Dick tossed the paper aside and turned upon Raven who, taking his chair
at the hearth, had bent to throw on a handful of light wood: the sticks
that wake and change a room so completely that they might almost lighten
the mood of the man their burning plays upon.
"Look here," said Dick, "you put the devil into Nan. What do you do it
for?"
Raven looked up at him in a complete surprise.
"No, I don't. The devil? Nan's got less to do with the devil than
anybody you and I ever saw. She's kept herself unspotted. She's a
child."
This last he said of sudden intent for, having noted its effect on
Milly, he wondered how it would strike Dick.
"Oh, no, she isn't," said Dick, with bitterness. "Unspotted--yes, of
course she is. But Nan knows her way about. She can play fast and loose
with the rest of 'em."
He stopped, conscious of talking too much, and ashamed of it. Raven
remembered that quick interchange of ownership and repudiation between
the two as they flashed back at each other in his library, those weeks
ago, but he could not tell the boy Nan had kissed him out of her
impetuous bounty only because the terrors of the time had lifted her
beyond habit and because Dick's need was so great. She had put the
draught of life to his lips, that was all. He remembered Monna Vanna
going to the sacrificial tent, and his heart melted at the thought of
woman's wholesale giving even when the act is bound to recoil upon
herself alone.
"You'd better not remind her of anything she said to you over there," he
allowed himself to advise. "Things were pretty strenuous then, Dick,
don't you remember? We've come back to a"--his voice failed him as he
thought how base a time they had returned to--"a different sort of thing
altogether. I'm an old fellow, according to you, but there's one thing I
know. You won't get a girl by 'flying off the handle,' as Charlotte
would say. Honest, old boy, when you have these fits of yours, you don't
seem, according to the prophet of your generation, as impressive as
usual."
"Who is the prophet of my generation?" put in Dick sourly, as if that
were the issue between them.
"G. B. S., I've understood," said Raven mildly. "Don't I recall your
telling me he was the greatest ever, at least since Aristophanes?"
"Oh, cut it," said Dick, whose gods were subject to change.
"Cut it by all means. But there is a thing or two I'd like your vote on.
Your mother now: what's your impression of her plans about staying along
here? Think she's game to tough it out as long as I do?"
"She'll stay as long as Nan does." Dick was frowning into the fire, and
Raven doubted whether one of his admonitory words had sunk in. "I had an
idea I could go back to town to-morrow morning and wire her I'd broken
my leg or something. But Nan's got to go with me."
"Nan will do as she pleases," said Raven. He rose from his chair
disgusted with young love so unpicturesque and cub-like. "Turn off the
lights, will you, when you go?" And he went off to bed.
But in the morning, when he came down, Dick met him at the foot of the
stairs. It was a changed Dick. His lip was trembling. Raven concerned,
yet unable to deny himself a flippant inward comment, thought the boy
looked as if he'd been saying his prayers.
"She's gone, Jack," said Dick.
In stress of intimacy, he often dropped the prefatory title.
"Gone?" Raven's mind flew to Tira. "Where?"
"Back to Boston. Walked to the station. Took the milk train. Charlotte
says she simply walked out and said she wasn't coming back."
"Your mother or--you don't mean Nan?"
"Nan, yes. Do you see mother walking five miles to a train?" But if Dick
was unsettled, this was not his surly mood of the night before. "If I
drove her away"--he began, and then ended with an appealingness to be
remembered of the Dick who had not been nettled by life, "Jack, I wish
she wouldn't."
"I'll ask Charlotte," said Raven. "Your mother out yet? No? Well, don't
bring her into it."
He went off to the kitchen where Charlotte was just setting little
silver pots on a damask-covered tray. She glanced up at him, not
absently, because Charlotte always seemed so charged with energy that
she could turn from one task and give full attention to another.
"For Mrs. Powell," she explained, setting her hands to the tray, as if
she expected him to make whatever remark he would without delaying her.
"She's havin' her breakfast in bed."
"Dick tells me----" he began, and she nodded.
"Yes, she's gone. Nan, you was inquirin' about, wa'n't you? It's all
right. I shouldn't ask any questions, if I was you: not yet anyways.
I've got a kind of an idea Dick'll be takin' the noon back to Boston.
Maybe his mother, too. But there!"
This last was as if it were too much to hope for, and she lifted the
tray and hurried away with it to Old Crow's room. Raven went
thoughtfully back to the hall where Dick stood waiting, gnawing at his
lip, and looking curiously like the Dick who had been a boy and come to
Uncle Jack to have his fortunes mended as they affected kite or ball.
"Yes," said Raven, "she's gone. Don't take it that way, old man. Nan
knows what's best for her."
"Walked to the station," said Dick bitterly. "Just plain cut stick and
ran. Probably carried a bag. All because I made it so sickening for her
she couldn't stay."
Raven thought of the things Nan had carried in the work of the last
years--supplies, babies born on retreats. She had seen the fortunes of
war. But there was no need of bracing Dick by telling him he could
testify she hadn't any bag. If the boy could be melted into a passion of
ruth over Nan, instead of a passion of resentment, so much the better
for him.
"Come and have breakfast," he said. "Charlotte's bringing it in."
They went together, and when Dick had bolted his coffee and egg he said:
"Of course I've got to take the 11.03."
"Of course," said Raven. He knew if he were a young lover who had
offended Nan and driven her away, that was what he should do: follow and
humble himself before her. "Jerry'll drive you down."
So it happened that when Amelia, carefully dressed, came out of her room
at noon, Dick had left without a word to her and her dignified
resentment was only diverted by hearing Nan, too, had gone.
"John," said she, disposing herself by the fire, "I should like to know
how you account for that girl?"
"For Nan?" said Raven absently. He was wishing Nan had found it easy to
tell him she was going. "I don't account for Nan. I don't have to."
"So unexpected," said Amelia. "So absolutely impervious to everything
we've brought them up to reverence. It's all of a piece. Depend upon it,
no young girl could go over there and do the things she did and not feel
the effects of it: for life, absolutely for life. You yourself feel the
effects in one way, the young ones in another."
Raven was very considerate of her, left stranded there with him. But
after the noon dinner, when they settled again by the fire, he began to
realize the magnitude of his task. He was simply saddled with Amelia.
She hadn't been able to get her alienist up here, but she had
constituted herself a psychic detective on her own account. At first he
didn't mind, she was so "simple honest" in her expedients. It was
amusing, to a moderate degree, to evade them. How did he sleep? Did he
dream? Did he know anything about the psychology of dreams? There was
Freud.
"Yes," Raven interpolated. "Nasty fellow. Peeps and botanizes on his
mother's grave."
Did the world still seem to him as hopeless as it did at the time of his
writing the letter? That gave him an idea.
"Where is that letter?" he asked, cutting across the track of her
calculated approaches. "What became of it?"
She did not evade him. She was too surprised.
"I gave it," she owned, "to one of our doctors at home. For a medical
congress."
"The devil you did!" Raven permitted himself. "Milly, sometimes I think
you advanced women--O Lord!"
"What else could I do?" Milly inquired, with her deliberate
fair-mindedness, which was, he miserably knew, a part of her culture.
"Surely, you wouldn't suppress evidence. And it won't be traced to you.
You're simply Mr. X."
Raven was silent. He was thinking what a fool he had been to unpack his
heart with words, and that if he told Milly so he should simply be
unpacking it some more. He looked at the clear winter day occupying
itself out there without him, and wondered why the deuce he couldn't put
on snowshoes and tramp off his discontent leaving her to fight her
boredom by the fire. She'd brought it on herself, hadn't she? Nobody
wanted her to come. Was there some hidden force in women, their apparent
vulnerability to the harsh world conditions that were bound to crush out
even them in the end? They seemed so weak you had, in mercy, to
reenforce them and then they proved so horribly strong, and used their
strength against you, depleted as you were by fighting for them. Anyway,
if he could get Milly's blood to moving and pump some of this hill air
into her she, too, might be a more wholesome citizen of even an
unfeeling earth.
"Want to go to walk, Milly?" he suggested seductively, and she looked at
him pleasantly, grateful for the tone, at least.
"No," she said, "we're so cozy here."
Cozy! it might be cozy, if that meant being choked. But he thought he
could stand a little more of it, and then he would at least drop asleep
and snore. The indiscretions of the body were terrible to Amelia. And he
did fall into a hopeless lethargy, and only about five o'clock, when the
early dark had come, threw it off and got to his feet.
"'Bye," he said. "I'll be back for supper."
Before she could answer, he was gone. Now he was afraid she might say,
with an ill-timed acquiescence, that after all she would have a little
walk, and he knew he simply couldn't stand it. By the fire, making an
inexorable assault on his senses, the calm, steady beat of her futile
talk could be borne. You bore it by listening through a dream. But out
of doors, when the crisp air had waked you, you'd simply have to swear
or run. He did run, snatching his hat as he went, up the road toward
Tenney's. It was not a reasoned flight, but he did want to calm himself
by the light burning through their windows, perhaps a glimpse of Tira
moving about. The night was going to be clear and not too cold for
pleasant lingering. Over beyond the rising slope opposite Nan's house he
heard an owl hooting and, nearer, the barking of a fox. He turned that
way and stood facing the dark slope. He knew what those trees were in
spring, pink and light brown in the marshes at the foot of the rise,
running up into a mist of sunshine with islands of evergreen. Then,
turning to go on, he cast a glance at the house and stopped with a word
of surprise. There was a light. Somebody had broken in (an incredible
happening here) and was beguiled by loneliness and silence into an
absurd security. He turned into the path and went softly up to the front
door, lifted the latch and was stepping in when some one came. It was
Nan. She was in the hall, a pile of blankets in her arms. Seeing him,
she did not start, only laughed a little, all the mischief of her face
running into it and waking it like the sun on moving water.
"Nan," said Raven, "Nan, my darling, why are you here?"
Nan did the incredible thing. She laid her pile of blankets in a chair,
came back to him and deliberately put arms over his shoulders and about
his neck. Her face, beautifully sweet in its new flush, was close to
his. It might well be flushed, for he had called her darling, and Nan,
feeling lorn and bewildered in losing the Rookie she used to think she
knew, felt for the instant that she had got home again. She had lost
him, she felt, when she saw the shaken look he gave the strange
beautiful woman up in the hut. Now here he was again, quite the same,
only it was true that she had not seemed to be, for years, what he
called her now.
"Rookie, my darling," said Nan, seeing no reason why she shouldn't give
him the precious thing back again, "I'm terrible glad you've come.
Charlotte tell you?" She put her cheek against his for a minute, took
her arms away and turned into the west sitting-room where a fire was
leaping and making soft, living shadows on the ceiling. In the middle of
the room she stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Look at the shadows,"
she said, in a low voice, as if they might hear and flee away. "It's
exactly as if they lived here all the time and waited for us to come
back to them. Look at the ones behind those candlesticks. They've always
been just like this, little old scholarly gentlemen in queer hats
walking along a London street. I used to think they were going to old
second-hand shops to buy old second-hand books. I wouldn't have those
candlesticks moved by half an inch for fear the shadows would get mad
and go with them. Sit down, Rookie, there where you used to read to me.
I'll light up, so we can see each other."
He did sit down without waiting for her, on the little squat,
old-fashioned sofa, and Nan went about the room with her match and
dotted it with candles. Raven looked after her in her housewifely
progress; he was still concerned, still grave over her leaving his house
for this. She had on her walking suit, whatever frills she might have
discovered upstairs, and she looked ready for outdoor enterprise. What a
hardy child she was, slender and supple, but taut for action in the
homespun service of the day! She threw her match into the fire and came
to him, sat down beside him and, like the Nan of a hundred years ago,
her childhood and his youth, put her head down on his shoulder.
"Nan," said he, abandoning what he sometimes considered the heavy father
attitude and jamming the silky head down into its hollow, "what did you
do it for? Didn't you like my house?"
"Yes, Rookie darling," she said, in a tone of drowsy happiness. "I meant
to stay--truly I did--and cut in when Mrs. Powell tried to get you to
give yourself away so she could tell her alienists how crazy you are.
But if I had, Dick would have stayed, too. He never'd have gone, never
in the world. And he's so quarrelsome."
"How do you know he's gone?" Raven asked.
"Why, of course he has. He would, the minute he thought I had. Hasn't
he?"
"Yes," said Raven, "he has. Nan, why the dickens do you treat him so?
You mean to take him in the end."
"Do I?" asked Nan, still most contentedly. "Rookie, what a lot you know.
Wake me if you hear a step."
"A step? Who's coming?"
"Charlotte. I told her I was no more afraid than up in your west
chamber. Not so much: Dick and his mother can't pounce on me here. I
didn't say that though. Charlotte thinks I just came over for a freak;
but she's coming to stay with me."
"You don't know what Charlotte thinks," said Raven succinctly. "She's
got a pretty accurate idea of all of us. You're not going to stay here.
That's flat. We'll blow out the candles in a minute or two and poke off
home."
"This is home," said Nan and rubbed her cheek on his coat. "Darling
Rookie!"
"You're running away from Milly," said Raven. "That's all right. I wish
I could myself. But what are you going to say when she finds the house
is open and you're here? I found it out and so can she. I was going by
and saw the light."
"She won't go by and see the light," said Nan, from the same far
distance. "Consider those pumps. She won't go out. If she does, you must
just take her the other way. Head her off, Rookie, that's what you do,
head her off."
"Do you know, Nan," said Raven, with a sudden resolution, "what Dick
feels about you: I mean, what makes him so sore and ugly? He told me."
(There was a slight disturbance on his shoulder. Nan seemed to be
shaking her head.) "He apparently can't get at you. There's something in
you that baffles him, puts him off. It makes him mad as thunder. You
won't let him in, Nan. You don't let him see you as you are."
"Why, Rookie!" said Nan. She sat up straight and looked him in the face.
Her eyes were beautifully calm. If her clinging to him was against the
rules of this present life, nothing in her expression showed it. She was
really like a child used to being loved and innocently demanding it.
"Why, Rookie, Dick's not more than half grown up."
"He writes," said Raven obstinately, aware of having really no argument.
"What kinds of books? Conventional rot. Verse. Anybody could do it by
the yard. No, you needn't look like that. 'Course I couldn't! But
anybody that could write at all. You could, Rookie, only you wouldn't
have the face. You'd feel such a fool."
"Of course it's conventional," said Raven, "his poetry is. But that's
natural enough. He belongs to the new school. You don't find him
conventional himself, do you? Too conventional?"
"He's precisely like his mother," said Nan. She had the air of wanting
to account for him, once for all, and sweep him out of the way. "Only
she's conventional about waving her hair and uplift and belonging to
societies, and he's conventional about brotherhood and a new world and
being too broad-minded to be healthy. Don't you know there are crude
things in a man that have got to stay there, if he is a man? War, now!
if some beast goes out on a prowl (like Germany) the normal man doesn't
call it a herd madness and quote the New Testament. He gets his gun. So
did Dick get his gun, but now he thinks it's all over, he's too
broad-minded to live. Oh, you can laugh, Rookie, but there is such a
thing as being too superior to be decent, and that's Dick. The only time
I come anywhere near liking him is when he forgets to call the world a
fraternal sewing circle and comes out with a healthy damn. That's the
streak of you in him. Don't you know the nicest thing about him is the
streak of you?"
Raven was not aware of knowing that, but he had to own, though silently,
that there was an exasperating three-quarters of Dick he himself could
not, of late years, get along with. Was it youth? he wondered. Yet Nan
was young. Who so sweetly sympathetic as Nan?
"Let's not talk about him," said she. "Yes, a minute more, though. I've
sent off a letter to him. Charlotte was to give it to Jerry to mail on
the train. It told him I shouldn't tell where I was, and I certainly
shouldn't come back till he got his mother away from here. He'd simply
got to do it. I told him plainly."
"And then you're going back? You promised him?"
"I didn't promise him anything. Because, how could I? I don't know how
things are coming out. There's the woman."
"What woman?"
He asked this in a perfect good faith.
"Mrs. Tenney." She withdrew from him slightly. If Tira made his heart
race, she wouldn't hear it. He should not be spied upon. "Don't you
know," said she clearly, "I've got to see this thing through?"
"See it through?" he repeated. "You can't. She won't let you. She won't
let me."
"Of course she won't let you. If the man's mad with jealousy, he won't
stand another man's supporting his wife."
"I should very much doubt if she let you. She's got a loyalty--well,
it's the sort you read about when a brute breaks a woman and she says
she fell and hurt herself. It's been the surprise of my life that she
said a word to me."
"That's easy," said Nan. "You're so awfully sorry for everybody. They
feel it in you. She thought you were an archangel."
"An archangel!" groaned Raven. "Good Lord! Well, what do you propose
doing?"
"Go over there to-morrow. Ask her to come here and help me get the house
in order."
"Then what? Talk to her? You'll frighten her."
But he knew Nan would frighten no one, not the least of the maimed and
spent.
"No, but I thought maybe if things kept happening, I could take her back
with me to town, to work."
"There's the child," suggested Raven.
"Yes, that's a drawback," she owned seriously. "On the other hand, it's
an advantage. The child might be made the reason: to have somebody look
at him, you know. I suppose you saw he isn't quite right."
"Not right? what do you mean? Deficient?"
"I don't know," said Nan. "That or something. Deaf, maybe. But not
right. I hear something. It's Charlotte. Kiss me, Rookie. On my
forehead"--he did it--"on my forehead, on my right cheek, on my left
cheek, on my chin. No, that's all. That's good-night, Rookie--darling
Rookie! It is Charlotte. I'll let her in."
She went to the door and opened it and Charlotte appeared, done up in an
old-fashioned shawl and--Raven noted in an amused incredulity--a
nondescript knitted thing, old-fashioned when he was a child.
"A cloud," he said to himself. "That's what they called the thing."
He felt absurdly thankful at seeing it again. It seemed to assure him
that although the surface of life might heave and sink with revolution
and the fate of dynasties, Charlotte and her equipment of bed-rock
integrity and clouds existed still. She paused in the doorway to take a
basket from Jerry, and closed the door on him, after a casual
good-night. Raven went into the hall. The basket was generous, in its
oval capacity, the contents covered with a napkin.
"Want this carried upstairs?" he asked, but Charlotte shook her head.
"No," she said. "It's for her breakfast. I shall be gone 'fore light."
She lifted her sincere gaze to Raven. "I thought I'd come over," she
added. "I shouldn't feel easy to have her here all alone. Jerry said he
wanted I should."
Raven nodded at her and carried the basket off into the kitchen, and
when he came back both women were upstairs and he heard the interchange
of voices and their quick tread.
"'Night, Rookie," Nan broke off her housewifely deeds to call, and he
called back:
"Good night."
Then he went out and home again, and fulfilled his destiny for the day
by another somnolent hour with Milly before the fire.