Raven passed his house and turned into the wood road. There he did not
slacken, but took the rise at a great gait. He was at the hut a moment
after Tira: she had had time for neither light nor fire.
"It's Raven," he called. She did not come, and he added: "I'm alone. Let
me in."
Waiting there at the door, he had time to note the stillness of the
woods, the creak of a branch now and then, and the half-drawn sigh from
the breeze you hardly felt. At the instant of his beginning to wonder
whether she might have fallen there from a hurt or whether she was even
terrified of him, he heard the sound of the key and the door opened. He
stepped in and her hand was at once on the key. She turned it and melted
noiselessly into the dark of the room, and he followed her.
"No fire!" he reproached her, or perhaps himself, for it seemed, in the
poignancy of his tenderness, as if he should have had it burning night
and day. He set a match to the kindling and the flame answered it. She
had taken one of the chairs at the hearth and he saw, in the leaping
light, that she had put the child on the couch and covered him. She was
shuddering all over, shaking horribly, even her lips, and he went into
the bedroom, came back with a blanket and wrapped it about her. She held
it close, in that humble way she had of trying to spare him trouble,
indeed to make no confusion in the world she found so deranged already.
He remembered the chartreuse she had once refused and took it down from
the high cupboard, poured a little and set the glass in her shaking
hand, and, when the muscles did not answer, put it to her lips.
"It won't hurt you," he said. "Down it."
She drank, and the kindly fire of it warmed her. She looked up at him,
and what she said was more unexpected than anything he could have
imagined:
"Do you believe it?"
"Believe what?"
He could only guess she meant something connected with Tenney's madness
of suspicion and the devil of a man.
"What he said." She was looking at him with intensity, as if life and
death lay in his answer. "He said He was there to-night, there in the
room. Do you believe that?"
"Who was there?" Raven prompted her, and the immediate reply staggered
him.
"Jesus Christ."
He temporized.
"I've no doubt he believed it," he said, unwilling to speak Tenney's
name. It was doubly hateful to him at the moment of her being so
patently undone. He could only think she was trying to reconcile the
ugly contrast between her husband's expressed faith and his insane
action. "I'm sure he thought so."
"That ain't what I mean," she hesitated, and he began to see how her
mind was striving in an anguish of interrogation. "What he
thinks--that's neither here nor there. What I want to know is whether
it's _so_. If there's Somebody"--she clasped her hands on her knees and
looked up at him, mutely imploring him who was so wise in books and life
to help her striving mind--"if there's Somebody that cares--that died
over it, He cared so much--if He's round here everywhere--if He sees it
all--an' feels terrible, same as we do ourselves--why, then it's
different."
"What's different?" Raven asked, out of his fog.
She was demanding something of him and he felt, in a sickness of
despair, that it was something he couldn't give her because he hadn't it
himself. Tenney could read her the alphabet of comfort, though he was
piling on her those horrors of persecution that made her hungry for it.
"Why," she said, and the light and a bloom of something ineffable swept
over her face, changing its tragic mystery from the somberness of the
Fates to the imagined youthful glory of the angels, "if He's here all
the time, if He's in the room when things happen to us, an' wishes He
could stop it an' can't because"--again her mind labored and she saw she
had come up against the mysterious negatives of destiny--"anyways, He
would if He could--an' He knows how we feel inside when we feel the
worst, an' cares, cares same as----" here she was inarticulate. But she
turned for an instant toward the couch where the child lay, and her face
was the mother face. She meant, he knew, as she cared for her child.
"Why, then," she continued, "there wouldn't be anything to fret about,
ever. You never'd be afraid, not if you was killed, you wouldn't. You'd
know there was Somebody in the room."
This was the most deeply considered speech of her whole life. The last
words, ingenuous as a child's unconscious betrayal, tore at him as, he
suddenly thought, it would be if he saw a child tortured and in fear: as
if he saw Nan. They told him how desperately lonesome and undefended she
had felt.
"An' don't you see," she concluded, with the brightness of happy
discovery, "even if you was killed, what harm would it do you? He'd be
waitin'. You'd go with Him. Wherever it is He lives, you'd go."
Raven turned abruptly, walked to a window and stood there looking into
the dark. The challenge of her face was impossible to bear. Suppose she
asked him again if he believed it? Did he believe in a God made man? By
no means. He believed in one God, benevolent, he had once assumed, but
in these latter years too well hidden behind His cloud for man to say.
Did the old story of a miraculous birth and an atonement move him even
to a desire to believe? It repelled him rather? What, to his honest
apprehension, was the God made man? An exemplar, a light upon the path
of duty, as others also had been. Had the world gone wrong, escaped from
its mysterious Maker, and did it need to be redeemed by any such
dramatic remedy? No, his God, the God who made, could not botch a job
and be disconcerted at the continuing bad results of His handiwork. The
only doubt about his God was whether He was in any degree benevolent.
When he reflected that He had made a world full to the brim of its cup
of bitterness, he sometimes, nowadays, thought not. All this swept
through his mind in a race of thoughts that had run on that course
before, and again he heard her and knew she was pulling him back to the
actual issue as it touched herself.
"You tell me," she was calling him. Her voice insisted. He did not turn,
but he knew her face insisted even more commandingly. "You know. There's
nothin' you don't know. Is it true?"
Nothing he didn't know! The irony of that was so innocently piercing
that he almost broke into a laugh. Nan was right then. Tira did regard
him, if not as an archangel, as something scarcely less authoritative.
He turned and went back to the fire, threw on an armful of sticks, and
stood looking into the blaze.
"What makes you say that?" he asked her. "What makes you think I know?"
"Why," said she, in a patent surprise, "'course you know. I've always
heard about you, writin' books an' all. An' that's the kind you be, too.
You're"--she paused to marshal her few words and ended in an awed
tone--"you're that way, too. When folks are in trouble, you're so sorry
it 'most kills you."
This was a blow staggering enough to hit his actual heart and stop it
for a beat. What if he should say to her: "Yes, I do care. I care when
you are hurt. I don't know about the God made man, but isn't my caring
enough for you?"
Then bitter certainties cut in and told him it wouldn't do. She had
learned her world lesson too terribly well. It would be only another
case of man's pursuing, promising--what had they promised in the past?
And after all, he thought recklessly, what did the private honor of his
testifying yes or no amount to anyway? What moral conceit! To save his
own impeccable soul by denying a woman the one consolation that would
save her reason.
"Yes, Tira," he said quietly, and did not know he had used her name,
"it's all true."
She gave a little sound, half sob, half ecstatic breath, and he saw she
had not been sure he would yield her the bright jewel she had begged of
him.
"True!" she said, in the low tone of an almost somnolently brooding
calm. "All of it! Everywhere!"
"Yes," said Raven steadily, "everywhere."
"Over there where He was born, here!" That seemed to amaze her to a
glory of belief. "Why, if He's everywhere, He's here, too."
"Yes," said Raven. He loved his task now. He was putting her sorrows to
sleep. "He's here, too."
At that moment, incredibly, it seemed to him that a difference pervaded
the place, or at least that his eyes had been opened to a something
unsuspected, dwelling in all things. Did he, his unchanged mind asked
him, actually believe what he had not believed before? No, the inner
core of him signaled back to his mind. His belief had not changed. Yet
indubitably something had happened and happened blessedly, for it
brought her peace. Tira gave a little laugh, a child's laugh of
surprised content. He glanced at her. She was looking into the fire and
the haggardness of her face had softened. It was even, under the warmth
of the flames and her own inner delight, absorbed and dreamy. And Raven
knew he must wake her, and, he hoped, without flawing the dream, to
present action.
"Now," he said, "I want you to come with me down to Nan's"--still he
dared not put her off a step from the intimacy of neighborly relations
by presenting Nan more formally--"and spend the night there. In the
morning, you'll go back to Boston with her. I shall enter a complaint
against your husband."
It wasn't so hard to give Tenney the intimacy of that name, now she
looked so sweetly calm. She started from her dream, glanced up at him
and, to his renewed discomfort, broke into a little laugh. It was sheer
amusement, loving raillery too, of him who could give her the priceless
gift of a God made man and then ask her to forsake the arena where the
beasts were harmless now because she no longer feared them.
"Why, bless your heart," she said, in a homespun fashion of address that
might have been Charlotte's, "I wouldn't no more run away! An' if you
should have him before the judge, I'd no more say a word ag'inst him! I
wouldn't git you into any trouble either," she explained, in an anxious
loyalty. "I'd say you was mistaken, that's all."
Something seemed to break in him.
"What do you mean?" he asked roughly. "What do you think you mean? I
suppose you're in love with him?"
Tira looked at him patiently. She yielded to a little sigh.
"Why," she said, "that's where I belong. I don't," she continued
hesitatingly, in her child's manner of explaining herself from her
inadequate vocabulary, "I guess I don't think about them things much,
not same as men-folks think. But there's one or two things I've got to
look out for." Here she gave that quick significant glance at the little
mound on the couch. "An' there ain't no way to do it less'n I stay right
there in my tracks."
Raven, his hand gripping the mantel, rested his forehead on it and dark
thoughts came upon him. They quickened his breath and brought the blood
to his face and his aching eyes. It was all trouble, it seemed to him,
trouble from the first minute of his finding her in the woods. She might
draw some temporary comfort from his silent championship, in the
momentary safety of this refuge he had given her. But he could by no
means cut her knot of difficulty. She was as far from him as she had
been the moment before he saw her. She was speaking.
"It ain't," she said, in a low voice, "it ain't that I don't keep in
mind what you've done for me, what you're doin' all the time. But I
guess you don't see what you've done this night's the most of all. Now
you've told me you know it's true"--here she was shy before the talk of
god-head--"why, I know it's so, too. An' I sha'n't ever be afraid any
more. I sha'n't ever feel alone."
"But Tira," he felt himself saying to her weakly, "I feel alone."
Did he actually say it, he wondered. No, for he lifted his face from his
shielding hand and turned miserable eyes upon her, and her eyes met him
clearly. Yet they were deeper, softer, moved by a sad compassion. There
was something patiently maternal in them, as if she had found herself
again before the old sad question of man's uncomprehended desires. She
spoke, strangely he thought then, and afterward he wondered if she
actually had said the thing at all.
"There's nothin' in the world I wouldn't do for you, not if 'twas
anyways right. But----" and again she gave that fleeting glance of
allegiance to the child.
He tried impatiently to pull himself together. She must see there was
something hideous in his inability to make her safe, something stupid,
also.
"Tira," he said, "you don't understand. Sometimes I think you don't
realize what might happen to you. And it's silly to let it happen,
foolish, ignorant. If some one told you there was a man outside your
door and he wanted to kill you, you'd lock the door. Now there's a man
inside your house, inside your room, that wants to kill you. Yes, he
does," he insisted, answering the denial in her face, "when he's got one
of his brain storms. Is there anything to pride yourself on in staying
to be killed?"
She answered first with a smile, the sweet reassurance of a confident
look.
"He won't," she said, "he won't try to kill me, or kill him"--she made a
movement of the hand toward the couch--"no, not ever. You know why? I'm
goin' to remind him Who's in the room."
"Why didn't you remind him this time?" Raven queried, pushed to the
cynical logic of it. "You could have turned his own words against him.
It wasn't an hour since he'd said it himself."
"Because," she answered, in a perfect good faith, "then I didn't know
'twas so."
"Didn't know 'twas so? Why didn't you?"
Her eyes were large with wonder.
"Because," she said, "then you hadn't told me."
Raven stared at her a full minute, realizing to the full the exact
measure of his lie coming back to him.
"Tira," said he, "I believe you're not quite bright."
"No," said she simply, with no apparent feeling, "I guess I ain't. 'Most
everybody's told me so, first or last."
It sobered him.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I didn't mean that. I'm off my head a
little. I'm so worried, you see. I want to know you're safe. You're not
safe. It isn't easy to accept that--to lie down under it."
Usually he had spoken to her in the homespun phrasing he instinctively
used with his country neighbors, but the last words were subtly
different to her, they were more distant, and she accepted them with a
grave humility.
"Yes, sir," she said, and Raven awoke to the irritating knowledge that
she was calling him "sir." He smiled at her and she realized that, as
mysteriously as she had been pushed away, now she was taken back.
"So," he said, "you won't go down to Nan's and spend the night?"
She shook her head, watching him. Little as she meant to do what he told
her, she wanted less to offend him.
"Then," said Raven, "you'll stay here. I'll bring in some more blankets,
and you lie on the couch. You'll have to keep an eye on the fire. Don't
let it go down entirely. It can get pretty cold."
He got up, lighted a candle and went into the bedroom for the blankets.
Tira followed him and silently took the pair he gave her, came back to
the couch and spread them carefully, not to waken the child. He followed
with more and, while she finished arranging her couch, piled wood on the
fire. For a moment he had an idea of announcing that he would stay and
keep the fire up while she slept. But even if she submitted to that, she
would be uneasy. And she was a hardy woman. It would not hurt her to
come awake, as he knew she could, with the house-guarding instinct of
the woman trained to serve.
"There," he said, beating the wood-dust from his hands, "now lock me
out. Remember, you're not to go back there to-night. You owe that to me.
You've given me bother enough."
But his eyes, when hers sought them timidly, were smiling at her. She
laughed a little, happily. It was all right, then.
"You ain't mad," she said, half in shy assertion, following him to the
door.
"No," he said gravely. "I'm not mad. I couldn't be, with you. I never
shall be. Good night."
He opened the door, went out and waited an instant to hear the key click
behind him and ran plunging down the snowy road. Once on the way he
looked up at the mysterious stars visible in the line of sky above the
track he followed. Deeper and deeper it was, the mystery. He had given
her a God to adore and keep her protecting company. He who did not
believe had wrought her faith out of his unbelief. When he turned into
the road, he thought he saw someone under the porch of his house and
hurried, his mind alive to the chance of meeting Tenney, searching for
her. The figure did not move and as he went up to the house a voice
called to him. It was Amelia's.
"O John, is that you? I can't see how you can leave the house alone to
go wandering off in the woods and never saying a word."
There she was in her fur coat, not so much frightened, he thought, as
hurt. She was querulous with agitation.
"All right, Milly," he said, and put an arm through hers, "here I am.
And the house isn't alone. Don't get so nervous. Next thing you know,
you'll have to see a specialist."
"And Charlotte's gone," she lamented sharply, allowing him to march her
in and turning, in the warm hall, to confront him. "Here I've been all
alone."
"Where's Jerry?"
Raven had thrown off his hat and coat and frankly owned himself tired.
"In the kitchen. But he won't tell where Charlotte is. He says she's
gone up along."
"Well, so she has, to a neighbor's. Come into the library and get 'het'
through before you go to bed."
"And," she lamented, letting him give her a kindly push toward the door,
"I've got to pack, myself, if Charlotte doesn't come."
"Pack?" He stared at her. "You're not leaving?"
"Yes, John." She said it portentously, as bidding him remember he might
be sorry when she was no more. "I'm going. Dick has telegraphed."
"Anything the matter?"
"That's it. I don't know. If I did, I could decide. He orders me, simply
orders me, to take the early train. What do you make of it?"
Raven considered. Actually, he thought, Dick was carrying out his
benevolent plan of getting her back, by hook or crook.
"I don't believe I'd worry, Milly," he said, gravely, "but I think you'd
better go."
"Yes," she said, "that's it. I don't dare not to. Something may be the
matter. I've tried to telephone, but he doesn't answer. I must go."