For a week it was hard, clear weather, with a crystal sky and no wind.
Tenney appeared in the early mornings and he and Jerry went off to their
chopping. Raven's relief grew. By the last of the week he found his
apprehension really lessening. Every hour of her safety gave him new
reassurance, and he could even face the nights, the long hours when
Tenney was at home. Tenney he took pains not to meet. He distinctly
objected to being pressed into a corner by the revivalist cant of a man
he could not wisely offend. Nor did he see her whom he called "the
woman." Sometimes in the early dusk after Tenney had got home, he was
strongly moved to walk past the house and see if their light looked
cheerful, or if he could hear the sound of voices within. Smile at
himself as he might, at the childishness of the fancy, he alternately
thought of her as being pursued out of the house by a madman with an axe
and exhorted to save herself by the blood of the Lamb. And, Tenney being
what he was, the last was almost as disquieting as the actual torment.
Every morning he went up to the hut to find no slightest sign of her
having been there. If he stayed long enough to build a fire, he went
back, after it had time to die, and laid another, so that she might
light it without delay.
On the Saturday night of that week the wind veered into the east and the
clouds banked up. The air had a grayness that meant snow. He had been up
at the hut all the afternoon. He had pulled out an old chest, the
sea-chest of a long dead Raven who had been marked with sea longing, as
it sometimes happens to those bred in the hills, and had run away and
become mate and captain. Raven had always been vaguely proud of him, and
so, perhaps, had other Ravens, for Old Crow, when he moved up here, had
brought the sea-chest with him, and his own books also were stowed away
in it. Old Captain Raven's were entirely consistent with his
profession--charts, a wonderful flat volume full of the starry heavens
and more enchanting to Raven than any modern astronomy; but Old Crow's,
in their diverse character, seemed to have been gathered together as it
happened, possibly as he came on them, in no sense an index of
individual taste. There were poets (strange company they made for one
another!) Milton, Ossian, Byron, Thompson, Herrick, and the Essays of
Montaigne, the Confessions of Rousseau. Also, the Age of Reason, which,
on the testimony of uncut leaves, had not been read. And there was a
worn, dog-eared Bible. Raven had never wanted to appropriate the books
so far as to set them with his own on the shelves. They seemed to him,
through their isolation, to keep something of the identity of Old Crow.
He believed Old Crow would like this. It was precious little earthly
immortality the old chap had ever got beyond the local derision, and if
Raven could please him by so small a thing, he would. He had them all
out on chairs and sat on the floor beside the chest, looking them over
idly until it began to grow dark and, realizing how early it was, he
glanced up at the windows and saw the veil of a fine falling snow. He
got up, left his books in disorder, and lighted the lamp. The fire had
been dying down and he kicked the sticks apart. It must die wholly so
that a fresh one would run no chance of catching the coals. Yet it was
unlikely she would come to-night. Tenney would be tired with his week's
work.
And just as he was making himself reasons, in a mechanical way, while he
put the room in order, there was a knock, quick, imperative, the door
was thrown open and there she was. She was about to shut the door, but
he ran before her. He did it and turned the key. Then he passed her and
hurried to the fire and with both hands heaped on cones and kindling
until it flared. While he did this she stood as still as a stone and
when, having his fire, he turned to her, he saw she had nothing on her
head and that the fine snow had drifted into the folds of her clothing
and was melting on her hair. She looked more wildly disordered than when
he had seen her before, for she had wrapped a blanket about her, and the
child was under it, covered so closely that Raven wondered how he could
breathe. He tried to take the blanket from her, but she held it
desperately. It seemed as if, in unreasoning apprehension, she dared not
let the child be seen. But he laid his hand on hers, saying, "Please!"
authoritatively, and she let him unclasp the tense fingers, remove the
blanket, and then take the child. Raven had had no experience with
babies, but this one he took, in the heat of his compassion, with no
doubt that he should know what to do with him. He felt the little feet
and hands and, finding them warm, drew forward an arm-chair for her,
and, when she sank into it, set the child in her lap.
"Put your feet to the fire," he said. "Your shoes are all snow. Better
take them off."
She shook her head. She stretched her feet almost into the blaze and the
steam rose from them. Raven went to the cupboard at the side of the
fireplace and took down a bottle of chartreuse. But she shook her head.
"I dassent," she said. "He'll smell it."
Raven came near breaking into an oath. Did the beast own her, that he
should be able, after this new outrage, to get her sweet breath?
"I ain't cold," she assured him, "not now. No, I won't drink any"--for
he was about to pour it for her--"I never took much stock in them
things. I've seen too much of 'em."
Then Raven remembered that Charlotte had told him all the boys
drank--her brothers--and he seemed to have turned another page in her
piteous life. He set back the bottle and, to give her time to recover
herself, resumed his task of straightening the room. At her voice, he
was at once beside her.
"Should you just as soon," she asked quietly, as if the question were of
no moment, "I'd stay up here all night?"
"Of course you're to stay all night." It seemed to him too beautiful a
thing to have happened, to know she was here in safety with the trees
and the snow. "I'll go down and get some milk and things for him"--he
was indicating the baby who, under the ecstasy of warmth, was beginning
to talk strange matters, standing on his mother's knee--"I'll tell
Charlotte I'm staying up here all night."
But now he saw, in surprise (for he had failed to guess how his words
would strike her) that she was terrified, perhaps more by him than she
had been by Tenney.
"No," she cried violently. "You can't do that. You mustn't. If you stay,
I've got to go."
"I can't have you up here in the woods alone," he reasoned.
She gave a little laugh. The quality of it was ironic. It made him
wonder what her laughter would be if she were allowed to savor the
quaintness of sheer fun. She spoke obliquely, yet accounting for the
laugh.
"What do you s'pose'd happen to me?"
"Nothing," he owned, comparing, as she meant him to, the safety of her
state up here, surrounded by the trees and the wind, and her prison with
the madman down below. "But I can't have it. Do you suppose I can go
down there and sleep in my bed?" He paused and began to coax. Charlotte
could have told her how beguiling he was when he coaxed. "I'll stay in
the other room and keep an eye out. I sha'n't sleep. I won't even
disturb you by tending the fire. You can do that. Come, is it a bargain.
It's the only safe thing to do, you know. Suppose he should come up here
in the night?"
"That's it," she said quietly. "S'pose he should? Do you want I should
be found up here with a man, any man, even you?"
He was silent, struck by her bitter logic. His heart, in the actual
physical state of it, ached for her. She would not let him save her, he
thought despairingly; indeed, perhaps she could not. For she alone knew
the noisome perils of her way. He relinquished his proposition, without
comment, and he could see at once what relief that gave her.
"Very well," he said, "I'll go down. But I shall certainly come back and
bring you some milk. Something to heat it in, too. Old Crow used to have
dishes, but they're gone. Lock the door after me. I'll call when I
come."
But she rose from her seat, put the baby on the couch and took the
blanket from the chair where he had spread it. There were still drops on
it, and she went to the other side of the room, at a safe distance from
the baby, and shook it. She had settled into a composure as determined
as his own.
"It's no use talkin'," she said. "I've got to go back."
"Go back?" He stared at her.
"Yes. What we've just said shows me. Nothin's more likely than his
comin' up here. He might reason it out. He knows I wouldn't go to any o'
the neighbors, an' he'd know I wouldn't let baby ketch his death, a
night like this, the storm an' all. An' if he found me here locked in,
even if there wa'n't nobody here with me, I dunno what he'd do. Burn the
house down, I guess, over my head."
The last she said absently. She was arranging the blanket about her with
an anxious care, evidently making it so secure that she need not use her
hands in holding. They would be given to the baby.
"Burn my house down, will he? Let him try it," said Raven, under his
breath.
She looked at him in a calm-eyed reproach that was all motherly.
"We mustn't have no trouble," said she. "I dunno what I should do if I
brought that on you."
"What does the man mean," Raven broke out, chiefly to attract her
attention and keep her there under shelter, "by going dotty half the
time and the other half butting in and asking people if they're saved?"
"Did he ask you?" she inquired. She nodded, as if it were precisely what
might have been expected. "I s'pose he thinks he has to. He's a very
religious man."
"Religious!" Raven muttered. "Does he have to do the other thing, too:
go off his nut?"
She was looking at him gravely. Suddenly it came to him he must be more
sympathetic in his attitude. He must not let her feel rebuffed, thinking
he did not understand.
"I dunno's I blame him," she said slowly, as if she found it a wearingly
difficult matter and meant to be entirely just. "You see he had
provocation." The red came flooding into her cheeks. "He come home from
work an' what should he see but the man, the one I told you----"
She stopped, and Raven supplied, in what he hoped was an unmoved manner:
"The one that looks up kinder droll?"
For his life he could not have helped repeating the words as she had
given them to him. He had found them too poignant in their picturesque
drama to be paraphrased or forgotten.
"Yes," she said eagerly. She was relieved to be helped. "He drove up in
his sleigh, about fifteen minutes 'fore Isr'el come home. He come up to
the house. I went to the door. 'What do you want?' I says. Then he begun
to say things, foolish things same's he always did----"
She stumbled there, as if in shame, and Raven knew what kind of things
they were: things about her eyes, her lips, insulting things to an
honest wife, taunting things, perhaps, touching the past. More and more
she seemed to him like a mother of sorrows, a child unjustly scourged
into the dark mysteries of passion and pain.
"Never mind," he said reassuringly. "Don't try to tell me. Don't think
of them."
But she would tell him. It seemed as if she had to justify herself.
"He told me he wanted to come in. 'You can't,' says I, 'not whilst I
live.' An' he laughed an' stood there an' dug his heel into the snow an'
waited, kinder watchin' the road till Isr'el hove in sight with his
dinner pail. An' then I see it all. He'd drove along that way an' see
Isr'el an' Jerry comin' acrost from their work an' he meant to stan'
there drivin' me out o' my senses till Isr'el see him. An' soon as he
was sure Isr'el did see him, he turned an' run for the sleigh an' got in
an' give the hoss a cut, an' he was off same's he meant to be."
"And you were left alone with Tenney," said Raven quietly. "There! don't
tell me any more."
She smiled upon him, giving him an ineffable sense that she had, in
telling him, somehow dropped her burden. Now she said, with as calm a
resolution as that of the martyr marching to the fire he is sure his
Lord has called him to:
"I'll go down along."
She went over to the couch, took up the child, and began to tuck about
him the folds of her enveloping blanket. Raven moved to her side. He had
an overwhelming sense of their being at one in the power of their
resolution. If she would yield to his deliberate judgment! if only their
resolutions could coincide!
"No," he said, "you're not going down there. I won't have it."
She looked at him and faintly smiled.
"I've got to," she said. "If I stay away all night an' he don't know
where, there wouldn't be any way o' piecin' on."
And suddenly he knew, if she was to persist in "piecing on," she was
right.
"Wait," he said. "Let me think."
There must be some way, he reflected, some means, by violence or
diplomacy, to help her fulfill the outer rites of her bargain until he
could persuade her to be taken beyond the reach of persecution. He
wanted to fight for her; but if that was not the way, if his fists would
only bruise her as well as Tenney, he was ready to lie. He had his idea.
It might be good, it might not, but it was an emergency idea.
"I'll go down," he said. "I'll go over to your house and offer to pay
him for his week's work. You follow. Give me time enough to go into my
house on the way and get some money. Then you come while I'm talking to
him and I'll stay a bit, as long as I can. When you come, we can see how
he is. If he's violent to you--if he looks it, even--you've got to come
away."
"Oh, no," she cried sharply, "I can't do that. You must see I can't."
"I'll take you to my house," he said. "You know Charlotte. She'll be
nice to you. Why, if Charlotte found out a thing like this was going on
in the neighborhood, she'd go for him tooth and nail."
"No," said she, in a dull decision. "I can't. It would all come on you."
He understood. The madman would drag him into that range of jealous fury
and because he was a man.
"I can look out for myself," he said roughly, "and you, too."
Again she shook her head.
"No," she said, "he might kill you. Anyways, he'd burn your barn."
"He won't kill me," said Raven, "and I don't care a hang about my barn.
Let him burn. Good thing. I'll clap him into jail and you'll know where
he is. Now!" He looked at the clock on the mantel. "I'm going. In just
twenty minutes you start and come along as fast as you want to. I'll be
at your house."
She had begun to speak, but he paid no attention. He turned up his
collar and stepped out into the storm.
"Lock the door," he called back to her. "Keep it locked till you go."
The road down the slope was scarcely clogged at all. The firs, waving
now and interlocking their branches in that vague joy or trouble of the
winter wind, were keeping off the powdery drift. When he got to his
house he saw Jerry on the way to the barn, but he did not hail him.
Possibly Jerry had paid Tenney for his week, and although Raven's own
diplomacy would stick at nothing, he preferred to act in good faith,
possibly so that he might act the better. He smiled a little at that and
wondered, in passing, if he were never to be allowed any arrogance of
perfect behavior, if he had always got to be so sorry for the floating
wisps of humanity that seemed to blow his way as to go darting about,
out of his own straight course, to pluck them back to safety. There were
serious disadvantages, he concluded, as he often had before, in owning a
feminine vein of temperament. He went in at the front door and up the
stairs, took a roll of money from his desk and ran down again. Charlotte
had not seen him. She was singing in the kitchen in a fragmentary way
she had when life went well with her, and the sound filled Raven with an
unreasoning anger. Why should any woman, even so dear and all deserving
as Charlotte, live and thrive in the warmth and light while that other
creature, of as simply human cravings, battled her way along from cliff
to cliff, with the sea of doom below, beating against the land that was
so arid to her and waiting only to engulf her? That, he thought, was
another count in his indictment against the way things were made.
The Tenney house, when he approached it, was cold in the darkness of the
storm. The windows were inhospitably blank, and his heart fell with
disappointment. He went up to the side door looking out on the pile of
wood that was the monument to Tenney's rages, and knocked sharply. No
one came. He knocked again, and suddenly there was a clatter within, as
if some one had overturned a chair, and steps came stumbling to the
door. A voice came with them, Tenney's voice.
"That you?" he called.
He called it three times. Then he flung open the door and leaned out
and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to
find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against
the step, with an implication of being snow-clogged and cold.
"How are you?" he said. "Let me come in, won't you? It's going to be an
awful night."
Tenney stepped back, let him enter, and closed the door behind him. They
stood together in the darkness of the entry. Raven concluded he was not
to be told which way to go.
"Smells warm in here," he said, taking a step to the doorway at the
left. "This the kitchen?"
Tenney recovered herself.
"Walk in," he said. "I'll light up."
Raven, standing in the spacious kitchen, all a uniform darkness, it was
so black outside, could hear the man breathe in great rasping gulps, as
if he were recovering from past emotion or were still in its grasp. He
had taken a lamp down from the high mantel and set it on the table. Now
he was lighting it, and his hand shook. The lamp burning and bringing
not only light but a multitude of shadows into the kitchen, he turned
upon Raven.
"Well," he said, harshly. "Say it. Git it over."
Raven heard in his voice new signs of a tremendous, almost an hysterical
excitement. It had got, he knew, to be quieted before she came.
"If you'll allow me," he said, "I'll sit down. I'm devilish cold."
"Don't swear," said Tenney, still in that sharp, exasperated voice, and
Raven guessed he was nervously afraid, at such a crisis, of antagonizing
the Most High.
The vision of his own grandmother came up before him, she who would not
let him read a child's book in a thunder shower lest God should consider
the act too trivial in the face of elemental threatening and strike him
dead. He took one of the straight-backed chairs by the stove and leaned
forward with an absorbed pretense of warming his chilled hands. But he
was not reassuring Tenney. He was still more exasperating him.
"Say it, can't you?" the man cried to him piercingly. "Tell it an' git
it over." Then, as Raven merely looked at him in a civil inquiry,
"You've got suthin' to break, ain't ye? Break it an' leave me be."
Raven understood. The man's mind was on his wife, fled out into the
storm. His inflamed imagination was picturing disaster for her. He was
wild with apprehension. And it was well he should be wild. It was a pity
she was likely to come so soon. Raven would have been glad to see his
emotions run the whole scale from terror to remorse before she came, if
come she would, to allay them.
"No," he said quietly, "I haven't anything to break. But it's going to
be an awful night. I guess there will be things to break about the folks
that are out in it."
Tenney came up to him and peered down at him in blank terror.
"Who's out in it?" he asked. "Who've you seen?"
Raven laughed jarringly. It did seem to him grimly amusing to be
dallying thus with a man's fears. He was not used to playing games with
the human creature's destiny. He had always looked too seriously on all
such drama, perhaps because he had been so perplexed by drama of his
own. If his life was too puzzling a thing to be endured, was not all
life, perhaps, equally puzzling and therefore too delicate a matter to
be meddled with? But now the game was on, the game of sheer diplomacy.
The straight and obvious path wouldn't do if he was to save a woman who
handicapped him in advance by refusing to let herself be saved.
"The night?" he repeated. "Who's out in it? Why, I'm out in it myself;
at least, I have been. But now I'm here by this stove, I don't know when
you'll get rid of me. Put in a stick, won't you, Tenney? These big rooms
have a way of cooling off before you know it."
Tenney did put in a stick and more. He crammed the stove with light
stuff and opened draughts. Raven noted, in the keen way his mind had
taken up, of snatching at each least bit of safety for the woman, that
the tea kettle was boiling. She would be chilled. She would need hot
water. And suddenly he felt the blood in his face. There was a hand at
the latch of the side door. Tenney, too, heard it. He threw back into
the box the stick of wood he had selected and made three strides to the
entry. Again he called, in that voice of sharp anxiety:
"That you?"
She opened the door just before he could put out his hand to it, passed
him without a look, and came in. He shut the door and followed her.
Raven got up from his chair and stood, glancing at her with what he
hoped was a casual attention. Tenney came back and, when she had thrown
off the blanket, took it from her hand and dropped it on a chair. He was
all trembling eagerness. That act, the relieving her of the blanket, was
incredible to Raven. The man had wanted to kill her (or, at the least,
to kill his child), and he was humbly inducting her into the comforts of
her home. She had not looked toward Raven. With a decorum finer, he
thought, than his own, she would not play the game of diplomacy. She
knew him and she could not deny him, even to save her life. Suddenly
Tenney, brushing past to draw up a chair for her at the stove, became
aware of him. Raven believed that, up to the moment, he had, to the
man's absorbed gaze, been invisible. Now Tenney seemed to recognize the
decencies toward even an unbidden guest.
"She's all beat out," he said, in uncouth apology. "It's my woman."
Raven turned to her, waiting for her cue. Would she take a hand at the
game, as it imposed itself on him? Her silence and aloofness were his
answer. She was sitting forward in her chair, to get the baby's feet
nearer the warmth. But since she would not speak, Raven did.
"I should think any one would be beat out, a night like this," he said,
as casually as he could manage, "carrying a baby, too, in such a storm.
You'd better be careful of the child, at least," he added curtly,
turning to Tenney, "if you want to keep him. Out in this cold and sleet!
You don't want their deaths on your hands, do you?"
Tenney stared back at him in a wildness of apprehension.
"Be you a doctor?" he managed to ask.
Raven remembered the words: "Their tongue cleaved to the roof of their
mouth." That seemed to be what Tenney's tongue was doing now.
"No," said he, "I'm not a doctor, but I've seen a good deal of sickness
in the War. Get them warm," he added authoritatively, "both of them. Put
the child into warm water."
"Yes," said Tenney, in an anguished sort of haste. Then to his wife he
continued, in a humility Raven noted as her best guaranty of at least
temporary safety, "I'll bring you the foot tub, an' whilst you're doin'
it, I'll warm the bed."
"Yes," she said quietly, but with a composure of mastery in her voice.
"So do."
Raven got up and made his way to the door. Then he bethought himself
that he had not given any reason for coming and that Tenney might
remember it afterward and wonder.
"I thought I'd run up," he said, "and pay you for your week's work."
Tenney was darting about with a small tin tub, filling it from the
kettle and trying the temperature with his hand.
"No," he answered absorbedly, "I can't bother with that to-night. Let it
be till another time."
He had drawn a chair to his wife's side and set the tub on it, and now
she also tried the temperature while he watched her anxiously. And at
once the baby who, in his solemnity of silence, had seemed to Raven
hitherto little more than a stage property, broke into a lusty yelling,
and Tenney put out his hands to him, took him to his shoulder and began
to walk the floor, while the woman poured more water into the tub.
Neither of them had a look for Raven, and he went out into the
blustering night with a picture etched so deeply on his brain that he
knew it would always be there while he, in his flesh, survived: the old
picture of the sacred three, behind the defenses of their common
interests, the father, mother and the child.