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.
"Well," said Amelia, as Raven, still laughing, solicitously lifted her out, "you seem to be in a very happy frame of mind. I'm glad youcanlaugh."
Thereafter they all behaved as if they had separated yesterday and nothing was more natural than to find themselves together again. Amelia, with bitterness in her heart, accepted the room she again longed to repudiate, and Nan, with a lifted eyebrow at Raven, as if wondering whether she'd really better be as daring as he indicated, followed Charlotte up the stairs. At supper they talked decorously of the state of the nation, which Raven frankly conceived of as going to the dogs, and Amelia upheld, from an optimism which assumed Raven to be amenable to only the most hopeful of atmospheres. After supper, when they hesitated before the library door, Nan said quite openly, as one who has decided that only the straight course will do:
"Rookie, could I see you a minute? In the dining-room?" She took in Amelia with her frank smile. "Please, Mrs. Powell! It's business."
"Certainly," Amelia said, rather stiffly. "Come, Dick. We'll keep up the fire."
They had evidently, she and Dick, resolved, though independently of each other, to behave their best, and Dick, in excess of social virtue, shut the library door, so that no wisp of talk would float that way and settle on them. Nan confronted Raven with gayest eyes.
"Did you ever!" she said, recurring to the Charlottian form of comment. "At the last minute, if you please, when I was taking the train. There she was behind me. We talked all the way, 'stiddy stream' (Charlotte!) and not a thing you could put your finger on. Did he send for her?"
"I rather think so," said Raven, giving Dick every possible advantage. Then, rallied by her smiling eyes, "Well, yes, of course he did. Don't look at me like that. I have to turn myself inside out, you she-tyrant!"
"Does Dick know?" she hastened to ask. "About Tira?"
"Yes."
"Know what I'm here for?"
"Yes."
"Given his word not to blab? Hope to die?" That was their childish form of vow, hers and Dick's.
"I hope so," said Raven doubtfully. "I represented it to him as being necessary."
"I'll represent it, too," said Nan. "Now, Rookie, I'm going over there, first thing to-morrow morning. I'm going to see Tenney."
"The deuce you are! I'm afraid that won't do."
"Nothing else will," said Nan. "Tenney's got to give his consent. We can't do any kidnaping business. That's no good."
She said it with the peremptory implication of extinguishing middle-aged scruples, and Raven also felt it to be "no good."
"Very well," said he. "You know best. I'll go with you."
"Oh, no, you won't. There are too many men-folks in it now. I'm going alone. Now, come back and talk to the family. Oh, I hope and pray Dick'll be good! Doesn't he look dear to-night, all red, as if he'd been logging? Has he? Have you? You look just the same. Oh, I do love Dick! I wish he'd let me, the way I want to."
Meantime Charlotte had come in, and Nan went to her and put her hands on her shoulders and rubbed cheeks, as she used to do with Raven.
"Come on," she said to him. "Time!"
So they went into the library and conversed, with every conventional flourish, until Amelia set the pace of retirement by a ladylike yawn. But she had a word to say before parting, reserved perhaps to the last because she found herself doubtful of Raven's response. If she had to be snubbed she could simply keep on her way out of the room.
"John," said she, at the door, with the effect of a sudden thought, "how about Anne's estate? Are they getting it settled?"
Raven hesitated a perceptible instant. He somehow had an idea the estate was an affair of his, not to say Nan's.
"I suppose so," he answered, frowning. "Whitney's likely to do the right thing."
Amelia was never especially astute in the manner of danger signals.
"I suppose," she said, "you've made up your mind what to invest in. Or are the things in pretty good shape? Can you leave them as they are?"
Dick was standing by the hearth, wishing hard for a word with Nan. She had smiled at him once or twice, so peaceably! The next step might be to a truce and then everlasting bliss. Now, suddenly aware of his mother, he ungratefully kicked the fire that was making him such pretty dreams, went to her, took her by the arm and proceeded with her across the hall.
"You talk too much," said Dick, when he had her inside her room. "Don't you know better than to drag in Miss Anne? He's touchy as the devil."
"Then he must get over it," said Amelia, in her best manner of the intelligent mentor. "Of course, she was a great loss to him."
"Don't you believe it," said Dick conclusively. "She had her paw on him. What the deuce is it in him that makes all the women want to dry-nurse him and build him up and make him over?"
Then he wondered what Nan was saying to Raven at the moment, remembered also Raven's injunction to play a square game with her and, though his feet were twitching to carry him back to the library, sat doggedly down at his mother's hearth and encouraged her to talk interminably. Amelia was delighted. She didn't know Dick had so earnest an interest in the Federation of Clubs and her popular course in economics. She was probably never more sustainedly intelligent than in that half hour, until Dick heard Nan going up to bed, sighed heavily, and lost interest in the woman citizen.
Nan and Raven, standing by the fire, in their unexpected minute of solitude, looked at each other and smiled in recognizing that they were alone and that when that happened things grew simple and straight. To Raven there was also the sense of another presence. Anne had somehow been invoked. Amelia, with her unfailing dexterity in putting her foot in, had done it: but still there Anne was, with the unspoken question on her silent lips. What was he going to do? He knew her wish. Presently he would have her money. He caught the interrogation in Nan's eyes. What was he going to do?
"I don't know, Nan," he said. "I don't know."
"Never mind," said Nan. "You'll know when the time comes."
And he was aware that she was still in her mood of forcing him on to make his own decisions. But, easily as he read her mind, there were many things he did not see there. It was a turmoil of questions, and of these the question of Aunt Anne was least. Did he love Tira? This headed the list. Did he want to tear down his carefully built edifice of culture and the habit of conventional life, and run away with Tira to elemental simplicities and sweet deliriums? And if he did love Tira, if he did want to tear down his house of life and live in the open, she would help him. But all she said was:
"Good night, Rookie. I'm sleepy, too."
To leap a dull interval of breakfast banalities is to find Nan, on a crisp day, blue above and white below, at the Tenneys' door. Tira, frankly apprehensive, came to let her in. Tira had had a bad night. The burning of the crutch fanned a fire of torment in her uneasy mind. She had hardly slept, and though she heard Tenney's regular breathing at her side, she began to have a suspicion it was not a natural breathing. She was persuaded he meant now to keep track of her, by night as well as day. It began to seem to her a colossal misfortune that the crutch was not there leaning against the foot of the bed, and now its absence was not so much her fault as a part of its own malice. Nan, noting the worn pallor of her face and the dread in her eyes, gathered that Tenney was at home. She put out her hand, and Tira, after an instant's hesitation, gave hers. Nan wondered if she were in a terror wild enough to paralyze her power of action. Still, she had given her hand, and when Nan stepped up on the sill, with a cheerful implication of intending, against any argument, to come in, she stood aside and followed her. But at the instant of her stepping aside, Nan was aware that she threw both hands up slightly. It was the merest movement, an unstudied gesture of despair. Tenney was sitting by the kitchen stove, and Nan went to him with outstretched hand.
"I thought I should find you if I came early enough," she said. "How's your foot?"
She had a direct address country folk liked. She was never "stand-off," "stuck-up." It was as easy talking with her as with John Raven.
"Some better, I guess," said Tenney. He eyed her curiously. Had Raven sent her, for some hidden reason, to spy out the land?
"You get round, don't you?" pursued Nan.
She took the chair Tira brought her and regarded him across the shining stove. Tira withdrew to a distance, and stood immovable by the scullery door, as if, Nan thought, she meant to keep open her line of retreat.
"No," said Tenney grimly, "I don't git about much. Three times a day I git from the house to the barn. I expect to do better, as time goes on. I've got my eye on a cord wood stick, an' I'm plannin' how I can whittle me out a crutch."
Nan, glancing at Tira, caught the tremor that went over her and understood this was, in a veiled way, a threat. She came, at a leap, to the purpose of her call.
"Mr. Tenney," she said, "I'm an awfully interfering person. I've come to ask you and your wife to let me do something."
Tenney was staring at her with lacklustre eyes. In these latter days, the old mad spark in them had gone.
"Your baby," said Nan, feeling her heart beat hard, "isn't right. I know places where such poor little children are made—right—if they can be. They're studied and looked after. I want you to let me take him away with me and see if something can be done. His mother could go, too, if she likes. You could go. Only, I'll be responsible. I'll arrange it all."
Tenney still stared at her, and she found the dull gaze disconcerting.
"So," he said at length, not even glancing at Tira, "so she's put that into your head."
"So far as that goes," said Nan boldly, "I've put it into hers. I saw he wasn't right. I told her I'd do everything in my power, in anybody's power, to have him"—she hesitated here for a homely word he might take in—"seen to. And now (you're his father) I've come to you."
Tenney sat a long time, motionless, his eyes on the window at the end of the room where a woodbine spray was tapping, and again Nan became conscious of the increased tremor in Tira's frame. For now it seemed to have run over her and strangely to keep time to the woodbine spray outside. One would have said the woodbine, looking in, had, in a mad, irritating way, made itself the reflex of these human emotions within the room. Tenney spoke, drily yet without emphasis:
"Then he put ye up to this?"
"Who?" asked Nan.
For some obscure reason he would not mention Raven's name. But he spoke with a mildness of courtesy surprising to her and evidently the more alarming to Tira, for she shook the more and the vine appallingly knew and kept her company.
"I'm obleeged to ye," said Tenney. "But I don't want nothin' done for me nor mine. He's mine, ye see. He's in there asleep"—he pointed to the open bedroom door—"an' asleep or awake, he's mine, same's any man's property is his. An' if he ain't right, he ain't, an' I know why, an' it's the will o' the Lord, an' the Lord's will is goin' to be fulfilled now an' forever after, amen!"
The tang of scripture phrasing led him further to the channel his mind was always fumbling for.
"Do you," he asked Nan, not with any great show of fervor, but as if this were his appointed task, "do you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ yet? Be ye saved?"
"Mr. Tenney," said Nan, "I don't care a scrap whether I'm saved or not, if I can make this world swing a little easier on its hinges." That seemed to her a figure not markedly vivid, and she continued. "It needs a sight of oiling. Don't you see it does? O, Mr. Tenney, think of the poor little boy that's got to live along"—the one phrase still seemed to her the best—"not right, and grow to be a man, and you may die and leave him, and his mother may die. What's he going to do then?"
"No," said Tenney quietly, with the slightest glance at Tira in her tremor there by the door, "I ain't goin' to die, not this v'y'ge. If anybody's goin' to, it ain't me."
"O Isr'el!" said Tira. Her voice rose scarcely above a whisper and she bent toward him in a beseeching way as if she might, in another instant, run to him. "You let him go. You an' me'll stay here together, long as we live. There sha'n't nothin' come betwixt us, Isr'el." In this Nan heard a hidden anguish of avowal. "But you let him go."
Tenney did not regard her. He spoke, pointedly to Nan:
"I'm obleeged to ye." He rose from his chair. He was dismissing her. His action approached a dignity not to be ignored, and Nan also rose.
"I sha'n't give it up," she said. "I shall come again."
She tried to smile at him with composure, including Tira in the friendliness of it, but Tira, oblivious of her, was staring at Tenney, and Nan found herself outside, trouble in her mind. Tira had not gone to the door with her. She had staid still staring, in that fixed interrogation, at Tenney. He looked at her now, met her eyes, and gave a little grimace. He had done well, the movement said. He had seen through it all. He was pleased with himself. Now he spoke to her, so affably that she frowned with perplexity at finding him kind.
"'Tain't so terrible hard," said Tenney, "to see through folks, once ye set your mind on it. He started her out on that, he an' you together, mebbe. ''F I git rid o' the young one,' you says, 'I shall have more freedom to range round, outdoor.' Mebbe you said it to him. Mebbe he said it to you. Mebbe 'twas t'other one—Martin—that said it an' you took it up. No, 'tain't so hard to see through folks, once ye git a start."
He turned and took, with a difficulty half assumed, the few steps to the wood-box, selected a couple of sticks and, with a quiet deftness that seemed to indicate a mind bent only on the act itself, put them in the stove. Tira watched him, fascinated by him, the strength in abeyance, the wayward will. When he set on the stove cover, it seemed to break the spell of her rigidity and she turned, hurried into the scullery and came back. She had, he saw, a knife. That was not alarming. It was a small kitchen knife, but he recognized it as the one she made a great fuss about, asking him to sharpen it often and keeping it for special use. But she gripped it strangely. Besides, there was the strangeness of her face.
"Here! here!" he said. "What you doin' o' that knife?"
Tira was not thinking of him. She had gone, with her quick, lithe step, to the window where the vine was tapping, and thrown it up.
"Here!" he called again, his uneasiness shifting; whatever a woman was doing, with a face like that, she must be stopped. "What you openin' winders for, a day like this, coldin' off the room?"
Tira reached out and seized the woodbine spray, cut it savagely and then shut the window. She came back with the spray in her hand, took off the stove cover and thrust it in, twining and writhing as if it had life and rebelled against the flame.
"There!" she said. "I ain't goin' to have no vines knockin' at winders an' scarin' anybody to death."
Then she went into the scullery and put the knife in its place, blade up in a little frame over the sink, and came back into the bedroom where the child was whimpering. She stayed there a long time, and Tenney stood where she left him, listening for her crooning song. When it began, as it did presently, he gave a nod of relief and started moving about the room. Once he went into the scullery, and Tira heard him pumping. But when she had got the child dressed, and had gone out there herself, to prepare the vegetables for dinner, she put her hand mechanically, without looking, on the rack above the sink. The hand knew what it should find, but it did not find it. The knife was gone. Tira stood a long time looking, not at the empty place, but down at her feet. It was not alarming to miss the knife. It was reassuring. It was not to be believed, yet she must believe it. Tenney was taking precautions. He was afraid.
Nan, halfway home, met Raven. He had been walking up and down, to meet her. Defeat, he saw, with a glance at her face.
"Yes," said Nan, coming up with him. "No go, Rookie. He was civil. But he was dreadful. I don't know whether I should have known it, but it's the way she looked at him. Rookie, she was scared blue."
Raven said nothing. He felt a poor stick indeed, to have brought Nan into it and given her over to defeat.
"Can't we walk a spell?" said she. "Couldn't we take the back road to the hut? I do so want to talk to you."
They turned back and passed the Tenneys' at a smart pace. Raven gave the house a swift glance. He was always expecting to hear Tira cry out, she who never did and who, he knew, would endure torture like an Indian. They turned into the back road where the track was soft with the latest snow, and came into the woods again opposite the hut. When they reached it and Raven put down his hand for the key, Nan asked:
"Does she come here often?"
"Not lately," he said, fitting the key in the lock. "She had rather a quiet time of it while he was lame."
They went in and Nan kept on her coat while he lighted the fire and piled on brush.
"Rookie," she said, when he had it leaping, "it's an awful state of things. The man's insane."
"No," said Raven, "I don't feel altogether sure of that. We're too ready to call a man insane, now there's the fashion of keeping tabs. Look at me. I do something outside the ordinary—I kick over the traces—and Milly says I'm to go to the Psychopathic. Dick more than half thinks so, too. Perhaps I ought. Perhaps most of us ought. We deflect just enough from what the majority are thinking and doing to warrant them in shutting us up. No, I don't believe you could call him insane."
They talked it out from all quarters of argument. Nan proposed emergency activities and Raven supplied the counter reason, always, he owned, going back to Tira's obstinacy. Nan was game to kidnap the child, even from Tira's arms. Couldn't be done, Raven told her. Not longer ago than yesterday, Tira would have consented, but now, he reminded her, Tenney's crazy mind was on him. Yes, it was a crazy mind, he owned, but Tenney was not on that account to be pronounced insane. He couldn't be shut up, at least without Tira's concurrence. And she never would concur. She had, if you could put it so, an insane determination equal in measure to Tenney's insane distrust, to keep the letter of her word. Then, Nan argued, Tira and the child together must go back with her. To Tenney, used only to the remote reaches of his home, the labyrinth of city life was impenetrable. He couldn't possibly find them. He wouldn't be reasonable enough, intelligent enough, to take even the first step. And Raven could stay here and fight out the battle. Tenney wouldn't do anything dramatically silly. Tira was "'way off" in fearing that. He would only fix Raven with those unpleasant eyes and ask if he were saved. Very well, Raven agreed. It was worth trying. They must catch the first chance of seeing Tira alone.
Then, though his mind was on Tira, it reverted to Anne. Again she seemed to be inexorably beside him, reminding him, with that delicate touch of her invisible finger, that he was not thinking of her, not even putting his attention uninterruptedly on what she had bidden him do: her last request, he seemed to hear her remonstrating, half sighing it to herself, as if it were only one more of the denials life had made her. Even if he did not agree with her, in his way of taking things (throwing away his strength, persuading young men to throw away theirs, that the limited barbarism called love of country might be served) could he not act for her, in fulfilling her rarer virtue of universal love?
"I tell you what, Nan," he said, with a leap from Tira to the woman more potent now in her unseen might than she had ever been when her subtle ways of mastery had been in action before him, "it's an impossible situation."
How did she know he was talking, not of Tira but of Anne? Yet she did know. There had been a moment's pause and perhaps her mind leaped with his.
It was, she agreed, impossible. Yet, after all, so many things weren't, that looked so at the start. Think of surgery: the way they'd both seen men made over. Well! He didn't remind her that they had also seen a mountain of men, if fate had piled their bodies as high as it was piling the fame of their endeavor, who couldn't be made over.
"If we refuse her," he said—and though Nan was determined he should make his decision alone, she loved him for the coupling of their intent—"we seem to repudiate her. And that's perfectly devilish, with her where she is."
It was devilish, Nan agreed. Her part here seemed to be acquiescence in his attitude of mind, going step by step with him as he broke his path.
"And," said Raven, lapsing into a confidence he had not meant to make—for would Anne in her jealous possessiveness, allow him to share one intimate thought about her, especially with Nan?—"the strange part of it is, I do seem to feel she's somewhere. I seem to feel she's here. Reminding me, you know, just as a person can by looking at you, though he doesn't say a word. Have you felt that? Do you now?"
"No," said Nan, with her uncalculated decisiveness that made you sure she was not merely speaking the truth as she saw it, but that she did see it clearly. "I have felt it, though, about other people. About two or three of the boys over there, you know. They were the ones I knew rather well. And Old Crow! up here, Rookie, alone with you, I have that sense of Old Crow's being alive, very much alive. Is it the thoughts he's left behind him, written on the air, or is it really Old Crow?"
"The air's been changed a good many times since he was here," said Raven lightly. It was not good for little girls to be wrestling forever with things formless and dark.
"Oh," said she, "but there's something left. Our minds make pictures. They don't get rubbed out. Why, I can see old Billy Jones sitting here and Old Crow bandaging his legs, and your mother and little Jack coming up to bring things in a basket. You can say that's because Old Crow told it so vividly I can't get it out of my mind. But that isn't all. Things don't get rubbed out."
The next day Raven saw Tenney driving by, probably to the street where all the neighbors went for supplies. Up to this time Jerry had offered, whenever he was going, to do Tira's "arrants," and Tenney had even allowed him to bring home grain. Raven at once summoned Nan. It was their chance. Tira must be taken by storm. Let her leave the house as it was and run away. Nan hurried on her things, and they went up the road.
"There she is," said Nan, "at the window."
Raven, too, saw her white face for the moment before it disappeared. She was coming, he thought, making haste to let them in. He knocked and waited. No one came. He knocked again, sharply, with his stick, and then, in the after silence, held his breath to listen. It seemed to him he had never heard a house so still. That was the way his mind absurdly put it: actively, ominously still.
"She was at the window," said Nan, in a tone that sounded to him as apprehensive as the beating of his own heart. "I saw her."
He knocked again and, after another interval, the window opened above their heads and Tira leaned over the sill.
"You go away," she said quietly, yet with a thrilling apprehension. "I can't let you in."
They stepped back from the door and looked up at her. She seemed even thinner than when Nan had seen her last, and to Raven all the sorrows of woman were darkling in the anguish of her eyes. He spoke quietly, making his voice reassuring to her.
"Why can't you? Have you been told not to?"
"No," said Tira, quick, he thought, to shield her persecutor, "nobody's said a word. But they've gone off, an' you can't be certain when they'll be back."
"Hasn't he gone to the street?" Raven asked her, and now her voice, in its imploring hurry, could not urge him earnestly enough.
"He said he was goin'. You can't tell. He may turn round an' come back. An' I wouldn't have you here—either o' you—for anything in this world."
But though she said "either of you," her eyes were on Raven, beseeching him to go. He did not answer that. In a few words he set forth their plan. She was to take the child and come. It was to be now. But she would hardly listen.
"No," she called, in any pause between his words. "No! no! no!"
"Don't you want to save the child?" Raven asked her sternly. "Have you forgotten what may happen to him?"
She had her answer ready.
"It's his," she said. "He spoke the truth, though it wa'n't as he mean it. But the baby's his, an' baby as he is, an'ashe is, he's got to fight it out along o' me. You go now, an' don't you come a-nigh me ag'in. An' if you stay here knockin' at my door, I'll scream so's I sha'n't hear you."
She withdrew her head from the window, but instantly looked out again.
"God Almighty bless you!" she said. "But you go! you go!"
"Tira!" called Raven sharply, "don't you know you're in danger? Don't you know if anything happens to you it'll——" He paused, and Nan wondered if he meant to say, "It will break my heart!" and scarcely felt the pain of it, she was so tense with misery for them both.
Tira leaned out again and seemed to bend even protectingly toward them. She smiled at them, and the softening of her face was exquisite.
"I ain't in danger," she said. "I've said things to him. He's afraid."
"Threatened him?" Raven asked.
"I've kep' tellin' him," said Tira, in that same tone of tender reasonableness such as mothers use when they persuade children to the necessities of things, "he must remember we ain't alone. An' somehow it seems to scare him. He don't see Him as I do: the Lord Jesus Christ."
She shut the window quietly, and Raven and Nan went away. They walked soberly home without a word, but when Nan was taking off her hat she heard bells and went to the library window. Raven was standing by the table, trying to find some occupation to steady his anxious mind.
"Look!" said Nan.
It was Tenney, and he was "whipping up."
"She knew, didn't she?" commented Nan, and he answered:
"Yes, she knew."
Here his trouble of mind broke forth. He had to be enlightened. A woman must guess what a woman thought.
"I can't understand her," he said. "I believe I have understood her, up to now. But to say the child's got to bear it with her! Why, a woman's feeling about her child! It's as old as the world. A woman will sacrifice herself, but she won't sacrifice her child."
He looked at her with such trouble in his face that Nan had to turn away. He understood her too well. Could he read in her eyes what her mind had resolved not to tell him? Yet she would tell him. He shouldn't grope about in the dark among these mysteries. She wanted, as much as Old Crow wanted it, to be a light to his feet.
"She would," she told him quietly, "sacrifice herself in a minute. Only she can't do it the way we've offered her, because now you've come into it."
"I've been in it from the first," frowned Raven. "Ever since the day I found her up there in the woods."
"Yes, but then that poor crazy idiot was jealous only of him, the creature that sat down by her at prayer-meeting; and now he's jealous of you. And she's saving you, Rookie. At any risk. Even her own child."
Nan thought she could add what had been in her mind, keeping time to every step of the way home: "For now she loves you better than the child." But it proved impossible to say that, and she went out of the room, not looking at him, and only waiting to put away her hat and coat in the hall. She went upstairs with the same unhurried step and shut the door of her room behind her. She stood there near the door, as if she were guarding it against even the thoughts of any human creature. They must not get at her, those compassionate thoughts, not Charlotte's, certainly not Raven's. For at that moment Nan found herself a little absurd, as many a woman has who knows herself to be starving for a man's love. She began to tremble, and remembered Tira shaking there by the door that morning that seemed now years away. The tremor got hold of her savagely and shook her. It might have been shaking her in its teeth.
"Nervous chill!" said Nan to herself, insisting on saying it aloud to see if her teeth would actually chatter and finding they did. She had seen plenty of such nervous whirlwinds among her boys and helped to quiet them. "I'm an interesting specimen," chattered Nan. "Talk aboutcafard!"
All that forenoon, Dick fretted about the house, waiting for her, hoping she would go to walk, let him read to her—Dick had a persistent habit of reading verse to you when he found you weren't likely to get into the modern movement by yourself—but no Nan. At dinner, there she was, rather talkative, in a way that took Amelia into the circle of intimacy, and seemed to link up everybody with everybody else in a nice manner. Nan had the deftest social sense, when she troubled herself to use it. Aunt Anne would have been proud of her.
Then everything, so far as Raven and Nan were concerned, quieted to an unbroken commonplace, and the four—for Amelia and Dick held to their purpose of "standing by"—again settled down to country life, full of the amenities and personal abnegations of a house party likely to be continued. Charlotte was delighted, in her brooding way, and ascribed the emotion to Jerry who, she said, "liked somethin' goin' on." Nan and Dick had vaulted back to their past: the old terms of a boy and girl intimacy in robust pursuits admitting much laughter and homespun talk. They went snowshoeing over the hills, Raven, though Nan begged him to come, electing to stay at home with Amelia, who would stand at the door to see them off, half persuaded she was up to going herself and, indeed, almost feeling she had gone, after considering it so exhaustively, and then retreating to the library where she was cramming for next year's economics. Raven was very good to her. He would sit down by the blazing hearth, listening with an outward interest to her acquired formulae of life, and then, after perfunctory assent or lax denial, retire to his own seclusion over a book. But he seldom read nowadays. He merely, in this semblance of studious absorption, found refuge from Amelia. He was mortally anxious for Tira, still face to face with brute irresponsibility, and when the mental picture of it flamed too lividly and could not be endured, he threw down his book and hurried up to the hut, to find her. She never came. The fire, faithfully laid for her, was unlighted. The room breathed the loneliness of a place that has known a beloved presence and knows it no more. Nearly every day he and Nan had a word about her, and often he saw Nan going "up along" and knew she was, in the uneasiness of no news, bent on walking past the house, if only for a glance at the windows and the sight of Tira's face. Three times within a few weeks Tenney had driven past, and each time Nan, refusing Dick's company, hurried up the road. But she came back puzzled and dispirited, and called to Raven, who, in a fever of impatience, had gone out to meet her:
"No. The door is locked."
She would put a hand on his arm and they would walk together while she told him her unvarying tale. When she had knocked persistently, Tira would appear at the chamber window, and shake her head, and her lips seemed to be saying, "No! no! no!" And each time Tenney returned shortly, and they were sure his going was a blind. He never went to the street, and even Charlotte remarked the strangeness of his short absences.
"What under the sun makes Isr'el Tenney start out an' turn round an' come back ag'in?" she inquired of Jerry. "He ain't gone twenty minutes 'fore he's home."
Jerry didn't know. He "'sposed Isr'el forgot suthin'."
How was Tira? Raven asked after Nan had seen her at the window, and she did not spare him. Pale, she said, paler than ever, a shadow of herself. But Nan had faith that her courage would hold. It was like the winter and the spring. Tenney stood for the forces of darkness, but the spring had to come in the end. Also she owned that her great reason for believing in Tira's endurance was that Tira was not alone. She had, like Old Crow, her sustaining symbol. She had, whatever the terrifying circumstance of her daily life, divine companionship. She had her Lord, Jesus Christ.
"I believe," said Raven abruptly, one day when they were tramping the snowy road and she was answering the panic of his apprehensive mind, "you swear by Old Crow's book."
"I do," said Nan simply, "seem to be hanging on to Old Crow. I've read it over and over. And it does somehow get me. Picture writing! And human beings drawing the lines and half the time not getting them straight! But if there's something to draw, I don't care how bad the drawing is. If there's actually something there! There is, Rookie. Tira's got hold of it because she's pure in heart. It's something real, and it'll see her through."
Raven was not content with its seeing her through until he could be told what the appointed end was likely to be. If Tira was to fight this desperate battle all her mortal life, he wasn't to be placated by the rewarding certainty of a heavenly refuge at the end.
"I can never," he said, "get over the monstrous queerness of it all. Here's a woman that's got to be saved, and she's so infernally obstinate we can't save her. When I think of it at night, I swear I'm a fool not to complain of the fellow in spite of her, and then in the morning I know it can't be done. She'd block me, and I should only have got her in for something worse than she's in for now."
"Yes," said Nan, "she'd block you. Wait, Rookie. Something will happen. Something always does."
Yes, Raven thought, something always does, and sometimes, in country tragedies, so brutal a thing that the remorseful mind shudders at itself for not preventing it. But Nan, equably as she might counsel him, was herself apprehensive. She expected something. She had a sense of waiting for it. Dick must be prepared. He must be found on their side. Whatever the outcome, Raven must not suffer the distrust and censure of his own house.
Dick had been reading to her by the fire while Raven was taking Amelia for a sober walk. Nan wished Dick wouldn't read his verse to her. It made her sorry for him. What was he doing, a fellow who had seen such things, met life and death at their crimson flood, pottering about in these bizarre commonplaces of a literary jog-trot? They sounded right enough, if you stood for that kind of thing, but they betrayed him, his defective imagination, his straining mind. He didn't see the earth as it was. He was so enamored of metaphorical indirection that he tried to see everything in the terms of something else. But to-day she had her own thoughts. She sat staring into the fire, her cheeks burned by the leaping heat, and Dick, looking up at her, stopped on an uncompleted line.
"You haven't," he said, "heard a word."
"Not much of it," said Nan. She looked at him disarmingly. When her eyes were like that, Dick's heart was as water. "I was thinking about Tira."
He had to place this. Who was Tira?
"Oh," said he, "the Tenney woman. Jack needn't have dragged you into that. It's a dirty country story."
"Not dirty," said Nan. "You'd love it if you'd thought of it yourself. You'd write a play about it."
Dick frowned.
"Well, I didn't think of it," said he, "and if I had, I shouldn't be eating and sleeping it as you and Jack are. Whatever's happening up there, it isn't our hunt. It's hers, the woman's. Or the authorities'. The man ought to be shut up."
Nan began telling him how it all was, how they wanted definitely to do the right thing and how Tira herself blocked them. Dick listened, commended the drama of it, and yet found it drama only.
"But it's a beastly shame," he commented, "to have this come on Jack just now when he isn't fit."
Nan had her sudden hot angers.
"Do you mean to tell me," she countered, "you believe that now, now you've lived with him and seen he's exactly what he used to be, only more darling—you believe he's broken, dotty? Heavens! I don't know what you'd call it."
Dick did not answer. He scarcely heard. One word only hit him like a shot and drew blood.
"Stop that!" he ordered.
They faced each other with eyes either angry or full of a tumultuous passion an onlooker would have been puzzled to name.
"Stop what?"
"Calling him darling. I won't have it."
Nan found this truly funny, and broke into a laugh.
"Do you know," she said, "how every talk of ours ends? Rookie! It always comes round to him. I call him darling and you won't have it. But you'll have to."
"No," said Dick, "I won't have it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. You little devil! I believe you do it to work me up. That's all right if it stopped there. But it won't. Some day he'll hear you and then——!"
She was flaming again.
"Hear me? Hear me call him darling? Why, he's heard it so often it's no more to him than your calling him Jack. But if he asked me what I meant by it! do you know what would happen then?"
"What would?"
"Then," said Nan enigmatically, "I should tell him, that's all."
She would say no more, though he hurled questions at her, and hardly remembered afterward what they were. He was of an impression that he begged her to love him, to marry him, though Dick, prodigal as he was of great words in his verse, scarcely believed he used them in the direct address of love-making. But certainly he did beg her, and Nan was gentle with him, though always, like Tira, as she remembered afterward, repeating, "No! no!" At the end, his passion softened into something appealing, as if they were together considering the sad case he found himself in and he depended on her to help him through.
"Nan," he said, in the boyish way she loved, "don't you see it's got to be in the end? We've always been together. We're always going to be. Don't you see, old Nan?"
Nan smiled at him, brilliantly, cruelly, he thought. But she was sorry for him, and it was only a show of cruelty. It came out of her kindness, really. Dick mustn't suffer so for want of her. Bully him, abuse him, anything to anger him and keep him from sheer weak, unavailing regret. Nan had a great idea of what men should be: "tough as a knot," she thought, seasoned all through. If they whimpered, she was aghast.
"No," she said again, with the brilliant smile, "no! no! I can't. I won't. Not unless"—and this, too, was calculated cruelty—"unless Rookie tells me to."
They sat staring at each other as if each wondered what the outcome was to be. Nan was excitedly ready for it. Or had the last word been actually said? But Dick altogether surprised her. He got up and stood looking down at her in a dignity she found new to him.
"When you come to me," he said, "you'll come because I ask you. It won't be because any other man tells you to."
He walked past her, out of the room. Did he, Nan wondered, in her ingenuous surprise, look a very little like Rookie? When he was twenty years older, was he going to look as Rookie did now? His expression, that is. For, after all, there was Dick's nose.
And in these days what of Tira? She, too, was on an edge of nervous apprehension. Tenney was about the house a great deal. He still made much of his lameness, though never in words. Every step he took seemed an implication that a cane was far from sufficient. He needed his crutch. And as the period of his silence lengthened, Tira was driven by her fear to another greater fear: that she might mention it herself. What if she should tell him how the crutch, leaning there at the foot of the bed, had seemed to her a weapon, not a crutch? What if she appealed to his pity and even played a part with him, dwelling on her woman's weakness of nature, her tremors, deprived of the protection that should be hers? Artifice was foreign to her. Yet what was there, short of implicating Raven, she would not do for the child? But a glance at Tenney's face, the tightness of reserve, the fanatical eyes, closed her lips, and they moved about together dumbly at their common tasks. As she grew paler and the outline of her cheek the purer over the bones beneath, he watched her the more intently, but still furtively. One forenoon when the sky was gray and a soft snow fell in great flakes that melted as they came, he went haltingly up to the shed chamber and came down with his gun. He was not a huntsman, and when they moved into the house it had been left there with a disorder of things not likely to be needed. He drew a chair to the table and then addressed her almost urbanely. He wanted, she guessed, to call her attention in some explicit way.
"You git me some kind of a rag," he bade her. "I'm goin' to clean up this old musket. You might's well hand me that oiler, too, off'n the sink shelf. I can't git about any too well."
She brought him the cloth and the oiler and went away to the sink again, determined not to be drawn into any uneasiness of questioning. But it fascinated her, the sight of him bending to his task, and her will weakened. In spite of herself, she went over to the table and stood looking down at him. Presently he glanced up at her and smiled a little in a way she did not like. It seemed to imply some recognition of a common knowledge between them. He had, the look said, more than the apparent reason for what he was doing. The oiling of the gun was not all. Something at the back of his mind was more significant than this act of his hands, and this something, the look said, she also knew. All through the moment of her gazing down at him Tira was telling herself she must not speak. Yet she spoke:
"You goin' gunnin'?"
"I dunno but I be," he returned, his eyes again on his work. "I've had it in mind quite a spell, an' I dunno's there's any reason for puttin' on't off."
"What you goin' after, Isr'el?" she asked, against her will, and he was silent for what seemed so long, that she pursued: "You goin' rabbitin'?"
"No," said Tenney. "I dunno's I be. What's the use o' shootin' down four-footed creatur's? T'other ones'll do well enough for me."
Again he glanced up at her and her look of frozen horror evidently warned him against terrifying her unduly. She must be shaken enough to obey him, not to fight.
"You look kinder peaked," he said, with what she found a false air of interest. "You don't git out enough. Mebbe you'd ought to git out nights. I've been noticin' how peaked you look, an' I thought mebbe I'd git the old musket loaded up an' go out an' shoot ye a pa'tridge. Tempt your appetite, mebbe, a mite o' the breast."
"I dunno," said Tira, speaking with difficulty through her rigid misery, "as you'd ought to, so near nestin' time. I dunno's as it's the season to kill."
"All seasons are the same to me," said Tenney. "When it's time to kill, then kill, I say. Kill!"
He spoke the word as if he loved it, and Tira walked away from him into the bedroom, and stretched herself on the bed, her hand on the sleeping child. When it was time to get dinner she came out again and found him reading his paper by the stove. He had set the gun away in a corner. But directly after dinner he shaved at the little glass by the kitchen window and told her, again with the air of abundant explanation she found foreign to him, that he was going to the street, to get the colt shod. The colt did need to be shod. She knew that. Perhaps this time he was actually going.
"You want to take along the eggs?" she said, and he assented.
He asked her, too, for a list of groceries she needed. He would have to wait his turn at the blacksmith's. He might be a long time. She need not expect him before dark. She might as well go out, he told her, and again:
"You're lookin' peaked. You need the air."
She heard him drive briskly out of the yard, but she would not, for some reason she did not herself know, go to the window to look after him. It was all a plan, she told herself. She was not to be taken in by it. She would force herself to sit down to her sewing. She would not leave the house while he was gone. If he wanted to tempt her out, to trap her, let him have his will. It was better, she thought, with a moment's satirical comment, for him to be driving off on a fictitious mission than roaming the neighborhood with a gun in his hand. She glanced involuntarily at the corner where the gun had stood not many minutes before he left the house. It was gone. Then she knew. She threw down her work, went to the telephone, and called Raven. He was there, and she felt her heart answer wildly when, at her first word, he broke in:
"Is it you?" Not her name, only the intimacy of the significant word. "The hut?" he added.
"Up there," said Tira, breathless. "Both of you. I've got to see you both. Come quick."
She got her cloak and threw it down again, remembering it was what she was used to wearing and that Tenney would most certainly recognize her outline in it, even though a long way off. Grandmother Tenney's black blanket shawl was in the parlor chest of drawers, that and her hood, disfiguring ancientry of dress. She ran into the parlor, snatched them out, tied on the black knitted hood and, not unfolding the shawl, wrapped it about her shoulders. The baby was in his cradle, and she gave him one glance. If he waked, he would cry. Let him cry. But she did lock the door behind her, and put the key on the sill, a place Tenney would know. Half way down the path, she went back, took the key again and dropped it into her apron pocket. Tenney might come, but he should not go into the house and find the child alone. Lest he should come the way he went, she took the back road, and there, when she was about to turn into the wood road, she heard sleigh-bells behind her, the horse going, as her ear told her, "step and step." But she was actually on the wood road when the driver whipped up and the bells came clashingly. She did not turn to look. It was not Tenney. She would have known his bells. The horse drew up, the driver called to him a peremptory and jovial word, and she knew the voice. It was Eugene Martin's, and instinct told her to stop and face him. He stepped out of the sleigh and threw the robe, with a quick motion, over the horse. Then he came on to her, smiling, effusively cordial, and Tira waited. A pace away he took off his hat and made her an exaggerated bow. He was carefully dressed, but then he was always that, according to his lights. Only Tira, who knew him so well, all his vain schemes of personal fitness, judged this to be a day of especial preparation. For what? He took the step between them and put out both hands.
"If this ain't luck!" he beamed. "How are you, girl? I made up my mind I'd see you, but I hadn't an idea you'd be on the road."
Tira rolled her hands in her apron, as if they were cold. His extended hands she did not seem to see.
"I ain't waitin' for you," she said quietly, her eyes on his. "You better go right straight along about your business an' leave me to mine."
"I ain't done right, Tira," said Martin, with the specious warmth she knew. "I did try to git you in bad with Tenney, but don't you know what that sprung from? I'm jealous as the devil. Don't you know I be?"
"You've no call to be jealous nor anything else," said Tira steadily. "You an' me are as fur apart"—she hesitated for a word, and her eyes rested for a moment on one of the tall evergreens moving slightly in the breeze. "We couldn't any more come together than I could climb up to the pick o' that pine tree."
He still regarded her solicitously. He was determined not to abandon his part.
"Ain't somebody come betwixt us?" he demanded, with that vibration of the voice once so moving to her. "You can't deny it. Can you now?"
"Nobody's come betwixt us," said Tira. "If you was the only man on this earth to-day, I'd run from you as I would a snake. I hate you. No, I don't. I look on you as if you was the dirt under my feet."
But as she said it she glanced down, wistfully troubled, as if she begged forgiveness of the good earth. The quick anger she knew in him flared like a licking flame. He threw his arms about her and held her to him as tightly, it seemed to her, as if he were hostile to the very breath within her body. And she was still, not only because he gripped her so but because she had called upon that terrible endurance women recognize within themselves. He kissed her, angry, insulting kisses she could bear more patiently than the kisses of unwelcome love. But as his lips defiled her face, he was suddenly aware that it was wet. Great tears were rolling down her cheeks. He laughed.
"Cryin'?" he jeered. "Poor little cry-baby! wipe her eyes."
While he held her with one arm, the other hand plunged into her apron pocket and brought out her handkerchief. It also touched the key. His instincts, she knew, had a scope of devilish cunning, and at once he knew what key it was. He laughed. Looking off through the trees, he had seen what gave him another clue.
"Smoke!" he called, as if he shouted it to an unseen listener who might not have been clever enough to guess. "Smoke from that shack Raven lazes round in same as Old Crow did afore him. That's where you were goin'. The wood road all broke out for you. I might ha' known it when I see that. Go along, my lady. He'll be there waitin' for you. Go along. But jest for the fun o' the thing, you leave the key with me."
She answered with a desperate wrench; but though one of her hands reached the pocket where the key lay, she could only twitch the fingers, and while he laughed softly he pulled the tie of her apron and, releasing her with a little push, snatched the apron from her, rolled it and thrust it into his pocket. She sprang at him, but he gave her another push that sent her staggering and ran laughing to the sleigh.
"So long!" he called back at her.
She recovered herself and started after him. But the horse plunged forward and Martin was shouting at her jovially, in what words she did not hear. She only knew, through the bewilderment of her despair, that the tone was merciless.
She stood there a moment, looking after him, and realizing that he had forced her into a corner from which there was no possible way out. But then another fear beat in her numbed brain. She had not accomplished the task for which she came here. Martin and his trick must wait. That other need was more important. There was the hut and its welcoming smoke and there Raven must be looking for her. She started running along the snowy path, reached the door, found it unlocked and went in.