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?"