Part 9

"How can you insinuate such a thing! Are they open, at the Charities building, in the afternoon?"

Rosamund threw her arms about the White Lady's neck in a half-strangling embrace. "You darling! Yes, we will go there at once! I told them we'd be there this afternoon!"

"Rose!" Eleanor cried. "How could you?"

"Oh, I knew you could never in the world send Tim back to them!"

They forgot Mrs. Hetherbee until they had signed the provisional papers of adoption for the child, and were on their way uptown in Cecilia's new limousine, which she had loaned Rosamund for the afternoon. It was disconcerting to find that Mrs. Hetherbee had no intention of releasing Eleanor; but Cecilia allowed herself to be persuaded to join in the campaign. When at last Cecilia sent for a society reporter who had never before succeeded in penetrating to her, and gave out the interesting item that she was to dine, _en famille_, with Mrs. Hetherbee on the twenty-second, the little lady capitulated, even adding her blessing.

To Cecilia, admiration was an incense always acceptable; Mrs. Hetherbee amused her, and one had to do something to amuse one's self. There was nothing exciting in Rosamund's shopping expeditions. The city might have been deserted, so few of their own friends were in town. Some lingered at their country places, others were in Lenox for the hunting, or still abroad. The effect of New York's social emptiness was to draw more closely together than was possible during the busier season the comparative few who for one reason or another were in town. There was more time for lunching together and going afterwards for a spin toward the Westchester hills or over to one of the Long Island golf courses; and for one of the week-ends, which were torrid with the humidity of late September, they stood out to sea aboard one of the steam yachts that were beginning to bring their owners back to the North River. Sometimes a longing for her mountains would sweep so strongly over Rosamund that she would have a sense of unreality, as if she were in a strange land, among strange people, instead of having just returned to the familiar noise and glitter of New York.

One morning, when they had been shopping about for things that refused to be discovered, and clothes which should be simple enough for the brown house, and Cecilia had refused to go farther until she had had something to eat, they went to their favorite lunching place, now curiously deserted except by people who seemed to have come from another world, who spoke in strange accents and stared about them as if still under the spell of the man with the megaphone. In a corner of the overdecorated room near a window which was still shielded by awning and window boxes from the Avenue's glare, Cecilia sank back, weary, and frankly out of sorts with everything.

"It is a most horrible time of year for shopping," she said, after she had ordered their luncheon with great precision. "There is not a thing left in the shops. I wonder what they do with the clothes that were left over? Does somebody wear them, or do they just throw them out, or what? Or is it because you are hunting for such queer things, Rosamund?"

Rosamund laughed. "But they won't be queer in the mountains, Cecilia," she said.

"I am glad I shall not have to look at them," Mrs. Maxwell replied. "But if you are going to do the peculiar, I suppose you may as well be consistently peculiar all the way along. Only, don't expect me to like it, nor approve of it; and don't think I'm encouraging you in it. I am going about with you because someone has to; I think you are foolish, _very_, and I really do _NOT_ believe even Colonel Randall would have approved of your going off like this!"

Hunger and fatigue had worn on poor Cecilia's nerves; but if she had dreamed of having any other audience than her sister, the scolding would have been subdued. Flood and Pendleton, finishing their luncheon in a distant corner, had seen the two and made their ways towards them. The sharpness of Cecilia's tone seemed to amuse Marshall.

"Dear me, Cecilia," he said, so close behind her that she fairly jumped, while Rosamund smiled, "what's going off?"

Cecilia's eyes looked dangerous, and Flood, laughing, came to the rescue. "Come off with us, won't you?" he asked, so genially that for the first time Rosamund felt some warmth of response to his smile. "We thought of running up Westchester way for the afternoon; won't you come with us?"

His lover's quick perception told him that Rosamund was not averse to the interruption of the _tête-à-tête_, and he looked at her rather than at Cecilia for response. "There's a bit of woods back of Pocantico that always reminds me of those Virginia places where the leaves remain pale green, and the sunlight comes through and touches the ferns; you know!"

His own eloquence rather abashed him; but Rosamund's tired face flushed; his words recalled to her the very scent of the woods; suddenly, there overlooking the Avenue, amid the vibrating undertone of noises, in the place of all others where the wealth of the metropolis and its cosmopolitanism that is unlike any other cosmopolitanism manifests itself most impressively, she was homesick for the mountains and her friends there. She could have cried out with longing; and Flood's offer of a glimpse of woods was to her what the blossom is to the man in a hospital.

"Oh, yes!" she said, leaning towards him with a little air of eagerness. "Oh, yes, do take us! I'd rather get out to the woods than do anything else in the world this afternoon!"

Flood's face reddened deeply with the satisfaction of having scored at last. He and Pendleton drew up chairs and chatted while the two women disposed of their skillfully combined luncheons.

"I say, Flood, make her promise not to desert us again," cried Pendleton.

"It is rather brave of you, Marshall, to talk about desertions!" Cecilia remarked.

Pendleton grinned. "I haven't deserted you, Cecilia," he said. "I retreated! You know I'm afraid of you, Cecilia, when you're in a temper."

Flood was beginning to look distressed, but Rosamund smiled at him. "Let them squabble, Mr. Flood! I want to tell you about Timmy!"

Flood's look brightened. "Ah! The little chap we bumped into! Yes! And do tell me about Ogilvie. Didn't you find him a good fellow?"

She told him of her plans for the child and for her winter; Flood listened, saying little. It put him to shame that she should be doing everything for the two waifs, but her doing so only set her on a higher throne in the heaven of his longing. So intent was he on listening to every word, catching every intonation, watching every fleeting expression, that he was unaware of her not answering his question about Ogilvie.

At last Flood was driving his own car northward out of the city. A hope that fortune would continue further to smile upon him had prompted his asking a third man, who came up to speak to them, to join their party, so that he could release his chauffeur for the afternoon; and it was either an undefined wish to be rid of Cecilia for a few hours, or else a latent sense of gratitude, which prompted Rosamund to take her place beside him, smiling divinely--or so he fondly thought--at him, and roguishly at Cecilia and her attendant swains. Cecilia thoroughly enjoyed having two men to herself, especially as Marshall had been none too faithful since their parting in Virginia, and the situation offered an opportunity for discipline. The third man was benignly unaware of complications, and Rosamund openly laughed at Pendleton's expression of disgust.

They had passed out of the place side by side, while Flood went ahead to see to the car. "What's the matter with its little nose?" Rosamund laughed at Pendleton. "All out of joint?"

"You are perfectly disgusting, Rosamund," he replied in a most matter-of-fact tone, quite as if he were saying the sun was warm or the car was there. "Your manners have become contaminated, and your complexion has suffered, and you are a most disagreeable person. I hope you'll be stout before you are thirty! There!"

Rosamund's laugh was so frankly merry that Cecilia turned on a quick impulse of repression. Rosamund ought to know better than to laugh aloud in the door of a restaurant! But Flood was beside them, the other man might misunderstand a sisterly admonition, and Pendleton's raised eyebrows of disgust quite satisfied her. She allowed herself to be helped into the tonneau, happy in her own situation.

Flood knew better than to attempt small talk; he divined that he could better make himself felt by saying nothing than by saying the wrong thing. They passed swiftly northward out of the city, following upland roads that gave enchanting glimpses of the river and of nearer gardens; after an hour or so he brought his car to slow speed. They were beyond Sleepy Hollow, in woods of new growth, ferny depths, scarcely touched by sunlight, roadsides where pale asters set themselves like stars.

"Isn't it like Virginia?" Flood asked.

Rosamund only nodded; but presently she almost whispered, "I love it! Oh, I love it!"

"You are really going to spend the winter there?" Flood asked.

"Yes," she told him. "It somehow seems like home to me."

He knew that he must move carefully into her thoughts. "I understand how that can be," he said, after a pause. "There was a place in Idaho that used to make me choke every time I passed it; I never knew why, until one day an English fellow happened to say as we rode by, 'Jove, there must be trout in that brook!' Then I knew it made me homesick, because every boy has something in him that makes him want to fish. I had wanted to, worst sort, when I was a youngster--though I was born in an inland city, and never had a chance to. It just made me homesick for the boyhood I ought to have had!"

Rosamund looked at him in amazement. Subtlety and imagination from Flood she had never foreseen; her own imagination was fired at once, and her face flushed a little with shame at what she had thought of him before. Flood looked straight ahead, but he was more keenly aware of the girl beside him than she of him. His heart was pounding as if he were setting out on a race; and indeed he beheld a stake before him as clearly as ever in his life. She answered, and he knew that he had scored; at last he had made her aware of him!

So well had they progressed by the time they had got back to town that he felt he could dare to say, before he left her, "I want to know those Maryland and Virginia woods of yours better, myself."

He wondered afterwards whether he had said too much.

XI

After the Westchester afternoon there were two dinners with Flood as host; and do what she would, she could not altogether escape his daily, almost hourly attentions, without wounding his feelings and her own. He did nothing she might not accept without in the least seeming to bind herself by any obligation; the very intensity of his love urged him to caution. But when he suggested to Cecilia that, since her sister had decided to go down by train, he should perhaps be going as far as Washington on the same day, he would have divined Cecilia better if he had not been so absorbed in his dreams of Rosamund; for Mrs. Maxwell's ambitions had enlarged since early summer, and she did not hesitate to divulge his plan. Rosamund was to have taken the Congressional; instead, she slipped away at nine o'clock; so anxious was she to put distance between herself and Flood, that she would not even wait for Eleanor.

On the way down, she wondered at something in Cecilia's expression when she had made known her intention of running away from Flood's companionship, but there was too much else in her mind to permit of her spending much thought upon those she had just left; there was a warmth in her heart as of the traveler's returning to the land of his affection. She had called New York her home for most of her life, and lived in the mountains three months; yet behind her she left little that she loved, and before her lay smiling fields of imagination; and she found the vision sweet. She planned the placing of the furniture in the little house, made out a list of the things that should go in each room, and wondered what she had forgotten. She was carrying little presents back with her, and she took them out of her bag, opened their boxes to make sure they were quite right, put them back into their wrappings, and with the pencil on her chatelaine wrote messages on each. Only for Ogilvie she had no gift; she had spent more time in hunting something for him than in choosing her dining-room furniture, and had come away with--nothing! There was really nothing in all New York that she could take back to the doctor!

When he met her at the little station in the October darkness of early evening, she looked about for Yetta and Tim.

"I thought you would bring the children to welcome me!" she exclaimed, and was glad that she had it to say.

But the doctor, who was walking beside her with her small hand bag, only said, quietly, "No, you didn't!" and Rosamund's cheeks burned as he helped her to her place behind White Rosy.

He asked her about her days in the city, but she had little to say of them; what interested her now was the new home she was going to make. As they approached it she peered through the darkness at the little brown cottage, and they stopped for a moment to make sure that Mother Cary's light could be seen from there. She told him that Mrs. Reeves was going to be with her, and that she had arranged with the Charities to keep Timmy for a while longer; of the possible adoption she said nothing, having bound Eleanor also to silence, ignoring the question in his eyes. When she spoke of her hope of having Grace live with them, the doctor's face became grave.

"It would be the best thing in the world for Grace, in one way, and perhaps for you; but--I am not thinking of anything specific--but Joe Tobet, if angered, might be a dangerous enemy. If he should resent Grace's defection, and blame it on you----"

Rosamund laughed. "Oh, but I am not in the least afraid of any Joe Tobets, you know!" she said. "What on earth could he do to me?"

"I suppose you mean what could a man of his class do to injure a woman of yours?"

Her face flushed a little. "Well, what if I do?"

"I think you'd find that he is unaware of class distinctions. He certainly would not regard them. He might be vindictive; he might make all sorts of trouble for you, and is sure to for Grace."

"Oh, but that's just the point! I want to protect her from him!"

"It is not your place to!" But then he turned towards her, and she knew he smiled through the darkness. "Play Lady Bountiful, if you will, but do take my advice and let poor Grace work out her own salvation."

She had no answering smile. "Oh," she said, "I thought you were above such phrases."

"Well, I thought so, too; but I'm not above anything when it's a question of danger to--you."

The slight deepening of his tone was enough to make her hold her breath; but she would not let emotion affect her desire to make her intention clear to him.

"I do not believe there is any danger," she said, "but if there is I think I cannot regard it. I--I am not sure I can make you understand--but I want to! It is not just an idle whim that makes me stay here this winter; it is not because I am tired of other things, things I've always had. I have been restless, I confess, but it is not restlessness that has made me decide to stay here. I have no theories of life. I'm afraid I've rather scorned the people who have; but somehow I know that I have something to do here. I cherish the belief that I have. I have never had any special thing to do, before, you see! So even if I knew that there was danger in my living in that little brown house, and having poor Grace with me, I should ignore the danger, because--well, because there is something for me to do here, and I am going to try to do it."

They were down in the valley by this time, Mother Cary's lamp twinkling far above them; there was light enough from the starlit sky for her to see that he had taken off his old cap, worn out of deference to her arrival, and that he ran his fingers backward through his hair, as always when he was troubled. He did not reply until they turned into the shadow of the wooded road and Rosy was climbing the last half mile of their drive.

"God knows, there's work a-plenty for every comer," he said. "It is not for me to tell you to keep out of it. But I hadn't thought of it in that way--for you."

"Perhaps I ought to tell you," she said, "that I can help in another way. I have heard Mother Cary talk about the people farther back in the mountains--the people you see, but that only come out, she says, when the 'summer folks' are gone. Grace has told me about them, too. I--I have some money at my disposal--I know where I can get a good deal. I thought perhaps you might--and Grace--use it in some way--you would know how, wouldn't you?"

The thought of her deception, if such it was, made her hesitate in her speech; but her disappointment was quick and keen that he did not at once accept her suggestion. When at last he spoke, his voice sounded tired, and she did not understand his answer until she had pondered it that night in her own room at Mother Cary's.

"I am afraid," he said, "that even with what you think is a good deal, we should need another miracle of the loaves and fishes."

XII

In the weeks before they moved into the cottage, there were moments when life presented itself to Rosamund in more difficult guise than she had dreamed it ever wore. Hitherto, it had been easy enough for her to take up her abode in one place or another, as fancy led her; in New York, in Georgia, in Europe, there were always people to smooth the way--servants to make everything ready and comfortable, mother or sister or one person or another to set in motion the many wheels of the household clockwork. She had never given a thought to the machinery of life; it had seemed as simple as to breathe the free air. Not even Cecilia's warnings had touched upon the rudimentary difficulties she found she had to meet. Before the furniture arrived, there was the first cleaning of the little house to be done, and no one to do it! The summer people and their servants had departed; the hotels were closed; the mountaineers held themselves haughtily aloof from domestic service. Eleanor would have known, but Mrs. Hetherbee kept her from day to day; and Aunt Sue was taking her own time in leaving Georgia. Grace Tobet and Yetta were always ready to do what they could, but they were as untrained as Rosamund herself in the methods of doing things as she had been used to having them. Yet they were the only ones she could find to help her, and she spent her days in a toil so unaccustomed as to leave her breaking with fatigue. She was ashamed to find how inadequate she was for such elemental things; and disgust at her own limitations, added to aching fatigue of body, left her little able to stand against the opposition she was beginning to encounter from everyone.

Pa Cary, gentlest of souls, became set in disapproval as firmly as the doctor; and some undivulged, disquieting information increased Ogilvie's first distrust of the plan. At last even Mother Cary somewhat shamefacedly agreed with them.

"I don't know as it wouldn't be better to shut up the house and stay right here with us, honey," she said. "Pap keeps tellin' me it ain't safe for ye there alone, jest women and children. I reckon that colored man wouldn't skeer anybody off. There's rough people in the mountings. They're used to folks summerin' here; but Pap says, what with all this talk of the Gov'ment's men bein' around, some are sayin' you know too much about the doin's o' this part of the country."

Rosamund knew the futility of expressing her indignation. She only felt that her die was cast, arrangements irrevocably made, that she must go on. Surely it was innocent enough to spend a winter in the mountains, to keep a waif of a girl out of harm's way, and give healing happiness to a child and a beloved woman. That her heart held other motive only the secret flaming of her cheeks attested. She told herself that the mountain people could not be so foolish as to disbelieve their own senses, and determined to prove herself to them. In time they must come to believe in her honesty and sincerity of purpose, in her friendship for them and her loyalty. It was largely their distrust of the world beyond their close horizon that held them in bondage to their own passions. To enlighten them, to free them, would be well worth while for anyone. She said as much to Ogilvie, who nevertheless continued to shake his head and warn her.

With the departure of the last "foreigner" the mountaineers were more frequently seen. During the summer Rosamund and Yetta had walked miles on the strange, dimly marked paths through the woods, paths as vague and deserted as if trodden only by timid wild feet trembling towards secret drinking places; never had they met another soul upon them. But now, occasionally, they encountered lank women or timid children, who peered with half-frightened eyes out of the depths of slat bonnets, and sometimes said "howdy" in passing. The Allen children no longer ran away at sight of her, and their mother, now well enough to be about the house, watched eagerly for Rosamund's visits; she had hopes of making more friends among the women, through Mrs. Allen and Grace Tobet. Several times, too, Mother Cary had visitors; and a little school in the valley drew children from the hillsides in varying numbers. As she went back and forth between the little brown house and the Carys', the people she passed stared at her curiously; the women, she thought, were not unfriendly, but the men seemed distrustful and surly.

"Why do they look at me in that way?" she asked Grace Tobet, on an afternoon when they were hastening homeward in the twilight. "The men all look at me as if I were some hateful thing--a spy, perhaps, or a--a snake! It hurts me to have them look at me in that way! No one ever did before! I don't deserve it!"

But before Grace could reply a thing happened that hurt Rosamund far more, that shook her to the depths of her pride and courage. Something struck her upon the arm, something that stung and bruised--a stone, thrown from the wood-side bushes with accurate aim. She cried out with physical pain and pain that was also mental, and sprang towards Grace. Someone moved off up the mountain, careless of the crackling undergrowth.

Grace had her arms about Rosamund on the instant, and her answering cry was almost as quick.

"What is it? What ails ye?" she besought the trembling one within her sheltering arms.

Rosamund's breath was coming in little sobbing gasps. "Oh--o--oh! Something--struck me--a stone, I think!"

From the wan spiritless creature that she usually was, Grace flashed into a wild passion of anger. Often before she had reminded Rosamund of a sodden leaf, wind-blown and colorless; now she was a flame, vivid, devouring, like the hot blasts that mow down the mountain forests.

"I'll KILL anyone that harms ye!" she cried; and raising her voice to a shriek called to the woods that hid the thrower of the stone:

"Come out! Come out in the open! Coward! Ye coward! Come out here and let yerself be seen!"

A jeering laugh answered, and Grace would have sprung in pursuit; but Rosamund grasped her.

"No, no!" she cried. "Don't, Grace! Don't! Let him go!"

The mountain woman, panting, fiery, would have broken away from the restraining hands; but Rosamund, inspired, cried:

"You wouldn't leave me here alone?"