XVI

At the house they found Charlotte, in a silent alertness, making ready

for the guests whom Nan, before going up to the hut, had announced to

her. She was systematically refusing to be flurried, but Raven knew that

Amelia, with her rigid conventions and perilous activity, was a

disquieting guest. Remembering that, he took the incident with an

ostentatious lightness, and Nan followed his lead. Presently Charlotte's

kind face relaxed, and when they saw she was continuing her preparations

with a less troubled brow, Raven took Nan upstairs to the great west

room made ready for his sister with a fire roaringly active. There he

installed her, and when she reminded him that the room had been wakened

from its winter drowse to this exhilaration for Amelia, he bade her

"hush up and stay put." Two facts were paramount: she was the first

comer and this was the best room. But, Nan said, she wasn't going to

stay over night. She should get the six o'clock back to Boston. Raven

might here have reflected that, if she had merely the fact of Amelia's

coming to break to him, she could have done it by telephone. Was there

something in the unexpectedness of finding him immersed in the problem

of Tira that had overthrown her preconceived plan? Had she, finding him

absorbed in a new association, lost immediate interest in the drama she

had mischievously meant to share?

"I take it for granted," she said, "you'll let Jerry carry me to the

station."

"No," said Raven, impishly determined, "you're going to stay. You'll

borrow nighties and things from Amelia."

"Seethe the kid in its mother's milk?" inquired Nan, her own impishness

flashing up, irresistible. "Come up here to undermine her and then

borrow her things?"

"Seethe the kid in its own tooth paste," said Raven. "Yes, you're simply

going to stay. It's foreordained. Actually you came up here to help me

out in more ways than one."

"Did I?" she asked, and reflected. She had one of her moments of clever

guesswork over him. Rookie was a simple proposition. She could always,

she had once boasted to him, find him out. And reaching about for the

clue, suddenly she had it and proclaimed it in triumph.

"I've got it. Your farmer's wife! you want me to do something, something

she won't let you do. It's what we said. You want me to take her back

with me."

"Yes," he said. "Just that."

They stood looking at each other gravely in the silence of the gaily

flowered room with the great blaze rushing up the chimney. It might have

seemed that they were measuring each other. Yet they were inadequately

matched, for though Raven knew Nan, it was not especially in her

relation to him, and she knew herself and him intimately, in their

common bond. The woman was the more intuitive, but the man was no less

honest. She thought a moment now, her gaze unseeingly following the

pattern of the rug at her feet.

"Very well," she said. "I'll go over to the house and get some things,

and I'll stay."

There were, they both knew, bureau drawers full of Aunt Anne's things,

doubtless in the perfect order that was a part of her exquisite mastery

of life. She disliked traveling with a cumbersome outfit, even from the

city to this ancestral foothold. Everything possible was left behind her

in each place.

"I'll go with you," said Raven. She should not poke into the cold house

alone for the first time since she had inherited it, and encounter the

desolation of change.

They went downstairs and out into the road, Charlotte looking from the

window after them and wondering if they were bound on some jaunt that

would leave her to encounter Mrs. Powell undefended. Nan's spirits

always came up in the out-of-doors. She was a normal creature, needing

to be quickened only by full air. She began to laugh.

"Rookie," she said, "I could tell you something funny."

"Fire away," said Raven.

"It's about my staying. I didn't bring any real things, because I knew I

could come over here and get some, but my toothbrush is right here in my

coat pocket. Don't you see, Rookie? I was going to stay if you made me,

but not if you didn't, and you weren't to know I so much as thought of

it."

"Humbug!" said Raven. "I might ha' knowed."

They came to the house, a great yellow square, well back from the road,

and there being no path through the snow, Nan boasted of her boots and

laughed at him for ordering her to wait until he went back for a shovel.

So he strode ahead and broke a path and she followed, and he was not

really concerned for her because she looked so fit; it seemed unlikely

the natural conditions of nature would hurt her, however hostile. She

opened the door with the key produced from her coat pocket and stepped

into the great hall, darkened from the obscurity of the rooms on each

side where shades had been drawn, and a winter coldness reigned. Nan

gave herself no time to shiver over the chill of her homecoming, but ran

up the stairs as if she expected to find the sun at the end, and Raven

stood in the hall, waiting, and the presence of Anne seemed suddenly

beside him, and something he tried to think of as the winter cold

(though it was far more penetrating and ethereal) struck him with a

chill. Anne, the poignant memory of her, was certainly there with him as

he stood absently following with his eyes the bridge-crossed road of the

old landscape paper and thinking how different it used to look when the

summer sunlight struck it through the open door; and Anne was beating,

with her beautiful hands, at his unwilling heart, crying:

"Let me in! let me in to crowd Nan and that common woman out!"

Nan, coming down with a roll under her arm, glanced at him, perturbed.

He had, she judged, been seeing ghosts. They went out and locked the

door behind them (locking in, Nan silently hoped, the ghosts also), and

hurried back along the road. And when they had gone into his house

again, Raven told her to run upstairs and put her things in the west

chamber.

"Scatter 'em all over the place," said he. "Amelia'll fight for that

room. She'll fight tooth and nail. I sha'n't let her have it, not even

if you give it up. Understand?"

"But what is she going to have?" Nan asked, from the stairs.

"She's going to sleep down here, back of the dining-room," said Raven

perversely, "in the room they made over for Old Crow when they were

going to get him to give up the hut and come down here to die. Amelia's

scared out of her boots in the country, unless she hears voices on every

side of her. I know Amelia. Cut along and come down again and help me

set the scene."

They did set the scene, with an exhilaration that played back and forth

between them like a heady atmosphere. Charlotte was bidden to make the

bed in Old Crow's room and while Raven built the fire, Nan helped

Charlotte. And when the pung drove up from the station at the moment Nan

had foreseen, she and Raven were sitting before the dining-room fire,

apparently deep in talk. Whether Charlotte took her cue from them they

did not know, but she was too busy in the back of the house to appear at

once, and Mrs. Powell and Dick came in unheralded, turning first to the

dining-room. There sat the two, absorbed. The visitors began, on an

according note.

"John!" cried Amelia, and "Nan!" Dick cried, in an identical voice.

Raven and Nan had the same effect of unison. They laughed, it was so

exactly what they had known it would be, and Raven came forward, put his

hands on his sister's shoulders, and gave her a little shake.

"Now, Milly," he said, "what the dickens are you up here for?"

Nan, having alienists on her mind, and finding none, was plumping her

question at Dick:

"Where's Doctor Brooke?"

Dick evaded it by the self-evident statement that he hadn't come, and

ended in a morass of frowning confusion.

Mrs. Powell turned to her with a surprised interrogation, a doubtful

warmth. It tried subtly to convey an entire acceptance of her as an

individual, combined with disapproval of finding her in the spot she had

no excuse for seeking. And while they were exchanging civil commonplaces

veiling unspoken implications, Raven was looking at his sister and

thinking, in a whimsical terror, what a very large grain of sand she was

likely to prove in the machinery of his daily life, and how little she

had changed during his absence from America. Here she was, so

indomitable in every particular that you could almost believe she was

going to be as lasting as the processes that went to her equipment. She

had, you learned to know, tackled life as a servant to be governed, an

enemy to be downed. If it had antidotes, she would lose no moment in

equipping herself with them. If circumstance proved unfriendly, she

would ignore it and forge ahead. She was, Raven had always recognized,

the feminine replica of his father's special type. As to her looks, she

was a thin, whip-like woman, who gave an impression of wiry endurance

and serviceable resiliency. You would expect her to be hard to the

touch, mental or moral, and yet she could double, evade, rebound. Put

her in a hole, and she soon proved to you that its obscurity was the

last place where she proposed to stay. She looked the latest thing

evolved by the art of man. Her clothes were the prevailing fantastic

creation, and yet, on her, they were not illogical. They were the

plumage of an eccentric bird hatched to look that way. Her face, in its

sandy monotone of color, fitted the art of her wonderful and yet not too

noticeable hat, and her gloves and veil were the last word of style.

Amelia had begun making herself, Raven used to think, long before God

stopped making her. As a girl, she had gone after strange gods of

culture and aestheticism, forsaking them, when they toppled, for newer

gods still; but always she was undaunted, always persisting in her

determined pose of governing the situation and her own attitude toward

it. And Amelia, he knew, could hang on like grim death.

"But Nan!" she was exclaiming, "who'd have expected to find you here?"

"Well," said Nan, in the shock of realizing she hadn't quite remembered

what Amelia was like, and ranging herself to fight on Rookie's side,

"who'd have expected you, Mrs. Powell?"

Dick stood frowning at them impartially and twisting his hat in his

hands like a sulky boy.

"Have you opened your house?" Amelia persisted. "You're not staying----"

"She's staying here," said Raven. "Nan's taken pity on me and come up

for a visit. Oh, Charlotte! here you are. Show Mrs. Powell to her room,

will you?"

Charlotte appearing, white-aproned, in the doorway, looking like the

beneficent goddess of home, Mrs. Powell greeted her urbanely and asked

appropriate questions. Was she well, as well as she looked? And how was

her husband? Always well, she remembered. Yes, she would go to her room,

please. But she'd go up by herself. She knew the way. She should think

so, indeed! And her reminiscent laugh endowed them with the picture of

the little girl she had been, born and brought up in this very house.

"Oh, but it isn't up," said Raven cheerfully. "It's the west bedroom."

"Not----" she began, and he nodded, taking her coat from the chair.

"Yes, Old Crow's room. What was going to be his if he hadn't given 'em

the slip. I put Nan into the west chamber. You'll be awfully comfortable

in that room, Milly. I'll take in your bag."

Amelia, immediately circumspect when she did not see her way, did follow

him, but she was in as great a state of suppressed dudgeon as a

civilized lady, living by the latest rules, allows herself to be. Dick

and Nan, left alone in the dining-room, turned upon each other like two

young furies.

"You came up here," said Dick, in a tone of ill-suppressed ire, "to tell

him we were coming. I call it a mean trick."

"What about you?" inquired Nan. "You'd better not talk about tricks. Can

you think of a meaner one than giving him away to the entire middle

west?'"

"The middle west!" echoed Dick bitterly. "I told my mother."

"Yes, you told your mother. And she comes up here with her alienists."

"You'll notice," said Dick icily, "the alienist didn't come."

"I assume," said Nan, "he's expected on the next train. Or he's going to

pounce some time when Rookie isn't prepared."

"You little beast!" said Dick. "You don't deserve it, but I'll inform

you he isn't coming at all. I choked him off. I told him mother's the

one that's dotty or she wouldn't have called him in, and Uncle Jack

wasn't a patient and never'd consent if he knew. And he was an awfully

decent fellow and said nothing would induce him to come."

"You did, did you?" said Nan ungratefully. "Well, you'd better. You've

made enough mischief for one not very inventive young person, don't you

think? And wouldn't it seem to you you'd better use your influence with

your mother to-morrow morning and get out of here?"

"Out of here?" repeated Dick. "Out of my uncle's house. You

act----" here he paused.

"Yes," said Nan, "I do act precisely that way. I act as if I had more

right here than you. And I have. For I adore Rookie. And that gives me a

right to stay with him and fight for him, and die for him, if I want to.

And you don't care a sixpence, or you wouldn't have brought this on

him."

Dick, the man, cooled sooner than she. He paled, and stood looking at

her. Then he spoke in a voice dulled by wonder:

"I believe you do adore him."

"Of course I do," cried Nan, all her anger of impatience thrilling in

her voice. "I love him more than anything in this world or the next and

I always did and I always shall."

This Raven, coming back through the hall, heard.

"Good Lord!" he said to himself. "Good Lord!"

So these two, with all the forces of probability and beckoning fortune

pushing them together, could not approach even within hailing distance.

It was the hideous irony of a world bent on disorder. He walked in on

them with a consciously grave aspect of recalling them to their more

reasonable selves.

"What are you two scrapping for?" he inquired, and Nan looked at him

humbly. She hated to have him bothered by inconsiderable persons like

herself and Dick. "Don't you know you've got the universe in your fists

for the last time you'll ever have it? You're young----"

There he stopped awkwardly in the enumeration of their presumable

blessedness. It was Nan's face that stopped him. It had paled out into a

gravity surprising to him: a weariness he had often expected to see on

it after her work abroad, but had not yet found there.

"Yes," she said, in a tone that matched her tired face, "we're young

enough, if that's all."

The talk displeased her. Nan never liked people to be dull and smudgy

with disorderly moods. She kept a firm hand on her own emotions and

perhaps she could not remember a time when they had got away from her

under other eyes. Aunt Anne was partly responsible for that, and partly

the proud shyness of her type.

"No, Rookie," she said, "we won't fight. Not here, anyway. Not in your

house."

She held out a careless hand to Dick, who looked at it an instant and

then turned sulkily away. "Young cub!" Raven thought. He should have

kissed it, even gone on his knees to do it, and placated her with a

laughing extravagance. He recalled the words he had caught from her lips

when he was coming in and flushed to his forehead over the ringing

warmth of them. He bent to the fine hand about relaxing to withdrawal,

after Dick's flouting, drew it to his own lips and kissed it: not as he

would have had Dick do it but yet with all his heart. As he lifted his

head he smiled into her eyes, and their look smote him. It was as if he

had somehow hurt her.

"O Rookie!" she said, under her breath.

And at the instant, while they stood awkwardly in the rebound from

emotions not recognized, Amelia came out from her bedroom, perfected as

to hair and raiment, but obviously on edge and cheerfully determined on

not showing it. Evidently she liked Old Crow's room no more than she

might have guessed.

"O Lord!" said Raven ruefully to his inner self, "we're going to have a

cheerful house-party, now ain't we?"