Raven gave his answering nod. That seemed to be about all he could
respond with, in his danger of saying the rash thing.
"Yes," he said, "scared. Same way?"
"No," she said. "Worse. I guess I never've been so scared. An' I've got
myself to thank. You see, last night----"
"Yes," said Raven. "I got wind of it last night."
This, though it puzzled her, she could not stay to follow out, with the
baby up in the hut defended only by pillows and Tenney perhaps turning
to ask: "You there?"
"You see," she said, "it's his crutch."
"You mean," supplied Raven, brute anger rising up in him against brute
man, "he's struck you with it?"
"No, no," she hastened to assure him. "He ain't even threatened me. Only
somehow it was like his havin' somethin' always by him, somethin' he
could strike with, an'--I dunno what come over me--I burnt it up."
At once Raven faced the picture of it, the mad impulse, the resulting
danger. But he would not add his apprehensiveness to hers.
"I dunno," she said, "as you'll hardly see what I mean: but it begun to
look kinder queer to me, that crutch did. All I could think of was how
much better 'twould be for everybody concerned if 'twas burnt up."
"Yes," said Raven. "I see. We all feel so sometimes, when we're tired
out." The moderation of these words but ill expressed his tumultuous
mind. That was it, his passionate understanding told him. The natural
world throws its distorted shadows, and our eyes have to be at their
strongest not to recoil in panic, while we turn back to strike. "And,"
he said, because she seemed to be mired here in the bog of her own
wonderment, "in the morning of course he found it out."
The strangest look came into her face: she was horrified, and more than
that, indubitably more, she was perplexed.
"Yes," she said, "he found it out. 'Course he found it out first thing,
'fore he dressed him even. I got up early an' made the fires. I've been
makin' 'em sence he's laid up. So I don't know no more'n the dead how he
looked when it first come over him the crutch wa'n't there. But he come
out int' the kitchen--I'd been t' the barn then an' give the cows some
fodder--an' he carried a cane, his gran'ther's it was, same's the
crutch. It's got a crook handle, an' I've kep' it in the chimney corner
to pull down boxes an' things from the upper cupboard. An' he went out
to the barn an' come in an' eat his breakfast, an' eat his dinner an'
his supper, when they come round, an' we done the barn work together,
an' he ain't mentioned the crutch from first to last."
"Well," said Raven, in a futile reassurance, "perhaps he thinks he's
left it somewhere, and if he doesn't particularly need it--Jerry told me
only this morning the doctor said he might as well be getting used to a
cane."
"No," said Tira conclusively, "he don't think he's left it anywheres.
He's keepin' still, that's all."
Immediately Raven saw the menacing significance of Tenney's keeping
still. His mind ran with a quick foot over the imprisonment of the two
there together. Was there a moment, he wondered, when the suffering
brute was not threatening to her, when her heart could rest itself for
the next hurried flight? He ventured his question.
"Has he been"--he hesitated for a word and found what sounded to him a
mawkish one--"good to you at all, these last weeks?"
Tira reflected a moment and then, for the first time since she came in
from the cold, the blood rushed to her haggard cheeks. She remembered a
moment, the day before the burning of the crutch, when he had found her
doing her hair before the bedroom glass and had caught her to him
wildly. She had put him away from her, though gently, because his
violence, whether it took the form of starved passion or raging hate,
always seemed to her the unbecoming riot of a forward child, and he had
left her in a shamefaced anger, a grumbling attempt to recover his lost
dignity. Tira hid even from herself the miserable secrets of marital
savagery. No sacrifice was too great to hide from Tenney her knowledge
of his abasement. Most of all must she hide it from another man, and
that man Raven. Her answer was not ready, but she had it for him, and he
understood, in his unfailing knowledge of her, that it was the first
crooked one she had ever given him, and for the first time he felt anger
toward her. She was defending her enemy, and against him.
"He does the best he can," she said. "He takes things terrible hard. I
dunno's I ever see anybody that took 'em so hard."
Then, as he did not speak, she looked at him and meeting the cold
unresponsiveness in his face her composure broke and she stretched out
her hands to him in a wildness of entreaty.
"Oh, don't you look like that," she cried. "If you turn from me 'twill
be my death."
He was not cold now. He bent to her and took her hands in his.
"Tira," he said, "come away with me. You can't bear this any longer.
Take the child and come. You'd be safe. You'd be happy, if you weren't
afraid. Don't go back there for another minute. Stay here over night,
and to-morrow I'll take you away."
He was looking at her, his eyes holding hers as his hands held her
hands. And, whatever he had meant, the strangest, swiftest retribution
of his life came to him through the change in her face. How could flesh
and muscle bring about such an alteration in human line and texture, the
Mother of Sorrows transformed to a Medusa head? Her lips parted,
trembling over words they could not bring themselves to say. Her eyes
widened into darkness. Her brows drew together in a pitiful questioning.
And her voice, when she did speak, was a vibrating protest against what
her eyes knew and her mind.
"You don't mean," she said, "_that_?"
Raven dropped her hands as if they had struck him. The question was a
rushing commentary on his life and hers. Was he, she meant, only another
actor in this drama of man's hunger and savagery? Was he a trader in the
desire of beauty, that tragic dower nature had thrown over her like a
veil, so that whoever saw it with a covetous eye, longed to possess and
rend it? Probably Tira never did what would be called thinking. But her
heart had a vital life of its own, her instinct was the genius of
intuition. He had been kind to her, compassionate. She had built up a
temple out of her trust in him, and now he had smoked the altar with the
incense that was rank in her nostrils. He had brought, not flowers and
fruits, but the sacrifice of blood. And he, on his part, what did he
think? Only that he must save her.
"No, Tira," he said, "I don't mean that. I mean--what you want me to
mean. You can't understand what it is to a man to know you're afraid, to
know you're in danger and he can't help you. I didn't ask you as I
ought. I asked you to come away with me. I ask you again. Come away with
me and I'll take you to the best place I know. I'll take you to Nan."
He had not guessed he was going to say this. Only, as he spoke, he knew
in his inner mind the best place was Nan. Suddenly she seemed to be in
the room with them. What was it but her cool fragrant presence? And she
understood. Tira might not. She might feel these turbid waves of his
response to he knew not what: the beauty and mystery of the world, the
urge of tyrant life, all bound up in the presence of this one woman. She
was woman, hunted and oppressed. He was man, created, according to the
mandate of his will, to save or to undo her. But the world and the
demands of it, clean or unclean, could not be taken at a gulp. He must
get hold of himself and put his hand on Tira's will. For she could only
be saved against her own desire. Whatever he had seemed to ask her, or
whatever his naked mind and rebellious lips had really asked, he could
not beg her to forgive him. He must not own to a fault in their
relation, lest he seem, as he had at that moment, an enemy the more.
"That's exactly what you must do," he said. "You must let me take you to
Nan."
A soft revulsion seemed to melt her to an acquiescence infinitely
grateful to her.
"That," she said, "was what I had in mind. If she'd take him--the
baby--an' put him somewhere. She said there were places. She said so
herself. I dunno's you knew it, but she talked to me about him. She said
there was ways folks know now about doin' things for 'em when they ain't
right, an' makin' the most you can of 'em. She told me if I said the
word, she'd come here an' carry him back with her."
"But," said Raven, "what about you? I'm ready to stand by the child,
just as Nan is. But I'm doing it for your sake. What about you?"
"Oh," said Tira, with a movement of her eloquent hands, as if she tossed
away something that hindered her, "tain't no matter about me. I've got
to stay here. Mr. Raven"--her voice appealed to him sweetly. He
remembered she had not so used his name before--"I told you that. I
can't leave him."
The last word she accented slightly, and Raven could not tell whether
the stress on it was the tenderness of affection, or something as
moving, yet austere. And now he had to know.
"You want to stay with him"----he began, and Tira interrupted him
softly, looking at him meantime, as if she besought him to understand:
"I promised to."
Raven sat there and looked into the fire, thinking desperately. At that
moment, he wanted nothing in the world so much as to snatch her away
from Tenney and set her feet in a safe place. But did he want it solely
for her or partly for himself? What did it matter? Casuistry was far
outside the tumult of desire. He would kick over anything, law or
gospel, to keep her from going back there this night. Yet he spoke
quietly:
"We'll go up and get the baby, and I'll call Charlotte, and you'll stay
here to-night. To-morrow we'll go."
"No," said Tira, gently but immovably, "I couldn't have Charlotte an'
Jerry brought into it. Not anyways in the world."
"Why not?" asked Raven.
"I couldn't," she said. "They're neighbors. They're terrible nice folks,
but folks have to talk--they can't help it--an', 'fore you knew it, it'd
be all over the neighborhood. An' he's a professin' Christian. 'Twould
be terrible for him."
Sometimes he only knew from the tone of her voice, in this general
vagueness of expecting him to understand her, whether she meant Tenney
or the child.
"What I thought was," she went on timidly, "if she'd come an' git
him"--and here "him" evidently meant the child--"'twould be reasonable
she was takin' him back where he could be brought up right. She'd just
as soon do it," she assured him earnestly, as if he had no part in Nan.
"Some folks are like that. They're so good."
He was insatiate in his desire to understand her.
"And you mean," he said, with a directness he was willing to tincture
with a cruelty sharp enough to serve, "to send the child off somewhere
where he will be safe, and then live here with this brute, have more
children by him----"
"No! no!" she cried sharply. "Not that! don't you say that to me. I
can't bear it. Not from you! My God help me! not from you."
He understood her. She loved him. He was set apart by her overwhelming
belief in him, but she was in all ways, the ways of the flesh as well as
the spirit, consecrated to him. Her body might become the prey of man's
natural cruelty, and yet, while she wept her tears of blood in this
unreasoning slavery, she held one worship. There he would be alone. The
insight of the awakened mind told him another thing: that, in spite of
her despairing loyalty, he could conquer her scruples. He could, by the
sheer weight of a loving will, force her to follow him. A warm entreaty,
one word of his own need, and she would answer. And while he thought,
the jungle feeling came upon him, hot, hateful to his conscious mind,
the feeling of the complexity of it all, strange beasts of emotion out
for prey, the reason drugged with nature's sophistries. The jungle! That
was what Nan had called it, this welter of human misery. Who else had
been talking to him about it? Why, Old Crow! He had not called it the
jungle, but he had been lost in its tortuous ways. This prescience to
Old Crow brought a queer feeling, as if a cool air blew on him. The
jungle feeling passed. Almost he had the vision of an eternal city,
built up by the broken but never wholly failing strength of man, and Old
Crow there beckoning him into it and telling him he'd kept a place for
him. And the cool breeze which was Old Crow told him that although Tira
must be rescued, if it could be brought about, it must not be through
any of the jungle ways. She must not be drugged by jungle odors and
carried off unwillingly, even to the Holy City itself, by that road. He
and Tira--yes, he and Tira and Nan--would march along together with
their eyes open. He hastened to speak, to commit himself to what he must
deliberately wish:
"Then we'll telephone Nan."
She looked at him, all gratitude. Her friend had gone away into strange
dark corners of life where only her instinct followed him, and here he
was back again.
"No," she said, "don't you telephone. Somebody'd listen in. You write. I
guess mebbe nothin'll happen right off, even if I did burn the crutch. I
guess I got kinder beside myself to-night. I ain't likely to be so
ag'in."
"I'll walk up to the hut with you," said Raven, rising as she did, "and
see you safe inside."
"No," said she, "I couldn't let you no ways. It's bad enough as 'tis."
By this she meant the paragraph in the paper which had laid an insulting
finger on him; but he had not seen it and did not understand. Only it
was plain to him that she would not let him go. She drew her hood up,
and made it secure under her chin. Then she looked at him and smiled a
little. She had to smile, her woman's instinct told her, to reassure
him. She opened the door, and though he followed her quickly, had
slipped through the outer door as softly and was gone. He stood there on
the sill watching her hurrying to the road. When she had turned to the
right, she began to run, and he went down the path after her to look up
the road, lest she had seen something pursuing her. But the night was
still. There was no sound of footsteps on the snow, and the far-off
barking of a fox made the silence more complete. She was only hurrying,
because her mother heart had wakened suddenly to the loneliness of the
child up there among the pillows, torturing herself with wonders that
she could leave him. He went out into the road and continued on her
track, until he saw her turn into the woods. Then, waiting until she
should be far enough in advance not to catch the sound of his pursuit,
he suddenly heard footsteps on the road and turned. A man was coming
rapidly. It was Dick.