"Darling Rookie," she said, so softly that the sound of it could not have got half way up the stairs, "what's it all about?"

"About you, Nan," he answered, and denied himself the darling Nan he had for her. "And being in love. And Dick's wanting you."

"It's more than that," said Nan wistfully. "He's been at you somehow. He's dug ditches across your dear forehead and down your cheeks. What d'he say, Rookie? What d'you say to him?"

Raven shook his head. He had no idea of inviting her into the psycho-analytic ward of Dick's mind.

"Nan," he said, "the boy's unhappy. He's in love with you. No doubt about it."

Nan, on her part, had nothing to say to this.

"What made you change your dress?" asked Raven. "You give me a funny feeling, as if you'd put the little Nan to bed and come down here to say you're going, in a minute, and never coming back."

"I am going," said Nan, "only not in a minute. Charlotte says Jerry shall take me to the early train."

"Now, by George!" said Raven, so loudly she put her finger to her lip, "if that's what Dick's done, he shall go himself, and know the reason, too. Spoil my visit with you, break it all up? Why, I never had a visit from you before."

"It's broken," said Nan. "You couldn't put it together again." The red had come into her cheeks and her eyes showed a surface glitter he did not know. "I'm going to leave you to Tenney—and Tira—and your destiny—and Old Crow."

"Is this a part of your scheme?" asked Raven roughly. He was curiously dashed, almost shamed by her repudiating him. "You're as bad as Dick. He's been bringing all his psychopathic patter to bear on me, and you're deserting me. Oh, come! Let's be safe and sane, like the Fourth."

"So we will be," said Nan. She was retreating toward the door. There were simple natural things she wanted at that moment. She wanted to go to him, put her arms about him, mother or child arms, as he might wish, and bid him a good-by that would wrap him about like a cloak while they were absent one from the other. He should have her lips as he had her heart. Nan was an adventurer on the high seas of life. She cared very little whether her boat rode the wave or sank, so it could unload the gold and gems it carried on the sand of the world she loved. Rookie was the home of her heart. The gold was all for him. But if he did not want it—and meantime she was at the door. "Don't get up," she said, "to see me off. If you do, he will, too, and there'll be more fireworks. No, no, Rookie. Don't look like that. I'm not hateful about him, really, only he has spoiled my fun."

"Why you should go," said Raven, advancing; "why you should leave this house just because he's come!"

"No fun!" said Nan. "Do you see us, the three of us, sitting down to meals together? No, Rookie. Can't be done. Good night."

Here she did turn definitely and went up the stairs, and Raven presently followed. In his room he stood for a moment thinking, not of Dick, who was troublesome, in an irritating way incident to biting young cubs just aware of their teeth, but of the challenge that was Nan. Here she was, all beauty, all wisdom, in the natal gifts of her, telling him, with every breath, she loved him and only him. And yet, his knowledge of life was quick to answer, it was the accretion of long hungers, the sum of all desires since she was little and consigned to Aunt Anne's delicate frigidities for nurture and, as the event proved, for penury. She had no conception of a love as irresistible as hers was now abounding. In a year or two, youth would meet her on the road of youth, and they would kiss and old Rookie would become the dim duty of remembered custom. And as he thought these things, his overwhelming revolt against earth and its cruelty came over him, and he stood there gripping his hands into their palms, again at open war with life. It was a question without an answer, a hunger unfed, a promise broken. Eternal life was the soporific distilled by man, in his pathetic cunning, to dull the anguish of anticipated death. Standing there in the silence, he felt the waves of loneliness going over him, and thought of Nan in her chamber across the hall, angelic in her compassion, her arms ready for him as a mother is ready for her child. The moonlight made arabesques on the walls, and he walked to the window with an instinctive craving for the open. He stood gripping the casing with both hands and looking up over the hillside where also the light lay revealingly. Up there was the hut where Tira might be now if Tenney had not wounded himself, fleeing in her turn from earthly cruelty. Up there Old Crow had lived in his own revolt against earth cruelty. And, with the thought, Old Crow seemed to be, not on the hillside, but beside him, reading to him the testimony of the mottled book, but more insistently, in a clearer voice. If it could be so, if God had intention, not only toward his own colossal inventiveness, but as touching the well-being of man—yes, and of the other creatures, too, the pathetically oppressing and oppressed—if He had given man the problem with no solution indicated, to work it out as he had worked out pottery and fabrics, and light and talking over space—always in conformity to law—it was stupendous. No matter how many million men went to the building of the safeguarding reefs, no matter through what blood and tears the garden of the earth was watered if the flower of faith could grow at last.

"That is my legacy to the boy," he seemed to hear Old Crow repeating. "He must not be afraid."

And as he was sinking off to sleep he had an idea he was praying, perhaps to God; or was it to Old Crow? At any rate, he was saying:

"For God's sake look out for Nan. You don't need to make it so devilish hard for Nan."

He was downstairs early. At the foot of the stairs stood Charlotte, waiting. She looked—what? compassionate?

"She's gone," said Charlotte. "Jerry was up 'fore light."

"Gone?" echoed Raven. "At this time of day? What for? She'll have an hour to wait."

"She would have it so," said Charlotte. "She was terrible anxious to git off."

So, Raven thought, she didn't want to see either of them. She was tired of them, of him with his stiff withdrawals and Dick's young puppyhood. He ran upstairs, snatched some old riding breeches out of a closet, put them on and, without a word to Charlotte, went to the barn. But her eye was on him and she called out of the shed door:

"You took your saddle with you. Don't you know you did? There's nothin' but your father's hangin' there, old as the hills."

Raven did not answer, or even turn his head. He went into the harness room, found the old saddle hanging in its place, led out Nellie, surprised at being expected to leave her oats, saddled her and rode away. He was angry, with Nan, with all the childish trouble of the business, and—as two neighbors agreed, seeing him gallop past—rode like the devil, yet not coming upon Nan and Jerry until they were at the station platform. Nan saw him first. She was gloriously glad, waving her hand and laughing out. Jerry stood with mouth open, silent but incurious, and Raven dismounted and threw him the reins.

"Hitch her behind," he said. "I'll go back with you. Got something extra to blanket her?"

He came up to Nan, and they took hands and went into the waiting room together. It was steaming hot from the monster stove and they retreated again to the platform.

"Come out and walk," said Raven, "up to Pine Grove. You've got an hour, you little simpleton. What did you run away for?"

The station is in a cluster of houses, awake early every morning when the milk goes away. But the road across the track leads up a little rise into Pine Grove, where church and sociables have picnics, the merrier for the neighborliness of the few trains. Raven and Nan climbed the rise almost at a run, and when they reached the shadowing pines, looked in at the pure spaces, remembering, for the first time, the snow would bar them out. They must keep to the road.

"Forty-eight minutes," said Raven. "We'll walk twenty and then cut back. Come on."

They walked a little, raced a little, talked—not much—and laughed a great deal. Raven was in the highest spirits, sure he was sending her off happy, since she would go. Never afterward could they remember what they talked about: only it seemed a fortunate moment stolen from the penury of years. Again he took out his watch.

"Time's up!" he said, and they went back.

The station was alive with its small activities. Jerry was walking Nellie up and down. The train came in and when Nan left him Raven remembered they had not said good-by. There was a kind of permanence in it; the moment had cemented something into bonds. When she had gone he and Jerry got into the pung and drove away leading Nellie, and then Raven remembered he had not breakfasted. They talked horse all the way home, and when Dick, appearing on the porch, called to them:

"What you got Nellie for?"

Raven answered cheerfully:

"I took a notion."

Then he and Dick went in to breakfast, and Nan's name was not mentioned. Charlotte, Raven concluded, had told the boy she was gone. He seemed to detect in Dick some watchful kindness toward himself, the responsible care attendants manifest toward the incapable. Dick was, he concluded, bent on therapeutic measures.



XXX

Tira, from the forenoon of Tenney's accident, entered on uneventful days. He lowered over his helplessness; he was angry with it. But the anger was not against her, and she could bear it. For the first time she saw his activities fettered, and the mother in her answered. She ventured no outspoken sympathy, but he was dependent on her and in that, much as it chafed him, she found solace. He was chained to his chair, his wounded foot on a rest, and he had no diversions. Tira sometimes wondered what he was thinking when he sat looking out at the road, smooth with the grinding of sleds and slipping of sleighs. Once she brought the Bible and laid it before him on a stand. If its exposition was so precious to him at evening meeting, there would be comfort in it now. But he glanced at her in what looked like a quick suspicion—did it mean he thought she meant to taunt him with the unreality of his faith?—and, after it had lain there a forenoon untouched, he said to her uneasily:

"You put that away."

She took it back to its place on the parlor stand under Grandsir Tenney's hatchet-faced photograph, wondering in her heart why it was not what she had heard them read of God: "A very present help in time of trouble." If you knew it was so, Tira reasoned, you never had to fret yourself any more. And if that place was waiting for you—the good place they talked about—even a long lifetime was not too much to face before you got to it. After she had laid the book down and turned away from it to cross the ordered stillness of the room, she stopped, with a sudden hungry impulse, and opened it at random. "Let not your heart be troubled," she read, and closed it again, quickly lest the next words qualify so rich a message. It might say further on that you were not to be troubled if you fulfilled the law and gospel, and that, she knew, was only fair. But in her dearth she wanted no sacerdotal bargaining. She needed the heavens to rain down plenty while she held out her hands to take. When she entered the kitchen again Tenney, glancing round at her, saw the change in her look. She was flushed, her mouth was tremulous, and her eyes humid. He wondered, out of his ready suspicion, whether she had seen anyone going by.

"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.

"Nothin's the matter," she answered. But her hands were trembling. She was like Mary when she had seen her Lord.

"Who's gone by?" he persisted. "I didn't hear no bells."

"No," said Tira. "I don't believe anybody's gone by, except the choppers. It's a proper nice day for them."

The child woke and cried from the bedroom and she brought him out in the pink sweetness of his sleep, got the little tub and began to give him his bath by the fire. As she bent over him and dried his smooth soft flesh, the passion of motherhood rose in her and she forgot he was "not right," and sang a low, formless song. When he was bathed she stood him naked on her knee, and it was then she found Tenney including them both in the livid look she knew. And she saw what he saw. The child's hair was more like shining copper every day, his small nose had the tiniest curve. By whatever trick of nature, which is implacable, he was not like her, he was not like Tenney. He was a message from her bitter, ignorant past. Her strong shoulders began to shake and her hands that steadied the child shook, too, so that he gave a little whimper at finding himself insecure.

"Isr'el," she broke out, "before God!"

"Well," said he, in the snarl she had heard from him at those times when his devil quite got the better of him, "what? What you got to tell?"

"It ain't so," she said, her voice broken by her chattering lips. "Before God, it ain't so."

"So ye know what I mean," he jeered, and even at the moment she had compassion for him, reading his unhappy mind and knowing he hurt himself unspeakably. "Ye know, or ye wouldn't say 'tain't so."

Words of his own sprang up in her memory like witnesses against him, half phrases embodying his suspicion of her, wild accusations when, like a drunken man, he had let himself go. But this he did not remember. She knew that. Shut up in his cell of impeccable righteousness, he believed he had dealt justly with her and no more. She would not taunt him with his words. She had a compassion for him that reached into his future of possible remorse. Tira saw, and had seen for a long time, a catastrophe, a "wind-up" before them both. Sometimes it looked like a wall that brought them up short, sometimes a height they were both destined to fall from and a gulf ready to receive them, and she meant, if she could, to save him from the recognition of the wall as something he had built or the gulf as something he had dug. As she sat looking at him now, wide-eyed, imploring, and the child trod her knee impatiently, a man went past the window to the barn. It was Jerry, gone to fodder the cattle, and Jerry brought Raven to her mind who, if he was obeying her by absence, was none the less protecting her. The trouble of her face vanished and she drew a quick breath Tenney was quick to note.

"Who's that?" he asked her sharply, turning in his chair to command the other window.

"Jerry," she said. Her heart stilled, and she began to dress the child, with her mother's deftness. "He comes a little early to fodder, 'fore he does his own."

"I dunno," said Tenney, irritably because he had to wear out his spleen, "why you can't fodder the cows when anybody's laid up. There's women that do it all the time if their folks are called away."

"Why, I could," said Tira, with a clear glance at him, "only he won't let me."

"What's he got to do with it," said Tenney, in surprise. "Won't let ye? Jerry Slate won't let ye? Jerry ain't one to meddle nor make. I guess if you told him 'twas your place to do it an' you'd ruther stan' up to it, he'd have no more to say."

The blood came again to her face. She had almost, she felt, spoken Raven's name, and a swift intuition told her she must bury even the thought of it.

"There ain't," she said, "two nicer folks in this township than Charlotte an' Jerry, nor two that's readier to turn a hand."

Tenney was silent, and Jerry did the chores and went home. Sometimes he came to the house to ask how Tenney was getting on, but to-day he had to get back to his own work.

This was perhaps a week after Tenney's accident, when he was getting impatient over inaction, and next day the doctor came and pronounced the wound healing well. If Tenney had a crutch, he might try it carefully, and Tenney remembered Grandsir had used a crutch when he broke his hip at eighty-two, and healed miraculously though tradition pronounced him done for. It had come to the house among a load of outlawed relics, too identified with the meager family life to be thrown away, and Tira found it "up attic" and brought it down to him. She waited, in a sympathetic interest, to see him try it, and when he did and swung across the kitchen with an angry capability, she caught her breath, in a new fear of him. The crutch looked less a prop to his insufficiency than like a weapon. He could reach her with it. He could reach the child. And then she began to see how his helplessness had built up in her a false security. He was on the way to strength again, and the security was gone.

The first use he made of the crutch was to swing to the door and tell Jerry he need not come again. Tira was glad to hear him add:

"Much obleeged. I'll do the same for you."

Afterward she went to the barn with him and fed and watered while he supplemented her and winced when he hurt himself, making strange sounds under his breath that might have been oaths from a less religious man. And Tira was the more patient because the doctor had told her the foot would always trouble him.

It was two days after he had begun to use his crutches, that Tira, after doing the noon chores in the barn and house, sat by the front window in her afternoon dress, a tidy housewife. The baby was having his nap and Tenney, at the other window, his crutch against the chair beside him, was opening the weekly paper that morning come. Tira looked up from her mending to glance about her sitting-room, and, for an instant, she felt to the full the pride of a clean hearth, a shining floor, the sun lying in pale wintry kindliness across the yellow paint and braided rugs. If she had led a gypsy life, it was not because her starved heart yearned the less tumultuously for order and the seemliness of walls. For the moment, she felt safe. The child was not in evidence, innocently calling the eye to his mysterious golden beauty. Tenney had been less irascible all the forenoon because he had acquired a fortunate control over his foot, and (she thought it shyly, yet believingly) the Lord Jesus Christ was with them. Disregarded or not, in these moments of wild disordered living, He was there.

She heard sleigh-bells, and looked out. Tenney glanced up over his glasses, an unwonted look, curiously like benevolence. She liked that look. It always gave her a thrill of faith that sometime, by a miracle, it might linger for more than the one instant of a changed visual focus. She caught it now, with that responsive hope of its continuance, and knew, for the first time, what it recalled to her: the old minister beyond Mountain Brook looked over his glasses in precisely that way, kindly, gentle, and forgiving. But mingled with the remembrance, came the nearing of the bells and the shock to her heart in the man they heralded: Eugene Martin, driving fast, and staring at the house. The horse was moving with a fine jaunty action when Martin pulled him up, held him a quieting minute, and got out. He paused an instant, his hand on the robe, as if uncertain how long he should stay, seemed to decide against covering the horse and ran up the path. He must have seen Tira and Tenney, each at a window, but his eyes were on the woman only. Half way along the path, he took off his hat and waved it at her in exaggerated salute, as if bidding her rejoice that he had come. In the same instant he seemed, for the first time, to see Tenney. His eyes rested on him with a surprise excellently feigned. He replaced his hat, turned about like a man blankly disconcerted and went back down the path, with the decisive tread of one who cannot take himself off too soon. He stepped into the sleigh and, drawing the robe about him, drove off, the horse answering buoyantly. Tira sat, the stillest thing out of a wood where stalking danger lurks, her eyes on her sewing. Tenney was staring at her; she knew it, and could not raise her lids. Often she failed to meet his glance because she so shrank, not from his conviction of her guilt, but the fear of seeing what she must remember in blank night watches, to shudder over. For things were different at night, things you could bear quite well by day. Now he spoke, with a restrained certainty she trembled at. He had drawn his conclusions; nothing she could possibly say would alter them.

"Comin' in, wa'n't he?" the assured voice asked her. "See me, didn't he, an' give it up?"

Tira forced herself to look at him, and the anguished depths of her eyes were moving to him only because they seemed to mourn over his having found her out.

"No, Isr'el," she said quietly. "He wa'n't comin' in. He drew up because he see you, an' he knew 'twould be wormwood to both of us to have him do just what he done."

Tenney laughed, a little bitter note. Tira could not remember ever having heard him laugh with an unstinted mirth. At first, when he came courting her, he was too worn with the years of work that had brought him to her, and after that too wild with the misery of revolt. She was sorry for that, with an increasing sorrow. Tira could bear no unhappiness but her own.

"Wormwood!" he repeated, as if the word struck him curiously. "D'he think 'twas goin' to be wormwood for a woman to find a man comin' all fixed up like courtin' time, to steal a minute's talk? You make me laugh."

He did laugh, and the laugh, though it might have frightened her, made her the more sorry. She had the sense of keeping her hand on him, of holding him back from some rushing course that would be his own destruction.

"Yes," she answered steadily. "'Twould be nothin' but wormwood for me, an' well he knows it. He don't—love me, Isr'el."

She hesitated before the word, and with it the thought of Raven came to her, as she saw him, unvaryingly kind and standing for quiet, steadfast things. "He hates me."

"Hates ye," he repeated curiously. "What's he hate ye for?"

"Because," said Tira, bound to keep quietly on in this new way of reason with him, "I left him. An' I left him 'fore he got tired o' me. He never'd overlook that."

"You left him, did ye?" he repeated. "Then that proves you was with him, or ye couldn't ha' left him."

"Why, Isr'el," said she, her clear gaze on his turbid answering one, "I told you. I told you long 'fore you married me. First time you ever mentioned it, I told you, so's to have things fair an' square. I told you, Isr'el."

He said nothing, but she knew the answer at the back of his mind, and it seemed to her wise now to provoke it, to dare the accusation and meet it, not as she always had, by silence, but a passionate testimony.

"You said," she continued, "it shouldn't make no difference, what I'd done 'fore you married me. You said we couldn't help the past, but we could what's comin' to us. An' I thought you was an angel, Isr'el, with your religion an' all. Not many men would ha' said that. I didn't know one. An' we were married an' you—changed."

"Yes," he said. His hands were shaking as they did at the beginning of his rages, but Tira, embarked on a course she had long been coming to, was the more calm. "Yes, I changed, didn't I? An' when d' I change? When that"—he paused and seemed to choke down the word he would have given the child—"when that creatur' in there turned into the livin' pictur' of the man that drew up here this day. Can you deny he's the image of him?"

"No," said Tira, looking at him squarely. "He is the image of him."

"What do folks think about it?" he asked her. "What do you s'pose the neighbors think? What'll it be when it grows worse an' worse? What'll the school children say when he's old enough to go to school? They'll see it, too, the little devils. The livin' image, they'll say, o' 'Gene Martin."

Tira laid her work on the table in front of her. The moment of restraining him had failed her, but another moment had come. This she had seen approaching for many months and had pushed away from her.

"Isr'el," she said, "I guess you won't have that to worry over. There's no danger of his goin' to school. He—ain't right."

He stared at her a long moment, puzzling instances accumulating in his mind, evidences that the child was not like other children he had seen. Then he began to laugh, a laugh full of wildness and despair.

"O my Lord!" he cried. "My Lord God! if I wanted any evidence I hadn't got, You've give it to me now. You've laid Your hand on her. You've laid Your hand on both of 'em. He can't ride by here an' see a red-headed bastard playin' round the yard an' laugh to himself when he says, 'That's mine.' You've laid Your hand on 'em."

Tira rose from her chair and went to him. She slipped to the floor, put her head on his unwelcoming shoulder and her arms about his neck.

"Isr'el," said she, "you hear to me. If you can't for the sake o' me, you hear to me for the sake o' him,—sleepin' there, the pitifullest little creatur' God ever made. How's he goin' to meet things, as he is? 'Twould be hard enough with a father 'n' mother that set by him as they did their lives, but you half-crazed about him—what'll he do, Isr'el? What'll the poor little creatur' do?"

Tenney sat rigid under her touch, and she went on, pouring out the mother sorrow that was the more overwhelming because it had been locked in her so long.

"Isr'el, I could tell you every minute o' my life sence you married me. If 'twas wrote down, you could read it, an' 'twould be Bible truth. An' if God has laid His hand on that poor baby—Isr'el, you take that back. It's like cursin' your own flesh an' blood."

"I do curse him," he muttered. "I curse him for that—not bein' my flesh an' blood." With the renewed accusation, his anger against her seemed to mount like a wave and sweep him with it, and he shook himself free of her. "Jezebel!" he cried. "Let go o' me."

Tira rose and went back to her chair. But she did not sit down. She stood there, looking out of the window and wondering. What to do next? With a man beside himself, what did a woman do? He was talking now, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair and looking at her.

"Sometimes," he said, "when it all comes over me, I think I'll shet you up. I'll leave him asleep in there an' lock you in, up chamber, an' you can hear him cry but you can't git to him. An' mebbe you can work it out that way. He'll be the scapegoat goin' into the wilderness, cryin' in there alone, an' you'll be workin' out your punishment, hearin' him cry."

Tira stood listening and thinking. This was a new danger. If he shut her away from the child (and he might do it easily, when his foot would serve him again) nobody would hear. They were too far away. He was frightening her. She would frighten him. She walked up to him and stood looking down on him.

"Isr'el," said she quietly, "don't you git it into your head you could shet me up."

"Yes," said he, and his tone was as ominous as her own, "I guess I could shet you up all right."

"Yes," said Tira, "mebbe you could. But if you do, I'll break out. An' when I've broke out"—she towered over him—"I'll break your neck."

Tenney, looking up and seeing in her eyes the mother rage that sweeps creation from man to brute, was afraid, and Tira knew it. She looked him down. Then her gaze broke, not as if she could not have held his forever, but haughtily, in scorn of what was weaker than herself.

"I've been a true wife to you, Isr'el," she said. "You remember it now, 'fore it's too late. For as God's my witness, if you turn your hand ag'inst a little child—whether it's your own or whether it ain't—an' that baby in there is yourn an' no man but you has got part nor lot in him—if you turn ag'inst him, I turn ag'inst you. An' when I've done that, you'll find me as crazy as you be, an' I can't say no worse."

She went into the bedroom and he heard her crooning there, defiantly he thought, even through the low sweetness of her voice. But her passion had shaken him briefly. For the moment, the inner self in him could not help believing her. He went back to his newspaper, trying, though the print was dim before him, to recover his hold on the commonplace of the day. He, too, would be unmoved; she should see he was not afraid of her tantrums. But he had not read half a column before an evil chance drew his eyes to a paragraph in the gossip from the various towns about. This was under the caption of his own town:

"A certain gentleman appeared last week with a black eye, gained, it is said, in a scrap with a non-resident interested in keeping the peace in country towns. It is said both combatants bore themselves gallantly, but that suit for assault and battery is to be brought by the party attacked."

Tenney sat staring at the words, and his mind told him what a fool he was. That meant the encounter at his gate. He had ignored that. He had been deflected from it simply because he had cut his foot and let himself be drawn off the track of plain testimony by his own pain and helplessness. Was Raven in it, too? Was there a shameless assault of all the men about on Tira's honesty? While he was the dupe of Martin, was Martin Raven's dupe? Did such a woman bring perpetual ruin in her path? This he did not ask himself in such words or indeed through any connected interrogation. It was passion within him, disordered, dim, but horrible to bear. He got up presently, took her scissors, cut out the paragraph and laid it on her basket where her eyes must fall upon it. When he had gone back to his chair, she appeared from the bedroom and went up to him. He did not look at her, but her voice was sweeter, gentler than the song had been, with no defiance in it, and, in spite of him, it moved his sick heart, not to belief in her, or even a momentary rest on her good intent toward him, but to a misery he could hardly face. Every nerve in him cried out in revolt against his lot, his aching love for her, his passion forever unsatisfied because she was not entirely his, the anguish of the atom tossed about in the welter of elemental life.

"Isr'el," said she, "there's one thing we forgot when we spoke so to each other as we did a minute ago."

She waited, and he looked up at her, and the hunger of his eyes was as moving to her as if, like the child they had fought over, he was himself a child and "not right."

"We forgot," she said, in a soft shyness at having to remind him who was a professing Christian of what he knew far better than she, "Who was with us all the time: the Lord Jesus Christ."

She turned away from him, in a continued timidity at seeming to preach to him, and seated herself again by the other window. The newspaper clipping arrested her eye. She took it up, read it over slowly, read it again and Tenney watched her. Then she crumpled it in her hand and tossed it on the table. She glanced across at Tenney and spoke gravely, threading her needle with fingers that did not tremble.

"That's jest like him," she said. "Anybody 't knew him 'd know 'twas what he'd do. He's hand in glove with Edson that carries on that paper. They go to horse-trots together. He's willin' to call attention to himself, black eye an' all, if he can call attention to somebody else, same time. That's wormwood, too, Isr'el. We're the ones it's meant for, you an' me."



XXXI

In a day or two Raven had convinced himself that Dick, firm-lipped, self-controlled, as if he had set himself a task, did not mean to leave him. Raven, half amused, half touched, accommodated his behavior to their closer relation and waited for Dick to disclose himself. He would have been light-heartedly glad of the boy's company if he had found no strangeness in it, no purpose he could not, from point to point, divine. Dick sent for more clothes, and a case came by post. He wrote in his chamber, for an hour or two every morning, and after that, Raven became conscious that the boy was keeping a watchful eye on him. If Raven went up to the hut, Dick was sure to appear there, in ten minutes at the most. Once, after a heavy snow, Raven had the wood road broken out, and Dick looked on in a darkling conjecture. And when Raven, now even to Jerry's wonder, proceeded to break from the hut to the back road, Dick found it not only impossible to restrain himself but wise to speak. They were standing by the hearth in the hut, after Raven had swept it and laid a careful fire. He had worked with all possible haste, for he never was there now without wondering whether she might come. He had been resting in the certainty of Tenney's crippled state, but the wounded foot, he knew, was bettering every day, and with it Tira's security lessened. Jerry's dismissal from the chores had troubled him so much that he had gone up, immediately after, to reason with Tenney. But Tenney was entering the barn door at the moment of his turning into the yard, and Tira, following, stopped an instant and made Raven a little gesture that seemed to him one of hasty dismissal, and he went back home again.

"Jack," said Dick, this morning in the hut—it was as if he had to speak—"what are you getting this place ready for, and breaking out the back road? You don't need to come up here, in weather like this. If you do, you've got your snowshoes. What the deuce are you breaking out for?"

Raven stood a moment looking down at Tira's fire. It seemed a sacred pile, consecrated to holy use. What would Dick say if he told him the paths had been broken for a woman's flying feet, the fire was laid to warm her when she came here hunted by man's cruelty? Dick was said to have written some very strong verse, but how if he found himself up against life itself?

"It's a jolly old place," Raven said, rousing himself out of his musing. "As for breaking out, that's what oxen are for."

Dick was looking at him in a manifest concern. It was true affection. The boy might find it difficult to hail him across the interval of years between them, but he did love old Jack, though with the precise measure of patronage due the old.

"You know," said Dick, "it worries me like the deuce to see you coming up here like——"

He paused as if the matter were too complex to be gone into lightly.

"Like what?" Raven asked him.

"Well, we've been over that. You know who built this. You know what he did in it. He brought an old rip up here to live with him, and—oh, confound it, Jack! don't pretend you don't even remember old Crow."

"Yes," said Raven gravely, "I remember Old Crow."

"Well, anyhow," said Dick, "he was a family disgrace, and the less said about him the better."

"I showed you, the night you came," said Raven, "the story of Old Crow's life. You didn't quite catch on. Want another try at it?"

Dick had to search his memory. The only thing he had kept in mind about that night was his anger against Nan. There was a book, he recalled vaguely: some sort of stuff in a crabbed hand.

"Old Crow?" he said. "Old Crow never wrote anything."

"You think," said Raven, "he brought his bum up here and they sat and guzzled. Well, you're wrong, my son. Come, let's go down, and though I don't know whether it'll mean anything to you, you shall have another hack at Old Crow."

He was not easy until he had turned the key on the safety of the hut and started down the hill. When they had rounded the curve made by the three jutting firs, he stopped.

"Go on," he said. "I'll overtake you."

He ran back and slipped the key under the stone. It was a part of her security to keep the secret from Dick also.

No more was said of Old Crow that day, but, in the early evening, when they were before the fire, Raven brought down the book, always in the drawer of the little table by his bed. It was, in an undefined way, kindliness and company, always reminding him that, whatever his undesirable status now, he had been "the boy," and this was his own personal message from Old Crow.

"There you are," he said. He laid it on the table. "Don't read it unless you'd really rather. It's meant a good deal to me. Maybe it won't to you. I don't know much about the processes of your mind. You may feel at home in this particular world. I never do. Old Crow didn't either. But you'll see."

Dick began to read and, since Nan was not by to be loved and hated, with an intent mind. Once or twice he turned back, Raven saw, to ponder some passage again. It was slow reading. He had not the passionate haste of one who has thirsted for some such community of assurance, and flies over the ground, plucking a leaf here and there, meaning to return. When he had finished he closed the book, laid it on the table, and pushed it aside as if he had definitely done with it.

"Jackie," said he, "I'm mighty glad you showed me this."

"Good!" said Raven. "Got inside it, have you?"

"Why, yes," said Dick, with assurance. "That's easy enough. It isn't new, you know. And it isn't so much my getting inside that as getting inside Old Crow."

"Oh!" said Raven mildly, "so you got inside Old Crow. Now what did you find there?"

"I don't know," said Dick, "whether you'd better be told. From a psychopathic point of view, that is. But I rather guess you ought."

"Dick," said Raven, "in the name of all the gods you worship, what shouldn't I be told? And exactly how do you see us two living along here, mild as milk? What's our relation? Sometimes, when I find you plodding after me, I feel as if you were my trainer. Sometimes I have a suspicion I really am off my nut and you're my keeper. Out with it, boy? How do you see it? Come!"

Dick, from a patent embarrassment, was staring down at the hearth, and now he looked quickly up in a frankness truly engaging.

"Jack," he said, "you needn't think you're going to be left here alone, to work things out by yourself. There's no danger of mother. I told her to keep off. She only irritates you. But she hasn't gone back home. She's right there in Boston, waiting to come."

Raven got up and walked back and forth through the room. Then he returned to his chair.

"Dick," he said conversationally, "if you were as young in years as you are in your mind, I'd mellow you."

Dick generously ignored this. He had the impeccable good nature of the sane set in authority over the sick.

"What I think, is," he said, with a soothing intonation Raven despairingly recognized as the note of strength pitting itself against weakness, "we can work it out together, you and I. We can do it better than anybody else. I suppose if I went back you'd send for Nan. But that won't do, Jack. You'll see it for yourself, when you're all right again. Now what I mean about Old Crow is, that his complexes are like yours—or rather yours are like his. Don't you see what an influence he's had on you? More than Miss Anne even."

"Hold up," said Raven. "I'm being mighty patient with you, but certain things, you know, you don't say."

"You used to go up there and see him," said Dick, willingly relinquishing Miss Anne. There were times when, as he remembered from boyhood, old Jack was dangerous. "Some of the things about him shocked you. Some appealed to you. Pity, too: you must have pitied him tremendously. You probably knew about his craze over this girl he mentions here. You may have heard things about her, just as he did. Jack, I can see—the whole thing has come to me in the last ten minutes—Old Crow has been the big influence in your life. Everything else has come from that. And then the war knocked you out and you got cafard and the whole blasted business blew up and came to the surface and—there you are."

"Yes," said Raven, "here we are."

He leaned back in his chair and laughed until he could have cried. Never had he found anything funnier than the boy's honest face and his honest voice pouring forth undigested scraps from haphazard gleanings.

"Dick," he said, "you're a dear fellow. But you're an awful ass. The trouble is with you, old man, you've no imagination. It was left out. You're too much like your mother and it'll be the death of you as it is of her if you don't stop being intelligent. That sort of popular science stuff, you know. Be a little sloppy, boy. Come off your high horse."

Dick was still unassailably good-natured. Raven was his job, and he could hold himself down with a steady hand.

"Now," said Raven, "for heaven's sake scrap your complexes, even if you scrap Old Crow with 'em, and let's see if we can't be moderately peaceable. That is, if we've got to be marooned here together."

And by dint of giving his mind to it, he was himself peaceable and even amusing, but as the dark came on he found he had much ado to keep up the game; he was too sensitively awake to Tira. With no new reason for it, he was plainly worried, and, leaving Dick reading by the fire, went up to his own room. He sat down by a front window, facing the dark wall of the hill, but when, after another hour, he heard Dick come up and shut himself in, he slipped down the stairs, took his cap and went off to the hut. The sky was dark, but clear, and the stars burned in galaxies of wonder. But the beauty of the night only excited and oppressed him until he could assure himself she was not out in it on one of her dreadful flights. If he found her in the hut, he could go home to bed. He reached the door, stopped, and put his hand under the stone. The key was there, and he laughed out in his thankfulness. The laugh was at his fears, and he wondered whether he would rather think of her there in her prison or here, still under sentence, due at her prison again. Then he heard a step: a man's crashing on regardless of underbrush. Was it Tenney? Should he hear that voice as he had before in its wild "Hullo"?

"Where are you?" came the voice. "Where are you, old man?"

Dick had followed him and was, in his affectionate solicitude, warning him against surprise. Raven ran down to meet him, and by the turn of the fir trees they faced each other.

"Dick," said Raven, "what are you up here for?"

"Can't help it, old man," said Dick. The eagerness of his voice made it very moving. "Really, you know, I can't have you trotting round, this time of night, all by your lonesome. If you want to hang round here, you let me come, too. We'll light the fire and smoke a pipe and finish the night, if you say so. Come, old man. Come on."

"No," said Raven quietly, "we won't light fires and smoke pipes. We'll go down now, to bed. Dick, you're a fool. I've had to tell you so more than once. But you're a dear fool, and sometime I may be able to remember that and nothing else. Just now I can't seem to want to do anything but pitch you, neck and crop, into the snow."

They went down together, Dick still doggedly conscious of doing the only thing possible, and when they were near the foot of the hill, Raven yelled at him, the old Moosewood whoop, and sprang. It was the signal between them when one or the other had a mind to "wrastle," and they stood there in the road and assailed each other scientifically and with vigor, to the great benefit of each. It was a beneficent outburst, and Charlotte, roused by the cry, ran to a chamber window and stood there in her nightgown, watching.

"How they do carry on!" she commented to Jerry, when they had separated and come in, chaffing volubly. "For all the world like two toms."

Things were easier between them, now they had mauled each other, and they ran upstairs together, "best friends" as they used to be when Dick learned the game. He was wonderfully encouraged. This was the Uncle Jack he used to tag about the place. He went to bed with a hopeful presentiment that, if things kept on like this, he might take Raven back to town presently, reasonable enough to place himself voluntarily in the right hands.

To Tira, the week dragged on with a malicious implication of never meaning to end until it ended her. Strange things could be done in a week, it reminded her, conclusive, sinister things. The old fears were on in full force, and though it had not looked as if they could be much augmented, now they piled up mountain high. And she presently found out they were not the old fears at all. There was a fresh menace, ingeniously new. She had studied the weather of Tenney's mind and knew the signs of it. She could even anticipate them. But this new menace she could never have foreseen. It was simply his crutch. An evil magic seemed to have fallen upon it, and it was no longer a crutch but a weapon. Tenney would not abandon it. His foot was improving fast, and the doctor had suggested his dropping the crutch for a cane; but he kept on with it, kept on obstinately without a spoken pretext. To Tira, there was something sinister in that. She saw him not relying on it to any extent, but sedulously keeping it by him. Sometimes he gesticulated with it. He had, with great difficulty, brought in the cradle again, as if to emphasize his callousness to the gash in it, and once he tapped it with the crutch, while the baby lay there asleep, and set it rocking. Tira, cooking at the table, felt her heart stand still. An actual weapon she could flee from, but was this a weapon? The uncertainty was in itself terrifying.

It was the day he set the cradle rocking that she awoke in the night, her fear full upon her. He was at her side, sleeping heavily. The baby was on her other arm. Yet it seemed to her that the menace from Tenney had pierced her to reach the child and, on its passage, stabbed through her racing heart. Then her temptation came upon her, so simple a thing she seemed stupid never to have thought of it before. She rose to a sitting posture, put her feet out of bed, took the child, and carried him with her into the sitting-room. She laid him on the couch and covered him, and then stole back into the bedroom. The crutch was there, in its habitual place at night, leaning against the foot of the bed. She could put her hand on it in the dark. Tenney, too, she had begun to reflect, could put his hand on it. What deeds might he not do with it in those hours when the sanities of life also sleep? She took it gently and went out again through the sitting-room and kitchen into the shed. Her purpose had been to hide it behind the wood. But if he came on it there, it would not be a crutch he found. It would be a weapon. She put her hand on an upright beam, as she stood painfully thinking it out, and touched the handle of a saw, hanging there on a nail; immediately she knew. She went back into the kitchen, lighted the lantern and carried it into the shed. There stood the crutch leaning against the beam below the saw, a weapon beyond doubt. She set down her lantern, laid the crutch on the block Tenney used to split kindlings, set her foot upon it and methodically sawed it into stove wood lengths. When it was done she gathered up the pieces, carried them into the sitting-room, to the stove where Tenney always, in winter weather, left a log to smoulder, dropped them in and opened the draught. Then she went back to the shed, swept up her scattering of sawdust, hung the saw in its place, gave a glance about her to see that everything was in its usual order, and returned into the kitchen. She put out the lantern, hung it on its nail, went into the sitting-room and partially shut the draft on the noisy blaze. She did not dare quite shut it, lest a bit of the weapon should be left to cry out from the ashes and tell. When she was back in bed again, the child on her arm, Tenney, disturbed by her coming, woke and turned. He lifted his head from the pillow, to listen, and she wondered if he could hear the beating of her heart.

"You there?" he asked. "What's that stove started out roarin' for? The chimbly ain't afire?"

"No," said Tira. "Mebbe somethin's ketched." She got out of bed, ran into the sitting-room, noiselessly shut the crack of draught, and came back. "Them knots are kinder gummy," she said calmly, and was heartened by the evenness of her voice. "I guess 'twon't roar long."

They listened together until the sound diminished, and Tira knew when he relaxed and dropped off again. It did not seem to her that she dropped off at all, she was so relieved to think of her enemy smouldering and done for.

This was the night Raven had had his premonition of her and gone up to the hut to find her, and the next night he was aware of her again, as if she had put a hand out through the darkness and given him an imploring touch. He and Dick had had an almost jovial day. Their wrestling bout had proved sound medicine. It had, Raven thought, cleared the air of the fool things they had been thinking about each other. This evening they had talked, straight talk, as between men, chiefly of Dick's future and his fitness for literature. There was no hint of Nan, though each believed she was the pivot on which Dick's fortunes turned. About ten they went up to bed, and again Raven found himself too uneasy to sleep, and again he sat down by the window in the dark. Incredibly, yet as he found he knew it would happen, he saw a figure running up the path. It came almost to the front door, halted a moment, as if in doubt, stooped and threw up a clutch of snow against a window. The snow was full of icy pellets; they rattled against the pane. But it was not his window, which was dark; the hand had cast its signaling pellets to the room where a light was burning and where the outline of a man's figure had just been visible. And the man was Dick. But Raven knew. He opened his door and shut it as softly, stole down the stairs, opened the outer door, and drew her in. Then, in the instant of snapping on the light, he saw Tira recoil; for there, at the foot of the stairs, was Dick. She would have slipped out again, but Raven's hand was on her. He still held hers, as he had taken it, and now he turned her to the library door. It was all done quickly, and meantime he said to Dick, "Go back to bed," and Dick perhaps not responding exactly, commented under his breath, "Good God!" Raven followed Tira into the library, turned the key in the lock, switched on the light in his reading lamp, and drew a chair to the smouldering fire.

"Sit down," he said. "You must get warm."

He threw on cones and roused a leaping blaze. Then he made himself look at her. He forgot Dick and Dick's shocked bewilderment. He was calm as men are calm in an accomplished certainty. She had come. She did not seem cold or in any sense excited, though she put her hands to the blaze and bent toward it absently, as if in courtesy because he had given it to her. As she sat, drawing long breaths that meant the ebbing of emotion, he let his eyes feed on her face. She was paler than he had seen her. There were shadows under her eyes, and the lashes on her cheek looked incredibly long: a curved inky splash. Her hood had fallen back, but she kept the blue cloak about her to her chin, as if it made a seclusion, a protection even against him. But it was only an instant before she withdrew her hands from the blaze and turned to him, with a little smile. She began to speak at once, as if she had scant time, either for indulging her own weakness or troubling him.

"You'll think it's queer," she said. "I've come here routin' you out o' bed when you've give me that nice place up there to run away to."

Raven found himself ready to break out into asseverations that it was the only natural thing for her to do. Where should she go, if not to him?

"No," he said, the more gravely because he was counseling himself while he answered her. "You did right. But," he added, "where's——?"

She understood. Where was the baby who always made the reason for her flight?

"He's up there," she answered, with a motion of her hand toward the road.

"In the hut?" he exclaimed. "You left him there?"

It seemed impossible.

"Yes," she said quietly, "all soul alone. I run out with him, same as I always have. I run up there. I found the road all broke out. I wa'n't surprised. I knew you'd do it. That is, I'd ha' known it if I'd thought anything about it. An' I found the key an' started the fire. An' then I knew I'd got to see you this night, an' I put him on the lounge an' set chairs so's he wouldn't fall out, an' packed him round with pillers, an' locked him in an' left him."

She paused and Raven nodded at her as if he wanted to find it as simple as it seemed to her.

"You see, I couldn't bring him down here," she said. "He might cry. An' there's Charlotte. An' Jerry. An' the young man. I'm sorry the young man see me. That's too bad."

"It's all right," said Raven briefly, though he was aware it was, from Dick's present point of view, all wrong. "I'll attend to that."

"He's safe enough," said Tira, her eyes darkening as she recurred to the baby. "If he cries, 'twon't do no hurt up there. Well!" She seemed to remind herself that there was much to say. "I must be gittin' along with my story." She looked at him in a most moving wistfulness, and added: "I got scared."



XXXII

Raven gave his answering nod. That seemed to be about all he could respond with, in his danger of saying the rash thing.

"Yes," he said, "scared. Same way?"

"No," she said. "Worse. I guess I never've been so scared. An' I've got myself to thank. You see, last night——"

"Yes," said Raven. "I got wind of it last night."

This, though it puzzled her, she could not stay to follow out, with the baby up in the hut defended only by pillows and Tenney perhaps turning to ask: "You there?"

"You see," she said, "it's his crutch."

"You mean," supplied Raven, brute anger rising up in him against brute man, "he's struck you with it?"

"No, no," she hastened to assure him. "He ain't even threatened me. Only somehow it was like his havin' somethin' always by him, somethin' he could strike with, an'—I dunno what come over me—I burnt it up."

At once Raven faced the picture of it, the mad impulse, the resulting danger. But he would not add his apprehensiveness to hers.

"I dunno," she said, "as you'll hardly see what I mean: but it begun to look kinder queer to me, that crutch did. All I could think of was how much better 'twould be for everybody concerned if 'twas burnt up."

"Yes," said Raven. "I see. We all feel so sometimes, when we're tired out." The moderation of these words but ill expressed his tumultuous mind. That was it, his passionate understanding told him. The natural world throws its distorted shadows, and our eyes have to be at their strongest not to recoil in panic, while we turn back to strike. "And," he said, because she seemed to be mired here in the bog of her own wonderment, "in the morning of course he found it out."

The strangest look came into her face: she was horrified, and more than that, indubitably more, she was perplexed.

"Yes," she said, "he found it out. 'Course he found it out first thing, 'fore he dressed him even. I got up early an' made the fires. I've been makin' 'em sence he's laid up. So I don't know no more'n the dead how he looked when it first come over him the crutch wa'n't there. But he come out int' the kitchen—I'd been t' the barn then an' give the cows some fodder—an' he carried a cane, his gran'ther's it was, same's the crutch. It's got a crook handle, an' I've kep' it in the chimney corner to pull down boxes an' things from the upper cupboard. An' he went out to the barn an' come in an' eat his breakfast, an' eat his dinner an' his supper, when they come round, an' we done the barn work together, an' he ain't mentioned the crutch from first to last."

"Well," said Raven, in a futile reassurance, "perhaps he thinks he's left it somewhere, and if he doesn't particularly need it—Jerry told me only this morning the doctor said he might as well be getting used to a cane."

"No," said Tira conclusively, "he don't think he's left it anywheres. He's keepin' still, that's all."

Immediately Raven saw the menacing significance of Tenney's keeping still. His mind ran with a quick foot over the imprisonment of the two there together. Was there a moment, he wondered, when the suffering brute was not threatening to her, when her heart could rest itself for the next hurried flight? He ventured his question.

"Has he been"—he hesitated for a word and found what sounded to him a mawkish one—"good to you at all, these last weeks?"

Tira reflected a moment and then, for the first time since she came in from the cold, the blood rushed to her haggard cheeks. She remembered a moment, the day before the burning of the crutch, when he had found her doing her hair before the bedroom glass and had caught her to him wildly. She had put him away from her, though gently, because his violence, whether it took the form of starved passion or raging hate, always seemed to her the unbecoming riot of a forward child, and he had left her in a shamefaced anger, a grumbling attempt to recover his lost dignity. Tira hid even from herself the miserable secrets of marital savagery. No sacrifice was too great to hide from Tenney her knowledge of his abasement. Most of all must she hide it from another man, and that man Raven. Her answer was not ready, but she had it for him, and he understood, in his unfailing knowledge of her, that it was the first crooked one she had ever given him, and for the first time he felt anger toward her. She was defending her enemy, and against him.

"He does the best he can," she said. "He takes things terrible hard. I dunno's I ever see anybody that took 'em so hard."

Then, as he did not speak, she looked at him and meeting the cold unresponsiveness in his face her composure broke and she stretched out her hands to him in a wildness of entreaty.

"Oh, don't you look like that," she cried. "If you turn from me 'twill be my death."

He was not cold now. He bent to her and took her hands in his.

"Tira," he said, "come away with me. You can't bear this any longer. Take the child and come. You'd be safe. You'd be happy, if you weren't afraid. Don't go back there for another minute. Stay here over night, and to-morrow I'll take you away."

He was looking at her, his eyes holding hers as his hands held her hands. And, whatever he had meant, the strangest, swiftest retribution of his life came to him through the change in her face. How could flesh and muscle bring about such an alteration in human line and texture, the Mother of Sorrows transformed to a Medusa head? Her lips parted, trembling over words they could not bring themselves to say. Her eyes widened into darkness. Her brows drew together in a pitiful questioning. And her voice, when she did speak, was a vibrating protest against what her eyes knew and her mind.

"You don't mean," she said, "that?"

Raven dropped her hands as if they had struck him. The question was a rushing commentary on his life and hers. Was he, she meant, only another actor in this drama of man's hunger and savagery? Was he a trader in the desire of beauty, that tragic dower nature had thrown over her like a veil, so that whoever saw it with a covetous eye, longed to possess and rend it? Probably Tira never did what would be called thinking. But her heart had a vital life of its own, her instinct was the genius of intuition. He had been kind to her, compassionate. She had built up a temple out of her trust in him, and now he had smoked the altar with the incense that was rank in her nostrils. He had brought, not flowers and fruits, but the sacrifice of blood. And he, on his part, what did he think? Only that he must save her.

"No, Tira," he said, "I don't mean that. I mean—what you want me to mean. You can't understand what it is to a man to know you're afraid, to know you're in danger and he can't help you. I didn't ask you as I ought. I asked you to come away with me. I ask you again. Come away with me and I'll take you to the best place I know. I'll take you to Nan."

He had not guessed he was going to say this. Only, as he spoke, he knew in his inner mind the best place was Nan. Suddenly she seemed to be in the room with them. What was it but her cool fragrant presence? And she understood. Tira might not. She might feel these turbid waves of his response to he knew not what: the beauty and mystery of the world, the urge of tyrant life, all bound up in the presence of this one woman. She was woman, hunted and oppressed. He was man, created, according to the mandate of his will, to save or to undo her. But the world and the demands of it, clean or unclean, could not be taken at a gulp. He must get hold of himself and put his hand on Tira's will. For she could only be saved against her own desire. Whatever he had seemed to ask her, or whatever his naked mind and rebellious lips had really asked, he could not beg her to forgive him. He must not own to a fault in their relation, lest he seem, as he had at that moment, an enemy the more.

"That's exactly what you must do," he said. "You must let me take you to Nan."

A soft revulsion seemed to melt her to an acquiescence infinitely grateful to her.

"That," she said, "was what I had in mind. If she'd take him—the baby—an' put him somewhere. She said there were places. She said so herself. I dunno's you knew it, but she talked to me about him. She said there was ways folks know now about doin' things for 'em when they ain't right, an' makin' the most you can of 'em. She told me if I said the word, she'd come here an' carry him back with her."

"But," said Raven, "what about you? I'm ready to stand by the child, just as Nan is. But I'm doing it for your sake. What about you?"

"Oh," said Tira, with a movement of her eloquent hands, as if she tossed away something that hindered her, "tain't no matter about me. I've got to stay here. Mr. Raven"—her voice appealed to him sweetly. He remembered she had not so used his name before—"I told you that. I can't leave him."

The last word she accented slightly, and Raven could not tell whether the stress on it was the tenderness of affection, or something as moving, yet austere. And now he had to know.

"You want to stay with him"——he began, and Tira interrupted him softly, looking at him meantime, as if she besought him to understand:

"I promised to."

Raven sat there and looked into the fire, thinking desperately. At that moment, he wanted nothing in the world so much as to snatch her away from Tenney and set her feet in a safe place. But did he want it solely for her or partly for himself? What did it matter? Casuistry was far outside the tumult of desire. He would kick over anything, law or gospel, to keep her from going back there this night. Yet he spoke quietly:

"We'll go up and get the baby, and I'll call Charlotte, and you'll stay here to-night. To-morrow we'll go."

"No," said Tira, gently but immovably, "I couldn't have Charlotte an' Jerry brought into it. Not anyways in the world."

"Why not?" asked Raven.

"I couldn't," she said. "They're neighbors. They're terrible nice folks, but folks have to talk—they can't help it—an', 'fore you knew it, it'd be all over the neighborhood. An' he's a professin' Christian. 'Twould be terrible for him."

Sometimes he only knew from the tone of her voice, in this general vagueness of expecting him to understand her, whether she meant Tenney or the child.

"What I thought was," she went on timidly, "if she'd come an' git him"—and here "him" evidently meant the child—"'twould be reasonable she was takin' him back where he could be brought up right. She'd just as soon do it," she assured him earnestly, as if he had no part in Nan. "Some folks are like that. They're so good."

He was insatiate in his desire to understand her.

"And you mean," he said, with a directness he was willing to tincture with a cruelty sharp enough to serve, "to send the child off somewhere where he will be safe, and then live here with this brute, have more children by him——"

"No! no!" she cried sharply. "Not that! don't you say that to me. I can't bear it. Not from you! My God help me! not from you."

He understood her. She loved him. He was set apart by her overwhelming belief in him, but she was in all ways, the ways of the flesh as well as the spirit, consecrated to him. Her body might become the prey of man's natural cruelty, and yet, while she wept her tears of blood in this unreasoning slavery, she held one worship. There he would be alone. The insight of the awakened mind told him another thing: that, in spite of her despairing loyalty, he could conquer her scruples. He could, by the sheer weight of a loving will, force her to follow him. A warm entreaty, one word of his own need, and she would answer. And while he thought, the jungle feeling came upon him, hot, hateful to his conscious mind, the feeling of the complexity of it all, strange beasts of emotion out for prey, the reason drugged with nature's sophistries. The jungle! That was what Nan had called it, this welter of human misery. Who else had been talking to him about it? Why, Old Crow! He had not called it the jungle, but he had been lost in its tortuous ways. This prescience to Old Crow brought a queer feeling, as if a cool air blew on him. The jungle feeling passed. Almost he had the vision of an eternal city, built up by the broken but never wholly failing strength of man, and Old Crow there beckoning him into it and telling him he'd kept a place for him. And the cool breeze which was Old Crow told him that although Tira must be rescued, if it could be brought about, it must not be through any of the jungle ways. She must not be drugged by jungle odors and carried off unwillingly, even to the Holy City itself, by that road. He and Tira—yes, he and Tira and Nan—would march along together with their eyes open. He hastened to speak, to commit himself to what he must deliberately wish:

"Then we'll telephone Nan."

She looked at him, all gratitude. Her friend had gone away into strange dark corners of life where only her instinct followed him, and here he was back again.

"No," she said, "don't you telephone. Somebody'd listen in. You write. I guess mebbe nothin'll happen right off, even if I did burn the crutch. I guess I got kinder beside myself to-night. I ain't likely to be so ag'in."

"I'll walk up to the hut with you," said Raven, rising as she did, "and see you safe inside."

"No," said she, "I couldn't let you no ways. It's bad enough as 'tis."

By this she meant the paragraph in the paper which had laid an insulting finger on him; but he had not seen it and did not understand. Only it was plain to him that she would not let him go. She drew her hood up, and made it secure under her chin. Then she looked at him and smiled a little. She had to smile, her woman's instinct told her, to reassure him. She opened the door, and though he followed her quickly, had slipped through the outer door as softly and was gone. He stood there on the sill watching her hurrying to the road. When she had turned to the right, she began to run, and he went down the path after her to look up the road, lest she had seen something pursuing her. But the night was still. There was no sound of footsteps on the snow, and the far-off barking of a fox made the silence more complete. She was only hurrying, because her mother heart had wakened suddenly to the loneliness of the child up there among the pillows, torturing herself with wonders that she could leave him. He went out into the road and continued on her track, until he saw her turn into the woods. Then, waiting until she should be far enough in advance not to catch the sound of his pursuit, he suddenly heard footsteps on the road and turned. A man was coming rapidly. It was Dick.



XXXIII

In his relief—for, in spite of the man's lameness, he had made sure it was Tenney—Raven laughed out. At once he sobered, for why was Dick here but to spy on him?

"Well," he inquired brusquely, "what is it?"

They turned together, and Dick did not speak. When they had gone in and Raven closed the hall door and glanced at him, he was suddenly aware that the boy had not spoken because he could not trust himself. His brows were knit, his face dark with reproachful anger.

"Think the old man shouldn't have gone out in the cold without his hat and muffler?" asked Raven satirically.

"Yes," said Dick, in a quick outburst. "I think just that. It's a risk you've no business to take. In your condition, too. Oh, yes, I know you do look fit enough, but you can't depend on that. Besides—Jack, who's that woman? What's she going up into the woods for? She's not going to the hut? Is that why——?"

Raven stood looking at him, studying not so much his face as the situation. He turned to the library door.

"Come in, Dick," he said. "We'll talk it out. We can't either of us sleep."

Dick followed him in and they took their accustomed chairs. Raven reached for his pipe, but he did not fill it: only sat holding it, passing his thumb back and forth over the bowl. He was determining to be temperate, to be fair. Dick could not forget he was old, but he must force himself not to gibe at Dick for being young.

"Do you feel able," he said, "to hear a queer story and keep mum over it? Or do you feel that a chap like me, who ought to be in the Psychopathic, hasn't any right to a square deal? When you see me going off my nut, as you expect, shall you feel obliged to give in your evidence, same as families do to the doctor and the clergyman if a man's all in?"

Dick was straight.

"I'll do my best," he said. "But a woman—like that—and you meeting her as you did! It's not like you, Jack. You never'd have done such a thing in all your born days if you weren't so rattled."

There were arguments at the back of his mind he could not, in decency, use. He remembered Raven's look when he drew her in, and the tragic one that mirrored it: passionate entreaty on the woman's face, on the man's passionate welcome. As usual, it was the real witnesses of life standing dumb in the background that alone had the power to convict. But they could not be brought into court. Custom forbade it, the code between man and man. Yet there they were, all the same.

"Well!" said Raven. He had responded with only a little whimsical lift of the eyebrows to this last. "If you won't trust me, I must you. That's all there is about it. The woman is our neighbor. Israel Tenney's wife, and she's in danger of her life from her husband, and she won't leave him."

Dick stared as at the last thing he had expected. He shook his head.

"Too thin," he said. "I've seen Tenney and I've heard him spoken of. He's a psalm-singing Methody, or something of that sort. Why, I met him one day, Jerry and I, and he stared at me as if he wanted to know me again. And Jerry said afterward he was probably going to ask me if I'd found the Lord; but he changed his mind or something. No, Jack, don't you be taken in. That woman's pulling your leg."

"Dick," said Raven, "I've been told you have a very vivid sense of drama in your narrative verse. You couldn't, by any possibility, apply it to real life?"

"Oh, I know," said Dick, "New England's chock full of tragedy. But I tell you I've seen Tenney. He's only a kind of a Praise-God Barebones. Put him back a few hundred years, and you'd see him sailing for Plymouth, for freedom to worship God. (Obstinate, too, like the rest of 'em. He wouldn't worship anybody else's God, only the one he'd set up for himself.) If his wife didn't mind him, he might pray with her or growl over the dinner table, but he wouldn't bash her head in. Understand, Jack, I've seen Tenney."

"Yes," said Raven drily, "I've seen Tenney, too. And seen him in action. Now, Dickie, you put away your man-of-the-world attitude toward battle, murder, and sudden death, and you let me tell you a few things about Tenney."

He began with the day when he had found Tira in the woods. He touched on the facts briefly, omitting to confess what the woman looked to his dazzled eyes. It was a drawing austerely black and white. Could he tell anyone—anyone but Nan—how she had seemed to him there, the old, old picture of motherhood, divine yet human? It was too much to risk. If he did lay his mind bare about that moment which was his alone, and Dick met it with his unimaginative astuteness, he could not trust himself to be patient with the boy. He said little more than that he had given her the freedom of the hut, and that he meant always to have it ready for her. Then he came to this last night of all, when she had run away from Tenney, not because he had been violent, but because he had "kept still." That did take hold on Dick's imagination, the imagination he seemed able to divorce from the realities of life and kept for the printed page.

"By thunder!" he said. "Burned the crutch, did she? That's a story in itself, a real story: Mary Wilkins, Robert Frost. That's great!"

"Sounds pretty big to me," said Raven quietly. "But it's not for print. See you don't feel tempted to use it. Now, here we are with Tira up against it. She's got to make a quick decision. And she's made it."

"Do you call her by her first name?" asked Dick, leaping the main issue to frown over the one possibly significant of Raven's state of mind.

"Yes," said Raven steadily, "I rather think I call her by her first name. I don't know whether I ever have 'to her head,' as Charlotte would say, but I don't seem to feel like calling her by Tenney's name. Well, Tira's decided. She's going to give her baby to Nan."

Dick's eyes enlarged to such an extent, his mouth opened so vacuously, that Raven laughed out. Evidently Dick wasn't regarding the matter from Tira's standpoint, or even Raven's now, but his own.

"Nan!" he echoed, when he could get his lips into action. "Where does Nan come in?"

"Oh," said Raven, with a most matter-of-fact coolness, "Nan came in long ago. I told her about it, and it seems she went to see Tira off her own bat, and offered to take the baby."

"She sha'n't do it," proclaimed Dick. "I simply won't have it, that's all."

"I fancy," said Raven, "Nan'll tell you you've got nothing whatever to do with it. And really, Dick, you never'll get Nan by bullying her. Don't you know you won't?"

Dick, having a perfectly good chance, turned the tables on him neatly.

"That'll do," said he, remembering how Raven had shut him up when he dragged in Anne Hamilton. "We won't discuss Nan."

Now it was Raven's turn to gape, but on the heels of it, seeing the neatness of the thrust, he smiled.

"Right, boy," he said. "Good for you. We won't discuss Nan, and we won't discuss Tira. But you'll hold your tongue about this business, and if you find me opening the door of my house at midnight, you'll remember it's my business, and keep your mouth shut. Now I'm going up the hill to see she's safe, and if you follow me, in your general policy of keeping on my trail, I don't quite know what will happen. But something will—to one of us."

He got up, went into the hall and found his cap and leather jacket. Dick meantime stood in the library door regarding him from so troubled a mind that Raven halted and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Cut it out, boy," he said, "all this guardian angel business. You let me alone and I'll let you alone. We're both decent chaps, but when you begin with your psychotherapy and that other word I don't know how to pronounce——"

Dick, having, at this period of his life only an inactive sense of humor, mechanically supplied it: "Psychiatry."

"What a beast of a word! Yes, that's it. Well, they're red rags to me, all these gadgets out of the half-baked mess they've stirred up by spying on our insides. I can't be half decent to you. But I want to be. I want us to be decent to each other. It's damnable if we can't. Go to bed, and I'll run up and see if poor Tira's safe."

He did not wait for an answer, but went out at the front door, and Dick heard him whistling down the path. The whistle seemed like an intentional confirmation of his being in a cheerfully normal frame of mind, not likely to be led too far afield by premonitions of New England tragedy. Perhaps that was why he did whistle, for when he reached the road he stopped and completed the first half of the ascent in silence. Then, as the whistle might mean something reassuring to Tira, he began again with a bright loudness, bold as the oriole's song. He reached the hut, whistling up to the very door, and then his breath failed him on a note, the place looked so forbiddingly black in the shadow, the woods were so still. It did not seem possible that a woman's warm heart was beating inside there, Tira's heart, home of loves unquenchable. He put his hand down under the stone. The key was there, and rising, he felt his mind heavy with reproaches of her. She had gone back to Tenney. The night's work was undone. What was the use of drawing her a step along the path of safety if she turned back the instant he trusted her alone? He went down the hill again in a dull distaste for himself. It seemed to him another man might have managed it better, swept her off her feet and bound her in an allegiance where she would obey. When he reached his own house, he was too discontented even to glance at Dick's window and wonder whether the boy was watching for him. The place was silent, and he put out the lights and went to bed.

Next morning he had got hold of himself and, with that obstinate patience which is living, went to the library after breakfast and called up Nan. It was wonderful to hear her fresh voice. It broke in upon his discouragements and made them fly, like birds feeding on evil food. Would she listen carefully, he asked. Would she translate him, because he couldn't speak in any detail. And when he had got thus far, he remembered another medium, and began the story of last night in French. Nan listened with hardly a commenting word, and when he had finished her bald answer was ridiculously reassuring.

"Sure!" said Nan. "I'll be there to-night. Send Jerry for me. Eight o'clock."

"God bless you!" said Raven. "You needn't bring any luggage. It'll probably be wiser to go right back."

Nan said "Sure!" again, no doubt, Raven thought, as indicating her view of her errand as a homespun one there was no doubt of her carrying out with the utmost simplicity. Then he went to tell Jerry he was to meet the evening train, and on the way he told Dick:

"Nan's coming to-night."

"Nan!" said Dick. "Not——"

"Yes," said Raven. "I telephoned her. Buck up, old man. Here's another chance for you, don't you see? We're in a nasty hole, Tira and incidentally Nan and I. Play the game, old son, and help us out."

"What," inquired Dick, "do you expect me to do?"

"Chiefly," said Raven, "keep out. It's my game and Nan's and Tira's. But you play yours. Don't sulk. Show her what a noble Red Man you can be."

Dick turned away, guiltily, Raven thought, as if he had plans of his own. What the deuce did he mean to do? But their day passed amicably enough, though they were not long together. Raven went up to the hut and stayed most of the afternoon. It was not so much that he expected Tira to come as that he felt the nearness of her there in the room she had disarranged with barricading chairs and pillows and then put in order again before she left. He could see her stepping softly about, with her deft, ordered movements, making it comely for him to find. She had left pictures of herself on the air, sad pictures, most of them, telling the tale of her terror and foreboding, but others of them quite different. There were moments he remembered when, in pauses of her talk with him, she glanced at the child, and still others when she sat immobile, her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze on the fire. Henceforth the hut would be full of her presence, hers and Old Crow's. And, unlike as they were, they seemed to harmonize. Both were pitiful and yet austere in their sincerity; and for both life had been a coil of tangled meanings. He stayed there until nearly dark, and his musings waxed arid and dull with the growing chill of the room. For he would not light the fire. It had to be left in readiness.

When he went down he found Dick uneasily tramping the veranda.

"Charlotte wants us to have a cup of tea," said Dick. "She said supper's put off till they come."

"They?" inquired Raven. "Who's they?"

"It's no use, Jack," Dick broke forth. "I might as well tell you. I s'pose if I didn't you'd kick up some kind of a row later. I telephoned Mum."

"You don't mean," said Raven, in a voice of what used to be called "ominous calm," before we shook off the old catch-words and got indirections of our own, "you don't mean you've sent for her!"

"It's no use," said Dick again, though with a changed implication, "you might as well take things as they are. Nan can't come up here slumming without an older woman. It isn't the thing. It simply isn't done."

Raven, through the window, saw Charlotte hovering in the library with the tea tray. He watched her absently, as if his mind were entirely with her. Yet really it was on the queerness of things as they are in the uniform jacket of propriety and the same things when circumstance thrusts the human creature out of his enveloping customs and sends him into battle. He thought of Dick's philosophy of the printed word. He thought of Nan's desperate life of daily emergency in France. Yet they were all, he whimsically concluded, being squared to Aunt Anne's rigidity of line. But why hers? Why not Old Crow's? Old Crow would have had him rescue Tira, even through difficult ways. He opened the door.

"Come on in," he said. "Charlotte's buttered the toast."

Dick followed him, and they sat down to their abundant tea, Charlotte pausing a moment to regard them with her all-enveloping lavishment of kindliness. Were they satisfied? Could she bring something more?

"The trouble with you, Dick," said Raven, after his third slice of toast, buttered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness, "is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake the actors make: repeated farewells."

Dick made no answer. He, too, ate toast prodigiously.

"Now," said Raven, when they had finished, "do I understand you mean to put your mother wise about what I told you last night? Yes or no?"

"I shall do——" said Dick, and at his pause Raven interrupted him.

"No, you won't," said he. "You won't do what you think best. Take it from me, you won't. What I told you wasn't my secret. It's poor Tira's. If you give her away to your mother—good God! think of it, Milly, with her expensive modern theories and her psychiatry—got it right, that time!—muddling up things for a woman like her! Where was I? Well, simply, if you play a dirty trick like that on me, I'll pack you off, you and your mother both. I don't like to remind you but, after all, old man, the place is mine."

The blood came into Dick's face. He felt misjudged in his affection and abused.

"You can't see," he said. "I don't believe it's because you can't. You won't. It isn't Nan alone. It's you. You're not fit. You're no more fit than you were when Mum was here before. And you can pack me off, but, by thunder! I won't go."

"Very well," said Raven, with a happy inspiration. "You needn't. I'll go myself. And I'll take Nan with me." A picture of Nan and her own vision of happy isles came up before him, and he concluded: "Yes, by George! I'll take Nan. And we'll sail for the Malay Peninsula, or an undiscovered island, and wear Mother Hubbards and live on breadfruit, and you and your precious conventions can go to pot."

So, having soothed himself by his own intemperance, he got up, found his pipe and a foolish novel he made a point of reading once a year—it would hardly do to tell what it was, lest the reader of this true story fail to sympathize with his literary views and so with all his views—and sat down to await his guests in a serviceable state of good humor. He had brought Dick to what Charlotte would call "a realizing sense." He could afford a bit of tolerance. Dick got up and flung out of the room, finding Raven, he told himself, in one of his extravagant moods. Nine times out of ten the moods meant nothing. On the other hand, in this present erratic state of a changed Raven, they might mean anything. For himself, he was impatient, with the headlong rush of young love. Nan was coming. She was on the way. Would she be the same, distant with her cool kindliness, her old lovely self to Raven only, or might she be changed into the Nan who kissed him that one moment of his need? He snatched his hat and tore out of the house, and Raven, glancing up from his novel, saw him striding down the path and thought approvingly he was a wise young dog to walk off some of his headiness before Nan came. As for him, he would doze a little over his foolish book, as became a man along in years. That was what Charlotte would say, "along in years." Was it so? What a devil of an expression, like all the rest of them that were so much worse than the thing itself: "elderly," "middle-aged," what a grotesque vocabulary! And he surprised himself by throwing his foolish book, with an accurate aim, at a space in the shelves, where it lodged and hung miserably, and getting up and tearing down the walk at a pace emulating Dick's, but in the opposite direction: the result of these athletic measures being that when Amelia and Nan drove up with Jerry, the station master's pung following with two small trunks that seemed to wink at Raven, with an implication of their competitive resolve to stay, two correctly clad gentlemen were waiting on the veranda in a state of high decorum. As to the decorum, it didn't last, so far as Raven was concerned. Messages of a mutual understanding passed between his eyes and Nan's. He burst into sudden laughter, but Nan, more sagely alive to the dangers of the occasion, kept her gravity.