The Land of Content

by Edith Barnard Delano

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.