In his relief--for, in spite of the man's lameness, he had made sure it
was Tenney--Raven laughed out. At once he sobered, for why was Dick here
but to spy on him?
"Well," he inquired brusquely, "what is it?"
They turned together, and Dick did not speak. When they had gone in and
Raven closed the hall door and glanced at him, he was suddenly aware
that the boy had not spoken because he could not trust himself. His
brows were knit, his face dark with reproachful anger.
"Think the old man shouldn't have gone out in the cold without his hat
and muffler?" asked Raven satirically.
"Yes," said Dick, in a quick outburst. "I think just that. It's a risk
you've no business to take. In your condition, too. Oh, yes, I know you
do look fit enough, but you can't depend on that. Besides--Jack, who's
that woman? What's she going up into the woods for? She's not going to
the hut? Is that why----?"
Raven stood looking at him, studying not so much his face as the
situation. He turned to the library door.
"Come in, Dick," he said. "We'll talk it out. We can't either of us
sleep."
Dick followed him in and they took their accustomed chairs. Raven
reached for his pipe, but he did not fill it: only sat holding it,
passing his thumb back and forth over the bowl. He was determining to be
temperate, to be fair. Dick could not forget he was old, but he must
force himself not to gibe at Dick for being young.
"Do you feel able," he said, "to hear a queer story and keep mum over
it? Or do you feel that a chap like me, who ought to be in the
Psychopathic, hasn't any right to a square deal? When you see me going
off my nut, as you expect, shall you feel obliged to give in your
evidence, same as families do to the doctor and the clergyman if a man's
all in?"
Dick was straight.
"I'll do my best," he said. "But a woman--like that--and you meeting her
as you did! It's not like you, Jack. You never'd have done such a thing
in all your born days if you weren't so rattled."
There were arguments at the back of his mind he could not, in decency,
use. He remembered Raven's look when he drew her in, and the tragic one
that mirrored it: passionate entreaty on the woman's face, on the man's
passionate welcome. As usual, it was the real witnesses of life standing
dumb in the background that alone had the power to convict. But they
could not be brought into court. Custom forbade it, the code between man
and man. Yet there they were, all the same.
"Well!" said Raven. He had responded with only a little whimsical lift
of the eyebrows to this last. "If you won't trust me, I must you. That's
all there is about it. The woman is our neighbor. Israel Tenney's wife,
and she's in danger of her life from her husband, and she won't leave
him."
Dick stared as at the last thing he had expected. He shook his head.
"Too thin," he said. "I've seen Tenney and I've heard him spoken of.
He's a psalm-singing Methody, or something of that sort. Why, I met him
one day, Jerry and I, and he stared at me as if he wanted to know me
again. And Jerry said afterward he was probably going to ask me if I'd
found the Lord; but he changed his mind or something. No, Jack, don't
you be taken in. That woman's pulling your leg."
"Dick," said Raven, "I've been told you have a very vivid sense of drama
in your narrative verse. You couldn't, by any possibility, apply it to
real life?"
"Oh, I know," said Dick, "New England's chock full of tragedy. But I
tell you I've seen Tenney. He's only a kind of a Praise-God Barebones.
Put him back a few hundred years, and you'd see him sailing for
Plymouth, for freedom to worship God. (Obstinate, too, like the rest of
'em. He wouldn't worship anybody else's God, only the one he'd set up
for himself.) If his wife didn't mind him, he might pray with her or
growl over the dinner table, but he wouldn't bash her head in.
Understand, Jack, I've seen Tenney."
"Yes," said Raven drily, "I've seen Tenney, too. And seen him in action.
Now, Dickie, you put away your man-of-the-world attitude toward battle,
murder, and sudden death, and you let me tell you a few things about
Tenney."
He began with the day when he had found Tira in the woods. He touched on
the facts briefly, omitting to confess what the woman looked to his
dazzled eyes. It was a drawing austerely black and white. Could he tell
anyone--anyone but Nan--how she had seemed to him there, the old, old
picture of motherhood, divine yet human? It was too much to risk. If he
did lay his mind bare about that moment which was his alone, and Dick
met it with his unimaginative astuteness, he could not trust himself to
be patient with the boy. He said little more than that he had given her
the freedom of the hut, and that he meant always to have it ready for
her. Then he came to this last night of all, when she had run away from
Tenney, not because he had been violent, but because he had "kept
still." That did take hold on Dick's imagination, the imagination he
seemed able to divorce from the realities of life and kept for the
printed page.
"By thunder!" he said. "Burned the crutch, did she? That's a story in
itself, a real story: Mary Wilkins, Robert Frost. That's great!"
"Sounds pretty big to me," said Raven quietly. "But it's not for print.
See you don't feel tempted to use it. Now, here we are with Tira up
against it. She's got to make a quick decision. And she's made it."
"Do you call her by her first name?" asked Dick, leaping the main issue
to frown over the one possibly significant of Raven's state of mind.
"Yes," said Raven steadily, "I rather think I call her by her first
name. I don't know whether I ever have 'to her head,' as Charlotte would
say, but I don't seem to feel like calling her by Tenney's name. Well,
Tira's decided. She's going to give her baby to Nan."
Dick's eyes enlarged to such an extent, his mouth opened so vacuously,
that Raven laughed out. Evidently Dick wasn't regarding the matter from
Tira's standpoint, or even Raven's now, but his own.
"Nan!" he echoed, when he could get his lips into action. "Where does
Nan come in?"
"Oh," said Raven, with a most matter-of-fact coolness, "Nan came in long
ago. I told her about it, and it seems she went to see Tira off her own
bat, and offered to take the baby."
"She sha'n't do it," proclaimed Dick. "I simply won't have it, that's
all."
"I fancy," said Raven, "Nan'll tell you you've got nothing whatever to
do with it. And really, Dick, you never'll get Nan by bullying her.
Don't you know you won't?"
Dick, having a perfectly good chance, turned the tables on him neatly.
"That'll do," said he, remembering how Raven had shut him up when he
dragged in Anne Hamilton. "We won't discuss Nan."
Now it was Raven's turn to gape, but on the heels of it, seeing the
neatness of the thrust, he smiled.
"Right, boy," he said. "Good for you. We won't discuss Nan, and we won't
discuss Tira. But you'll hold your tongue about this business, and if
you find me opening the door of my house at midnight, you'll remember
it's my business, and keep your mouth shut. Now I'm going up the hill to
see she's safe, and if you follow me, in your general policy of keeping
on my trail, I don't quite know what will happen. But something will--to
one of us."
He got up, went into the hall and found his cap and leather jacket. Dick
meantime stood in the library door regarding him from so troubled a mind
that Raven halted and put a hand on his shoulder.
"Cut it out, boy," he said, "all this guardian angel business. You let
me alone and I'll let you alone. We're both decent chaps, but when you
begin with your psychotherapy and that other word I don't know how to
pronounce----"
Dick, having, at this period of his life only an inactive sense of
humor, mechanically supplied it: "Psychiatry."
"What a beast of a word! Yes, that's it. Well, they're red rags to me,
all these gadgets out of the half-baked mess they've stirred up by
spying on our insides. I can't be half decent to you. But I want to be.
I want us to be decent to each other. It's damnable if we can't. Go to
bed, and I'll run up and see if poor Tira's safe."
He did not wait for an answer, but went out at the front door, and Dick
heard him whistling down the path. The whistle seemed like an
intentional confirmation of his being in a cheerfully normal frame of
mind, not likely to be led too far afield by premonitions of New England
tragedy. Perhaps that was why he did whistle, for when he reached the
road he stopped and completed the first half of the ascent in silence.
Then, as the whistle might mean something reassuring to Tira, he began
again with a bright loudness, bold as the oriole's song. He reached the
hut, whistling up to the very door, and then his breath failed him on a
note, the place looked so forbiddingly black in the shadow, the woods
were so still. It did not seem possible that a woman's warm heart was
beating inside there, Tira's heart, home of loves unquenchable. He put
his hand down under the stone. The key was there, and rising, he felt
his mind heavy with reproaches of her. She had gone back to Tenney. The
night's work was undone. What was the use of drawing her a step along
the path of safety if she turned back the instant he trusted her alone?
He went down the hill again in a dull distaste for himself. It seemed to
him another man might have managed it better, swept her off her feet and
bound her in an allegiance where she would obey. When he reached his own
house, he was too discontented even to glance at Dick's window and
wonder whether the boy was watching for him. The place was silent, and
he put out the lights and went to bed.
Next morning he had got hold of himself and, with that obstinate
patience which is living, went to the library after breakfast and called
up Nan. It was wonderful to hear her fresh voice. It broke in upon his
discouragements and made them fly, like birds feeding on evil food.
Would she listen carefully, he asked. Would she translate him, because
he couldn't speak in any detail. And when he had got thus far, he
remembered another medium, and began the story of last night in French.
Nan listened with hardly a commenting word, and when he had finished her
bald answer was ridiculously reassuring.
"Sure!" said Nan. "I'll be there to-night. Send Jerry for me. Eight
o'clock."
"God bless you!" said Raven. "You needn't bring any luggage. It'll
probably be wiser to go right back."
Nan said "Sure!" again, no doubt, Raven thought, as indicating her view
of her errand as a homespun one there was no doubt of her carrying out
with the utmost simplicity. Then he went to tell Jerry he was to meet
the evening train, and on the way he told Dick:
"Nan's coming to-night."
"Nan!" said Dick. "Not----"
"Yes," said Raven. "I telephoned her. Buck up, old man. Here's another
chance for you, don't you see? We're in a nasty hole, Tira and
incidentally Nan and I. Play the game, old son, and help us out."
"What," inquired Dick, "do you expect me to do?"
"Chiefly," said Raven, "keep out. It's my game and Nan's and Tira's. But
you play yours. Don't sulk. Show her what a noble Red Man you can be."
Dick turned away, guiltily, Raven thought, as if he had plans of his
own. What the deuce did he mean to do? But their day passed amicably
enough, though they were not long together. Raven went up to the hut and
stayed most of the afternoon. It was not so much that he expected Tira
to come as that he felt the nearness of her there in the room she had
disarranged with barricading chairs and pillows and then put in order
again before she left. He could see her stepping softly about, with her
deft, ordered movements, making it comely for him to find. She had left
pictures of herself on the air, sad pictures, most of them, telling the
tale of her terror and foreboding, but others of them quite different.
There were moments he remembered when, in pauses of her talk with him,
she glanced at the child, and still others when she sat immobile, her
hands clasped on her knee, her gaze on the fire. Henceforth the hut
would be full of her presence, hers and Old Crow's. And, unlike as they
were, they seemed to harmonize. Both were pitiful and yet austere in
their sincerity; and for both life had been a coil of tangled meanings.
He stayed there until nearly dark, and his musings waxed arid and dull
with the growing chill of the room. For he would not light the fire. It
had to be left in readiness.
When he went down he found Dick uneasily tramping the veranda.
"Charlotte wants us to have a cup of tea," said Dick. "She said supper's
put off till they come."
"They?" inquired Raven. "Who's they?"
"It's no use, Jack," Dick broke forth. "I might as well tell you. I
s'pose if I didn't you'd kick up some kind of a row later. I telephoned
Mum."
"You don't mean," said Raven, in a voice of what used to be called
"ominous calm," before we shook off the old catch-words and got
indirections of our own, "you don't mean you've sent for her!"
"It's no use," said Dick again, though with a changed implication, "you
might as well take things as they are. Nan can't come up here slumming
without an older woman. It isn't the thing. It simply isn't done."
Raven, through the window, saw Charlotte hovering in the library with
the tea tray. He watched her absently, as if his mind were entirely with
her. Yet really it was on the queerness of things as they are in the
uniform jacket of propriety and the same things when circumstance
thrusts the human creature out of his enveloping customs and sends him
into battle. He thought of Dick's philosophy of the printed word. He
thought of Nan's desperate life of daily emergency in France. Yet they
were all, he whimsically concluded, being squared to Aunt Anne's
rigidity of line. But why hers? Why not Old Crow's? Old Crow would have
had him rescue Tira, even through difficult ways. He opened the door.
"Come on in," he said. "Charlotte's buttered the toast."
Dick followed him, and they sat down to their abundant tea, Charlotte
pausing a moment to regard them with her all-enveloping lavishment of
kindliness. Were they satisfied? Could she bring something more?
"The trouble with you, Dick," said Raven, after his third slice of
toast, buttered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness,
"is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for
Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake the actors
make: repeated farewells."
Dick made no answer. He, too, ate toast prodigiously.
"Now," said Raven, when they had finished, "do I understand you mean to
put your mother wise about what I told you last night? Yes or no?"
"I shall do----" said Dick, and at his pause Raven interrupted him.
"No, you won't," said he. "You won't do what you think best. Take it
from me, you won't. What I told you wasn't my secret. It's poor Tira's.
If you give her away to your mother--good God! think of it, Milly, with
her expensive modern theories and her psychiatry--got it right, that
time!--muddling up things for a woman like her! Where was I? Well,
simply, if you play a dirty trick like that on me, I'll pack you off,
you and your mother both. I don't like to remind you but, after all, old
man, the place is mine."
The blood came into Dick's face. He felt misjudged in his affection and
abused.
"You can't see," he said. "I don't believe it's because you can't. You
won't. It isn't Nan alone. It's you. You're not fit. You're no more fit
than you were when Mum was here before. And you can pack me off, but, by
thunder! I won't go."
"Very well," said Raven, with a happy inspiration. "You needn't. I'll go
myself. And I'll take Nan with me." A picture of Nan and her own vision
of happy isles came up before him, and he concluded: "Yes, by George!
I'll take Nan. And we'll sail for the Malay Peninsula, or an
undiscovered island, and wear Mother Hubbards and live on breadfruit,
and you and your precious conventions can go to pot."
So, having soothed himself by his own intemperance, he got up, found his
pipe and a foolish novel he made a point of reading once a year--it
would hardly do to tell what it was, lest the reader of this true story
fail to sympathize with his literary views and so with all his
views--and sat down to await his guests in a serviceable state of good
humor. He had brought Dick to what Charlotte would call "a realizing
sense." He could afford a bit of tolerance. Dick got up and flung out of
the room, finding Raven, he told himself, in one of his extravagant
moods. Nine times out of ten the moods meant nothing. On the other hand,
in this present erratic state of a changed Raven, they might mean
anything. For himself, he was impatient, with the headlong rush of young
love. Nan was coming. She was on the way. Would she be the same, distant
with her cool kindliness, her old lovely self to Raven only, or might
she be changed into the Nan who kissed him that one moment of his need?
He snatched his hat and tore out of the house, and Raven, glancing up
from his novel, saw him striding down the path and thought approvingly
he was a wise young dog to walk off some of his headiness before Nan
came. As for him, he would doze a little over his foolish book, as
became a man along in years. That was what Charlotte would say, "along
in years." Was it so? What a devil of an expression, like all the rest
of them that were so much worse than the thing itself: "elderly,"
"middle-aged," what a grotesque vocabulary! And he surprised himself by
throwing his foolish book, with an accurate aim, at a space in the
shelves, where it lodged and hung miserably, and getting up and tearing
down the walk at a pace emulating Dick's, but in the opposite direction:
the result of these athletic measures being that when Amelia and Nan
drove up with Jerry, the station master's pung following with two small
trunks that seemed to wink at Raven, with an implication of their
competitive resolve to stay, two correctly clad gentlemen were waiting
on the veranda in a state of high decorum. As to the decorum, it didn't
last, so far as Raven was concerned. Messages of a mutual understanding
passed between his eyes and Nan's. He burst into sudden laughter, but
Nan, more sagely alive to the dangers of the occasion, kept her gravity.
"Well," said Amelia, as Raven, still laughing, solicitously lifted her
out, "you seem to be in a very happy frame of mind. I'm glad you _can_
laugh."