Raven, tired to lethargy by the morning's turmoil, stayed in the house
until after dinner. He sat by the library fire, a book on his knee,
chiefly to convince Charlotte, who would inevitably detect his drop in
responsive liveliness, that he was merely absorbed and not moping. Once
or twice she did appear at the door, plainly to look at him, but,
finding he kept his eyes on the page, she did not speak. The life had
gone out of him. He wondered at himself for being so fagged. Yet it had
been a good deal of a strain, that anguish of a creature he was not
allowed to help; it was exacting a heavy penalty. He found his mind
dwelling on it, look by look, word by word, and finding no relief except
in the thought of Tenney in the river pasture, chopping. If that came to
pass, the woman would be safe for hours she could count upon.
That afternoon, Jerry reported that Tenney had been over and promised to
appear next morning with his axe. Then Raven went off for a walk along
the road skirting the base of the mountain. Possibly he chose it because
it led to the woman's old home, and the thought of her was uppermost in
his mind. The road itself was still and dark, subdued to a moving
silence, it might almost seem, by the evergreens, watchers on the high
cliff at the left, and the quiet of the river, now under ice, on the
other side below. He kept on to the stepping stones, at the verge of the
scattered settlement of Mountain Brook. They were rough granite at
regular distances apart, only the tops of them visible above the ice,
and they made the concluding stage of the walk across lots from Wake
Hill to Mountain Brook. In spring the water swirled about them madly,
and it was one of the adventures of boyhood for a squad to go over to
the stepping stones and leap from one to another without splashing into
the foam below. This was "playing Moosewood," the Indian who had been
found there drowned, whether by his own act because the local palefaces
had got his hill-top, over beyond, or from prolonged fire-water, no one
knew. But always he was a noble red man and one boy acted his despairing
part, and the others hunted him across the stones. In the game, he
always escaped and "shinnied" up the cliff opposite, by fissures the
boys of every generation knew, and struck a pose among the evergreens
above, whooping down defiance.
Raven stopped there and gave a thought to the boy he had been, and then
to Anne, who had once taken the walk across lots with him, and who, when
he told her how they used to play Moosewood, insisted on crossing,
though he had tried to dissuade her, noting her foolish shoes, and aware
that she had no adroitness of eye and muscle. But she had a will of
steel in these matters, as well as those of the spirit, and would not be
prevailed on. Three of the daring leaps she made from one stone to
another and at the fourth she slipped and he caught and held her, the
delicate slenderness of her, in his arms. He had felt awkward merely and
sorry for her, she so overprized doing things superlatively well, and
when they reached the bank she was flushed and shaken, and again he was
sorry, it seemed so slight a thing to care about. But as he looked down
there now he was thinking really about her he called "the woman" in his
mind. She would not slip. She was as perfectly adapted in every tempered
muscle to the rough conditions of natural life as the pioneer women who
helped their men clear the wilderness and set hearthstones. It darkened
between the firs and they began to stir a little, as if a wind were
coming up, and he turned back home, again growing uneasy about her, shut
up there with her tormentor and walled about by the dark.
He had his supper early, and he did not again invite Charlotte and Jerry
to eat with him. Now, he felt, he should need all the solitude he could
get to think out this thing he seemed to have taken upon himself, and
keep a grip on his anxiety. After supper he asked Charlotte for blankets
and a pillow. She did not look at him, but he was clearly aware that she
was worried and would not let him read it in her eyes.
"It's all right, Charlotte," he assured her. "I just want some things up
there at the hut, for the couch, that's all."
"You ain't goin' to sleep up there, be you?" she asked quietly.
Charlotte, he knew, had felt his mood. She saw he was on edge.
"No," he said, "I shall be right back. Only I want to get them up there.
To-morrow I shall be carrying books and things."
She got the blankets without a word, venturing only, as she gave them to
him:
"Jerry'll be as mad as fire with me for not sendin' him up to lug 'em."
Raven smiled at her and went off with his load. He carried also his
electric torch, and traversing the dark between the moving trees,
creaking now and complaining, at the door of the hut he flashed on the
light and lifted the stone. The key was there. That gave him a momentary
relief. She had understood and done her part toward his task of
defending her. He went in, tossed the things over a chair, and lighted
one of the candles on the mantel. The hearth was cold and he piled logs
and kindling. Then he put the pillow in its place on the couch and
spread the blankets. That was to show her she was to make herself
comfortable. The match-box he placed on the mantel, where it seemed
likely her hand would touch it, if she thought to feel there, and beside
it his torch. It might be a momentary defence against the impalpable
terrors of the night. But he was not sure she would feel any terrors,
save of the defined and tangible. That he considered absorbedly as he
went down the path after placing the key under the stone. It was not
that she was insensitive. He felt in her the alert readiness of a
perfectly acting nervous system. It showed itself in her self-control,
her readiness of courage, her persistent calm. She would not thrill with
apprehension over the tapping of those boughs against the walls: only at
a voice or a human tread.
When he went in at his own door Charlotte appeared, with a quick step,
from the kitchen. She was relieved, he saw. Dear Charlotte! she did not
know how his anxieties were mounting, but she did feel the uneasiness he
had brought with him. He tried to throw her off the track of her silent
interrogations.
"I'm dog tired," he told her. "I believe I'll go to bed."
"That's right," said she. "Your fire's been blazed up quite a while."
"Don't you know," he called back to her from the stairs, "how we always
sleep when we first come? I suppose it's the altitude."
"Yes," said Charlotte. "So 'tis, anyhow accordin' to Jerry."
Raven carried the look of her anxious, warm-colored face with him. It
was all motherly. Yet she had no children. Jerry lived under the daily
chrism of that soft well-wishing. And there was the woman up the road,
looking like a spiritual mother of men and strangely, mysteriously, also
like the ancient lure that makes men mad, and she had to fight like a
tigress for the mere life of her child. The contrast leaped into the
kaleidoscopic disorder he saw now as life like a brilliant, bizarre
fragment to make the whole scheme (if the scheme could be even estimated
by mortal minds) more disorderly still. But he was tired and he slept.
It would be good, he had thought for many weeks now, when he felt
himself drifting off, to sleep forever. To-night he did not want that
everlasting sleep. He wanted life, life to its full of power and
probity, to stand between the woman and her terror. Suddenly he woke,
and lay, his heart beating hard at the sound of the pines in the grove.
Charlotte had done her best to put the breadth of the house between him
and their lamenting, but their voices crept round the corner and into
his open windows, and invaded his mind. He lay there, the wind on his
face and that sighing melancholy of theirs calling him to an answering
sadness of his own. And now it was not his inexplicable panic of
disaffection toward the earth as God had made it, but a pageant of
darkness where formless terrors moved, all hostile to the woman. At this
moment, she seemed to him the point of blinding pain about which the
general misery of the world revolved. She was beauty in the flesh. She
led the mind to the desire of holy things. At least, that was where she
had led his mind.
But the cruelty of creation was not content with setting her loose in
the world of created things with the gift of beauty and holiness in her
hand. It had veiled her also with the mysterious magic that was simple
enough and directly compelling enough to rouse the beast of jealousy,
the beast of mastery, in the hearts of men. She did not seem to him an
Aphrodite, bearing in her hand the cup of love. There was something
childlike about her, something as virginal as in Nan. He could believe
she would be endlessly pleased with simple things, that she could be
made to laugh delightedly over the trivialities of daily life. But the
hand of creation having made her, the brain of creation (that inexorable
force bent only on perpetuation) saw she was too good a thing to be
lost, too innocently persuasive to the passion of men. So it had thrown
over her the veil of mystery and pronounced against her the ancient
curse that she should be desired of many and yet too soft of her heart,
too weak in her defenses, even to foresee the pitfalls that awaited her
wandering feet and would sometime break her bones.
This was the worst of all the sleepless hours he had had, and in the
morning he was up and out before Charlotte was ready for him. Jerry had
breakfasted, when Raven came on him in the barn. He expected Tenney to
go chopping, and he wanted the chores done, to get off early. Raven went
in then and told Charlotte he would not have his own breakfast until
Jerry had gone. He wanted to say a word to him as to the gray birches.
But actually he could not down his impatience to know whether Tenney was
coming at all. So he hung about and hindered Jerry with unnecessary talk
for a half hour or so, and while they were standing in the yard
together, looking down toward the river pasture, and Raven was
specifying, with more emphasis than he felt, that a fringe of trees
should be kept along the mowing, Tenney came. Jerry at once said he'd go
in and get his dinner pail and Raven waited for Tenney. This was not the
man of yesterday. He carried his axe and dinner pail. He walked alertly,
as if his mind were on his day's work, and the pale face had quite lost
its livid excitement. It was grave and even sad. Raven, seeing that,
wondered if the fellow could feel remorse, and was conscious of a lift
in the cloud of his own anxiety. Tenney, not waiting to be addressed,
walked straight up to him. He spoke, as soon as he was within hearing
distance of a tone of ordinary volume, and what he said surprised Raven
even more than the catamount calls of yesterday:
"Be you saved?"
Raven knew the salient country phrases, but, so alien was the question
to his conception of the man, that he answered perplexedly:
"What do you mean by saved?"
Tenney set down his dinner pail, as if it hampered him, and began
rhythmically, in the voice of the exhorter:
"Saved by the blood of the Lamb."
Raven stepped back a pace.
"No," he said coldly, "not that I'm aware of."
Tenney came forward a step and Raven again backed. There was something
peculiarly distasteful in being exhorted by a fellow of unbridled temper
and a bestial mind.
"You are a sinner," said Tenney. "If you reject the great atonement, you
are lost. Don't you know you be?"
"No," said Raven. He was on the point of turning away, when he
remembered it was an ill-judged impetuosity he could not afford. It was
more important, in this world of persecution and unstable defense, to
keep your antagonist busy, cutting gray birches.
"Do you reject Him?" Tenney, too, had his day's work on his mind and he
spoke rapidly, with a patent show of getting his exhortation done in
time to fall into step with Jerry, appearing, at the moment, axe in
hand. He picked up his dinner pail. "Do you reject Him?" he repeated, in
his former singsong. "Do you reject Christ crucified?"
And in spite of the prudence his inner self had counseled, Raven found
he was, perhaps only from force of habit augmented by his distaste for
the man, answering truthfully:
"Yes," he said, "as you mean it, I do."
Jerry, in the road, had halted and was looking back inquiringly. Tenney
started after him. Instead of being rebuffed by Raven's attitude, he
seemed to be exhilarated. Raven concluded, as he saw the light of a
perhaps fanatical zeal playing over his face, that the fellow took it
for a challenge, an incentive to bring one more into the fold. It was
something in the nature of a dare.
When he went in, Charlotte was about her tasks at the kitchen stove.
"You're not going to fodder the cattle, you know," he said to her,
passing through. "I'll see to that. Jerry showed me the mow he is using
from."
"I always do," said Charlotte, "when he's away all day. I admire to git
out there an' smell the creatur's and hear 'em rattlin' round the
stanchils till they see the hay afore 'em."
"Never mind," said Raven. "I'll do it to-day." Then a thought struck
him. "I wonder," he said, "who Tenney leaves to do his chores."
"Why," said Charlotte, "I s'pose she does 'em, same's I do when I'm
alone. 'Tain't no great of a job, 'specially if the hay's pitched round
beforehand."
Raven, sitting down to his breakfast, thought it a good deal of a task
for a woman made for soft, kind ways with children and the small
domestic animals by the hearth. And then he did have the humor to laugh
at himself a little. It showed how she had unconsciously beguiled him,
how she had impressed him with her curious implication of belonging to
things afar from this world of homespun usages. She was strong and
undeniably homespun herself, in every word and look. Let her fodder the
cattle. Perhaps they would add to the lonesome tranquillity of her day,
with their needs and their sweet-breathed satisfactions.