Raven, as soon as he had Tira's message, went to find Nan. She was not in her room, but Charlotte, when he finally brought up at the kitchen, told him Nan and Dick had gone to walk. Down the road, she said. They had called to him, but he was in the barn.
"Then," said Raven, getting into his jacket, "see her the minute she comes back and send her up to the hut."
Yes, Charlotte meant to be in the kitchen all the afternoon. She would see Nan. Raven left the house and hurried up the hill. He found the hut in order, the fire laid as he had left it. That was, foolishly, always a surprise. Her presence hung so inevitably about the place that he was taken aback to find no visible sign of it. Now when she appeared it was breathlessly, not, as he thought, from haste, but from her encounter with Martin. And she came stripped of her reserves, the decorum of respectful observance she always kept toward him. At first glance he was shocked by the change in her appearance and could not account for it, not knowing he missed the familiar folds of the blue cloak about her, not seeing that her black shawl and the knitted hood accentuated the tragic paleness of her face. She came straight to him and he took her hands and, finding them so cold, held them in one of his and chafed them. This she did not notice. She neither knew that they were cold nor that he was holding them.
"You must go away," she said, surprising him because he thought she had come to say she herself was ready to go. "Where is she?" Tira asked, with a quick glance about the room, as if the least deviation in her plan fretted her desperately. "I depended on seein' her."
"Nan?" asked Raven. "I couldn't find her. What is it, Tira?"
"She'd ha' helped me out," said Tira despairingly. "She'd ha' seen you've got to go away from here an' go quick. Couldn't you pack up an' git off by the nine o'clock?"
"Don't be foolish," said Raven. He released her hands and drew a chair nearer the fire. "Sit down. I haven't the least idea of going anywhere. Do you suppose I should go and leave you in danger?"
But she did not even seem to see the chair he had indicated or the fire. She stood wringing her hands, in a regardless way, under her shawl, and looking at him imploringly.
"I ain't in any danger," she said, "not compared to what you be. He's stopped dwellin' on that man an' his mind is on you."
The shame of this did not move her now. Her fear had burned every reticence to ashes and her heart looked out nakedly.
"He's got out the old gun," she went on. "I dunno's he's fired a gun sence we've been here unless it might be at a hawk sailin' over. He says he's goin' to shoot me a pa'tridge—for me! a pa'tridge for me to eat!—an' he looked at me when he said it, an' the look was enough. You go. You go to-night an' put the railroad betwixt you an' me."
"Don't be foolish, Tira," said Raven again. "I've been in more dangerous places than this, and run bigger risks than Tenney's old musket. That's all talk, what he says to you, all bluff. I begin to think he isn't equal to anything but scaring a woman to death. But"—now he saw his argument—"I will go. Nan and I will go to-night, but only if you go with us. Now is your chance, Tira. Run back to the house and get the boy. Bring him here, if you like, to stay till train time and then come."
He stretched out his hand to her and waited, his eyes on hers. Would she put her hand into his in obedience, in fealty? She began to cry, silently yet rendingly. He saw the great breaths rising in her, and was sick at heart to see her hand—the hand she should have laid in his—clutching her throat to still its agony.
"I dunno," she said brokenly. "Yes, I s'pose I do know. I've got to do it. It's been pushin' me an' pushin' me, an' now I've got to give up beat. You won't save yourself, an' somehow or another you've got to be saved."
Raven felt the incredible joy of his triumph. He had yielded to her obstinacy, he had actually given up hope, and now, scourged by her devotion to him, she was walking straight into the security he had urged upon her. Yet he dared not betray his triumph, lest outspoken emotion of any sort should awaken her to a fear of—what? Of him? Of man's nature she had learned to abhor?
"That's right, Tira," he said quietly. "Now you've given up responsibility. You've put yourself and the boy in my hands, mine and Nan's. You've promised, remember. There's no going back."
Still he held out his hand, and though she ignored it, her dumbly agonized look was aware of it. It was waiting for her, the authoritative, kind hand, and she took hers from her throat and laid it in his grasp. Tira seemed to herself to be giving up something she had been fighting to keep. What was she giving up? Nothing it was right to keep, she would have said. For at that minute, as it had been in all the minutes that led to it, she believed in him as she did in her Lord, Jesus Christ. Yet she was aware, with that emotional certainty which is more piercing than the keenness of the most brilliant mind, that she had surrendered, the inner heart of her, and whatever he asked her to do would now be humbly done.
In the instant of their standing there, hand clasped in hand, the current of life between them rushed to mingle—humble adoration in her, a triumphant certainty in him. But scarcely had the impetuous forces met before they were dissolved and lost. The sharp crack of a gun broke the stillness outside, and Tira tore her hand from his and screamed piercingly. She threw herself upon Raven, holding him with both hands.
"Hear that!" she whispered. "It's right outside here. He's shot to make you come out an' see what 'tis. In the name o' God, don't you open the door."
Raven shook himself free from her, and then, because she was sobbing wildly, took her by the shoulders and pushed her into the chair by the hearth.
"Stop that," he said sternly. "Stay there till I come back."
He took the key from the lock, opened the door and stepped out. There lay Dick on his face, his head close by the door-stone, and Tenney, gun in hand, stood stupidly staring at him.
"I shot at a pa'tridge," Tenney babbled, "I shot——"
But Raven was kneeling by Dick in the reddening snow.
Eugene Martin had driven at a quick pace through the back road and down again to the point where it met the highway. He had stuffed Tira's apron into his pocket, and through his passion he was aware of it as something he could use, how he did not yet know. But the key: that was a weapon in itself. She could not get into her house without it. Tenney could not get in. So far as Tira was concerned, it was lost, and Tenney would have to be told. And as he turned into the other road, there was Tenney himself driving toward home, and Martin knew what he was to do.
"Hi!" he called, but Tenney did not stop. He drew out slightly to the side of the road, the implication that Martin might pass. Martin drove up alongside and, the way growing narrower, seemed bent on crowding him. The horses were abreast and presently the road narrowed to a point where, if they continued, one would be in the ditch.
"I've got something o' yourn," called Martin. He was good humor itself. The chances of the road had played patly into his hand. "Anyways, I s'pose 'tis. I come across your woman on the back road. She turned into the loggin' road, to Raven's shack. She dropped her apron an' I picked it up. There's a key in the pocket. Looks like a key to somebody's outer door. Yourn, ain't it? Here 'tis, rolled up in the apron. Ketch!"
He had taken out the apron, rolled it tighter and then, as Tenney made no movement, tossed it into the sleigh. He shook the reins and passed, narrowly escaping an over-turn, but, at the same moment, he was aware that Tenney had stooped slightly and lifted something. It was a familiar motion. What had he lifted? It could not be a gun, he told himself. Yet he knew it could be nothing else. Was this the next move in the mad game? For the first time he began to wonder whether Tenney's religion would really keep him cool and questioned whether, having neatly balanced his own account, he might close it now before he found himself in danger. Driving fast, he was aware that Tenney, behind him, was also coming on. But he would not look until he had passed Tenney's house, and then he did give one backward glance. Tenney had turned into the yard, and Martin relaxed, satisfied with the day's job. Perhaps it was really finished, and he and Tira were square.
Tenney, having driven into the yard, blanketed the horse and thrust the apron under the seat of the sleigh. He stood for a moment, thinking. Should he unlock the door, go into the house, and lock it against the woman who had run away to Raven's shack? He could not think clearly, but it did seem to him best to open the door and look about. How had she left things behind her? Was her absence deliberately planned? Inside, he proceeded mechanically with the acts he would ordinarily have done after an absence. The familiar surroundings seemed to suggest them to him. He fitted the key into the lock again, took off his great-coat and hung it up, chiefly because the nail reminded him, and then, the house suddenly attacking him with all the force of lonely silence, he turned and went out again and shut the door behind him. There was the horse. Why had he covered him? He would naturally have unharnessed. But then he saw the gun in the sleigh, and that, like the silent house, seemed to push him on to something he had lost the power to will, and he took the gun and walked fast out of the yard. Now at once he felt clear in the head. He was going to find Raven. That was the next step. Wherever Raven was, he must find him. But when he turned out of the yard to go up the back road, he was aware of a strange dislike to coming upon him at the hut. Tira was there, he knew, but if Raven also was, then there would be something to do. It was something in the back of his mind, very dark and formless as yet, but it was, he told himself again, something that had to be done. Perhaps after all, even though it was to be done sometime, it need not be to-day. Even though Tira was up there, the job was a terrifying one to tackle when he felt so weak in his disabled foot, so cold after Martin's jeering voice when he tossed over the key. He turned again and went down the road to Raven's. His foot ached badly, but he did not mind it so much now, the confusion and pain of his mind had grown so great. It seemed, like this doubt that surrounded Tira, a curse that was to be always with him. At Raven's, he went to the kitchen door and knocked, and Charlotte came.
"He to home?" he asked, not looking at her, but standing there a drooping, miserable figure.
"Jerry?" she asked. "Yes. He's in the barn, gone to feed an' water."
"No," said Tenney. "John Raven. Is he to home?"
"Why, no," said Charlotte. "Not round the house. He said he's goin' up to the hut."
At that he stared at her desperately, as if begging her to take back her words; they might have been a command to him, a verdict against him. She stepped out a pace.
"Why, Mr. Tenney," she said, "what you round with a gun for, this time o' night? You can't see nothin'. It'll be dusk in a minute."
"Pa'tridges," he called back to her, adding darkly, "I guess I can see well enough, come to that."
Charlotte stood there watching him out of the yard and noted that he turned toward home. When Nan and Dick came up the road the other way, she had gone in, and they had been in the house five minutes or more before she knew of it. Then Dick wandered into the kitchen, on one of the vague quests always bringing the family there in search of her, and she called to him from the pantry:
"D'you see anything of Isr'el Tenney on the road?"
No, Dick had seen nobody. He stood leaning against the casing, watching her floury hands at their deft work.
"He come here, not ten minutes ago," said Charlotte, "after your Uncle John. He had a gun. I never see Isr'el Tenney with a gun. 'Pa'tridge shootin,' he said. Pa'tridges, when you can't see your hand afore you in the woods! I told him Uncle John'd gone up to the hut. When Uncle John went off, he said he wanted Nan should come up there, quick as ever she could. You tell her, won't you? I forgot."
Then Dick knew. Tira was up there. And Tenney was out with a gun: New England tragedy. It was impossible, the sanctimonious Tenney. Yet there was New England tragedy, a streak of it, darkly visible, through all New England life. It would be ridiculous: old Tenney with his prayer-meetings and his wild appeals. And yet, he reflected, all tragedy was ridiculous to the sane, and saw before his mind's eye a satiric poem wherein he should arraign the great sad stories of the world and prove their ironic futility. But all this was the hurried commentary of the mind really bent on something actual, and from that actuality he spoke:
"Don't tell Nan, Charlotte. I'll see what he wants."
He went off and Charlotte thought he was right, the afternoon waning as it was. She would tell Nan later, a good deal later, when Raven and Dick had had time to come down again. And this was how Dick climbed the slope and was approaching the door of the hut when Tenney stole behind him through the dusk and fired.
Raven, in the instant of seeing Dick there on the ground, locked the door of the hut, dropped the key in his pocket, knelt by him and, with a hand on his pulse, snapped out his orders to Tenney, standing there staring vacuously:
"Go down to the house. Get Jerry and the sled. Come back with him. Get a move on. Run!"
Tenney continued looking emptily at him, still babbling about pa'tridges, and Raven got up and wrenched the gun from his hand, calling loudly, though they were close together:
"Don't you hear me? Get Jerry and the sled. Run, man, run."
Tenney started away in a dazed indecisiveness and Raven remembered his hurt and that he probably could not run. At the same instant Tenney's mind cleared. He was plunging down the slope and, whatever anguish it caused him, insensible to it.
Raven unlocked the door, stepped in and found Tira facing him.
"Go home," he said. "Get the boy and go down to my house. You're to stay there now."
At the instant of saying this, he set the gun inside the door, snatched some blankets from the bedroom and came out again. Tira stepped aside to let him pass. It looked as if he would have walked over her. He covered Dick warmly, picked up the boy's glasses from the snow and dropped them into his pocket. With that involuntary act, the emotional assault of the whole thing nearly had him. He remembered Dick's eyes as he had sometimes seen them without their glasses, wistful and vaguely soft. Always his eyes, denuded of the lenses behind which they lived, had a child's look of helpless innocence, and here he was floored by life's regardless cruelty. Though, if he was not only floored but actually done for, he was not yet the one to suffer. He was away in that sanctuary of the assaulted body known as unconsciousness, and Raven did not dwell for more than an instant on "the pity of it" all.
Tira had come out of the hut and, at sight of Dick under his mound of covering, she gave a little cry and stooped to him with outstretched hand, perhaps with an idea of somehow easing him. But Raven caught her wrist before she touched him.
"Don't," said he. "I've sent down for the sled."
"Is he——?" she whispered, stepping back as he released her.
"I don't know," said he. "You can't do anything. Don't stay here."
But she stood still, staring down at the mound of blankets and Raven again on his knees beside it, his fingers on Dick's wrist.
"Didn't you hear me?" said he curtly. "You're to get the child and come to my house for the night."
"Will he"—and now he saw her mind was with Tenney—"will he be arrested?"
"I hope," Raven allowed himself the bitterness of saying, "I hope he'll get imprisonment for life."
And there was such sternness in the kind voice that Tira turned and went, half running, up the path to the back road and home.
That night at eleven, when the house had quieted, and Raven was alone in the library, he permitted himself a glimpse at the denied emotional aspect of the day. Jerry had got quickly to the top of the hill and Dick had been moved down without disaster, Tenney, white-faced and bewildered, lending his strength as he was told. Raven called upon him for this and that, and kept him by them on the way down to the house, so that Tira might have time to snatch the child and hurry away. At the moment of nearing the house he remembered her, and that if Tenney went directly back by the high road, he might meet her.
"Here!" This to Tenney, who was sagging on behind the sled, and who at once hurried along to his side. "Go back to the hut and see if I've left the key in the door. If it's there, you can lock up and bring it down to me. If it isn't, don't come back."
Then, he assumed, Tenney would go home by the back road, the shortest route. For he would not find the key, which was still in Raven's pocket. Tenney looked at him, seemed to have something to say, and finally managed it. As Raven remembered, it was something about pa'tridges and his gun. Whether he was shaken by fright, one could not have told, but he was, as Charlotte remarked upon it afterward, "all to pieces." Raven ignored the mumble, whatever it was, and Tenney, finally understanding that he might as well be as far off the earth as Dick, for all the attention anybody was going to pay him, turned, limping, and then Raven, with that mechanical sensitiveness to physical need always awake in him now, caught up a stick lying in the dooryard and tossed it to him.
"Here!" said he. "That'll do for a cane."
Tenney could not catch; he was too stupid from bewilderment of mind. But he picked it up, and went limping off across the road and up the hill. Then the women had to be told, and when Jerry brought the horses to a standstill at the door, Raven ran in, pushing Charlotte aside—dear Charlotte! she was too used to life and death to need palliatives of indirection in breaking even such news as this—and believed now, as he thought it over, that he met Milly and Nan, who had seen their approach, running to meet him, and that he said something about accident and, as if it were an echo of Tenney, a fool shooting partridges. Milly, shocked out of her neat composure, gave a cry, but Nan turned on her, bade her be quiet, and called Charlotte to the bedroom to get it ready. It was Milly's room, but the most accessible place. Raven telephoned for the doctor at the street and called a long-distance for a Boston surgeon of repute, asking him to bring two nurses; and he and Nan rapidly dressed the wound, with Dick still mercifully off in the refuge called unconsciousness. Raven remembered that Milly, as she got in his way, kept telling him she ought to have taken a course in first aid, and that Dick was her son and if a mother didn't know, who did? But he fancied he did not answer at all, and that he and Nan worked together, with quick interrogative looks at each other here and there, a lifted eyebrow, a confirming nod. And now the local doctor had arrived, had professed himself glad his distinguished colleague had been summoned and approved Raven's work. He was gone in answer to another urgent call, and the surgeon had not come, could not come for hours. But Dick was conscious, though either too weak or too wisely cautious to lift an eyelid, and Nan was with him. That Raven had ordered, and told Milly she was to come to the library after Jerry moved her things upstairs and she was settled for the night.
Milly was badly shaken. She looked, her strained eyes and mouth compressed, as if not only was she robbed of the desire of sleep, but had sworn never, in her distrust of what life could do to her, to sleep again. But she had not appeared, and as Raven sat there waiting for her, Charlotte came down the stairs and glanced in, a comprehensive look at the light, the fire, and at him, as if to assure him, whatever the need in the sick room, she kept him also in mind. Raven signed to her and she nodded. He had a question to ask. It had alternated in his mind with queer little heart-beats of alarm about Dick: hemorrhage, shock, hemorrhage—recurrent beats of prophetic disaster.
"Have you seen Tira?" he asked. "I told her to come here and stay till we could get her off somewhere."
Then he remembered that, so wide-reaching did Charlotte always seem to him in her knowledge of the life about her, he had not explained why Tira must be got out of the way, and that also was before him. But in her amazing habit of knowing, she knew.
"No," she said, "she ain't b'en near. She won't leave Tenney. She's one o' them that sticks by."
Immediately he was curious to hear what she had imagined, how she knew. Was the neighborhood awake to even the most obscure local drama? While Tira thought she was, at the expense of her own safety, covering Tenney's wildness of jealousy, were they all walking in the sun?
"Who told you?" he asked her.
"Why, nobody," said Charlotte. "It didn't take no tellin'. Jerry heard him hollerin' after her that day you was up in the woods, an' when you kep' the loggin' road broke, I knew you was givin' her some kind of a hole to creep into."
So they had known, she and Jerry. But they had not told. They would never tell.
"One thing," said Charlotte, smoothing her apron and looking at him in an anxious interrogation, "what be we goin' to say? That was the first thing doctor asked: 'Who done it?' (You know I let him in.) ''Twas a poor crazed creatur,' says I, 'after pa'tridges.' I was goin' to say Dick had a gun an' tripped up over a root; but that never'd do in the world, shot in the back so."
"The partridges'll do for the present," said Raven grimly. "He's certainly crazy enough. He said he was shooting partridges. We'll take it at that."
Charlotte went on, and he sat thinking. So Tira had chosen not to come. So fixed was his mind on the stern exigency of the situation, as it now stood, that her disobedience in itself irritated him. The right of decision, as he reasoned, had passed out of her hands into his. He was, in a sense, holding the converging lines of all this sudden confusion; he was her commanding officer. At that moment, when he was recognizing his anger against her and far from palliating, cherishing it as one of the tools in his hand, to keep him safely away from enfeebling doubt, Milly came noiselessly down the stairs. She would, he realized, in her unflinching determination to do the efficient thing, be as silent as a shadow. She appeared in the doorway, and her face, her bearing, were no longer Milly's. This was a paper semblance of a woman, drawn on her lines, but made to express grief and terror. Quiet as she was, the shock had thrown her out of her studied calm. She was elemental woman, despising the rigidities of training, scourged into revolt. Even her dress, though fitted to the technical needs of the hour, was unstudied. Her hair, ordinarily waved, even in the country, by the intelligence of her capable fingers, was twisted in a knot on the back of her head. Raven, so effective had been the success of her ameliorating devices, thought Milly's hair conspicuously pretty. But now there was a little button of it only, as if she had prepared for exacting service where one displaced lock might undo her. A blue silk negligée was wrapped about her, with a furled effect of tightening to the blast, and her face was set in a mask of grief that was not grief alone, but terror. She came in and sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth, not relaxing in the act, but as if she could no longer stand.
"John!" she said, in a broken interrogation. "John!"
He got up and elaborately tended the fire, laying the sticks together with an extreme care, and thinking, as he did it, by one of those idle divagations of the mind, like a grace note on the full chord of action, that a failing fire had helped a man out of more than one hole in this disturbing life. It gave your strung nerves and rasped endurance a minute's salutary pause. He put down the tongs and returned to his chair.
"Buck up, Milly," said he. "Everything's being done. Now it'll be up to Dick."
But he realized, as if it were another trial setting upon him at the moment when he had borne enough, that his eyes were suddenly hot. This was not for Milly, not for himself. Again, for some obscure reason, he saw Dick's eyes, softened, childlike, as he had recalled them without their glasses. Through these past weeks of strain, he had been irritated with the boy, he had jeered at him for the extravagances of his gusty youth. Why, the boy was only a boy, after all! But Milly, leaning forward to the fire, her trembling hands over the blaze, was talking with amazing intensity, but still quietly, not to disturb the stillness of the expectant house. For the house, suddenly changed, seemed itself to be waiting, as houses do in time of trouble. Was it for Dick to die or to take on life again? Houses are seldom kind at such times, even in their outward tranquillity. They are sinister.
And when Milly began to speak, Raven found he had to deal with a woman surprisingly different from the one who had striven to heal him through her borrowed aphorisms.
"To think," she began, "to think he should escape, after being over there—over there, John, in blood and dirt and death—and come home to be shot in the back by a tramp with a gun! Where is the man? You detained him, didn't you? Don't tell me you let him go."
"I know where to find him," Raven temporized. "He'd no idea of going."
She insisted.
"You think it was an accident? He couldn't have had a grudge. Dick hadn't an enemy."
"You can make your mind easy about that," said Raven, taking refuge in a detached sincerity. "It wasn't meant for Dick. He was as far from the fellow's thoughts as the moon."
He remembered the fringe of somber woods and the curve of the new moon.
"It isn't so much the misfortunes of life," Milly kept on. She was beating her knee now with one closed hand and her voice kept time. "It's the chances, the horrible way things come and knock you down because you're in their path. If he doesn't"—here she stopped and Raven knew she added, in her own mind, "if he doesn't live—I shall never believe in anything again. Never, John, never!"
Raven was silent, not only because it seemed well for her to free her mind, but because he had a sudden curiosity to hear more. This was Milly outside her armor at last. When she had caught him out of his armor, she had proposed sending him to the Psychopathic, and here she was herself, raving against heaven and earth as unrestrainedly as a savage woman might beat her head against a cliff.
"Chance!" she repeated. "That's what it is, chance! He got in the way and he was struck. I lived through the War. I gave my son. What more could I do? But now, to have him come home to our old house and be shot in the back! How can you sit there and not move a muscle or say a word? What are you thinking about?"
"Well," said Raven quietly, "if you'll believe me, I'm thinking about you. I'm mighty sorry for you, Milly. And I'm keeping one ear cocked for Nan."
"There's no change," she interrupted him. "Charlotte would tell us. I left Nan on purpose. I want him, every time he opens his eyes, to see her there. She's the one he wants. Mothers don't count." Here again the elemental woman flashed out and Raven welcomed the reality of it. "She couldn't help being kind, with him as he is."
No, he inwardly concurred, Nan, who had kissed the boy to hearten him in his need, would be ready with her medicinal love again. She'd pour herself out: trust her for that.
"Besides," he said, "besides you and Dick and Nan, I was thinking of Old Crow."
"Old Crow?" This threw her out for an instant and she went back to her conception of Raven as a victim of complexes of which Old Crow was chief. "It's no time for dwelling on things that are past and gone. You think far too much about Old Crow. It weakens you."
"Old Crow," said Raven quietly, "is the chap you and I need here to-night. I'd like mighty well to sit down and talk it over with him. So would you, if you knew him better. Old Crow went through what you and I are going through now. He found the world a deuced puzzling place and he didn't see the conventional God as any sort of a solution. And then—I don't suppose you're going to bed right off. You won't feel like sleep?"
"Bed!" she flung out. "Sleep!"
"Then look here, Milly," said Raven, "you do what I tell you." He opened a drawer in his desk and took out the mottled book. "Here's Old Crow's journal. You sit here by the fire and read it while I take Nan's place and send her off to bed. And if it doesn't give you an idea Old Crow's got his mind on us to-night, wherever he is, I'm mistaken."
He brought her the book. She took it, with no interest, leaving it unopened on her knee.
"Wherever he is," she repeated, not precisely curious, but as if she might be on the verge of it when she again had time. "I didn't know you believed in immortality."
"I didn't, either," said Raven. "But," he added, "I believe in Old Crow."
She was holding the book mechanically and he left her sitting with it still unopened and went in to Dick. He found him restless, not in any movement of his body but in the glance of his dilated eyes. Nan looked up, grave, steady, gone back, as Raven saw, to her trained habit of action, emotionless, concentrated on the moment.
"You'd better go up to bed," said Raven. "I'll stay now. He can have you to-morrow."
"He can have me all the time," said Nan clearly, and Dick's eyes turned upon her with an indifferent sort of query. How much did she mean by that? It sounded as if she meant everything, and yet Raven, his heart constricting, knew it might not be more than impetuous sacrifice, the antidote given in haste. But now Dick spoke and Raven bent to him, for either he was too weak to speak clearly or he was saving himself.
"Don't arrest him. No end of talk."
"No," said Raven. "It wasn't you he was out for."
The restless eyes turned on Nan.
"Go to bed," said Dick.
Her hand had been on his and she took it gently away, and got up.
"I'm not sleepy," she said. "I'll camp in the library a while."
When she had gone Raven, sitting there by Dick, who did not speak again, listened for the murmur of voices from the library. Would they keep companionable vigil, the two women, heartening each other by a word, or would they sit aloof, each wrapped in her own grief? There was not a sound. They were falling in with that determination of the house to maintain its sinister stillness, its air of knowing more than it would tell.
Tenney, not finding the key of the hut, and increasingly alive to the anguish flaring in his foot, went home by the back way. Tira was waiting at the door. She saw him coming, and, for that first moment, he could ignore the pain in a savage recognition of her plight. She had, he thought, having missed the key, not even tried the door. But this brief summary of her guilty folly angered him for the moment only. He was suddenly tired, and his foot did ache outrageously. He gave way to the pain of it, and limped heavily. As he neared the house, however, his face did relax into a mirthless smile. There were tracks under the kitchen window. She had hoped to get in that way and had found the window fastened. And all the time there was the door, ready for a confident hand. But the ill chance of it amused him for not much more than the instant of its occurrence. His mind recoiled upon his own miserable state. He had gone out in search of justice, and he had come home in terror of what he had himself unjustly done. If he had been imaginative enough to predict the righteous satisfaction he expected from his vengeance on Raven, he might have foreseen himself coming back to bring Tira the evil news, and smiling, out of his general rectitude, at her grief and terror. Perhaps he would have been wrong in those unformulated assumptions. Perhaps he would not have been calm enough for satisfaction in the completed deed, since the mind does, after a red act, become at once fugitive before the furies of inherited beliefs and fears. Perhaps it would have shrunk cowering back from the old, old penalty against the letting of blood, as it did now when he was faced with the tragic irony of the deed as it was. He had shed blood and, by one of the savage mischances of life, the blood of a man innocent of offense against him. After the first glance at Tira, he did not look at her again, but passed her, threw open the door, and went in. His thoughts, becoming every instant more confused, as the appalling moments in the woods beat themselves out noisily, seemed to favor closing the door behind him. It was she who had brought him to this pass. It was she who had locked his door upon herself and, in her wantonness, as good as thrown away the key. Let her stay outside. But he was not equal to even that sharpness of decision and Tira, after she found the door swinging free, went in.
Tenney had seated himself in his arm-chair by the window. He had not taken off his hat, and he sat there, hands clasped upon the stick Raven had tossed him, his head bent over them. He looked like a man far gone in age and misery, and Tira, returning from the bedroom, the child in her arms, felt a mounting of compassion and was no longer afraid. She laid the child in its cradle and, with a cheerful clatter, put wood in the stove. The child cried fretfully and, still stepping about the room, she began to sing, as if to distract it, though she knew she was making the sounds of life about Tenney to draw him forth from the dark cavern where his spirit had taken refuge. But he did not look up, and presently she spoke to him:
"Ain't you goin' to unharness? I'm 'most afraid Charlie'll be cold."
The form of her speech was a deliberate challenge, a fashion of rousing him to an old contention. For it was one of her loving habits with animals to name them, and Tenney, finding that "all foolishness," would never accept the pretty intimacies. To him, the two horses were the bay and the colt, and now Tira, with an anxious intent of stirring him even to contradiction, longed to hear him repeat, "Charlie?" adding, "D'you mean the bay?" But he neither spoke nor moved, and she suddenly realized that if she screamed at him he would not hear. She went on stepping about the room, and presently, when the dusk had fallen so that she could see the horse in the yard only as an indeterminate bulk, she slipped out, unharnessed him, and led him into his stall. She began to fodder the cattle, pausing now and then to listen for Tenney's step. But he did not come. She returned to the house for her pails, lighted a lantern, and went back to milk. Still he did not come, and when she carried in her milk, there he sat in the dark kitchen, his head bent upon his hands. Tira shut up the barn, came back to the kitchen, and put out her lantern; then she was suddenly spent, and sat down a moment by the stove, her hands in her lap. And so they sat together, the man and woman, and the child was as still as they. He had whimpered himself off to sleep.
Tira, recognizing herself, with a dull indifference, as too tired to move, was not at first conscious of thinking either about what she had gone through or what was before her. But as her muscles relaxed, her mind, as it was always doing now for its rest and comfort, left this present scene where, for the first active moments, Tenney had filled her thoughts, and settled upon Raven. He had told her to come to him. He had ordered it, as if she belonged to him, and there was heavenly sweetness in that. Tira loved this new aspect of him. She rested in it, as a power alive to her, protecting her, awake to her well-being. Yet, after that first glance at Tenney, sitting there with head bent over the stick, she had not a moment's belief in her right to go. It was sweet to be commanded, to her own safety, but here before her were the dark necessities she must share. And suddenly, as she sat there, and the sense of Raven's protectingness enfolded her and she grew more rested, a feeling of calmness fell upon her, of something friendly nearer her than Raven even (though it had seemed to her lately as if nothing could be more near), and she almost spoke aloud, voicing her surprised delight: "Why, the Lord Jesus Christ!" But she did not speak the words aloud. She refrained in time, for fear of disturbing Tenney in some way not wise for him; but her lips formed them and they comforted her. Then, suddenly tranquillized and feeling strong, she rose and fed the child and made some bustling ado, talking about milk and bread, hoping to rouse Tenney to the thought of food. But he sat there darkly, and by and by she put the kettle on and, in the most ordinary manner, made tea and spread their table.
"Come," she said to him. "Supper's ready. We might's well draw up."
He did glance at her then, as if she had surprised him, and she smiled, to give him confidence. At that time Tira felt all her strength, her wholesome rude endurance, to the full, and stood tall and steady there in the room with the two who were her charge and who now, it seemed to her, needed her equally. Tenney rose with difficulty and stood a moment to get control of his foot. He walked to the table and was about to sit down. But suddenly his eyes seemed to be drawn by his hand resting on the back of the chair. He raised it, turned it palm up and scrutinized it, and then he looked at the other hand with the same questioning gaze, and, after a moment, when Tira, reading his mind, felt her heart beating wildly, he went to the sink and pumped water into the basin. He began to wash his hands. There was nothing on them, no stain such as his fearful mind projected, but he washed them furiously and without looking.
"You stop a minute," said Tira quietly. "I'll give you a mite o' hot water, if you'll wait."
She filled a dipper from the tea kettle, and, tipping the water from his basin into the sink, mixed hot and cold, trying it solicitously, and left him to use it.
"There!" she said, standing by the table waiting for him, "you come as quick's you can. Your tea'll be cold."
So they drank their tea together, and Tira forced herself to eat, and, from the store of woman's experience within her, knew she ought to urge him also to hearten himself with meat and bread. But she did not dare. She could feel the misery of his sick mind. She had always felt it. But there were reactions, of obstinacy, of rage almost, in the obscurity of its workings, and these she could not challenge. But she poured him strong tea, and when he would take no more, got up and cleared the table. And he kept his place, staring down at his hand. He was studying it with a look curiously detached, precisely as he had regarded it at the moment when he seemed to become aware of its invisible stain. Tira, as she went back and forth about the room, found herself also, by force of his attitude, glancing at the hand. Almost she expected to find it red. When her work was done, she sat down by the stove and undressed the baby, who was fretful still and crying in a way she was thankful to hear. It made a small commotion in the room. If it irritated Tenney into waking from his daze, so much the better.
Ten o'clock came, and Tenney had not stirred. When eleven struck she roused from her doze and saw his head had sunken forward; he was at the nodding point of sleep. She had been keeping up the fire, and presently she rose to put in wood, knocking down a stick she had left on the end of the stove to be reached for noiselessly. He started awake and rose, pushing back his chair.
"Is that them?" he asked her, with a disordered wildness of mien. "Have they come?"
By this she knew he expected arrest for what he had done.
"No," she said, in her quietest voice. "Nobody's comin' here to-night. I dropped a stick o' wood, that's all. Don't you think you better poke off to bed?"
He did not answer her, but went to the window, put his hands to his face and peered out. Then he turned, stood a moment looking about the room as if for some suggestion of refuge, went to the couch, and lay down. Tira stood for a moment considering. Almost at once, he was asleep. She threw a shawl over him and went into the bedroom and stretched herself as she was on the bed.
Raven, to his sorry amusement, discovered something. It was Milly, and she had changed. Indubitably Milly regarded him with a mixture of wonder and of awe. He had taken command of the situation in the house and developed it rationally. The house itself had become a converging point for all medical science could do for a man hit in a vital spot and having little chance of recovery. But what Raven knew to be the common sense of the measures he brought to pass, Milly, in her wildness of anxiety, looked upon as the miracles of genius. She even conciliated him, as the poor human conciliates his god. She brought him the burnt offering of her expressed belief, her humility of admiration. And whenever one of the family was allowed to supplement the nurses, by day or night, she effaced herself in favor of Raven or Nan. Raven was the magician who knew where healing lay. Nan was warmth and coolness, air and light. Dick's eyes followed Nan and she answered them, comforting, sustaining him, Raven and Milly fully believed, in his hold on earth. But as to Milly, Raven had to keep on wondering over her as she wondered at him. So implicit had been his belief in her acquired equipment for applying accepted remedies to the mischances of life, that he was amazed at seeing her devastated, overthrown. She was even less calm than the women he remembered here in this country neighborhood. When sickness entered their homes, they were, for the most part, models of efficient calm. They had reserves of energy. He wondered if Milly had crumbled so because she had not only to act but to decide how to seem to act. She had to keep up the wearisome routine of fitting her feelings to her behavior, her behavior to her feelings. There were not only things to be done; there were also the social standards of what ought, in crises, to be felt. She had to satisfy her gods. And she simply wasn't strong enough. Her hold was broken. She knew it, clutched at him and hung on him, a dead weight, while he buoyed her up. Were they all, he wondered, victims of the War? Milly, as she said that night when she came to him in her stark sincerity while Dick lay unconscious, had given him up once. She had given him to the War, and done the act with the high decorum suited to it. And the country had returned him to her. But now, grotesque, bizarre beyond words, she had to surrender him to a fool "shooting pa'tridges." For facing a travesty like that, she had no decorum left.
Dick, too, was the victim of abnormal conditions. He had been summoned to the great act of sacrifice to save the world, and the call had challenged him to after judgments he was not ripe enough to meet. It had beguiled him into a natural sophistry. For had not the world, in its need, called mightily on the sheer strength and endurance of youth to slay the dragon of brute strength in her enemies? Youth had done it. Therefore there was no dragon, whether of the mind or soul, it could not also slay. His fellows told him so, and because they were his fellows and spoke the tongue he understood, he believed it with a simple honesty that was Dick.
As to Nan, she seemed to Raven the one sane thing in a bewildered world; and for himself: "I'm blest if I believe I'm so dotty, after all," he mused. "What do you think about it?" And this last he addressed, not to himself, but to the ever-present intelligence of Old Crow. He kept testing things by what Old Crow would think. He spoke of him often, as of a mind active in the universe, but only to Nan. And one night, late enough in the spring for the sound of running water and a bitterness of buds in the air, he said it to her when she came down the path to him where he stood listening to the stillness broken by the ticking of the season's clock—steady, familiar sounds, that told him winter had broken and the heart of things was beating on to leaf and bloom. He had, if he was not actually waiting for her, hoped she would come out, and now he saw her coming, saw her step back into the hall for a scarf and appear again, holding it about her shoulders. At last, firm as she was in spirit, she had changed. She was thinner, with more than the graceful meagerness of youth, and her eyes looked pathetically large from her pale face. She had seen Dick go slipping down the slope, and now that beneficent reactions were drawing him slowly back again, she was feeling the waste of her own bodily fortitude.
"Where shall we go?" she asked him. "Been to the hut lately?"
No, Raven told her, he hadn't been there for days. They crossed the road and began the ascent into the woods.
"So you don't know whether she's been there?" Nan asked. She stopped to breathe in the wood fragrances, coming now like a surprise. She had almost forgotten "outdoors."
"Yes," said Raven. "I know. Sometimes I fancy she won't need to go there again. Tenney's a wreck. He sits there in the kitchen and doesn't speak. He isn't thinking about her. He's thinking of himself."
"How do you know? You haven't been over?"
"Yes, I went over the morning after the shooting. I intended to tell Tira to get her things on and come down to the house. But when I saw him—saw them—I couldn't."
"You were sorry for him?" Nan prompted.
They had reached the hut, and Raven took out the key from under the stone. Close by, there was a velvet fern frond ready to unfurl. He unlocked the door and they went in. Her last question he did not answer until he had thrown up windows and brought out chairs to the veranda at the west. When they were seated, he went on probing for his past impression and speaking thoughtfully.
"No, I don't know that I was particularly sorry for him. But somehow the two of them there together, with that poor little devil between them—well, it seemed to me I couldn't separate them. That's marriage, I suppose. Anyhow it looked to me like it: something you couldn't undo because they wouldn't have it undone."
Nan turned on him her old impetuous look.
"You simpleton!" she had it on her tongue to say. "She doesn't want it undone because anybody that lifts a finger will get you—not her—deeper into the mire." But she did say: "I don't believe you can even guess what she wants, chiefly because she doesn't want anything for herself. But if you didn't ask her to leave him, what did you do?"
"I told him to hold himself ready for arrest."
"You're a funny child," commented Nan. "You warn the criminal and give him a chance to skip."
"Yes," said Raven unsmilingly. "I hoped he would. I thought I was giving her one more chance. If he did skip, so much the better for her."
"How did she look?" asked Nan, and then added, tormenting herself, "Beautiful?"
"Yes, beautiful. Not like an angel, as we've seen her. Like a saint: haggard, with hungry eyes. I suppose the saints hunger, don't you? And thirst." He was looking off through the tree boles and Nan, also looking, found the distance dim and felt the sorrow of youth and spring. "Everything," said Raven, "seems to be in waves. It has its climax and goes down. Tenney's reached the climax of his jealousy. Now he's got himself to think about, and the other thing will go down. Rather a big price for Dick to pay, to make Tira safe, but he has paid and I fancy she's safe." He turned to her suddenly. "Milly's very nice to you," he asserted, half interrogatively.
He saw the corner of her mouth deepen a little as she smiled. Milly had not, they knew, been always nice.
"Yes," she agreed, "very nice. She gives me all the credit she doesn't give you about doctors and nurses and radiographs and Dick's hanging on by his eyelids. She says I've saved him."
"So you have," said Raven. "You've kept his heart up. And now you're tired, my dear, and I want you to go away."
"To go away?" said Nan. "Where?"
"Anywhere, away from us. We drain you like the deuce."
"No," said Nan, turning from him and speaking half absently, "I can't go away."
"Why can't you?"
"He'd miss me."
"He'd know why you went."
Her old habit of audacious truth-telling constrained her.
"I should have to write to him," she said. "And I couldn't. I couldn't keep it up. I can baby him all kinds of ways when he's looking at me with those big eyes. But I couldn't write him as he'd want me to. I couldn't, Rookie. It would be a promise."
"Milly thinks you have promised." This he ventured, though against his judgment.
"No," said Nan. "No, I haven't promised. Do you want me to?"
"I don't know," Raven answered, without a pause, as if he had been thinking about it interminably. "If it had some red blood in it, if you were—well, if you loved him, Nan, I should be mighty glad. I'd like to see you living, up to the top notch, having something you knew was the only thing on earth you wanted. But these half and half things, these falterings and doing things because somebody wants us to! God above us! I've faltered too much myself. I'd rather have made all the mistakes a man can compass, done it without second thought, than have ridden up to the wall and refused to take it."
"Do you think of her all the time?" she ventured, in her turn, and perversely wondered if he would think she meant Tira and not Aunt Anne.
But he knew. "No," he said, "I give you my word she's farther away from me than she ever was in her life. For a while she was here, at my elbow, asking me what I was going to do about her Palace of Peace. But suddenly—I don't know whether it's because my mind has been on Dick—suddenly I realized she was gone. It's the first time." Here he stopped, and Nan knew he meant it was the first time since his boyhood that he had felt definitely free from that delicate tyranny. And being jealous for him and his dominance over his life, she wondered if another woman had crowded out the memory of Aunt Anne. Had Tira done it?
"And you haven't decided about the money."
"I've decided," he surprised her by saying at once, "to talk it out with Anne."
She could only look at him.
"One night," he continued, "when Dick was at his worst, I was there alone with him, an hour or so, and I was pretty well keyed up. I seemed to see things in a stark, clear way. Nothing mattered: not even Dick, though I knew I never loved the boy so much as I did at that minute. I seemed to see how we're all mixed up together. And the things we do to help the game along, the futility of them. And suddenly I thought I wouldn't stand for any futility I could help, and I believe I asked Old Crow if I wasn't right. 'Would you?' I said. I knew I spoke out loud, for Dick stirred. I felt a letter in my pocket—it was about the estate, those bonds, you remember—and I knew I'd got to make up my mind about Anne's Palace of Peace."
Nan's heart was beating hard. Was he going to follow Aunt Anne's command, the poor, pitiful letter that seemed so generous to mankind and was yet so futile in its emotional tyranny?
"And I made up my mind," he said, with the same simplicity of hanging to the fact and finding no necessity for explaining it, "to get hold of Anne, put it to her, let her see I meant to be square about it, but it had got to be as I saw it and not as she did. Really because I'm here and she isn't."
Her eyes filled with tears, and as she made no effort to restrain them, they ran over and spilled in her lap. She had thought hard for him, but never so simply, so sternly as this.
"How do you mean, Rookie," she asked humbly, in some doubt as to her understanding. "How can you get hold of Aunt Anne?"
"I don't know," said he. "But I've got to. I may not be able to get at her, but she must be able to get at me. She's got to. She's got to listen and understand I'm doing my best for her and what she wants. Old Crow understands me. And when Anne does—why, then I shall feel free."
And while he implied it was freedom from the tyranny of the bequest, she knew it implied, too, a continued freedom from Aunt Anne. Would he ever have set his face so fixedly toward that if he had not found Tira? And what was Tira's silent call to him? Was it of the blood only, because she was one of those women nature has manacled with the heaviness of the earth's demands? Strangely, she knew, nature acts, sometimes sending a woman child into the world with the seeds of life shut in her baby hand, a wafer for men to taste, a perfume to draw them across mountain and plain. The woman may be dutiful and sound, and then she suffers bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her womanhood—here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch—he did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth because it was the maternal that spoke in her, and all the forces of nature must guard the maternal, that its purpose may be fulfilled. Tira could not speak the English language with purity, but this was immaterial. She was Tira, and as Tira she had innocently laid on Raven the old, dark magic. Nan was under no illusion as to his present abandonment of Tira's cause. That he seemed to have accepted the ebbing of her peril, that he should speak of it with something approaching indifference, did not mean that he had relaxed his vigilance over her. He was not thinking of her with any disordered warmth of sympathy. But he was thinking. Suddenly she spoke, not knowing what she was going to say, but out of the unconscious part of her:
"Rookie, you don't want anything really, do you, except to stand by and give us all a boost when we're down?"
Raven considered a moment.
"I don't know," he said, "precisely what I do want. If you told me Old Crow didn't want anything but giving folks a boost, I'm with you there. He actually didn't. You can tell from his book."
"I can't seem to bear it," said Nan. She was looking at the darkening woods and her wet eyes blurred them more than the falling dusk. "It isn't healthy. It isn't right. I want you to want things like fury, and I don't know whether I should care so very much if you banged yourself up pretty well not getting them. And if you actually got them! O Rookie! I'd be so glad."
"You're a dear child," said Raven, "a darling child."
"That's it," said Nan. "If you didn't think I was a child, perhaps you'd want me. O Rookie! I wish you wanted me!"
Into Raven's mind flashed the picture of Anne on her knees beside him saying, in that sharp gasp of her sorrow, "You don't love me." This was no such thing, yet, in some phase, was life going to repeat itself over and over in the endless earth journeys he might have to make, futilities of mismated minds, the outcry of defrauded souls? But at least this wasn't his cowardly silence on the heel of Anne's gasping cry. He could be honest here, for this was Nan.
"My darling," he said, "you're nearer to me than anything in this world—or out of it. Don't you make any mistake about that. And if I don't want things 'like fury,' as you say, it's a matter of the calendar, that's all. Dick wants them like fury. So do you. I'm an old chap, dear. You can't set back the clock."
But he had pushed her away, as his aloofness had pushed Anne. He had thrown Anne back upon her humiliated self. He had tossed Nan forward into Dick's generation and hers. But here was the difference. She wasn't going to cry out, "You don't love me." Instead, she turned to him, shivering a little and drawing her scarf about her shoulders.
"We'd better go down," she said. "It's getting cold. Dick'll be wondering."
They got up and Raven set the chairs inside the hut and took his glance about to see if all was in order: for he did not abandon the unwilling hope that Tira might sometime come. As they went down the hill the talk turned to the hylas and the spring, but when they reached the house Nan did not go in to Dick. She went to her own room and lay down on her bed and thought passionately of leaving Rookie free. How was it possible? Could he be free while she was bound? Sometimes of late she had been so tired that she could conceive of no refuge but wild and reckless outcry. And what could he think she meant when she said: "I wished you wanted me"?
Spring came on fast and Nan, partly to assure Milly she wasn't to be under foot forever, talked of opening her house and beginning to live there, for the first time without Aunt Anne. But she predicted it, even to Milly, with no great interest, and Raven, though he had urged her to run away from the cloudy weather Milly and Dick made for her, protested against her living alone. Dick was now strong enough to walk from his room to the porch, and Raven, watching him, saw in him a greater change than the languor of low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of it all, patently acquiescent.
Then Nan found herself rested, suddenly, in the way of youth. One morning she got up quite herself again, and wrote her housekeeper to assemble servants and bring them up, and told Raven he couldn't block her any longer. She had done it for herself, and she quoted the over-worked commonplace of the psychological moment. He, also believing in the moment, refrained from argument and went over to open doors and windows. He was curiously glad of a word with her house, not so much to keep up old acquaintance as to ask its unresponsiveness whether it was going to mean Nan alone for him hence-forth or whether, at a time like this when he stood interrogating it, Anne Hamilton also stood there, in her turn interrogating him. Was she there to-day? Everything spoke mutely of her, the wall-paper she had prized for its ancient quaintness, the furniture in the lines of grace she loved. At that desk she had sat, slender figure of the gentlewoman of a time older than her own. Was her presence so etched in impalpable tracery on the air that he ought to feel it? Was she aching with defeated hopes because she might almost be expecting him, not only to remember but even to hear and see? No death could be more complete than the death of her presence here. He could not, even by the most remorseful determination, conjure up the living thought of her. Somehow it had seemed that here at least he might explain himself to her, feel that he had made himself clear. He did actually speak to her:
"I can't do it, Anne. Don't you see I can't?"
This was what he had meant when he told Nan he must get hold of her. What place could be so fortunate as this, full of the broken threads of her personality? They only needed knitting up by his passionate challenge, to be Anne. He called upon her, he caught the fluttering fringes of her presence in his trembling hands. But he could not knit them up. They broke, they floated away. It seemed, from the dead unresponsiveness of her house, as if there had never been any Anne. So he gave it up, and, in extreme dullness of mind, went about opening windows, and as the breeze idled in and stirred the waiting air and the sunlight rushed to it, he seemed to be sweeping the last earthly vestiges of her from the place that had known her best. And at once it appeared to him that he had done an inexorable, perhaps even a cruel thing, and he hurried out, leaving the air and sun to be more merciful than he.
When he went into his own yard he saw Dick sitting under the western pines, where Raven had set a couple of chairs and had a hammock swung. Dick had ignored the hammock. He scarcely sat at ease, and Raven had an idea he was meeting discomfort halfway, with the idea of making himself fit. He did say a word of thanks for the chairs.
"Only," he added, "don't let it look too sociable. That'll be as bad as the porch." He laughed a little, and concluded: "I don't mean you, Jack. You know that, don't you?"
Raven guessed he was allowing himself the indulgence of avoiding his mother. For now Milly, as he recovered, had struggled hard for her lost poise and regained it, in a slightly altered form, it is true; but still she had it pretty well in hand, she was unweariedly attentive to him and inexorably self-sacrificing in leaving Nan the right of way. Her life had again become a severely ritualistic social enterprise, but now she was just far enough lacking in spontaneity to fail in playing her game as prettily as she used. It was tiring to watch, chiefly because you could see how it tired her to play.
Raven went down the little foot-path to Dick, and he thought anew how illness had ravaged him. He had the tired eyes, the hollow cheek of ineffective youth.
"Hoping you'd come," said Dick. "Now, where's Tenney?"
"Tenney," said Raven, "is at home, so far as I know. I saw him last night."
"Go up there?"
"Yes."
"What for?"
Raven smiled a little, as if he found himself foolish or at best incomprehensible.
"Well," he said, "I gave him every chance to skip. I hoped he would. That would be the simplest way out. But when I found he wasn't going to, I began to go there every night to let him see I was keeping an eye on him. I don't go in. I just call him out and we stare over each other's heads and I inform him you're better or not so well (the probation dodge, you know) and he never hears me, apparently, and then I go away. I've got used to doing it. Maybe he's got used to having it done. Maybe it's a relief to him. I don't know."
"Does he still look like a lunatic at large?"
"More or less. His eyes are less like infuriated shoe buttons, but on the whole he seems to have quieted a lot."
"You don't suppose," said Dick, "you've put the fear of God into him?"
"Not much. If anybody has, it was you when he saw you topple over and knew he'd got the wrong man."
"He was laying for you, then," said Dick.
"Why, yes," said Raven. "Tira was there, telling me he'd set up a gun, and she'd got to the point of letting Nan take her away, when he fired. What the dickens were you up there for, anyhow?" he ended, not quite able to deny himself reassurance.
"I'd heard he was out with a gun," said Dick briefly. "Charlotte told me. And I gathered from your leaving word for Nan that the Tenney woman was there—at the hut, you know."
"Don't say 'the Tenney woman,'" Raven suggested. "I can't say I feel much like calling her by his name myself, but 'the Tenney woman' isn't quite——"
"No," said Dick temperately. "All right, old man, I won't."
"Awfully sorry you got it instead of me," said Raven, apparently without feeling. He had wanted to say this for a long time. "Wish it had been the other way round."
"I don't, then," said Dick, gruffly in his turn. "It's been an eye-opener, the whole business."
"What has?"
"This." He evidently meant his own hurt and the general viewpoint induced by it. "I'm not going to stay round here, you know," he continued, presenting this as a proposition he had got to state abruptly or not at all.
"Why not?"
"I don't believe I could say," Dick temporized, in a way that suggested he didn't mean to try. "There's Mum, you know. She's going to be at me again to go in for my degree. Oh, yes, she will, soon as she thinks I won't come unglued. Well, I don't want it. I simply don't. And I don't want what she calls a profession: any old thing, you know, so long as it's a profession. I couldn't go in for that either, Jack. If I do anything, it's got to be on my own, absolutely on my own. Fact is, I'd like to go back to France."
"Reconstruction?" Raven suggested, after a minute.
"Maybe. Not that I'm specially valuable. Only it would be something to get my teeth into."
Was this, too, Raven wondered, an aftermath of the War? Had it shaken the atoms of his young purpose too far astray for them ever to cohere again? Dick had had one purpose. Even that didn't seem to be surviving, in any operative form.
"Writing?" he suggested. "Oxford—and poetry?"
Dick shook his head.
"Well," said Raven, "if it's France then, maybe I'll go with you."
Dick smiled slightly. Did his lip tremble?
"No," he said, at once, as if he'd been waiting for it, "you stay here and look after Nan."
This gave Raven the slightest opening.
"That's the devil of it," he said, "your leaving Nan."
"Yes," said Dick quietly, his eyes on an orchard tree where an unseen robin sang, "I'm leaving her."
"She's been devoted to you," Raven ventured.
"Quite so. I've been lying there and seeing——"
He paused and Raven prompted:
"Seeing what?"
Dick finished, with a deeper quiet:
"Seeing her look at you."
Raven, too, stared at the tree where the robin kept up the bright beauty of his lay. He was conscious, not of any need to combat this finality of Dick's, but of a sense, more poignant than he could support without calling on his practiced endurance, of the pity of it, the "tears of things." Here was youth, its first bitter draught in hand, not recoiling from it, but taking it with the calmness of the older man who has fewer years to taste it in. He could not ask the boy to consider, to make no hasty judgment. Whatever lay behind the words, it was something of a grave consequence. And Dick himself led the way out of the slough where they were both caught.
"Curious things come to you," he said, "when you're laid by the heels and can't do anything but think: I mean, as soon as you get the nerve to think."
"Such as?"
"Well, poetry, for one thing. When I began to think—and I didn't want it to be about Nan any more than I could help—I used to have a temperature, you know—puzzled them, doctor, nurse, all of you. Nan, that was! I knew it, though the rest of you hadn't the sense. Well, I made my mind run away from it. I said I'd think about poetry, my long poem. I'd lie there and say it over to myself, and see if the rest of it wouldn't come." He laughed a little, though not bitterly. He was frankly amused. "What do you think? I couldn't even remember the confounded thing. But I could other things: the verse I despised. Wasn't that the limit? Omar Khayyám! I lay there and remembered it by the yard."
"That's easy," said Raven. "Nothing like the first impressions. They stick."
"Evidently," said Dick. "They did stick. And my stuff didn't."
"Is this," Raven ventured, not seeing whether the boy was quivering under his calm, "a case against the moderns?"
Dick answered promptly, though Raven could only wonder, after all, just what he meant:
"It's a case against me." He went on, his eyes still on the melodious orchard converts. It must have been a vagabond robin swaggering there, really deriding nests, he found so much leisure to sing about them. "I wanted to say I didn't get you that time when you told me you'd pretty much done with the world. I though Mum was right:cafard, you remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system. I'm done with it."
Raven looked at him in a sudden sharp misery of apprehension. First, Old Crow, then he, then Dick, one generation following another.
"Don't you go that path, old man," he said. "You'll only lose your way and have to come back."
"Come back?"
"Yes. Old Crow did. Remember the book. He challenged the whole business, and then he swung round to adoring it all, the world and Whoever made it. He didn't understand it a whit better, but he believed, he accepted, he adored."
"What would you say?" Dick asked curiously, after a moment. "Just what happened to him?"
"Why, I suppose," said Raven, "in the common phrase, he found God."
They were silent for a time and both of them tried desperately to think of the vagabond robin. Raven, his mind released by this fascination of dwelling on Dick apart from any responsibility of talking to him, found it running here, there, back and forth, over these weeks of their stay together. It halted, it ran on, it stopped again to consider, but always it was of Dick and incidentally of himself who didn't matter so much, but who had to be in it all. Were they at one in this epidemic of world sickness? As the great explosive forces of destruction and decay seemed to have released actual germs to attack the physical well-being of races, had the terrible crashes of spiritual destinies unsettled the very air of life, poisoned it, drugged it with madness and despair? Was there a universal disease of the mind, following this wholesale slaughter, which the human animal hadn't been able really to bear though it had come to a lull in it, so that now it was, in sheer shrieking panic, clutching at its various antidotes to keep on living? One antidote was forgetfulness. They were forgetting the War, some thousands of decent folk who clearly had meant to remember. A horrible antidote that, but perhaps they had to take it to save themselves. Too big a price to pay for living (and such thread-paper lives!) but still there did seem to be a prejudice in favor of the mere drawing of breath. Maybe you couldn't blame them, spinning in the sunshine like insects of a day. Some of the others had to save themselves by the wildness of a new intoxication. They danced, their spirits danced: a carmagnole it was, a dance of death, the death of the spirit as he saw it. But maybe, with this preposterous love of life in them they, too, had to do it. Maybe you couldn't blame them. He and Dick—they had been like two children, scared out of their wits, crying out, hitting at each other in the dark. Youth and age, that was what they had fought about. It had been an unseemly scrap, a "you're another." Dick had been brought up against life as it looks when you see it naked, the world—and what a world! No wonder he swore it was a world such as neither he nor his fellows, like him aghast, would have made. He would simply have to live some quarter century to find out what sort of a world he and his fellows did actually make.