he could have bought all she owned without missing what it cost him, showed her the usual deference.

Therefore, there was something fresh and unaccustomed in her growing friendship with Ogilvie. It amused and piqued her; in her ignorance of his real state of mind it even touched her. She found herself eager to be real with him, to show him depths of heart and mind which she herself had scarcely suspected. Other men saw only the social glaze which hid her real self and reflected themselves; Ogilvie had a way of looking at her which pierced the surface, although, because of his obvious sincerity, it caused her no resentment. So, during the glowing summer, while the hot noons ripened the corn in the valley and the cold nights left early beacons of flame in the young maples on the mountains, they grew to know each other; she serene in her belief in his unsuspecting simplicity, he ignoring in her what other men would so greatly have valued. As far as the things of the world affected them, they might, on their drives, have been alone in a deserted land, or at least in one peopled only by aborigines.

For always he had as an objective point some mountain cottage where his aid was needed. At first she was inclined to be curious about the mountaineers; theoretically they ought to have been interesting, quaint, amusing. But in reality she scarcely saw them; when she did, she found nothing appealing in their lank figures, and faces hidden in the depths of slat bonnets or under large straw hats pulled down over their eyes.

"They all seem to avoid me," she told Ogilvie one day when he had come out of a house with a tiny child in his arms, which had slid down and run away at sight of her. "Do they think I'm the bogey-man or the plague?"

He laughed aloud at her petulance. "They don't stop to think," he said. "They are as timid as chipmunks, or as any other hunted woodland creatures."

"Oh, hunted!" she cried, as if to repudiate what he implied. "I've heard you talk like that before! Do you still believe in that nonsense about the secret stills and the Government spies, and all that?"

"Yes, I believe in it."

"I have been here eight weeks, and I have not heard another soul speak of it!"

"How many of the 'natives,' as you call them, have you met?"

She pursed her lips. "I don't believe there are many to see!"

"Allow me to remind you again of my feeble simile of the chipmunks!" he laughed. "And believe me, it is more apt than you think. For instance, have you seen the little Allen children?"

"What, the queer little animals that bend their arms over their eyes when you meet them, and live in that shanty back of Father Cary's pasture?"

He smiled at her description. "Precisely! The Carys' nearest neighbors, scarcely a mile away. And have you seen their mother?"

She seemed to be trying to remember.

"Come now," he teased, "don't tell me you don't believe they have a mother! The eldest child is not yet six, and the youngest of the five is two months old!"

She laughed and gave in. "No, I have not seen the mother, nor the father, nor the aunts, nor any of the rest of the family! But that is only one instance."

"There are many; you really may take my word for it, if it interests you to. But if you were to be here after the summer people go, then you'd see. They come out into the open then."

She still looked skeptical, and he pointed up the mountain. "Do you see that path?" he asked.

"No. Where?"

He laughed. "Caught, Miss Randall! A path is there, invisible though it is to you--to us. All through these woods there are paths, often little more than trails, well known to the mountaineers and often used. Sometimes they run for a mile or more beside the road, screened by the undergrowth; sometimes they keep higher up, or cross where a road could not, or follow the courses of the streams; but they are there. It is only one of the evidences of the mountaineers' secretiveness."

"Your simile was a good one! What animals they are!"

"So are we all."

"Oh, of course, you are the doctor, saying that! But you could scarcely class these creatures with ourselves!"