In a day or two Raven had convinced himself that Dick, firm-lipped,
self-controlled, as if he had set himself a task, did not mean to leave
him. Raven, half amused, half touched, accommodated his behavior to
their closer relation and waited for Dick to disclose himself. He would
have been light-heartedly glad of the boy's company if he had found no
strangeness in it, no purpose he could not, from point to point, divine.
Dick sent for more clothes, and a case came by post. He wrote in his
chamber, for an hour or two every morning, and after that, Raven became
conscious that the boy was keeping a watchful eye on him. If Raven went
up to the hut, Dick was sure to appear there, in ten minutes at the
most. Once, after a heavy snow, Raven had the wood road broken out, and
Dick looked on in a darkling conjecture. And when Raven, now even to
Jerry's wonder, proceeded to break from the hut to the back road, Dick
found it not only impossible to restrain himself but wise to speak. They
were standing by the hearth in the hut, after Raven had swept it and
laid a careful fire. He had worked with all possible haste, for he never
was there now without wondering whether she might come. He had been
resting in the certainty of Tenney's crippled state, but the wounded
foot, he knew, was bettering every day, and with it Tira's security
lessened. Jerry's dismissal from the chores had troubled him so much
that he had gone up, immediately after, to reason with Tenney. But
Tenney was entering the barn door at the moment of his turning into the
yard, and Tira, following, stopped an instant and made Raven a little
gesture that seemed to him one of hasty dismissal, and he went back home
again.
"Jack," said Dick, this morning in the hut--it was as if he had to
speak--"what are you getting this place ready for, and breaking out the
back road? You don't need to come up here, in weather like this. If you
do, you've got your snowshoes. What the deuce are you breaking out for?"
Raven stood a moment looking down at Tira's fire. It seemed a sacred
pile, consecrated to holy use. What would Dick say if he told him the
paths had been broken for a woman's flying feet, the fire was laid to
warm her when she came here hunted by man's cruelty? Dick was said to
have written some very strong verse, but how if he found himself up
against life itself?
"It's a jolly old place," Raven said, rousing himself out of his musing.
"As for breaking out, that's what oxen are for."
Dick was looking at him in a manifest concern. It was true affection.
The boy might find it difficult to hail him across the interval of years
between them, but he did love old Jack, though with the precise measure
of patronage due the old.
"You know," said Dick, "it worries me like the deuce to see you coming
up here like----"
He paused as if the matter were too complex to be gone into lightly.
"Like what?" Raven asked him.
"Well, we've been over that. You know who built this. You know what he
did in it. He brought an old rip up here to live with him, and--oh,
confound it, Jack! don't pretend you don't even remember old Crow."
"Yes," said Raven gravely, "I remember Old Crow."
"Well, anyhow," said Dick, "he was a family disgrace, and the less said
about him the better."
"I showed you, the night you came," said Raven, "the story of Old Crow's
life. You didn't quite catch on. Want another try at it?"
Dick had to search his memory. The only thing he had kept in mind about
that night was his anger against Nan. There was a book, he recalled
vaguely: some sort of stuff in a crabbed hand.
"Old Crow?" he said. "Old Crow never wrote anything."
"You think," said Raven, "he brought his bum up here and they sat and
guzzled. Well, you're wrong, my son. Come, let's go down, and though I
don't know whether it'll mean anything to you, you shall have another
hack at Old Crow."
He was not easy until he had turned the key on the safety of the hut and
started down the hill. When they had rounded the curve made by the three
jutting firs, he stopped.
"Go on," he said. "I'll overtake you."
He ran back and slipped the key under the stone. It was a part of her
security to keep the secret from Dick also.
No more was said of Old Crow that day, but, in the early evening, when
they were before the fire, Raven brought down the book, always in the
drawer of the little table by his bed. It was, in an undefined way,
kindliness and company, always reminding him that, whatever his
undesirable status now, he had been "the boy," and this was his own
personal message from Old Crow.
"There you are," he said. He laid it on the table. "Don't read it unless
you'd really rather. It's meant a good deal to me. Maybe it won't to
you. I don't know much about the processes of your mind. You may feel at
home in this particular world. I never do. Old Crow didn't either. But
you'll see."
Dick began to read and, since Nan was not by to be loved and hated, with
an intent mind. Once or twice he turned back, Raven saw, to ponder some
passage again. It was slow reading. He had not the passionate haste of
one who has thirsted for some such community of assurance, and flies
over the ground, plucking a leaf here and there, meaning to return. When
he had finished he closed the book, laid it on the table, and pushed it
aside as if he had definitely done with it.
"Jackie," said he, "I'm mighty glad you showed me this."
"Good!" said Raven. "Got inside it, have you?"
"Why, yes," said Dick, with assurance. "That's easy enough. It isn't
new, you know. And it isn't so much my getting inside that as getting
inside Old Crow."
"Oh!" said Raven mildly, "so you got inside Old Crow. Now what did you
find there?"
"I don't know," said Dick, "whether you'd better be told. From a
psychopathic point of view, that is. But I rather guess you ought."
"Dick," said Raven, "in the name of all the gods you worship, what
shouldn't I be told? And exactly how do you see us two living along
here, mild as milk? What's our relation? Sometimes, when I find you
plodding after me, I feel as if you were my trainer. Sometimes I have a
suspicion I really am off my nut and you're my keeper. Out with it, boy?
How do you see it? Come!"
Dick, from a patent embarrassment, was staring down at the hearth, and
now he looked quickly up in a frankness truly engaging.
"Jack," he said, "you needn't think you're going to be left here alone,
to work things out by yourself. There's no danger of mother. I told her
to keep off. She only irritates you. But she hasn't gone back home.
She's right there in Boston, waiting to come."
Raven got up and walked back and forth through the room. Then he
returned to his chair.
"Dick," he said conversationally, "if you were as young in years as you
are in your mind, I'd mellow you."
Dick generously ignored this. He had the impeccable good nature of the
sane set in authority over the sick.
"What I think, is," he said, with a soothing intonation Raven
despairingly recognized as the note of strength pitting itself against
weakness, "we can work it out together, you and I. We can do it better
than anybody else. I suppose if I went back you'd send for Nan. But that
won't do, Jack. You'll see it for yourself, when you're all right again.
Now what I mean about Old Crow is, that his complexes are like yours--or
rather yours are like his. Don't you see what an influence he's had on
you? More than Miss Anne even."
"Hold up," said Raven. "I'm being mighty patient with you, but certain
things, you know, you don't say."
"You used to go up there and see him," said Dick, willingly
relinquishing Miss Anne. There were times when, as he remembered from
boyhood, old Jack was dangerous. "Some of the things about him shocked
you. Some appealed to you. Pity, too: you must have pitied him
tremendously. You probably knew about his craze over this girl he
mentions here. You may have heard things about her, just as he did.
Jack, I can see--the whole thing has come to me in the last ten
minutes--Old Crow has been the big influence in your life. Everything
else has come from that. And then the war knocked you out and you got
_cafard_ and the whole blasted business blew up and came to the surface
and--there you are."
"Yes," said Raven, "here we are."
He leaned back in his chair and laughed until he could have cried. Never
had he found anything funnier than the boy's honest face and his honest
voice pouring forth undigested scraps from haphazard gleanings.
"Dick," he said, "you're a dear fellow. But you're an awful ass. The
trouble is with you, old man, you've no imagination. It was left out.
You're too much like your mother and it'll be the death of you as it is
of her if you don't stop being intelligent. That sort of popular science
stuff, you know. Be a little sloppy, boy. Come off your high horse."
Dick was still unassailably good-natured. Raven was his job, and he
could hold himself down with a steady hand.
"Now," said Raven, "for heaven's sake scrap your complexes, even if you
scrap Old Crow with 'em, and let's see if we can't be moderately
peaceable. That is, if we've got to be marooned here together."
And by dint of giving his mind to it, he was himself peaceable and even
amusing, but as the dark came on he found he had much ado to keep up the
game; he was too sensitively awake to Tira. With no new reason for it,
he was plainly worried, and, leaving Dick reading by the fire, went up
to his own room. He sat down by a front window, facing the dark wall of
the hill, but when, after another hour, he heard Dick come up and shut
himself in, he slipped down the stairs, took his cap and went off to the
hut. The sky was dark, but clear, and the stars burned in galaxies of
wonder. But the beauty of the night only excited and oppressed him until
he could assure himself she was not out in it on one of her dreadful
flights. If he found her in the hut, he could go home to bed. He reached
the door, stopped, and put his hand under the stone. The key was there,
and he laughed out in his thankfulness. The laugh was at his fears, and
he wondered whether he would rather think of her there in her prison or
here, still under sentence, due at her prison again. Then he heard a
step: a man's crashing on regardless of underbrush. Was it Tenney?
Should he hear that voice as he had before in its wild "Hullo"?
"Where are you?" came the voice. "Where are you, old man?"
Dick had followed him and was, in his affectionate solicitude, warning
him against surprise. Raven ran down to meet him, and by the turn of the
fir trees they faced each other.
"Dick," said Raven, "what are you up here for?"
"Can't help it, old man," said Dick. The eagerness of his voice made it
very moving. "Really, you know, I can't have you trotting round, this
time of night, all by your lonesome. If you want to hang round here, you
let me come, too. We'll light the fire and smoke a pipe and finish the
night, if you say so. Come, old man. Come on."
"No," said Raven quietly, "we won't light fires and smoke pipes. We'll
go down now, to bed. Dick, you're a fool. I've had to tell you so more
than once. But you're a dear fool, and sometime I may be able to
remember that and nothing else. Just now I can't seem to want to do
anything but pitch you, neck and crop, into the snow."
They went down together, Dick still doggedly conscious of doing the only
thing possible, and when they were near the foot of the hill, Raven
yelled at him, the old Moosewood whoop, and sprang. It was the signal
between them when one or the other had a mind to "wrastle," and they
stood there in the road and assailed each other scientifically and with
vigor, to the great benefit of each. It was a beneficent outburst, and
Charlotte, roused by the cry, ran to a chamber window and stood there in
her nightgown, watching.
"How they do carry on!" she commented to Jerry, when they had separated
and come in, chaffing volubly. "For all the world like two toms."
Things were easier between them, now they had mauled each other, and
they ran upstairs together, "best friends" as they used to be when Dick
learned the game. He was wonderfully encouraged. This was the Uncle Jack
he used to tag about the place. He went to bed with a hopeful
presentiment that, if things kept on like this, he might take Raven back
to town presently, reasonable enough to place himself voluntarily in the
right hands.
To Tira, the week dragged on with a malicious implication of never
meaning to end until it ended her. Strange things could be done in a
week, it reminded her, conclusive, sinister things. The old fears were
on in full force, and though it had not looked as if they could be much
augmented, now they piled up mountain high. And she presently found out
they were not the old fears at all. There was a fresh menace,
ingeniously new. She had studied the weather of Tenney's mind and knew
the signs of it. She could even anticipate them. But this new menace she
could never have foreseen. It was simply his crutch. An evil magic
seemed to have fallen upon it, and it was no longer a crutch but a
weapon. Tenney would not abandon it. His foot was improving fast, and
the doctor had suggested his dropping the crutch for a cane; but he kept
on with it, kept on obstinately without a spoken pretext. To Tira, there
was something sinister in that. She saw him not relying on it to any
extent, but sedulously keeping it by him. Sometimes he gesticulated with
it. He had, with great difficulty, brought in the cradle again, as if to
emphasize his callousness to the gash in it, and once he tapped it with
the crutch, while the baby lay there asleep, and set it rocking. Tira,
cooking at the table, felt her heart stand still. An actual weapon she
could flee from, but was this a weapon? The uncertainty was in itself
terrifying.
It was the day he set the cradle rocking that she awoke in the night,
her fear full upon her. He was at her side, sleeping heavily. The baby
was on her other arm. Yet it seemed to her that the menace from Tenney
had pierced her to reach the child and, on its passage, stabbed through
her racing heart. Then her temptation came upon her, so simple a thing
she seemed stupid never to have thought of it before. She rose to a
sitting posture, put her feet out of bed, took the child, and carried
him with her into the sitting-room. She laid him on the couch and
covered him, and then stole back into the bedroom. The crutch was there,
in its habitual place at night, leaning against the foot of the bed. She
could put her hand on it in the dark. Tenney, too, she had begun to
reflect, could put his hand on it. What deeds might he not do with it in
those hours when the sanities of life also sleep? She took it gently and
went out again through the sitting-room and kitchen into the shed. Her
purpose had been to hide it behind the wood. But if he came on it there,
it would not be a crutch he found. It would be a weapon. She put her
hand on an upright beam, as she stood painfully thinking it out, and
touched the handle of a saw, hanging there on a nail; immediately she
knew. She went back into the kitchen, lighted the lantern and carried it
into the shed. There stood the crutch leaning against the beam below the
saw, a weapon beyond doubt. She set down her lantern, laid the crutch on
the block Tenney used to split kindlings, set her foot upon it and
methodically sawed it into stove wood lengths. When it was done she
gathered up the pieces, carried them into the sitting-room, to the stove
where Tenney always, in winter weather, left a log to smoulder, dropped
them in and opened the draught. Then she went back to the shed, swept up
her scattering of sawdust, hung the saw in its place, gave a glance
about her to see that everything was in its usual order, and returned
into the kitchen. She put out the lantern, hung it on its nail, went
into the sitting-room and partially shut the draft on the noisy blaze.
She did not dare quite shut it, lest a bit of the weapon should be left
to cry out from the ashes and tell. When she was back in bed again, the
child on her arm, Tenney, disturbed by her coming, woke and turned. He
lifted his head from the pillow, to listen, and she wondered if he could
hear the beating of her heart.
"You there?" he asked. "What's that stove started out roarin' for? The
chimbly ain't afire?"
"No," said Tira. "Mebbe somethin's ketched." She got out of bed, ran
into the sitting-room, noiselessly shut the crack of draught, and came
back. "Them knots are kinder gummy," she said calmly, and was heartened
by the evenness of her voice. "I guess 'twon't roar long."
They listened together until the sound diminished, and Tira knew when he
relaxed and dropped off again. It did not seem to her that she dropped
off at all, she was so relieved to think of her enemy smouldering and
done for.
This was the night Raven had had his premonition of her and gone up to
the hut to find her, and the next night he was aware of her again, as if
she had put a hand out through the darkness and given him an imploring
touch. He and Dick had had an almost jovial day. Their wrestling bout
had proved sound medicine. It had, Raven thought, cleared the air of the
fool things they had been thinking about each other. This evening they
had talked, straight talk, as between men, chiefly of Dick's future and
his fitness for literature. There was no hint of Nan, though each
believed she was the pivot on which Dick's fortunes turned. About ten
they went up to bed, and again Raven found himself too uneasy to sleep,
and again he sat down by the window in the dark. Incredibly, yet as he
found he knew it would happen, he saw a figure running up the path. It
came almost to the front door, halted a moment, as if in doubt, stooped
and threw up a clutch of snow against a window. The snow was full of icy
pellets; they rattled against the pane. But it was not his window, which
was dark; the hand had cast its signaling pellets to the room where a
light was burning and where the outline of a man's figure had just been
visible. And the man was Dick. But Raven knew. He opened his door and
shut it as softly, stole down the stairs, opened the outer door, and
drew her in. Then, in the instant of snapping on the light, he saw Tira
recoil; for there, at the foot of the stairs, was Dick. She would have
slipped out again, but Raven's hand was on her. He still held hers, as
he had taken it, and now he turned her to the library door. It was all
done quickly, and meantime he said to Dick, "Go back to bed," and Dick
perhaps not responding exactly, commented under his breath, "Good God!"
Raven followed Tira into the library, turned the key in the lock,
switched on the light in his reading lamp, and drew a chair to the
smouldering fire.
"Sit down," he said. "You must get warm."
He threw on cones and roused a leaping blaze. Then he made himself look
at her. He forgot Dick and Dick's shocked bewilderment. He was calm as
men are calm in an accomplished certainty. She had come. She did not
seem cold or in any sense excited, though she put her hands to the blaze
and bent toward it absently, as if in courtesy because he had given it
to her. As she sat, drawing long breaths that meant the ebbing of
emotion, he let his eyes feed on her face. She was paler than he had
seen her. There were shadows under her eyes, and the lashes on her cheek
looked incredibly long: a curved inky splash. Her hood had fallen back,
but she kept the blue cloak about her to her chin, as if it made a
seclusion, a protection even against him. But it was only an instant
before she withdrew her hands from the blaze and turned to him, with a
little smile. She began to speak at once, as if she had scant time,
either for indulging her own weakness or troubling him.
"You'll think it's queer," she said. "I've come here routin' you out o'
bed when you've give me that nice place up there to run away to."
Raven found himself ready to break out into asseverations that it was
the only natural thing for her to do. Where should she go, if not to
him?
"No," he said, the more gravely because he was counseling himself while
he answered her. "You did right. But," he added, "where's----?"
She understood. Where was the baby who always made the reason for her
flight?
"He's up there," she answered, with a motion of her hand toward the
road.
"In the hut?" he exclaimed. "You left him there?"
It seemed impossible.
"Yes," she said quietly, "all soul alone. I run out with him, same as I
always have. I run up there. I found the road all broke out. I wa'n't
surprised. I knew you'd do it. That is, I'd ha' known it if I'd thought
anything about it. An' I found the key an' started the fire. An' then I
knew I'd got to see you this night, an' I put him on the lounge an' set
chairs so's he wouldn't fall out, an' packed him round with pillers, an'
locked him in an' left him."
She paused and Raven nodded at her as if he wanted to find it as simple
as it seemed to her.
"You see, I couldn't bring him down here," she said. "He might cry. An'
there's Charlotte. An' Jerry. An' the young man. I'm sorry the young man
see me. That's too bad."
"It's all right," said Raven briefly, though he was aware it was, from
Dick's present point of view, all wrong. "I'll attend to that."
"He's safe enough," said Tira, her eyes darkening as she recurred to the
baby. "If he cries, 'twon't do no hurt up there. Well!" She seemed to
remind herself that there was much to say. "I must be gittin' along with
my story." She looked at him in a most moving wistfulness, and added: "I
got scared."