Tira, from the forenoon of Tenney's accident, entered on uneventful
days. He lowered over his helplessness; he was angry with it. But the
anger was not against her, and she could bear it. For the first time she
saw his activities fettered, and the mother in her answered. She
ventured no outspoken sympathy, but he was dependent on her and in that,
much as it chafed him, she found solace. He was chained to his chair,
his wounded foot on a rest, and he had no diversions. Tira sometimes
wondered what he was thinking when he sat looking out at the road,
smooth with the grinding of sleds and slipping of sleighs. Once she
brought the Bible and laid it before him on a stand. If its exposition
was so precious to him at evening meeting, there would be comfort in it
now. But he glanced at her in what looked like a quick suspicion--did it
mean he thought she meant to taunt him with the unreality of his
faith?--and, after it had lain there a forenoon untouched, he said to
her uneasily:
"You put that away."
She took it back to its place on the parlor stand under Grandsir
Tenney's hatchet-faced photograph, wondering in her heart why it was not
what she had heard them read of God: "A very present help in time of
trouble." If you knew it was so, Tira reasoned, you never had to fret
yourself any more. And if that place was waiting for you--the good place
they talked about--even a long lifetime was not too much to face before
you got to it. After she had laid the book down and turned away from it
to cross the ordered stillness of the room, she stopped, with a sudden
hungry impulse, and opened it at random. "Let not your heart be
troubled," she read, and closed it again, quickly lest the next words
qualify so rich a message. It might say further on that you were not to
be troubled if you fulfilled the law and gospel, and that, she knew, was
only fair. But in her dearth she wanted no sacerdotal bargaining. She
needed the heavens to rain down plenty while she held out her hands to
take. When she entered the kitchen again Tenney, glancing round at her,
saw the change in her look. She was flushed, her mouth was tremulous,
and her eyes humid. He wondered, out of his ready suspicion, whether she
had seen anyone going by.
"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.
"Nothin's the matter," she answered. But her hands were trembling. She
was like Mary when she had seen her Lord.
"Who's gone by?" he persisted. "I didn't hear no bells."
"No," said Tira. "I don't believe anybody's gone by, except the
choppers. It's a proper nice day for them."
The child woke and cried from the bedroom and she brought him out in the
pink sweetness of his sleep, got the little tub and began to give him
his bath by the fire. As she bent over him and dried his smooth soft
flesh, the passion of motherhood rose in her and she forgot he was "not
right," and sang a low, formless song. When he was bathed she stood him
naked on her knee, and it was then she found Tenney including them both
in the livid look she knew. And she saw what he saw. The child's hair
was more like shining copper every day, his small nose had the tiniest
curve. By whatever trick of nature, which is implacable, he was not like
her, he was not like Tenney. He was a message from her bitter, ignorant
past. Her strong shoulders began to shake and her hands that steadied
the child shook, too, so that he gave a little whimper at finding
himself insecure.
"Isr'el," she broke out, "before God!"
"Well," said he, in the snarl she had heard from him at those times when
his devil quite got the better of him, "what? What you got to tell?"
"It ain't so," she said, her voice broken by her chattering lips.
"Before God, it ain't so."
"So ye know what I mean," he jeered, and even at the moment she had
compassion for him, reading his unhappy mind and knowing he hurt himself
unspeakably. "Ye know, or ye wouldn't say 'tain't so."
Words of his own sprang up in her memory like witnesses against him,
half phrases embodying his suspicion of her, wild accusations when, like
a drunken man, he had let himself go. But this he did not remember. She
knew that. Shut up in his cell of impeccable righteousness, he believed
he had dealt justly with her and no more. She would not taunt him with
his words. She had a compassion for him that reached into his future of
possible remorse. Tira saw, and had seen for a long time, a catastrophe,
a "wind-up" before them both. Sometimes it looked like a wall that
brought them up short, sometimes a height they were both destined to
fall from and a gulf ready to receive them, and she meant, if she could,
to save him from the recognition of the wall as something he had built
or the gulf as something he had dug. As she sat looking at him now,
wide-eyed, imploring, and the child trod her knee impatiently, a man
went past the window to the barn. It was Jerry, gone to fodder the
cattle, and Jerry brought Raven to her mind who, if he was obeying her
by absence, was none the less protecting her. The trouble of her face
vanished and she drew a quick breath Tenney was quick to note.
"Who's that?" he asked her sharply, turning in his chair to command the
other window.
"Jerry," she said. Her heart stilled, and she began to dress the child,
with her mother's deftness. "He comes a little early to fodder, 'fore he
does his own."
"I dunno," said Tenney, irritably because he had to wear out his spleen,
"why you can't fodder the cows when anybody's laid up. There's women
that do it all the time if their folks are called away."
"Why, I could," said Tira, with a clear glance at him, "only he won't
let me."
"What's he got to do with it," said Tenney, in surprise. "Won't let ye?
Jerry Slate won't let ye? Jerry ain't one to meddle nor make. I guess if
you told him 'twas your place to do it an' you'd ruther stan' up to it,
he'd have no more to say."
The blood came again to her face. She had almost, she felt, spoken
Raven's name, and a swift intuition told her she must bury even the
thought of it.
"There ain't," she said, "two nicer folks in this township than
Charlotte an' Jerry, nor two that's readier to turn a hand."
Tenney was silent, and Jerry did the chores and went home. Sometimes he
came to the house to ask how Tenney was getting on, but to-day he had to
get back to his own work.
This was perhaps a week after Tenney's accident, when he was getting
impatient over inaction, and next day the doctor came and pronounced the
wound healing well. If Tenney had a crutch, he might try it carefully,
and Tenney remembered Grandsir had used a crutch when he broke his hip
at eighty-two, and healed miraculously though tradition pronounced him
done for. It had come to the house among a load of outlawed relics, too
identified with the meager family life to be thrown away, and Tira found
it "up attic" and brought it down to him. She waited, in a sympathetic
interest, to see him try it, and when he did and swung across the
kitchen with an angry capability, she caught her breath, in a new fear
of him. The crutch looked less a prop to his insufficiency than like a
weapon. He could reach her with it. He could reach the child. And then
she began to see how his helplessness had built up in her a false
security. He was on the way to strength again, and the security was
gone.
The first use he made of the crutch was to swing to the door and tell
Jerry he need not come again. Tira was glad to hear him add:
"Much obleeged. I'll do the same for you."
Afterward she went to the barn with him and fed and watered while he
supplemented her and winced when he hurt himself, making strange sounds
under his breath that might have been oaths from a less religious man.
And Tira was the more patient because the doctor had told her the foot
would always trouble him.
It was two days after he had begun to use his crutches, that Tira, after
doing the noon chores in the barn and house, sat by the front window in
her afternoon dress, a tidy housewife. The baby was having his nap and
Tenney, at the other window, his crutch against the chair beside him,
was opening the weekly paper that morning come. Tira looked up from her
mending to glance about her sitting-room, and, for an instant, she felt
to the full the pride of a clean hearth, a shining floor, the sun lying
in pale wintry kindliness across the yellow paint and braided rugs. If
she had led a gypsy life, it was not because her starved heart yearned
the less tumultuously for order and the seemliness of walls. For the
moment, she felt safe. The child was not in evidence, innocently calling
the eye to his mysterious golden beauty. Tenney had been less irascible
all the forenoon because he had acquired a fortunate control over his
foot, and (she thought it shyly, yet believingly) the Lord Jesus Christ
was with them. Disregarded or not, in these moments of wild disordered
living, He was there.
She heard sleigh-bells, and looked out. Tenney glanced up over his
glasses, an unwonted look, curiously like benevolence. She liked that
look. It always gave her a thrill of faith that sometime, by a miracle,
it might linger for more than the one instant of a changed visual focus.
She caught it now, with that responsive hope of its continuance, and
knew, for the first time, what it recalled to her: the old minister
beyond Mountain Brook looked over his glasses in precisely that way,
kindly, gentle, and forgiving. But mingled with the remembrance, came
the nearing of the bells and the shock to her heart in the man they
heralded: Eugene Martin, driving fast, and staring at the house. The
horse was moving with a fine jaunty action when Martin pulled him up,
held him a quieting minute, and got out. He paused an instant, his hand
on the robe, as if uncertain how long he should stay, seemed to decide
against covering the horse and ran up the path. He must have seen Tira
and Tenney, each at a window, but his eyes were on the woman only. Half
way along the path, he took off his hat and waved it at her in
exaggerated salute, as if bidding her rejoice that he had come. In the
same instant he seemed, for the first time, to see Tenney. His eyes
rested on him with a surprise excellently feigned. He replaced his hat,
turned about like a man blankly disconcerted and went back down the
path, with the decisive tread of one who cannot take himself off too
soon. He stepped into the sleigh and, drawing the robe about him, drove
off, the horse answering buoyantly. Tira sat, the stillest thing out of
a wood where stalking danger lurks, her eyes on her sewing. Tenney was
staring at her; she knew it, and could not raise her lids. Often she
failed to meet his glance because she so shrank, not from his conviction
of her guilt, but the fear of seeing what she must remember in blank
night watches, to shudder over. For things were different at night,
things you could bear quite well by day. Now he spoke, with a restrained
certainty she trembled at. He had drawn his conclusions; nothing she
could possibly say would alter them.
"Comin' in, wa'n't he?" the assured voice asked her. "See me, didn't he,
an' give it up?"
Tira forced herself to look at him, and the anguished depths of her eyes
were moving to him only because they seemed to mourn over his having
found her out.
"No, Isr'el," she said quietly. "He wa'n't comin' in. He drew up because
he see you, an' he knew 'twould be wormwood to both of us to have him do
just what he done."
Tenney laughed, a little bitter note. Tira could not remember ever
having heard him laugh with an unstinted mirth. At first, when he came
courting her, he was too worn with the years of work that had brought
him to her, and after that too wild with the misery of revolt. She was
sorry for that, with an increasing sorrow. Tira could bear no
unhappiness but her own.
"Wormwood!" he repeated, as if the word struck him curiously. "D'he
think 'twas goin' to be wormwood for a woman to find a man comin' all
fixed up like courtin' time, to steal a minute's talk? You make me
laugh."
He did laugh, and the laugh, though it might have frightened her, made
her the more sorry. She had the sense of keeping her hand on him, of
holding him back from some rushing course that would be his own
destruction.
"Yes," she answered steadily. "'Twould be nothin' but wormwood for me,
an' well he knows it. He don't--love me, Isr'el."
She hesitated before the word, and with it the thought of Raven came to
her, as she saw him, unvaryingly kind and standing for quiet, steadfast
things. "He hates me."
"Hates ye," he repeated curiously. "What's he hate ye for?"
"Because," said Tira, bound to keep quietly on in this new way of reason
with him, "I left him. An' I left him 'fore he got tired o' me. He
never'd overlook that."
"You left him, did ye?" he repeated. "Then that proves you was with him,
or ye couldn't ha' left him."
"Why, Isr'el," said she, her clear gaze on his turbid answering one, "I
told you. I told you long 'fore you married me. First time you ever
mentioned it, I told you, so's to have things fair an' square. I told
you, Isr'el."
He said nothing, but she knew the answer at the back of his mind, and it
seemed to her wise now to provoke it, to dare the accusation and meet
it, not as she always had, by silence, but a passionate testimony.
"You said," she continued, "it shouldn't make no difference, what I'd
done 'fore you married me. You said we couldn't help the past, but we
could what's comin' to us. An' I thought you was an angel, Isr'el, with
your religion an' all. Not many men would ha' said that. I didn't know
one. An' we were married an' you--changed."
"Yes," he said. His hands were shaking as they did at the beginning of
his rages, but Tira, embarked on a course she had long been coming to,
was the more calm. "Yes, I changed, didn't I? An' when d' I change? When
that"--he paused and seemed to choke down the word he would have given
the child--"when that creatur' in there turned into the livin' pictur'
of the man that drew up here this day. Can you deny he's the image of
him?"
"No," said Tira, looking at him squarely. "He is the image of him."
"What do folks think about it?" he asked her. "What do you s'pose the
neighbors think? What'll it be when it grows worse an' worse? What'll
the school children say when he's old enough to go to school? They'll
see it, too, the little devils. The livin' image, they'll say, o' 'Gene
Martin."
Tira laid her work on the table in front of her. The moment of
restraining him had failed her, but another moment had come. This she
had seen approaching for many months and had pushed away from her.
"Isr'el," she said, "I guess you won't have that to worry over. There's
no danger of his goin' to school. He--ain't right."
He stared at her a long moment, puzzling instances accumulating in his
mind, evidences that the child was not like other children he had seen.
Then he began to laugh, a laugh full of wildness and despair.
"O my Lord!" he cried. "My Lord God! if I wanted any evidence I hadn't
got, You've give it to me now. You've laid Your hand on her. You've laid
Your hand on both of 'em. He can't ride by here an' see a red-headed
bastard playin' round the yard an' laugh to himself when he says,
'That's mine.' You've laid Your hand on 'em."
Tira rose from her chair and went to him. She slipped to the floor, put
her head on his unwelcoming shoulder and her arms about his neck.
"Isr'el," said she, "you hear to me. If you can't for the sake o' me,
you hear to me for the sake o' him,--sleepin' there, the pitifullest
little creatur' God ever made. How's he goin' to meet things, as he is?
'Twould be hard enough with a father 'n' mother that set by him as they
did their lives, but you half-crazed about him--what'll he do, Isr'el?
What'll the poor little creatur' do?"
Tenney sat rigid under her touch, and she went on, pouring out the
mother sorrow that was the more overwhelming because it had been locked
in her so long.
"Isr'el, I could tell you every minute o' my life sence you married me.
If 'twas wrote down, you could read it, an' 'twould be Bible truth. An'
if God has laid His hand on that poor baby--Isr'el, you take that back.
It's like cursin' your own flesh an' blood."
"I do curse him," he muttered. "I curse him for that--not bein' my flesh
an' blood." With the renewed accusation, his anger against her seemed to
mount like a wave and sweep him with it, and he shook himself free of
her. "Jezebel!" he cried. "Let go o' me."
Tira rose and went back to her chair. But she did not sit down. She
stood there, looking out of the window and wondering. What to do next?
With a man beside himself, what did a woman do? He was talking now,
drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair and looking at her.
"Sometimes," he said, "when it all comes over me, I think I'll shet you
up. I'll leave him asleep in there an' lock you in, up chamber, an' you
can hear him cry but you can't git to him. An' mebbe you can work it out
that way. He'll be the scapegoat goin' into the wilderness, cryin' in
there alone, an' you'll be workin' out your punishment, hearin' him
cry."
Tira stood listening and thinking. This was a new danger. If he shut her
away from the child (and he might do it easily, when his foot would
serve him again) nobody would hear. They were too far away. He was
frightening her. She would frighten him. She walked up to him and stood
looking down on him.
"Isr'el," said she quietly, "don't you git it into your head you could
shet me up."
"Yes," said he, and his tone was as ominous as her own, "I guess I could
shet you up all right."
"Yes," said Tira, "mebbe you could. But if you do, I'll break out. An'
when I've broke out"--she towered over him--"I'll break your neck."
Tenney, looking up and seeing in her eyes the mother rage that sweeps
creation from man to brute, was afraid, and Tira knew it. She looked him
down. Then her gaze broke, not as if she could not have held his
forever, but haughtily, in scorn of what was weaker than herself.
"I've been a true wife to you, Isr'el," she said. "You remember it now,
'fore it's too late. For as God's my witness, if you turn your hand
ag'inst a little child--whether it's your own or whether it ain't--an'
that baby in there is yourn an' no man but you has got part nor lot in
him--if you turn ag'inst him, I turn ag'inst you. An' when I've done
that, you'll find me as crazy as you be, an' I can't say no worse."
She went into the bedroom and he heard her crooning there, defiantly he
thought, even through the low sweetness of her voice. But her passion
had shaken him briefly. For the moment, the inner self in him could not
help believing her. He went back to his newspaper, trying, though the
print was dim before him, to recover his hold on the commonplace of the
day. He, too, would be unmoved; she should see he was not afraid of her
tantrums. But he had not read half a column before an evil chance drew
his eyes to a paragraph in the gossip from the various towns about. This
was under the caption of his own town:
"A certain gentleman appeared last week with a black eye, gained, it is
said, in a scrap with a non-resident interested in keeping the peace in
country towns. It is said both combatants bore themselves gallantly, but
that suit for assault and battery is to be brought by the party
attacked."
Tenney sat staring at the words, and his mind told him what a fool he
was. That meant the encounter at his gate. He had ignored that. He had
been deflected from it simply because he had cut his foot and let
himself be drawn off the track of plain testimony by his own pain and
helplessness. Was Raven in it, too? Was there a shameless assault of all
the men about on Tira's honesty? While he was the dupe of Martin, was
Martin Raven's dupe? Did such a woman bring perpetual ruin in her path?
This he did not ask himself in such words or indeed through any
connected interrogation. It was passion within him, disordered, dim, but
horrible to bear. He got up presently, took her scissors, cut out the
paragraph and laid it on her basket where her eyes must fall upon it.
When he had gone back to his chair, she appeared from the bedroom and
went up to him. He did not look at her, but her voice was sweeter,
gentler than the song had been, with no defiance in it, and, in spite of
him, it moved his sick heart, not to belief in her, or even a momentary
rest on her good intent toward him, but to a misery he could hardly
face. Every nerve in him cried out in revolt against his lot, his aching
love for her, his passion forever unsatisfied because she was not
entirely his, the anguish of the atom tossed about in the welter of
elemental life.
"Isr'el," said she, "there's one thing we forgot when we spoke so to
each other as we did a minute ago."
She waited, and he looked up at her, and the hunger of his eyes was as
moving to her as if, like the child they had fought over, he was himself
a child and "not right."
"We forgot," she said, in a soft shyness at having to remind him who was
a professing Christian of what he knew far better than she, "Who was
with us all the time: the Lord Jesus Christ."
She turned away from him, in a continued timidity at seeming to preach
to him, and seated herself again by the other window. The newspaper
clipping arrested her eye. She took it up, read it over slowly, read it
again and Tenney watched her. Then she crumpled it in her hand and
tossed it on the table. She glanced across at Tenney and spoke gravely,
threading her needle with fingers that did not tremble.
"That's jest like him," she said. "Anybody 't knew him 'd know 'twas
what he'd do. He's hand in glove with Edson that carries on that paper.
They go to horse-trots together. He's willin' to call attention to
himself, black eye an' all, if he can call attention to somebody else,
same time. That's wormwood, too, Isr'el. We're the ones it's meant for,
you an' me."